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if you look at their whois (http://www.centralnic.com/whois) it looks like fuckyou.uk.com is "reserved". so the wildcard doesnt apply to domains that are already in their database.

i just did "dig fuckyou.uk.com" and seems that its a CNAME to "null.centralnic.com", so maybe reserved domains are taken out of the wildcard.

I've also got it running nicely on my laptop (HP Omnibook 9000), it's damn fine. Kudos to Pat and the gang.

I'm a happy Slackware user. I've been a Slack user for years - and not just out of "being used to it". I used Slackware in my first job, I built mailservers on it in my second job, I used it to run a complete ISP in my third job, and a complete domain registry in my fourth job (incidentally, I'm still on a heck of a salary and really enjoy my work).

I've actually looked at other distributions to make maintainence easier, but:

• Debian I found was populated by anal freaks who were real religious fanatics - we had a department full of Debian people and I said "ok, let's do Debian then" and two years later I'm finding it hard to work out just where they put everything [1].
• RedHat just had too many problems and decided to SetUID root a load of crap (plus there's the obvious rootkits).
• SuSE fell apart at the seams.

It's quite funny when someone came along, found a security hole such as the recent OpenSSH hole, and tried to crack a Slack box - it was fairly obvious from the start, because the rootkits failed. Then I built Slack packages for tripwire and stuff.

Pat's got it right, IMHO. It's a good, simple distro with decent ground-up building. And there's a lot of misconception that you have to build stuff on Slack boxes - you don't - you can quite happily build packages.

I now run Slack on my laptop, on the company servers, on my desktop, and loads of other places. It works for me. I'm pleased to see Pat's finally got it together for 8.1 (I've been following the updates for some time).

But one bit of advice: update slackware.com - it's bloody old.

Snogs,

Joel.
[1] Admittedly I haven't got used to it in the same way I got used to Slack, but there's enough people in the company who can get used to Slack. Standardising means getting other people to learn it too.

Last year a company called CentralNic, who operate a registry for uk.com and many other similar domains, decided to auction off all the generic names they had previously held back. The main difference is that CentralNic did it for charity, and not to line their own pocket.

My company uses Slackware exclusively on all our servers all over the world, and on the desktops of the technical department (apart from me, I use RH). Nothing gets us worked up more than the release of a new Slack version.

Part of the reason is habitual, but Slackware's simplicity and UNIX-ness is also very appealing for a large, complex network that needs a lot of work to operate. Its lean install (if you don't want it, you don't have to install it, if you do, put it on yourself) is perfect for mission critical stuff where security is important.

That's why Slack will always have a place in our hearts and on our boxen.

Wind back to August 1998 - I tried originally installed Red Hat on an old Axil (that's a Sun clone, in this case of a SparcStation 20). It was an absolute nightmare as there weren't any easily-obtainable bootable CDs, and we ended up netbooting it. The thing panicked repeatedly, and as for compiling kernels we might as well have compiled using pencil and paper for all the good it did.

Now come to the present day. I use the Slackware SPARC port, which in my view is absolutely excellent.

Here's the rundown on what was good (and bad) from each distribution I tried:

• Red Hat: Admittedly not tried it recently, but seemed to suffer from quite a few problems including kernels not compiling. Last tried 2.2.0, I think it was RH6. Install was reasonably trouble-free once we got it netbooting, and installation using the console port was fine.
• SuSE: Ruediger will kill me for this, but I had no ends of problems with it. The console port is not supported very well for installs, so you have to connect a monitor up to it - which for most people won't be accessible. That said, it seemed to work fine once installed and screwed down. Installed via CD, taken from SuSE's website.
• Debian: Mostly my unfamiliarity with Debian let me down here, but I've got a nameserver box running it quite happily now. It's a SS20 with 32M RAM and it ticks along fine, coping quite adequately with huge zonefiles. Installed via CD taken from a local Debian mirror.
• Slackware: A newcomer, but I'm a Slackware whore anyway so I was pretty good with it. Disadvantage is that the ISO just installs the bare essentials, so you have to download the rest of slackware-current and install it later. Big problem in that it didn't detect the basic network card on a SS5, SS10 or SS20 for an NFS install, but seemed to work OK on an Ultra5.

Linux on a Sparc copes wonderfully with lots of database transactions and loads of I/O, certainly better than an Intel box will. In my day job we've had really good success running MySQL on a Sparc, but we're now porting to Oracle on Solaris (but only really cos they haven't released it for Sparc Linux!).

Perfect as Verisign just start their own "uk.com" service using the reserved word because "The domain just wasn't reregistered - your credit card was never authorised (never entered into the terminal more like) - sorry, nothing we can do"...

I used to work for CentralNic, who operate uk.com, eu.com, de.com (not fr.com, that's somebody else) and many other similar domains of the form xx.com and xx.net, and the domains were renewed for ten years. So, even if Verisign "arranged" for the domain not to be renewed, your uk.com domain is safe from that until 2010.

In the UK, the first two rules already exist, hence there is only one 1 letter domain (x.co.uk), and a few 2 letter domains (bt.co.uk, f9.co.uk) that were allocated before Nominet came in to manage the namespace.[...]

This is more or less correct, except that you can have two-character domains provided that one is a letter and the other is a digit, so f9.co.uk is still valid under the present rules. I strongly doubt that any of the 520 such combinations remain unregistered though.

What I quite like about Nominet's rules is that you have to be an ISP to have a .net.uk address, and there are strict rules as to what the user can do with it. Unfortunately, Nominet do not appear to be policing this, and there are abuses such as onetel.net.uk (which IMO should be deleted for breach of contract).

On another note, I notice that CentralNic have sex.eu.com up for auction as their charity thingy for the Farmers In Crisis fund, at www.auctions.eu.com, and nobody's bid for it yet...

Certainly not as bad as the place in Docklands which gives it's URL as:

• hppt//itdesigns.co.uk

• www.moving.com.uk