Slashdot Mirror

Start method is rexec

The only way to rename a file is through an invisible menu.

Dude ... are you serious? My grandmother is 75 years old and is the most annoyingly computer illiterate person I have ever dealt with. I explained the concept of right clicking to her *one time* and she "got it".

Now I know your rebuttal is going to be ... "But the point is she shouldn't have to have it explained to her at all!!!" ... That's just stupid. People have to learn how to do just about everything and it's no big deal once you know it. How intuitive is a TV remote, really? If you've never used a TV before in your life? How intuitive is driving a car? How intuitive is an ATM for getting out cash? I could sit here and play all your "but, but, but" games like instead of "but, what is right clicking" I could say "but, what's a PIN number? What's "my card"? What's withdraw?" It's all learned.

There's a quote I read that says "The only "intuitive" interface is the nipple. After that it's all learned."

Unlike the rules of the road, the rules for computers completely change every 5 years.

A fair point. In the grand scheme of things computers are a relatively immature technology. (And it's still a fair comparision automobiles. Early cars experienced rapid change in both technology, technique, and legal restrictions.) But if it's so immature is it reasonable to demand that it be as easy to use as a nipple?

it's very easy to find a public machine that allows me to authenticate via https as opposed to one that has an ssh client.

I've yet to find a publicly-accessible Win32 machine that was locked down tight enough that I couldn't pull a PuTTY binary off my home webserver and run it. Mozilla won't work, but IE gives you the option to run binaries right after they're downloaded without saving them anywhere in particular. You could even run it directly from this link provided by the author. (That IE allows this is a security hole through which you could drive a Mack truck, but such is the state of security on your average Windows box. That doesn't stop me from taking advantage of it if I can. It's not like I'd run a fork-bomb type of program that throws up a bunch of windows pointing to goatse.cx and/or tubgirl.com...)

A nice thing about Mozilla (the suite) is that with one not-unreasonable download, I can convert a foreign computer (want to check email at a friend's place, etc.) to a reasonable communications station (email, IRC, web) with an interface I like, including tabbed browsing. Primarily, this means "on a Windows machine," since most Linux or FreeBSD machines will probably already be equipped with both Mozilla and Xchat. (OK, two, downloads if I want ssh -- putty rocks.)

For the last few years, I've used Chatzilla on and off, usually finding after an hour or so that I missed Xchat, which so far is to me the most impressive IRC client around (and from which Chatzilla seems to intelligently take many cues). Recently though, esp. with Mozilla 1.7a, I notice that I start chatzilla and *don't* need to switch to Xchat. The one exception is DCC, but since I've used DCC rarely, it's not a biggie.

So I find that as of this month, my primary IRC client has been Chatzilla. Thanks, Mozilla / Chatzilla developers!

timothy

TRS-80 Model I/III - these affordable computers were the first to have inexpensive networking. They had a multiplexer device avaiable (think hub) that workied through the casette port - one computer could 'save' to another 'loading' computer. Cheap, by clever, flie-level networking for the masses.

Are you sure that's the first? I agree the TRS80s were early, but the Acorn Atom (1980 - and I have one from that year with the network card) had Econet, a network with up to 255 nodes per subnet and a protocol for servers (machines with hard disk and/or printers) to advertise themselves to clients.

TRS-80 Model I/III - these affordable computers were the first to have inexpensive networking. They had a multiplexer device avaiable (think hub) that workied through the casette port - one computer could 'save' to another 'loading' computer. Cheap, by clever, flie-level networking for the masses.

Are you sure that's the first? I agree the TRS80s were early, but the Acorn Atom (1980 - and I have one from that year with the network card) had Econet, a network with up to 255 nodes per subnet and a protocol for servers (machines with hard disk and/or printers) to advertise themselves to clients.

NSA Key

ssh can do it for free via Cygwin

What's wrong with Putty?
It's free and a heck of a lot smaller than Cygwin.

IPTables (hi, Rusty!), PostFix, OpenOffice.org, OpenLDAP, OpenSSL, Mozilla, the KDE suite... all of these make Linux useful as well. SaMBa is "just" one more "pluggable" component on the most popular server application framework in existence. It happens to be a very good one (as in, robust, extensive, flexible, secure).

Lest you think I'm only a one-eyed Penguinista, I've used and benefited from SaMBa running on Solaris, BSDi, *BSD, Irix, HP-UX and AIX too.

One piece of MS-Windows software which always amuses me is PuTTY. Why "PuTTY"? Well... it makes Windows useful. (-:

I've tried a good deal of the stuff listed. The following are the most intuitive, free, software products I have encountered. They increase productivity, and are stable.

Freeware List: If you can think of it, it's in here.
OpenCD: Precompiled CD with all open source software.
Doom9.org: Famed site for lots of media tools.
Trillian: AIM, ICQ, IRC, MSN, Yahoo! IM software all in one.
AVG Anti-Virus: Free AV
SpyBot (Spam Remover): Free Spam Remover/Search & Destroy
Firebird: Web browser w/ adblock & popup control.
FileZilla FTP: FTP Client
Smart FTP: Free Client, better looking, faster
Kerio: Personal Firewall, better than ZoneAlarm
Textpad: Text Editor.
PuTTY: SSH Client.
CygWin: Linux emulation.
FFDshow: DivX/XVid decoder.
TweakUI: Microsoft's famed Powertoy for Windows XP.
WinAce: Fast, high-compression (40% smaller, faster compression than ZIP).
WinAmp: MP3 player, with this skin.
dBpowerAMP: Music Converter (copies CDs to MP3)

One last thing, don't use Outlook. Find a better program: Eudora, Thunderbird, or PegasusMail (in that order) are safer/more powerful. Windows comes bundled with great software, just like Mandrake - but their internet package leaves much (security) to be desired.

Ive been using XP for a while now and these are the essentials that I've found I can't live without
1 : Firebird (IE sucks leprous donkey balls, opera cant render properly, mozilla is slow, firebird is the best)
2 : Gvim is the best editor out there for code and text alike (remember to disable backup files)
3 : PuTTy retreat to a comfortable bash shell ;)
4 : XP Powertoys virtual desktop manager,cmd prompt here context menu and of course...
5 : TweakUI turn off those silly windows defaults
6 : a good FTP client,WS-ftp is a good one
7 : Winace,the only compression tool youll ever need!
8 : startup monitor monitors for extraneous crap adding itself to startup
9 : strokeit ,mouse gestures for windows,Yay!
10 : Nethack the only game you need (safe for work too)

that might not necessarily be in the right order and this doesnt count amusement software like media players and whatnot but those are my most used tools at work

• CygWin. The Linux-like environment for Windows.
  Mozilla. Use this for mail, news, and browsing if you like.
  Firebird. for FAST browsing.
  WS FTP Light. A FREE, FTP client that works great.
  Filezilla. which is TRULY free and does sftp as well.
  PuTTY. a free SSH client for Windows.
  TTSSH. is a much less clunky ssh client than PuTTY.
  iXplorer. freeware secure FTP client
  VNC hello!? remote controll software.
  Tight VNClike the original, only FAST.
  GNU-EMacs for Windows. just trust me ;).
  Dev-C++a free C++ compiler for those who can't afford VS.
  NetHack. as someone here said, you MUST have NetHack installed on everything...
  Free-AV.free Anti-Virus software for Windows, (mandatory these days). or
  AVG Free edition. another free Anti-Virus software for Windows.
  Zonealarm. my favorite Personal Firewall,, really!. or
  Kerio. another firewall that some seem to like. or
  Sygate. yet another firewall. whatever floats your boat.
  Boingo. to see where the closest hotspot is, hehe.
  OpenOffice 1.1 the Microsoft Office KILLER :) {really!}
  Winamp 2.x for audio/video usage in Windows, stay away from the new one :).
  Mark's Adding Machine is much better than the Windows calculator.
  SpyBot Search & Destroy The best Ad-ware / Spyware removal tool we've found, "IE is unusable without".
  Ad-Aware another spy-ware app "alas poor Windoze."
  Trillian a favorite IM, since we're all chatters @ heart. or
  GAIM since trillian hogs resources, "bad piggy!".
  Gimp image creation/editing. Who needs Photoshop anyway?
  EnZip freeware Zip Utility, Stop nagging you WinZip!!
  Iview is a great little image viewer. or
  Irfanviewone of the best image viewer out there for Windows.
  Audacity is a great little sound editor.
  Virtual Dub. a great video editor.
  cDex gotta rip those cd's for the RIAA!
  MAME for games, period. Free. You can buy some ROMs, or *ahem* ask around. and finally
  XPantiSPY since XP is E-V-I-L.

And FINALLY, don't trust me! Trust the experts;

Go to the Pricelessware site maintained by the alt.comp.freeware Usenet group.
The

Browser: Mozilla Firebird 0.6.1 (or 0.7 nightly build)

Email: Thunderbird 0.2 (or 0.3 nightly build)

Office Suite: Open Office 1.1

SSH Client: Putty 0.53b

Graphics: Irfan View 3.85 or GIMP 1.2.5

Music: Winamp 2.91

Virus Scanner: AVG 7.0

Instant Messenger: Psi 0.9 or Trillian Basic 0.74E or gaim 0.70

Non-Copywrited Music downloads :P : WinMX 3.31

Video Player (paired with an ATI Video card): ATI MMC 7.6

FTP : LeapFTP 2.7.4

ok so that was 11 .. sorry ;)

Really, it's hard to pinpoint withoug knowing what you're going to be using it for, however, for basic needs, I utilize the following (win32. I have a pair of RH boxes, but they are both servers without KDE/Gnome, so I don't use Linux desktops much):

Mozilla 1.4

(The whole suite) mail/browser with additional functionlity provided by a couple of plugins (EasySearch bar, Optimoz Mouse Gestures and the Calendar). Been playing with Firebird/Thunderbird, but thunderbird has a bit to go before it's up to the level ot the regular Mozilla mail client.

AntiVIR free Antivirus.
Updates every 2 weeks (or more if you're paranoid). Used AVG (Grisoft's product) for a while, but had issues with its W2k/XP compatibility. That was over a year ago, however.

EnZip Freeware Zip Utility

Explorer-like interface, with shell extensions and all. No nag screens!

FileZillaOpen-source FTP utility

Includes queuing and scheduling functions. Better than WsFTP lite.

Putty freeware SSH client

Nuf said!

iXplorer Freeware secure FTP client

Transfer files over SSH connections. Useful for transferring files to/from Linux hosts without opening up FTP.

WinAmp free Multimedia Player

With some plugins, can play almost any type of media file.

There's more, but I'm not going to list everything I use. Normally I'd just send you to my website, but I'm not going to /. my own site. It's just a little 486 box on a DSL connection!

You can get SCP for windows from PuTTy. There's a GPL graphical frontend called Secure iXplorer from i-tree.org.

If you're running a Windows box, then the following is mandatory. I even have it all burned to a CD to give to friends. Some free/speech, some free/beer, some shareware.

ZoneAlarm - You MUST have a software firewall for Windows.
Mozilla - I think you know this one by now
OpenOffice.org - Ibid
PuTTY - Not the best interface, but Free ssh/scp client
WinZip - I think XP has its own unzipper, but I suggest WinZip anyway for people. Mostly because I don't deal with people who use XP. I refuse to do computer support for friends who use XP. (I'm making an exception by even talking to you. )

On the Mandrake side, I like using Konqueror. Honestly, the KDE suite, OpenOffice.org, and xmms should give you everything you need for everything. :-)

• OpenOffice to cover word processing and other office utilities.
• Pegasus for email.
• Mozilla Firebird for the browser.
• PuTTY to connect to your linux server (you do have one of those, right?).
• Winamp to play your music.
• ActivePerl because Perl scripts are so damn handy, regardless of the platform.

Some free, Free and not so free applications:

Webbrowser Mozilla Firebird (Win / linux)
Email Eudora (win) Evolution (linux)
Office suite OpenOffice.org 1.1 (win / linux)
SSH client putty (win) openssh (linux)
Videoplayer VLC (win / linux) or BSPlayer (win) and Xine (linux)
Editor Textpad (windows) Kate (linux)
Chat Jabber PSI (win / linux)
Firewall Kerio (win)
Anti virus F-Secure (not free) (win)

- Ost

My Personal Opinions (Apps I can think of):

Mozilla Thunderbird: Email client that's still in Alpha but has never given me one problem.

Mozilla Firebird: Greatest web browser around today. Here are some reasons why.

Krusader/Windows Commander: Great file managers. Windows Commander is (obviously) the windows original and Krusader is the KDE based *nix one.

Open Office: You already mentioned this one

GAIM: Best IM client avaliable (I know this isn't exactly productivity software).

AVG Anti-Virus : Free non-commerical use anti-virus.

PuTTY: Telnet/SSH/Rlogin, everything you need for remote access.

XMMS/Winamp: Media Players

I am still looking for good financial software. Microsoft Money is the best I've found so far.
cuban

Here is my top ten list (in no particular order) for Windows. I'll let everyone argue about the Linux tools.
CygWin the Linux-like environment for Windows.
Mozilla naturally.... Use this for mail, news, and browsing if you like.
WS FTP Light a FREE, FTP client that works great.
PuTTY a free SSH client for Windows.
VNC remote controll software, NOTE: the location is no longer on the ATT Labs UK site.
GNU-EMacs for Windows. I usually install it, but use Vi more.
Dev-C++ a free C++ compiler. I use VC++ 6.0, but this is free, and I think it's pretty good.
NetHack You MUST have NetHack installed on everything...
Free-AV free Anti-Virus software for Windows.
Boingo to see where the closest hotspot is. (free) you don't need the service.

Hey, man. PuTTY works good enough for me.

If you look for an MX record and none is found, the nameserver returns an A record. So it definitely screws with spam filtering.

Eh?

shawn@zedd:~$ dig +short 67732732726326.com
64.94.110.11
shawn@zedd:~$ dig +short 67732732726326.com mx
shawn@zedd:~$

Or, if you're doing this from a C program, you'll use something like adns, which will also look up precisely what you ask it for. In fact, I'm not aware of any DNS API that behaves as you describe, and I don't recall anything in RFC 1035 that allows the server to return A records when asked for MX records. Even if the server did return A records, what DNS API doesn't tell you what sort of records you got?

I suppose there might be some tool that works the way you describe, but if there is, it's brain dead and you should use a better one.

> With the way things are going, the whole damn Internet will be running over HTTP soon.

Hell yeah -- you can even tunnel SSH over HTTP these days.

Long live the Intarweb.

Unless you are behind a firewall, use PuTTY. It is a nice little telnet/ssh client for Windows.

One word: Putty.

1. Wiring that part of the world so people have more individual 'net access. (This could take a little while... I know I won't be holding my breath.)
2. Use Jabber servers that have java clients.
3. If you're traveling around and have a host system you can set up with a permanent domain name, you could install a text-based jabber client on it, then ssh/telnet to that machine. Slow, but you'd have jabber. (If you need ssh access, you can go to PuTTY's website, go to download, right-click on the exe, and pick "Run from this location" since it doesn't use an installer.)

off topic, but... ssh can be proxied:

PuTTY SSH

I keep putty on my pendrive, as well as psftp. I also keep a backup of my Mozilla bookmarks. Other than that, I use it to move data around.

Great idea, however, if you really want to fuck with them (at least in a legal way), use -j DROP rather than -j REJECT. This should make their system wait for a timeout and thus tie up their spamming engine a bit (well, at least one thread of it)... See this article for more information.

Good points, but I would prefer a combination of SquirrelMail (or SSH / PuTTY & Mutt) and a dynamic DNS domain over a "freemail provider". :)

I hard coded one of my boxes to a specific IP then port forward from port XXXX to port 21 at my internal IP of 192.168.1.205. Only my friends and I know it's there and can access it. Very handy.


Nice, but I strongly suggest you use SSH instead, particularly since you're on a cable connection.

You can download a windows client called putty. It's a small, standalone .exe so you can easily grab it when you need it, and drop it in the trash when you're finished.

There are very few clients (puTTY and Powerterm) on the PC that can handle our product. The Mac situation is much worse. It took me a few months to find an appropriate solution for working with our clients from my Mac. The winners are:

Eterm -free- Get version 0.9 through Fink. It's much faster than Apple's terminal application and is much more configurable.
Here's a shot of a typical Eterm on my machine

DataComet -not free- but worth it. This program is similar to Powerterm on the PC side. It can handle just about any emulation you throw at it. Powerterm and DataComet both include their own font suites which allow for full PC-ANSI emulation, for example. Very comprehensive package. It integrates with the built-in shell and even handles my company's software.
Here's a screenshot of DataComet on my system

Here's a random screenshot.

Note: There is a Powerterm for Mac OSX, but it's fairly expensive, and DataComet performs as well. Hit me up if you have any questions....

This is a bit of a departure from the original topic, but since you raised the point, I'll continue with it. If you want "xterm mousing" in a high quality, free terminal app on Windows, and you want a more native-feeling application than a cygwin port of rxvt, you might want to try PuTTY. PuTTY is best known for its solid SSH capabilities, but it can also be used for telnet, rlogin, and raw TCP connections. It is not a truly generic terminal, since it cannot act as a display for arbitrary local programs, but that's very rarely an issue on Windows.

Everyone's favorite SSH/Telnet program for Windows, PuTTY, is a possible future option. A MacOS port is forthcoming. If you're brave, preliminary support is in CVS right now.

(In other Non-MacOS-related PuTTY news, you can also get a PuTTY-based xterm replacement for X if you fancy its emulation better: pterm).

Everyone's favorite SSH/Telnet program for Windows, PuTTY, is a possible future option. A MacOS port is forthcoming. If you're brave, preliminary support is in CVS right now.

(In other Non-MacOS-related PuTTY news, you can also get a PuTTY-based xterm replacement for X if you fancy its emulation better: pterm).

You can use SFTP to transfer files between Linux and Windows. These Open Source folks are nice enough to write programs even for operating systems they hate, but you might be labeled a Troll if you mention any of them here.

I guess it doesn't matter if you're the only one reading the code, but I can't see how macros can do anything other than make code harder to read...

http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/corout ines.html

So what's wrong with doing coroutines in C? :-)

I'll help here:

Server side:

Uncomment line in sshd_config, enabling:
X11Forwarding yes

Client side (Unix, GNU/Linux):

Client side (Windows):

Get Cygwin/XFree86. It has an easy installer wizard featuring on-the-fly download of packages: just select XFree86-base among the available packages, and the SSH client too if it's not already selected. Easy as cake!

Fire up your X server - there are a number of ways to do this, try peeking into the startx.bat file. Anyway, use the -rootless switch to make the X server window run minimized, and have each program start in a separate window in the Windows environment. If you want native Windows decorations, try -multiwindow.

After that you have access to a nice bash shell, where you can run the same commands as above for Unix, GNU/Linux.

If you prefer a native win32 SSH client, get PuTTY and enable 'X11 forwaring' in it's preferences window for each host.

Why are there so many variants of crypto key formats?

Not only the PKCS series, but also the various encoding methods. And clearly these are inadequate for everyone, so we get PGP formats, SSH/OpenSSH/PuTTY formats, etc.

If there had been a much smaller, more universal set of key formats, interoperable crypto would have been far easier.

On my paranoid days, I begin to suspect the TLA agencies on the standards committees deliberately introduced complexity to limit take-up.

Late posting moderation multiplier=2

BTW, what alteratives to BIND exist for Linuxand *BSD? I actually don't know and would like to know.

There are now a number of alternative packages that may have advantages for many deployments. E.g.:

MaraDNS is a general-purpose, fast DNS server package (doing recursive, authoritative, and caching roles, plus fully supporting zone transfers):
http://www.maradns.org/

pdnsd is a small caching-only DNS server with a disk-based cache, suitable for small networks and workstations:
http://home.t-online.de/home/Moestl/

Dnsmasq is a small authoritative and caching DNS server for a group of NATted / IPmasqued machines (optionally pulling names from DHCP leases):
http://www.thekelleys.org.uk/dnsmasq/

DNRD is a small caching-only DNS server for NAT / IPmasq networks:
http://dnrd.nevalabs.org/

MyDNS is a MySQL-based authoritative and caching server (no recursive service) suitable for very large sites. In such roles, it's faster and more responsive than BIND9, even though the latter uses a RAM-based cache:
http://mydns.bboy.net/

ldapdns implements the same idea, except out of an LDAP database. Again, much faster than BIND9:
http://nimh.org/code/ldapdns/

GnuDIP is an authoritative server for Dynamic DNS:
http://gnudip2.sourceforge.net/gnudip-www/

NSD is a high-performance authoritative-only daemon:
http://www.nlnetlabs.nl/nsd/

PowerDNS (open source as of 2002-11-25) is an authoritative-only daemon with a modular structure supporting various back-end information stores such as SQL databases (MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle 8i, Oracle 9i, IBM DB2, and others via ODBC), BIND zonefiles and other file formats, and LDAP directories. Supports AXFR zone transfers.
http://www.powerdns.com/products/powerdns/

CustomDNS is a authoritative-only daemon for both static addresses and its variant form of dynamic DNS:
http://customdns.sourceforge.net/

lbnamed is a similar authoritative-only daemon for static and dynamic information, with a load-balancing multi-machine architecture:
http://www.stanford.edu/~riepel/lbnamed/

Posadis is another fast authoritative-only daemon:
http://posadis.sourceforge.net/

dents is another general-purpose DNS server, but is perenially unfinished, and is probably dead, at this point:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/dents/

Pliant DNS Server is another general-purpose DNS server, although it may not support zone transfers:
http://pliant.cx/pliant/protocol/dns/

Yaku-NS is another small, fast general-purpose DNS server:
http://www.kyuzz.org/antirez/ens.html

Twisted Names is an authoritative and caching DNS server, written in Python:
http://twistedmatrix.com/documents/howto/names

Oak DNS Server is an authoritative and caching DNS server, supporting dynamic DNS updates and AAAA records. It's written in Python, and doesn't need to run privileged:
http://www.digitallumber.com/oak

dnsjava is a minimal, authoritative-only server, a resolver library, and a set of DNS utilities, all written in Java:
http://www.xbill.org/dnsjava/

Related:

FireDNS is a client library for DNS requests, with emphasis on speed and asynchronous processing. Written in C, and has low-timeout blocking functions. Can be used to relace standard libc resolver library functions like getbyhostname with much faster equivalent code:
http://ares.penguinhosting.net/~ian/

GNU adns is a resolver library for C (and C++) programs, and a collection of useful DNS resolver utilities:
http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~ian/adns/

Proprietary packages include:

UltraDNS (UltraDNS Corporation)
djbdns/tinydns
ATLAS (Verisign)
BINDPlus (Information Network Eng. Group, Inc.)
Global Name Service (Nominum, Inc.)
NeDNS (Neteka, Inc.)

I maintain this list at http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/linux-info/dns-servers

Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com

My employer still uses telnet, for our entire ERP system.

All because, we (IT) cant get anyone to approve the purchase of a newer version of our terminal software (the money's not avaiable, etc...). It'd push out something such as PuTTY (OpenSSH is already installed, and used by the admin team) but the ERP app requires SCOANSI support, if it were not for that, it would be a dead simple sell.

The PuTTY folks are close, but not quite close enough for our enduser's needs... I'd help add the feature if I only had the time, and understood C as well as Perl and Bash...

There's some here and here.

As a wise man once said: The only intuitive interface is the nipple. All else is learned.

By the way, here's some research about that quote. Apparently some babies don't know what to do with a nipple. Maybe they tried to right-click it?

I have a box at home set up like that & just carry the floppy with putty on it when I'm out of town.

PuTTY.

here's the source code via http, the source code via ftp, and the md5sum

all this and more including read-only cvs access, nightly cvs tarballs, and contacts for submitting your own patches can be found at putty's home page here

just getting the word out. they've apparently become inundated with support mail for their free product, and could use some more developers :)

Nobody should be required to pick up a manual and read through hundreds of pages before they're able to use something.

Err yes they should and that goes for anything technical. Reading and training are essential but practice is most important. We're not learning to ride a bike here. I think what your trying to say is that reading a book on programming isn't going to make you a good programmer because it won't. Often I see ppl ask dumb questions that could be solved by typing in a man command. I think the absolute first thing any newbie should read are these 2 documents ->

Asking smart questions
How to report bugs effectively