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If you have to do a lot of reverse proxying then you might want to check out Varnish. It performs much better than squid, but it only works for reverse-proxy.

I installed a new Videocard. Windows detected it and I installed the drivers. Worked great. I then booted Linux. Linux detected the card and I installed the drivers. Linux couldn't figure out what resolution my monitor supported.

My experience has been decidedly the opposite. I've had Windows refuse to boot when I added a new video card, but Linux ran fine. Not long ago, I had a SATA error on my motherboard. Windows refused to boot, Linux (Ubuntu 8.08, to be specific) ran just fine. The fact that it was only Windows that failed kept me from suspecting the hardware, though clearing the CMOS eventually fixed the problem.

Linux does have problems, but the thing is, they aren't being ignored.

Tried Munin? I was quite impressed when I installed it and found it'd auto-detected a whole bunch of locally graphable stuff.

Yes, you can use threads well. But with less effort (taking into account synchronization and debugging), you can make the asynchronous tasks independent programs instead of threads. Your video and sound processing threads sound like perfect candidates for being made into independent programs.

A task being an independent program affords several advantages. For example, it's easier to test an independent program, especially in a test harness. An independent program can be run by itself. And it's very clear what an independent program's data dependencies are. There is no risk of accidentally racing in memory access, assuming the programs don't share memory. Don't do that.

Performance simply is not a problem. Any modern operating system will have IPC primitives that are more than good enough.

For something like a video processing application, all three programs sharing file descriptors open to a video buffer sounds ideal. And before you complain that "disk access" is slow: on modern operating systems, main memory is just a cache for the disk anyway. With a modern page cache, using a disk file well be just as efficient as pretending you can keep arbitrarily large data structures in memory. See Varnish's architecture.

Even if you must use threads, you should always program them as if they were independent programs, use message-passing, sockets, and so on for communication, and treat the shared address space more as a dangerous misfeature than a communication medium.

LinPro. Disclaimer: Friend works there. :)

Varnish has enabled a Norwegian newspaper to handle over a million visits a day with only one server. It is FOSS. http://varnish.projects.linpro.no/

Let the user become the crawler- and do not eliminate the search giants (just don't rely on them completely). Already I sort of operate like a (slow) crawler with my queues of links to read, bookmarks (be weary- big load) and indexing those very interesting or important pages, sharing related tidbits, etc. Just feels like the natural extension, though I am sure that many people will want to stick with traditional GUIs and "back/forward" habits. There is also some interesting discussion in ATLAS-L re: future search infrastructures. So, in the spirit of promoting development in this area, linkage:

* Grub article (now defunct)- was distributed peer-to-peer crawler. (see also)
* Boitho, another distributed crawler
* YaCy- another peer-to-peer crawler
* How to build a web spider
* C++ web crawler lib
* LibWWW (perl)
* W3C's WebBot
* The Internet Archive's Heritrix crawler
* WebSPHINX- customizable crawler

Somehow, this is like an extension of surfraw. I imagine that soon enough we will start up an open source crawler-browsing hybrid software package, though have been surprised that nothing like it has popped up yet- it's (usually) the way of the programmer to make sure that he has the ability to do what the giants are doing. Maybe we have all been collectively blinded by graphical web browsers (IE, Firefox, Opera, etc.) and "click-click-click" thinkware?

Hey dude, take a look at varnish instead of using Apache as a reverse proxy ;-)

Myself, I like mathopd for static content and employ a stripped down Apache 1.3 with a static mod_php for the dynamic stuff. Lighttpd is often promoted by fanbois that obviously don't even run busy sites - it's very strange these guys think themselves qualified to give advice (and yes, I have evaluated it).

• Cacti (an RRDtool front-end -- if you don't know what RDDtool is, you don't need this :) )
• Munin, and
• OSSEC.

I've looked over someone's shoulder at the latter - it seems pretty good, it runs on SNMP - I tinkered with NAGIOS five years ago and found it good, but a little dangerous if you didn't read the docs before firing it up (back then, anyway, it auto-discovered the local network by strobing everything in sight with Nmap scans)... but I've no experience of any of these in production. I've been asked to build out a new office network, which will be a template for future local offices, and getting the monitoring right is going to be crucial, so any actual experience of production use gratefully received!

You seem to have mentioned the low end of the spectrum (cacti).

So, as long as we are there, let me mention my favorite : Munin.

what exactly is HEAD slashdot.org

It's a (perl) script which comes with libwww-perl which either is now part of the standard Perl distribution, or is installed by default in any decent Linux distribution.

If you don't have HEAD, you can type a bit more and get the server with LWP::Simple's head() method (then you don't need grep):

$ perl -MLWP::Simple -e '$s=(head "http://slashdot.org/" )[4]; print $s'

Either way is better than those useless 12 lines of ruby (I'm sure ruby can also do the same in a similarly simple way, but that author just doesn't have a clue)

Can it run on Windows .... been waiting a while to say that.

Dunno. Don't care either, but it might. Its based on rrdtool which does run on Windows. I don't know if this article is a slashvertisement, or just void of information. I've linked to rrdtool, and here is the munin homepage.

There are _tons_ of these things running around. In my opinion, rrdtool is one of the best tools that has come to computing in a long time. Its awesome. Other packages that use rrdtool are cricket, ganglia, and many others. I believe that the rrdtool site has a listing of some of these.

For those not familiar with it, rrdtool is a database that is designed for time series data. Its kinda like a smart FIFO where it looses details the further back in time you go by storing running averages. I have rolled my own monitoring stuff with rrdtool and perl to monitor CPU, load, temperatures, you name it. One of the cool things about rrdtool is that the database is fixed in size. rrdtool is not easy to initially set up and work with, but the effort is definitely worth it.

Basically, if your a sysadmin in 2006 and you do not have rrdtool based monitoring going on. Well, maybe the job is not for you. Its that important and good. A simple click on a link of a webpage with a rrdtool graph can demonstrate to even the pointiest of pointy PHB that you need more equipment or a trend is going on or whatever.

This is the kind of stuff I would like to see more talked about here on slashdot.

Atmel and Realtek, I believe. With WLAN, you really have to check which chipset you get before buying. Avoid Broadcom, Prism54 (driver support is coming, but depends on reverse engineering). Here is a page with some recommendations.

Personally, I have an Asus WL-107 with Ralink rt2500 chipset (cardbus), which works acceptably, and a 3com with Prism54 that doesn't work. Beware of cards that change chipset from revision to revision.

But why would they want to? There are plenty of geeks available locally.

The other thing that helps here is the fact that D-Link doesn't change chipsets in the middle of a product line like other crappy brands (at least, not in _this_ line).

Bullshit.
There are 4 completely different versions of the DWL-650, each with a totally different and incompatible chipset.
http://www.wifi.com.ar/doc/wifi/wlan_adapters.html
http://users.linpro.no/janl/hardware/wifi.html

They do the same with all of their adaptors, including multiple versions of the DWL-G650 and plus models.
You have to be very careful with D-link products, at least as much as with any other manufacturer.

I would recommend Netgear, but unfortunately they follow the same idiotic practice. :(

At my work we use Ultramonkey with LVS-kiss and Mon.

Our hardware infrastructure includes 2 load-balancers running in a failover system with 3 web servers in the backend (1.8ghz, 512ram, 40gig hdd, 100mbps network) systems. That hosts over 60 million page views a month, it also supports real-time failover. For monitoring there are tools out there that use MRTG/RRD for cluster statistics.

I don't know what kind of server equipment you've got, but since you'll be running IE then I guess you've got some kind of Terminal Server or Citrix solution. Take a look at http://www.linpro.no/english, and ask them about their product Multiframe. It might be just what you're looking for: Not very expensive, Linux-based, very light footprint, very simple to administer.

In a case like this I would rather stand in front of a judge with a jury consisting of experts rater that "clueless" non-technical fellow citizens.

He is off course neutral as a judge but at least he knows something about computers, crypto, Open Source/Free Software and Linux (probably a lot).

If you ask me; anyone that want their future decided by twelve/fourteen, possible 100% clueless, civil jury members rather than seven judges in a case like this is plain stupid.

Some parts of what you are saying is ok enough (although the dependency issue is horrendously outdated, and you seldomly need to compile things) but the last two points are just absurd.

"- It's free - Which usually means there isn't a company behind it that will support it."

Then what are Red Hat, SuSE, IBM, HP and the thousands of consultancy agencies out there (like mine?

" - It's open source - So you can modify it to do what you want it to do. This, of course, takes time and money, and there isn't a company you can go to and pay them to do it."

Then what are Red Hat, SuSE, IBM, HP and the thousands of consultancy agencies out there (like mine?

Some parts of what you are saying is ok enough (although the dependency issue is horrendously outdated, and you seldomly need to compile things) but the last two points are just absurd.

"- It's free - Which usually means there isn't a company behind it that will support it."

Then what are Red Hat, SuSE, IBM, HP and the thousands of consultancy agencies out there (like mine?

" - It's open source - So you can modify it to do what you want it to do. This, of course, takes time and money, and there isn't a company you can go to and pay them to do it."

Then what are Red Hat, SuSE, IBM, HP and the thousands of consultancy agencies out there (like mine?

This may sound inflammatory, but it's just cold facts...

The code in http://members.shaw.ca/rosensto/bus/bus.pl is horrible. Just look at it. No strict, no warnings, global variables everywhere, executing `external programs` when the same thing could be achieved easily and cleanly using Perl.

localtime didn't work? Sounds like PEBKAC.

Does he say "Cannot load $stop_num"."left.html" because "$stop_numleft.html" didn't work? D'oh. How about using e.g. "${stop_num}left.html"?

Is he joking? It wasn't funny. Why not just use LWP?

... but a /.'ing in less than 6mins?

According to the time stamp of this fine +5 funny poem, it took about 4 minutes: The article is from 12:52 (my time zone, I guess :), the poem from 12:56. If you calculate the time, the AC probably needed to check the link, notice, that it's already slashdotted and then type the poem and submit it, it's probably even less than 4 minutes, which is really heavy.

Interestingly the Slashdot effect this time (also?) seems to have hit their DNS server, because I always got and still get a "host not found" error instead of a "host not reachable" or "connection refused" as usual. Maybe the DNS server was running just on the same host. But what then happend to the secondary DNS server?

Thanks to commentators and moderators there were at least two links with similar informations and pictures. BTW: Regarding the caching issues mentioned in some +5 insightful comment, I agree to try to use the Google Cache (if they're fine with that additional traffic, they at least weren't pleased when one of the live tests of LWP connected to them and then filtered those request returning a 403 and therefore causing the live test to fail) or the archive at web.archive.org.

But, FYI, Perl has a coupla thousand killer apps, most of which are available on CPAN.

Industry Standards include:

• CGI
• LWP
• DBI
• AxKit
• mod_perl
• and, of course, slash

The Beatles never flamed the Stones. The Stones never dissed the Beatles. And at no time did either party rip on Bob Dylan or badmouth Marvin Gaye. Language designers should celebrate their brethren. Particularly when the similarities so overwhelmingly outnumber the differences.

Perl is worse than Python because people wanted it worse. Larry Wall, 14 Oct 1998

Frankly, I'd rather not try to compete with Perl in the areas where Perl is best -- it's a battle that's impossible to win, and I don't think it is a good idea to strive for the number of obscure options and shortcuts that Perl has acquired through the years. Guido van Rossum, 7 Jul 1992

When I originally designed Perl 5's OO, I thought about a lot of this stuff, and chose the explicit object model of Python as being the least confusing. So far I haven't seen a good reason to change my mind on that. Larry Wall, 27 Feb 1997 on perl5-porters

If Perl weren't around, I'd probably be using Python right now. Tom Christiansen in comp.lang.perl, 2 Jun 1995

Python is an excellent language for learning object orientation. (It also happens to be my favorite OO scripting language.) Sriram Srinivasan, Advanced Perl Programming

.. a look at this website, made by one of my coworkers. I found it very helpful:
Check it out

LWP is an excellent collection of Perl modules for understanding and exploring HTTP headers and cookies. You can use it to test your own cookie-based site and make sure that web applications you develop don't choke when the user passes in an unexpected cookie. You can get a good understanding of the HTTP protocol writing relatively simple scripts. (Sample applications and recommended books on the page too.)

Why bother with a thinkpad when Dell has a very nice 1400x1050 SXGA+ display available on their Inspiron 5000 (I have one - runs linux just fine and the display works great with the patches from http://intern.linpro.no/~janl/inspir on-5000.html)

clearly, the link was supposed to be to http://linuxguiden.linpro.no/experience .php

Missing > in fact. Try http://linuxguiden.linpro.no/experience .php

bnf

The link above doesn't work. Click here instead.

Follow me

The article is here http://linuxguiden.linpro.no/experience. php

Join the largest computer in the world!!
distributed.net

Here's the link:
http://linuxguiden.linpro.no/experience .php

Try here if you're lazy.

Roblimo once again forgets his HTML.

And then the Lord High Root sayeth: "Thou shalt always check the links in thy posts, and then check them again, lest though shouldst become naughty in my site" :-)

I believe the correct link is here

Botched link: correct link

here

The correct link for the store is below.

http://linuxguiden.linpro.no/experience. php

Enjoy.


They are a threat to free speech and must be silenced! - Andrea Chen

Try here.

About time... what Linux needs to truly take off is support from the average desktop user, not just the techies and power users. I just hope we see more favorable reviews from "average" people and that these reviews encourage other "average" users to run Linux on their PC. It's important to recognize that Linux isn't just a server OS, it can work well as an office platform too.

I hope reviews like this will dispel the intimidation that is keeping the average PC user from even trying out Linux. And perhaps an increased user base will encourage more badly needed software support... definitely a good thing.

Oh and by the way, the link is broke. try this

Meanwhile, there's a kid and his family in Norway who need help putting on a legal defense.
If you can find a way to contribute $ directly to their defense, please help out. If anybody has a link to a legit legal fund that is backing the Johansens, please post it here on Slashdot.
There is also the EFF, which is funneling donations to the defense of the stateside OpenDVD posters. Contribute by joining with a donation. You can contribute a little by just buying an OpenDVD T-shirt at Copyleft.net.
There is also this petition circulated by Norway's Linuxguide which is accepting signatures from around the world in protest of the way Norwegian authorities are bringing a patently false prosecution against Jon and his father on behalf of Hollywood's powerful film cartel, the MPAA. By this time tomorrow there could ~15,000 signers!

Meanwhile, get the code, preferably in the form of the now sealed babbling of the MPAA's own President, John J. Hoy and email it to as many people as you can. That's right, spam them with DeCSS to show you care. Be sure to send it to reporters for national news organizations. Sure, they can easily have already seen it, but they need to know that everybody else has too, and that's a story! That's the story, really. There is no better way to demonstrate the inappropriateness of laws like the Digital Millenium Copyright than by showing how unnaturally they impede the free flow of informnation, and that is shown by how perfectly easy and natural it is for the information to flow.

Let me rephrase myself in terms a moron can understand:

DeCSS is simply a tool to watch DVD format movies on a machine running a non-windows operating system.

The proof for that assertion is that it is simple to pirate DVD's using any DVD player without using DeCSS.

My final point was that we need to stand behind Jon and try to attract as much attention as possible to the fact that Money-Grubbing Executives want to put a 16 year-old in jail for being an outstanding member of the Open Source community. Go fill out the petition!

Here's a site for a Petition against the treatment received by Jon Johansen. From the site:

This is an open letter of protest to norwegian authorities, DoEC (Department of Economic Crime). This is an expression of my personal opinion, an opinion I hope all linux-enthusiasts in Norway will see fit to support (and all others interested in the freedom of speech and government abusal). This letter, including all attenders will be forwarded to DoEC, with a copy to Johansens lawyer.

http://linuxguiden.linpro.no/protesteng .php

Take 2: sorry for the extra quotes in the URL of the previous comment

Here's a site for a Petition against the treatment received by Jon Johansen. From the site:

This is an open letter of protest to norwegian authorities, DoEC (Department of Economic Crime). This is an expression of my personal opinion, an opinion I hope all linux-enthusiasts in Norway will see fit to support (and all others interested in the freedom of speech and government abusal). This letter, including all attenders will be forwarded to DoEC, with a copy to Johansens lawyer.

"http://linuxguiden.linpro.no/protesten g.php"

You're quite right to have misgivings about how the programme is going to portray Jon. The media cares only about sensationalism, never about truth (unless it's sensational).

So, let's give them something at least slightly sensational: the fact that thousands of respected people around the globe are up in arms about the action of the MPAA and the consequent unfair treatment of Jon. Signing up to the PETITION will help there immensely, because even the old TV media types are aware of the power of the Internet as a competing medium, and you can bet your life that they'll be looking at the signature count to add a factoid to their piece.

There is a petition against the treatment received by Jon Johansen in Norway. Read it and sign it.

http://linuxguiden.linpro.no/protesteng .php

So far its been pretty limited to non-US addresses. There are some US ones in there but not a lot. Its quite a geography lesson to say the least. Sign it today!

Here's a point and click link for the petition. Please help by signing at the bottom and clicking submit. That's it!