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It's been up on the kernel.org site for a while now, and it only sends binary diffs, so it's quite light. The overhead is like 1%, plus the diffs. In fact, Tridge wrote this exact case (rsyncing the linux kernel) up in one of his early papers on the need for rsync. rsync.samba.org for more information.

On the whole, the cross-referencing is less useful than Exuberant-etags and id-utils under emacs, but it's still pretty cool.

Doxygen can produce TeX output, however it doesn't look great, and for a project as big as Samba it can overflow internal limits in the default build of LaTeX. I'm sure you could patch it to look better.

Another weakness is that it does not know about CVS. It's nice to see the history of the code integrated with the current state. LXR will do that for you, but at the cost of a more complicated server-side installation.

--
Martin

If there were some way I could contribute monetarily to the Samba project

It's a well known fact that Andrew Tridgell, Samba's creator, accepts Pizza if you feel the urge to be generous. More details in the FAQ:

Andrew doesn't askfor payment, but he does appreciate it when people give him pizza. This calls for a little organisation when the pizza donor is twenty thousand kilometres away, but it has been done.

Method 1: Ring up your local branch of an international pizza chain and see if they honour their vouchers internationally. Pizza Hut do, which is how the entire Canberra Linux Users Group got to eat pizza one night, courtesy of someone in the US

Method 2: Ring up a local pizza shop in Canberra and quote a credit card number for a certain amount, and tell them that Andrew will be collecting it (don't forget to tell him.) One kind soul from Germany did this.

Method 3: Purchase a pizza voucher from your local pizza shop that has no international affiliations and send it to Andrew. It is completely useless but he can hang it on the wall next to the one he already has from Germany :-)

Method 4: Air freight him a pizza with your favourite regional flavours. It will probably get stuck in customs or torn apart by hungry sniffer dogs but it will have been a noble gesture.

Any decent admin worried about security will disable booting from CD (and floppy) and password-protect the BIOS configuration screen.

Except that you don't always have control of all of the workstations. University personally owned computers, for example. What you're suggesting will only work in a rigidly controlled environment. Better to have a more secure filesharing methodology. NFS4, for example. Or I understand AFS to be more secure. However, this would seem to be a difficult system to use in an evironment that must also cooperate with, say, Windows clients.

I hate to say it, but as things stand today, you'll end up with a much more secure shared filesystem if you use samba + windows clients. Unless you use a system like AFS that doesn't play nice with others. This is definitely a chink in the *nix armor.

Maybe I just don't understand AFS well enough. I've been pinning my hopes on NFSv4, but this certainly looks discouraging. Maybe umich will save us. By June 30th, they say... Here's to William, Jim, Kendrick, and Jake!

You haven't done much (if any) research, have you? Actually, if you were half-way involved in a corporate environment that took linux seriously, you might have had a clue in the first place. So let's start building a reply:

The linux desktop is going nowhere fast, and for most of these projections to come true there would have to be a mass migration to the linux desktop which will not happen.

Debatable. But you are probably correct that there will not be a mass migration to a Linux desktop, at least in a short period of time. But you can't deny the efforts being made to push in that direction. With a few moves in the right direction I think Linux has a pretty good chance.

OEMS are stepping away from the linux desktop not towards it, so you will not be seeing "dual boots".

OEMs screwed it up all on their own. I recently ordered a Dell i8k laptop back when they were still "offerring" Linux preinstalled. If I chose Linux, Dell told me it would take 2-3 weeks to ship. However a Windows version could be shiped the next day. And do you seriously think Microsoft would let a OEM ship anything dual-booted with Windows?!?

I look back at the NT 4 domain model, and it wasn't great, but its better than anything in the linux camp.

You haven't played much with Samba, have you? Samba can completely replace NT4, Warp, and Netware services. That's the server side. On the client side there's Pam_Smb which can allow Linux to authenticate to NT/2000 domains. Red Hat 7.2 even gives you this option during install now.

And now with AD you have highly scalable enterprise ready directory services and no way to truly integrate linux.

We can argue about your definition of "truly", or I can go back to my Perl scripts that work with AD just fine.

can update whole directory trees and filesystems

optionally preserves symbolic links, hard links, file ownership, permissions, devices and times

requires no special privilages to install
internal pipelining reduces latency for multiple files

can use rsh, ssh or direct sockets as the transport

supports anonymous rsync which is ideal for mirroring

There are about a million other features your GUI can't even come CLOSE to implementing w/o a maze of tabbed options menus. Fortunately for me, I am capable of LEARNING how to use the tool so I can whip out a one liner in a few seconds that does EXACTLY what I want, every time.

GUIs are great for tasks you only do a few times (or need to learn how to do quickly), but as a front end to a general purpose utility, they simply don't match up to what a CLI can do.

You'd have to get fancy to get past 26 drive letters though,

Besides, who on earth would want more than 26 block devices? [Uh, maybe the same folks who would want more than 640k of RAM? Naaah.]

So now, as then, if you want something out of the ordinary (i.e., something useful) don't use Micro$soft products. I think the suggestion of using Samba on Linux under VMWare to serve the ISO images to the host W2K box is your best bet.

A lot of people have mentioned that disk to disk backup seems to be the best way to go.

I agree.

What hasn't been mentioned is rsync, which makes disk to (local or remote) disk backups fast and easy.

It is trival to set up a second disk that is a "stale" mirror of your primary disk(s) that backs up nightly, and will boot off a floppy. This captures some of the advantage of RAID (quick recovery) while being an actual backup, not just fault tolerance.

Rsync can use ssh as a transport, so you can securely back up remote disks as well.

-Peter

starbuck.

I was not aware of the starbuck network. google turned up this. It states you have to logon (and pay ) to use their network. I suppose the car is also good for them if you have to pay anyway.

By the way: I was disappointed when i went on vacation to california this summer about public internet access. I found:
-public libraries: 3 out of 4 times there was a waiting list. (reserved days ahead)
-something at a gas station in palm springs.
1 (1) internet cafee at the las vegas strip.

A friend went to peru and in almost every small village they had public (not free) access.

Hi, I currently work in the UC Davis sec lab (current project(s): HACQIT).

The basic problem with all IDS is in the confidence level of determining if something is an attack or just random garbage. Also, IDS have to be fast. If there's too much traffic (if you've been /.'d), you may not be able to check all attacks. Some methodogies start from the approach that deviating from a set of known safe operations is considered suspect. Other IDSes approach it from checking against a known-attack database. We're currently working on genetic algorithms and expert systems to correlate sensors and systems to detect and respond to attacks. The best approach I've seen is a complete kernel-level instrumentation of all system calls that's transparent and mostly undetectable. It would probably be DoS-able as well. The main prob is that you realy gotta have another comp to offload IDS checking.

Right now, nearly all IDSes are extremely primitive and consist of nothing more than snort rules and Perl scripts that call ipchains or something.

Btw, I went to RAID 2001 this year (hosted at UCD), it was fairly interesting.

I'm a linux bigot, for sure. But one hurdle that has to be overcome before anyone who's not insane sells this idea to their boss is the utter lack of secure filesharing for a multi-user office. Usernames and passwords, in plain text, in an automount config file is not an option. Experimental filesystems are not an option. NFS is not an option (got root on the client (install cd) you've got access to anything.). OpenAFS maybe, but not exactly a widely discussed or supported system.

NFS4 sounds like the ticket, but the two available open implementations (umich and samba team) are in their infancy.

Until this problem is solved, this whole discussion is moot, as far as I'm concerned.

Luckily, since Win2k, they have been doing a *great* job of testing and working with service packs. Basically now they are just big security fixes (which is great!).

Well, almost. In particular, scroll down to the Samba 2.2.1 release notes (about 60% down the page) where it says this:

This is just the tip of the story, actually. Microsoft used Win2K SP2 to intentionally introduce a bug (or perhaps more properly, a wart) that would break compatibility with a Samba PDC while not breaking a genuine NT 4.0 PDC (which Samba emulates with a good deal of success). It did this by sending a bogus opcode to the server and expecting a very specific error reply.

I do have to admit, however, that MS has been doing much better at keeping the quality of the Win2K service packs much greater than those for previous versions of WinNT.

Why bother?

Well, if you've got a few minutes on your hands, then taking a look at the stateful capabilities of IPTables/Netfilter over IPChains might be time well spent.

Be aware that the IPChains support in the 2.4 kernels is only a compatiblity layer over the top of netfilter, and in some cases will not just allow you to drop in your existing IPChains ruleset with some work.

I found it trival to rewrite my IPChains ruleset to use IPTables (including some stateful stuff) with the help of Rusty Russell's Unreliable Guides (as already mentioned: see netfilter.samba.org for everything worth knowing about Netfilter.)

man iptable is your friend.

I have not been able to find a HOWTO for Netfilters!

There is a HOWTO for netfilter. It's at http://netfilter.samba.org/unreliable-guides/, and it's called the Linux 2.4 Packet Filtering HOWTO. Also look at the Linux 2.4 NAT HOWTO while you're there.

If your home computer is online 24/7 (which is presumably is if you're on broadband) t's cooler to use SAMBA, AFS (or here), Coda, InterMezzo, NFS, or the unfinished Lustre. If you're not big on effort, set up an http or ftp (or gopher!) server. That way, you have an automatically up-to-date menu of your mp3s, where you can access all your music any time you can connect to the 'Net.
This box is just itching to be a Coda server.

From the About Samba Page

Samba is maintained by
the Samba Team, who support the original author, Andrew Tridgell.

Tridgell = Australian

1. Require Microsoft to document, disclose or license to third parties: (a) portions of APIs or Documentation or portions or layers of Communications Protocols the disclosure of which would compromise the security of anti-piracy, anti-virus, software licensing, digital rights management, encryption or authentication systems, ...

IANAL, but this seems to be explicitly protecting MS against circumvention. If I want to talk to a PDC/BDC, I still have to go through the right song-and-dance act so having the protocol shouldn't help me. SAMBA should be able to get the necessary information. OTOH, SAMBA's business plan (Open Source) sucks as far as MSFT is concerned so without very good lawyers to argue each disclosure, it will be very difficult to prove anything.

Microsoft, the best law that money can buy!

So if the rsync, the algorithm, was proposed in 1998 (Nov 11 according to the date at the bottom of the page), what was rsync, the program, based off of in earlier versions? According to this page, rsync v.2.2.0 was out by them...the first version was out by June 15, 1996. Just courious.

I was thinking about doing something very similar to this. I haven't gotten around to implementing it yet, but what I want to do is to use the VFS feature of Samba to add CVS-like (possibly by interfacing with a local CVS server?) versioning control to certain directories of files.

According to his home page

Until recently I was a senior engineer in VA Linux Systems. Due to the recent layoffs at VA I am now actively looking for a job.

To more accurately compare pipes as IPC mechanisms they should have used the CreatePipe call which creates an anonymous named pipe that only goes through the Kernel and back. These should be quite fast by comparison. Of course a much more interesting comparison would be to compare shared memory -- a much more critical IPC mechanism used by high performace appclications like databases.

BTW if you want to access NamedPipes and TransactNamedPipes in 100% Java the http://jcifs.samba.org project has implemented everything necessary to interoperate with MS NamedPipe servers.

1) Get:
- 1U 4bays rack mountable chassis from Sliger Designs
- 3WARE 6410 Escalade IDE controller (Choice of 0/1/0+1/5 Raid) on a 90 PCI riser card
- 4 x 75/100GB ATA100 drives (maybe DiamondMax)
- MicroATX mainboard with NIC and Video integrated on board (invest in RAM not in processing power - 750/850MHZ should be more than sufficient)
- Minimum Linux/*BSD OS booting from a read-only 16 to 64MB flash IDE device, loading kernel and a customised Ramdisk root filesystem, mounting Raid devices in R/W mode, starting SAMBA (and/or Netatalk).
A good starting point is Linux Bootdisk HOWTO

2) Choose 0+1 Raid and you get quick and completely redundant 150/200GB storage that can survive the full failure of one disk.

3) Want remote grafical managment from a standard web browser? Go for Webmin or SWAT.

1) Get:
- 1U 4bays rack mountable chassis from Sliger Designs
- 3WARE 6410 Escalade IDE controller (Choice of 0/1/0+1/5 Raid) on a 90 PCI riser card
- 4 x 75/100GB ATA100 drives (maybe DiamondMax)
- MicroATX mainboard with NIC and Video integrated on board (invest in RAM not in processing power - 750/850MHZ should be more than sufficient)
- Minimum Linux/*BSD OS booting from a read-only 16 to 64MB flash IDE device, loading kernel and a customised Ramdisk root filesystem, mounting Raid devices in R/W mode, starting SAMBA (and/or Netatalk).
A good starting point is Linux Bootdisk HOWTO

2) Choose 0+1 Raid and you get quick and completely redundant 150/200GB storage that can survive the full failure of one disk.

3) Want remote grafical managment from a standard web browser? Go for Webmin or SWAT.

Actually, it would seem it's the other way around.

I was just browsing through a new HP-UX 11i guide, looking at info about CIFS/9000 which is based in large part on Samba. Since it's based on open-source software CIFS/9000 is free to download, but note that it only runs on HP-UX 11.x.

And that seems to be a good system for them: Develop tools based off the work of open-source projects (so the ground work is already done for you), but tailor them to only run on HP-UX. That way re-releasing the new tools for free doesn't hurt you, because the only way for someone to use them is if they are a paying HP-UX customer.

They've got the best of both worlds. The grunt work and benifits of open-source developers, AND they get to keep charging huge ammounts of money for the OS.

Thanks for the info on the TiVO GPLed code, maroberts C'est rien.

Sounds like the device has the bits and pieces to do everything required. The TiVo (again IIRC) uses a mere 50MHz PowerPC chip [being RISC, this probably delivers similar performance to a 200MHz Pentium, but a lot of TiVo reverse engineers believe the Tivo gets very near to its processing limits at times] with a number of support chips.
If you're really interested in the TiVo, see the ongoing discussions in the TiVo AVS forum:
http://www.avsforum.com/ubbcgitivo/Ultimate.cgi
Also Andrew Tridgell (of Samba fame) has done some engineering to get the TivO to take a network cardand other goodies. See
http://www.samba.org
for more details.

i mean, things like the samba project cannot be done anymore, thanks to the DMCA.
please, someone correct me!

Firstly.... Australian Capital _Territory_. :-)

Secondly, and this one's good: The actual project site. GPL requirements mean code's open source. And it is!

Software Improvements is a key player in a very good spot here. One of the principals of SI, Clive Boughton, is an associate Lecturer (or visiting lecturer) at the ANU, where he currently convenes the Software Engineering course. Last year, as well as teaching Software Analysis and Design and Project Management to the 3rd year cohort, he was strongly connected with the 3rd year Software Engineering Group Project.

The group project was to produce an online, web-based voting system. The project was targeted at Federal elections, but apart from the preference counting system, the principle holds.

Out of the project (after 1 academic year) came 12 seperate online voting systems. One of these systems was apparently pitched to the ACT government in response to the Request For Tender they released near the end of the year, which looked an awful lot like the Request For Proposal the teams were given at the beginning of the year.

Amongst the requirements for the project, was that the system be utterly open source (except for the RDBMS) and be delivered as a set of RPMs and SRPMS against Redhat 6.1.

Another important requirement of both projects (and the Australian electoral system) is that a person be able to vote just once, and that once a vote is recorded, it must not be able to be linked to a specific person.

The group project had tougher requirements than the ACT's project, in that the group project was for use in Internet voting, not just computerising polling booths.

Software Improvements can (and in fact has, I am given to understand) draw upon this unique pool of experience to produce what I confidently expect will be a successful product which I look forward to using come the election.

Some trivia:

• Although the ANU group project required RedHat 6.1, the two spare machines in the room ran Debian Linux up until the last month or so of the project where they went from spare to testing-platform.
• The ANU's past lecturer list includes Andrew Tridgewell, Paul Mackerras and Paul "Rusty" Russell. If you don't recognise the names, think linux-pmac, Samba, Netfilter, rsync, Tivo ethernet card, Tivo in Pal, pppd, just to name a few.

How do I know all this?

I was one of the group leaders for the 3rd year group project. I hold the distinction of having the only RedHat 6.1 computer in the project room which the system testers could not break into without getting a screwdriver from upstairs to clear the bios.

Mind you, that wasn't part of the testing. They just wanted to see our developement machine and figured it would be easier than calling me. Fooled 'em good!

Firstly.... Australian Capital _Territory_. :-)

Secondly, and this one's good: The actual project site. GPL requirements mean code's open source. And it is!

Software Improvements is a key player in a very good spot here. One of the principals of SI, Clive Boughton, is an associate Lecturer (or visiting lecturer) at the ANU, where he currently convenes the Software Engineering course. Last year, as well as teaching Software Analysis and Design and Project Management to the 3rd year cohort, he was strongly connected with the 3rd year Software Engineering Group Project.

The group project was to produce an online, web-based voting system. The project was targeted at Federal elections, but apart from the preference counting system, the principle holds.

Out of the project (after 1 academic year) came 12 seperate online voting systems. One of these systems was apparently pitched to the ACT government in response to the Request For Tender they released near the end of the year, which looked an awful lot like the Request For Proposal the teams were given at the beginning of the year.

Amongst the requirements for the project, was that the system be utterly open source (except for the RDBMS) and be delivered as a set of RPMs and SRPMS against Redhat 6.1.

Another important requirement of both projects (and the Australian electoral system) is that a person be able to vote just once, and that once a vote is recorded, it must not be able to be linked to a specific person.

The group project had tougher requirements than the ACT's project, in that the group project was for use in Internet voting, not just computerising polling booths.

Software Improvements can (and in fact has, I am given to understand) draw upon this unique pool of experience to produce what I confidently expect will be a successful product which I look forward to using come the election.

Some trivia:

• Although the ANU group project required RedHat 6.1, the two spare machines in the room ran Debian Linux up until the last month or so of the project where they went from spare to testing-platform.
• The ANU's past lecturer list includes Andrew Tridgewell, Paul Mackerras and Paul "Rusty" Russell. If you don't recognise the names, think linux-pmac, Samba, Netfilter, rsync, Tivo ethernet card, Tivo in Pal, pppd, just to name a few.

How do I know all this?

I was one of the group leaders for the 3rd year group project. I hold the distinction of having the only RedHat 6.1 computer in the project room which the system testers could not break into without getting a screwdriver from upstairs to clear the bios.

Mind you, that wasn't part of the testing. They just wanted to see our developement machine and figured it would be easier than calling me. Fooled 'em good!

Firstly.... Australian Capital _Territory_. :-)

Secondly, and this one's good: The actual project site. GPL requirements mean code's open source. And it is!

Software Improvements is a key player in a very good spot here. One of the principals of SI, Clive Boughton, is an associate Lecturer (or visiting lecturer) at the ANU, where he currently convenes the Software Engineering course. Last year, as well as teaching Software Analysis and Design and Project Management to the 3rd year cohort, he was strongly connected with the 3rd year Software Engineering Group Project.

The group project was to produce an online, web-based voting system. The project was targeted at Federal elections, but apart from the preference counting system, the principle holds.

Out of the project (after 1 academic year) came 12 seperate online voting systems. One of these systems was apparently pitched to the ACT government in response to the Request For Tender they released near the end of the year, which looked an awful lot like the Request For Proposal the teams were given at the beginning of the year.

Amongst the requirements for the project, was that the system be utterly open source (except for the RDBMS) and be delivered as a set of RPMs and SRPMS against Redhat 6.1.

Another important requirement of both projects (and the Australian electoral system) is that a person be able to vote just once, and that once a vote is recorded, it must not be able to be linked to a specific person.

The group project had tougher requirements than the ACT's project, in that the group project was for use in Internet voting, not just computerising polling booths.

Software Improvements can (and in fact has, I am given to understand) draw upon this unique pool of experience to produce what I confidently expect will be a successful product which I look forward to using come the election.

Some trivia:

• Although the ANU group project required RedHat 6.1, the two spare machines in the room ran Debian Linux up until the last month or so of the project where they went from spare to testing-platform.
• The ANU's past lecturer list includes Andrew Tridgewell, Paul Mackerras and Paul "Rusty" Russell. If you don't recognise the names, think linux-pmac, Samba, Netfilter, rsync, Tivo ethernet card, Tivo in Pal, pppd, just to name a few.

How do I know all this?

I was one of the group leaders for the 3rd year group project. I hold the distinction of having the only RedHat 6.1 computer in the project room which the system testers could not break into without getting a screwdriver from upstairs to clear the bios.

Mind you, that wasn't part of the testing. They just wanted to see our developement machine and figured it would be easier than calling me. Fooled 'em good!

Firstly.... Australian Capital _Territory_. :-)

Secondly, and this one's good: The actual project site. GPL requirements mean code's open source. And it is!

Software Improvements is a key player in a very good spot here. One of the principals of SI, Clive Boughton, is an associate Lecturer (or visiting lecturer) at the ANU, where he currently convenes the Software Engineering course. Last year, as well as teaching Software Analysis and Design and Project Management to the 3rd year cohort, he was strongly connected with the 3rd year Software Engineering Group Project.

The group project was to produce an online, web-based voting system. The project was targeted at Federal elections, but apart from the preference counting system, the principle holds.

Out of the project (after 1 academic year) came 12 seperate online voting systems. One of these systems was apparently pitched to the ACT government in response to the Request For Tender they released near the end of the year, which looked an awful lot like the Request For Proposal the teams were given at the beginning of the year.

Amongst the requirements for the project, was that the system be utterly open source (except for the RDBMS) and be delivered as a set of RPMs and SRPMS against Redhat 6.1.

Another important requirement of both projects (and the Australian electoral system) is that a person be able to vote just once, and that once a vote is recorded, it must not be able to be linked to a specific person.

The group project had tougher requirements than the ACT's project, in that the group project was for use in Internet voting, not just computerising polling booths.

Software Improvements can (and in fact has, I am given to understand) draw upon this unique pool of experience to produce what I confidently expect will be a successful product which I look forward to using come the election.

Some trivia:

• Although the ANU group project required RedHat 6.1, the two spare machines in the room ran Debian Linux up until the last month or so of the project where they went from spare to testing-platform.
• The ANU's past lecturer list includes Andrew Tridgewell, Paul Mackerras and Paul "Rusty" Russell. If you don't recognise the names, think linux-pmac, Samba, Netfilter, rsync, Tivo ethernet card, Tivo in Pal, pppd, just to name a few.

How do I know all this?

I was one of the group leaders for the 3rd year group project. I hold the distinction of having the only RedHat 6.1 computer in the project room which the system testers could not break into without getting a screwdriver from upstairs to clear the bios.

Mind you, that wasn't part of the testing. They just wanted to see our developement machine and figured it would be easier than calling me. Fooled 'em good!

Firstly.... Australian Capital _Territory_. :-)

Secondly, and this one's good: The actual project site. GPL requirements mean code's open source. And it is!

Software Improvements is a key player in a very good spot here. One of the principals of SI, Clive Boughton, is an associate Lecturer (or visiting lecturer) at the ANU, where he currently convenes the Software Engineering course. Last year, as well as teaching Software Analysis and Design and Project Management to the 3rd year cohort, he was strongly connected with the 3rd year Software Engineering Group Project.

The group project was to produce an online, web-based voting system. The project was targeted at Federal elections, but apart from the preference counting system, the principle holds.

Out of the project (after 1 academic year) came 12 seperate online voting systems. One of these systems was apparently pitched to the ACT government in response to the Request For Tender they released near the end of the year, which looked an awful lot like the Request For Proposal the teams were given at the beginning of the year.

Amongst the requirements for the project, was that the system be utterly open source (except for the RDBMS) and be delivered as a set of RPMs and SRPMS against Redhat 6.1.

Another important requirement of both projects (and the Australian electoral system) is that a person be able to vote just once, and that once a vote is recorded, it must not be able to be linked to a specific person.

The group project had tougher requirements than the ACT's project, in that the group project was for use in Internet voting, not just computerising polling booths.

Software Improvements can (and in fact has, I am given to understand) draw upon this unique pool of experience to produce what I confidently expect will be a successful product which I look forward to using come the election.

Some trivia:

• Although the ANU group project required RedHat 6.1, the two spare machines in the room ran Debian Linux up until the last month or so of the project where they went from spare to testing-platform.
• The ANU's past lecturer list includes Andrew Tridgewell, Paul Mackerras and Paul "Rusty" Russell. If you don't recognise the names, think linux-pmac, Samba, Netfilter, rsync, Tivo ethernet card, Tivo in Pal, pppd, just to name a few.

How do I know all this?

I was one of the group leaders for the 3rd year group project. I hold the distinction of having the only RedHat 6.1 computer in the project room which the system testers could not break into without getting a screwdriver from upstairs to clear the bios.

Mind you, that wasn't part of the testing. They just wanted to see our developement machine and figured it would be easier than calling me. Fooled 'em good!

Yes. In order to allow parties (and potentially voters) to audit the software it needs to be released. It is therefore available (in current draft form) at evacs.samba.org. (The reason it's on the samba website is that people like Andrew Tridgell are/were involved in the project).

I didn't want to be a karma whore, but nobody else seems to have posted that link... and there's not much point talking about a wonderful, new, GPL'd program without also telling people where to get it from.

You can actually grab the docs/code/prototypes at http://evacs.samba.org/.

You will need the latest version of modutils.

You may need to do some mknod magic if you want to use some of the newer drivers/interfaces, or you could just switch over to devfs.

That's about all I can think of at the moment; I may well be forgetting something, but it's late. Also keep in mind that I shun RedHat, so I don't really have any distro-specific knowledge for you.

--

Not a problem: 2.4's netfilter has modules to emulate both ipchains *and* ipfwadm.

Personally I prefer iptables though: the HOWTOish things at http://netfilter.samba.org/unreliable-guides are quite helpful.

--

This brings up an even larger issue: if there is something that can only be accomplished one way, and people are likely to find the solution independently, should such a thing even be copyrightable (if that's a word)?

If the implementations are exactly the same, right down to the symbols, then that would definately warrant a raised eyebrow. It should still be licensable of course. Otherwise someone could write a similiar implementation to, lets say a method of sharing files between windows machines, and then because their fresh implementation resembled the preexisting item, the preexisting developers would be forced to give their code away.

That might be hard to understand. I'll try saying it again. :-) If I write a program B that performs the same as program A, does the author of A have to give his code away because A & B are so similiar? See, it doesn't make sense like that.

BTW, I once thought I'd lost some code, so I reimplemented it a few weeks later. When I did find my original code, the original and the reimplementation were near identical, right down to the variable names. :-)

What, you mean, the way that samba is " much more reliable" than Microsoft's implementation of SMB? (Hint: select 'bugtraq', search for 'samba': I get more than 150 hits... althogh the articles themselves aren't available, I'm getting this error: "Sql.sql(): Couldn't connect using the mysql database"... irony, gotta love it)

Don't be so sure that all Microsoft software is complete rubbish, or that an open source or free implementation would automatically be better. The only way in which all free software is better than all Microsoft software is in it's freedom. That's the important factor to me, but most PHBs could care less about freedom (if they even understood the concept.) Yet when their expectations of Linux and free software are set by that sort of unthinking hype - Linux is far more secure than Windows, Linux is much more reliable than Windows, you know the tune - all that happens is that when they try it out, and it dumps core, or their local MS astroturfer points out tha bugtraq carries tens of posts a DAY listing remote root exploits in all sorts of Unix software, they decide never to trust those weird communist amateur hippy types.

That's why I've come down on the FSF point of view rather than the Open Source Institute's point of view.

(Of course, it goes without saying that quite a lot of Free software *is* more reliable / secure / etc than the MS version... which isn't the point I'm making)
--
"I'm not downloaded, I'm just loaded and down"

> As someone who can't use Linux (we have a WinME box sharing our cable modem connection), I have often wondered how compatable are such things as different file systems? Can a linux box read a PC floppy or HD?

if you mean windows/dos formated floppy/hd by saying PC floppy than the answer is yes, it can read PC floppy or HD. > How about one for Mac?

not sure about this one , but i think it has support for mac filesystem.

> Can a redhat box access files from a Mandrake one?

yes. only difference between different linux distributions a) location of config files b) some distros are using bsd init (slack ?)instead of sysV init like rest of the the distros c) packaging system d) amount of apps shipped with the distro.

> Can I get a linux box to access the internet through the Windows network?

i'm no expert in this area but i believe you can do that with the help of samba. try looking at samba.org for more info. there is also free samba book published by oreilly on their site. good luck

About the closest you can get to your criterion is to buy an old TiVo that still has a version 1.3.X system (or reinstate it with a backup). TiVo originally offered the option of purchasing the unit for use without guide data (they now cripple this severely), with pause/rewind functions and manual recording of time/channel allowed. The 2.0.1 upgrade was supposed to grandfather in old units, but now includes a vast array of reminders that make it pretty painful (see the recent slashdot story). A fix is promised with 2.5 sometime in the fall (or much later, judging by 2.0 delays).

Contrary to some other poster's comments, you don't have to call in to TiVo and download software if you aren't using guide data (the only thing you need is the date). You can make a test call only to sync up the date/time or set the date via bash prompt by hooking up a linux box to the serial port for a terminal session. A full call will upgrade you to 2.0.1 and introduce the subscription reminder advertising spam.

Any TiVo can be converted to PAL input/output and newer UK units come set up for PAL already (I'm told, I haven't tried either). Note that this conversion is also incompatible with 2.0.1. You can find more info about PAL, etc. at the AVS TiVo forums. Expect to pay about $150-200 for one on ebay or the TiVo community garage sale, but you'll need to look around carefully to find one that still has the 1.3 system (general upgrades went out to connected recievers in April or so).

Regards, RJS

I think if TiVo got rid of the subscription model and went to a model fueled by hardware sales they'd have the best shot of becoming the ubiquitous device of this decade -- but with MS gunning at them and their continuing missteps, it's hard to see them becoming a widespread success. I'm still waiting to see what becomes of the vaporous but potential TiVo-killer Nokia Media Terminal. By the time these devices reach third generation, they'll be great--but I hate having to wait it out in the meantime!!

This seems like a nice opportunity to add iptables to *BSD. Iptables is the linux version of ipf. Some people claim that iptables is superior (or at least more flexible and easier to understand) to ipf ....

The main site for iptables is: http://netfilter.kernelnotes.org but that site has been down for some time now, use http://www.samba.org/netfilter/ instead.

You're looking for netfilter for Linux 2.4. Two different projects. As far as I know, netfilter is GPL'd since it is included in the kernel. It probably has everything ipfilter does except a BSD license. If you're just looking to build a stateful firewall it should work fine.

Linux uses ipfilter too. I'm surprised this has been overlooked thusfar. The official ipfilter for Linux 2.4 site went down two days ago, along with documentation and the CVS archive. And yes, iptables is only the frontend to ipfilter in the kernel. iptables is not a firewall in itself.

An interesting thing is that Todd Fries bought the openipf.org domain on May 25.
Todd contributes to many opensource projects, like OpenSSH .
So maybe it means that IPF have the same future than SSH : a really free implementation will follow.
At the same time, Linux Netfilter is growing. While it's not as mature as IPFilter, it's definitely featureful, and going in the right direction.
So maybe the BSD folks can work with the Netfilter dudes instead of reinventing the wheel. We would get only one free packet filtering system, but common to many system, with many developpers, and that would beat everything.
Porting Netfilter to BSD systems is not impossible. Internal socket structures are different, but the way protocols are analyzed can be left unchanged. And it should be also easy to code a parser that would rewrite IPF rules into Netfilter rules, so that people would be able to easily migrate.

You just haven't looked hard enough.... :-)

apt-get install picturebook longrun jogdiald
or download from
http://samba.org/picturebook/
ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/cpu/crusoe/
http://perso.wanadoo.fr/pascal.brisset/vaio/

then you'll get, among other things,
setbrightness [0-254]
vaiobat (read battery status)
longrun -f [economy|performance] (set power saving mode; you can also change specific settings)
jogdiald (which I use to get page up/page down events from the jog dial in X)

(Hopefully bits of these will make it into the kernel before much longer.)

He cited the history of Unix, which has been replete with incompatible versions.

Yes, partially due to the fact that each vendor was restricted from building on the work of others, and partially due to the fact that there were multiple vendors. You won't see "Bob's Win32", simply because Microsoft actively works to prevent such compatibility.

Once solid platform-independent implementations of the various UNIX tools became available, people began switching to them. For all the complaining people do about the various Linux-based OSen, they are remarkably consistent at the most basic user level (drop me on any GNU system and I will be able to at least find my way around the system, write code, etc). And this toolkit is available thanks to the GNU GPL and the enthusiasm RMS roused in the various developers.

Secondly, free software actually enables integration with closed platforms. For example, see Samba or Cygwin, which allow tight integration between Windows and Unix (no thanks to the "open" and "developer-friendly" Microsoft). And the first thing I and most other people do when confronted with a fresh Solaris box is to install a decent userland.

"It is innovation that really drives growth," Mr. Mundie said, arguing that without the sustained investment made possible by commercial software, real innovation would not be possible.

Uh huh. Sure. Let's take the WWW as an example, since everyone lately seems convinced it's the most innovative thing since sliced bread. It was invented by a guy at CERN, and Mosaic, the first massively popular graphical client, was written at NCSA. Since Web stuff became a commercial thing, exactly what "innovation" have we recieved? Bigger and more offensive ads and horrifically noncompliant HTML, that's what.

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rsync does a block by block checksum of a file, then searches another file for matching blocks, thus making it a generalisation of this idea to /any/ file. It's been around for a /long/ time - the mailing list archives go back to 1991.

rproxy applies the rsync protocol to http caching. I first heard about it at CALU in July 1999, and checked out some cvs code that worked at that time.

The general idea has been floating around for ages, though - look on the rproxy site for links to other people's ideas about this kind of thing.

This /is/ yet another case of a really dumb patent.

himi

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Forgot to check the link... it's here: PhD thesis

Since the site is slashdotted, here are the links to the advisories on the netfilter sites:

• mirror 1
  
• mirror 2
• mirror 3