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This is similar to the reason I ended up leaving the pool 7 years ago... The week I left the pool I had two different people call me telling me that one of my machines was hacked because it was attacking their network. "Hmm, what port are you seeing the attacks on?" "123." "You know what 123 is, right? NTP... Those packets your intrusion detection system is complaining about are in response to packets you sent that server."

It was actually the guy that hung up on me while I was telling him that his machines were causing this, that caused me to leave the pool. I'm sorry, but I just can't be providing individual phone support to everyone who uses the NTP pool, that's kind of how I was feeling...

I haven't been in the pool for 7 years, and I'm still getting around 8,000 packets per second on NTP, around a megabit per second. There's one DSL line in Italy that sends an average of 15 packets/sec.

Here's a blog post I wrote in relation to this: http://www.tummy.com/journals/entries/jafo_20050412_123522

Sean

I mean seriously, how am I going to use it?

Running old programs maybe?

I use it for installing BIOS and other hardware driver updates that need a DOS boot disk. The process goes something like this:

http://www.tummy.com/journals/entries/jafo_20080920_234755

4.2.2.2 is one I've used for a long time ( provided by Level 3 ) although from .1 to .6 works as well. Here's the story behind it: http://www.tummy.com/Community/Articles/famous-dns-server/

I wrote about the latest storage server I built back in 2008, and a lot of my thoughts at the time are written up in http://www.tummy.com/Community/Articles/ultimatestorage2008/

However, to answer a few of your questions...

External disc enclosures? Avoid them like the plague. My initial experience with the 5 bay eSATA enclosures was pretty good -- sometimes it wouldn't pick up the external drives, but usually I could get it to find them after some tweaking, rebooting, etc... I ended up getting 3 of them, the AMS DS-2350S, which at the time were well reviewed, etc... I have since pulled all 3 of them out of active use and have them just sitting around. I don't know exactly the mode of the failures, but eventually after replacing some with others, I finally put them in internal SATA enclosures, which have been very reliable (I used these Supermicro CSE-M35T-1.

Also note that eSATA connectors don't really hold on that well. If anything, they're not as robust as internal SATA connectors, despite being outside the case where they can get banged around.

If I were to do it over again, I'd probably stick with the case I started with, with 5 internal 3.5" bays, and 3 front 5.25" bays, and put the Supermicro in there. I'd also probably go with fewer big drives rather than more smaller drives like I did previously (even though at the time the drives were free, I had them from another project).

As far as running it in the garage, don't even think it, unless your garage is not where you store your cars. I have some computers that I've run in the garage for the last 9 months, and they are filthy, I've had a lot of fan failures, lots of dust, insects, and random other crap. I put mine in our furnace room, which has enough extra space.

As far as using a server case? Hard to see the payback there unless you have a cabinet. Most server cases are HUGE, heavy, and expensive. A 3U case with 12 drive bays likely costs $500, plus you usually have to deal with special form-factor power supplies, expect to spend another $200 on one of those. I wouldn't do it, and I have a 3U 12-bay Chenbro case just sitting at my office that I could re-purpose.

As far as the file-system, I selected ZFS (via zfs-fuse under Linux) and I've been VERY happy with it. The primary benefit is that it checksums *ALL* data and can recover from some types of corruption or at least alert about corruption if it can't correct it. So, if you are storing photos or home videos that you may not be accessing very often, that's good peace of mind to have, I know in 10 years I won't go to look at some photographs I've taken and find they were silently corrupted. Of course, you could get similar benefits by saving off a database of file checksums and checking and alerting if they are bad. Really the only downside of ZFS that I've seen is that if you need to do a RAID rebuild it is a seek-heavy task rather than just streaming. I have a 8x2TB drive array that I'm currently rebuilding (drive failure, at work), and it's 33% done after 31 hours. A normal RAID-5 array would have rebuilt that in what, 10? The system is idle except for the rebuild.

If you care about the data going into it, make sure you checksum and verify the files regularly.

The 8 port PCI SATA card I got is fantastic, it's a Supermicro with the Marvel chipset and is very well supported (even supported by Nexenta).

Finally, all this data is encrypted, so if someone were to burgle us I only have to worry about them getting the hardware, I don't have to worry about them now having scanned bills and other documents and other personal and private data, etc... This is why I'm running ZFS in Linux, it gave me encryption plus ZFS (not available otherwise in 2008), as well as being an OS I'm very familiar with.

As far as OS, I am personally running CentOS on my system because that means I can install and set it up and then forget about it for quite a few years, except for regularly running "yum update". Debian should be fine, but you will get/have to track upstream changes more frequently.

I have a machine running FreeBSD 8.1 which has been up a couple of months with a zfs filesystem

hey, great news. Thank you for the feedback.

is there anything in particular which could make it crash

I don't think 'zfstest' has been ported to anything (from Solaris) but zfsstress runs on Linux:

ftp://ftp.tummy.com/pub/tummy/zfsstress/

so probably getting it going under BSD has been done or would be straightforward. I haven't tried it myself yet.

Tummy sponsors some hosts for the Fedora Project (I'm a Fedora contributor) and they're just all around good people. If you're looking for hosting give them a serious consideration: http://tummy.com/

As previously mentioned, try switching to 5GHz if you can. It won't go through walls, which means that you need to locate the AP carefully to make sure you have coverage where you need it. But it does mean that your neighbors APs, if they switch to 5GHz as well, won't interfere as much with you.

Run your APs at the lowest power possible to still cover where you need, and have your neighbors do the same. Many people want to push the power up and up when they have problems. But that just leads to an arms race and more interference.

I only use the non-overlapping channels.

I use 802.11g on 2.4GHz, using the theory that sending the data in a smaller time will decrease the overall contention. However, 802.11b may be more robust.

If your systems have a setting for "Interference robustness", try using it.

Try setting the RTS threshold, possibly to a very low number.

You might want to try setting up an AP on two or 3 of the non-overlapping channels, with the same ESSID. Your systems *MAY* switch from one to the other if they run into interference.

See this URL for more information on what I've had success with: http://www.tummy.com/Community/Articles/pycon2007-network/

Sean

Sean

20Mbps? Are they kidding me?

PyCon 2008 used a 45Mbps DS3.

And, then, that's nothing compared to SCinet

I am impressed by what folks at http://www.open-xchange.com/ and http://www.tummy.com/ have dome with group-ware products.

Now for Postfix, in order to effectively do its work as an MTA one has to install and configure all this other software. This is the crux of the matter.

In case I am not being clear about all this, have a look at the vPostMaster Email Server at http://www.tummy.com/. What they are doing is what I am talking about.

BTW I was running my servers at home but had the same problems mentioned elsewhere. Plus the growing problem of my email being rejected since it came from a block of residential IP addresses, and old hardware that I was increasingly uncomfortable leaving up unattended. I eventually said "screw it" and got a cheap virtual hosting system at Tummy. For $25/month I get reliable service and can run the apps of my choice.

> Sendmail is THE MTA of choice for all major ISPs.

Not any more.
And what a sad piece of shit sendmail is!

In UNIX Hater's Handbook they rightly dedicated it a whole chapter "Sendmail: The Vietnam of Berkeley Unix".
Hahaha....

> Hotmail is not an ISP. Yahoo is not an ISP. Google is not an ISP.

ISP? Big deal - what now matters are these three.

According to educated guesses, sendmail has about 40% of MTA share:
http://www.softpanorama.org/Mail/mta.shtml
See this too: http://www.tummy.com/journals/entries/jafo_2004112 1_044830

KRUD is a RedHat based distribution that is well maintained by tummy.com. Monthly CDs in the mail to upgrade from, ensuring that any new install is already a patched install. (no need to spend hours downloading and installing all of the updates released since the CDs were mastered 6 months ago)

Also, they add a number of helpful packages to the distro and provide good repositories for updates. You pay for it, but very very little, especially considering the original poster was asking for a corporate environment.

I've been using the Merlin C201 PCMCIA card under Linux for nearly 2 years now. The card shows up as a regular modem which you run PPP on. I've got an extensive page on how to do this setup at http://www.tummy.com/Community/Articles/merlin-c20 1/.

The service is through Sprint, and costs $80/month for all "you can eat". Apparently, the service agreement for the $10/month net with your phone prohibits the use of a laptop with it, but there are people using USB adapters or similar to access the net over the phone. The setup is similar to the PCMCIA card, using PPP.

I also have a page on using the LG-5350 phone and USB cable to get net access using PPP with Linux at http://www.tummy.com/Community/Articles/lg5350/

Sprint coverage is pretty good. The first trip I took with it was up into the mountains, where I was able to get extremely good coverage from my camp site. Another crowd would wonder WTF I was doing with a laptop when camping, but the /. crowd will understand, I'm sure.

The speed is pretty good. I can do downloads at 12 to 15KB/sec, and at one point while camping I ran an incremental backup of my laptop up to a my server. I think it pushed 600MB of data across it, uploaded, at 7KB/sec average.

The real killer is the latency. It runs, on average, 500ms (half a second). For web page downloads it's not so bad, but for anything interactive it's pretty nasty. Latency usually ranges between 250ms and 1000ms, but if coverage lapses or is spotty it can be several seconds.

That said, I love the connectivity. These days you can get WiFi in most locations if you are willing to go to a place that has it. The CDMA is great for times when I want to use the net from a place that doesn't have it, or a place where their WiFi is wedged because of a flaky AP or a butt-head with a virus or running file sharing.

Sean

I've been using the Merlin C201 PCMCIA card under Linux for nearly 2 years now. The card shows up as a regular modem which you run PPP on. I've got an extensive page on how to do this setup at http://www.tummy.com/Community/Articles/merlin-c20 1/.

The service is through Sprint, and costs $80/month for all "you can eat". Apparently, the service agreement for the $10/month net with your phone prohibits the use of a laptop with it, but there are people using USB adapters or similar to access the net over the phone. The setup is similar to the PCMCIA card, using PPP.

I also have a page on using the LG-5350 phone and USB cable to get net access using PPP with Linux at http://www.tummy.com/Community/Articles/lg5350/

Sprint coverage is pretty good. The first trip I took with it was up into the mountains, where I was able to get extremely good coverage from my camp site. Another crowd would wonder WTF I was doing with a laptop when camping, but the /. crowd will understand, I'm sure.

The speed is pretty good. I can do downloads at 12 to 15KB/sec, and at one point while camping I ran an incremental backup of my laptop up to a my server. I think it pushed 600MB of data across it, uploaded, at 7KB/sec average.

The real killer is the latency. It runs, on average, 500ms (half a second). For web page downloads it's not so bad, but for anything interactive it's pretty nasty. Latency usually ranges between 250ms and 1000ms, but if coverage lapses or is spotty it can be several seconds.

That said, I love the connectivity. These days you can get WiFi in most locations if you are willing to go to a place that has it. The CDMA is great for times when I want to use the net from a place that doesn't have it, or a place where their WiFi is wedged because of a flaky AP or a butt-head with a virus or running file sharing.

Sean

Also try Jotweb.

The problem isn't the ridiculously short lifetimes of Red Hat's releases, it's that there is currently now NO upgrade path for Red Hat 7.3, 8, and 9 users still out there.

As for Fedora, I won't hit anything even remotely related to Red Hat with YOUR girlfriend's dick anytime soon.

I still have my KRUD CDs from coming in within the top 20 for 2.4. I missed 2.6 by a month. Both guesses were made the day the pool went up.

We can see that zero persons hit the correct day! There's three on the 16:th and two on the 18:th. C'mon Linus, you did this on purpose, didn't you? Bastard. We'll, there'll be a winner anyhow.

Not me, that's for sure. The results doesn't seem to be in yet.

Just a little note for all those left in the cold by Red Hat's recent moves; Kevin Fenzi has a paid subscription service where they supply a customized version of RedHat with all the paid errata and updates and a bunch of extra apps. They also have krud2date, an excellent updating tool. He's doing the support Red Hat doesn't want to do. Check it out - if you're worried about support for your RH system (and you are actually willing to pay for it), it may work for you.

This blatant karma whoring post brought to you by bfg9000 and the number 7.

For another distribution that focuses on providing updates to RedHat, see KRUD, recommended by Eric Raymond. This one's not as community-oriented, however.

Over the last 6 months, I've noticed a declining interest in KRUD, which I attribute to several factors (low cost bandwidth due to broadband reducing the demand for CD distributions, more commercial distro users moving to more expensive Red Hat versions, and others). Interestingly, this has come at a time when many people have stated an interest in continued support of older Red Hat distributions because of the new Red Hat End Of Life announcements.

We'd like to be able to continue to do KRUD, and are exploring electronic distribution options, and broadening our offerings.

I think that KRUD provides a valuable service, both in providing an easy, secure, complete, up-to-date distribution, and in providing an alternative to Red Hat's soon to be discontinued 'hobbiest' versions.

Right now, we're evaluating providing support for 7.3 and 8.0 after Red Hat's End of Life in December. It's going to take us close to a full time engineer to do the updates, I estimate. So far, I've had only about 10 requests to provide End of Life support, which is not even close to being able to cover the costs to produce. The price would drop to a more reasonable level if more people order it.

It's interesting that many people are expressing interest for longer support for older Red Hat releases, but few seem to find any value in it.

If you're interested in pre-ordering, please feel free to contact me.

Over the last 6 months, I've noticed a declining interest in KRUD, which I attribute to several factors (low cost bandwidth due to broadband reducing the demand for CD distributions, more commercial distro users moving to more expensive Red Hat versions, and others). Interestingly, this has come at a time when many people have stated an interest in continued support of older Red Hat distributions because of the new Red Hat End Of Life announcements.

We'd like to be able to continue to do KRUD, and are exploring electronic distribution options, and broadening our offerings.

I think that KRUD provides a valuable service, both in providing an easy, secure, complete, up-to-date distribution, and in providing an alternative to Red Hat's soon to be discontinued 'hobbiest' versions.

Right now, we're evaluating providing support for 7.3 and 8.0 after Red Hat's End of Life in December. It's going to take us close to a full time engineer to do the updates, I estimate. So far, I've had only about 10 requests to provide End of Life support, which is not even close to being able to cover the costs to produce. The price would drop to a more reasonable level if more people order it.

It's interesting that many people are expressing interest for longer support for older Red Hat releases, but few seem to find any value in it.

If you're interested in pre-ordering, please feel free to contact me.

I'm #85934. I think I saw that Slackware reminder to register a thousand times (certainly three different installs) until I finally gave in and registered.

Too bad, for some weird reason I really wonder how low a # I'd gotten if I'd registered ASAP

Oh, well. At least I got #24 of 1283 in the 2.4 kernel pool. But I truly digress

Any idea when Kevin's Red Hat Uber Distribution

http://www.tummy.com/krud/

If I had mod points, you'd get one. I'd rather have someone give a subscription to KRUD to their local library than buy me some geek toy I'll play with for a week and then forget about. There are a lot of great projects out there. Support them. It may be something some guy developed and put out there for free, not even asking for donations, but if you use it and benefit from it, send him (or her) ten bucks for the non-specific-winter-observance-of-your-choice season.

did you chack google? a little ways down searching on debian hosting i see a link to tummy.com and their debian hosting. add in the word "web" and the search seems to have even more on offer.

Unlike Debian, the stable release has recent libaries and binaries; they also have a much more formal SQA methodology than what Debian has (Debian testing works, of course, but it just takes longer for Debian to declare something stable). Unlike gentoo/sorcerer/etc., no one has to wait while all of the programs compile. While this is an excellent learning experience, a.k.a. Slackware (another great platform for learning the internals of Linux on a very intimate level), it is, in my opinion, not necessary for daily production usage.

I like knowing that I can buy (or download; the two are 100% identical) RedHat and not have to upgrade my system for a year or two; RedHat will "freeze" on a given release and release only critical bug fixes (mainly security updates) for a period of two years for a given release. This is very useful; it allows people to use systems without having to be on the constant upgrade treadmill.

I am very pleased to see RedHat merging KDE and Gnome; having different applications on the desktop having different user interfaces looks, IMHO, unprofessional and I am glad to see RedHat resolving this.

RedHat has always strongly belived in free software. They took a stand aginst the old Free/Qt licensing by strongly supporting Gnome; their actions undoubtably contributed to QT's decision to allow the free versions of their libraies be GPL'd.

If you don't like RedHat, you are free to make your own fork of RedHat which fixes the things you don't like. Mandrake did this because they wanted a RedHat with KDE five years ago; they are a RedHat fork which still exists today (knock on wood; I hope they get past their financial problems). I think the person at tummy.com is still selling RedHat-derived distributions (RedHat + whatever updates he feels are needed).

I have been using RedHat for over five years, since RedHat 4.2, and have been very happy with RedHat. I feel that they have made an excellent compromise between making the settings configurable with a GUI or with a text editor--I happyily use a text editor to configure my RedHat box (currently only one: A laptop with 7.2). Some old Sun greybeards (too lazy to learn a new tool) complain about Xinetd; I think RedHat is remarkably conservative about intorducing new things which force users to relearn; I think replacing the old, crufty inetd.conf with Xinetd is perfectly reasonable. Now, if only Microsoft were so reasonable about keeping the UI so consistant between releases.

Speaking of Microsoft, RedHat, as the articles pointed out, can not be the next Microsoft. The GPL protects us from that.

- Sam

Put US$65.00 annually into KRUD: Kevin's Redhat Uber Distribution

Updated monthly, sent out on CD.

If you can put up with Red Hat's approach to a Linux disto, this may be for you.

Current version: KRUD 7.3 2002-07-01 which is base upon Red Hat 7.3, strangely enough.

"Highly Recommended(tm)"

t_t_b

Other issues:

• win-hardware (modems)
• Windows-only software (mostly games -- I don't play games)
• browser plug-ins (but, hey, that isn't what the web is for)

Once installed and configured, who cares what OS is running? To say Windows is easier than Mac OS or Linux is bunk. I tried to explain to my mother yesterday how to make a backup copy of her Quickbooks data to another drive -- it took me about 15 minutes. Lord help her if she wants to do it again! With Linux, I could have remotely configured an icon or root menu option that would forever accomplish the task. Or, I could send her a command via email, she could have copy/paste to xterm window. I have a customer using xvscan for document imaging on a Linux box that runs its own Apache for retrieval. She finds the system easier to use than the Windows scanning system with a much more expensive, less-featured retrieval system. She can look up information from any Windows workstation on the network and I can perform remote maintainence.

I'm disappointed that they didn't include Kevin's Red Hat Uber Distribution. Kevin Fenzi is the author of the Linux Security HOW-TO, and the hardened version of Red Hat that they produce has served me quite well for over a year.

Yikes! Links make it a lot easier for people to figure out what's going on!

"A year ago, there seemed to be two promising Linux HA [high availability] frameworks--along with lots and lots of experimental things: SGI's FailSafe, and Kimberlite from Mission Critical Linux. The FailSafe software website now seems very out of date, although the mailing list remains active, and there seems to be forward momentum. On the other hand, Redhat seems to have forked the development of Kimberlite, calling the fork Redhat Cluster Manager. They don't seem to be making development source available, at least to the public. Are these two projects still relevant? What's the current status of Open Source HA?"

Try also linux-ha.org and open cluster

Storing mail in a Postgres DB is actually at Mail2DB

You can find it by searching the Qmail Site

Perhaps you want KRUD?

Of course, you can also switch between them fairly painlessly on the same box. Yet another reason I love linux...

• One bank uses 3 Linux workstations for document scanning, using Tummy Software xvscan. The images are set in a PostgreSQL database, and retreivable bia a web browser. They purchased this system with the custom software saving over $15,000 compared to the cheapest Windows solution they could find.
• I know of a bank that uses Star Office on Linux for Microsoft Office training machines. Having Linux on the computers keeps the trainees from loading software, and the two office suites are similar enough for basic training. There are ten training workstations.
• A law firm that uses two Linux workstation, a Mac, and Appletalk/Samba on Linux for a server. They also have custom database applications for billing and client records.
• A financial planner that has a Linux Internet gateway that later turned into a PostgreSQL database for stock tracking and analysis. He still uses Windows for his workstation, but in addition has a Linux computer using the quote program to get stock quotes.
• A pet store using Linux exclusively for point-of-sale and server. He replaced an old SCO system, and did not buy a monitor for his server, so he connects with his vt320 terminal.
• An outdoor advertising company has replaced two Windows computers with Linux, and are loving them. They don't know anything about Linux, but like the stability of their applications, and they saved a bundle.

My company has been working on custom Linux applications to replace Windows. I hope there are many chances in the future to suggest Linux.

They note all the improvements of 8.1beta1 over 8.0, but none of it seems particularly compelling. The latest versions of X, Y, and Z are de riguer at this point, and can be added to your existing install painlessly anyway. The improvements to their management tools are incremental (yes, I know it's a . release). I'll probably grab it when it's final just to see the new mgmt tools but my system (running Krud) has the latest Gnome/Evolution/Gimp/Gphoto/etc etc etc already so it's going to go on the guinea pig box basically to see if I should install it on my wife's computer.

I've moved most of my systems to KRUD, but I still have a lone Mandrake box and I'm moving my wife to linux (finally) and starting her out on Mandrake. I will definitely be donating because I am too impatient to wait for retail boxes so I download the ISO's.

Okay, the link for KRUD is here.

SGI previously released their FailSafe application monitoring and restart service. Having the Phoenix stuff underneath it and available for the GFS file system, and using the existing linux-ha bits would pretty much be a complete cluster solution. That would be good.

-dB

Actually, if it's done right, is reasonably priced, and is easy to use, I don't have much of a problem with subscription services.

I already have a subscription to a service that sends me an updated CD every month with all bugfixes and patches inclued. It's at http://www.tummy.com/krud/. I've found it to be useful.

Ya get a new disk, drop it in the drive, goto the directory for that month and "rpm -Fvh *rpm". Pretty painless

Note: I don't have anything to do with these people other than I'm a fairly satisfied customer.

Z

Some nice pics of emmet and a penguin in there!

kevin at tummy dot com

I suggest using XVscan. It costs $50, is supported by a company and is really simple to use.

I have used SANE with beta drivers and have had good luck, very few glitches. So it would not be a bad idea to consider scanners in the beta list. No experience with alpha though.