As a member - though somewhat inactive - of the IL Rt. 66 preservation society, I can attest to both parts of that. A real big chunk of Rt. 66 in IL is actually I55 (or one side of '55), but the other half of '66 is still regular highway, running along side of the interstate. It's kinda nice being able to choose the leisurely, low-traffic version or the "I wanna run 80 MPH" version and really not have to change your plans significantly...:)
The Hot Rod Power Tour was mostly 2-lane highway driving until the last couple of years. I've crossed the whole country north-south a couple of times on that trip - but never east-west.
How do you determine how much physical memory to put into a machine? How do you determine how fast your processor needs to be? How do you determine how large your hard drive needs to be? How do you determine what optical drives you'll need? Man, if you don't have even the roughest idea of what you'll do with your computer over the next few weeks, I don't think that "running out of swap space" is your biggest computing issue.
Oh, and you make a swap file that's roughly the same size as physical memory. If you find out that you need more, you'll want more physical memory because performance will tank if you just increase swap.
Managing swap partitions? What "management"? You run mkswap, put the line in fstab, and either reboot or run swapon. Oh, man, what a hassle! Never mind, of course, that you really oughtta have an idea of how much memory you'll need to run your system ahead of time - and never mind that Linux has supported swap files for years...
Anyway, what partitions is it that you have growing out of control? I separate/var/log so an out-of-control log file (or attack) can't fill up the whole system. I separate/home so I can easily manage space there. I separate/tmp so I can add space as needed. I separate/var and/usr because I want to keep the root small, managable, and read-only. I keep/boot separate so it can be read-only on the rare time when I want to write to the root./opt is separate. Some machines have a separate/music and/video partition. This all sounds very complicated, and difficult to manage, right? I mean, what if a partition needs some more space, and I've allocated too much to another partition? Three words all compressed into one handy acronym: LVM. With LVM you essentially virtualize your partitions. Combine that with reiserfs (or another filesystem that can grow on the fly) and you can add space to a partition while an application is writing to that partition. You can remove space from a partiton by just unmounting it. You can move partitions around, span disks, etc. It also makes backups easier - simply don't span devices. Did I mention that you can add another drive and integrate it into your existing structure without having to screw with partitioning and symlinking? Oh, and did I mention that your whole system won't be ground to a halt by some memory-leaking program creating an ever-growing swap file that fills your drive, or by some badly written program that generates mountains of log files which you don't notice until too late?
If you're avoiding good partitioning practices because partitions are "too hard" or "inconvenient", look into LVM/EVMS (even if you just make one huge volume that can grow onto another disk later). If, rather, you're avoiding it because you're convinced that every other sysadmin out there is stupid and has been wasting their time for no reason over teh last few decades, well, I can't help you out there.:)
One of them was talking to his grandmother, and she said "don't talk to anyone about any of this". Yup, is was someone's grandmother giving out that advise.
How do people get to their houses if they don't live on an interstate off-ramp? You know, it's amazing, but there are a lot of people who don't even live in a town that has multiple controlled-access interstate highways passing through. And they're not even farmers! I hear that some people still travel down old Route 66 on occasion...
Turning too hard is a result of going into a turn with too much speed, not ABS. Without ABS, it's just as possible that the car will spin around due to loss of traction, in my experience (driving mostly cars without ABS). For competition driving, non-ABS is great - but for general mind-numbing driving with all the other zombies (in the snow / rain), it's nice to not have to think about pumping the brakes. Dry pavement (or when riding a motorcycle), that's another thing, but how often does the extra couple of feet you can get from a *really* good driver on dry pavement really make the difference?
So we pick a pretty large airplane and estimate the mileage based on that large capacity, but it's not OK to use the mileage of a fairly typical compact car? Yeah, I call a Jetta compact, because I can't straighten my legs out inside. A midsize would let me do that in front, and a full-sized car would let me do that in the back seats too (while in the normal seating position).
If most people had dedicated mechanics taking care of their cars, and if most people realzed that the truck they just bought isn't the car *or* minivan that they were looking for, then I'd bet that "most" people would get better mileage.:)
I was listening to George Carlin a month or so back, and he said something that I found somewhat amusing and insightful (which is what I like about Mr. Carlin's brand of humor). You reminded me of it. It was along the lines of questioning the idea of asking God for things when the religion teaches that God will do what he wills. Basically, if God's gonna do whatever he wants either way, and you accept that, what does it matter if you're constantly asking for things? Seems like you're just bugging him all the time for no good reason. He's believed to be all-knowing and all-powerful, so it's not like he needs your input in order to decide what to do. "Oh, thanks for the idea, Bob. I hadn't thought of that, nor did I know you wanted that to happen!" So quit hassling him. I don't think that constantly asking for favors is the way to get into anyone's good graces.:)
Are you composing these long reports in your email editor, or usign a dedicated editor and then copy/pasting into the mail program? I'll bet the latter. Either way, though, if the formatting is actually important to the content, you'd probably have better (aka, more reliable) results by attaching a PDF / word doc to a short textual message. And it'd work better with encryption setups.:)
that you'll be killed by a drunk driver on the way to work
I've gotta think that the concentration of drunk drivers on the road is a little lower at 8AM than, say, most of the evening. Maybe on the way *home* from work, or on the way to work for 3rd shift...:)
Among questionable business practices and glaringly lacking browser functionality, there are some redeeming qualities.
Yeah, the best way to prove that is to specifically list problems and then vaugely say that "there are some redeeming qualities" without listing any of those.:)
What they did "right" was to get license agreements with large comapnies, out-market IBM when OS/2 was a viable alternative, and then redo their look-n-feel just a little every few years so people would have some compulsion to upgrade.
Sorry - I'm not sure why the "XP" went in there. I meant just plain Athlon - AMD changed the name of their Athlon to Sempron to more strongly differentiate their "budget" processor from their "fancy" processor line. The XP and MP weren't getting it across, apparently.:)
To expand on the other reply, you're familiar with permissions, right? You have the user bits, the group bits, and the "other" bits, given as three octal numbers consisting of a read, write, and execute bit (in that order) - so mode 754 would be 111 101 100 in binary, with the "set" bits meaning user having read, write, execute, the group having read and execute, and the "other" having just read. Well, there's an implied 0 at the beginning of the 754 you might type - it's really 0754. There are three more less used bits at the front. In order, they're setuid, setgid, and "sticky". They do slightly different things on directories than they do on files, and the effects are well documented in the chmod man page as well as all over the internet if you're unfamiliar with them.:)
Man if only there was a way to make directories setgid, change the default umask to 002, and put the developers in the same group.;) It gets even easier when using samba / ftp / something else, when you can make the file transport force permissions...
To further explain that, when you enable the setgid bit on a directory, newly created files will inherit the directory's group, and newly created directorys will do that as well as inheriting the setgid bit. You then set the users default umask to either 002 or 007. You also have to create a unique group for each user, then, and set that as their default group so they're not accidentally creating files that are group writeable. You still make everyone a member of the users group, though, and tell the users that they need to manually change the group any files that they want to share. It works well for typical situations.
Don't forget about the slower Athlon XP, which became the Sempron after nothing but a label change and a decision to differnetiate the slow processors from the "new fast"...:)
That's darn near "irony" - an article about spam in which about 300% of the article space is taken up by ads - and the actual subject lines are presneted in one long, illegible sentence.:)
I worked for several years at a large community college with Gateway computers which all came with Western Digital drives. I'm pretty sure that we replaced over half of the hard drives in those computers. To qualify that, these were Pentium II and prior-era drives, and WD seems to have done better with quality in the last few years. None the less, the only manufacturer I've never had *large-scale* failure experience with is Seagate. Every Maxtor drive I've purchased (for corporate use) in the last decade has failed. Some more than once (I mean the replacement fails - the same driev doesn't actually fail more than once). Samsung and Fujitsu used to be alright, but they're not the big players, and I've just used them personally on a small scale.
So, after working with literally thousands of hard drives, when it comes time to buy drives for my personal use, I buy Seagate. They consistantly have a good rebate, they've been around forever, and the only failures I've had were two which were bad out of the box (a bearing was squealing on one after about one day of use, which gave me time to make a more current backup, and the other one just never worked - probably banged around in shipping). Other people have their preferences, and WD's probably fine now, but I'm drawing from a large enough sample to feel quite good about my choice.
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As a member - though somewhat inactive - of the IL Rt. 66 preservation society, I can attest to both parts of that. A real big chunk of Rt. 66 in IL is actually I55 (or one side of '55), but the other half of '66 is still regular highway, running along side of the interstate. It's kinda nice being able to choose the leisurely, low-traffic version or the "I wanna run 80 MPH" version and really not have to change your plans significantly... :)
The Hot Rod Power Tour was mostly 2-lane highway driving until the last couple of years. I've crossed the whole country north-south a couple of times on that trip - but never east-west.
How do you determine how much physical memory to put into a machine? How do you determine how fast your processor needs to be? How do you determine how large your hard drive needs to be? How do you determine what optical drives you'll need? Man, if you don't have even the roughest idea of what you'll do with your computer over the next few weeks, I don't think that "running out of swap space" is your biggest computing issue.
Oh, and you make a swap file that's roughly the same size as physical memory. If you find out that you need more, you'll want more physical memory because performance will tank if you just increase swap.
Managing swap partitions? What "management"? You run mkswap, put the line in fstab, and either reboot or run swapon. Oh, man, what a hassle! Never mind, of course, that you really oughtta have an idea of how much memory you'll need to run your system ahead of time - and never mind that Linux has supported swap files for years...
/var/log so an out-of-control log file (or attack) can't fill up the whole system. I separate /home so I can easily manage space there. I separate /tmp so I can add space as needed. I separate /var and /usr because I want to keep the root small, managable, and read-only. I keep /boot separate so it can be read-only on the rare time when I want to write to the root. /opt is separate. Some machines have a separate /music and /video partition. This all sounds very complicated, and difficult to manage, right? I mean, what if a partition needs some more space, and I've allocated too much to another partition? Three words all compressed into one handy acronym: LVM. With LVM you essentially virtualize your partitions. Combine that with reiserfs (or another filesystem that can grow on the fly) and you can add space to a partition while an application is writing to that partition. You can remove space from a partiton by just unmounting it. You can move partitions around, span disks, etc. It also makes backups easier - simply don't span devices. Did I mention that you can add another drive and integrate it into your existing structure without having to screw with partitioning and symlinking? Oh, and did I mention that your whole system won't be ground to a halt by some memory-leaking program creating an ever-growing swap file that fills your drive, or by some badly written program that generates mountains of log files which you don't notice until too late?
:)
Anyway, what partitions is it that you have growing out of control? I separate
If you're avoiding good partitioning practices because partitions are "too hard" or "inconvenient", look into LVM/EVMS (even if you just make one huge volume that can grow onto another disk later). If, rather, you're avoiding it because you're convinced that every other sysadmin out there is stupid and has been wasting their time for no reason over teh last few decades, well, I can't help you out there.
One of them was talking to his grandmother, and she said "don't talk to anyone about any of this". Yup, is was someone's grandmother giving out that advise.
How do people get to their houses if they don't live on an interstate off-ramp? You know, it's amazing, but there are a lot of people who don't even live in a town that has multiple controlled-access interstate highways passing through. And they're not even farmers! I hear that some people still travel down old Route 66 on occasion...
Turning too hard is a result of going into a turn with too much speed, not ABS. Without ABS, it's just as possible that the car will spin around due to loss of traction, in my experience (driving mostly cars without ABS). For competition driving, non-ABS is great - but for general mind-numbing driving with all the other zombies (in the snow / rain), it's nice to not have to think about pumping the brakes. Dry pavement (or when riding a motorcycle), that's another thing, but how often does the extra couple of feet you can get from a *really* good driver on dry pavement really make the difference?
So we pick a pretty large airplane and estimate the mileage based on that large capacity, but it's not OK to use the mileage of a fairly typical compact car? Yeah, I call a Jetta compact, because I can't straighten my legs out inside. A midsize would let me do that in front, and a full-sized car would let me do that in the back seats too (while in the normal seating position).
:)
If most people had dedicated mechanics taking care of their cars, and if most people realzed that the truck they just bought isn't the car *or* minivan that they were looking for, then I'd bet that "most" people would get better mileage.
How does one select an event that's entirely unpredictable?
I was listening to George Carlin a month or so back, and he said something that I found somewhat amusing and insightful (which is what I like about Mr. Carlin's brand of humor). You reminded me of it. It was along the lines of questioning the idea of asking God for things when the religion teaches that God will do what he wills. Basically, if God's gonna do whatever he wants either way, and you accept that, what does it matter if you're constantly asking for things? Seems like you're just bugging him all the time for no good reason. He's believed to be all-knowing and all-powerful, so it's not like he needs your input in order to decide what to do. "Oh, thanks for the idea, Bob. I hadn't thought of that, nor did I know you wanted that to happen!" So quit hassling him. I don't think that constantly asking for favors is the way to get into anyone's good graces. :)
Are you composing these long reports in your email editor, or usign a dedicated editor and then copy/pasting into the mail program? I'll bet the latter. Either way, though, if the formatting is actually important to the content, you'd probably have better (aka, more reliable) results by attaching a PDF / word doc to a short textual message. And it'd work better with encryption setups. :)
that you'll be killed by a drunk driver on the way to work
:)
I've gotta think that the concentration of drunk drivers on the road is a little lower at 8AM than, say, most of the evening. Maybe on the way *home* from work, or on the way to work for 3rd shift...
Among questionable business practices and glaringly lacking browser functionality, there are some redeeming qualities.
:)
Yeah, the best way to prove that is to specifically list problems and then vaugely say that "there are some redeeming qualities" without listing any of those.
What they did "right" was to get license agreements with large comapnies, out-market IBM when OS/2 was a viable alternative, and then redo their look-n-feel just a little every few years so people would have some compulsion to upgrade.
Sorry - I'm not sure why the "XP" went in there. I meant just plain Athlon - AMD changed the name of their Athlon to Sempron to more strongly differentiate their "budget" processor from their "fancy" processor line. The XP and MP weren't getting it across, apparently. :)
To expand on the other reply, you're familiar with permissions, right? You have the user bits, the group bits, and the "other" bits, given as three octal numbers consisting of a read, write, and execute bit (in that order) - so mode 754 would be 111 101 100 in binary, with the "set" bits meaning user having read, write, execute, the group having read and execute, and the "other" having just read. Well, there's an implied 0 at the beginning of the 754 you might type - it's really 0754. There are three more less used bits at the front. In order, they're setuid, setgid, and "sticky". They do slightly different things on directories than they do on files, and the effects are well documented in the chmod man page as well as all over the internet if you're unfamiliar with them. :)
If memory serves, you were also waiting for Intel to release Merced so you could run that OS in 64 bits, right? :)
To further explain that, when you enable the setgid bit on a directory, newly created files will inherit the directory's group, and newly created directorys will do that as well as inheriting the setgid bit. You then set the users default umask to either 002 or 007. You also have to create a unique group for each user, then, and set that as their default group so they're not accidentally creating files that are group writeable. You still make everyone a member of the users group, though, and tell the users that they need to manually change the group any files that they want to share. It works well for typical situations.
To initially set that up:Alternatively, do all that with one obscene find commandline so you only recurse the tree once, and later on have no idea what the heck you typed:
Which is about 37 degrees C, or right around negative 40 below zero. :)
The one that makes you want to yell "HELLO!" in a public place? OTOH, maybe I'm the only one that watched Trigger Happy TV.
Don't forget about the slower Athlon XP, which became the Sempron after nothing but a label change and a decision to differnetiate the slow processors from the "new fast"... :)
That's darn near "irony" - an article about spam in which about 300% of the article space is taken up by ads - and the actual subject lines are presneted in one long, illegible sentence. :)
You think that being around Donald Trump will make your penis larger?
Negative 40 below zero? That's darn near tee shirt weather, unless you've got your thermometer upside-down... ;)
Hmm, "well known" may well be a bit of an exaggeration. Lugs are threaded rods, as far as I've been able to tell - anything else is just silly.
I worked for several years at a large community college with Gateway computers which all came with Western Digital drives. I'm pretty sure that we replaced over half of the hard drives in those computers. To qualify that, these were Pentium II and prior-era drives, and WD seems to have done better with quality in the last few years. None the less, the only manufacturer I've never had *large-scale* failure experience with is Seagate. Every Maxtor drive I've purchased (for corporate use) in the last decade has failed. Some more than once (I mean the replacement fails - the same driev doesn't actually fail more than once). Samsung and Fujitsu used to be alright, but they're not the big players, and I've just used them personally on a small scale.
So, after working with literally thousands of hard drives, when it comes time to buy drives for my personal use, I buy Seagate. They consistantly have a good rebate, they've been around forever, and the only failures I've had were two which were bad out of the box (a bearing was squealing on one after about one day of use, which gave me time to make a more current backup, and the other one just never worked - probably banged around in shipping). Other people have their preferences, and WD's probably fine now, but I'm drawing from a large enough sample to feel quite good about my choice.
No, I'm not sure why I misspelled Serenity at least 4 times. I'm gonna blame cold fingers, since I spelled it correctly in the "find" dialog... Weird.