Not everyone realizes that the changes made to ext2 to add the journal are backward compatible. Don't be a dick.
Also, the point he makes about the root filesystem may not be 100% accurate, but the problem *will* arise if you have more than one partition. That is, you might be able to get / to mount when you reboot, but when the init scripts try to mount/home, 'mount' will complain that ext3 is an unknown fs and fail to mount the filesystem. Other mounts could be far more catastrophic, like/usr or/var.
the filesystem still writes at 50% the speed of ext2 (since all data is written twice).
Not true. Only one of the journaling modes does this, and it's not the default. The default mode only writes fs data twice, and is usually much faster, since it optimizes drive head motion by ordering the writes.
- It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool, than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.
half the opensource code needs to be changed to compile and run ok with gcc3
That code also needs to be fixed for 2.96. It's not half, it's just "some." 2.96 was a snapshot on the road to 3.0. There's probably not as much difference as you think.
When you make a shortcut in Windows, it's a bit like a soft link in Unix- it's only a pointer.
What? It's not *anything* like a soft link. It's not a filesystem pointer, it's a file. You can open it up and look at its contents. It's just a "special" file that the explorer knows how to read and interperet.
When doing backups of OS 10.x laptops from an NT-based backup system, I found that OS 10.x was sending the remote client (the backup agent) into a filesystem loop.
And you expected what? NT doesn't have any concept of a symbolic link, so there's no way to communicate to an NT machine that a file is one of those. There's just no language to describe it that NT will understand. Either symlinks work over SMB, and NT will follow them like any other file/folder, or they don't work at all, which would be very inconvenient, and very confusing to fix your special case of making backups from a platform too stupid to understand soft links.
Apple could learn a lesson or two from the Unix side of the market.
What lesson? Try the same thing on a Samba server running on Linux or FreeBSD. If you create an fs loop with symlinks, then your backup is going to fill up with your loop.
That's why we don't run backups on NT servers. Run your backups on a system capable of actually understanding the semantics of other machines, or run the backup from the machine with the content and pipe the data to the tape on the backup server.
It's NT that isn't a "good network citizen" and it always has been.
Shit, Maxtor drives? Those are at the very bottom of my list of reliable drives, trying hard for a place next to Western Digital. Seriously, couldn't they have picked a better drive? Fujitsu still makes some good quality drives. They're very quite, too.
OTOH, maybe Maxtor's gotten better since they incorporated Quantum... but I dunno. It doesn't seem terribly likely to me.
Microsoft already does use an interpereted language for their "desktop productivity apps", and has for quite some time. Most of MS Office is written in Visual Basic.
As it's been pointed out, pretty much all base dev tools are CLI. Most IDE's provide an editor (which really *has* to be GUI), a form editor (which is usually faster than designing forms from scratch, but usually gets tweaked afterward), and a debugger (about as GUI as an editor...). The differentiation between MS tools and old UNIX tools isn't so much GUI vs. CLI, but GUI vs. terminal. The GUI is just a prettier terminal, really. When you realize that, you can stop comparing the tools based on whether or not it has some superficial icons and menus, and compare the *individual tools* for their qualities. I certainly think that Emacs in X is very GUI, and a great IDE. I can accomplish things much faster with Emacs than I ever could with MS VC++.
However, if that doesn't satisfy you... If you're really looking for ammo against the GUI users, then here it is: Microsoft uses Perl, a couple of UNIX tools under DOS, and their CLI compiler to build their software. Does that qualify for "state of the art"?
No it doesn't. The server admin has a key on the system as of system installation. He is responsible for adding keys for any users of the system. (and for verifying that the admin account only has the appropriate admin keys the first time he logs in;-)
Viola, I now can log into every machine on the network.
No you can't. You still have to get access to the other machines and add your key. The only thing the script does is *remove* unauthorized, unlisted keys. It means that we can quickly and easily expire a key if it gets compromised, or the owner leaves.
I'm preparing a contribution to policy where I work which includes several stipulations on the use of SSH.
First, password authentication should be disabled, in favor of public key authentication. Second, only encrypted private keys are allowed for login sessions; an ssh agent will be recommened to minimize the inconvenience of repeatedly typing pass phrases. *Long* pass phrases will be recommended. (Note that you can't actually enforce the last two, they're just a matter of procedure.) In cases such as automated scripts which can not use encrypted private keys, a key pair will be generated *for each task*. The public key, when installed, will have the command specified so that the key pair can be used to execute *ONLY* one command.
In addition, all authorized public keys will be kept in a document on an HTTP server. A cron job (python script) will run at least once a day to fetch that list, and compare all of the private keys installed on the system to the authorized list. Any key which isn't in the master list will be removed from the system, and the network admin will be alerted.
Maybe similar procedures would benefit others. Does anyone see holes in this procedure?
Both of the comparisons that have been done on phpbuilder.net have put PostgreSQL ahead on heavily loaded sites (like slashdot). MySQL's lead has always really been connection times. However, it's a total flop under many concurrent connections.
Hell no! I've administered to IIS and Apache servers for years, and all that IIS's GUI ever does is get in the way. Let's imagine for a moment that you have an IIS server hosting multiple sites, and that one of those sites is working properly while the other doesn't work at all. Now tell me how you'd go about comparing the settings on the two to see what's different? It's a god damn pain in the ass. You can't compare the two side by side, and there's a handful of entirely separate panels to check for differences, each with sub-panels.
Now, with apache, I can open two terminals/editors and compare the comparisons side-by-side in just a moment.
With text configs, I can also compose a template for new sites and set them up with a quick cut and paste operation. Much less work than creating a new site in IIS...
Well, if you want to *learn* Linux, then you want SlackWare. I recommend it without even hesitating. Use Slack for 6 months to a year, and you'll know far more than you would if you used anything else. There's not easy to use GUI config tools. If you need a kernel feature, you'll probably compile it. If you need to change the way the system boots, you'll edit the init scripts. If you need software you're going to compile it 80% of the time. Using Slack *forces* you to know how the system works. It's just you, a text editor, and the config files. It's old school.
Using Slack will teach you how things are done, and it will teach you what not to do. You will spend a lot of time doing menial admin tasks. Slack doesn't even rotate your logs, so you'll have to do that yourself!
After you've mastered Slack, move on to something that's well maintained and stable; i.e. Debian or Red Hat Linux. Forget Mandrake. All of my friends who've used it have found it to be less stable than Red Hat. Noticing that a Linux distro isn't stable is terrible, and frustrating. Red Hat or Debian will be blissful in comparison to Slack, and you will love them for the rest of your days. Plus, most all of the things you learned from Slack will still apply.
And I believe that system had an availability measured in single digit percentages. PR blamed the problem on a router, but we heard from inside sources that the machine itself kept falling over itself.
It was the sheer stupidity of the worm's creator and the skill of some network admins which limited the worms attack and DoS potential.
Riiiggght. This is the second time Code Red has been mentioned on Slashdot with a reference to the "stupid" author. Compared to the skilled network admins? What, the ones who let Windows NT boxen on their network? The ones who got HACKED by the silly virus author? Yeah, they're skilled all right, truely elite.
Mock the author as you will, but the fatal errors in Code Red were choices that the author made. His options for those choices could have been stopped, too. It wasn't really the stupidity of the virus author that saved whitehouse.gov, but the vigilance of some people doing things that might be illegal under the DMCA or some other law in the near future.
Remember that the next time you're feeling elite, yourself.
Most of the conversation here has been focusing on Final Fantasy (given, the story is about final fantasy...). But how many of you played "Vagrant Story"? Don't get me wrong, I'm a huge FF fan. I own a copy of all of the FF games released in the US. However, I thought that VS was far more captivating than the later FF games, equal in quality to FFII and III. I never understood why it didn't sell very well here.
When it was originally released, I'd read that it was mp3-only, although a search on google turns up several pages that indicate that you are correct. However, for all intents and purposes, giving away a handful of records and asking that they be distributed as mp3's and *only* as mp3's makes it sorta official. At least as official as a CD that was recorded from a master.
why didn't anyone try to sign some big names - example, Hole, Smashing Pumpkins, etc.
Well, Smashing Pumpkins is gone. I was at their last American concert *ever*. But, before they went, they released one more album in MP3 format only, on the web, free for download. I beleive that it was called "Machina II - The Friends and Enemies of Modern Music" which I've taken to be a statement about recording studios. Make what you will of it.
Oh, man... That's so disappointing to hear. I've been wondering for quite a while where that page was at. I wanted to read one more time about those guys trying to heat a coffee pot only to watch the glass pot itself melt. Made me want one of those lenses.
Does anyone else remember a page on reality that had the details of an SGI employee purchasing an insanely large magnifying lens and using it to melt stuff? I thought I saw it about 3 years ago. That story was the basis for most of my opinions about SGI as a company.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
"Didn't realize"?
/home, 'mount' will complain that ext3 is an unknown fs and fail to mount the filesystem. Other mounts could be far more catastrophic, like /usr or /var.
Not everyone realizes that the changes made to ext2 to add the journal are backward compatible. Don't be a dick.
Also, the point he makes about the root filesystem may not be 100% accurate, but the problem *will* arise if you have more than one partition. That is, you might be able to get / to mount when you reboot, but when the init scripts try to mount
the filesystem still writes at 50% the speed of ext2 (since all data is written twice).
Not true. Only one of the journaling modes does this, and it's not the default. The default mode only writes fs data twice, and is usually much faster, since it optimizes drive head motion by ordering the writes.
- It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool, than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.
half the opensource code needs to be changed to compile and run ok with gcc3
That code also needs to be fixed for 2.96. It's not half, it's just "some." 2.96 was a snapshot on the road to 3.0. There's probably not as much difference as you think.
When you make a shortcut in Windows, it's a bit like a soft link in Unix- it's only a pointer.
What? It's not *anything* like a soft link. It's not a filesystem pointer, it's a file. You can open it up and look at its contents. It's just a "special" file that the explorer knows how to read and interperet.
When doing backups of OS 10.x laptops from an NT-based backup system, I found that OS 10.x was sending the remote client (the backup agent) into a filesystem loop.
And you expected what? NT doesn't have any concept of a symbolic link, so there's no way to communicate to an NT machine that a file is one of those. There's just no language to describe it that NT will understand. Either symlinks work over SMB, and NT will follow them like any other file/folder, or they don't work at all, which would be very inconvenient, and very confusing to fix your special case of making backups from a platform too stupid to understand soft links.
Apple could learn a lesson or two from the Unix side of the market.
What lesson? Try the same thing on a Samba server running on Linux or FreeBSD. If you create an fs loop with symlinks, then your backup is going to fill up with your loop.
That's why we don't run backups on NT servers. Run your backups on a system capable of actually understanding the semantics of other machines, or run the backup from the machine with the content and pipe the data to the tape on the backup server.
It's NT that isn't a "good network citizen" and it always has been.
"We currently use and recommend Maxtor drives"
Shit, Maxtor drives? Those are at the very bottom of my list of reliable drives, trying hard for a place next to Western Digital. Seriously, couldn't they have picked a better drive? Fujitsu still makes some good quality drives. They're very quite, too.
OTOH, maybe Maxtor's gotten better since they incorporated Quantum... but I dunno. It doesn't seem terribly likely to me.
Microsoft already does use an interpereted language for their "desktop productivity apps", and has for quite some time. Most of MS Office is written in Visual Basic.
As it's been pointed out, pretty much all base dev tools are CLI. Most IDE's provide an editor (which really *has* to be GUI), a form editor (which is usually faster than designing forms from scratch, but usually gets tweaked afterward), and a debugger (about as GUI as an editor...). The differentiation between MS tools and old UNIX tools isn't so much GUI vs. CLI, but GUI vs. terminal. The GUI is just a prettier terminal, really. When you realize that, you can stop comparing the tools based on whether or not it has some superficial icons and menus, and compare the *individual tools* for their qualities. I certainly think that Emacs in X is very GUI, and a great IDE. I can accomplish things much faster with Emacs than I ever could with MS VC++.
However, if that doesn't satisfy you... If you're really looking for ammo against the GUI users, then here it is: Microsoft uses Perl, a couple of UNIX tools under DOS, and their CLI compiler to build their software. Does that qualify for "state of the art"?
No it doesn't. The server admin has a key on the system as of system installation. He is responsible for adding keys for any users of the system. (and for verifying that the admin account only has the appropriate admin keys the first time he logs in ;-)
Viola, I now can log into every machine on the network.
No you can't. You still have to get access to the other machines and add your key. The only thing the script does is *remove* unauthorized, unlisted keys. It means that we can quickly and easily expire a key if it gets compromised, or the owner leaves.
I'm preparing a contribution to policy where I work which includes several stipulations on the use of SSH.
First, password authentication should be disabled, in favor of public key authentication. Second, only encrypted private keys are allowed for login sessions; an ssh agent will be recommened to minimize the inconvenience of repeatedly typing pass phrases. *Long* pass phrases will be recommended. (Note that you can't actually enforce the last two, they're just a matter of procedure.) In cases such as automated scripts which can not use encrypted private keys, a key pair will be generated *for each task*. The public key, when installed, will have the command specified so that the key pair can be used to execute *ONLY* one command.
In addition, all authorized public keys will be kept in a document on an HTTP server. A cron job (python script) will run at least once a day to fetch that list, and compare all of the private keys installed on the system to the authorized list. Any key which isn't in the master list will be removed from the system, and the network admin will be alerted.
Maybe similar procedures would benefit others. Does anyone see holes in this procedure?
Now look at the later comparison, titled "Open Source Databases: As The Tables Turn".
Both of the comparisons that have been done on phpbuilder.net have put PostgreSQL ahead on heavily loaded sites (like slashdot). MySQL's lead has always really been connection times. However, it's a total flop under many concurrent connections.
Should it?
Hell no! I've administered to IIS and Apache servers for years, and all that IIS's GUI ever does is get in the way. Let's imagine for a moment that you have an IIS server hosting multiple sites, and that one of those sites is working properly while the other doesn't work at all. Now tell me how you'd go about comparing the settings on the two to see what's different? It's a god damn pain in the ass. You can't compare the two side by side, and there's a handful of entirely separate panels to check for differences, each with sub-panels.
Now, with apache, I can open two terminals/editors and compare the comparisons side-by-side in just a moment.
With text configs, I can also compose a template for new sites and set them up with a quick cut and paste operation. Much less work than creating a new site in IIS...
Well, if you want to *learn* Linux, then you want SlackWare. I recommend it without even hesitating. Use Slack for 6 months to a year, and you'll know far more than you would if you used anything else. There's not easy to use GUI config tools. If you need a kernel feature, you'll probably compile it. If you need to change the way the system boots, you'll edit the init scripts. If you need software you're going to compile it 80% of the time. Using Slack *forces* you to know how the system works. It's just you, a text editor, and the config files. It's old school.
Using Slack will teach you how things are done, and it will teach you what not to do. You will spend a lot of time doing menial admin tasks. Slack doesn't even rotate your logs, so you'll have to do that yourself!
After you've mastered Slack, move on to something that's well maintained and stable; i.e. Debian or Red Hat Linux. Forget Mandrake. All of my friends who've used it have found it to be less stable than Red Hat. Noticing that a Linux distro isn't stable is terrible, and frustrating. Red Hat or Debian will be blissful in comparison to Slack, and you will love them for the rest of your days. Plus, most all of the things you learned from Slack will still apply.
Note to self: previwe before submit....
And I believe that system had an availability measured in single digit percentages. PR blamed the problem on a router, but we heard from inside sources that the machine itself kept falling over itself.
It's hard to crack a machine that isn't up.
Those of us who are "more experienced in Linux" know that you can get apt for rpm and use it to maintain a Red Hat system.
dd if=virus.doc.pif of=clean.doc bs=1 skip=137216
True, but copying byte by byte is really slow. I'd increase the block size to something like 8 or 16K to make that operation a lot faster.
It was the sheer stupidity of the worm's creator and the skill of some network admins which limited the worms attack and DoS potential.
Riiiggght. This is the second time Code Red has been mentioned on Slashdot with a reference to the "stupid" author. Compared to the skilled network admins? What, the ones who let Windows NT boxen on their network? The ones who got HACKED by the silly virus author? Yeah, they're skilled all right, truely elite.
Mock the author as you will, but the fatal errors in Code Red were choices that the author made. His options for those choices could have been stopped, too. It wasn't really the stupidity of the virus author that saved whitehouse.gov, but the vigilance of some people doing things that might be illegal under the DMCA or some other law in the near future.
Remember that the next time you're feeling elite, yourself.
And the way I've always read Bill's statement was:
Some customers complain, but neither those customers nor the bugs they complain about matter to us.
Of course no one complains... There's no point. MS has never been known to do anything about bug complaints but disavow and disregard them.
Most of the conversation here has been focusing on Final Fantasy (given, the story is about final fantasy...). But how many of you played "Vagrant Story"? Don't get me wrong, I'm a huge FF fan. I own a copy of all of the FF games released in the US. However, I thought that VS was far more captivating than the later FF games, equal in quality to FFII and III. I never understood why it didn't sell very well here.
Some distributions' packages of KDE depend on lm_sensors. You can't install the distributions' KDE packages without lm_sensors as well.
When it was originally released, I'd read that it was mp3-only, although a search on google turns up several pages that indicate that you are correct. However, for all intents and purposes, giving away a handful of records and asking that they be distributed as mp3's and *only* as mp3's makes it sorta official. At least as official as a CD that was recorded from a master.
Quick search on google found this site:
http://www.slut-69.com/sp_machina2.html
why didn't anyone try to sign some big names - example, Hole, Smashing Pumpkins, etc.
Well, Smashing Pumpkins is gone. I was at their last American concert *ever*. But, before they went, they released one more album in MP3 format only, on the web, free for download. I beleive that it was called "Machina II - The Friends and Enemies of Modern Music" which I've taken to be a statement about recording studios. Make what you will of it.
Oh, man... That's so disappointing to hear. I've been wondering for quite a while where that page was at. I wanted to read one more time about those guys trying to heat a coffee pot only to watch the glass pot itself melt. Made me want one of those lenses.
Does anyone else remember a page on reality that had the details of an SGI employee purchasing an insanely large magnifying lens and using it to melt stuff? I thought I saw it about 3 years ago. That story was the basis for most of my opinions about SGI as a company. :-)