I was under the impression that the type of journal reiserfs uses wasn't an actual 'data' journal of what was going to get written to disk, it was a 'list of things I'm in the process of doing' and if any operation isn't completed, it is 'backed-out' to the previous state.
The advantage, from what I understand is that you don't have to fsck every time the system's unclean because a quick check of the journal tells you exactly what files are 'dirty'.
When I first heard of journalling I thought that it would journal the actual data, writing it to disk ASAP and then organizing and moving it to reasonable locations later, but I don't think this is true, I think reiserfs just journals a 'to do' list and ensures that every operation is either completely done or completely NOT done.
That's because Windows runs a daemon to troll the important files and replace them from backups if they get corrupted or replaced incorrectly. Nonesuch thing on any of my boxes.
What was the reason for the panic? I've been running my system HARD for years without any panics.
If your hardware or kernel has problems you can hardly blame a filesystem that's expressly designed for high-reliability hardware for data loss.
'journalling' is not any better than none when it comes to flaky hardware or a badly compiled kernel. All it means is that you don't have to wait an hour for fsck to run. The whole point of a journalling FS is that it 'knows' what files are suspect after a major outage and it quarantines them, it's not any better at preventing them from being corrupted.
All in all, I can say that Linux an other Unices are VERY sensitive to improper halts/panics/shutdowns. I've hosed several OS X machines by not exiting gracefully, and several Linux boxes too. Your number-one priority when setting up a system is to do what it takes to keep it from crashing, ever.
When I built my desktop I carefully selected components that were 100% Linux-compatible so I wouldn't have issues like the ones you described.
I've been using ReiserFS _EXCLUSIVELY_ since about 2.4.11 and I've never had a single problem. It's important to format with the defaults and not specify 'special' arguments to mkreiserfs or you can run into trouble.
I've got three systems currently running reiser on Gentoo, from my PowerPC/SCSI/NFS/Samba file/print server to the ancient Compaq laptop with a 4GB drive. I've never had as much as a hiccup from ReiserFS.
I have to disagree. The quote you use does not prove your point. Osama wants America to stop forking over loot and coddling the Israelis because from his POV they're keeping Muslims off of Muslim lands. America is also the number-one supporter of the house of Saud, who had Osama himself kicked out of HIS OWN COUNTRY.
You can bet your ass that if I got kicked out of America because I was a potential threat to the ruling party I'd be directing 'terror' attacks against the people who had me booted.
And for the record, I'm FAIR GAME for Osama as far as I'm concerned, and so were the people in the twin towers. I pay my taxes willingly, and a portion of those monies keep Israel illegally armed (read: Nuclear Proliferation), and another portion goes to our millitary to operate on Muslim land we have no business being in. Also, I fork over three hundred dollars a month to Shell Oil, and I'm sure a bunch of that goes to the house of Saud. I'm as guilty as can be.
See, our democaracy and capitalism is great, it really is, I love it and choose it over the alternatives. The problem is that because we choose our leaders by election and 'vote policy' with every dollar we spend, we each bear responsibility for the actions of our country as a whole. You and I MADE Osama who he is today by our own free will, and now, as a local rapper says, "The melting pot seems to be calling the kettle black".
I don't think they would have used nukes for 9-11 anyway, even if they had them. 9-11 was a SYMBOLIC attack on western capitalism and our milltary-industrial complex, not a clear-cut kill-as-many-americans-as-possible mission.
I can even argue that using a nuke on 9-11 on D.C. would have been counter-productive for Al-Qaeda, because it wouldn't have let America react so smoothly and fall into Bin Laden's trap so easily.
Seriously, using an airplane or two against the pentagon? That was clearly just a way to say 'fuck off' while leaving the whole American system intact enough to go totally apeshit and overreact by starting a war or two.
Jerk or not, Bin Laden is a VERY smart guy, and so far what we've done to 'fight terrorism' has done much to benefit his cause. Knocking-off Saddam has turned a once sedated Arab land into an unruly danger to Saudi interests.
If Al Qaeda REALLY wanted to just fuck as many Americans as possible they would have had people infiltrate water plants as empployees and sprinkle slow-acting cumulative poisons (radioactive stuff?) into the drinking supply, or send operatives with high-resistant tuberculosis into American subways and airports.
I never stole anything in my life, but for a while a few years ago I was helping some 'questionable' friends wipe out machines of 'questionable' origin. At the time it was a way to feed myseld and get deals on hardware, I'm not into that sort of thing anymore.
You can be SURE that if a laptop gets stolen, the kids that wiped it are going to take it straight to their local geek who will boot the machine off a CD and wipe the drive. Usually stolen goods go right into local low-level organized-crime units for 'laundering' and appraisal.
My advice is to not allow your iBook to get stolen in the first place. I tote my PBG4 AL with me everywhere I go, it's never out-of-sight, not even when I hit the bathroom at my local coffee joint. Do backups and get homeowners/renters insurance on it and encrypt your home folder.
Hey, I'm with you, but every time I price out an AMD desktop I get shot down because "it might not be 100% compatible with our intel software". It's amazing how far the PHBs can push their heads into their asses.
Well I think the reason AMD64 chips aren't catching on as quickly as they could is that the AMD roadmap clearly shows how they're moving to a new socket soon. Why would you buy or invest R&D into a machine that is essentially dead-ended in terms of CPU availability?
I think that once the socket-939 chips come out and the platform 'congeals' into a long-term solution you'll see more of these things selling.
It also doesn't help that there's no version of Windows that takes advantage of 64-bitness yet, or that a HUGE portion of the IT people making purchasing decisions still doesn't trust AMD CPUs.
Dude, something's wrong with your setup. I've got Mozilla loading -OVER NFS- in under 1 second. I can load it locally on an old 40GB IDE drive 'fresh' (not cached, right out of booting) in three seconds while compiling two things in the background.
This is on a 1.4GHz Athlon with PC2100 RAM and a 40GB 'junker' hard drive.
I just 'upgraded' from an original-series RADEON to a RADEON 7500 from Crucial, there's virtually no difference performance-wise, but the newer GPU doesn't need a fan and the chip count on the board is much lower on the 7500.
I'm a VERY happy camper, as ATI seems to always produce excellent-quality picture on my big Hitachi CRT.
I'm very sensitive to bad DACs on video cards, I had to toss an EPIA board and an Nvidia because I could see the 'blurriness' on my monitor, but the ATI cards have always done me right.
I also get the feeling that by running a fanless GPU you reduce a teensy bit of pixel distortion because there's no inducted current so close to the DAC.
The G5 is VERY efficient, using about half the juice of a similarly-powered P4. The problem is in perception, it's a lot hotter than any PREVIOUS Apple CPU offering and Apple case design tends to aim for more heatsink and bigger fans than small loud HSF combos. This leads to the idea that the G5 is a monster power draw when it is quite benign.
It's just like when Mac users complained about the 'hot' G4 PowerBook, it wasn't much different than high-end P4 laptops of it's day, but Mac users expected cooler machines, so they raised a stink about them.
My Athlon draws much more juice at 1.8GHz than a PPC970 at 2GHz, and the 970 can mop the floor with any Athlon-XP.
The G4 74xx and 75xx are also quite good in power draw, but the design is old enough that it really can't run much over 1.5GHz, remember that the core of that chip (PPC750) was 233MHz when it came out; the Altivec implementation and onboard cache, while nice, are huge real-estate hogs on the die.
Well I'm the 'Mac Guy' where I work, so I spend a lot of time 'helping' the windows folks patch and update. Anyhoo, today I helped patch some VIPs, explaining that if they had Macs they'd be a lot more safe from such attacks.
The great thing is that I did some SIMPLE research yesterday and had the network guy disable all traffic on ports 5554 and 9996, both useless ports to us. Well now the worm is locked down to whatever subnet it gets in on, it can't propagate. We've had zero confirmed infections internally, except one subnet where someone brought a laptop and hosed two other machines.
It's easy to stop this stuff if you're heavily subnetted and can block ports at the switches.
I think I'm going to ask for more pay, if I can stop windows infections from my desk and I'm the 'Mac Guy' I should be asking for a fatter check.
I've always been of the mind that if I can fix the issue myself through a lifestyle change rather than medicine, it's probably the 'right' thing to do. I can't speak for people who have major lifelong issues, but I think I did the right thing. My sinus infection was a symptom of a much larger problem that I fixed myself, in deference to modern medicine.
I went two years without health insurance or enough income to pay for doctors too, and you really learn how to care for yourself when you do that, I had to make a plastic shim for my ankle to keep it from moving for a few days because I had to go to work on it sprained, I must've saved $500 on doctor's costs there.
I was told that they'd have to surgically remove a sinus infection as well. Instead I asked what it was EXACTLY, it turned out to be a fungal thing, which I also had problems with in my ears. Long story short, I went no-carb for a few months and low-carb for a few more and now I'm fine. I can only assume that I got so sick from drinking all the healthy bacteria in my body away and not feeding myself right. I also feel a lot more energetic and less bloaty.
It's worth a try, just to humor yourself. I think there's a LOT of folks out there with fungal things that feed on body sugars who get misdiagnosed.
My doctor told me that the infection was gone, but that the no-carb thing was bull. He said that I'd only have a fungal thing like I thought if I had a major physical breakdown, and that ot would take a lot of diflucan to fix it. Shows what he knows.
Re:My one question...
on
Wi-Fi in the Sky
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
The short answer is 'no', Radio/WiFi signals move at near-light speeds and planes do not. Any sort of 'trail' that you're thinking would be at MOST a few millimeters (if that!) and it would be only one-way, preventing any real communication.
Don't forget that you can build your own uber-customized stages 1, 2, 3, and more using a working Linux system and the 'stager' tool. I always build a 'clean' and updated stage 3 from portage and install from that. There's no need for a full day of downtime when you decide to scuttle your current system and reinstall.
I have a headless file/print/shell/kerberos/distcc server and it boots all services in under 40MB RAM, it's got 768MB under the hood and uses 40, that leaves a LOT for buffers and cache. I've got no use for swap on it, so I made a token 64MB swapfile (not a partition) and it's almost never been touched.
Servers often don't need much RAM, adding or disabling swap on my server wouldn't make ANY difference at all.
There's a registry key that purports to reduce the swapping of the 'executive' components of the kernel. I think it's in: HKLM/system/control/ccurcset/sessionmanager/memory (abbreviated for sanity)
There will always be SOME of the kernel paged out, because I guess some stuff loads into the kernel at boot and can't be 'jettissoned' I think my w2k box dropped from 32MB/kernel paged to about 20MB after I disabled PagingExecutive.
It's a good idea for laptops or high memory systems.
The VAST majority of schools on I2 automatically route all intra-school traffic through I2, it's really the smart way to do it. So at most schools, using ANY IP-application, from an FTP client to P2P to browsing will run over I2 _IF_ there's a path to the target via I2. I've heard a few peole say 'keep it for research' but they don't understand, it's an academic-institution-only network, ALL the traffic falls under the umbrella of 'research'. The 'research' thing is just an excuse for the schools to disallow any commercial entries into the I2, which is really just a bunch of schools hooked up to each other via ATM.
I used to work ten feet from the uri.edu I2 gateway, and I can tell you it's fast when you need to pull something from another school, and pretty clogged when you need something from a.com.
Internet2 is really a misnomer, they oughtta call it 'schoolnet' or something, it's not anything special, it's not 'the future' or 'the next generation' of the Internet, it's just a regular IP network running exclusively between schools. The schools get HUGE 'sideways' bandwidth value compared to the costs of commercial bandwidth.
The people who were saying 'the grads have I2, we have regular access' is probably wrong, the grads have uncapped access while the undergrads have limited access to bandwidth. I'm pretty sure that the school doesn't route traffic that would be 'free' on I2 through an expensive ISP.
Stages are more flexible than that. If you use a tool like stager or catalyst you can compile fully-optimized stage3 tarballs for your next install from the system you're working on already, so you can still use 'today's' machine while building 'tomorrow's'.
I have a stager script that I've hacked the bejeezus out of and configured to generate 2.6-headered NPTL systems that are fully optimized, even though the installs start at stage3. I've got flowcharts and stuff to keep track of the 'stage evolution'
here's my process, IIRC:
1. have working gentoo system with stager and a stage1 snapshot. 2. emerge sync 3. unmask or modify certain.ebuilds for desired result (gcc-3.3.3 and linux-headers-2.6.5 come to mind). Also modify stager for optimizations and stager/files/make.conf.$ARCH for USE flags. 3. stager snap $DATE-custom 4. stager athlon-xp 2 stage1 $DATE-custom 5. stager athlon-xp 1 $DATE-custom $DATE-custom 6. clean out temp files in/var/stager for good luck 7. stager athlon-xp 2 $DATE-custom $DATE-custom 8. stager athlon-xp 3 $DATE-custom $DATE-custom
so now you've got a fully-native NPTL stage1 to build other stages from and a fully-native stage3 ready to install.
My actual system is a lot more complex, as I build a 'generic i686' stage1 and then fork off to Pentium3 ad Athlon-XP builds for my different machines. I've also got a totally seperate stage geneology for the PPC build, but they all share the portage snapshots and configs for consistency.
There's still a lot of R&D into making the software clean, featureful, and easy-to-use. Wireless technology is a heck of a lot more than chips and antennae.
Apple puts a lot of R&D into their hardware, even though it's all built from components engineered elsewhere, you can't make a computer by tossing a CPU, video card, and hard drive into a plastic bin and shaking it, can you?
Slashdot Mirror
I was under the impression that the type of journal reiserfs uses wasn't an actual 'data' journal of what was going to get written to disk, it was a 'list of things I'm in the process of doing' and if any operation isn't completed, it is 'backed-out' to the previous state.
The advantage, from what I understand is that you don't have to fsck every time the system's unclean because a quick check of the journal tells you exactly what files are 'dirty'.
When I first heard of journalling I thought that it would journal the actual data, writing it to disk ASAP and then organizing and moving it to reasonable locations later, but I don't think this is true, I think reiserfs just journals a 'to do' list and ensures that every operation is either completely done or completely NOT done.
That's because Windows runs a daemon to troll the important files and replace them from backups if they get corrupted or replaced incorrectly. Nonesuch thing on any of my boxes.
What was the reason for the panic? I've been running my system HARD for years without any panics.
If your hardware or kernel has problems you can hardly blame a filesystem that's expressly designed for high-reliability hardware for data loss.
'journalling' is not any better than none when it comes to flaky hardware or a badly compiled kernel. All it means is that you don't have to wait an hour for fsck to run. The whole point of a journalling FS is that it 'knows' what files are suspect after a major outage and it quarantines them, it's not any better at preventing them from being corrupted.
All in all, I can say that Linux an other Unices are VERY sensitive to improper halts/panics/shutdowns. I've hosed several OS X machines by not exiting gracefully, and several Linux boxes too. Your number-one priority when setting up a system is to do what it takes to keep it from crashing, ever.
When I built my desktop I carefully selected components that were 100% Linux-compatible so I wouldn't have issues like the ones you described.
I've been using ReiserFS _EXCLUSIVELY_ since about 2.4.11 and I've never had a single problem. It's important to format with the defaults and not specify 'special' arguments to mkreiserfs or you can run into trouble.
I've got three systems currently running reiser on Gentoo, from my PowerPC/SCSI/NFS/Samba file/print server to the ancient Compaq laptop with a 4GB drive. I've never had as much as a hiccup from ReiserFS.
Under what circumstances did you lose data?
Not my corner of it!
I have to disagree. The quote you use does not prove your point. Osama wants America to stop forking over loot and coddling the Israelis because from his POV they're keeping Muslims off of Muslim lands. America is also the number-one supporter of the house of Saud, who had Osama himself kicked out of HIS OWN COUNTRY.
You can bet your ass that if I got kicked out of America because I was a potential threat to the ruling party I'd be directing 'terror' attacks against the people who had me booted.
And for the record, I'm FAIR GAME for Osama as far as I'm concerned, and so were the people in the twin towers. I pay my taxes willingly, and a portion of those monies keep Israel illegally armed (read: Nuclear Proliferation), and another portion goes to our millitary to operate on Muslim land we have no business being in. Also, I fork over three hundred dollars a month to Shell Oil, and I'm sure a bunch of that goes to the house of Saud. I'm as guilty as can be.
See, our democaracy and capitalism is great, it really is, I love it and choose it over the alternatives. The problem is that because we choose our leaders by election and 'vote policy' with every dollar we spend, we each bear responsibility for the actions of our country as a whole. You and I MADE Osama who he is today by our own free will, and now, as a local rapper says, "The melting pot seems to be calling the kettle black".
I don't think they would have used nukes for 9-11 anyway, even if they had them. 9-11 was a SYMBOLIC attack on western capitalism and our milltary-industrial complex, not a clear-cut kill-as-many-americans-as-possible mission.
I can even argue that using a nuke on 9-11 on D.C. would have been counter-productive for Al-Qaeda, because it wouldn't have let America react so smoothly and fall into Bin Laden's trap so easily.
Seriously, using an airplane or two against the pentagon? That was clearly just a way to say 'fuck off' while leaving the whole American system intact enough to go totally apeshit and overreact by starting a war or two.
Jerk or not, Bin Laden is a VERY smart guy, and so far what we've done to 'fight terrorism' has done much to benefit his cause. Knocking-off Saddam has turned a once sedated Arab land into an unruly danger to Saudi interests.
If Al Qaeda REALLY wanted to just fuck as many Americans as possible they would have had people infiltrate water plants as empployees and sprinkle slow-acting cumulative poisons (radioactive stuff?) into the drinking supply, or send operatives with high-resistant tuberculosis into American subways and airports.
I never stole anything in my life, but for a while a few years ago I was helping some 'questionable' friends wipe out machines of 'questionable' origin. At the time it was a way to feed myseld and get deals on hardware, I'm not into that sort of thing anymore.
You can be SURE that if a laptop gets stolen, the kids that wiped it are going to take it straight to their local geek who will boot the machine off a CD and wipe the drive. Usually stolen goods go right into local low-level organized-crime units for 'laundering' and appraisal.
My advice is to not allow your iBook to get stolen in the first place. I tote my PBG4 AL with me everywhere I go, it's never out-of-sight, not even when I hit the bathroom at my local coffee joint. Do backups and get homeowners/renters insurance on it and encrypt your home folder.
Hey, I'm with you, but every time I price out an AMD desktop I get shot down because "it might not be 100% compatible with our intel software". It's amazing how far the PHBs can push their heads into their asses.
Well I think the reason AMD64 chips aren't catching on as quickly as they could is that the AMD roadmap clearly shows how they're moving to a new socket soon. Why would you buy or invest R&D into a machine that is essentially dead-ended in terms of CPU availability?
I think that once the socket-939 chips come out and the platform 'congeals' into a long-term solution you'll see more of these things selling.
It also doesn't help that there's no version of Windows that takes advantage of 64-bitness yet, or that a HUGE portion of the IT people making purchasing decisions still doesn't trust AMD CPUs.
Dude, something's wrong with your setup. I've got Mozilla loading -OVER NFS- in under 1 second. I can load it locally on an old 40GB IDE drive 'fresh' (not cached, right out of booting) in three seconds while compiling two things in the background.
This is on a 1.4GHz Athlon with PC2100 RAM and a 40GB 'junker' hard drive.
I just 'upgraded' from an original-series RADEON to a RADEON 7500 from Crucial, there's virtually no difference performance-wise, but the newer GPU doesn't need a fan and the chip count on the board is much lower on the 7500.
I'm a VERY happy camper, as ATI seems to always produce excellent-quality picture on my big Hitachi CRT.
I'm very sensitive to bad DACs on video cards, I had to toss an EPIA board and an Nvidia because I could see the 'blurriness' on my monitor, but the ATI cards have always done me right.
I also get the feeling that by running a fanless GPU you reduce a teensy bit of pixel distortion because there's no inducted current so close to the DAC.
The G5 is VERY efficient, using about half the juice of a similarly-powered P4. The problem is in perception, it's a lot hotter than any PREVIOUS Apple CPU offering and Apple case design tends to aim for more heatsink and bigger fans than small loud HSF combos. This leads to the idea that the G5 is a monster power draw when it is quite benign.
It's just like when Mac users complained about the 'hot' G4 PowerBook, it wasn't much different than high-end P4 laptops of it's day, but Mac users expected cooler machines, so they raised a stink about them.
My Athlon draws much more juice at 1.8GHz than a PPC970 at 2GHz, and the 970 can mop the floor with any Athlon-XP.
The G4 74xx and 75xx are also quite good in power draw, but the design is old enough that it really can't run much over 1.5GHz, remember that the core of that chip (PPC750) was 233MHz when it came out; the Altivec implementation and onboard cache, while nice, are huge real-estate hogs on the die.
Well I'm the 'Mac Guy' where I work, so I spend a lot of time 'helping' the windows folks patch and update. Anyhoo, today I helped patch some VIPs, explaining that if they had Macs they'd be a lot more safe from such attacks.
The great thing is that I did some SIMPLE research yesterday and had the network guy disable all traffic on ports 5554 and 9996, both useless ports to us. Well now the worm is locked down to whatever subnet it gets in on, it can't propagate. We've had zero confirmed infections internally, except one subnet where someone brought a laptop and hosed two other machines.
It's easy to stop this stuff if you're heavily subnetted and can block ports at the switches.
I think I'm going to ask for more pay, if I can stop windows infections from my desk and I'm the 'Mac Guy' I should be asking for a fatter check.
I've always been of the mind that if I can fix the issue myself through a lifestyle change rather than medicine, it's probably the 'right' thing to do. I can't speak for people who have major lifelong issues, but I think I did the right thing. My sinus infection was a symptom of a much larger problem that I fixed myself, in deference to modern medicine.
I went two years without health insurance or enough income to pay for doctors too, and you really learn how to care for yourself when you do that, I had to make a plastic shim for my ankle to keep it from moving for a few days because I had to go to work on it sprained, I must've saved $500 on doctor's costs there.
I was told that they'd have to surgically remove a sinus infection as well. Instead I asked what it was EXACTLY, it turned out to be a fungal thing, which I also had problems with in my ears. Long story short, I went no-carb for a few months and low-carb for a few more and now I'm fine. I can only assume that I got so sick from drinking all the healthy bacteria in my body away and not feeding myself right. I also feel a lot more energetic and less bloaty.
It's worth a try, just to humor yourself. I think there's a LOT of folks out there with fungal things that feed on body sugars who get misdiagnosed.
My doctor told me that the infection was gone, but that the no-carb thing was bull. He said that I'd only have a fungal thing like I thought if I had a major physical breakdown, and that ot would take a lot of diflucan to fix it. Shows what he knows.
The short answer is 'no', Radio/WiFi signals move at near-light speeds and planes do not. Any sort of 'trail' that you're thinking would be at MOST a few millimeters (if that!) and it would be only one-way, preventing any real communication.
Don't forget that you can build your own uber-customized stages 1, 2, 3, and more using a working Linux system and the 'stager' tool. I always build a 'clean' and updated stage 3 from portage and install from that. There's no need for a full day of downtime when you decide to scuttle your current system and reinstall.
I have a headless file/print/shell/kerberos/distcc server and it boots all services in under 40MB RAM, it's got 768MB under the hood and uses 40, that leaves a LOT for buffers and cache. I've got no use for swap on it, so I made a token 64MB swapfile (not a partition) and it's almost never been touched.
Servers often don't need much RAM, adding or disabling swap on my server wouldn't make ANY difference at all.
Well after three years of compulsively staring at top output while I do evil shit to my boxes i've decided to move to swapfiles instead of partitions.
/swap.img
The MOST swap I've ever tapped was 16M, I run all my boxes with 512MB-or-more RAM, so there's really no need to have a sizeable swap.
Right now I have three boxes running with 768MB RAM, and each has a 64MB swapfile, and with over a week uptime on all of them I'm using...
3MB on the file/print server
0MB on the workstation
0MB on my friend's machine
The best part about a swapfile is that the size isn't set in stone, if I want to move up or down I just:
# swapoff -a
# dd bs=1m if=/dev/zero of=/swap.img count=
# mkswap
# swapon -a
There's a registry key that purports to reduce the swapping of the 'executive' components of the kernel. I think it's in: HKLM/system/control/ccurcset/sessionmanager/memory
(abbreviated for sanity)
There will always be SOME of the kernel paged out, because I guess some stuff loads into the kernel at boot and can't be 'jettissoned' I think my w2k box dropped from 32MB/kernel paged to about 20MB after I disabled PagingExecutive.
It's a good idea for laptops or high memory systems.
The VAST majority of schools on I2 automatically route all intra-school traffic through I2, it's really the smart way to do it. So at most schools, using ANY IP-application, from an FTP client to P2P to browsing will run over I2 _IF_ there's a path to the target via I2. I've heard a few peole say 'keep it for research' but they don't understand, it's an academic-institution-only network, ALL the traffic falls under the umbrella of 'research'. The 'research' thing is just an excuse for the schools to disallow any commercial entries into the I2, which is really just a bunch of schools hooked up to each other via ATM.
.com.
I used to work ten feet from the uri.edu I2 gateway, and I can tell you it's fast when you need to pull something from another school, and pretty clogged when you need something from a
Internet2 is really a misnomer, they oughtta call it 'schoolnet' or something, it's not anything special, it's not 'the future' or 'the next generation' of the Internet, it's just a regular IP network running exclusively between schools. The schools get HUGE 'sideways' bandwidth value compared to the costs of commercial bandwidth.
The people who were saying 'the grads have I2, we have regular access' is probably wrong, the grads have uncapped access while the undergrads have limited access to bandwidth. I'm pretty sure that the school doesn't route traffic that would be 'free' on I2 through an expensive ISP.
BTW, you can disable or add packages to the 'base' system by editing /usr/portage/profiles/.
I disable a few packages from the 'recommended set' before I snapshot the tree and start building.
Stages are more flexible than that. If you use a tool like stager or catalyst you can compile fully-optimized stage3 tarballs for your next install from the system you're working on already, so you can still use 'today's' machine while building 'tomorrow's'.
.ebuilds for desired result (gcc-3.3.3 and linux-headers-2.6.5 come to mind). Also modify stager for optimizations and stager/files/make.conf.$ARCH for USE flags. /var/stager for good luck
I have a stager script that I've hacked the bejeezus out of and configured to generate 2.6-headered NPTL systems that are fully optimized, even though the installs start at stage3. I've got flowcharts and stuff to keep track of the 'stage evolution'
here's my process, IIRC:
1. have working gentoo system with stager and a stage1 snapshot.
2. emerge sync
3. unmask or modify certain
3. stager snap $DATE-custom
4. stager athlon-xp 2 stage1 $DATE-custom
5. stager athlon-xp 1 $DATE-custom $DATE-custom
6. clean out temp files in
7. stager athlon-xp 2 $DATE-custom $DATE-custom
8. stager athlon-xp 3 $DATE-custom $DATE-custom
so now you've got a fully-native NPTL stage1 to build other stages from and a fully-native stage3 ready to install.
My actual system is a lot more complex, as I build a 'generic i686' stage1 and then fork off to Pentium3 ad Athlon-XP builds for my different machines. I've also got a totally seperate stage geneology for the PPC build, but they all share the portage snapshots and configs for consistency.
There's still a lot of R&D into making the software clean, featureful, and easy-to-use. Wireless technology is a heck of a lot more than chips and antennae.
Apple puts a lot of R&D into their hardware, even though it's all built from components engineered elsewhere, you can't make a computer by tossing a CPU, video card, and hard drive into a plastic bin and shaking it, can you?