I recently was looking to improve my backup solution (dds2 tape drive, 8G compressed). I was looking for a system that did at least 30G compressed. All the DDS, DLT, and VXA drives that satisfied the requirement were more than $500. Media wasn't cheap either, with the worst being the VXA media at $70/15G.
I gave up and went with a backup 160G hard drive and less-frequent multi-tape backups to the DDS2 drive. Is there a better way?
Where are vendor statements that usually accompany such announcements?
Thankfully the default setup on SuSE 7.3 is "ChallengeResponseAuthentication no". Unfortunately, the default on Redhat 7.[0123] is "ChallengeResponseAuthentication yes".
Recently I was trying to get Ximian Gnome to run on an 8bpp pseudocolor Tek Xterm (a piece of hardware). Conclusion: it can be done, but don't try to run any other apps that rely on using pseudocolor. The panel or sawfish took all the colors, even with imlib set to a low color pallete.
Now, most somewhat modern apps will allocate a private colormap if it can't get all the colors it needs but there are some old apps that don't do that.
I ended up running icewm.
Powertweak and /proc twiddling
on
Linux Tuning Tricks?
·
· Score: 4, Informative
You may try to use Powertweak to alter settings to improve performance.
Then there is tweaking settings via/proc. I used to have a link to some excellent documentation on it but, alas, I can't seem to find it. You could try reading the various bits of info in the Documentation tree of the Linux source but it is pretty spartan.
Well, I can tell you I wouldn't win the scholorship. That website was so annoying that I couldn't get past the first couple pages (including a splash page, barf) which talked about Flash being 21st century technology and all the l33t speak.
"This is your captain speaking. Would whoever is ping flooding the cockpit please stop? I'm trying to telnet to the altimeter and the packets are being dropped. I'm not sure, but I think we are about to hit Mount Rushmore."
Up until this point I've admin'ed servers and I am completely at a loss how to explain things to newbies. For example, one user asked how to access a floppy and I said "type 'mount/mnt/floppy.'" The response was a blank stare. Then I said "start a shell." No stare this time. They said "What's a shell?" After showing them how to start a shell, and type the command, etc., their eyes had glazed over and there was no way they could remember how to do it. For me, it was second nature.
My problem is that I don't know too much. Rather, I only know how to do things via the command line. I'm sure that KDE on RedHat 7.1 has some file-manager-like tool for accessing the floppy but I was at a loss to find it. Kfm wasn't it. Konqueror wasn't it.
At this point I realize I need to learn how to do things through a GUI. The problem is we have a variety of versions of RedHat, some running KDE and some running GNOME. Rather than devote a huge amount of time learning all the GUIs I think standardizing and simplfying is the way to go.
I have no point here besides the fact that I hate GUIs and may have the wrong job. I especially hate sysadmin GUIs. For example I have used the guis under Redhat, SuSE, Solaris, HP-UX, Digital Unix, and IRIX to add a user. They are all different and lame. I long for the days when adding a user with vipw, mkdir, and cp was the only way to go.
The small newspaper I work at received a nasty-gram from a law firm implying that our web site may be violating a lame patent about user-updatable web pages. I think our response was to ignore it.
ImageMagick can separate channels and handle the CMYK colorspace. Alas, the options for extracting a channel are R, G, and B. Depending on how much of a programmer you are, you may wish to look at the its channel-separating code and see if there is an easy hack that would work for you. Warning: I know nothing about screen printing so what I have said may be nonsene.
Where are the _real_ (not marketdroid) numbers for HA systems? My impression is that companies never want to give out uptime numbers. If you'd like to do any sort of study I would suspect that you can't just walk up to IBM and say: "Hi! I'm a college student. Can I have you HA stats?" It will take much negotiation and then years to collect the data. I.e.: not a college project unless your advisor is Ghod and can bend companies to his will and you start the study as a freshman.
"...reboots are not required as often, since you can recycle the appropriate daemon without restarting." Umm, you can? What gave you the impression that this was the case in general? Certainly for simple apps like sendmail or apache one can do this but any more complicated app is much more involved. For example, take the recent update of/.: can you update a Slash-based site merely by cylcing (HUPing) a daemon? No, there was a huge database conversion involved.
Finally, it is going to be very hard to get statistically significant results with such a high degree of precision. For example, mon will track downtime. It says that my mailserver has been available 99.95% of the time over the past two years. I know that is wrong (and mon notes this as well). The server hasn't gone down at all but the method of measurement (snmp) has introduced error because it's availablility isn't 100%.
I've never had a custom-designed system based on FreeBSD (or Linux) but I would think that it would drive me insane, knowing that it was based on FreeBSD, but unable to use any of the flexibility FreeBSD offers.
Suppose, for example, the thing didn't support ftp. You know FreeBSD supports proftpd but I bet you are forbidden from installing it on the box. Suppose there is a huge bug in the mta on the box (never!). Do you wait for the vendor to supply a patch or do you start hacking?
The situation is similar to using a package manager. Whenever I install SuSE I try to keep it purely RPM-based but inveitably there is some piece of software I end up compiling myself, without making it a package before installing. From that point on I abandon yast and SuSE config because they don't know about that software and will happily trounce it's config files if one isn't careful. (Strangely, I never worry installing a port on a FreeBSD box. I'm more confident that the port isn't going to be sticking its nose where it doesn't belong.)
One of the points of splintering the rc scripts
from bsd to sysv is so that apps won't step on other apps's toes when placing themselves in the startup sequence. No need to use sed, etc., to edit rc.local or rely on a sysadmin to put it in to get a daemon to run at startup.
By placing all the config information in rc.config, SuSE went back to the bad old days, requiring the hack of fillup(8) to allow apps to edit rc.config. Since 7.1 (at least), SuSE has realized their folly and now have splintered rc.config into a bunch of config files in/etc/rc.config.d/. For example, all the sendmail config information is now in/etc/rc.config.d/sendmail.cf.
However, there will always be a tension between putting config info in one big file and putting it in separate files. What if a setting is needed by more than one app? SuSE seems to be trying to get a good balance, at least.
(Spoken when the login process initiates a routine scan of your system "to optimize performance" and it detects that your copy of MS PowerDork Professional Edition Plus Ham is unregistered.)
Yeah my results may be atypical, or yours may be. We need more data. If an organization didn't know how much spam the MAPS services would block for them we also need some idea of what the independent variables are. For example, I work at a newspaper company and that might affect how much spam we get. It doesn't need to be exact but I would certainly expect to get a rough idea of the value of MAPS before coughing up the dough.
I keep one year's worth of mail logs for my company's mail server. The company is small, with about 1000 email accounts. With a simple grep I found that the RBL blocked 3000 messages in one year. That's about one message every 100 days per user. Obviously, the RBL is virtually worthless for our company, so we didn't pay for a subscription.
If possible you should see how many messages the MAPS services you used blocked for you. Notice that as far as I can tell MAPS doesn't provide any hard data for the success rate of their services. When they were free that wasn't so important but once money enters the equation I need some real eveidence.
Slashdot Mirror
How do you backup these large drives?
I recently was looking to improve my backup solution (dds2 tape drive, 8G compressed). I was looking for a system that did at least 30G compressed. All the DDS, DLT, and VXA drives that satisfied the requirement were more than $500. Media wasn't cheap either, with the worst being the VXA media at $70/15G.
I gave up and went with a backup 160G hard drive and less-frequent multi-tape backups to the DDS2 drive. Is there a better way?
At a talk last night Damian said that perl6 is expected in about 18 months.
Where are vendor statements that usually accompany such announcements?
Thankfully the default setup on SuSE 7.3 is "ChallengeResponseAuthentication no". Unfortunately, the default on Redhat 7.[0123] is "ChallengeResponseAuthentication yes".
Recently I was trying to get Ximian Gnome to run on an 8bpp pseudocolor Tek Xterm (a piece of hardware). Conclusion: it can be done, but don't try to run any other apps that rely on using pseudocolor. The panel or sawfish took all the colors, even with imlib set to a low color pallete.
Now, most somewhat modern apps will allocate a private colormap if it can't get all the colors it needs but there are some old apps that don't do that.
I ended up running icewm.
You may try to use Powertweak to alter settings to improve performance.
Then there is tweaking settings via /proc. I used to have a link to some excellent documentation on it but, alas, I can't seem to find it. You could try reading the various bits of info in the Documentation tree of the Linux source but it is pretty spartan.
Well, I can tell you I wouldn't win the scholorship. That website was so annoying that I couldn't get past the first couple pages (including a splash page, barf) which talked about Flash being 21st century technology and all the l33t speak.
"This is your captain speaking. Would whoever is ping flooding the cockpit please stop? I'm trying to telnet to the altimeter and the packets are being dropped. I'm not sure, but I think we are about to hit Mount Rushmore."
I don't know if you are making a joke, but somebody already is.
Up until this point I've admin'ed servers and I am completely at a loss how to explain things to newbies. For example, one user asked how to access a floppy and I said "type 'mount /mnt/floppy.'" The response was a blank stare. Then I said "start a shell." No stare this time. They said "What's a shell?" After showing them how to start a shell, and type the command, etc., their eyes had glazed over and there was no way they could remember how to do it. For me, it was second nature.
My problem is that I don't know too much. Rather, I only know how to do things via the command line. I'm sure that KDE on RedHat 7.1 has some file-manager-like tool for accessing the floppy but I was at a loss to find it. Kfm wasn't it. Konqueror wasn't it.
At this point I realize I need to learn how to do things through a GUI. The problem is we have a variety of versions of RedHat, some running KDE and some running GNOME. Rather than devote a huge amount of time learning all the GUIs I think standardizing and simplfying is the way to go.
I have no point here besides the fact that I hate GUIs and may have the wrong job. I especially hate sysadmin GUIs. For example I have used the guis under Redhat, SuSE, Solaris, HP-UX, Digital Unix, and IRIX to add a user. They are all different and lame. I long for the days when adding a user with vipw, mkdir, and cp was the only way to go.
The small newspaper I work at received a nasty-gram from a law firm implying that our web site may be violating a lame patent about user-updatable web pages. I think our response was to ignore it.
I just picked up 4 Model M's for 25 cents a piece at Boeing Surplus.
What I would like to see are more window managers that use pie menus. Piewm is ancient. Pie menus for gtk seems dead.
ImageMagick can separate channels and handle the CMYK colorspace. Alas, the options for extracting a channel are R, G, and B. Depending on how much of a programmer you are, you may wish to look at the its channel-separating code and see if there is an easy hack that would work for you. Warning: I know nothing about screen printing so what I have said may be nonsene.
Where are the _real_ (not marketdroid) numbers for HA systems? My impression is that companies never want to give out uptime numbers. If you'd like to do any sort of study I would suspect that you can't just walk up to IBM and say: "Hi! I'm a college student. Can I have you HA stats?" It will take much negotiation and then years to collect the data. I.e.: not a college project unless your advisor is Ghod and can bend companies to his will and you start the study as a freshman.
"...reboots are not required as often, since you can recycle the appropriate daemon without restarting." Umm, you can? What gave you the impression that this was the case in general? Certainly for simple apps like sendmail or apache one can do this but any more complicated app is much more involved. For example, take the recent update of /.: can you update a Slash-based site merely by cylcing (HUPing) a daemon? No, there was a huge database conversion involved.
Finally, it is going to be very hard to get statistically significant results with such a high degree of precision. For example, mon will track downtime. It says that my mailserver has been available 99.95% of the time over the past two years. I know that is wrong (and mon notes this as well). The server hasn't gone down at all but the method of measurement (snmp) has introduced error because it's availablility isn't 100%.
We have used Teleboots to power cycle outlets using a touch-tone phone. They work well even when you have no network connectivity.
I've never had a custom-designed system based on FreeBSD (or Linux) but I would think that it would drive me insane, knowing that it was based on FreeBSD, but unable to use any of the flexibility FreeBSD offers.
Suppose, for example, the thing didn't support ftp. You know FreeBSD supports proftpd but I bet you are forbidden from installing it on the box. Suppose there is a huge bug in the mta on the box (never!). Do you wait for the vendor to supply a patch or do you start hacking?
The situation is similar to using a package manager. Whenever I install SuSE I try to keep it purely RPM-based but inveitably there is some piece of software I end up compiling myself, without making it a package before installing. From that point on I abandon yast and SuSE config because they don't know about that software and will happily trounce it's config files if one isn't careful. (Strangely, I never worry installing a port on a FreeBSD box. I'm more confident that the port isn't going to be sticking its nose where it doesn't belong.)
One of the points of splintering the rc scripts from bsd to sysv is so that apps won't step on other apps's toes when placing themselves in the startup sequence. No need to use sed, etc., to edit rc.local or rely on a sysadmin to put it in to get a daemon to run at startup.
By placing all the config information in rc.config, SuSE went back to the bad old days, requiring the hack of fillup(8) to allow apps to edit rc.config. Since 7.1 (at least), SuSE has realized their folly and now have splintered rc.config into a bunch of config files in /etc/rc.config.d/. For example, all the sendmail config information is now in /etc/rc.config.d/sendmail.cf.
However, there will always be a tension between putting config info in one big file and putting it in separate files. What if a setting is needed by more than one app? SuSE seems to be trying to get a good balance, at least.
Take a look at this. It claims to be a "Report" but is obviously whoring for va-linux, who happens to own Newsforge.
Initially it tries to be critical but towards the end we get this wonderful commercial for sourceforge.
You forgot one:
"You've got jail!"
(Spoken when the login process initiates a routine scan of your system "to optimize performance" and it detects that your copy of MS PowerDork Professional Edition Plus Ham is unregistered.)
No viable successor yet.
HTH, HAND, and to the CKO: FOAD
Knuth uses postscript for figures? What a hypocrite. I stick to pure [la]tex for my figures with eepic (by way of xfig).
Yeah my results may be atypical, or yours may be. We need more data. If an organization didn't know how much spam the MAPS services would block for them we also need some idea of what the independent variables are. For example, I work at a newspaper company and that might affect how much spam we get. It doesn't need to be exact but I would certainly expect to get a rough idea of the value of MAPS before coughing up the dough.
I keep one year's worth of mail logs for my company's mail server. The company is small, with about 1000 email accounts. With a simple grep I found that the RBL blocked 3000 messages in one year. That's about one message every 100 days per user. Obviously, the RBL is virtually worthless for our company, so we didn't pay for a subscription.
If possible you should see how many messages the MAPS services you used blocked for you. Notice that as far as I can tell MAPS doesn't provide any hard data for the success rate of their services. When they were free that wasn't so important but once money enters the equation I need some real eveidence.
I tried to log in and got this message:
Pfft.