Not quite the same situation, but that's what I've done. The company I work for recently paid $MANY thousand dollars each for three oscilloscopes. Turns out one runs XP (and we had to register the installation...), one runs 2K (SP2) and one runs Windows fucking 98 with IIS 4.0. That's right, W98 with IIS 4. I just about had a heart attack.
So what do to? I grabbed some cheap Linksys routers, spent half an hour configuring them, and then duct-taped the damn things to the equipment. And I let people know that I will delete their files if they hook 'em up directly to the LAN:-).
Obviously it's not the same situation -- no one's life is depending on these oscilloscopes. But there must be something along those lines that they can do, even if it's just plugging the ethernet port with bubblegum (properly sterilized, of course).
So my wife used to use this iMac she bought from her last job. It
worked well for a while, but then it started crashing at random
intervals and really pissing her off. Being the sensitive type,
I notice after a few months and offer to build her a new computer, nice
'n' fast, running Linux. "My hero!"
I spend the day running around buying a 2GHz Athlon, memory, case, yadda
blah, then go back home to set it up. Memory and CPU installed, I check
it out -- everything's good. Put in the rest, turn it on again, and
admire my work while staring at the pretty smoke coming off the
motherboard.
The USB cables from the front were not terminated in a single nice,
easy-to-insert-correctly plastic block; instead, they were individual
tiny plastic blocks that, it turns out, were very easy to insert
incorrectly. By the time I figured out what was happening and turned
off the power, the cables to the front had fused together and the
plastic was bubbling merrily.
To add insult to injury, the cheap mobo (Elite K7S5A) I'd bought did
not recognise the Athlon as a 2GHz model -- kept saying it was 1.6GHz.
I hadn't done my homework, and this was the highest speed it could
recognize. I did some Googling, and decided that a BIOS upgrade was
in order. Something went wrong, and the onboard USB refused to work.
Further Googling turned up the fact that, yeah, that happened sometimes.
I decided to revert to the original BIOS. After that, booting hung
right after the memory check.
I went and bought an Asus motherboard like I should've done in the first
place, and spent much of that week apologising.
Think about this for a minute. Let's suppose there were three parties instead of two. In a democracy, the simple majority would get their leader elected. You could pontentially have two thirds of the population ruled by a leader chosen by the remaining dominant third. The majority would be ruled by a minority. This is a dangerous scenario, and would cause far greater instability and division than you can imagine.
I'm Canadian. In an hour, I'm going to vote in our national election. There are three or four major parties running, depending on who you talk to.
This is a close election, so unlike other years the final result may still be up in the air by the time the polls close here in British Columbia. That said, like other years I fully expect to turn on my television tonight to see Toronto and Montreal in flames, to see shelling in Halifax and Quebec City, and the always-colorful mayor of Winnipeg declaring the sovereignty of that city again.
As in other years, the prime minister-elect will require the use of his (the candidates are all men this year) party's private militia to storm the Parliament Buildings, where the Speaker of the outgoing parliament will have barricaded the doors. 24 Sussex Drive, the official residence of Canada's Prime Minister, will be engulfed in flames as members of the RCMP loyal to the outgoing PM machine-gun members of the RCMP loyal to the incoming PM.
As in other years, Canada's military will be used to quell rebellious ridings who had the emisfortune to elect members of parliament who don't belong to the winning party; without this strong action, those unfortunate MPs would either be run out of town on a rail by a populace trying to join the winning side, or forced to head a posse which would then drive to Ottawa to join the fighting and attempt to drive out holdouts from the previous government.
As in other years, the Prime Minister-elect will join the Governor-General in an undisclosed location (previously, a submarine at the bottom of Lake Ontario has been a pretty popular choice) for the inauguaration ceremony. It will be followed closely by 24-hour broadcasts showing the victorious party mopping up resistance across the country, and constant declarations that control is complete.
As in other years, members of the party that garnered the second-highest number of MPs will be declared the Official Opposition; this is a death sentence. If an Opposition MP is not found dead of mysterious causes ("How'd that bullet get in his chest?") in his office, he'll be lynched by a Cabinet Minister for daring to show up for Question Period in the House of Commons. Laws are passed unanimously, because no one will dare vote against the ruling party. There will be occasional defections to the ruling party in order to garner favour for that MP's riding.
As in other years, ordinary citizens will hide in their basements with two week's food and water, waiting for assurances from foreign radio stations that the fighting has died down at last. During this time Canada's economy will have not merely stopped, but regressed; it will take six months' hard work before we're back where we were before the election.
Yes, a three- or four-party system is madness, folks, sheer madness. When you see the footage tonight of our country engulfed in madness, take a moment and spare a tear for the once-beautiful nation of Canada, and its tragic dedication to insane levels of democracy.
I had the same experience with 3.5 -- very nice, very minimalist, very quick.
That said, I'm going back to Linux. Why? The scheduler: I really miss the ability to do a bunch of things at once and still keep playing Ogg files.
I've got a slower machine -- used to be an overclocked (450MHz! woo-hoo!) Celeron, now down to stock 300MHz after a bunch of crashes recently. I run IceWM, bunch of xterms, XMMS and Phoenix/Firebird. Under Debian, 2.6 kernel, I could do all of that without any problems. Same machine under OpenBSD will chug and stutter on Ogg files when I hit reload in Firebird, switch windows, or start a new xterm.
It's amazing how much a difference there is in the feel of the desktop. I'd choose OpenBSD in a heartbeat for a server, and maybe for a desktop in a faster machine, but I really like the feel of the recent Linux kernels; it makes all the difference.
It's like you read my mind. Come cower before the greatness that is...JobJar!
From the description:
Jobjar is a Small but Useful (tm) utility to manage a list of non-critical jobs to do...you know, like a job jar. You can add a job to the jar, you can remove a job, or you can just print out a job for you to do. In the grand tradition of Unix, the list is called ~/.jobjar and is a simple text file. None of your binary Windows nonsense here...no, sir! And in the grand tradition of GNU software, it's released under the GPL. What more could you possibly want?
JobJar: Because if you need more than Perl, plain text and a command line, you are a heathen and must die.
We're in Canada, so Speakeasy is out. Telus is the one he's on, and they're evil too. They hand out addresses by DHCP -- no big surprise, but then their DHCP servers would go down for hours/days at a time. Connection was fine, but you couldn't get an address. Plus they've laid off about eight million people, so by all accounts customer service is terrible.
But yeah, everything I've read about Speakeasy makes me envy their customers.
You know when you've got popcorn going and it gets to that crazy insane
stage when things just go nuts? That's my firewall these days.
I send firewall logs to DShield.org,
and you should to. The firewall is set to only log 100 denied packets
at a time, so lazy bastard that I am I set a cronjob to reset the
counters every hour. That was a few months ago.
Last week I happened to be looking at the logfiles, and I noticed
something: an hour was no longer enough. The counter hits 100 within
10 or 15 minutes. I can watch the hits come in, and it's all
Windows crap: Port 445. Port 137. Port 139. Port 1026. That's it.
Nothing interesting -- you know, no stealthy scans by l33t cr5X0rZ, no
probing for open relays, nothing.
Two thoughts before I go:
First, this makes for excellent demonstration material. A
coworker mentioned that he was considering moving from Windows to Linux
because he was tired of all the viruses and worms. I showed him what
tail -f on my firewall logs looked like, pointed out that it was all
Windows junk, and he was convinced. Gave him a Knoppix CD and made
another notch on my belt.:-)
Second, I'm lucky: my ISP has not yet started firewalling ports yet. A
friend's ISP just started, and now his web and mail server, which I'm
doing DNS for, are no longer available from outside -- they've started
blocking those along with 445, 137, 139, and so on. Sadly, it looks
like the ISP has no provision for lifting this if you can prove you're
l33t enough, so it looks like he's screwed.
Honestly, though, I'm not surprised. Yeah, it sucks that the
Internet is no longer open -- but it sucks that the Internet is no
longer friendly, too, and the one is a consequence of the other. As
much as I bitch about Windows and Microsoft, I don't think they're
entirely to blame...you get that many people joining something,
and you're going to have enough asshats to ruin it pretty quickly.
Very cool! I'm curious -- how jerky does it look? (I'm thinking compared to the article, where he had all the trip filmed.)
In '99, my (now) wife and I took a two-month road trip: Vancouver to San Diego to Texas to New Orleans to Indiana to Wisconson to Ontario to North Dakota to Saskatchewan to Vancouver. I really wanted to do something like what you did. I did the math and figured that 1 picture/minute x 30 frames/second == ~1 hour of film.
Unfortunately, an 8mm camera that could do this was too expensive (at least, it was at the camera shop I checked at), and I certainly didn't have the money to pick up a laptop and camera. If/when we do this again, I'm definitely going to be doing this.
I beg your pardon? Why the fuck are the implications of taking up cryptography to stop shady, shouldn't-be-happening-in-the-first-place eavesdropping by so-called friends and allies "troubling"?
If there is a "growing rift" in the Western hemisphere, who the fuck do you think is responsible for this -- the ones who are pissed off about the eavesdropping and are trying to do something to stop it (and think for a moment about the fact that they're trying encryption rather than attempting to convince the US et al. that it's a Bad Thing...what does that tell you about their chances of actually convincing anyone to stop anything?), or the countries and intelligence agencies that decided this was acceptable in the first place?
Sorry for the shouting, but this intellectual coyness does not become you.
Just figured out how to do this...could probably be simplified, but this
is what works right now.
I'm using FreeBSD for a firewall, and natd for redirection. Invoke natd
like so:
natd -n [outside interface] -t [unused IP address inside]
This redirects any unsolicited traffic to the IP address you specify -- think about whether or not that's what you really want. Then have LaBrea listening on a (Linux, as it happens) machine
inside like so:
Anyone who's following this example: RTFM! LaBrea is pretty damned
complicated, and there are many well-deserved dire warnings about how to
screw things up. That said, it's working so far...
Thanks again for the tip. I've been wanting to do something like this
for a while now.
Son of a bitch! I knew about LaBrea but it never occurred to me to run it with redirection -- even though I just set up two jailed webservers listening on the loopback interface and used natd to redirect...Excellent idea.
My other thought was using dummynet to restrict traffic...not sure how well that might work.
I got lucky on this one. There was one machine at work where the patch caused problems; since it was a license server, I had to remove it. While I was trying to find a way to have my patch and a working machine, the power supply and/or motherboard died. New machine, new install of 2K, and all the patches.
Slashdot Mirror
So what do to? I grabbed some cheap Linksys routers, spent half an hour configuring them, and then duct-taped the damn things to the equipment. And I let people know that I will delete their files if they hook 'em up directly to the LAN :-).
Obviously it's not the same situation -- no one's life is depending on these oscilloscopes. But there must be something along those lines that they can do, even if it's just plugging the ethernet port with bubblegum (properly sterilized, of course).
Ha! Did you know about this?
Does this really happen? When? (I'm from Canada, so I'm trying to find out if this really happens or if I'm too thick to understand the joke.)
Touche. :-)
My favourite: president_gore@whitehouse.gov. Looks like it's just me, though; if you Google for it, you just find a reference to my Seti@Home account.
I spend the day running around buying a 2GHz Athlon, memory, case, yadda blah, then go back home to set it up. Memory and CPU installed, I check it out -- everything's good. Put in the rest, turn it on again, and admire my work while staring at the pretty smoke coming off the motherboard.
The USB cables from the front were not terminated in a single nice, easy-to-insert-correctly plastic block; instead, they were individual tiny plastic blocks that, it turns out, were very easy to insert incorrectly. By the time I figured out what was happening and turned off the power, the cables to the front had fused together and the plastic was bubbling merrily.
To add insult to injury, the cheap mobo (Elite K7S5A) I'd bought did not recognise the Athlon as a 2GHz model -- kept saying it was 1.6GHz. I hadn't done my homework, and this was the highest speed it could recognize. I did some Googling, and decided that a BIOS upgrade was in order. Something went wrong, and the onboard USB refused to work. Further Googling turned up the fact that, yeah, that happened sometimes. I decided to revert to the original BIOS. After that, booting hung right after the memory check.
I went and bought an Asus motherboard like I should've done in the first place, and spent much of that week apologising.
Dammit! It was so cool IN MY HEAD!
but somebody when it works on Harley-Davidsons.
I'm Canadian. In an hour, I'm going to vote in our national election. There are three or four major parties running, depending on who you talk to.
This is a close election, so unlike other years the final result may still be up in the air by the time the polls close here in British Columbia. That said, like other years I fully expect to turn on my television tonight to see Toronto and Montreal in flames, to see shelling in Halifax and Quebec City, and the always-colorful mayor of Winnipeg declaring the sovereignty of that city again.
As in other years, the prime minister-elect will require the use of his (the candidates are all men this year) party's private militia to storm the Parliament Buildings, where the Speaker of the outgoing parliament will have barricaded the doors. 24 Sussex Drive, the official residence of Canada's Prime Minister, will be engulfed in flames as members of the RCMP loyal to the outgoing PM machine-gun members of the RCMP loyal to the incoming PM.
As in other years, Canada's military will be used to quell rebellious ridings who had the emisfortune to elect members of parliament who don't belong to the winning party; without this strong action, those unfortunate MPs would either be run out of town on a rail by a populace trying to join the winning side, or forced to head a posse which would then drive to Ottawa to join the fighting and attempt to drive out holdouts from the previous government.
As in other years, the Prime Minister-elect will join the Governor-General in an undisclosed location (previously, a submarine at the bottom of Lake Ontario has been a pretty popular choice) for the inauguaration ceremony. It will be followed closely by 24-hour broadcasts showing the victorious party mopping up resistance across the country, and constant declarations that control is complete.
As in other years, members of the party that garnered the second-highest number of MPs will be declared the Official Opposition; this is a death sentence. If an Opposition MP is not found dead of mysterious causes ("How'd that bullet get in his chest?") in his office, he'll be lynched by a Cabinet Minister for daring to show up for Question Period in the House of Commons. Laws are passed unanimously, because no one will dare vote against the ruling party. There will be occasional defections to the ruling party in order to garner favour for that MP's riding.
As in other years, ordinary citizens will hide in their basements with two week's food and water, waiting for assurances from foreign radio stations that the fighting has died down at last. During this time Canada's economy will have not merely stopped, but regressed; it will take six months' hard work before we're back where we were before the election.
Yes, a three- or four-party system is madness, folks, sheer madness. When you see the footage tonight of our country engulfed in madness, take a moment and spare a tear for the once-beautiful nation of Canada, and its tragic dedication to insane levels of democracy.
Out of curiosity: what's the anti-Goldwater commercial you're referring to?
That said, I'm going back to Linux. Why? The scheduler: I really miss the ability to do a bunch of things at once and still keep playing Ogg files.
I've got a slower machine -- used to be an overclocked (450MHz! woo-hoo!) Celeron, now down to stock 300MHz after a bunch of crashes recently. I run IceWM, bunch of xterms, XMMS and Phoenix/Firebird. Under Debian, 2.6 kernel, I could do all of that without any problems. Same machine under OpenBSD will chug and stutter on Ogg files when I hit reload in Firebird, switch windows, or start a new xterm.
It's amazing how much a difference there is in the feel of the desktop. I'd choose OpenBSD in a heartbeat for a server, and maybe for a desktop in a faster machine, but I really like the feel of the recent Linux kernels; it makes all the difference.
From the description:
JobJar: Because if you need more than Perl, plain text and a command line, you are a heathen and must die.
But yeah, everything I've read about Speakeasy makes me envy their customers.
I send firewall logs to DShield.org, and you should to. The firewall is set to only log 100 denied packets at a time, so lazy bastard that I am I set a cronjob to reset the counters every hour. That was a few months ago.
Last week I happened to be looking at the logfiles, and I noticed something: an hour was no longer enough. The counter hits 100 within 10 or 15 minutes. I can watch the hits come in, and it's all Windows crap: Port 445. Port 137. Port 139. Port 1026. That's it. Nothing interesting -- you know, no stealthy scans by l33t cr5X0rZ, no probing for open relays, nothing.
Two thoughts before I go:
First, this makes for excellent demonstration material. A coworker mentioned that he was considering moving from Windows to Linux because he was tired of all the viruses and worms. I showed him what tail -f on my firewall logs looked like, pointed out that it was all Windows junk, and he was convinced. Gave him a Knoppix CD and made another notch on my belt. :-)
Second, I'm lucky: my ISP has not yet started firewalling ports yet. A friend's ISP just started, and now his web and mail server, which I'm doing DNS for, are no longer available from outside -- they've started blocking those along with 445, 137, 139, and so on. Sadly, it looks like the ISP has no provision for lifting this if you can prove you're l33t enough, so it looks like he's screwed.
Honestly, though, I'm not surprised. Yeah, it sucks that the Internet is no longer open -- but it sucks that the Internet is no longer friendly, too, and the one is a consequence of the other. As much as I bitch about Windows and Microsoft, I don't think they're entirely to blame...you get that many people joining something, and you're going to have enough asshats to ruin it pretty quickly.
Hey! He can't say that! Sic 'em!
In '99, my (now) wife and I took a two-month road trip: Vancouver to San Diego to Texas to New Orleans to Indiana to Wisconson to Ontario to North Dakota to Saskatchewan to Vancouver. I really wanted to do something like what you did. I did the math and figured that 1 picture/minute x 30 frames/second == ~1 hour of film.
Unfortunately, an 8mm camera that could do this was too expensive (at least, it was at the camera shop I checked at), and I certainly didn't have the money to pick up a laptop and camera. If/when we do this again, I'm definitely going to be doing this.
"Eloquent"? Fuck, no; I was angry.
If there is a "growing rift" in the Western hemisphere, who the fuck do you think is responsible for this -- the ones who are pissed off about the eavesdropping and are trying to do something to stop it (and think for a moment about the fact that they're trying encryption rather than attempting to convince the US et al. that it's a Bad Thing...what does that tell you about their chances of actually convincing anyone to stop anything?), or the countries and intelligence agencies that decided this was acceptable in the first place?
Sorry for the shouting, but this intellectual coyness does not become you.
...you'd better like back bacon. That's all I should have to tell you.
I live in Canada, you insensitive clod!
I'm using FreeBSD for a firewall, and natd for redirection. Invoke natd like so:
This redirects any unsolicited traffic to the IP address you specify -- think about whether or not that's what you really want. Then have LaBrea listening on a (Linux, as it happens) machine inside like so:Anyone who's following this example: RTFM! LaBrea is pretty damned complicated, and there are many well-deserved dire warnings about how to screw things up. That said, it's working so far...Thanks again for the tip. I've been wanting to do something like this for a while now.
My other thought was using dummynet to restrict traffic...not sure how well that might work.
I got lucky on this one. There was one machine at work where the patch caused problems; since it was a license server, I had to remove it. While I was trying to find a way to have my patch and a working machine, the power supply and/or motherboard died. New machine, new install of 2K, and all the patches.
Oh god, I'm sorry. Used to work Saturdays too. My sincere sympathies.
Coolness...thanks for the tip.