I once saw an A+ certified technician burn out a PC motherboard when she plugged a Mac monitor into the joystick port.
Obviously not all A+ people are like this, but the A+ after someone's name doesn't mean they're not going to do something incredibly stupid to your hardware.
I've read articles (and seen web signatures - IIS
likes to broadcast it's use) showing that hotmail
*does* run Windows/IIS
RTFA.
But Friday, Microsoft conceded FreeBSD was still being used at Hotmail on machines that track
advertising and that run a crucial Internet function known as "DNS hosting." A Microsoft
spokesman said he couldn't explain why Microsoft
had given out incorrect information on the
topic.
Lately, I've seen mailing list chatter to the effect that academic environments are starting to use IDE RAID in their servers, i.e. those poor bastards are always underfunded. Most of them seem happy, but I don't recall which products they mentioned.
Just download and burn the relevant bits, i.e. the install CD comes with SPARC binaries and a boatload of precompiled packages that you won't need.
Or just download the boot floppies and do an FTP install.
Take a look at INSTALL.i386 for detailed install instructions.
If that's too much bother then you might want to reconsider installing OpenBSD at all... It's not newbie friendly, the developers have other priorities.
>Web support sucks. The FAQ, etc. provides some
>help, not much. Even USENET isn't THAT helpful.
>You need need to get used to reading man pages...
>a LOT.
That's intentional. The idea is that all OpenBSD documentation should be available from the man pages instead of scattered over man pages, info pages, FAQs, and HOWTOs.
Opinions vary, to me that's a "feature", but I freely concede that some consider it a "bug".
There's no need to query each box. The information you want is on your local wire, so stick something like ntop on the network and let it collect your stats.
Take a look at Novell's NDS.
NDS is a distributed database of NetWare accounts, passwords, server metadata, etc.
NDS is far from a general purpose database. Still, reading up on NDS will give you a sense of the issues involved, i.e. how they chose to implement replication, db integrity issues, time sync issues, etc.
Once upon a time there was some NDS-to-ODBC glue that could be used to submit SQL queries to NDS, don't know if it still exists.
Novell hasn't opened up any source worth mentioning, but you can get free (beer) copies of NetWare from your local reseller or education center, just call them up and tell them you need an eval copy of NetWare.
NDS now has a version running on top of Linux, I'm not sure if there is a free eval version available.
NDS is complicated stuff, you really don't see any payback until you've got more then 4-5 servers. But once you've got 20+ servers in 10 sites sharing the same account database, you'll really like it.
The retail computer market is extremely cut-throat. Take a look in last year's phonebook for all of the little mom & pop computer-building businesses, and now take a look at this year's phonebook - a lot of those guys are gone, and have been replaced by different guys who will last a couple of years before they go under as well.
The margins are razor thin, the value of your inventory drops almost daily, and competetion is fierce.
If you get into this business, you're a brave fellow.
| Tolken ring actually allows for several
| packets to circulate...
Well, duh... Of course a Tolkien ring has to have several packets circulating at the same time.
Three packets for the Elven-Kings under the sky,
Seven for the Dwarf-Lords in their halls of stone,
Nine for Mortal Men doomed to die,
One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne
in the land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.
One Packet to rule them all, One Packet to find them,
One Packet to bring them all and in the darkness bind them
I don't know diddly about your environment, so it's a bit hard to give specific advice. The smartass answer is to teach your techs everything you can about Unix, but that probably isn't practical.
It's painful, but the only way to really identify where you need training is to log *all* your support calls/visits/escalations for a couple of weeks.
By looking at your calls, you can see what kinds of questions the techs are getting, and you can identify the most critical training needs for the techs, and maybe even justify some user training.
Repeat this process every 6 months or so. Logging everything is hell, but it does pay off.
Maybe you've already got a tech support ticketing system in place, in which case maybe you should be trolling your ticket database instead of surfing/.
The OpenBSD/FreeBSD/NetBSD team has no direct control over the s/w in the ports collection.
There is no organized effort to audit everything in the ports collection.
The OpenBSD audit is only concerned with the base OS, that in itself is a huge job. They don't have the resources to audit the thousands of apps in the ports collection.
The ports team does what they can to keep up with bugfixes from the various apps, but they aren't auditing the ports.
Once you install some 3rd party software, it's up to you to keep up with bugfixes for that 3rd party s/w.
>Because incorrect media reporting could have very
>serious ramifications for people? Ramifications
>not easily reversible?
Slow down dude, I'm not saying that pub. bans are always a bad thing, I'm saying that it's an instance where.usians have more freedom then canucks.
You sound like you'd get along with my wife, who strongly believes that curtailing this freedom results in a net gain for society.
I'm pretty ambivilant about this issue myself, I hate the idea of pub. bans, but then I look at the media circus of the OJ trial and I have to wonder if a pub. ban might have been helpful in that instance...
I don't pay enough attention to US elections to know if this is an issue for you folks. Up here the bulk of the pop. is in the eastern part of the country. As long as I can remember, the election has _always_ been decided by the time the polls close in Ontario. So it quite honestly doesn't matter much if those guys out west see the results early or not; the matter has been decided before their polls close.
Completely off-topic: In Canada, I vote by using a pencil to mark an X on a ballot. I'm sure there's a good reason that.us uses complicated, failure prone gizmos to do the same thing... right?
My origional post was probably a bit inflammatory:)
>You are correct, the PQ have been so accused, but
>so has the Canadian Alliance
Yes, candidates from both parties have said some pretty unbelievable things. To me, that just means we should kick both their asses.
The PQ is one of my pet peeves in life, there was a documentary lately about the FLQ kidnapping/murder, and they showed the FLQ terrorist/murderer guys a few years later out of prison attending a PQ function - they got a standing ovation from the crowd. The PQ are jerks, and I see no reason not to call them on it.
I'll leave the gun control alone, there have been enough bytes wasted about that on other forums.
The discussion is about some American guy potentially coming to.ca - our gun control laws would be pretty radical to him. I tried to explain our gun laws to the clerks at a pawn shop in Tennessee once, they thought I was lying.
>This is obviously flamebait. At any rate, most
>of us Canadians know that it isn't the French
>people that are making the fuss - it's the
>powerhungry gov't of Quebec.
The "federalist" Quebec Liberals were just as bad as the PQ.
>Personally, I think it adds a lot to Canada that
>we are bilingual.
Sure, and I my french is pretty decent, at least verbally. But that doesn't magically change the fact that the provincial language laws in Quebec are unconstitutional bullshit.
>Oh, and as for the French in Quebec being
>racist, that is absolutely incorrect. The people
>of Quebec are both welcome and necessary for
>Canada's identity, and your remark is the real
>racist sentiment here.
Yeah, the PQ have never gotten in any trouble for trash talking "ethnics" or jews. Riiight.
I've got no problem with the average franco, but the Quebecois nationalist movement has a very ugly side, and calling me a racist doesn't make that any less true.
Canada has publication bans about stuff like court cases and elections in progress, I think Slashdot had an article this fall about someone who is up on charges for posting election results on his web site while people were still voting in western Canada, there are a lot of time zones in.ca.
There's a trial going on right now (Air India bombing, circa 1985) with a very restrictive publication ban, the press can say almost nothing about the trial except that it is taking place.
Obviously the US doesn't have these (OJ anyone?).
And don't forget the whole gun control debate, as of Jan 1 2001 Canadian gun owners had to register themselves, by 2003 (?) we'll have to register all of our guns. A lot of people aren't doing it; but it is the law of the land.
And of course you won't make nearly as much $$$ up here. I know a hell of a lot of Canucks going South to make big bucks, can't think of any Yanks coming up here; the last time there was a serious migration from.us to.ca was Vietnam draft dodgers.
If you got to Quebec, you'll have to put up with bullshit language laws, designed to prop up the (dying) French language. The Franco establishment in Quebec is isolationist at best, racist at worst.
I'm not really pissing on.ca. I like it here, but I'm just trying to say that it's far from perfect.
Oh, and if you move up here, bring a nice, warm pair of mittens.
Who moderated that as offtopic? Impossible Mission was the first c64 game with digitized voice, it was a technical marvel for the day and a lot of fun. I remember cranking up the volume on the TV and jumping off platform after platform so I could hear the guy's scream fade off into the bottomless pit.
>(Plus, you need[ed] a central server for Novell networks...)
Just a nitpick, but you could play IPX/SPX games without a server. Me and my university roomies did a helluva lot of IPX/SPX Doom at home, no NetWare server at all.
But yeah, the NICs weren't cheap, and the hubs were outrageous $$$, so it was coax all the way. It still amazes me that I can walk into the mall and buy a cheap hub.
They did do a remake of Archon for the PC but it sucked.
I'd really like to see a modern Racing Destruction Set. Use the Carmageddon 2 engine, but include a track editor and a car editor. Carmageddon has land mines, but needs to add oil slicks.
>most people would kill for a good promotion / pay raise.
Some of us wouldn't consider a job where you spend all of your time in meetings a "promotion". Most tech jobs have enough meetings and politics as it is.
If there's no technical component, I wouldn't want the job either.
It's not like these guys are morally against the very existance of floppy-based routers. Theo doesn't feel it to be worth *his* time, he's got different priorities.
There's nothing stopping you (or anyone else) from rolling your own floppy-based OpenBSD router.
Or how about another IRC client? The world desperately needs more ICQ clients, too. Maybe you should work on a MUD? Also, there is a desperate lack of alpha release "slashdot style" web board engines on sourceforge...
I spent some time flipping around sourceforge looking for a project to help me get some practice with PHP, and my query came back with 600+ hits for projects implemented in PHP. There are a *lot* of projects covering the same ground. How many PHP-based online scheduler/calendars are there on sourceforge? I guess that's not totally a bad thing, but it does make it harder for me to pick which one to work on.
Hey, anyone working on something nifty on PHP and looking for some not very expert help?
>Since Theo and a few others are highly competent
>and heavily dedicated, the BSDs have as active a
>developer community as they need.
Theo has said that he'd continue to work on OpenBSD even if he was the only user. He started it as a one man show, and if he had to, he'd go back to that.
Slashdot Mirror
I once saw an A+ certified technician burn out a PC motherboard when she plugged a Mac monitor into the joystick port.
Obviously not all A+ people are like this, but the A+ after someone's name doesn't mean they're not going to do something incredibly stupid to your hardware.
Dr. Fun shares your concern about old USENET posts...
o ns /Dr-Fun/df9601/df960124.jpg
http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/electronic-publicati
RTFA.
Tom's Hardware talks about the Promise IDE RAID controller here...
http://www6.tomshardware.com/storage/00q1/000329/
Lately, I've seen mailing list chatter to the effect that academic environments are starting to use IDE RAID in their servers, i.e. those poor bastards are always underfunded. Most of them seem happy, but I don't recall which products they mentioned.
One thing for sure, the price can't be beat.
No ISO is available. You don't need it.
Just download and burn the relevant bits, i.e. the install CD comes with SPARC binaries and a boatload of precompiled packages that you won't need.
Or just download the boot floppies and do an FTP install.
Take a look at INSTALL.i386 for detailed install instructions.
If that's too much bother then you might want to reconsider installing OpenBSD at all... It's not newbie friendly, the developers have other priorities.
>Web support sucks. The FAQ, etc. provides some
>help, not much. Even USENET isn't THAT helpful.
>You need need to get used to reading man pages...
>a LOT.
That's intentional. The idea is that all OpenBSD documentation should be available from the man pages instead of scattered over man pages, info pages, FAQs, and HOWTOs.
Opinions vary, to me that's a "feature", but I freely concede that some consider it a "bug".
There's no need to query each box. The information you want is on your local wire, so stick something like ntop on the network and let it collect your stats.
Take a look at Novell's NDS.
NDS is a distributed database of NetWare accounts, passwords, server metadata, etc.
NDS is far from a general purpose database. Still, reading up on NDS will give you a sense of the issues involved, i.e. how they chose to implement replication, db integrity issues, time sync issues, etc.
Once upon a time there was some NDS-to-ODBC glue that could be used to submit SQL queries to NDS, don't know if it still exists.
Novell hasn't opened up any source worth mentioning, but you can get free (beer) copies of NetWare from your local reseller or education center, just call them up and tell them you need an eval copy of NetWare.
NDS now has a version running on top of Linux, I'm not sure if there is a free eval version available.
NDS is complicated stuff, you really don't see any payback until you've got more then 4-5 servers. But once you've got 20+ servers in 10 sites sharing the same account database, you'll really like it.
The retail computer market is extremely cut-throat. Take a look in last year's phonebook for all of the little mom & pop computer-building businesses, and now take a look at this year's phonebook - a lot of those guys are gone, and have been replaced by different guys who will last a couple of years before they go under as well.
The margins are razor thin, the value of your inventory drops almost daily, and competetion is fierce.
If you get into this business, you're a brave fellow.
| Tolken ring actually allows for several
| packets to circulate...
Well, duh... Of course a Tolkien ring has to have several packets circulating at the same time.
Three packets for the Elven-Kings under the sky,Seven for the Dwarf-Lords in their halls of stone,
Nine for Mortal Men doomed to die,
One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne
in the land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.
One Packet to rule them all, One Packet to find them,
One Packet to bring them all and in the darkness bind them
I don't know diddly about your environment, so it's a bit hard to give specific advice. The smartass answer is to teach your techs everything you can about Unix, but that probably isn't practical.
/.
It's painful, but the only way to really identify where you need training is to log *all* your support calls/visits/escalations for a couple of weeks.
By looking at your calls, you can see what kinds of questions the techs are getting, and you can identify the most critical training needs for the techs, and maybe even justify some user training.
Repeat this process every 6 months or so. Logging everything is hell, but it does pay off.
Maybe you've already got a tech support ticketing system in place, in which case maybe you should be trolling your ticket database instead of surfing
The ports are 3rd party software.
The OpenBSD/FreeBSD/NetBSD team has no direct control over the s/w in the ports collection.
There is no organized effort to audit everything in the ports collection.
The OpenBSD audit is only concerned with the base OS, that in itself is a huge job. They don't have the resources to audit the thousands of apps in the ports collection.
The ports team does what they can to keep up with bugfixes from the various apps, but they aren't auditing the ports.
Once you install some 3rd party software, it's up to you to keep up with bugfixes for that 3rd party s/w.
>Because incorrect media reporting could have very
.usians have more freedom then canucks.
.us uses complicated, failure prone gizmos to do the same thing... right?
>serious ramifications for people? Ramifications
>not easily reversible?
Slow down dude, I'm not saying that pub. bans are always a bad thing, I'm saying that it's an instance where
You sound like you'd get along with my wife, who strongly believes that curtailing this freedom results in a net gain for society.
I'm pretty ambivilant about this issue myself, I hate the idea of pub. bans, but then I look at the media circus of the OJ trial and I have to wonder if a pub. ban might have been helpful in that instance...
I don't pay enough attention to US elections to know if this is an issue for you folks. Up here the bulk of the pop. is in the eastern part of the country. As long as I can remember, the election has _always_ been decided by the time the polls close in Ontario. So it quite honestly doesn't matter much if those guys out west see the results early or not; the matter has been decided before their polls close.
Completely off-topic: In Canada, I vote by using a pencil to mark an X on a ballot. I'm sure there's a good reason that
>I was too harsh in my comments - sorry
:)
My origional post was probably a bit inflammatory
>You are correct, the PQ have been so accused, but
>so has the Canadian Alliance
Yes, candidates from both parties have said some pretty unbelievable things. To me, that just means we should kick both their asses.
The PQ is one of my pet peeves in life, there was a documentary lately about the FLQ kidnapping/murder, and they showed the FLQ terrorist/murderer guys a few years later out of prison attending a PQ function - they got a standing ovation from the crowd. The PQ are jerks, and I see no reason not to call them on it.
I'll leave the gun control alone, there have been enough bytes wasted about that on other forums.
.ca - our gun control laws would be pretty radical to him. I tried to explain our gun laws to the clerks at a pawn shop in Tennessee once, they thought I was lying.
The discussion is about some American guy potentially coming to
>This is obviously flamebait. At any rate, most
>of us Canadians know that it isn't the French
>people that are making the fuss - it's the
>powerhungry gov't of Quebec.
The "federalist" Quebec Liberals were just as bad as the PQ.
>Personally, I think it adds a lot to Canada that
>we are bilingual.
Sure, and I my french is pretty decent, at least verbally. But that doesn't magically change the fact that the provincial language laws in Quebec are unconstitutional bullshit.
>Oh, and as for the French in Quebec being
>racist, that is absolutely incorrect. The people
>of Quebec are both welcome and necessary for
>Canada's identity, and your remark is the real
>racist sentiment here.
Yeah, the PQ have never gotten in any trouble for trash talking "ethnics" or jews. Riiight.
I've got no problem with the average franco, but the Quebecois nationalist movement has a very ugly side, and calling me a racist doesn't make that any less true.
Just to play devil's advocate:
.ca.
.us to .ca was Vietnam draft dodgers.
.ca. I like it here, but I'm just trying to say that it's far from perfect.
Canada has publication bans about stuff like court cases and elections in progress, I think Slashdot had an article this fall about someone who is up on charges for posting election results on his web site while people were still voting in western Canada, there are a lot of time zones in
There's a trial going on right now (Air India bombing, circa 1985) with a very restrictive publication ban, the press can say almost nothing about the trial except that it is taking place.
Obviously the US doesn't have these (OJ anyone?).
And don't forget the whole gun control debate, as of Jan 1 2001 Canadian gun owners had to register themselves, by 2003 (?) we'll have to register all of our guns. A lot of people aren't doing it; but it is the law of the land.
And of course you won't make nearly as much $$$ up here. I know a hell of a lot of Canucks going South to make big bucks, can't think of any Yanks coming up here; the last time there was a serious migration from
If you got to Quebec, you'll have to put up with bullshit language laws, designed to prop up the (dying) French language. The Franco establishment in Quebec is isolationist at best, racist at worst.
I'm not really pissing on
Oh, and if you move up here, bring a nice, warm pair of mittens.
Who moderated that as offtopic? Impossible Mission was the first c64 game with digitized voice, it was a technical marvel for the day and a lot of fun. I remember cranking up the volume on the TV and jumping off platform after platform so I could hear the guy's scream fade off into the bottomless pit.
AAAAaaaaaaggghhh.....
AAAAaaaaaaggghhh.....
AAAAaaaaaaggghhh.....
>(Plus, you need[ed] a central server for Novell networks...)
Just a nitpick, but you could play IPX/SPX games without a server. Me and my university roomies did a helluva lot of IPX/SPX Doom at home, no NetWare server at all.
But yeah, the NICs weren't cheap, and the hubs were outrageous $$$, so it was coax all the way. It still amazes me that I can walk into the mall and buy a cheap hub.
Ah, the memories.
M.U.L.E.
Archon
Racing Destruction Set
Tapper
They did do a remake of Archon for the PC but it sucked.
I'd really like to see a modern Racing Destruction Set. Use the Carmageddon 2 engine, but include a track editor and a car editor. Carmageddon has land mines, but needs to add oil slicks.
>most people would kill for a good promotion / pay raise.
Some of us wouldn't consider a job where you spend all of your time in meetings a "promotion". Most tech jobs have enough meetings and politics as it is.
If there's no technical component, I wouldn't want the job either.
It's not like these guys are morally against the very existance of floppy-based routers. Theo doesn't feel it to be worth *his* time, he's got different priorities.
There's nothing stopping you (or anyone else) from rolling your own floppy-based OpenBSD router.
> It was a notebook. A Pentium classed ThinkPad for
> $600 isn't a TERRIBLY bad deal.
He said $600 Canadian.
1$ Can == 0.65 $US
Or how about another IRC client? The world desperately needs more ICQ clients, too. Maybe you should work on a MUD? Also, there is a desperate lack of alpha release "slashdot style" web board engines on sourceforge...
I spent some time flipping around sourceforge looking for a project to help me get some practice with PHP, and my query came back with 600+ hits for projects implemented in PHP. There are a *lot* of projects covering the same ground. How many PHP-based online scheduler/calendars are there on sourceforge? I guess that's not totally a bad thing, but it does make it harder for me to pick which one to work on.
Hey, anyone working on something nifty on PHP and looking for some not very expert help?
>Since Theo and a few others are highly competent
>and heavily dedicated, the BSDs have as active a
>developer community as they need.
Theo has said that he'd continue to work on OpenBSD even if he was the only user. He started it as a one man show, and if he had to, he'd go back to that.
I kind of like this new artwork, kind of hope it ends up on a poster or sticker or something.