A worthy answer, thanks. In addition to being polite and helpful, however, you've also done a fantastic job of illustrating my point: unlike other distro channels, the graybeards who live in #debian assume that anyone they don't know falls into one of the categories you listed. Seriously, this problem is pretty much unique among the distro-specific channels, and the shit needs to quit. (Not your fault, I know, but I'm fed up with assholes today)
Actually, you're quite full of shit in this case - I've had issues more than once where I'm coming in with something fairly deep, that I've googled (including the now-broken google groups) intensively, have joined the chan, asked a direct question with relevant details about my problem, including all the basics (deb version, broken software version, hardware, etc) and still get the RTFM. I've come to the conclusion that there are just a few assholes who think too much of themselves and need to read the link currently posted as my URL here.
The link I put in there was an irc link to irc.freenode.net. Looks like slashcode ate it for breakfast =[
Oh, by the way, if you think LISP guys are bad, try asking something (anything) in #perl sometime - the answers you will get will be divided into two categories:
Four or five people who have F-keys bound to the link for the most excellent Learning Perl
A couple of people who think a help and discussion channel is a good place to intellectually masturbate after the style of the IOCCC but who aren't skilled enough to put in an entry that goes anywhere except/dev/null
Heh. For a really good time, try going into #debian on freenode and asking any question, no matter how esoteric. You're bound to get about three or four RTFMs, and one guy who will pmsg you with more helpful information. Note: I just switched to deb after several years of RPM-based distros, and am not a complete n00b here, so the attitude I encountered was offputting to say the least. Imagine sending your grandma in there for help - she'd probably smack you with her purse the next time she saw you!
Well, I guess he said all that he needed right there to lose all credibility with me. Might as well have said "I also live in my parents basement, but at least my computer has neat lights and a bitchin' LED panel!" Oh, and a framed MSCE cert on the wall above his bed to keep him company in between shifts at the pizza joint.
So this guy complains (without mentioning which of the two websites listed in the story he's complaining about) that there are horrid adverts in his site, and then he goes on to spamvertize a free-shit site in his sig that is nothing but an opt-in for spammers. What a jackass. I have a suggestion for he you can stick his free gadget...
Thankfully, Chicken Little, planes do NOT fall out of the sky during a total air traffic control outage, but control regresses to pencil and paper.
Or, more appropriately, to the hands of the pilots, including the one who had to take evasive action. What's glossed here is that a stupid application flaw very nearly did result in serious loss of life. Kudos to the pilot who knew what the fuck to do when the time came.
Well, if you really want to know when it's out, there's a rather useful website, including an option to get automatic email notification when the linux binaries are available. [/shameless_plug]
As far as locking down goes, there's plenty of stuff on there the kids don't need - the shell for instance =]. You have to remember, these computers are going to be used by K-12 students, often with inadequate supervision, as budget cuts have pinched us between state-mandated online testing, the need to purchase and upgrade equipment, and the obvious need to keep enough staff to maintain basic order (not to mention actually educate the kids).
If nothing else, your average linux distro has about a zillion and one features, which for someone like you or I is a Good Thing, but can be overwhelming to someone who is just learning how to use a computer. Beyond that, locking down the interface reduces the hell out of our support burden, as it completely eliminates the "I lost the Mozilla icon from my toolbar" type of problems. What's there is there, and will be there tomorrow - another Good Thing(r) for support folks.
While on the subject of Mozilla, yeah, the reason I put it in that wrapper is exactly because there are a lot of cases where multiple terminals will be logged in under the same username. It's hard enough keeping a couple hundred staff and 1500 high- and middle-school students to remember their passwords - forget about trying to do that with the first graders =] So I put Mozilla in a wrapper on the primary school lab servers, and they all login with a schoolwide student account. Part of me understands why mozilla is set up the way it is, and the other part of me hates the setup with a passion. And I still needed the primary school lab computers to be able to authenticate with regular user accounts... long story but trust me it's the right call. So mozwrapper it was!
Sometimes it's hard not to kick oneself for being an early adopter. I've been successfully deploying LTSP labs at work this year using SuSE 9.0 as a base system, and the project has been a success, but it's been a heck of a lot of work. As we're deploying these as student lab computers in a K12 environment, lockdown is key, so I've had to learn (and make good use of) the KDE Kiosk API, and of course this is before the Kiosk admin tool became available. Additionally, we have an Active directory with accounts for all secondary students, so I got to learn how to compile, install, and configure Samba 3 to get winbind to do some of the tricks I needed it to do besides just auth. Also, our primary students don't have an account of their own but rather use a shared school account, and Mozilla has that very annoying profile problem when a user tries to run multiple instances of it, so I had to write a wrapper so that it could run sandboxed (which also provides the benefit of keeping the kids from setting bizarre configurations which are then replicated to all the other users as they are wont to do in our other labs).
All in all, I'm kind of glad I did all this work by hand - I learned a lot, and most of it is now very easy for me to do. On the other hand, had the rumoured deployment tools been available when I started the project, I would have jumped on that and quick. I'm frankly not sure which is better in the long term, but I know it would have been faster to just click'n'run =]
One last thing - before someone flames me for being stupid and not just using K12LTSP, I have to say I tried it, and didn't like it - for one thing I needed more flexibility than was provided by K12LTSP, especially where AD auth comes in, and besides that, as a matter of preference I like what the KDE Kiosk api provides, and we all know just how much Redhat-based distros Don't Support KDE =] In the end, I got to know the system a lot better, and can do a lot more with it than I would have been able to do under a K12LTSP system. This isn't to disparage the effort and amazing work produced by the K12LTSP team - they really do have an excellent product and I recommend it wholeheartedly for K12 staff needing to get a fast deployment out - it just wasn't the fit I needed for this project.
It would appear that some child is running an attack script at the moment. It's kind of hard to make original posts that aren't buried behind 9 pages of the same lengthy post, so better off to reply.
chances are, the child could be fixed by a single line of iptables... and a phone call to his mom
The town I used to live in (and hope to move back to very soon) built a city-wide group of fiber links (22 nodes for a town of 20,000) that is working out rather quite well - you can get teevee if that's your wish - not mine, but hey, scifi is cool sometimes - or DOCSYS to the curb for 5 megs down or so... the upstream used to be one until the college kids saturated the network with p2p and the admin responded by capping upload. Cost for your 5 meg connection is about 30 bucks a month depending on which ISP you choose.
On the education front, the school district which I work for has 6 locations in three different municipalities. We were linked together by T1 lines that really were pretty terrible - bad connections which were weather-sensitive (not such a good thing in Oregon!), and slow even when they were running at full speed. We were approached by a local (and reputable) company which offered to build out and give us 2 dark fibers to each location and a pair of fibers to our upstream provider (thereby giving us glass all the way to the NOC), all for the price we were paying for our T1 line. Sounds too good to be true? Nope. We put out an RFP, the guys who made the original proposal won the bidding by miles, they did all the hanging from poles, trenching, etc, gave us our glass, we put media converters in, and voila! we've got screaminig connection between locations - all for the price of that cruddy T1 that we were apparently paying too much for.
The moral of this story? I guess there isn't one, except to say that what they're talking about in the lead story is real, and works. As a slashdot-friendly aside, Paul Allen, in his role of higher-up for the local cable pigopoly, swore to the City Council that he'd do everything in his power to sink the fiber project since they weren't using his Borg-infested kit to do it, preferring instead to use local people and companies. This threat occurred about 5 years ago, and the fiber network is still doing OK. Sorry, Paul =P
Or just drive around vegas with one of the things constantly transmitting. Was one of my teenage amusements - my friends and I would drive around the endless suburbia that was our soulless haunt/hometown, madly clicking the button on all our parents' garage door openers. Back then, the "security" on those things was a 3-digit number that you got to set yourself, and a startling number of people back then never thought to change those from the factory settings, typically "000" or "111" and of course we cottoned onto this fairly quickly. Even without the default settings, there were still more than enough identical houses and developments for us to drive around slowly at 4am to get at least a few hits a night. Amazing how funny you think the sight of a garage door opening is when you're 16 and wasted. We were dumb kids, not thieves, though - our prank was leaving the door open and driving off. I sure hope nothing happened...
You should jump back in... a lot's changed, and SID just announced that they are porting it over to the Enemy Territory engine, so within a couple months there should be enough of a shakeup within the games so that those people with amazingly well-developed skills will have to get back onto the learning ladder.
As far as being a newbie to UrT, my experience is that if you say sorry when you TK someone, don't make the same mistake too many times, and generally try to be friendly, on most servers you'll be treated well even by the most experienced players. Of course there are still some jerks, but that's the case everywhere. Some of the better servers around are TexasUT, FSK405, Mumble's Meat-Rack, and The 6th Floor...
Hehe. I'd say that practicing against bots is mandatory for things like flying a chopper in Desert Combat. There's nothing like jumping into the gunner's seat of a chopper, only to have it fly fifty feet in the air, spin a 720, flip upside down, and crash =-| Good piloting is only a couple hours away...
Actually, punkbuster has been releasing a LOT of updates in the last month or so. I actually had it nail me twice on the same session! I loaded a game of my favorite mod, fragged somebody, got bumped for a punkbuster update, switched to a vt, ran pbweb (much faster than waiting for the ingame download to work, if it even ever does), got the update, did a/reconnect to the game server, and played for about 2 hours, at which point I got bumped to spec AGAIN for a pb update. I just had to laugh.
Those pricks like noskill must be hating life these days =]
Re:Beavis..this is the coolest thing i have ever s
on
Your Own Mecha
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Crikey, man, no joke. I looked at that thing and thought it'd be a killer way to move stacks of planks and whatnot out on the jobsite - not to mention something very strong to "hold this up here just like that for a minute." As much of a Robotech geek as I might have been (or thought I was) back when I was a teenager, when I grew up I started to think of technology for useful purposes, not destructive ones. Maybe that's the problem with the current crop of warmongers - they never grew up. I'd put my money on that one, in fact.
Hah! Same thing happened where I work (I'd been there for all of 2 weeks when we discovered the problem). Someone had put an IIS box set to all defaults on the live end of the wire, and somewhat to my amazement, the ONLY thing that happened to it was that a bunch of s'kiddies donated a rather large collection of music and movies to the tech staff here after we noticed that a certain computer was moving a lot of data and chugging the rest of the network. =]
Needless to say, the incident led to a somewhat more robust security model...
It crashes Safari. Now, admittedly, I don't know whether this is a Safari bug, a Java bug, a bug in the applet, or some combination thereof, but here's what happens to me: I load the thing in its own tab, have a look, look at the neat code that loads an IFRAME, etc. Ho-hum, nice idea, let's see where it goes, cmd-W to close the tab. Whups! The entire browser window closed, including all the tabs which I hadn't got around to checking yet! Safari is still running in the foreground, but I just lost its window.
Anyone interested enough to debug this? I'm not =P
Slashdot Mirror
A worthy answer, thanks. In addition to being polite and helpful, however, you've also done a fantastic job of illustrating my point: unlike other distro channels, the graybeards who live in #debian assume that anyone they don't know falls into one of the categories you listed. Seriously, this problem is pretty much unique among the distro-specific channels, and the shit needs to quit. (Not your fault, I know, but I'm fed up with assholes today)
Cheers
Actually, you're quite full of shit in this case - I've had issues more than once where I'm coming in with something fairly deep, that I've googled (including the now-broken google groups) intensively, have joined the chan, asked a direct question with relevant details about my problem, including all the basics (deb version, broken software version, hardware, etc) and still get the RTFM. I've come to the conclusion that there are just a few assholes who think too much of themselves and need to read the link currently posted as my URL here.
Oh, by the way, if you think LISP guys are bad, try asking something (anything) in #perl sometime - the answers you will get will be divided into two categories:
Heh. For a really good time, try going into #debian on freenode and asking any question, no matter how esoteric. You're bound to get about three or four RTFMs, and one guy who will pmsg you with more helpful information. Note: I just switched to deb after several years of RPM-based distros, and am not a complete n00b here, so the attitude I encountered was offputting to say the least. Imagine sending your grandma in there for help - she'd probably smack you with her purse the next time she saw you!
Well, I guess he said all that he needed right there to lose all credibility with me. Might as well have said "I also live in my parents basement, but at least my computer has neat lights and a bitchin' LED panel!" Oh, and a framed MSCE cert on the wall above his bed to keep him company in between shifts at the pizza joint.
So this guy complains (without mentioning which of the two websites listed in the story he's complaining about) that there are horrid adverts in his site, and then he goes on to spamvertize a free-shit site in his sig that is nothing but an opt-in for spammers. What a jackass. I have a suggestion for he you can stick his free gadget...
Well, if you really want to know when it's out, there's a rather useful website, including an option to get automatic email notification when the linux binaries are available.
[/shameless_plug]
As far as locking down goes, there's plenty of stuff on there the kids don't need - the shell for instance =]. You have to remember, these computers are going to be used by K-12 students, often with inadequate supervision, as budget cuts have pinched us between state-mandated online testing, the need to purchase and upgrade equipment, and the obvious need to keep enough staff to maintain basic order (not to mention actually educate the kids).
If nothing else, your average linux distro has about a zillion and one features, which for someone like you or I is a Good Thing, but can be overwhelming to someone who is just learning how to use a computer. Beyond that, locking down the interface reduces the hell out of our support burden, as it completely eliminates the "I lost the Mozilla icon from my toolbar" type of problems. What's there is there, and will be there tomorrow - another Good Thing(r) for support folks.
While on the subject of Mozilla, yeah, the reason I put it in that wrapper is exactly because there are a lot of cases where multiple terminals will be logged in under the same username. It's hard enough keeping a couple hundred staff and 1500 high- and middle-school students to remember their passwords - forget about trying to do that with the first graders =] So I put Mozilla in a wrapper on the primary school lab servers, and they all login with a schoolwide student account. Part of me understands why mozilla is set up the way it is, and the other part of me hates the setup with a passion. And I still needed the primary school lab computers to be able to authenticate with regular user accounts... long story but trust me it's the right call. So mozwrapper it was!
Hrm. You probably need a NIC card to use it. Oh, well.
Sometimes it's hard not to kick oneself for being an early adopter. I've been successfully deploying LTSP labs at work this year using SuSE 9.0 as a base system, and the project has been a success, but it's been a heck of a lot of work. As we're deploying these as student lab computers in a K12 environment, lockdown is key, so I've had to learn (and make good use of) the KDE Kiosk API, and of course this is before the Kiosk admin tool became available. Additionally, we have an Active directory with accounts for all secondary students, so I got to learn how to compile, install, and configure Samba 3 to get winbind to do some of the tricks I needed it to do besides just auth. Also, our primary students don't have an account of their own but rather use a shared school account, and Mozilla has that very annoying profile problem when a user tries to run multiple instances of it, so I had to write a wrapper so that it could run sandboxed (which also provides the benefit of keeping the kids from setting bizarre configurations which are then replicated to all the other users as they are wont to do in our other labs).
All in all, I'm kind of glad I did all this work by hand - I learned a lot, and most of it is now very easy for me to do. On the other hand, had the rumoured deployment tools been available when I started the project, I would have jumped on that and quick. I'm frankly not sure which is better in the long term, but I know it would have been faster to just click'n'run =]
One last thing - before someone flames me for being stupid and not just using K12LTSP, I have to say I tried it, and didn't like it - for one thing I needed more flexibility than was provided by K12LTSP, especially where AD auth comes in, and besides that, as a matter of preference I like what the KDE Kiosk api provides, and we all know just how much Redhat-based distros Don't Support KDE =] In the end, I got to know the system a lot better, and can do a lot more with it than I would have been able to do under a K12LTSP system. This isn't to disparage the effort and amazing work produced by the K12LTSP team - they really do have an excellent product and I recommend it wholeheartedly for K12 staff needing to get a fast deployment out - it just wasn't the fit I needed for this project.
Don't you mean to say that the Motion Picture Ass Head is Mr. Jack Valenti?
End grammar cop session...
or bad DNS? Either way, I can't resolve.
I suppose another solution to deal with the problem would be to temporarily turn off AC posts until they can track down the botnet...
It would appear that some child is running an attack script at the moment. It's kind of hard to make original posts that aren't buried behind 9 pages of the same lengthy post, so better off to reply.
chances are, the child could be fixed by a single line of iptables... and a phone call to his mom
The town I used to live in (and hope to move back to very soon) built a city-wide group of fiber links (22 nodes for a town of 20,000) that is working out rather quite well - you can get teevee if that's your wish - not mine, but hey, scifi is cool sometimes - or DOCSYS to the curb for 5 megs down or so... the upstream used to be one until the college kids saturated the network with p2p and the admin responded by capping upload. Cost for your 5 meg connection is about 30 bucks a month depending on which ISP you choose.
On the education front, the school district which I work for has 6 locations in three different municipalities. We were linked together by T1 lines that really were pretty terrible - bad connections which were weather-sensitive (not such a good thing in Oregon!), and slow even when they were running at full speed. We were approached by a local (and reputable) company which offered to build out and give us 2 dark fibers to each location and a pair of fibers to our upstream provider (thereby giving us glass all the way to the NOC), all for the price we were paying for our T1 line. Sounds too good to be true? Nope. We put out an RFP, the guys who made the original proposal won the bidding by miles, they did all the hanging from poles, trenching, etc, gave us our glass, we put media converters in, and voila! we've got screaminig connection between locations - all for the price of that cruddy T1 that we were apparently paying too much for.
The moral of this story? I guess there isn't one, except to say that what they're talking about in the lead story is real, and works. As a slashdot-friendly aside, Paul Allen, in his role of higher-up for the local cable pigopoly, swore to the City Council that he'd do everything in his power to sink the fiber project since they weren't using his Borg-infested kit to do it, preferring instead to use local people and companies. This threat occurred about 5 years ago, and the fiber network is still doing OK. Sorry, Paul =P
[Pot, to kettle}: You're black!
Or just drive around vegas with one of the things constantly transmitting. Was one of my teenage amusements - my friends and I would drive around the endless suburbia that was our soulless haunt/hometown, madly clicking the button on all our parents' garage door openers. Back then, the "security" on those things was a 3-digit number that you got to set yourself, and a startling number of people back then never thought to change those from the factory settings, typically "000" or "111" and of course we cottoned onto this fairly quickly. Even without the default settings, there were still more than enough identical houses and developments for us to drive around slowly at 4am to get at least a few hits a night. Amazing how funny you think the sight of a garage door opening is when you're 16 and wasted. We were dumb kids, not thieves, though - our prank was leaving the door open and driving off. I sure hope nothing happened...
You should jump back in... a lot's changed, and SID just announced that they are porting it over to the Enemy Territory engine, so within a couple months there should be enough of a shakeup within the games so that those people with amazingly well-developed skills will have to get back onto the learning ladder.
As far as being a newbie to UrT, my experience is that if you say sorry when you TK someone, don't make the same mistake too many times, and generally try to be friendly, on most servers you'll be treated well even by the most experienced players. Of course there are still some jerks, but that's the case everywhere. Some of the better servers around are TexasUT, FSK405, Mumble's Meat-Rack, and The 6th Floor...
The more the merrier =]
Hehe. I'd say that practicing against bots is mandatory for things like flying a chopper in Desert Combat. There's nothing like jumping into the gunner's seat of a chopper, only to have it fly fifty feet in the air, spin a 720, flip upside down, and crash =-|
Good piloting is only a couple hours away...
Actually, punkbuster has been releasing a LOT of updates in the last month or so. I actually had it nail me twice on the same session! I loaded a game of my favorite mod, fragged somebody, got bumped for a punkbuster update, switched to a vt, ran pbweb (much faster than waiting for the ingame download to work, if it even ever does), got the update, did a /reconnect to the game server, and played for about 2 hours, at which point I got bumped to spec AGAIN for a pb update. I just had to laugh.
Those pricks like noskill must be hating life these days =]
Crikey, man, no joke. I looked at that thing and thought it'd be a killer way to move stacks of planks and whatnot out on the jobsite - not to mention something very strong to "hold this up here just like that for a minute." As much of a Robotech geek as I might have been (or thought I was) back when I was a teenager, when I grew up I started to think of technology for useful purposes, not destructive ones. Maybe that's the problem with the current crop of warmongers - they never grew up. I'd put my money on that one, in fact.
Hah! Same thing happened where I work (I'd been there for all of 2 weeks when we discovered the problem). Someone had put an IIS box set to all defaults on the live end of the wire, and somewhat to my amazement, the ONLY thing that happened to it was that a bunch of s'kiddies donated a rather large collection of music and movies to the tech staff here after we noticed that a certain computer was moving a lot of data and chugging the rest of the network. =]
Needless to say, the incident led to a somewhat more robust security model...
It crashes Safari. Now, admittedly, I don't know whether this is a Safari bug, a Java bug, a bug in the applet, or some combination thereof, but here's what happens to me:
I load the thing in its own tab, have a look, look at the neat code that loads an IFRAME, etc. Ho-hum, nice idea, let's see where it goes, cmd-W to close the tab. Whups! The entire browser window closed, including all the tabs which I hadn't got around to checking yet! Safari is still running in the foreground, but I just lost its window.
Anyone interested enough to debug this? I'm not =P
Bah. You're no fun. I want my calculator mousepad, and that's that ;-P