Most of the foods eat have been genetically manipulated the old fashioned way - Selective breeding.
Plants have been changed to have bigger yeilds that ripen at the same time. In some cases (such as corn) the differences between the domesticated version and the wild cousin is drastic. Plants also have been manipulated to remove genes that cause bitterness.
Animals have been changed to be larger, slower, dumber and to carry more meat on their frame.
The problem is that the words 'Genetically Modified' scares a lot of people (like the words 'Nuclear' and 'Radiation'). But there is a whole world of difference between transferring genes from two unrelated organisms and removing or enhancing the genes of a single organism.
I don't see anything wrong with enhancing already existing genes, or removing genes that provide undesirable traits in our food. What you find in the supermarket is different from what you'll find in the wild. Going back to the selective-breeding analogy, nobody has a problem with seedless grapes. There's not much of a difference between finding a random seedless mutation and making a seedless mutation.
Switching genes between organisms are another story. I don't have a problem with adding vitamins to plants that normally lack them. (Adding vitamin A to rice could reduce a lot of blindness, for example). Other cases need a closer look though.
Then again, if you want to worry, probably massively dosing our livestock with antibiotics will hurt us more in the long run.
Helium will raise your voice drastically. Most of us know this.
There is another gas, if I recall correctly, sulfur hexafluoride, if I recall correctly, which will drastically lower your voice. Of course, the gas in question is heavier then air, so to get it out of your lungs afterwords, you have to stand on your head. Was a crowd pleaser last time I checked. (Double check that gas before trying, btw, this was 10 years ago, my memory could be foggy)
I distinctly remember someone commenting on how they preferred EQ in Wine because they didn't have to run it full screen.
There was a win32 hack to EQ awhile back for windowed play, but I think updates later broke it. Which is rather sad. Not everyone wants to run their games full screen.
Er, wormholes aren't a SF solutions. Look up "Einstein-Rosen Bridge". The problem with such a bridge is that matter won't survive the trip.
Digging deeper into the hat of theoretical physics, we have a possible solution. What needs to be done is to thread the wormhole with something that sounds a lot like antigravity. This sounds like a SF solution, but there is no theoretical reason why a negative gravitational force shouldn't exist. Its a mathematically viable solution.
OTOH, this could be a pretty expensive solution. First you need to find or create a bridge and then stabilize it. If your race has perfected suspended animation, it might be the cheaper way to go from one system to another. Or maybe there's some other reason.
Its flawed reasoning to think "There's no ETs visiting us, thus FTL travel is impossible." Maybe we're living in the cosmic equivalent of a natural preserve. Maybe intelligence evolves beyond the need for physical bodies. Maybe there are intersteller laws against messing with the locals. Maybe hydrogen based life is the norm. Or life that can live in a vacuum. Or maybe we've just been overlooked.
For Antivirus management, I prefer Norton AV Corporate. Its a little pricey, but does automatic updates without a reboot, and can be set up with a central server to distribute updates (good for lowbandwidth sites) and keep track of infections and other information on all the client machines.
Not all fans are created equal. Some are noisier, some are quieter. Look for db levels. Do your homework.
As a general rule, the lower the rpms, the quieter the fan.
The larger the fan, the more air it can push. Combine this rule with rule #2, and you can make a large slow quiet fan with the same airflow as a small fast noisy fan. Hint: Wallwarts (AC/DC adapters) can be found that will be at the right voltage to run a fan or two).
If you ever look under your car, you'll notice that the exhaust hangers are attached to the car by a metal/rubber/metal sandwich. This reduces the vibrations transmitted to the frame, and thus reduces the noise level. A hardware store should be able to sell you rubber washers if you decide to use a fan. Remember, wood is one of the ways that acoustic guitars amplify the plucking of a string.
You want air flow. Exposing the whole thing to air might not work. This is the difference between properly adding case fans and removing the side of your case. Removing the side of your case is not the best way to cool your system. In a cabinet, may I suggest a vent at the bottom for
air intake and a vent at the top for air output? See how that affects the temperature. Consider adding a fan at the top blowing out if the temperature drop isn't to your liking.
I didn't get very deep into vinyl printing, but it was one of the businesses that my old place of work was doing.
The machine looks like a huge plotter. Say about five feet wide. Heavy, and very tempermental about the quality of ink it drinks. You feed it white rolls of vinyl, and it will "print" whatever you want. IIRC, it was identified as a regular printer under windows, and shipped with its own control program. The output, with a good enough image, is great.
Hey now, the h was my pet. Or perhaps I was its pet. Anyways, it was great, killing most things in one round by brainlessness. 20 @'s finally took it out. Oh well, a ?SoG dipped into a !PoHW removed all of the non-friendly h's from the game shortly thereafter.
Also had a grey D for awhile but a a blue T finally killed it on its third ressurection. Died over water, so I didn't even have a chance to get the raw materials for a [GDSM. Oh well, that's what a/WoW is for. Well, for that, and a blessed (MM to write myself another ?SoG to take out all those nasty L's.
This, btw, makes perfect sense to those who play. This is why you shouldn't start playing.
Google has a search engine. Its a damn fine search engine. It searches many a site, and caches them in case they are no longer there when you search. Its good for hunting down background information about systems.
However, where google really shines for problem solving is that it archives usenet. Guess what, odds are, your question has already been asked and answered. That's why a lot of people are upset about the recent spat of 'Ask Slashdot' questions.
Why not drop the service?
on
Anonymous Surfing?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Sure this will be the more expensive route, but drop cable (and explain that the reason you are dropping them is that they are monitoring your surfing habits), and get DSL.
If enough people did this, the company will what they are doing or go out of business.
You have to realize, everything on Win9x effectively runs as root. (As well as a lot of things on NT, but that's a different story). Last time I checked, IP Tables and any personal firewall software out there does port filtering/blocking, it doesn't try to prevent itself from being killed. No matter if its windows or linux, if its running on the machine with the right privileges, it can kill the firewall.
Now there are a lot of viruses out there that will try to disable anti-virus software, and more then a few will try to evade it by using obscure methods of accessing the system. From what I understand of win32 'real-time' virus scanners, for performance and complexity reasons, they can't monitor all system activities. They try to monitor the most common and the most exploitable. There is also a method of attack that tries to introduce enough delay in the realtime scanning so that the virus can disable the AV software before the AV software realizes something is wrong. Therefore, we see viruses that tend to be rather effective at disabling AV software. (Solution, btw, is to boot off a floppy and run antivirus software that way - F-Prot works well for that purpose).
Anyways, like the *Nix world, the solutions are not to run unneeded services, and to PATCH PATCH PATCH. AV shouldn't be your only line of defense.
I have a theory that what geeks need is a large advertising budget. We need commercials on TV that tells our side of the story.
Imagine it...
View of a long haired pale man hunched over a keyboard
Johnny is a hacker. But he doesn't live in his parent's basement. He doesn't work for an evil foreign government. He's not part of a group that spells their name with numbers. No, Johnny works for the record companies. Under a proposed US law, Johnny will have the right to hack into your computer and break it. The record companies are very concerned with getting the ability to hack your computer - even though they aren't concerned about lower CD prices. They were recently convicted of overcharging Americans roughly half a billion dollars for CDs.
WinPT under windows will setup and manage gpg keys. Its a GPL'ed program that sits in the system tray and allows quick access to GPG functions. (Kind of like what later versions of PGP does.) WinPT's installation file includes a copy of GPG. WinPT + Mozilla 1.2a + Enigmail works well under windows.
Disclaimer: There is a bug (I've notified the author) where if you install winPT under c:/program files/winPT instead of the default c:/winPT, you need to set the path in options to c:/progra~1/winpt. The long file name with spaces support is a tad broken.:)
Why not have it just take n number of video imputs? Basically, instead of having 2 monitors, its possible just to have one screen with the same amount of screen space, but with two inputs. Then its compatable with any multi-headed capable OS.
Suppose it would be a niche product though. Be nice for saving space and avoiding the monitor borders I have now with my dual setup.
The client is a spammy piece of shit as well. The other day I was at NPR's website, and I decided to try out there RP stream. Punched a hole in the firewall for real player, and listened to NPR for awhile.
My version of RP is probably a year or two out of date, since I tend not to use it. Anyways, today, I checked my email, and there's a nice upgrade message from Real.
Fixed the hole in the firewall. RP isn't trusted with unrestricted access to the 'net anymore. If I want to listen to streams, I'll open it on a site-by-site basis.
What's wrong with Miranda ICQ? Its not skinnable, but otherwise, it seems stable, and has MSN Messenger support. People use IM's, and the default ICQ client is a tad bloated for memory size, and doesn't have MSN Messenger support.
I'll neatly leap over the question whether or not
system admins are engineers *leap*, and address the
problem of MCSEs.
As someone who is interested in both unix and microsoft systems, the current state of MCSEs is
damaging to honest admins. A network is no more
easy if its windows 2000. Setting it up may appear
easier, since windows will try to hold your hand,
but that doesn't make debugging easier. (In a way,
its harder, since windows likes to hide scary
information that has the potential to debug). I've
worked with windows machines for 5 years, and I
take pride in professional setups of workstations
and networks, regardless of the underlying OSes.
In theory, the MCSE program is not bad. The
business world benefits from being able to
tell a professional Microsoft administrator from
the boss's nephew whose professional skills
involve setting up a half-life server. However,
MCSE seems to be one of the cash cows out there,
computer training centers and Microsoft is pimping
out the certification for money. There are plenty
of 'paper' MCSE's out there - people who have passed the test and have the certification, but
lack the real-world experience they need.
Linux zealots shouldn't be smug, because as linux becomes popular (to the public and management), expect the same thing to happen to the Linux+ or RHCE exams. There is nothing preventing the schools that teach to the test for MCSE exams this week to teach to the test for RHCE exams next week. Instead of having poorly running windows networks, there will be poorly run linux networks. Instead of Nimda attacking unpatched IIS servers, there will be the latest $LINUX_WORM attacking unpatched apache servers. THERE IS NOTHING ABOUT LINUX THAT WILL SAVE IT FROM THE STUPIDITY OF POOR ADMINS!
Well, either you're a troll or an idiot. Lets assume you are the latter.
From the article - How about this: would it be possible to create a Linux-based disk-array with an IEEE1394 interface (Old P200, crammed with disks, software RAID, lots of RAM for caching, Firewire interface, looking/acting like a single disk to the outside world, storage device mgmt via web-frontend)?
Your reading comprehension is horrible. So is your technical knowledge. Let me educate you.
First of all, this guy wants to use a pentium 200 as the basis of the system. This places technological limitations on the system. For example, some pentium chipsets have a caching problem with anything over 64 Megs of memory. The kernel can work around this (basically by using anything above 64M as a swap file) but there are limitations to performance. There is also a limitation of how much memory you can put in the old pentium motherboards. If you're looking at a pentium-based solution, you're looking at something that's cheap and not appropriate for heavy loads.
Now what disks are you going to put in this cheap system? SCSI? Only if you have the brains of the anonymous coward that I'm replying to. On pricewatch, a 146 GB SCSI drive is just under a grand. A 120 GB IDE driver is about $150.
You talk about getting 100% speed between two laptops. Interesting. Not sure how that applies, since I'm willing to bet money that my packets traveled just as fast. If you're talking about bandwidth, we have a different problem. In a sustained read from a device, the limiting factors will be the HDD speed, IDE Bus speed, and ethernet card. Lets look at the HDD speed. Tom's hardware benchmarked a recent 120 GB HDD at between 20 - 40 mbytes/second. So, the hard drive should be able to saturate a 100 mbit/second ethernet network in a sustained read. Unfortuneately, when you run a new HDD over a 5 year old ide bus, the performance goes to hell. Say hello to 3 mbytes/second. If you don't realize that there will be a performance difference between a new mac laptop and some hardware that is a half decade old, then you're naive. No matter who you call 'Asshole', you won't get 100mbit/s out of a 5 year old IDE bus.
So, how do we fix this? By either putting in a new IDE card, or RAID. Lets buy a nice card that does everything in hardware. The ATA-100 specifications gives us more then enough speed to match the hard drive. A RAID card allows us to combine hard drives and increase the maximum data transfer rate. However, we have a 132MB/s limit on the PCI bus (32 bit 33mhz bus). This should be fast enough to max out an ethernet network (even gigabit) or firewire.
Up to now, this looks like building a bloody file server, doesn't it? Figuring out bandwidth and speeds of the components. *Slap* There goes your 'similar' complaint. In fact, some ethernet-based NAS are nothing more x86 Hardware and a custom BSD system. (Yes, I know SANs and NASes are different, but the storage media tends to be the same.)
You can't replace the PCI bus, so if you're using a pentium based system, you're limited to 132mb/s, at peak efficiency. In practice, you'll get less then this. If the hard drive will be handling non-sequential reads (which it probably will), expect another drop.
Basically though, building a NAS is nothing more then building a file server, then instead of running ftp/smb/nfs/afs or the like, hunting down or hacking something to provide NAS over firewire. From a hardware perspective, this project is easy. Software might prove a challenge.
As for the weather outside, not all of us live between 45N and 45S. Some parts of the world are rather chilly this time of year.
GordianKnot (available here) helps to automate the button. Someone should ask the author for an 'idiot' button. Select the soundtrack you want, resolution, size of the finished product, and click 'rip'.
Of course, there are enough open source and free apps that could be automated, its not stopping anyone from making their own home-brewed gordianknot. To piss off the big guys, remember, make it a win32 binary with very easy setup.:)
My "fileserver" (also DHCP server) is a Pentium 166 with 32 megs memory and an old 10 mbit 3com509b card. Basically, $25 on ebay. A floppy drive was used to install linux (net install of Debian), then removed. There is no cd drive, and no video card in the machine. A 2 gig HDD is used for booting, and for most of the system files, and an 80 gig HDD is used for storage. (It was big at the time).
Running Samba, I can saturate my 10 mbit network with the machine. With tests done on a 100 mbit network, I reach about 30% use. However, the bottleneck is not the CPU or memory, it seems to be the onboard IDE. With a PCI ATA 100 card, performance should go up.
All in all, its a nice machine. Since its a desktop, it fits nicely under the printer it shares. An SSH server allows me to securely log in, change any system settings, and do updates. Its quiet, cheap, and effective. With only a power cable, an ethernet cable, and the printer cable, its neat. And did I mention upgradeable?
A hardware RAID-IDE card should cost me about $250. [Haven't tried software RAID in a P166 and I have no urge too.] That shouldn't put any load on the CPU, and would provide redundancy. Getty on a serial port would be nice as well. If I want to, I can also swap the drive for something bigger without worry about the system supporting it. With ext3, it handles power outages well.
Under 2000, there is the option to install 'Unix Printing'. A download gives 98 this feature as well. It will print directly via CUPS on port 631 of the machine in question.
apt-get install cupsys cupsys-bsd
[ Wait for download on 56k ]
lynx localhost:631
[ Setup my printer - a simple Deskjet 540 ]
[ Print test page - CUPS is now working ]
vi/etc/samba/smb.conf
[ Set printing = cups ]
[ Set printcap name =/etc/printcap.sys ]
[ Set load printers = yes ]
[ Set print command = lpr -P %P %p %s ]
[ Set a few other minor things ] /etc/init.d/samba restart
Download postscript driver
[ Wait for 56k connection - Could have used one of the apple postscript drivers that came with 98, btw ]
[ Install network printer under windows ]
Automating some of the work that a Sysadmin has to do won't make them redundant.
You sure? I've just heard of this new thing called perl, and its supposed to help me automate everything, especially if I pair it with a little known utility called 'cron'. I'm really worried that there will be no sort of future for *nix admins.
Slashdot Mirror
Most of the foods eat have been genetically manipulated the old fashioned way - Selective breeding.
Plants have been changed to have bigger yeilds that ripen at the same time. In some cases (such as corn) the differences between the domesticated version and the wild cousin is drastic. Plants also have been manipulated to remove genes that cause bitterness.
Animals have been changed to be larger, slower, dumber and to carry more meat on their frame.
The problem is that the words 'Genetically Modified' scares a lot of people (like the words 'Nuclear' and 'Radiation'). But there is a whole world of difference between transferring genes from two unrelated organisms and removing or enhancing the genes of a single organism.
I don't see anything wrong with enhancing already existing genes, or removing genes that provide undesirable traits in our food. What you find in the supermarket is different from what you'll find in the wild. Going back to the selective-breeding analogy, nobody has a problem with seedless grapes. There's not much of a difference between finding a random seedless mutation and making a seedless mutation.
Switching genes between organisms are another story. I don't have a problem with adding vitamins to plants that normally lack them. (Adding vitamin A to rice could reduce a lot of blindness, for example). Other cases need a closer look though.Then again, if you want to worry, probably massively dosing our livestock with antibiotics will hurt us more in the long run.
Just my 2 zorkmids,
Dasunt
Helium will raise your voice drastically. Most of us know this.
There is another gas, if I recall correctly, sulfur hexafluoride, if I recall correctly, which will drastically lower your voice. Of course, the gas in question is heavier then air, so to get it out of your lungs afterwords, you have to stand on your head. Was a crowd pleaser last time I checked. (Double check that gas before trying, btw, this was 10 years ago, my memory could be foggy)
I distinctly remember someone commenting on how they preferred EQ in Wine because they didn't have to run it full screen.
There was a win32 hack to EQ awhile back for windowed play, but I think updates later broke it. Which is rather sad. Not everyone wants to run their games full screen.
Er, wormholes aren't a SF solutions. Look up "Einstein-Rosen Bridge". The problem with such a bridge is that matter won't survive the trip.
Digging deeper into the hat of theoretical physics, we have a possible solution. What needs to be done is to thread the wormhole with something that sounds a lot like antigravity. This sounds like a SF solution, but there is no theoretical reason why a negative gravitational force shouldn't exist. Its a mathematically viable solution.
OTOH, this could be a pretty expensive solution. First you need to find or create a bridge and then stabilize it. If your race has perfected suspended animation, it might be the cheaper way to go from one system to another. Or maybe there's some other reason.
Its flawed reasoning to think "There's no ETs visiting us, thus FTL travel is impossible." Maybe we're living in the cosmic equivalent of a natural preserve. Maybe intelligence evolves beyond the need for physical bodies. Maybe there are intersteller laws against messing with the locals. Maybe hydrogen based life is the norm. Or life that can live in a vacuum. Or maybe we've just been overlooked.
Just my $.02
For Antivirus management, I prefer Norton AV Corporate. Its a little pricey, but does automatic updates without a reboot, and can be set up with a central server to distribute updates (good for lowbandwidth sites) and keep track of infections and other information on all the client machines.
I didn't get very deep into vinyl printing, but it was one of the businesses that my old place of work was doing.
The machine looks like a huge plotter. Say about five feet wide. Heavy, and very tempermental about the quality of ink it drinks. You feed it white rolls of vinyl, and it will "print" whatever you want. IIRC, it was identified as a regular printer under windows, and shipped with its own control program. The output, with a good enough image, is great.
Hey now, the h was my pet. Or perhaps I was its pet. Anyways, it was great, killing most things in one round by brainlessness. 20 @'s finally took it out. Oh well, a ?SoG dipped into a !PoHW removed all of the non-friendly h's from the game shortly thereafter.
Also had a grey D for awhile but a a blue T finally killed it on its third ressurection. Died over water, so I didn't even have a chance to get the raw materials for a [GDSM. Oh well, that's what a /WoW is for. Well, for that, and a blessed (MM to write myself another ?SoG to take out all those nasty L's.
This, btw, makes perfect sense to those who play. This is why you shouldn't start playing.
Google has a search engine. Its a damn fine search engine. It searches many a site, and caches them in case they are no longer there when you search. Its good for hunting down background information about systems.
However, where google really shines for problem solving is that it archives usenet. Guess what, odds are, your question has already been asked and answered. That's why a lot of people are upset about the recent spat of 'Ask Slashdot' questions.
Sure this will be the more expensive route, but drop cable (and explain that the reason you are dropping them is that they are monitoring your surfing habits), and get DSL.
If enough people did this, the company will what they are doing or go out of business.
After all, why pay for an inferior service?
You have to realize, everything on Win9x effectively runs as root. (As well as a lot of things on NT, but that's a different story). Last time I checked, IP Tables and any personal firewall software out there does port filtering/blocking, it doesn't try to prevent itself from being killed. No matter if its windows or linux, if its running on the machine with the right privileges, it can kill the firewall.
Now there are a lot of viruses out there that will try to disable anti-virus software, and more then a few will try to evade it by using obscure methods of accessing the system. From what I understand of win32 'real-time' virus scanners, for performance and complexity reasons, they can't monitor all system activities. They try to monitor the most common and the most exploitable. There is also a method of attack that tries to introduce enough delay in the realtime scanning so that the virus can disable the AV software before the AV software realizes something is wrong. Therefore, we see viruses that tend to be rather effective at disabling AV software. (Solution, btw, is to boot off a floppy and run antivirus software that way - F-Prot works well for that purpose).
Anyways, like the *Nix world, the solutions are not to run unneeded services, and to PATCH PATCH PATCH. AV shouldn't be your only line of defense.
Its probably because I'm reading an article on Japan, but before I actually took the time to read your sig, I thought it was kanji.
I have a theory that what geeks need is a large advertising budget. We need commercials on TV that tells our side of the story.
Imagine it...
View of a long haired pale man hunched over a keyboard
Johnny is a hacker. But he doesn't live in his parent's basement. He doesn't work for an evil foreign government. He's not part of a group that spells their name with numbers. No, Johnny works for the record companies. Under a proposed US law, Johnny will have the right to hack into your computer and break it. The record companies are very concerned with getting the ability to hack your computer - even though they aren't concerned about lower CD prices. They were recently convicted of overcharging Americans roughly half a billion dollars for CDs.
See, we need an agency to mix the FUD our way. :)
WinPT under windows will setup and manage gpg keys. Its a GPL'ed program that sits in the system tray and allows quick access to GPG functions. (Kind of like what later versions of PGP does.) WinPT's installation file includes a copy of GPG. WinPT + Mozilla 1.2a + Enigmail works well under windows.
Disclaimer: There is a bug (I've notified the author) where if you install winPT under c:/program files/winPT instead of the default c:/winPT, you need to set the path in options to c:/progra~1/winpt. The long file name with spaces support is a tad broken. :)
Why not have it just take n number of video imputs? Basically, instead of having 2 monitors, its possible just to have one screen with the same amount of screen space, but with two inputs. Then its compatable with any multi-headed capable OS.
Suppose it would be a niche product though. Be nice for saving space and avoiding the monitor borders I have now with my dual setup.
The client is a spammy piece of shit as well. The other day I was at NPR's website, and I decided to try out there RP stream. Punched a hole in the firewall for real player, and listened to NPR for awhile.
My version of RP is probably a year or two out of date, since I tend not to use it. Anyways, today, I checked my email, and there's a nice upgrade message from Real.
Fixed the hole in the firewall. RP isn't trusted with unrestricted access to the 'net anymore. If I want to listen to streams, I'll open it on a site-by-site basis.
What's wrong with Miranda ICQ? Its not skinnable, but otherwise, it seems stable, and has MSN Messenger support. People use IM's, and the default ICQ client is a tad bloated for memory size, and doesn't have MSN Messenger support.
I'll neatly leap over the question whether or not system admins are engineers *leap*, and address the problem of MCSEs.
As someone who is interested in both unix and microsoft systems, the current state of MCSEs is damaging to honest admins. A network is no more easy if its windows 2000. Setting it up may appear easier, since windows will try to hold your hand, but that doesn't make debugging easier. (In a way, its harder, since windows likes to hide scary information that has the potential to debug). I've worked with windows machines for 5 years, and I take pride in professional setups of workstations and networks, regardless of the underlying OSes.
In theory, the MCSE program is not bad. The business world benefits from being able to tell a professional Microsoft administrator from the boss's nephew whose professional skills involve setting up a half-life server. However, MCSE seems to be one of the cash cows out there, computer training centers and Microsoft is pimping out the certification for money. There are plenty of 'paper' MCSE's out there - people who have passed the test and have the certification, but lack the real-world experience they need.
Linux zealots shouldn't be smug, because as linux becomes popular (to the public and management), expect the same thing to happen to the Linux+ or RHCE exams. There is nothing preventing the schools that teach to the test for MCSE exams this week to teach to the test for RHCE exams next week. Instead of having poorly running windows networks, there will be poorly run linux networks. Instead of Nimda attacking unpatched IIS servers, there will be the latest $LINUX_WORM attacking unpatched apache servers. THERE IS NOTHING ABOUT LINUX THAT WILL SAVE IT FROM THE STUPIDITY OF POOR ADMINS!
Just my $.02
OpenOffice.org
Miranda ICQ
Mozilla
Putty
XNview
Audacity
TuxRacer
GLTron
Povray
FreeCiv
Kakepad
FileZilla
Xchat
CDex
All GPL (I believe), and hopefully I didn't include anything too geeky.
Well, either you're a troll or an idiot. Lets assume you are the latter.
From the article -
How about this: would it be possible to create a Linux-based disk-array with an IEEE1394 interface (Old P200, crammed with disks, software RAID, lots of RAM for caching, Firewire interface, looking/acting like a single disk to the outside world, storage device mgmt via web-frontend)?
Your reading comprehension is horrible. So is your technical knowledge. Let me educate you.
First of all, this guy wants to use a pentium 200 as the basis of the system. This places technological limitations on the system. For example, some pentium chipsets have a caching problem with anything over 64 Megs of memory. The kernel can work around this (basically by using anything above 64M as a swap file) but there are limitations to performance. There is also a limitation of how much memory you can put in the old pentium motherboards. If you're looking at a pentium-based solution, you're looking at something that's cheap and not appropriate for heavy loads.
Now what disks are you going to put in this cheap system? SCSI? Only if you have the brains of the anonymous coward that I'm replying to. On pricewatch, a 146 GB SCSI drive is just under a grand. A 120 GB IDE driver is about $150.
You talk about getting 100% speed between two laptops. Interesting. Not sure how that applies, since I'm willing to bet money that my packets traveled just as fast. If you're talking about bandwidth, we have a different problem. In a sustained read from a device, the limiting factors will be the HDD speed, IDE Bus speed, and ethernet card. Lets look at the HDD speed. Tom's hardware benchmarked a recent 120 GB HDD at between 20 - 40 mbytes/second. So, the hard drive should be able to saturate a 100 mbit/second ethernet network in a sustained read. Unfortuneately, when you run a new HDD over a 5 year old ide bus, the performance goes to hell. Say hello to 3 mbytes/second. If you don't realize that there will be a performance difference between a new mac laptop and some hardware that is a half decade old, then you're naive. No matter who you call 'Asshole', you won't get 100mbit/s out of a 5 year old IDE bus.
So, how do we fix this? By either putting in a new IDE card, or RAID. Lets buy a nice card that does everything in hardware. The ATA-100 specifications gives us more then enough speed to match the hard drive. A RAID card allows us to combine hard drives and increase the maximum data transfer rate. However, we have a 132MB/s limit on the PCI bus (32 bit 33mhz bus). This should be fast enough to max out an ethernet network (even gigabit) or firewire.
Up to now, this looks like building a bloody file server, doesn't it? Figuring out bandwidth and speeds of the components. *Slap* There goes your 'similar' complaint. In fact, some ethernet-based NAS are nothing more x86 Hardware and a custom BSD system. (Yes, I know SANs and NASes are different, but the storage media tends to be the same.)
You can't replace the PCI bus, so if you're using a pentium based system, you're limited to 132mb/s, at peak efficiency. In practice, you'll get less then this. If the hard drive will be handling non-sequential reads (which it probably will), expect another drop.
Basically though, building a NAS is nothing more then building a file server, then instead of running ftp/smb/nfs/afs or the like, hunting down or hacking something to provide NAS over firewire. From a hardware perspective, this project is easy. Software might prove a challenge.
As for the weather outside, not all of us live between 45N and 45S. Some parts of the world are rather chilly this time of year.
And that, sir, is why you are an idiot.
GordianKnot (available here) helps to automate the button. Someone should ask the author for an 'idiot' button. Select the soundtrack you want, resolution, size of the finished product, and click 'rip'.
Of course, there are enough open source and free apps that could be automated, its not stopping anyone from making their own home-brewed gordianknot. To piss off the big guys, remember, make it a win32 binary with very easy setup. :)
My "fileserver" (also DHCP server) is a Pentium 166 with 32 megs memory and an old 10 mbit 3com509b card. Basically, $25 on ebay. A floppy drive was used to install linux (net install of Debian), then removed. There is no cd drive, and no video card in the machine. A 2 gig HDD is used for booting, and for most of the system files, and an 80 gig HDD is used for storage. (It was big at the time).
Running Samba, I can saturate my 10 mbit network with the machine. With tests done on a 100 mbit network, I reach about 30% use. However, the bottleneck is not the CPU or memory, it seems to be the onboard IDE. With a PCI ATA 100 card, performance should go up.
All in all, its a nice machine. Since its a desktop, it fits nicely under the printer it shares. An SSH server allows me to securely log in, change any system settings, and do updates. Its quiet, cheap, and effective. With only a power cable, an ethernet cable, and the printer cable, its neat. And did I mention upgradeable?
A hardware RAID-IDE card should cost me about $250. [Haven't tried software RAID in a P166 and I have no urge too.] That shouldn't put any load on the CPU, and would provide redundancy. Getty on a serial port would be nice as well. If I want to, I can also swap the drive for something bigger without worry about the system supporting it. With ext3, it handles power outages well.
It works.
Under 2000, there is the option to install 'Unix Printing'. A download gives 98 this feature as well. It will print directly via CUPS on port 631 of the machine in question.
apt-get install cupsys cupsys-bsd
[ Wait for download on 56k ]
lynx localhost:631
[ Setup my printer - a simple Deskjet 540 ]
[ Print test page - CUPS is now working ]
vi /etc/samba/smb.conf /etc/printcap.sys ]
/etc/init.d/samba restart
[ Set printing = cups ]
[ Set printcap name =
[ Set load printers = yes ]
[ Set print command = lpr -P %P %p %s ]
[ Set a few other minor things ]
Download postscript driver
[ Wait for 56k connection - Could have used one of the apple postscript drivers that came with 98, btw ]
[ Install network printer under windows ]
That was hard. Think I need a beer. :)
Psiren writes:
Automating some of the work that a Sysadmin has to do won't make them redundant.
You sure? I've just heard of this new thing called perl, and its supposed to help me automate everything, especially if I pair it with a little known utility called 'cron'. I'm really worried that there will be no sort of future for *nix admins.