Linux firewalls and NAT routers were able to handle FTP and IRC at least as far back as the 2.0.x series kernels, using kernel modules that I assume basically forced state tracking on these types of connections. Other modules handle all the other major protocols like this (e.g. RealAudio).
LEAF/LRP/Dachstein do so automatically. I assume most if not all of the others you cite do so as well.
So, to answer your question, the answer is "no". Lack of support for connection tracking is indeed unacceptable. But 2.0.x and 2.2.x have tracking after all, at least where it matters.
Actually picoBSD tries to do just this, though it is based on FreeBSD rather than OpenBSD. Personally , I prefer LEAF in its Dachstein form, which is essentially what happened to LRP.
Theo (in citing their tendency to go bad) clearly misses the point of floppies, though:
- Read only media are a true blessing. You are never more than a reboot away from a clean system.
- Their unreliability makes them more secure, since if they go bad, the router just dies at the next reboot, which is ultimate security, however frustrating.
- They are only used every couple of months when you upgrade.
I wrote what was once widely appreciated as the most useful howto for using LRP. It is now woefully out of date, and I recommend Eigerstein or Dachstein, which are so well-designed that they don't need that kind of detailed documentation.
I can shed a little more light on the middle-recent history of LRP and LEAF. Two years ago, LRP was indeed the center of all linux floppy firewall/router activity. However, people were starting to innovate, and Dave Cinege (who owns the domain name) never seemed to find the time to update his own work or incorporate that of others. It was a running joke on the mailing list. It would not have been much work for Dave to at least put up links to the sites documenting and extending LRP, but it never seemed to happen.
For a while, linuxrouter.sourceforge.net (now changed to leaf.sourceforge.net) was a repository of all the extra work. Before that everything had been on a crazy collection of obscure personal websites (like mine).
Dave promised major updates to LRP, and then gave up on LRP and decided a completely new, cool project was necessary. This was around the time Tim McVeigh was executed, which Dave considered the murder of a hero or prisoner of war. Without getting into politics or morality, I merely note that it was the last straw for many people, who made a complete split and formed LEAF. I presume it was the rancor behind this split that keeps Dave from mentioning LEAF on his website.
Unfortunately, if you type "linux router" into Google, LEAF shows up way down the list -- maybe 20th.
IMHO, the people working on LEAF are dedicated and impressive. It remains far and away the best floppy-based router/firewall available. It is certainly the most actively maintained.
I've noticed that the more a parent spends time with computers, the less important they think it is for their children to use one.
As a parent who spends all day on the computer, I feel they are nearly useless as teaching aids (except for programming, naturally). That's particularly true for small children.
People who don't spend time with computers tend to (it seems) mystify them. Perhaps they think there's some profound skill in moving a mouse around.
This is one reason ASP works well only for big companies, like the big bank I work for. The contract for any ASP software we buy provides for code escrow, and us getting a copy should the provider go bust.
In addition, if the provider looks dodgy (e.g. Cygnifi) we will demand financial backup, or walk away from the deal.
Travel is not a particularly efficient way to gather this information. Here you can see that the USA, on an absolute measure, comes fifth, with Switzerland the only sizable country ahead of it. (Others are small banking specialists and tax dodge havens like Luxembourg.)
If you measure standard of living as "the amount of stuff you can buy given local prices" the the PPP numbers on the same chart show the USA is third, with no sizable country ahead of it. "Cost of living", which you cite, is best measured this way.
Now one could make a quite valid argument that standard of living really includes things like nice weather, beaches, elephants, or icebergs. Depending on which of those you chose, of course, the country coming out near the top would differ.
Note that historically, the USA is not always so completely in front. The dollar is presently overvalued by many measures. But it is a historical feature of the last several decades that the US is always near the very top by these metrics.
What is astonishing about this is that the USA is both so large and so rich. I would argue that gives us (I am a citizen) a much greater obligation than we currently acknowledge to help the poorer bits of the world, for example by hunting down malaria cures.
On a side note, to us non-native English speakers, that has spent too much time in Dilbert-land, "Sales engineer" really sounds like an oxymoron."
Leave it to a Nordic to apologize for their English, and then use a word that 1/2 the high school students in the USA couldn't define, all in the same sentence.
If he is choosing the best deal each time he finds a new provider, then naturally he is choosing the provider who, at that time, is cutting their margins the most.
Thus, each time he is choosing the one provider most likely to fail. Amusing, is it not?
It's probably worth noting that this works fine as an approximation, but that physically almost any medium will exhibit a certain amount of dispersion. That is, you will have not just
d^2 u / dx^2 = d^2 u / dt^2
but also a small diffusion term (size mu)
d^2 u / dx^2 = d^2 u / dt^2 + mu du/dt
This cannot be run backwards in the way the wave equation can. Essentially, it loses information, which will be evidenced by instability of your numerical scheme.
I'm curious. Given that neigbor communications are the most important, how do you network the machines? I mean, it seems that a useful design might be to have extra network cards in all the machines, to make overlapping network topologies reminiscent of the physical dependencies.
Or is th elatter to problem-dependent to make this practical?
Am I the only one who is bugged by the fact that the acronym IPN is formed like "InterPlanetary interNet"? Is the word "inter" important enough to form an acronym boundary, but occasionally too trivial to get a letter into the acronym?
How about Solar System Network (SSN) instead? Then a node on an asteroid still counts, too!
I yearn for the good old days when if you were talking about a keyboard and mouse, it meant Tom was trying to kill Jerry, who had hidden inside a piano. And Tom would play a damn good bit of Liszt trying to do it!
Would you believe I got a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Michigan without ever expressing a proof in terms of axiomatic set theory? I suppose if you have some real math education, you would. I see all sorts of people posting that "this is useful only for real mathematicians." I have news for you....it's not even useful for all of us!
If I need to know the proof of something, I go look it up somewhere that I know will have the right level of abstraction, and depend on me to know the real basics. This may involve looking up one or two subreferences, but they too will be more loosely stated. I don't need links to formal theorems that 2+2=4, thanks.
Where I see this having some applicability (and presumably the source of Wolfram Research's ire, cited above) is with machine understanding. To the extent that it is possible to make a machine "understand" higher mathematics through this sort of reductionism, an archive like this could be rather useful. I am pessimistic about this approach, though. Did anyone notice that there are no nontrivial results in the archive not pertaining to logic/set theory? That's because of the absolutely daunting amount of work in creating such a characterization.
I tremble at the thought of seeing, say, Wiles' proof of the Fermat conjecture in a form like this. No human mind could hold it all. So what use is this, really, to humans?
Katz makes this sound way too simple. Sure, it would be easy to say "sorry", even if the U.S. feels it's not at fault. It's not a problem of childish intractability that prevents the U.S. from doing so, but rather that there are times when apologies really must mean something. Like when you accidentally bomb an embassy, say. If the U.S. were to apologize here, when it's fairly clear their plane was not the proximate cause of the crash, then what diplomatic avenues would be available to them when they really did screw up? All those protocols exist for a reason, and they have been generally observed over the centuries because they provide a clear (to diplomats) form of communication between governments. Why do you think both the U.S. and Russia expelled dozens of diplomats this year after the FBI spy was found? It's a code, and I would hope Slashdotters can appreciate that. Incidentally, there is a good article at the NY times about this affair, making the point that the Chinese government lacks manoeuvering room as well, due to rising nationalism and a politically influential military. China is not a monolith, and there are factions pulling in isolationist and open directions. Sending the plane and troops back to the U.S. would do a lot for the Chinese economy, as well as helping to keep the U.S. from selling fancy Aegis destroyers to Taiwan, but such a generous move would have China's hawks demanding the leadersips' heads on a platter. This one will be interesting to watch.
It's probably possible, at the very least in theory, to separate two virtual machines more or less completely. You can simulate the BIOS, the hardware clock, the PRAM, the ethernet card PRAM, and all those other sneaky places that most people don't think about as writable areas of their PC.
Peripherals are a different matter. They had better be sure that only the insecure side is capable of sync'ing to the Palm Pilot!
Slashdot Mirror
Linux firewalls and NAT routers were able to handle FTP and IRC at least as far back as the 2.0.x series kernels, using kernel modules that I assume basically forced state tracking on these types of connections. Other modules handle all the other major protocols like this (e.g. RealAudio).
LEAF/LRP/Dachstein do so automatically. I assume most if not all of the others you cite do so as well.
So, to answer your question, the answer is "no". Lack of support for connection tracking is indeed unacceptable. But 2.0.x and 2.2.x have tracking after all, at least where it matters.
Theo (in citing their tendency to go bad) clearly misses the point of floppies, though:
- Read only media are a true blessing. You are never more than a reboot away from a clean system.
- Their unreliability makes them more secure, since if they go bad, the router just dies at the next reboot, which is ultimate security, however frustrating.
- They are only used every couple of months when you upgrade.
- They are low-power and have no spin noise.
- They are found on the cheapest hardware.
I wrote what was once widely appreciated as the most useful howto for using LRP. It is now woefully out of date, and I recommend Eigerstein or Dachstein, which are so well-designed that they don't need that kind of detailed documentation.
I can shed a little more light on the middle-recent history of LRP and LEAF. Two years ago, LRP was indeed the center of all linux floppy firewall/router activity. However, people were starting to innovate, and Dave Cinege (who owns the domain name) never seemed to find the time to update his own work or incorporate that of others. It was a running joke on the mailing list. It would not have been much work for Dave to at least put up links to the sites documenting and extending LRP, but it never seemed to happen.
For a while, linuxrouter.sourceforge.net (now changed to leaf.sourceforge.net) was a repository of all the extra work. Before that everything had been on a crazy collection of obscure personal websites (like mine).
Dave promised major updates to LRP, and then gave up on LRP and decided a completely new, cool project was necessary. This was around the time Tim McVeigh was executed, which Dave considered the murder of a hero or prisoner of war. Without getting into politics or morality, I merely note that it was the last straw for many people, who made a complete split and formed LEAF. I presume it was the rancor behind this split that keeps Dave from mentioning LEAF on his website.
Unfortunately, if you type "linux router" into Google, LEAF shows up way down the list -- maybe 20th.
IMHO, the people working on LEAF are dedicated and impressive. It remains far and away the best floppy-based router/firewall available. It is certainly the most actively maintained.
And no form letters, be orginial!
Like with our spelling?
(Sorry, I couldn't resist)
I've noticed that the more a parent spends time with computers, the less important they think it is for their children to use one.
As a parent who spends all day on the computer, I feel they are nearly useless as teaching aids (except for programming, naturally). That's particularly true for small children.
People who don't spend time with computers tend to (it seems) mystify them. Perhaps they think there's some profound skill in moving a mouse around.
B
If the programmer hates SPAM dont give them a job to sort mailing lists.
That's EXACTLY the guy I want sorting MY mailing lists.
This is one reason ASP works well only for big companies, like the big bank I work for. The contract for any ASP software we buy provides for code escrow, and us getting a copy should the provider go bust.
In addition, if the provider looks dodgy (e.g. Cygnifi) we will demand financial backup, or walk away from the deal.
Travel is not a particularly efficient way to gather this information. Here you can see that the USA, on an absolute measure, comes fifth, with Switzerland the only sizable country ahead of it. (Others are small banking specialists and tax dodge havens like Luxembourg.)
If you measure standard of living as "the amount of stuff you can buy given local prices" the the PPP numbers on the same chart show the USA is third, with no sizable country ahead of it. "Cost of living", which you cite, is best measured this way.
Now one could make a quite valid argument that standard of living really includes things like nice weather, beaches, elephants, or icebergs. Depending on which of those you chose, of course, the country coming out near the top would differ.
Note that historically, the USA is not always so completely in front. The dollar is presently overvalued by many measures. But it is a historical feature of the last several decades that the US is always near the very top by these metrics.
What is astonishing about this is that the USA is both so large and so rich. I would argue that gives us (I am a citizen) a much greater obligation than we currently acknowledge to help the poorer bits of the world, for example by hunting down malaria cures.
On a side note, to us non-native English speakers, that has spent too much time in Dilbert-land, "Sales engineer" really sounds like an oxymoron."
Leave it to a Nordic to apologize for their English, and then use a word that 1/2 the high school students in the USA couldn't define, all in the same sentence.
If he is choosing the best deal each time he finds a new provider, then naturally he is choosing the provider who, at that time, is cutting their margins the most.
Thus, each time he is choosing the one provider most likely to fail. Amusing, is it not?
I believe the original quote is
"I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy"
- Groucho Marx
One of my favorites...thanks for reminding me of it!
It's probably worth noting that this works fine as an approximation, but that physically almost any medium will exhibit a certain amount of dispersion. That is, you will have not just
d^2 u / dx^2 = d^2 u / dt^2
but also a small diffusion term (size mu)
d^2 u / dx^2 = d^2 u / dt^2 + mu du/dt
This cannot be run backwards in the way the wave equation can. Essentially, it loses information, which will be evidenced by instability of your numerical scheme.
Brian
I'm curious. Given that neigbor communications are the most important, how do you network the machines? I mean, it seems that a useful design might be to have extra network cards in all the machines, to make overlapping network topologies reminiscent of the physical dependencies.
Or is th elatter to problem-dependent to make this practical?
That makes it only about 58 days from now, if only we were traveling in the "right" direction.
...as if there were not enough discrimination against older programmers already.
Am I the only one who is bugged by the fact that the acronym IPN is formed like "InterPlanetary interNet"? Is the word "inter" important enough to form an acronym boundary, but occasionally too trivial to get a letter into the acronym?
How about Solar System Network (SSN) instead? Then a node on an asteroid still counts, too!
I yearn for the good old days when if you were talking about a keyboard and mouse, it meant Tom was trying to kill Jerry, who had hidden inside a piano. And Tom would play a damn good bit of Liszt trying to do it!
If I need to know the proof of something, I go look it up somewhere that I know will have the right level of abstraction, and depend on me to know the real basics. This may involve looking up one or two subreferences, but they too will be more loosely stated. I don't need links to formal theorems that 2+2=4, thanks.
Where I see this having some applicability (and presumably the source of Wolfram Research's ire, cited above) is with machine understanding. To the extent that it is possible to make a machine "understand" higher mathematics through this sort of reductionism, an archive like this could be rather useful. I am pessimistic about this approach, though. Did anyone notice that there are no nontrivial results in the archive not pertaining to logic/set theory? That's because of the absolutely daunting amount of work in creating such a characterization.
I tremble at the thought of seeing, say, Wiles' proof of the Fermat conjecture in a form like this. No human mind could hold it all. So what use is this, really, to humans?
Katz makes this sound way too simple. Sure, it would be easy to say "sorry", even if the U.S. feels it's not at fault. It's not a problem of childish intractability that prevents the U.S. from doing so, but rather that there are times when apologies really must mean something. Like when you accidentally bomb an embassy, say.
If the U.S. were to apologize here, when it's fairly clear their plane was not the proximate cause of the crash, then what diplomatic avenues would be available to them when they really did screw up? All those protocols exist for a reason, and they have been generally observed over the centuries because they provide a clear (to diplomats) form of communication between governments. Why do you think both the U.S. and Russia expelled dozens of diplomats this year after the FBI spy was found? It's a code, and I would hope Slashdotters can appreciate that.
Incidentally, there is a good article at the NY times about this affair, making the point that the Chinese government lacks manoeuvering room as well, due to rising nationalism and a politically influential military. China is not a monolith, and there are factions pulling in isolationist and open directions. Sending the plane and troops back to the U.S. would do a lot for the Chinese economy, as well as helping to keep the U.S. from selling fancy Aegis destroyers to Taiwan, but such a generous move would have China's hawks demanding the leadersips' heads on a platter.
This one will be interesting to watch.
I don't look for porn stars. They just seem to find me.
Just make sure your Turing Machine is running Windows 95.
Prob(halting) = 1.0
It's very easy to encode!
I agree, Cygwin on NT/2K is wonderful. Of course, I switched to using zsh.
- Brian
Is anybody seriously arguing that these types of questions don't affect people's decisions? What are they smoking in Utah?
Moderators, please moderte the above up. Scott McCloud's thoughtful books on comincs are amazing, and arefascinating even to non-fans.
It's probably possible, at the very least in theory, to separate two virtual machines more or less completely. You can simulate the BIOS, the hardware clock, the PRAM, the ethernet card PRAM, and all those other sneaky places that most people don't think about as writable areas of their PC.
Peripherals are a different matter. They had better be sure that only the insecure side is capable of sync'ing to the Palm Pilot!
-- Brian