I also don't know quite what he's complaining about. "Forced to use the package-manager"? Well, big furry deal. Better that there is a decent manager to be used, and that you use it, than that you have some kludgy mess where some files are owned by packages and some aren't.
This is, after all, what/usr/local/ is designated for. Stuff that really can't be packaged somehow (like, er, what?) can be built from source with --prefix=/usr/local/stow/, and then stowed from there into/usr/local, *where it belongs*. The entities in your PATH would be nothing but symlinks, *and* under the control of a package manager (stow is one such beast), *and* would allow for the arch-independent files to be easily shared amongst machines. The filesystem *can* be its own package-manager, but you need the functionality of stow around it.
I get the feeling that Mr Mosfet really doesn't have half a clue what he's talking about, and is just an old sales-droid unix-head who hasn't bothered reading either the FHS or `man dpkg` and doesn't know how to admin a box tidily.
And incidentally, his history is fscked as well: Debian has lead the way in FHS-compliance, *followed* by RH. (Cf how/usr/doc became/usr/share/doc in debian, followed by RH.)
Last I checked, it wasn't just the size, at all, but the whole POSIX-compliance/bourne-compat thing, anyway.
Besides, given my experiences with "bourne" on AIX/Slowlaris/HP/whatever, I'd be quite happy for the whole concept to die a horrible death, standardise on simple bash and have done.
"Alan is taking a different approach. He's not trying to show the world that breaking the law will get you in trouble. He's trying to show the world that people who obey the law are the ones being hampered."
I see. So I should really regard the Changelog as a joke and diff the sources for myself, should I? *bzzzt*, I have real live servers to maintain. If I don't get to know what I'm upgrading and for why, I won't use linux on them at all.
Alan, if you're reading, remember that you're in the UK, not the US, and don't pander to their damn silly DMCA "law" either as a joke or semi-seriously (I know kernel.org is in the US...) again.
The difference, speaking from personal experience of one datapoint, is that the `commercial' world employs monkeys who say "oh yeah, On Linux gethostbyaddr_r returns -2 in this case" whereas in the free world, in the next release, libc6 (note, not "Linux") will return a different code, and in the real world, people will not be so stupid as to hard-code the numbers by hand when there are perfectly good symbolic Esomething constants to be used instead.
Re:Can't they be bitten by their own pet law?
on
RIAA to DoS Pirates?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
"Doesn't this mean that the RIAA are now guilty of attempting to hack,"
The RIAA wouldn't know how to hack. Crack, maybe, anyone can be a skr1pt k1dd1e these days...
However, the implications of someone wantonly DoS-ing a company's connection because of an employee's (or, better, a wandering consultant's) illegally downloaded file, is phenomenal: you piss off a whole company, you get sued, very quickly, for DoS-ing them without good reason. IOW, it's very easy to miss the target...
Re:Sun was optimistic. So were we(the OSS supporte
on
No GNOME For Solaris 9
·
· Score: 2
"Sun made the decision to use Gnome during the happy times of "dot com". Those exuberant days are over."
Actually, no, life in the ".com" world does go on for some, it's just that the hype has disappeared, and we know that there's nothing special in a mere version mismatch like this "news" story.
Gnome is an open-source project, it is not a product that must be released on a schedule to fit in with Sun's arbitrary release dates. The real world's version numbers just go up and up and up, there's nothing special about them.
The smug response to this is "binary modules? well there you go then, vendor lock-in and all".
OTOH it would be quite a sensible thing for you to consider 2.4, and maybe junk the proprietary equipment, on the grounds that iptables is at least a stateful filter whereas ipchains was only an approximation.
"Now they are talking about 2.6. When will it end?"
Never. Development is good. Taking a flyer and running with something out of development (what package do you use that *hasn't* evolved since you installed it?) is your responsibility/problem/job.
Re:He SHOULD care about the competition...
on
Torvalds Tells All
·
· Score: 5, Informative
What if there is no "competition"?
Competition between MS and Linux is an invention of the markets, not a feature of the kernel's existence. At least, I think Linus is right if he thinks as much.
Re:Interesting Interview?
on
Torvalds Tells All
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
"Sure, he's not marketing driven, he said as much in the interview, he's only concerned about technical matters...Hoo hah, excellent..But we shouldn't try to pass this off as interesting."
In an increasingly market-driven world, I think having someone who knows to look at the job at hand without giving a fig for what others do with it is an "interesting" perspective. Try working as a consultant for a while, you'll see a lot of "don't care" attitudes around, but someone with that focus on what is going to happen is a welcome rarity. It's good to see `market' versus `geek' become separated out more; slashdot should take the hint.
"BSD" does not have to "hang on" to anything. Linux is not all it's cracked up to be - amongst other counter-examples, the idea of any OS dictating how much swap I *need* in order to run it really is pretty crap.
And you seem to have been living under a rock the past couple of years; intellectual-property issues are a defining feature of this phase in the maturing of the IT industry; without getting the rights and wrongs into the population's heads, the industry will go right down the pan. Even more than now.
Last, this `mud-slinging' says nothing about how much discourse there was prior to letting it slip, nor whether it was actively posted straight-off here on/. or this story gleaned from elsewhere.
Heh, yeah, you did well. I was a little worried that mine would've turned `we don't support that' on me.. I let him be, as he knew how to ask "MAC Address?" and not much else, while I got on with DHCP:)
If you get cracked, it's through your own silly fault. If that's because you believed M$loth and/or got the impression that installing software was a zero-maintenance task, you deserve what you get.
And don't try to play the 75-yo sympathy game, either, the rules are just the same: you get your box cracked, you're responsible for it scanning & spreading to other sites, end of story.
"many hi-speed companies ACTIVELY DISCOURAGE YOU from setting up your own firewall"
Mine didn't. Mine provided pointers to Zone Alarm for windoze users and said that security was the user's own problem in the nice little handbook they gave me. Then again, mine's in the UK so doesn't have to pander to the Great Unwashed just yet..
(Of course, it doesn't help that the guy they sent round to install it saw `zsh, spodzone 18:03 #' and asked `is that windows 2k then?', but at least it left me free to do the obvious with dhcp instead:)
What about them? If you manage to get one infected by Nimda, I'd like to know how.
What would be sensible would be sending the affected hosts a mail or two saying why, before actually cutting them off, of course. And maybe waiting while the mail is downloaded, or 48hrs max.
Additional point:
3. Not only can anyone can grab the sources for GnuPG and carry on from the last Free version, even if the government outlaws it, but the sources can be verified for backdoors and cleaned if need be; the only way around that would be to get all your keys generated by a government agency, but that could at best only be voluntary as there is a Free GnuPG out there that generates perfectly good keys as well.
And as you say, we can't expect criminals to play fair anyway, so legislation along the lines of escrow is guaranteed to do no more than irritate the masses in the mistaken name of the few.
Well, only sort of. In much the same way that CodeBlue is `IIS + NT + ?98?', you mean...
Point being, we all know RH is the most-deployed distro out there, and if you target the majority, you'll make a pretty big splash, regardless of whether that majority is running GNU/Linux, RH, or Windoze.
"More Linux means less viruses. Seems like ISPs would think that's a good idea."
You mean `fewer', apart from the fact that you don't mean that at all.
`More linux' would result in just the same amount of viruses and, more to the point, worms, because you've still got the same number of black-hats out there writing the things and the same number of real idiots who think they can admin their way out of a paper bag but are somehow exempt from applying updates. Actual choice of `most frequently encountered OS' has stuff-all to do with it: if you've not been totally asleep all year then you'll remember that January - March were full of Ramen, 1i0n and adore worms for linux.
"mp3" became a generic term for `audio file stored in a particular popular format' because of how folks used it. The dodgy authorities in the US (damn the lot of them) picked up on it, started getting mediaeval on people's asses, and mp3s started to get frowned upon. Then the hardware catches up and people start to think of real uses for it like in cars, mobile phones, etc.
OTOH it's still possible to go *back* to a simple view of what "an mp3" actually is, and use it as such - if you have a valid audio stream you want to get from A to B, it's probably one of the better formats to use, on grounds of compression rate for the quality you get.
We've had this rise of Ogg-Vorbis stuff for a year or more now; I suggest that people treat it sensibly. If you've got stuff to transfer or archive, use it by all means. If your `transferral' or `archiving' is to bootleg stuff around, please don't. Let's have one format that remains untarnished by misbehavious, please?
The X-files have sucked ever since they felt the need to make episodes about folks making films about the X-files. The `introspection' option means they've long-since run out of good ideas. ~Tim
-- .|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
Yes; qmail has its ways, FWIW so do the other MTAs as well. In short, you're looking for a way to host virtual domains, and to create mappings so that within one particular domain, certain users get handled separately (if any), and (optionally) all the other user-parts get diverted to one user.
I do the latter; all mail for two of my domains goes to me and I filter based on apparent destination. ~Tim
-- .|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
When you're at work, you're still you, you're just on work's premises using their gear. You have to respect *both* halves of `still you' and `their gear', though. This is why it's give and take: the only sensible kind of policy I've seen is one that says `we won't snoop and you won't waste resources'.
There's no need to get all stuck on one extreme ("it's the employer's gear!") or another ("you have privacy rights!") when there's a common-sense fair middle of the road to be taking.
Next issue please?;) ~Tim
-- .|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
`Despam'? YM `munge', that's the traditional term.
Anyway. I have to say I find Usenet is the greatest cause of spam around. Bots regularly trawl both From: and Reply-To: headers, so I get most of my spam that way.
I've found the best bet is to have complete ownership over your own (sub)domain; you can easily enough choose one or two real usernames at that subdomain to use for yourself, and then when you sign up for given services online, invent a single word (egg@, asserta@, slash@, aol@, chat@, whatever) on a per-site basis. That way you can track exactly where a given spam got your email address if you want.
I'm not convinced of the timing in the guy's article; I started getting spams to usenet@ my domain only a couple of weeks from starting using it; it wasn't even that long that the throw-away account started getting these things from/. as well.
The moral is simple: beware of what things you publish. Not only will advertising an email address bring you spam, but sticking your box in DNS as `www' will bring you loads of packets, and appearing in an NNTP-Posting-Host: header will bring you *loads* of news-port scans as well. ~Tim
-- .|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
a) stay uptodate - apply patches like there's no yesterday
b) use an IDS like snort
c) run logchecker and AIDE
d) use libsafe around net-listening daemons.
Then you'll be in the right league; whenever you get emails off these you're expected to *read* them, too.
Me, I'm getting portmapper, FTP and DNS in approximately that order; I've also had quite a few telnet scans following the recent vulnerability in telnetd as well. ~Tim
-- .|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed.
/usr/local/ is designated for. Stuff that really can't be packaged somehow (like, er, what?) can be built from source with --prefix=/usr/local/stow/, and then stowed from there into /usr/local, *where it belongs*. The entities in your PATH would be nothing but symlinks, *and* under the control of a package manager (stow is one such beast), *and* would allow for the arch-independent files to be easily shared amongst machines. The filesystem *can* be its own package-manager, but you need the functionality of stow around it.
/usr/doc became /usr/share/doc in debian, followed by RH.)
I also don't know quite what he's complaining about. "Forced to use the package-manager"? Well, big furry deal. Better that there is a decent manager to be used, and that you use it, than that you have some kludgy mess where some files are owned by packages and some aren't.
This is, after all, what
I get the feeling that Mr Mosfet really doesn't have half a clue what he's talking about, and is just an old sales-droid unix-head who hasn't bothered reading either the FHS or `man dpkg` and doesn't know how to admin a box tidily.
And incidentally, his history is fscked as well: Debian has lead the way in FHS-compliance, *followed* by RH. (Cf how
"You think the average Joe will trust a computer to fly them?"
The point is, the `average Joe' will not be flying them, a more capable computer will be instead.
Last I checked, it wasn't just the size, at all, but the whole POSIX-compliance/bourne-compat thing, anyway.
Besides, given my experiences with "bourne" on AIX/Slowlaris/HP/whatever, I'd be quite happy for the whole concept to die a horrible death, standardise on simple bash and have done.
"Alan is taking a different approach. He's not trying to show the world that breaking the law will get you in trouble. He's trying to show the world that people who obey the law are the ones being hampered."
I see. So I should really regard the Changelog as a joke and diff the sources for myself, should I? *bzzzt*, I have real live servers to maintain. If I don't get to know what I'm upgrading and for why, I won't use linux on them at all.
Alan, if you're reading, remember that you're in the UK, not the US, and don't pander to their damn silly DMCA "law" either as a joke or semi-seriously (I know kernel.org is in the US...) again.
The difference, speaking from personal experience of one datapoint, is that the `commercial' world employs monkeys who say "oh yeah, On Linux gethostbyaddr_r returns -2 in this case" whereas in the free world, in the next release, libc6 (note, not "Linux") will return a different code, and in the real world, people will not be so stupid as to hard-code the numbers by hand when there are perfectly good symbolic Esomething constants to be used instead.
"Doesn't this mean that the RIAA are now guilty of attempting to hack,"
The RIAA wouldn't know how to hack. Crack, maybe, anyone can be a skr1pt k1dd1e these days...
However, the implications of someone wantonly DoS-ing a company's connection because of an employee's (or, better, a wandering consultant's) illegally downloaded file, is phenomenal: you piss off a whole company, you get sued, very quickly, for DoS-ing them without good reason. IOW, it's very easy to miss the target...
"Sun made the decision to use Gnome during the happy times of "dot com". Those exuberant days are over."
Actually, no, life in the ".com" world does go on for some, it's just that the hype has disappeared, and we know that there's nothing special in a mere version mismatch like this "news" story.
Gnome is an open-source project, it is not a product that must be released on a schedule to fit in with Sun's arbitrary release dates. The real world's version numbers just go up and up and up, there's nothing special about them.
The smug response to this is "binary modules? well there you go then, vendor lock-in and all".
OTOH it would be quite a sensible thing for you to consider 2.4, and maybe junk the proprietary equipment, on the grounds that iptables is at least a stateful filter whereas ipchains was only an approximation.
"Now they are talking about 2.6. When will it end?"
Never. Development is good. Taking a flyer and running with something out of development (what package do you use that *hasn't* evolved since you installed it?) is your responsibility/problem/job.
What if there is no "competition"?
Competition between MS and Linux is an invention of the markets, not a feature of the kernel's existence. At least, I think Linus is right if he thinks as much.
"Sure, he's not marketing driven, he said as much in the interview, he's only concerned about technical matters...Hoo hah, excellent..But we shouldn't try to pass this off as interesting."
In an increasingly market-driven world, I think having someone who knows to look at the job at hand without giving a fig for what others do with it is an "interesting" perspective. Try working as a consultant for a while, you'll see a lot of "don't care" attitudes around, but someone with that focus on what is going to happen is a welcome rarity. It's good to see `market' versus `geek' become separated out more; slashdot should take the hint.
"BSD" does not have to "hang on" to anything. Linux is not all it's cracked up to be - amongst other counter-examples, the idea of any OS dictating how much swap I *need* in order to run it really is pretty crap.
/. or this story gleaned from elsewhere.
And you seem to have been living under a rock the past couple of years; intellectual-property issues are a defining feature of this phase in the maturing of the IT industry; without getting the rights and wrongs into the population's heads, the industry will go right down the pan. Even more than now.
Last, this `mud-slinging' says nothing about how much discourse there was prior to letting it slip, nor whether it was actively posted straight-off here on
Heh, yeah, you did well. I was a little worried that mine would've turned `we don't support that' on me.. I let him be, as he knew how to ask "MAC Address?" and not much else, while I got on with DHCP :)
Bollocks.
If you get cracked, it's through your own silly fault. If that's because you believed M$loth and/or got the impression that installing software was a zero-maintenance task, you deserve what you get.
And don't try to play the 75-yo sympathy game, either, the rules are just the same: you get your box cracked, you're responsible for it scanning & spreading to other sites, end of story.
"many hi-speed companies ACTIVELY DISCOURAGE YOU from setting up your own firewall"
:)
Mine didn't. Mine provided pointers to Zone Alarm for windoze users and said that security was the user's own problem in the nice little handbook they gave me. Then again, mine's in the UK so doesn't have to pander to the Great Unwashed just yet..
(Of course, it doesn't help that the guy they sent round to install it saw `zsh, spodzone 18:03 #' and asked `is that windows 2k then?', but at least it left me free to do the obvious with dhcp instead
What about them? If you manage to get one infected by Nimda, I'd like to know how.
What would be sensible would be sending the affected hosts a mail or two saying why, before actually cutting them off, of course. And maybe waiting while the mail is downloaded, or 48hrs max.
Additional point:
3. Not only can anyone can grab the sources for GnuPG and carry on from the last Free version, even if the government outlaws it, but the sources can be verified for backdoors and cleaned if need be; the only way around that would be to get all your keys generated by a government agency, but that could at best only be voluntary as there is a Free GnuPG out there that generates perfectly good keys as well.
And as you say, we can't expect criminals to play fair anyway, so legislation along the lines of escrow is guaranteed to do no more than irritate the masses in the mistaken name of the few.
> Redhat you mean
Well, only sort of. In much the same way that CodeBlue is `IIS + NT + ?98?', you mean...
Point being, we all know RH is the most-deployed distro out there, and if you target the majority, you'll make a pretty big splash, regardless of whether that majority is running GNU/Linux, RH, or Windoze.
Thanks for reiterating that....
"More Linux means less viruses. Seems like ISPs would think that's a good idea."
You mean `fewer', apart from the fact that you don't mean that at all.
`More linux' would result in just the same amount of viruses and, more to the point, worms, because you've still got the same number of black-hats out there writing the things and the same number of real idiots who think they can admin their way out of a paper bag but are somehow exempt from applying updates. Actual choice of `most frequently encountered OS' has stuff-all to do with it: if you've not been totally asleep all year then you'll remember that January - March were full of Ramen, 1i0n and adore worms for linux.
Think homogeneity.
"mp3" became a generic term for `audio file stored in a particular popular format' because of how folks used it. The dodgy authorities in the US (damn the lot of them) picked up on it, started getting mediaeval on people's asses, and mp3s started to get frowned upon. Then the hardware catches up and people start to think of real uses for it like in cars, mobile phones, etc.
OTOH it's still possible to go *back* to a simple view of what "an mp3" actually is, and use it as such - if you have a valid audio stream you want to get from A to B, it's probably one of the better formats to use, on grounds of compression rate for the quality you get.
We've had this rise of Ogg-Vorbis stuff for a year or more now; I suggest that people treat it sensibly. If you've got stuff to transfer or archive, use it by all means. If your `transferral' or `archiving' is to bootleg stuff around, please don't. Let's have one format that remains untarnished by misbehavious, please?
The X-files have sucked ever since they felt the need to make episodes about folks making films about the X-files. The `introspection' option means they've long-since run out of good ideas.
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
~Tim
--
Yes; qmail has its ways, FWIW so do the other MTAs as well. In short, you're looking for a way to host virtual domains, and to create mappings so that within one particular domain, certain users get handled separately (if any), and (optionally) all the other user-parts get diverted to one user.
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
I do the latter; all mail for two of my domains goes to me and I filter based on apparent destination.
~Tim
--
You appear to be avoiding half the issue.
;)
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
When you're at work, you're still you, you're just on work's premises using their gear. You have to respect *both* halves of `still you' and `their gear', though. This is why it's give and take: the only sensible kind of policy I've seen is one that says `we won't snoop and you won't waste resources'.
There's no need to get all stuck on one extreme ("it's the employer's gear!") or another ("you have privacy rights!") when there's a common-sense fair middle of the road to be taking.
Next issue please?
~Tim
--
`Despam'? YM `munge', that's the traditional term.
/. as well.
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
Anyway. I have to say I find Usenet is the greatest cause of spam around. Bots regularly trawl both From: and Reply-To: headers, so I get most of my spam that way.
I've found the best bet is to have complete ownership over your own (sub)domain; you can easily enough choose one or two real usernames at that subdomain to use for yourself, and then when you sign up for given services online, invent a single word (egg@, asserta@, slash@, aol@, chat@, whatever) on a per-site basis. That way you can track exactly where a given spam got your email address if you want.
I'm not convinced of the timing in the guy's article; I started getting spams to usenet@ my domain only a couple of weeks from starting using it; it wasn't even that long that the throw-away account started getting these things from
The moral is simple: beware of what things you publish. Not only will advertising an email address bring you spam, but sticking your box in DNS as `www' will bring you loads of packets, and appearing in an NNTP-Posting-Host: header will bring you *loads* of news-port scans as well.
~Tim
--
Yes, that's a good philosophical position..
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
I'm just wondering, if there's a "formula" for the n'th bit of the thing, it *can't* be random, can it?
For values of `random' that mean `uncompressible' of course, it can probably rate pretty highly.
~Tim
--
You're missing 4 things ;)
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
a) stay uptodate - apply patches like there's no yesterday
b) use an IDS like snort
c) run logchecker and AIDE
d) use libsafe around net-listening daemons.
Then you'll be in the right league; whenever you get emails off these you're expected to *read* them, too.
Me, I'm getting portmapper, FTP and DNS in approximately that order; I've also had quite a few telnet scans following the recent vulnerability in telnetd as well.
~Tim
--