I thought it was going to be about an Open Source IDS/IDP (think snort or tripwire but more embedded-hardware-based and more adaptive).
That said, I think the real tipping point w/r/t OSS software getting mindshare and being a Big Thing is going to be via either simple devices running linux (mythTV setups sold cheaper than linux, for e.g.,) or when linux/freebsd gets a UI that is more MacOSX-like (by this I mean that you can do everything via GUI; current linux GUIs are getting closer to the simplicity and adaptability of MacOSX, but aren't going to be there for a while yet.)
Consider that most desktop systems are trying very hard to simplify things, and also consider how people raised with MS environments have trouble with a professional environment like MacOSX, just because it's not what they're used to. Not to say that it's impossible, just difficult.
one thing to be aware of on sparc machines -- and all linux-sparc distros have this AFAIK -- is that setting up the boxes requires you to include a sun disklabel (like a meta-partition that's the whole size of the disk). Debian is one of the few distros that will actually still work on sparcs (gentoo and *BSDs being the others that spring to mind). I've had more success and less problems with FreeBSD than Debian, but Debian does work just as on the x86 platform.)
So, they need the FBI to determine how the theft occurred, but they're sure it wasn't because their software has security holes?
You can be sure of ways it DIDN'T happen without actually knowing how it did. I may not know exactly where Cisco is keeping their current source code, but I can be reasonably sure that it's not in my pants, or on the moon.
and now you know why Novell was hated on for so long. Actually, if you used Windows+Novell (which you kinda needed to before AD, if you wanted any kind of sanity vis-a-vis networking and shares and especially granular control of rights) then the hatred goes more to MS: they did everything they could to make Novell as slow and shitty as possible on Windows (so as to make AD seem better in comparison.)
Instead of, you know, making their product better. Novell's mistake was setting themselves up to get the shaft; but microsoft were the ones fucking everything up.
I meant desktop applications in general, not speficically those; I've never been able to get rhythmbox to work without it sucking really hard, so I stick with xmms. I named the apps that I would like to see, but more apps in general ported to Solaris would be a boon for it, obviously. See the sunfreeware.com site for proof of how sun users need apps in a dire way (there's lots of stuff there, but it could very much use more stuff, imo.)
Sun's pkg management isn't that bad -- if you've used FreeBSD's package tools (pkg, NOT ports,) or Slackware's package tools (pkg_install, pkg_remove etc) then you pretty much already know what the pkg management is for Solaris. There's an apt-get style tool, called pkg-get (think there's a new version with a different name as well,) which works very similarly to apt-get in debian.
Hopefully this means more porting user-end apps (desktop stuff) over to solaris. In my experience, it's a lot more stable than linux -- probably the only thing that compares is FreeBSD, and even that is a maybe. Combine that with a more desktop friendly software set, and it's not a bad combination. KDE, XFCE4, xmms, mplayer, etc. The Live Sun Java Desktop was just Not As Good As It Could Have Been. A desktop that functions as well as Knoppix but from Sun? That would be cool. (maybe not a moneymaker, but certainly cool).
I would love to be able to practice more admin stuff on Solaris. With the exception of production servers -- which are not ideal "hey, i wonder what this does" testing conditions -- I don't have access to any Solaris boxes; I'd like to run it on a laptop but drivers are a fucking nightmare (yes, i know there are solaris sparc laptops like SPARCle but I don't have that kind of money to just toss around.)
My job at a university entails working with Solaris and migrating everything that's ON solaris OFF it, over to linux or BSD or windows or "anything but solaris". Management has lost faith in SUN in general and solaris specifically, and they want it gone gone gone. This is good for me, because I get to practice doing Cool Shit with linux and FreeBSD (FreeBSD being the only distro I've tried that doesn't require setting up stupid sunlabel partitions and lots of tweaking to get right: slap the CD in, install it, tweak it a bit and then forget about it. Even my beloved Debian wasn't that easy on a sparc arch machine.) At the same time, I'd still like to get more familiar with the Solaris way of doing things, for sundry reasons (more impressive skillset, more theory and better understanding of the internal workings of the OS, etc.)
I slapped the Sol10 beta on a single-proc netra that we found lying in a gutter begging for change, and it wasn't too bad. Of course, I haven't used it for more than 10 minutes, but that's the price you pay for having fun at work, I guess.
apt isn't debian-specific, so your comments about stable/unstable/testing don't really apply. The roll-back thing would be nice to have; and installing different versions of -dev packages might be possible with apt-pinning. I've never been interested in it so I can't say for certain.
i love debian, but am in total agreement with this post. consider also that suse/redhat can be retrofitted with apt-rpm (or yum or whatever it's called now,) if you really really really really want apt -- but if you're running this in production, are you really going to be using apt on the machine a lot? I know that apt-get is only really useful on stable machines for security updates and on testing/unstable for OS/bleeding edge stuff. Which, if you've paid for service, security updates should be part and parcel with the service. And if you're running testing or unstable in a production environment, you deserve all the trouble you will get, imo.
make a wiki out of your course. others have suggested making it a creative commons licensed thing, but if you make a wiki, users can pick and choose what they want to look up right-quick, as opposed to googling for a FAQ, then having to tear through the whole thing for the answer to their question; a lot of times, a user encountering a problem will not know what the proper question is. an example entry for permissions (on ext2/ext3 FS's) would link (or explain) lsattr and how some files can be immutable even if you're root and it's on a writeable disk/dir/location with proper permissions.
example configs with thourough documentation would be most edifying, of course. a friend of mine has a FreeBSD wiki (still a work in progress, i'm sure that when there's more content he'll want to make it more well-known, but for now, no link) and it's been quite handy and I've seen how useful it is to find something right away with no-nonsense answers.
I'm looking for lots of short how-tos and best-practices stuff (security, notably,) and not just "do this to that file and killall -HUP the service to affect changes" -- I'd like some theory behind some of it so that I can understand the whys and hows a BSD system is different from a Linux or Solaris box.
There's BSDWiki, which I contribute to now and again, but it's still early in that project's development and although I know a lot of linux stuff, I am not nearly as conversant in the differences between FreeBSD and Linux, and quite frankly, the handbook makes my eyes gloss over.
When you come back to reality, let the rest of us know, OK?
A system like this needs infrastructure of some sort. Note that the "free" programs that do this don't have much in the way of quality control, and you really can't trust the song that you download to be the song that you *wanted* to download. There's nothing to keep me from recording myself farting and belching for 4 minutes and putting it up on KaZaa or what-have-you labelled "Bjork - Medulla Demos - 01. (untitled).mp3". I'm willing to bet I'd get more than a few downloads.
Aside from that, barring a natural disaster, apple's itunes music store servers will always be available (I _think_ they get their backbone from akamai; i know their regular sites do, but I don't know about the music store itself. it would be weird but i wouldn't put it past them to distribute the load in a weird way.) KaZaa (or whatever) simply do not have the infrastructure in place to keep everything running all the time. For starters, they don't hold the data; it's a p2p network, not a client-server network.
Yes, CDs do cost 2$ to make (or thereabouts, I'm sure someone will be happy to correct me if I'm off) but people like to be paid, and that includes the people who sell the stuff to you, the people who ship it to the people who sell the stuff to you, the people who pressed it, the recording studio, the recording company that manages all that nonsense and lastly (very lastly,) the artists themselves. Not all companies charge exorbitantly; fugazi's CDs can be bought from the band's own record label for the outrageous price of 10$ -- I believe that's post-paid, btw. Did I mention that they've been charging that price for their CDs since they first started putting CDs out? That 10$ seems more realistic to me than your $2. But keep in mind that large companies want more than just enough to keep going. So don't expect Capitol records to make all their CDs 10$ anytime soon. They have shareholders to answer to, and when that happens, good intentions go out the window.
I use old intell PII's as goatee combs -- just long enough to get it neat looking and not really useful for anything else.
Re:UNIX on the desktop in 3 steps!
on
Linux Desktop Guide
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· Score: 3, Informative
I take it you haven't actually used a Mac OS X's command-line then. Hell, you can get a dual-proc G5 or an Xserve and use them as pure unix servers. Samba, apache, ssh, a large amount of things can be configured via command-line (the only things that come to mind that aren't able to do this are GUI-only things that it would make no sense to do via CLI anyway.) Probably the only thing that I can think of that's a bitch about OS X is that Java and it's browsers are a bit different on it. Fuck, you can install Fink on it and get apt-get updates and install unix/linux programs like GIMP or different shells (tcsh, csh, ksh, bash, whatever.)
But if you have a reason for saying that OS X doesn't have the power of unix in it, I'd like to hear about it. It's meant for a workstation or desktop, but it can certainly do traditional unix server stuff.
If someone knowledgeable is going to install it, I'd suggest debian sarge (or stable with sarge updates for a lot of apps) with an automated cron script to update stuff.
If the user is going to install it themselves, I'd suggest Libranet. It's a customized debian that has a lot of user-friendly stuff put in it (easy setup for PPP, Flash, fonts, etc). The updates are debian so you know they're gonna be around in a 3 years -- although note that libranet encourages users to use libranet repositories, since they customize their apt-get stuff for their distro (it's not a straight stable or unstable tree, I mean.)
Red Hat fucks around with their plans a bit much for my liking, and pay distros (like SuSE, which someone else suggested) are really good but you can't be sure that Novell won't trash suse or sell it to SUN or whatever.
yeah, i remember the first time I used windows and I had to install apt-win so that I could get security updates for my machine. It was such a pain to use cmd.exe and then edit.exe to edit my apt-win repositories.
If you have to install stuff that's no in the base distro (which AFAIK apt-rpm isn't) you're already asking more from a first-time linux user than you're likely to get. That sucks, but that's the way it is.
they kinda shot themselves in the foot by killing the free server-level product. fedora is not enterprise-level server stuff. hey, how handy, they have an entreprise product!....but it's expensive and there's no way to try it out without buying it. It's kind of hard to tell my management that linux is cheap when I need to ask him for a purchase order for RH Enterprise. We can afford it, because we're pretty big...but hell, we can afford FreeBSD and Solaris and Debian for the cost of a CDR and some bandwidth.
Re:_Did_ anyone ever get fired for buying IBM?
on
IT Myths
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· Score: 1
Whatshisface in charge of kernel 2.6 has apparently decided that cryptoloop is "kindergarten" and is going to yank it from the *stable* kernel tree. Now, textbook perfect encryption or not, it sure sucks for people using it in production.
If you're using 2.6 in production, you deserve anything you get, guy. I know companies still using the red hat 5.2 with 2.0 kernel (there's a company does that billing tracking for pay-per-view movies in hotels, for example.) I would consider anything that isn't very very far away from.0 (which the 2.6 IS NOT very far away from) to be beta at best. Maybe that's good enough for your desktop, and i'm sure that it has improvements that make the desktop better, but "ooh fast X-Windows!" isn't a big deal on a server without X11 on it.
If you're building a product out of linux, you are building it and you are responsible for supporting it. Them's the breaks. Oh, you want bleeding edge and you want someone else to support it? Fucking send Linus a big check and say "we'll pay you a gajillion dollars to do this and do it right." Of course, he might not do it anyway. That's his right. And your right is to look at the license and find someone who _can_ and _will_ do it or just suck it up. Note that it's the open nature of the software that makes that possible at all. If some secret windows API that SP2 hands out or modifies or whatver breaks your nifty new program, you can call Microsoft, and hope that one day they will fix it, or you can hire someone to try to find what the new API is expecting your program to do and fix your program around it, but that's going to be not fun and not cheap.
one of the arguments that i've read (online, can't give you a source because it was a while ago,) against linux/OSS is that it gives "Bad People" access to very good encryption and communication software, which in turn gives the US intelligence community a headache when trying to decypher it. I would be surprised if they weren't using something like PGP/GPG, but it's more likely that they're running it on a Windows platform.
Slashdot Mirror
That said, I think the real tipping point w/r/t OSS software getting mindshare and being a Big Thing is going to be via either simple devices running linux (mythTV setups sold cheaper than linux, for e.g.,) or when linux/freebsd gets a UI that is more MacOSX-like (by this I mean that you can do everything via GUI; current linux GUIs are getting closer to the simplicity and adaptability of MacOSX, but aren't going to be there for a while yet.)
Consider that most desktop systems are trying very hard to simplify things, and also consider how people raised with MS environments have trouble with a professional environment like MacOSX, just because it's not what they're used to. Not to say that it's impossible, just difficult.
one thing to be aware of on sparc machines -- and all linux-sparc distros have this AFAIK -- is that setting up the boxes requires you to include a sun disklabel (like a meta-partition that's the whole size of the disk). Debian is one of the few distros that will actually still work on sparcs (gentoo and *BSDs being the others that spring to mind). I've had more success and less problems with FreeBSD than Debian, but Debian does work just as on the x86 platform.)
how will I know how long we've been at war with Oceania?
You can be sure of ways it DIDN'T happen without actually knowing how it did. I may not know exactly where Cisco is keeping their current source code, but I can be reasonably sure that it's not in my pants, or on the moon.
Instead of, you know, making their product better. Novell's mistake was setting themselves up to get the shaft; but microsoft were the ones fucking everything up.
Sun's pkg management isn't that bad -- if you've used FreeBSD's package tools (pkg, NOT ports,) or Slackware's package tools (pkg_install, pkg_remove etc) then you pretty much already know what the pkg management is for Solaris. There's an apt-get style tool, called pkg-get (think there's a new version with a different name as well,) which works very similarly to apt-get in debian.
I would love to be able to practice more admin stuff on Solaris. With the exception of production servers -- which are not ideal "hey, i wonder what this does" testing conditions -- I don't have access to any Solaris boxes; I'd like to run it on a laptop but drivers are a fucking nightmare (yes, i know there are solaris sparc laptops like SPARCle but I don't have that kind of money to just toss around.)
My job at a university entails working with Solaris and migrating everything that's ON solaris OFF it, over to linux or BSD or windows or "anything but solaris". Management has lost faith in SUN in general and solaris specifically, and they want it gone gone gone. This is good for me, because I get to practice doing Cool Shit with linux and FreeBSD (FreeBSD being the only distro I've tried that doesn't require setting up stupid sunlabel partitions and lots of tweaking to get right: slap the CD in, install it, tweak it a bit and then forget about it. Even my beloved Debian wasn't that easy on a sparc arch machine.) At the same time, I'd still like to get more familiar with the Solaris way of doing things, for sundry reasons (more impressive skillset, more theory and better understanding of the internal workings of the OS, etc.)
I slapped the Sol10 beta on a single-proc netra that we found lying in a gutter begging for change, and it wasn't too bad. Of course, I haven't used it for more than 10 minutes, but that's the price you pay for having fun at work, I guess.
you mean like crossover office? made by
apt isn't debian-specific, so your comments about stable/unstable/testing don't really apply. The roll-back thing would be nice to have; and installing different versions of -dev packages might be possible with apt-pinning. I've never been interested in it so I can't say for certain.
you run your webcam from the command line? How'd you manage that?
i love debian, but am in total agreement with this post. consider also that suse/redhat can be retrofitted with apt-rpm (or yum or whatever it's called now,) if you really really really really want apt -- but if you're running this in production, are you really going to be using apt on the machine a lot? I know that apt-get is only really useful on stable machines for security updates and on testing/unstable for OS/bleeding edge stuff. Which, if you've paid for service, security updates should be part and parcel with the service. And if you're running testing or unstable in a production environment, you deserve all the trouble you will get, imo.
Sweet, sweet whiskey: Helping take the pain away since ...fuck, too drunk to remember.
example configs with thourough documentation would be most edifying, of course. a friend of mine has a FreeBSD wiki (still a work in progress, i'm sure that when there's more content he'll want to make it more well-known, but for now, no link) and it's been quite handy and I've seen how useful it is to find something right away with no-nonsense answers.
some?
There's BSDWiki, which I contribute to now and again, but it's still early in that project's development and although I know a lot of linux stuff, I am not nearly as conversant in the differences between FreeBSD and Linux, and quite frankly, the handbook makes my eyes gloss over.
A system like this needs infrastructure of some sort. Note that the "free" programs that do this don't have much in the way of quality control, and you really can't trust the song that you download to be the song that you *wanted* to download. There's nothing to keep me from recording myself farting and belching for 4 minutes and putting it up on KaZaa or what-have-you labelled "Bjork - Medulla Demos - 01. (untitled).mp3". I'm willing to bet I'd get more than a few downloads.
Aside from that, barring a natural disaster, apple's itunes music store servers will always be available (I _think_ they get their backbone from akamai; i know their regular sites do, but I don't know about the music store itself. it would be weird but i wouldn't put it past them to distribute the load in a weird way.) KaZaa (or whatever) simply do not have the infrastructure in place to keep everything running all the time. For starters, they don't hold the data; it's a p2p network, not a client-server network.
Yes, CDs do cost 2$ to make (or thereabouts, I'm sure someone will be happy to correct me if I'm off) but people like to be paid, and that includes the people who sell the stuff to you, the people who ship it to the people who sell the stuff to you, the people who pressed it, the recording studio, the recording company that manages all that nonsense and lastly (very lastly,) the artists themselves. Not all companies charge exorbitantly; fugazi's CDs can be bought from the band's own record label for the outrageous price of 10$ -- I believe that's post-paid, btw. Did I mention that they've been charging that price for their CDs since they first started putting CDs out? That 10$ seems more realistic to me than your $2. But keep in mind that large companies want more than just enough to keep going. So don't expect Capitol records to make all their CDs 10$ anytime soon. They have shareholders to answer to, and when that happens, good intentions go out the window.
about the 2nd disc (the LiveCD) thing: does it just boot the OS and drop you on the command line? or does it do X/windowing stuff a la Knoppix etc?
I use old intell PII's as goatee combs -- just long enough to get it neat looking and not really useful for anything else.
But if you have a reason for saying that OS X doesn't have the power of unix in it, I'd like to hear about it. It's meant for a workstation or desktop, but it can certainly do traditional unix server stuff.
If the user is going to install it themselves, I'd suggest Libranet. It's a customized debian that has a lot of user-friendly stuff put in it (easy setup for PPP, Flash, fonts, etc). The updates are debian so you know they're gonna be around in a 3 years -- although note that libranet encourages users to use libranet repositories, since they customize their apt-get stuff for their distro (it's not a straight stable or unstable tree, I mean.)
Red Hat fucks around with their plans a bit much for my liking, and pay distros (like SuSE, which someone else suggested) are really good but you can't be sure that Novell won't trash suse or sell it to SUN or whatever.
If you have to install stuff that's no in the base distro (which AFAIK apt-rpm isn't) you're already asking more from a first-time linux user than you're likely to get. That sucks, but that's the way it is.
they kinda shot themselves in the foot by killing the free server-level product. fedora is not enterprise-level server stuff. hey, how handy, they have an entreprise product!....but it's expensive and there's no way to try it out without buying it. It's kind of hard to tell my management that linux is cheap when I need to ask him for a purchase order for RH Enterprise. We can afford it, because we're pretty big...but hell, we can afford FreeBSD and Solaris and Debian for the cost of a CDR and some bandwidth.
If you're using 2.6 in production, you deserve anything you get, guy. I know companies still using the red hat 5.2 with 2.0 kernel (there's a company does that billing tracking for pay-per-view movies in hotels, for example.) I would consider anything that isn't very very far away from .0 (which the 2.6 IS NOT very far away from) to be beta at best. Maybe that's good enough for your desktop, and i'm sure that it has improvements that make the desktop better, but "ooh fast X-Windows!" isn't a big deal on a server without X11 on it.
If you're building a product out of linux, you are building it and you are responsible for supporting it. Them's the breaks. Oh, you want bleeding edge and you want someone else to support it? Fucking send Linus a big check and say "we'll pay you a gajillion dollars to do this and do it right." Of course, he might not do it anyway. That's his right. And your right is to look at the license and find someone who _can_ and _will_ do it or just suck it up. Note that it's the open nature of the software that makes that possible at all. If some secret windows API that SP2 hands out or modifies or whatver breaks your nifty new program, you can call Microsoft, and hope that one day they will fix it, or you can hire someone to try to find what the new API is expecting your program to do and fix your program around it, but that's going to be not fun and not cheap.
my proud what?
one of the arguments that i've read (online, can't give you a source because it was a while ago,) against linux/OSS is that it gives "Bad People" access to very good encryption and communication software, which in turn gives the US intelligence community a headache when trying to decypher it. I would be surprised if they weren't using something like PGP/GPG, but it's more likely that they're running it on a Windows platform.