LEAF supports booting from flash, hard disk, or cdrom as well as floppy, and can then pick up packages from any or all of the above or a network server.
The point to booting from floppy isn't to reboot every twenty seconds in some sort of floppy-drive torture test, but rather to boot from a media that allows hardware-based write protect. A more reliable hardware write protect can be achieved with CD-Rs, but not everyone has a burner or a CD-ROM in their erstwhile disposable router machine.
Hee-hee, I clicked on this article for the sole purpose of seeing if I'd be the F1rst P0ST d00d for LEAF.
Seriously, LEAF distributions are one of the best ways available to secure a network. Floppy-sized distribution, pre-made disk images, scripted configuration, and no need for read-write media. They run from RAM disk, don't install things you don't need, support boot from CD-ROM, flash disk, floppy, zip drive, or network, support backup of configuration files only if you're booting from non-writable media... I could go on for a long time, but check out http://leaf.sourceforge.net instead.
Your company is not likely to pay for a T1 or FT1 to the Internet - this can easily run into $300, $700, or more a month by the time all is said and done.
On the other hand, your company is quite likely to pay $100 a month for two residential connections using different technologies and supported by different vendors. In my neighborhood DSL and wireless are good options, in yours it might be DSL and cable or some other combination of choices.
Have a look at leaf.sourceforge.net -- Dachstein and Oxygen both support booting from CD with configuration on floppy, and having your root on RAM disk will help improve speed and reduce the impact of a machine failure.
There isn't a Mosix or Beowulf setup for either yet, but if they'll compile in glibc 2.0.7 and kernel 2.2.19 you're good to go. If not, look under the devel section for Jacques Nilo's work; he's been doing a LEAF distro which gives up the floppy-sized goal and uses the latest glibc and kernel.
Don't assume that the corporate laptops are any better on that front; my company-provided IBM T20 came with a couple of nice discolorations of the type you're describing. Funny, they match up exactly with where one's middle and ring fingers would sit if one tried to pick up the laptop by the screen with the right hand.
"Or where do you think the US would be today if the UN, Britain, and Russia had sent in peace keepers during the US civil war?"
Fallacious line of argument, though you might get somewhere by asking if Canada had intervened. In the mid-1800s it took two to three months to get news, people, or material from Britain to the east coast of North America, and Russia would be another month or six weeks. Financial ties were present but weak, the recent War of 1812 had not gone well from Europe's perspective, and Britain had plenty of internal problems to deal with.
Today, news is instantaneous around the world and trans-oceanic journeys can be measured in hours and days. Strong financial ties exist around the world, and the "first world nations" have decided that unified markets and globalization are good goals to try for.
Point being that the world is different now than it was. If you were trying to get the reader to question one country's right to send troops to another country, it might be better to come out and say so.
The license clearly delineates a maintainer role and specifies that Bram is currently that maintainer. When he gets tired of it, last responsibility is to hand off to another. Sounds familiar, doesn't it? And the model has grown this way because:
a) rule by committee typically doesn't work as well as having a leader or two. A well-chosen committee is great for bringing out all the angles to an issue so that the leader can make an informed decision, but making all the decisions by vote slows down the process and can create dissension among the members who 'lost' the vote. Having one person act as the decision gatekeeper with a "the buck stops here" responsibility level seems to work well for software projects./. readers welcome to insert all sorts of inappropriate analogies here.
and b), there aren't typically a lot of people who care enough about a project to take full responsibility for it. There may be a lot of people interested in patching it to scratch their own itch, but who wants to own or co-own the source tree? Patch integration, commenting, mailing-list moderation, evaluating the latest whiz-bang proposal to rewrite everything from scratch so you can support some buzzword?
"But appointing one person to make the "right" decissions what parts of "my" code should be handed over to him doesn't sound fair either."
I don't believe that's what the license says...
"If you distribute a modified version of Vim, you are encouraged to send the
maintainer a copy, including the source code. Or make it available to the
maintainer through ftp; let him know where it can be found. If the number of
changes is small (e.g., a modified Makefile) e-mailing the diffs will do.
When the maintainer asks for it (in any way) you must make your changes,
including source code, available to him.
The maintainer reserves the right to include any changes in the official
version of Vim. This is negotiable. You are not allowed to distribute a
modified version of Vim when you are not willing to make the source code
available to the maintainer."
I don't think so, no. A single TCP session will reach a "saturation point" when crossing a WAN -- I've been doing some modeling and tests that suggest it's around 40 Mbps for a North American coast to coast application (assuming 1% of packets is dropped and average latency of 90ms). The saturation is caused by the impact of latency on acks and the effect of dropped packets on retransmits.
Anything that decreases the amount of data to transmit helps a little, but if you want to replicate a delta of 100 Gbytes decreasing the data to transfer by a few percent is nothing to write home about -- you need multiple streams, which introduces some ugly complexity when it comes to buffering and reconstruction.
Just like Office? Maybe, at that... here's a little experiment.
Choose File > New > Brochure.
Write up a three column landscape-oriented brochure with text boxes and pictures.
Print it out.
Try to figure out why it's printing in portrait orientation. This will lead you through steps like printing to a postscript file which is still in portrait, and putting the document into portrait orientation, which does make it print in landscape, but with mangled formatting.
After this you might try to give the hapless user Windows in a VMWare box, at which point you'll find that VMWare and Trident CyberBlade iL don't play nicely together.
By the time you finish that process the user will have given up and produced the brochure on a friend's iMac or Win32 box.
Dictate that computing environments must employ a free mix of platforms and tools so that a single crack or worm can't be used to exploit the entire company/organization/network.
my kids were into BabyWow up to about 18 months, which runs (poorly) under Wine. On Linux GCompris, GLTron, GBreakout, Gnibbles, and the www.nickjr.com and www.pbskids.org sites are all popular (use Crossover to view those sites, the Linux Flash player is seriously crippled).
The best games are still for Windows/Mac -- haven't tried many of them on Wine. Current favorites for my 3 year old are Reader Rabbit and Lionel Trains. He played Jumpstart for a little while but got sick of it fast (good thing too, it was NAUSEATING).
In the server room, you'll be able to replace at least 70% if not 100% of the Windows computers.
If you must replace the desktops, you'll have a tougher task. If you don't solicit feedback and get positive response from the users, I'd tread carefully.
One way to ease the transition if you do whack the desktops is to provide a remote display service so that a couple of beefy Win2K boxes will supply the apps that people are currently used to -- that way you're not the bad guy, the support problem is centralized, and the performance is decreased enough that end-users will want to find Linux solutions.
VNC is an option in this direction -- there's also apparently a Citrix ICA client for Linux.
I think you missed the point... that ability is a great advantage once the problem has been traced down to a specific point (e.g. the kernel VM manager).
However, one cannot go to the core developers and offer them some money and say "please catch the next flight to Peoria and figure out why the database takes fives minutes to complete a dual-phase commit if the record is greater than 25KB in size."
The allure of a single vendor solution is that the vendor will provide you with just that level of support, regardless of whether the problem was hard disk, network, OS, RDBMS, SAN fabric, &c...
The downside is of course that while component X may be fabulous, component B may be mediocre and component J may be a completely subpar waste of space. The single vendor solution makes it very difficult to mix and match. Mixing and matching to avoid that component J makes it very likely that when you call the big vendor, they'll take one look at the system and say "component J is clearly the problem since we didn't make it and install it." Suddenly you the customer are responsible for troubleshooting, and laying off all that troublesome and expensive internal staff looks like less of a good idea.
Finish your degree, you'll get a lot farther with a four-year degree in underwater basket-weaving than with 3.5 years of theoretical physics.
Then, go do something you like. Be a DJ, paint pictures, write stories, go hiking, and find a way to make money at it. The challenge of keeping yourself fed while doing something you care about will be a lot more rewarding.
Definitely finish the degree though, it shows potential employers that you're not a quitter.
Is it just me, or is Slashdot really annoying to use with all the lameness filters and slow-down-cowboy filters and such?? I mean, I still read it for news, but posting is a pain and so I rarely do. Tonight is no exception.
I've put up some tips and things to look for here.
In short, you might be better off setting up two routers. TEQL might help with 1 router, haven't gotten it going yet.
HTH,
42U = 73.5" = 6.12' of usable space, plus a bit on top and bottom for stability = 7 feet, which is the standard height for a 19" wide computer equipment rack (again usable, actual width between 22" and 24"), though there are also lots of 9' models available so you can get a big patch panel on top of the stack of equipment.
The really interesting part is of course what happens when Joe User racks a home-made Beowulf cluster and finds out that his home's electrical system is only rated to 20 or 30 amps per circuit, with a 100 amp max to the whole house.
XFce.org -- mostly incremental improvements, as you'd expect from an aim of small and fast, but recently anti-aliased display is supported and a migration to the ROX filer is about to be completed.
I use pale blue (think Mozilla's modern theme) background and black text. A big readability change was to switch to non-serif fixed space fonts at least size 12. I tend to use Lucida Console and Tahoma on Windows, Lucida Console and Helvetica on Linux.
Dark colors are also helpful, and look good with the blue palette -- for wallpapers I use black and blue themes a lot. See http://www.monkeynoodle.org/screenshot.jpg if you care.
If you're generating enough Internet traffic to overload an ISA bus and an NE2000, I want your Internet connection. Granted this gear won't handle Ethernet at full utilization, but the majority of "broadband" home connections aren't going to generate much sustained traffic.
Another option if you don't have a closet or metal frames don't match your decor...
I got a large pine TV cabinet from IKEA and put all the hardware in it (four PC cases, UPS, hubs and laptop dock). I then have two small pine tables next to it with monitors/mice/keyboards on them and KVM switches to control multiple machines. Heat can be an issue if you don't have air conditioning -- I had to remove the back panel and put it near an outside window, and the machines are decased inside the cabinet.
Now if only there were a wireless KVM option.... Of course if I had wireless KVM I'd just put all the hardware in the garage where I can't hear the fans.
Slashdot Mirror
LEAF supports booting from flash, hard disk, or cdrom as well as floppy, and can then pick up packages from any or all of the above or a network server.
The point to booting from floppy isn't to reboot every twenty seconds in some sort of floppy-drive torture test, but rather to boot from a media that allows hardware-based write protect. A more reliable hardware write protect can be achieved with CD-Rs, but not everyone has a burner or a CD-ROM in their erstwhile disposable router machine.
Hee-hee, I clicked on this article for the sole purpose of seeing if I'd be the F1rst P0ST d00d for LEAF.
Seriously, LEAF distributions are one of the best ways available to secure a network. Floppy-sized distribution, pre-made disk images, scripted configuration, and no need for read-write media. They run from RAM disk, don't install things you don't need, support boot from CD-ROM, flash disk, floppy, zip drive, or network, support backup of configuration files only if you're booting from non-writable media... I could go on for a long time, but check out http://leaf.sourceforge.net instead.
.
OpenBSD is pretty easy, but ipf is pretty easy to screw up. A scripted interface is a good thing.
Your company is not likely to pay for a T1 or FT1 to the Internet - this can easily run into $300, $700, or more a month by the time all is said and done.
On the other hand, your company is quite likely to pay $100 a month for two residential connections using different technologies and supported by different vendors. In my neighborhood DSL and wireless are good options, in yours it might be DSL and cable or some other combination of choices.
.
Have a look at leaf.sourceforge.net -- Dachstein and Oxygen both support booting from CD with configuration on floppy, and having your root on RAM disk will help improve speed and reduce the impact of a machine failure.
There isn't a Mosix or Beowulf setup for either yet, but if they'll compile in glibc 2.0.7 and kernel 2.2.19 you're good to go. If not, look under the devel section for Jacques Nilo's work; he's been doing a LEAF distro which gives up the floppy-sized goal and uses the latest glibc and kernel.
Don't assume that the corporate laptops are any better on that front; my company-provided IBM T20 came with a couple of nice discolorations of the type you're describing. Funny, they match up exactly with where one's middle and ring fingers would sit if one tried to pick up the laptop by the screen with the right hand.
"Or where do you think the US would be today if the UN, Britain, and Russia had sent in peace keepers during the US civil war?"
Fallacious line of argument, though you might get somewhere by asking if Canada had intervened. In the mid-1800s it took two to three months to get news, people, or material from Britain to the east coast of North America, and Russia would be another month or six weeks. Financial ties were present but weak, the recent War of 1812 had not gone well from Europe's perspective, and Britain had plenty of internal problems to deal with.
Today, news is instantaneous around the world and trans-oceanic journeys can be measured in hours and days. Strong financial ties exist around the world, and the "first world nations" have decided that unified markets and globalization are good goals to try for.
Point being that the world is different now than it was. If you were trying to get the reader to question one country's right to send troops to another country, it might be better to come out and say so.
The license clearly delineates a maintainer role and specifies that Bram is currently that maintainer. When he gets tired of it, last responsibility is to hand off to another. Sounds familiar, doesn't it? And the model has grown this way because:
/. readers welcome to insert all sorts of inappropriate analogies here.
a) rule by committee typically doesn't work as well as having a leader or two. A well-chosen committee is great for bringing out all the angles to an issue so that the leader can make an informed decision, but making all the decisions by vote slows down the process and can create dissension among the members who 'lost' the vote. Having one person act as the decision gatekeeper with a "the buck stops here" responsibility level seems to work well for software projects.
and b), there aren't typically a lot of people who care enough about a project to take full responsibility for it. There may be a lot of people interested in patching it to scratch their own itch, but who wants to own or co-own the source tree? Patch integration, commenting, mailing-list moderation, evaluating the latest whiz-bang proposal to rewrite everything from scratch so you can support some buzzword?
"But appointing one person to make the "right" decissions what parts of "my" code should be handed over to him doesn't sound fair either."
I don't believe that's what the license says...
"If you distribute a modified version of Vim, you are encouraged to send the
maintainer a copy, including the source code. Or make it available to the
maintainer through ftp; let him know where it can be found. If the number of
changes is small (e.g., a modified Makefile) e-mailing the diffs will do.
When the maintainer asks for it (in any way) you must make your changes,
including source code, available to him.
The maintainer reserves the right to include any changes in the official
version of Vim. This is negotiable. You are not allowed to distribute a
modified version of Vim when you are not willing to make the source code
available to the maintainer."
I don't think so, no. A single TCP session will reach a "saturation point" when crossing a WAN -- I've been doing some modeling and tests that suggest it's around 40 Mbps for a North American coast to coast application (assuming 1% of packets is dropped and average latency of 90ms). The saturation is caused by the impact of latency on acks and the effect of dropped packets on retransmits.
Anything that decreases the amount of data to transmit helps a little, but if you want to replicate a delta of 100 Gbytes decreasing the data to transfer by a few percent is nothing to write home about -- you need multiple streams, which introduces some ugly complexity when it comes to buffering and reconstruction.
UDP doesn't warm my cockles.
Pulling drives off an IDE bus means shutting down the system which equals a pain in the butt. Maybe firewire would get around that?
Just like Office? Maybe, at that... here's a little experiment.
Choose File > New > Brochure.
Write up a three column landscape-oriented brochure with text boxes and pictures.
Print it out.
Try to figure out why it's printing in portrait orientation. This will lead you through steps like printing to a postscript file which is still in portrait, and putting the document into portrait orientation, which does make it print in landscape, but with mangled formatting.
After this you might try to give the hapless user Windows in a VMWare box, at which point you'll find that VMWare and Trident CyberBlade iL don't play nicely together.
By the time you finish that process the user will have given up and produced the brochure on a friend's iMac or Win32 box.
--
Dictate that computing environments must employ a free mix of platforms and tools so that a single crack or worm can't be used to exploit the entire company/organization/network.
my kids were into BabyWow up to about 18 months, which runs (poorly) under Wine. On Linux GCompris, GLTron, GBreakout, Gnibbles, and the www.nickjr.com and www.pbskids.org sites are all popular (use Crossover to view those sites, the Linux Flash player is seriously crippled).
The best games are still for Windows/Mac -- haven't tried many of them on Wine. Current favorites for my 3 year old are Reader Rabbit and Lionel Trains. He played Jumpstart for a little while but got sick of it fast (good thing too, it was NAUSEATING).
In the server room, you'll be able to replace at least 70% if not 100% of the Windows computers.
If you must replace the desktops, you'll have a tougher task. If you don't solicit feedback and get positive response from the users, I'd tread carefully.
One way to ease the transition if you do whack the desktops is to provide a remote display service so that a couple of beefy Win2K boxes will supply the apps that people are currently used to -- that way you're not the bad guy, the support problem is centralized, and the performance is decreased enough that end-users will want to find Linux solutions.
VNC is an option in this direction -- there's also apparently a Citrix ICA client for Linux.
HTH,
I think you missed the point... that ability is a great advantage once the problem has been traced down to a specific point (e.g. the kernel VM manager).
However, one cannot go to the core developers and offer them some money and say "please catch the next flight to Peoria and figure out why the database takes fives minutes to complete a dual-phase commit if the record is greater than 25KB in size."
The allure of a single vendor solution is that the vendor will provide you with just that level of support, regardless of whether the problem was hard disk, network, OS, RDBMS, SAN fabric, &c...
The downside is of course that while component X may be fabulous, component B may be mediocre and component J may be a completely subpar waste of space. The single vendor solution makes it very difficult to mix and match. Mixing and matching to avoid that component J makes it very likely that when you call the big vendor, they'll take one look at the system and say "component J is clearly the problem since we didn't make it and install it." Suddenly you the customer are responsible for troubleshooting, and laying off all that troublesome and expensive internal staff looks like less of a good idea.
Welcome to corporate IT!!
destroying everything you love about a subject.
Finish your degree, you'll get a lot farther with a four-year degree in underwater basket-weaving than with 3.5 years of theoretical physics.
Then, go do something you like. Be a DJ, paint pictures, write stories, go hiking, and find a way to make money at it. The challenge of keeping yourself fed while doing something you care about will be a lot more rewarding.
Definitely finish the degree though, it shows potential employers that you're not a quitter.
Is it just me, or is Slashdot really annoying to use with all the lameness filters and slow-down-cowboy filters and such?? I mean, I still read it for news, but posting is a pain and so I rarely do. Tonight is no exception.
So, I screwed up the URL above -- it should be http://www.monkeynoodle.org/lrp/LRP-Load-Balancing -HOWTO.html.
Sheesh.
I've put up some tips and things to look for here. In short, you might be better off setting up two routers. TEQL might help with 1 router, haven't gotten it going yet. HTH,
Lots of people run it on Windows.
HTH,
whuh?
42U = 73.5" = 6.12' of usable space, plus a bit on top and bottom for stability = 7 feet, which is the standard height for a 19" wide computer equipment rack (again usable, actual width between 22" and 24"), though there are also lots of 9' models available so you can get a big patch panel on top of the stack of equipment.
The really interesting part is of course what happens when Joe User racks a home-made Beowulf cluster and finds out that his home's electrical system is only rated to 20 or 30 amps per circuit, with a 100 amp max to the whole house.
XFce.org -- mostly incremental improvements, as you'd expect from an aim of small and fast, but recently anti-aliased display is supported and a migration to the ROX filer is about to be completed.
Case-sensitivity is a problem, and fixing it requires either brute force mucking or some extremely in-depth knowledge of sed and awk.
But the Default.htm thing can be fixed by telling Apache to include that file in its DirectoryIndex list and then symlinking to index.html.
in httpd.conf:
DirectoryIndex index.html index.php index.htm index.shtml index.cgi Default.htm default.htm index.php3
in your webroot:
ln -s index.html Default.htm
HTH,
I use pale blue (think Mozilla's modern theme) background and black text. A big readability change was to switch to non-serif fixed space fonts at least size 12. I tend to use Lucida Console and Tahoma on Windows, Lucida Console and Helvetica on Linux.
Dark colors are also helpful, and look good with the blue palette -- for wallpapers I use black and blue themes a lot. See http://www.monkeynoodle.org/screenshot.jpg if you care.
If you're generating enough Internet traffic to overload an ISA bus and an NE2000, I want your Internet connection. Granted this gear won't handle Ethernet at full utilization, but the majority of "broadband" home connections aren't going to generate much sustained traffic.
Another option if you don't have a closet or metal frames don't match your decor...
I got a large pine TV cabinet from IKEA and put all the hardware in it (four PC cases, UPS, hubs and laptop dock). I then have two small pine tables next to it with monitors/mice/keyboards on them and KVM switches to control multiple machines. Heat can be an issue if you don't have air conditioning -- I had to remove the back panel and put it near an outside window, and the machines are decased inside the cabinet.
Now if only there were a wireless KVM option.... Of course if I had wireless KVM I'd just put all the hardware in the garage where I can't hear the fans.