I'm a sys admin/manager for a community college in Delaware (er, the only one!). We use slirp extensively. Why on earth for?
7 years ago, we got 20 dial-in analog lines for our userbase of 255 CIS students. Now we have 16,000 students (all students get e-mail now of course, not just CIS), but still have 20 lines.
Why? The college doesn't want to get into the ISP business. It's expensive and most students have ISP accounts of their own anyway. It's a decision I supported 100%.
But there's always the poorer students who gets screwed by policies like this. So we maintain shell access for those students to get their e-mail and -- if they can figure it out -- allow them to use SLiRP to get something approaching a PPP line.
We put up a web page explaining the steps in getting it to work, but specify that we don't support it. This way, the student who isn't burdened with a lot of cash but has half a brain can get equal access to the net at no cost.
So far, policy works fine. Most students use their own ISP, and our 20 lines don't get maxed out, but most of those that DO use it, are running slirp.
It'd be nice to see it maintained. I've seen cases where it drops the last byte of an FTP transfer and haven't been able to figure out why, for example. (We run DG/UX boxes here, might be an OS compatability issue... Also, DG/UX doesn't have a pppd that will work on a non-serial connection, ruling out that...)
Now the next slirp question I'm sure to hear is -- can it be hacked to work with Dreamcast? Beings I just bought one this morning and my first analysis of it -- answer is no. Doesn't seem to support a connection script... just PAP or CHAP I suppose...:-(
Finally is an interesting idea that has been proposed a few times that I just wanted to throw out for discussion. As it stands, you only see the moderator controls when you have moderator points to use. What if the moderator controls were always visible, but when you submitted the form, they were only counted if you had moderator points. Oh, and you wouldn't know if you had points.
PLEASE don't do this. Whenever I get moderator points, I spend a helluva lot of time reading stuff at -1 and make a real effort to be fair and thorough. If this suggestion was implemented and I just appeared to have access, but didn't know for sure, I just wouldn't bother at all.
I hate to sound snotty, but I am a technical services manager, have a lot of experience in NT and Linux, have a lot to offer, but I do NOT have time to sit around and waste.
If you occasionally want me to moderate, fine. I will, I will take it very seriously, and I will be honored by the privilege.
But please don't jerk me around. It'll get old fast...
At IBM, they monitor everything you get, every site you visit and if you go porn surfing then they fire you.
What if you make a typo and end up at some porn palace by mistake, and then as you keep hitting the back button and close box, more port sites keep popping up?
There's a lot of pr0n sites that get close to a real site's spelling just to trick you. Some I've stumbled into include icrosoft.com and licos.com
Let's see. Since this new backbone will be capable of transmitting the content of digital music, the next step will be for the Canadians to tax it at the rate of $132/second since you'll be capable of transferring about 14 audio CDs a second.
And that is at uncompressed rates!
Damn Canadians, them with their floppy little heads and beady little eyes. BLAME CANADA!
I understand the concept, but there's an amount of lag time between when a DNS change is made and it progates through everyone's DNS cache.
For example: If slashdot.org was on some net that used DDNS and it was rebooted and got a different IP address on the way up, it'd take a while before other nets would flush the old info from their cache and get the new address. Correct?
Or is it set to have a VERY short cache time, causing every lookup to hit the main server instead of being cached locally.
Sounds like a good idea. I'm just curious about the implementation.
In Philadephia, the Spectrum II concert hall and arena was later named the CoreStates Center. After they got bought out, it got renamed to the First Union center. Now all of the D.J's on local radio simply refer to it as the F.U. Center.
I guess it could be worse. At least it isn't affiliated with First Union -- the worst credit card company in the world.
Would have been neater and more appropriate if they got one via a 100% Internet Bank, like Security First Network Bank (www.sfnb.com). I've had all my accounts with them for over three years now, and can pay bills, move balances, etc, all on the web.
I didn't see mention of it, but I'd sure hope you can manage and pay your Linux MasterCard account on-line. We are nerds after all..
As a system manager, I was floored when a user from a department that we had just purchased Visual Basic 5 came to me and said we also had to buy VB4. (We had skipped a version and went straight from 3 to 5).
I was in total disbelief. He was telling me that VB5 would not read in any of their VB3 programs. They had to first import it into VB4, and then take that and move it to VB5.
I, of course, thought the person was nuts and out of their mind. I have no VB experience but do realise that they have project files and such. The fact that it will only read its own version and the one before it, however, still has me shaking my head in disbelief.
Is this really true? I really didn't have time to argue with the user, so they got their VB4.
Of course, when VB6 came out, we had to upgrade and not skip a version again...:-(
What good is that windows2000test site? I simply tried viewing it with Netscape, got a javascript error, and the page was unreadable.
First impression (from a user viewpoint): Looks like IIS on w2k is a piece of shit. Guess you just have to upgrade to w2k client with IE5 to access an w2k IIS site! flock() the rest of the non-Microsoft world I guess...
The sales tax concept is not evil. What's evil is that they are used in addition to a plethora of other ways to get your money.
The ideal tax would be a U.S. wide national sales tax or VAT/GST *BUT* with also eliminate income taxes. Then everyone would have to pay their fair share, including drug dealers who buy tacky gold-trimmed BMWs, foreigners (take that, I have to pay VAT when I go to your country) and rich ass holes that think nothing of spendng $80K on basic transportation.
Rule #1: Never trust a politician
Example: Steve Forbes wants a flat income tax. But guess what? His plan just taxes wages and my ole my, rich old fucks like Steve Forbes have *ZERO* income from wages. All of his income comes from inheritance, capital gains, and other investment income. Under his plan, none of that would be taxable.
But bottom line, an Internet Sales Tax isevil and stupid as sin because we are taxed every which way there can be, it ignores the international nature of the net (US politicians still haven't figured this out), is probably unconstitutional, and poor jerks in states like Tennessee with very high sales taxes as it is would get nailed twice for a purchase made instate.
You won't believe this, but I am being harrassed about the opposite. I have javascript code at the top of my site pages to keep them from being stuck in someone else's frame.
So this idiot writes a threatening e-mail to me because his site wants to refer people to my site (bus schedules) and keep a frame up top with their advertisements in it. Their reasoning is that they are driving traffic to my site, so they have a right to show advertisements around it. They are upset that I won't allow that.
Clueless idiots. Of course, if he had any brains, he could write a LWP perl script to just grab my content and embed it into his pages.
So the same with Universal. Plenty of technical solutions to prevent your pages from being pirated, as well as to pirate other pages.
I have Ultra-DMA66 working on two systems with Promise controllers. There is no support in the 2.2.x kernels yet. You have to patch it in. Wasn't that tough at all.
See the mini-HOWTO entitled "Ultra-DMA mini-HOWTO" at your favorite LDP mirror.
I found this entertaining how they are battling themselves into the ground. My favorite quote was bashing Microsoft's regard for security and privacy:
Yes! I don't get it. Why aren't people more in an uproar over this "asking for your other account password" business? It's probably because it's common practice now -- and it drives me crazy. Hotmail will gladly "collect" your mail from other POP3 accounts. Just type in your account name and password there, they store it (and it has to be in plaintext or easily resolvable to plain text) and log in for you.
Our system policies are clear. Reveal your password to anyone else, or type it into a foreign web site, your account is locked. We watch for POP3 logins from foreign web mail sites like yahoomail and hotmail and auto-lock accounts.
But this is just battling the symptom. The legit guys are making requests for other system passwords you own common place. All a bad guy has to do is hack into their system and get millions of id/passwords or just set up a web page offering to do something on behalf of the user.
"Welcome to weave's shell buddy watch system. Enter the sites where you have UNIX shell accounts, your ID and passowrd, and a list of buddies to watch for. When they log in, we'll IM you."
Not a difficult mod_perl script, actually make it work, then trade the dns/id/password tuples around with other bad guys to gain other good info.
lusers are idiots and it's amazing how freely they will give their passwords away.:-(
I put down $10 last week on a Sega Dreamcast system so I can scarf one up on 9/9/99 when it's released. My friend rented the Japanese version a few months ago, and let me tell you, it's incredible.
The Dreamcast has a built in 56K modem and you can even buy a keyboard for it. It will support net access, web access, e-mail, and of course multi-player gaming. Unfortunately, you have to do this through their ISP service. No details on what that'll cost yet.
I'm going to be damn curious to see what type of protocol it will use. Since it runs Windows CE as an OS, hopefully it's PPP and one can hack a Linux box to allow it to "dial in" to it, then let it access the net that way.
But, if the ISP service they provide is reasonable, I can see this bringing a lot more people onto the net. Everyone has a game console, even dirt poor folk. Computers still intimidate people, and even the friendly Macs drive people up the walls when "a type -2 error occured" pops up.
side note: beings that it runs Windows CE, we may see our first cases of seriously bugging game consoles crashing all the time. I have a Cassiopeia E-100 and that bitch crashes too often. All the wonders of big daddy Windows in a small package...:-(
Encoding an image with JPEG involves a fairly complex mathematical process, which is relatively CPU intensive. It's not really possible to produce a "lightweight" JPEG compressor. Having said that, with the speed of modern CPUs, it doesn't need to be particularly lightweight, and such a library could now be feasibly produced. However, the sort of images that can be dynamically produced don't tend to lend themselves to JPEG anyway...
Try ImageMagick and PerlMagick. You can create images on the fly and save them to just about *ANY* graphic file format.
Their "surplus direct" site started spamming many of my users years ago. I parked their site into our block list so they get an SMTP 551 error back. All these years, the idiots keep sending to the same list of receipients and every time it bounces back. Like a typical spammer, it looks like they don't even check their NDN messages and clean their lists.
Ever since the spam, I stopped buying from Egghead and never would buy from surplus direct. No wonder they can't do anything right. Spamming doesn't pay.
And Microsoft has BILLIONS, but they don't spend ALL of that on Windows. Most of it goes into theory and experiemental research. I'm glad someone is spending that kind of money on that sort of stuff these days.
Hmm, using that logic, everyone should still be buying just IBM solutions. IBM is still a much larger company and spends much more than Microsoft.:)
Everything is relative and specific to each case. For us, I looked into Exchange to support our 25,000 user mailboxes. The client access licenses alone -- even with our huge educational microsoft select pricing -- is over $100,000. The hardware required to run an Exchange server that size is out of this world. Hell, you're not even supposed to have 25,000 users in a single NT domain no matter how big the box is.
Contrast that with a simple unix/linux/*ix box running sendmail for peanuts.
All of us should try and keep bigotry and prejudices behind us. There is no ideal solution that will fit every need.
But it's very unlikely you would see a C> prompt. Upder CP/M the only way that would happen is if you had three floppy drives. Or a sense of humor.
Not so. In the very early 80s, I replaced the CP/M CCP and BDOS with my own network shell redirector written in Z80 assembler to allow our CP/M computers to get to a $30,000 50-megabyte hard drive we purchased (yup, that was how much it cost). It not only had C> but also P> and Z>
While I'm sure the C> in the film was a gaffe, it would be logical that someone within Microsoft would have also hacked around with CP/M as well.
I do believe Microsoft sold a Z80 CP/M board for the Apple ][ and it ran CP/M. (showing my age, I just turned 40 this past week...)
Personally, I don't want my web server running in the kernel. If the web server crashes, I just want it to take down the web server, not the entire box.
Where Apache shines is it's ability to run on low-cost multi-process commodity boxes. I've been running Apache on a quad-processor M88K box for years, long before Micros~1 knew what SMP (or the Internet for that matter) stood for.
Basically, if you are that worried about performance, for the money you save from not buying NT server, go buy more processors or memory. But if your web site gets that much traffic to make this an issue, remember that neither IIS nor NT scale well on a single box. Their answer is to throw additional servers (and licenses of course) at the problem.
The best feature of the RIO is "no moving parts." Also, Click is only 40 megs, which is less than the latest RIOs or the first RIOs with 16 meg expansion card. That means you need to be carrying around extra media with you.
Listen, I'm not going to claim I go jogging with my Rio. Truth is, I am as lethargic as your typical/. reader. But I also don't own a car (why waste money on one? Less toys) so I do a lot of walking to bus stops. The Rio's lack of moving parts is perfect for that.
Sure, I'd also love a portable CD player that could read MP3s. That would be perfect for car use (if I owned one).
My motto: The right tool for the right job
Anyway, the future of computing is not smaller and faster hard drives. It's NO hard drives and no moving parts. A 100% "solid state" beast. We're not there yet, but getting there. My office computer has 10x as much RAM as my first office computer had hard drive space (256 megs/20 megs). (It also ran DOS 2.1 but I digress!)
I've read the comments in this forum and the original note with great interest.
I manage a computer tech department at a fairly large college (which anyone with half a brain can figure out with one click!:). I have a few comments on the story and on the followup comments:
I will crucify any faculty or staff that I catch illegally pirating commercial software because if we get audited and come up guilty, it will be me that gets the shaft.
As part of the Microsoft Select program under educational pricing, we can equip a lab machine with Office, NT Workstation, and NT CAL for under $100. Other companies have similar aggressive educational pricing deals.
Under Microsoft Select, a faculty member can legally copy a legally licensed software on their office machine and take it home providing that they only use it for school work. Beings that this is hard to police (let alone support) we generally don't provide this.
Whenever at all possible, we use "open source" and free software. This certainly keeps the ratio of cost per student down yet still provides a rich software environment.
I have a certified SPA tech on staff who does regular self-audits.
Regardless, if the SPA ever did audit us or any other school, they should be shot. That story is a big crock and it almost seems like they are trying to set up a justification to starting campaigns to audit schools for software piracy just because low expendiatures on software just must indicate software piracy internally.
To quote from an excellent CD by Extreme; "There are three sides to every story. Yours, mine, and the truth."
Somehow I think this "finding" is not quite accurate. Why would the US gov blow its wad on leaking confidential data to contractors to give them an advantage? The best part of having a secret is keeping it.
Slashdot Mirror
Just think, run a copied game -- zap your dreamcast.
Mod your Dreamcast? First time you hook it to the net, your firmware gets erased.
Try and port Linux to it (a non-licensed product), the Charo in your VMU pops to life and kills your penguin!
7 years ago, we got 20 dial-in analog lines for our userbase of 255 CIS students. Now we have 16,000 students (all students get e-mail now of course, not just CIS), but still have 20 lines.
Why? The college doesn't want to get into the ISP business. It's expensive and most students have ISP accounts of their own anyway. It's a decision I supported 100%.
But there's always the poorer students who gets screwed by policies like this. So we maintain shell access for those students to get their e-mail and -- if they can figure it out -- allow them to use SLiRP to get something approaching a PPP line.
We put up a web page explaining the steps in getting it to work, but specify that we don't support it. This way, the student who isn't burdened with a lot of cash but has half a brain can get equal access to the net at no cost.
So far, policy works fine. Most students use their own ISP, and our 20 lines don't get maxed out, but most of those that DO use it, are running slirp.
It'd be nice to see it maintained. I've seen cases where it drops the last byte of an FTP transfer and haven't been able to figure out why, for example. (We run DG/UX boxes here, might be an OS compatability issue... Also, DG/UX doesn't have a pppd that will work on a non-serial connection, ruling out that...)
Now the next slirp question I'm sure to hear is -- can it be hacked to work with Dreamcast? Beings I just bought one this morning and my first analysis of it -- answer is no. Doesn't seem to support a connection script... just PAP or CHAP I suppose... :-(
PLEASE don't do this. Whenever I get moderator points, I spend a helluva lot of time reading stuff at -1 and make a real effort to be fair and thorough. If this suggestion was implemented and I just appeared to have access, but didn't know for sure, I just wouldn't bother at all.
I hate to sound snotty, but I am a technical services manager, have a lot of experience in NT and Linux, have a lot to offer, but I do NOT have time to sit around and waste.
If you occasionally want me to moderate, fine. I will, I will take it very seriously, and I will be honored by the privilege.
But please don't jerk me around. It'll get old fast...
Thanks.
What if you make a typo and end up at some porn palace by mistake, and then as you keep hitting the back button and close box, more port sites keep popping up?
There's a lot of pr0n sites that get close to a real site's spelling just to trick you. Some I've stumbled into include icrosoft.com and licos.com
And that is at uncompressed rates!
Damn Canadians, them with their floppy little heads and beady little eyes. BLAME CANADA!
For example: If slashdot.org was on some net that used DDNS and it was rebooted and got a different IP address on the way up, it'd take a while before other nets would flush the old info from their cache and get the new address. Correct?
Or is it set to have a VERY short cache time, causing every lookup to hit the main server instead of being cached locally.
Sounds like a good idea. I'm just curious about the implementation.
I'm sure that must get First Union a bit upset! :)
I guess it could be worse. At least it isn't affiliated with First Union -- the worst credit card company in the world.
Would have been neater and more appropriate if they got one via a 100% Internet Bank, like Security First Network Bank (www.sfnb.com). I've had all my accounts with them for over three years now, and can pay bills, move balances, etc, all on the web.
I didn't see mention of it, but I'd sure hope you can manage and pay your Linux MasterCard account on-line. We are nerds after all..
I was in total disbelief. He was telling me that VB5 would not read in any of their VB3 programs. They had to first import it into VB4, and then take that and move it to VB5.
I, of course, thought the person was nuts and out of their mind. I have no VB experience but do realise that they have project files and such. The fact that it will only read its own version and the one before it, however, still has me shaking my head in disbelief.
Is this really true? I really didn't have time to argue with the user, so they got their VB4.
Of course, when VB6 came out, we had to upgrade and not skip a version again... :-(
What a racket.
I wonder if ns[12].winisp.net is running win2k!
Even if win2k *just* running IIS *was* bulletproof, what good does it do if you can't get an IP address to get to it! :)
First impression (from a user viewpoint): Looks like IIS on w2k is a piece of shit. Guess you just have to upgrade to w2k client with IE5 to access an w2k IIS site! flock() the rest of the non-Microsoft world I guess...
The sales tax concept is not evil. What's evil is that they are used in addition to a plethora of other ways to get your money.
The ideal tax would be a U.S. wide national sales tax or VAT/GST *BUT* with also eliminate income taxes. Then everyone would have to pay their fair share, including drug dealers who buy tacky gold-trimmed BMWs, foreigners (take that, I have to pay VAT when I go to your country) and rich ass holes that think nothing of spendng $80K on basic transportation.
Rule #1: Never trust a politician
Example: Steve Forbes wants a flat income tax. But guess what? His plan just taxes wages and my ole my, rich old fucks like Steve Forbes have *ZERO* income from wages. All of his income comes from inheritance, capital gains, and other investment income. Under his plan, none of that would be taxable.
But bottom line, an Internet Sales Tax is evil and stupid as sin because we are taxed every which way there can be, it ignores the international nature of the net (US politicians still haven't figured this out), is probably unconstitutional, and poor jerks in states like Tennessee with very high sales taxes as it is would get nailed twice for a purchase made instate.
So this idiot writes a threatening e-mail to me because his site wants to refer people to my site (bus schedules) and keep a frame up top with their advertisements in it. Their reasoning is that they are driving traffic to my site, so they have a right to show advertisements around it. They are upset that I won't allow that.
Clueless idiots. Of course, if he had any brains, he could write a LWP perl script to just grab my content and embed it into his pages.
So the same with Universal. Plenty of technical solutions to prevent your pages from being pirated, as well as to pirate other pages.
But no, let's fight this out in court... :(
See the mini-HOWTO entitled "Ultra-DMA mini-HOWTO" at your favorite LDP mirror.
Yes! I don't get it. Why aren't people more in an uproar over this "asking for your other account password" business? It's probably because it's common practice now -- and it drives me crazy. Hotmail will gladly "collect" your mail from other POP3 accounts. Just type in your account name and password there, they store it (and it has to be in plaintext or easily resolvable to plain text) and log in for you.
Our system policies are clear. Reveal your password to anyone else, or type it into a foreign web site, your account is locked. We watch for POP3 logins from foreign web mail sites like yahoomail and hotmail and auto-lock accounts.
But this is just battling the symptom. The legit guys are making requests for other system passwords you own common place. All a bad guy has to do is hack into their system and get millions of id/passwords or just set up a web page offering to do something on behalf of the user.
"Welcome to weave's shell buddy watch system. Enter the sites where you have UNIX shell accounts, your ID and passowrd, and a list of buddies to watch for. When they log in, we'll IM you."
Not a difficult mod_perl script, actually make it work, then trade the dns/id/password tuples around with other bad guys to gain other good info.
lusers are idiots and it's amazing how freely they will give their passwords away. :-(
The Dreamcast has a built in 56K modem and you can even buy a keyboard for it. It will support net access, web access, e-mail, and of course multi-player gaming. Unfortunately, you have to do this through their ISP service. No details on what that'll cost yet.
I'm going to be damn curious to see what type of protocol it will use. Since it runs Windows CE as an OS, hopefully it's PPP and one can hack a Linux box to allow it to "dial in" to it, then let it access the net that way.
But, if the ISP service they provide is reasonable, I can see this bringing a lot more people onto the net. Everyone has a game console, even dirt poor folk. Computers still intimidate people, and even the friendly Macs drive people up the walls when "a type -2 error occured" pops up.
side note: beings that it runs Windows CE, we may see our first cases of seriously bugging game consoles crashing all the time. I have a Cassiopeia E-100 and that bitch crashes too often. All the wonders of big daddy Windows in a small package... :-(
Try ImageMagick and PerlMagick. You can create images on the fly and save them to just about *ANY* graphic file format.
www.wizards.dupont.com/magick/
I used this stuff to create a web-based coloring book. Have a peek at:
www.dartfirststate.com/color/
Ever since the spam, I stopped buying from Egghead and never would buy from surplus direct. No wonder they can't do anything right. Spamming doesn't pay.
Hmm, using that logic, everyone should still be buying just IBM solutions. IBM is still a much larger company and spends much more than Microsoft. :)
Everything is relative and specific to each case. For us, I looked into Exchange to support our 25,000 user mailboxes. The client access licenses alone -- even with our huge educational microsoft select pricing -- is over $100,000. The hardware required to run an Exchange server that size is out of this world. Hell, you're not even supposed to have 25,000 users in a single NT domain no matter how big the box is.
Contrast that with a simple unix/linux/*ix box running sendmail for peanuts.
All of us should try and keep bigotry and prejudices behind us. There is no ideal solution that will fit every need.
Not so. In the very early 80s, I replaced the CP/M CCP and BDOS with my own network shell redirector written in Z80 assembler to allow our CP/M computers to get to a $30,000 50-megabyte hard drive we purchased (yup, that was how much it cost). It not only had C> but also P> and Z>
While I'm sure the C> in the film was a gaffe, it would be logical that someone within Microsoft would have also hacked around with CP/M as well.
I do believe Microsoft sold a Z80 CP/M board for the Apple ][ and it ran CP/M. (showing my age, I just turned 40 this past week...)
Where Apache shines is it's ability to run on low-cost multi-process commodity boxes. I've been running Apache on a quad-processor M88K box for years, long before Micros~1 knew what SMP (or the Internet for that matter) stood for.
Basically, if you are that worried about performance, for the money you save from not buying NT server, go buy more processors or memory. But if your web site gets that much traffic to make this an issue, remember that neither IIS nor NT scale well on a single box. Their answer is to throw additional servers (and licenses of course) at the problem.
Listen, I'm not going to claim I go jogging with my Rio. Truth is, I am as lethargic as your typical /. reader. But I also don't own a car (why waste money on one? Less toys) so I do a lot of walking to bus stops. The Rio's lack of moving parts is perfect for that.
Sure, I'd also love a portable CD player that could read MP3s. That would be perfect for car use (if I owned one).
My motto: The right tool for the right job
Anyway, the future of computing is not smaller and faster hard drives. It's NO hard drives and no moving parts. A 100% "solid state" beast. We're not there yet, but getting there. My office computer has 10x as much RAM as my first office computer had hard drive space (256 megs/20 megs). (It also ran DOS 2.1 but I digress!)
I manage a computer tech department at a fairly large college (which anyone with half a brain can figure out with one click! :). I have a few comments on the story and on the followup comments:
Regardless, if the SPA ever did audit us or any other school, they should be shot. That story is a big crock and it almost seems like they are trying to set up a justification to starting campaigns to audit schools for software piracy just because low expendiatures on software just must indicate software piracy internally.
Somehow I think this "finding" is not quite accurate. Why would the US gov blow its wad on leaking confidential data to contractors to give them an advantage? The best part of having a secret is keeping it.