People will call me paranoid for the backup system I maintain (for personal and commercial purposes), yet here it is:
Our Linux file server uses LVM on top of RAID-5 (4 120GB SATA and PATA drives, resulting in 240GB of space with 1 drive in hot standby). We do a full backup to (SCSI based) DDS-3 tape (using LVM snapshots) every Sunday. We then do incrementals each day to DDS-3 tape. Data is stored using standard tar format (so there is NO chance of NOT being able to access the data in 5, 10 or even 50 years). We also do not use DDS-3 compression, so there is no tying the data on the tape to a specific drive format (we currently have both Sony and Seagate drives). Our critical data requires 6 12GB DDS-3 tapes (72GB) - we are currently looking at upgrading to DDS-4 (24GB per tape so only 3 tapes needed).
Each weeks worth of tapes are then stored in a safe. The first backup of each month is then transfered to our safety deposit box at a local bank. After six months or so we purge every second monthly backup set (just re-use the tapes). After a year we perform the same operation to yield 3 monthly backup sets per year archived forever. We have been doing this since 1997 (back with only DDS-2), so you can imagine that we have quite a few tapes.
Although tape is not by any means a perfect medium (it is susceptible to strong magnetic fields and tape tension can be a problem) it has proven itself to the IT world for decades to be very reliable. We plan on staying with DDS based technology, which is backwards compatible (at least for reading). If for some reason DDS is no longer a viable technology we will have to re-visit our archived data (at least one snapshot per year) and transfer it to a new medium.
Why do we keep data for so long? Well, I have personally lost files that were supposed to be on a hard-drive which ended up being corrupted. Our so-called backup was using an unreliable medium, which had degraded. There was only one backup made so we lost the data. This system was designed to avoid such a problem, yet nothing is perfect.
I really can't stand companies who create their own PCB/CAD software that produces proprietary file formats, not to mention the fact that this software usually is only available for windows (no Linux or Mac ports).
I prefer to fire up Eagle's Cadsoft (under Linux!) and generate my own gerber and excellon files. I can then send these files to ANY board house I choose.
When creating 2 layer boards and when I don't need super fine spacing I use Olimex (the lowest cost 2 layer with silk screen and solder mask pcb house I have EVER seen!). When I need 4 more or layers I go with the more expensive PCB Express.
Although I think emachine shop sounds great, you can get much cheaper smaller runs of aluminum panels from Front Panel Express. Their prices are very low and their quality is amazing!
I was in the market for a new PDA a couple of months ago (my palm M100, purchased a 2 years ago was getting a little light on RAM at only 2MB!). Anyway, being a follower of palm technology I was excited to get a new tungsten E. However upon arriving at a local tech store I soon realized how awful the unit was. It had a cheap large plastic body, that was contoured (hello, this is supposed to fit in your pocket!). Although the sales dude was proud to show that he had one, it had scratches on the fake chrome paint exposing the cheap-o plastic body - what a demo!
Anyway I scoured around the shop and came across the Clie TJ25 - what a beauty! This was the first PDA I had seen (in the sub $200 price range) with a metal shell and beautiful color screen! I was a little hesitant about the 'memory stick' (I prefer more 'open' technologies like SD or CF), yet I found some cheap 128 MB sticks at tigerdirect (which were actually lower in cost per MB than SD/CF).
Anyway, I was really hoping to upgrade in a year or so to a new wireless/camera/MP3 Clie. Now I guess it will happen sooner than later because of the price drops as stores dump their Clie inventory. However it will be a sad day when the Clie is removed from the PDA lineup - one less great choice for those choosing palm! I just really hope we don't see Sony jump ship to the ms wince camp in a year or two!
Man am I ever pissed for missing this article on Friday, since this is my field!
I'm always on the search for embedded development tools for Linux. Although once in a while I have to deal with a windows based tool (which I run under win4lin), most of the time I am happily coding, compiling/linking and debugging under Linux.
I actually cut my teeth in embedded programming with the Intel 8048/8052 (yes the original 12 clocks per instruction). Those were the days - little or no embedded peripherals (the 8048 had no UART, or stack pointer for that matter), handful of bytes of RAM, a few kBytes or Flash, programming required 21V. Today's micros have much more horsepower, a lot more memory and (more importantly) lots of embedded peripherals. What is also very nice is that most modern micros can be programmed with a single bit banger from the parallel port using their ISP (In-Service Programming)!
Although the PIC micro was a great entry level micro (I first used them back in 1991, IIRC), I personally recommend the AtmelAVR as an entry level device.
Even though the AVR is 8 bits, it packs a hell of a lot of computing power into the instruction set (16 MHz means nearly 16 MIPs). I would call the AVR a pseudo 16 bit micro because many of the registers can be combined to act as 16 pointers/indexes. In fact the stack pointer is 16 bits, allowing a stack up to 64-4 kBytes (although the parts currently only have 8 kBytes of internal RAM, the ones with an external bus can have the stack (.bss or.data for that matter) outside the chip. BTW, don't get confused with the 8051 derivatives with fake out 16 bit access, the AVR has true 16 bit pointers allowing data and the stack to be located anywhere within the RAM memory range.
Just like the PIC, the AVR needs minimal components to operate. In fact, if you can live with an inaccurate clock, you can actually run the part without a crystal because of the on-chip R/C oscillator. Since there is an on-chip power on reset, you don't even need an R/C reset circuit.
As for development tools under Linux, you can find the sources for all the GNU AVR tools at my site. I also have a script that will build and install GCC, binutils, libc and GDB/insight for the AVR under Linux (and most unices). You can also find links to free programming tools that allow programming of parts in-circuit (via ISP or JTAG).
I hope this helps you on your way to embedded hacking under Linux. And remember there are a lot of other nice micros out there so keep looking, and have fun (and good luck with your engineering degree)!
How does RMS expect us to compile a kernel for our architecture and for every architecture which we need embedded firmware for? We could end up being required to have dozens of different compilers (think ARM7, i960, MIPS...), not to mention libraries and other tools installed. Many of these are closed source, or are restricted from distributing the source. A good example is the DSP I am using at an optical controller company - the silicon vendor is the only source of the compiler which costs $4000 U.S., not to mention that many of the libraries we use are not available in source form.
Trust me, the embedded market is a completely different picture than the desktop when it comes to development. Even if the firmware source was released it would do you no good.
The real problem is not in TCP (although sequence number windows are a bad idea), it's in allowing in spoofed IP datagrams. If network admins locked down their routers correctly then script kiddies wouldn't be able to send forget packets, and this wouldn't be an issue.
Note to netadmins and sysadmins: block packets with source IPs that are not valid for the interface they came from! Geesh!
Never, ever, not even once in a million years, run ANYTHING on your firewall (especially a remote shell). In fact, if you are really anal, you should be running a bastion host, and then only allow services on your DMZ'd servers (yes that's what I have).
I you are too lazy to properly configure your firewall, or even more stupid and run your firewall on a PC that users can login to (or even more idiotic, run it on a Windows PC with full root for every user, ala win 98) then you deserve to be owned.
I wouldn't really call that an 'alternative'. Check out their releases, there haven't been any for 3+ years. Most of the hardware they support was popular back in 1999-2000.
Don't get me wrong, I think their project is an excellent idea. However creating low level BIOS images capable of setting up the myriad of hardware available on modern PCs isn't easy. This is why this project is kind of dead.
Valve is simply a bunch of OSS whores who take and have never given back. Thousands of HL servers are running Linux and therefore millions of HL users, and therefore Valve, are gaining from the benefit of Linux.
I couldn't care if it was even just a shitty release of the original HL source so we could port the game finally to Linux/*BSD/etc, Valve needs to give back or stop utilizing Linux.
Why do great companies like ID give soooo much to the community, and evil companies like Valve give nothing? ID has not only made each and every game available under Linux, they also routinely release the source to the community! Other groups, like the Atari/Unreal franchise have followed this trend - but not the whores at Valve!
You are out to lunch if you think a commercial distro like mandrake is anything like Debian. Gentoo resembles Debian by far more than any other distro out there.
He did not make any reference to the spotty security record which IIS has enjoyed over the years.
I am not surprised that a company dealing in such shitty software would bark at the truth, and ignore the facts; this is exactly how micro$oft performs it's PR magic.
Why? A big reason why they have so many big contract customers is because of all the geeks like you and me who used Red Hat, or at least wanted to use a distro of Linux at work and finally after many years our PHBs listened to us and allowed us to install what was the most commercial and well supported distro around that we also could use at home. Now more and more young geeks are going to start off on another distro (many already are) and when they cry for Linux at work it's going to be for Gentoo, Debian, Suse, Slackware or whatever - but not Red Hat (they will say 'What is Red Hat?').
Bye, bye Red Hat the distro - thanks for the memories. I guess your time had to come as a conventional, any one will want to use, let's me borrow the CDs from a friend, find it available at any hosting ISP distro.
P.S. I picked up a copy of Slackware back in '95 and used it until I was able to get our PHBs to look at Linux in '99, which was Red Hat. I am now using Gentoo at home, yet I am slowly moving my systems at work and on the net to Gentoo - thanks Gentoo!
This sounds so much like a moronic thing verisign.com would do (back in the day, or even recently) when they 'accidentally' gave away domain names without confirming the requests). How could these idiots do this, especially for such a high profile domain name?
I have my important domains at directnic.com which provides amazing 24/7 trouble-ticket based support. I don't even think the somewhat less tech savvy the, yet ultra cheap godaddy.com would try this.
We use a 12GB DDS3 for backing up, and tapes are $9 (Canadian), that's $.75 per GB. A brand new 120 GB 7200 RPM 8MB WD ATA 100 drive is $165, or $1.38 per GB. Tapes are cheaper, and infinitely more reliable than disks.
I wouldn't trust a disk as a backup for anything other than a short-term copy of another disk image. We mirror our disks and then cut the important data to tape. The mirrors get recycled each day, tapes each week with monthly backups archived for two or more years.
I personally can't stand swapping tapes, and backups are slow (1 MB/s using SCSI-2), as a result we only backup a portion of our systems, however DDS3 (or AIT/DLT for larger companies) can't be beat.
On a side note. I just replaced a 4 month old craptacular Maxtor 120 GB drive which already has bad sectors. Who the fsck in their right mind would trust a hd as a medium for backing up (is the author of this article smoking some crack?). I understand using a hd for making a temporary copy of a disk, especially before committing the data to tape, yet for any length term backup, you have to be insane. I can play frisbee with my DDS3 tapes, and they will still last 20 years, yet the disks might last 1 year even if they aren't touched (based on current trends).
No where near as cool, yet my arcade controller plugs into a standard game port and uses the same classic joystick and buttons (from Happ Controls, see my site for links, pics and schematics).
What's even more upsetting is that the source contains GPL'd code. By copyright law, Valve MUST provide the source to the entire game for whomever receives the binary, if it contains GPL'd code. The open source community should be on it's toes when Valve does release it's binary version of the game. If GPL'd code is found (either by searching the binary, or through another insider source code release) Valve must be held accountable!
At least we can rest assured that honest game developers like id (the creators of the famous Doom and Quake series) have not violated the GPL. They have always voluntarily released the source code for their games (Doom, Doom2, Quake and even Quake 2 just a few years ago) once they move on to a new product, and no GPL violations have ever been found. Let's hope all game developers are playing with the same rules as id!
On a side note, it appears that the 'insider' was a hacker who remotely gained access to Valve's internal network via a buffer exploit or trojan in microsoft outlook. How much does it take for people to learn the dangers of using windows, outlook and internet explorer?
I was just about to write a long rant about how well OO has evolved from the days of star-office 5.x, yet it appears you have summarized my thoughts on this subject *completely*!
Thank you OpenOffice.org dudes for making it 10x easier to convince my family, friends, colleagues and clients that a Linux based desktop is finally ready for the masses!
Slashdot Mirror
Our Linux file server uses LVM on top of RAID-5 (4 120GB SATA and PATA drives, resulting in 240GB of space with 1 drive in hot standby). We do a full backup to (SCSI based) DDS-3 tape (using LVM snapshots) every Sunday. We then do incrementals each day to DDS-3 tape. Data is stored using standard tar format (so there is NO chance of NOT being able to access the data in 5, 10 or even 50 years). We also do not use DDS-3 compression, so there is no tying the data on the tape to a specific drive format (we currently have both Sony and Seagate drives). Our critical data requires 6 12GB DDS-3 tapes (72GB) - we are currently looking at upgrading to DDS-4 (24GB per tape so only 3 tapes needed).
Each weeks worth of tapes are then stored in a safe. The first backup of each month is then transfered to our safety deposit box at a local bank. After six months or so we purge every second monthly backup set (just re-use the tapes). After a year we perform the same operation to yield 3 monthly backup sets per year archived forever. We have been doing this since 1997 (back with only DDS-2), so you can imagine that we have quite a few tapes.
Although tape is not by any means a perfect medium (it is susceptible to strong magnetic fields and tape tension can be a problem) it has proven itself to the IT world for decades to be very reliable. We plan on staying with DDS based technology, which is backwards compatible (at least for reading). If for some reason DDS is no longer a viable technology we will have to re-visit our archived data (at least one snapshot per year) and transfer it to a new medium.
Why do we keep data for so long? Well, I have personally lost files that were supposed to be on a hard-drive which ended up being corrupted. Our so-called backup was using an unreliable medium, which had degraded. There was only one backup made so we lost the data. This system was designed to avoid such a problem, yet nothing is perfect.
Where loved ones are remembered: Memoriam.org
I have a build script and all the tarballs on my site, in case anyone is interested in hacking with the AVR under Linux!
But where are the Linux binaries? id, please don't hold back - your 'soon after the windows release' is now turning into a hell of a long wait!
I prefer to fire up Eagle's Cadsoft (under Linux!) and generate my own gerber and excellon files. I can then send these files to ANY board house I choose.
When creating 2 layer boards and when I don't need super fine spacing I use Olimex (the lowest cost 2 layer with silk screen and solder mask pcb house I have EVER seen!). When I need 4 more or layers I go with the more expensive PCB Express.
Although I think emachine shop sounds great, you can get much cheaper smaller runs of aluminum panels from Front Panel Express. Their prices are very low and their quality is amazing!
- Rod
Where loved ones are remembered: Memoriam.org
Anyway I scoured around the shop and came across the Clie TJ25 - what a beauty! This was the first PDA I had seen (in the sub $200 price range) with a metal shell and beautiful color screen! I was a little hesitant about the 'memory stick' (I prefer more 'open' technologies like SD or CF), yet I found some cheap 128 MB sticks at tigerdirect (which were actually lower in cost per MB than SD/CF).
Anyway, I was really hoping to upgrade in a year or so to a new wireless/camera/MP3 Clie. Now I guess it will happen sooner than later because of the price drops as stores dump their Clie inventory. However it will be a sad day when the Clie is removed from the PDA lineup - one less great choice for those choosing palm! I just really hope we don't see Sony jump ship to the ms wince camp in a year or two!
I'm always on the search for embedded development tools for Linux. Although once in a while I have to deal with a windows based tool (which I run under win4lin), most of the time I am happily coding, compiling/linking and debugging under Linux.
I actually cut my teeth in embedded programming with the Intel 8048/8052 (yes the original 12 clocks per instruction). Those were the days - little or no embedded peripherals (the 8048 had no UART, or stack pointer for that matter), handful of bytes of RAM, a few kBytes or Flash, programming required 21V. Today's micros have much more horsepower, a lot more memory and (more importantly) lots of embedded peripherals. What is also very nice is that most modern micros can be programmed with a single bit banger from the parallel port using their ISP (In-Service Programming)!
Although the PIC micro was a great entry level micro (I first used them back in 1991, IIRC), I personally recommend the Atmel AVR as an entry level device.
Even though the AVR is 8 bits, it packs a hell of a lot of computing power into the instruction set (16 MHz means nearly 16 MIPs). I would call the AVR a pseudo 16 bit micro because many of the registers can be combined to act as 16 pointers/indexes. In fact the stack pointer is 16 bits, allowing a stack up to 64-4 kBytes (although the parts currently only have 8 kBytes of internal RAM, the ones with an external bus can have the stack (.bss or .data for that matter) outside the chip. BTW, don't get confused with the 8051 derivatives with fake out 16 bit access, the AVR has true 16 bit pointers allowing data and the stack to be located anywhere within the RAM memory range.
Just like the PIC, the AVR needs minimal components to operate. In fact, if you can live with an inaccurate clock, you can actually run the part without a crystal because of the on-chip R/C oscillator. Since there is an on-chip power on reset, you don't even need an R/C reset circuit.
As for development tools under Linux, you can find the sources for all the GNU AVR tools at my site. I also have a script that will build and install GCC, binutils, libc and GDB/insight for the AVR under Linux (and most unices). You can also find links to free programming tools that allow programming of parts in-circuit (via ISP or JTAG).
I hope this helps you on your way to embedded hacking under Linux. And remember there are a lot of other nice micros out there so keep looking, and have fun (and good luck with your engineering degree)!
How does RMS expect us to compile a kernel for our architecture and for every architecture which we need embedded firmware for? We could end up being required to have dozens of different compilers (think ARM7, i960, MIPS...), not to mention libraries and other tools installed. Many of these are closed source, or are restricted from distributing the source. A good example is the DSP I am using at an optical controller company - the silicon vendor is the only source of the compiler which costs $4000 U.S., not to mention that many of the libraries we use are not available in source form.
Trust me, the embedded market is a completely different picture than the desktop when it comes to development. Even if the firmware source was released it would do you no good.
Note to netadmins and sysadmins: block packets with source IPs that are not valid for the interface they came from! Geesh!
I you are too lazy to properly configure your firewall, or even more stupid and run your firewall on a PC that users can login to (or even more idiotic, run it on a Windows PC with full root for every user, ala win 98) then you deserve to be owned.
Attention investors: if you invest in a company with no product and who acquired a shell company so it could be traded you are freakin insane !
If everyone followed your moronic thinking then cops would be pulling over every ryder truck thinking that there was a bomb on it!
Don't get me wrong, I think their project is an excellent idea. However creating low level BIOS images capable of setting up the myriad of hardware available on modern PCs isn't easy. This is why this project is kind of dead.
EV1Servers (formally rackshack) had crappy support anyway, now they have crossed the line...
- Rod
I couldn't care if it was even just a shitty release of the original HL source so we could port the game finally to Linux/*BSD/etc, Valve needs to give back or stop utilizing Linux.
Why do great companies like ID give soooo much to the community, and evil companies like Valve give nothing? ID has not only made each and every game available under Linux, they also routinely release the source to the community! Other groups, like the Atari/Unreal franchise have followed this trend - but not the whores at Valve!
You are out to lunch if you think a commercial distro like mandrake is anything like Debian. Gentoo resembles Debian by far more than any other distro out there.
If this is the case, then as a Canadian I think we should take after Brazil and retaliate by fingerprinting Americans when they arrive in Canada.
I am not surprised that a company dealing in such shitty software would bark at the truth, and ignore the facts; this is exactly how micro$oft performs it's PR magic.
Bye, bye Red Hat the distro - thanks for the memories. I guess your time had to come as a conventional, any one will want to use, let's me borrow the CDs from a friend, find it available at any hosting ISP distro.
P.S. I picked up a copy of Slackware back in '95 and used it until I was able to get our PHBs to look at Linux in '99, which was Red Hat. I am now using Gentoo at home, yet I am slowly moving my systems at work and on the net to Gentoo - thanks Gentoo!
I have my important domains at directnic.com which provides amazing 24/7 trouble-ticket based support. I don't even think the somewhat less tech savvy the, yet ultra cheap godaddy.com would try this.
Thanks for that useless comparison! Did you not read my post, I was talking Canadian, NOT US dollars!
I wouldn't trust a disk as a backup for anything other than a short-term copy of another disk image. We mirror our disks and then cut the important data to tape. The mirrors get recycled each day, tapes each week with monthly backups archived for two or more years.
I personally can't stand swapping tapes, and backups are slow (1 MB/s using SCSI-2), as a result we only backup a portion of our systems, however DDS3 (or AIT/DLT for larger companies) can't be beat.
On a side note. I just replaced a 4 month old craptacular Maxtor 120 GB drive which already has bad sectors. Who the fsck in their right mind would trust a hd as a medium for backing up (is the author of this article smoking some crack?). I understand using a hd for making a temporary copy of a disk, especially before committing the data to tape, yet for any length term backup, you have to be insane. I can play frisbee with my DDS3 tapes, and they will still last 20 years, yet the disks might last 1 year even if they aren't touched (based on current trends).
No where near as cool, yet my arcade controller plugs into a standard game port and uses the same classic joystick and buttons (from Happ Controls, see my site for links, pics and schematics).
Enjoy!
At least we can rest assured that honest game developers like id (the creators of the famous Doom and Quake series) have not violated the GPL. They have always voluntarily released the source code for their games (Doom, Doom2, Quake and even Quake 2 just a few years ago) once they move on to a new product, and no GPL violations have ever been found. Let's hope all game developers are playing with the same rules as id!
On a side note, it appears that the 'insider' was a hacker who remotely gained access to Valve's internal network via a buffer exploit or trojan in microsoft outlook. How much does it take for people to learn the dangers of using windows, outlook and internet explorer?
Thank you OpenOffice.org dudes for making it 10x easier to convince my family, friends, colleagues and clients that a Linux based desktop is finally ready for the masses!
Everyone will become totally confused, not only because this is a new obfuscated URI scheme, yet because there is a .info TLD!