Re:Works great with older setups & configs
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Amanda 2.5 Released
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· Score: 1
That would be people who didn't study history well enough the first time around I'd expect.:)
-- Cheers, Gene
Re:Works great with older setups & configs
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Amanda 2.5 Released
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· Score: 1
Chuckle:) I've been saying that for years, but somehow there doesn't seem to be a way to make a bash script "purty", but they sure are handier than bottled beer for stuff like that.
-- Cheers, Gene
Re:Works great with older setups & configs
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Amanda 2.5 Released
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· Score: 2, Interesting
In fact I have about a 7 year history with amanda. Having worn out 4 of those 4 tape seagate changers & a couple of regular DDS2 drives, I've come to the conclusion that disks, having much more development money behind them, have indeed now exceeded the utility of tapes when I can buy a disk that lasts several years, possibly a decade, for 10% or less the cost per gigabyte of an equivalent tape drive and its backup medium. But thats just my opinion, the opinion of an old man these days as I'm now 71. So while I've been there, and done an awfull lot of that, the youngsters tend to discount that experience, prefering to get their own experiences. Oh, well. As has been said many many times, history will repeat itself.
-- Cheers, Gene.
Works great with older setups & configs
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Amanda 2.5 Released
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· Score: 4, Informative
I've been running it for 4 nights now, replaceing the previous 2.4.5 version I've been running for quite some time, and its working just like the 2.4.5 version it replaced. So if you are worried about the upgrade breaking something, if it worked with your old configs, it should Just Work(TM) with the new version too. I used the same config/build script I've been useing for years to build and install it.
Newbies, please goto amanda.org or zmanda.org and read the top ten FAQ there, it will save you many headaches in getting it setup. To make it work, and work well, may require a re-thinking of how you think a backup should be done. Once setup its a background process you get nightly emails from, but requires little or no hand-holding on a daily basis other than making sure the tape needed is in the drive for tonights run. vtape users (where the tape images are kept on a humongous hard drive) don't even have to deal with that, the best of both worlds IMO. I've been doing that for about 18 months or more here at the coyote.den, my private domains name.
And I highly recommend subscribing to the amanda-user mailing list, details on amanda.org, where you can ask for help and get it from more knowledgable people than I, although you will find me there too. 10 messages is a busy day so it won't eat your lunch.
Only in your wildest dreams. That would be something similar to a zebra and a leopard tradeing skin patterns, it just tain't done. To the leopard, a zebra is lunch, not a sex partner.
Your attempt at sarcastic humor didn't get any laughs here. They have done exactly that and poor publicity over it has always been spun to say look, we caught another pie-rat.
I tend to run with the facts. Yeah, they go look at megacorp with their 10,000 employees & only 50 licenses, maybe, depending on what megacorp has those 10,000 employees doing. 9550 of them could be coal miners for all you know. Thats not to say those coal miners don't use windows at home, possibly pirated, but thats a seperate, totally unrelated problem.
Its precisely that these rebuilders are so high profile due to their emphasis on charitable giving in their advertising efforts to collect these machines, that they get the SPA's attention. Thats the real world we live in IF you do windows.
And thats why there's only one windows machine on the premises at the moment, its the neighbors and I'm trying to figure out why it self reboots randomly, or doesn't boot, not even post, also randomly. I left memtest86 running on it last night, in the 3rd pass, when I got up it was back on pass 0. Beginning to think its motherboard. It also has trouble reading a floppy even with a new, known good floppy hanging on the end of the cable. Its a &$^%#! older Compaq, 1Gig athlon, 256 memory, what can I say...
Somewhere on MS's site it has a page about if you can receive donated Windows licenses and terms
Yeah, sure, and then they make you jump thru hoops by having the original bill of sale when the SPA comes calling. And they will, bet the farm on it as you are a VERY high profile target.
Put something like Ubuntu-5.10 on them. These people may not be already windows indoctrinated to the point that they can't learn how to run firefox in 5 minutes, and get their email setup and running in 15, most of which is negotiating a connection to the net from their ISP of choice. Make sure iptables, portsentry and tcpwrappers are installed and setup for outgoing requests establishing the path, and trash ANYTHING that comes in un-invited. And setup the update tool to do it every night, or if its not on then, makes sure anacron knows about it by makeing sure its running in the startup.
That combination is pretty bullet proof, I've had 3 attacks get as far as the log before they were turned off absolutely in 3 years on a dsl circuit. And 2 of those came from known addresses as they were from compromised DNS servers at my ISP, verizon. They're windows lovers, obviously.
You may have a few more questions to field early in the game, but in the end you will have made a new generation of computer savvy people who are NOT slaves to the M$ machine in Redmond. And that is of course a very desirable thing at the end of the day, you have shown that the M$ way is NOT the only way, and the linux way is far more secure.
Handle the root access by making them prove enough knowledge to be able to handle it before you give it out. That will save a lot of phone calls right there.
Sure, and pigs fly too. I've never been too bashfull to stand up and be counted when it counts. I guess thats from growing up in rural Iowa in the 30's, watching my father & grandfather crying on the night of Dec 7th, 1941 because they knew what was next & going thru WW2 before things got better. If somethings not right, you can figure on me standing up to object. And when I do I don't much care who hears me, the more the merrier. Yeah, I've been slapped down a time or two for it. It goes with the territory and I sleep well at night.
He's said that GB has the best legal environment for a coder. I don't think he can continue to say that if this becomes law.
I do hope there will be a modicum of common sense exhibited by the MP's when they toss this one into the trashcan of history, to be repeated at suitable intervals when there isn't anything else to stir up the sheeple with.
And I was using "star city" in the truckers parlance where star city means the capital of the state, whatever state you're in ATM, (I'd forgotten about WV actually have one of those) so I'm about 40 miles south of you in Weston. I was the CE at the ch5 you sometimes watch from 1984-2002.
But they never truely let you retire you know. I'm still doing the transmitter pm early saturday mornings.:)
Welcome fellow West Virginian, but you're new here I take it, any topic is fair game on/.:-)
I'll have to plead a certain amount of curiosity over the way they handled it. As a semi-retired technical person, I occasionally get shipped out of state to go 'put out fires' so to speak, and which pays me pretty well. But when I'm out doing those things, I may be running on my credit card for a couple of months at a time, paying it off when I get back & settled up for expenses etc. That can run to several thou and has, but I always call the card folks & let them know at least a rough idea of how long, where I'll be, and a swag on the how much. As far as I know, no flags were ever raised to the point that a deposit was held more than overnight. And I paid it as soon as I knew the totals. Interest-wise, I carry only one card, and negotiated a rate some would kill to get years ago.
But, and this I fail to understand at all, is whyinhell did they ever let a 23% penny's card get THAT far behind. Thats fscking financial stupidity at its worst if they had the money to pay it off. I've dealt with penny's over their acceptance of a non-penny's card with a 40k line of credit on it, the bitch was gonna keep the card because it wasn't signed. It had been once, nearly 4 years back from that day, but wore off. I blew up loud enough they heard me all over the store and my permitted 38 was 5 seconds from coming out before she decided she'd give me back the card. I was gonna put about a $290 suit on it, but you know the rest of that story & I've only been back in penny's once since then, to check out an adv in the paper, but of course it was that old bait and switch at work again, they didn't have it, and never did have it. Jerks, they'll go away just like monkey ward did ten years ago now.
We used to have a montgomery ward here, but thats all they ever did the last 5 or 6 years of their existance, was bait & switch. 15 years ago I needed a water heater & they had a good deal in the paper. But when I got there later that day, adv in hand, they only had the floor model & it wasn't for sale under any conditions as "it was the show model, but we've got this other one with the same 40 gallons and warranty for only $185 more". Sure... I went down to Ace Hdwe and got the one I wanted for a tenner more than the wards paper price. After a while you get the message & they went bust for wholely justifiable reasons. You simply cannot treat people like that if you want their business.
Yeah, that much on a 23% card is unconsiously stupid in the first place. Ignorance can usually be fixed by education, but stupidity is for a lifetime I do believe. I give you that couple as evidence.
I'm on I-79, about a hundred north of star city, whats your 20?
Am I the oddball that gets away with it then? Here I am, 71 years old, retired, as is the wife, living on SS and Teachers Retirement. We're not social climbers that have to have a new caddy every year or anything like that. The house is paid off so we are 'stable'.
But when our 97 caravan with 125k on it started its inevitable slide into the cesspool of 500 dollar fixits, like the whole dash insert was going dead for the 3rd time, the heater blower only worked when it wanted to & well, you get the picture. Electrically, the wiring was all corroded and going to hell in a handbasket, it was sending me telegrams in escense.
We didn't really need that van anymore since the missus quit teaching music, and my own 88 nissan 4wd is slowly rusting in two & not worth much for a tradein. I'll get a few more miles out of it yet, I mean its only got 206k on it now, just broken in for one of the 3L V6's with an auto tranny behind it. Neither was the van although it was otherwise showroom bodywise and the engine wasn't using or leaking any oil & could still 'light them up' if you needed to get out of the way.
But I did need a bigger 4wd to haul construction materials as I'm going to redo a rotting out carport this summer, along with the cement floor under it thats slowly sinking. I did the retaining wall around it, hauling sakcrete in a ton at a time with the nissan over the last 2 years. Keeps me out of the bars that way.:-)
But why a 4wd? Well, this IS West Virginia folks, where a higher percentage of people drive 4wd's than any other state in the union because our hills are right up in your face, personal hills. If you need to go without waiting for the roads to clear, you drive a 4wd, its that simple.
Shopping around I found a 99 GMC KingCab 3 door with 59k miles on it, the usual small V8, auto, 4wd, new BIG rubber, yadda yadda, showroom condition & we haggled around to where I wrote a check for a bit over $15k getting an extended warranty & a couple other things thrown in. One of them 'pewter' paint jobs theres at least a million of running around, or is in my neck of these hills.
AFAIK, that did not raise any red flags. If it had made trouble, I know the phone numbers of my senator and my reps and I have the freedom plan. Somewhat akin to saying I've got a shotgun and a shovel, any questions?
It may not be a 40mpg econobox, but I've loaded it up with an extra 500+ lbs and made a trip to western NY state already, getting 20 mpg at the speed limits, not too shabby for a bigger rig IMO.
Thats 5mpg better than the much smaller nissan pickup gets FWIW. And 2 to 3 mpg better than the van with its 3.6L v6 ever got.
You could say I'm a redneck, but I'm an import of only 22 years duration here in WV. Its a great place to live, retire, and eventually die in, really.
You'll forgive me that I take the word of a respected professional over that of some random Slashdotter.
OTOH, respected or not is relatively immaterial. He is an employee, no doubt a valuable one to M$, BUT HE IS NOT M$ . Given the M$ rep for internal secrecy, its entirely possible those backdoors do exist, and frankly I'd be very surprised if they did not, however his ability to control their existance is probably minimal. He may, when they are disclosed like the previous ones were, flee the camp just to protect his reputation, but as for his imminent demise, that might be an unfortunate side effect of one of Steve Balmers apparently well documented chair throwing scenes.
When dealing with the likes of m$ and their corporate history, methinks you give this mans word way too much weight.
400+ dvd's? I might be able to find 5 or 6 if I really took the place apart. I guess I've never become a slave to h(b)ollywood. Ditto CD's, might have 40 or 50...
As far as it being buried, unless we make a concerted effort to replace our congresscritters with some that represent the people, that will never happen. And I fully intend to vote exactly that way in the next election.
If Jay votes for the patriot act (and I think he did), or this new audio flag just intro'd yesterday, or any single one of the other freedom reducing laws, he'll find my vote in the other column. With modern telephone abilities, pick up the phone and yell at the office type when something is about to go down thats undemocratic. I do.
If he votes to do a serious reform of our patent system, or to put copyrights back to what the founding fathers had in mind, he *might* get a free ride. But notice the emphasis.
I wish I could vote Sen. KingofPork into retirement, but he's not in my district. I do like what his pork has done for WV, but the nation as a whole cannot afford him and his "get it all for us" competition. It doesn't lead to the nations government being run in an economical manner at all.
Why not, they haven't policed the profanity on the ham bands in 30 years now, nor the profanity on 11 meters in nearly 40. What makes you think they'll do more than token enforcement in the future? The only enforcement is by the hams themselves, and on 80 meters in particular, its whoever has the biggest linear, with one rig I heard 4 or 5 years ago that had to have been at least 50kw. And it was being run by an idiot with no knowledge of proper modulation, just the steadier he could keep the power meter pegged, the better it had to be. He was covering 150khz either side of himself with overmod splatter from almost 3000 miles away. And he's probably still on the air for all I know, but the band is a lot emptier if he is, he's run the legal minded folks off. Maybe for good. Like a barrel of apples, it only takes one bad one to spoil all.
Listen carefully MPAA/RIAA. Re the aneurism, I hope its fatal. Damnit, you got your ransom for that disk when it was first sold, and it was sold with the understanding that the buyer had unlimited play rights. And if he/she/it gets tired of it and sells it to a used bookstore for 50 cents rather than add to the trash in the landfill, then those unlimited play rights go with the cd to the next buyer. The secret is that when the seller does sell it, he is legally expected to expunge any ripped copies from his possession. If he does not, then he should be held guilty of a copyright violation, not the buyer in the used book store that has no damned idea if the seller is honest or not, he just wants this rare out of print copy of whatever the hell he has in his hand when he walks to the checkout.
As for doing business with the RIAA, I do damned little, and what I do buy on cd is carefully inspected for the presence of the CD logo owned by Phillips, if its not there, then it goes back in the bin.
Now if I just could figure out how to apply similar rules to the purchase of dvd's. We all know that you can update a dvd player just by putting the update on a cd and inserting it into the drive, and I'll be damned if I'll have some shithead with an idea like sony/bertelsman figure out how to 'adjust' the software in my dvd player.
So listen carefully. Treat us comsumers as human beings, giving us quality product for your outragiously 'quality' price for a dimes worth of plastic, and we will treat you as human. Continue running roughshod over the consumers historical rights with artificial, legally unbreakable limits and there will be an escalation of hostilities and your name might as well be Gen. G. A. Custer at the Little Big Horn River meeting. Understand that we do vote, and that today we can pickup the phone and tell our congresscritters exactly what kind of scumbags you are, and that voting to support you will be measured in how many more votes they get to cast before being voted out of office at the next election.
I think so. But its not been historicly stated that way. The acronym 'rms' means the root of the mean sum of all squares, if the voltage was sampled at a high rate of speed compared to the cycle time, then the mean of all readings squared, ignoring the sign is determined, and the root taken of that mean, I think. Could be wrong, probably am. But that doesn't say in so many words thats its the square root of 2. Just the square root of the mean sum of all the squares.
By using the equivalent in heating power, distortions can be absorbed, such as the flat topping of the waveform when a majority of the load is the full wave bridges in todays switching power supplies, not all of which contain pfc correction circuitry. Thats rather visible on a scope these days if you look.
The $12 ea in case lots offshore 300 watt stuff certainly doesn't. Ditto for flourescent lighting loads, which generally have a rather poor power factor at the lamp sockets, which is converted into a highly inductive pf lag by the ballasts, or were by 1st generation ballasts. I think todays somewhat more expensive ballasts do a better job, as do the current crop of ccfl lamps that screw into std incandescent sockets.
But thats almost a whole 'nother field of discussion.
No it doesn't swing over the 115 to -115 range. Swings yes, but the range is such that the heating effect when applied to a resistor is the same as 127 volts today, which means that the peak voltage of the sineusoid wave is 127*1.414=179.578 volts peak, plus or minus as the case might be at the instant its measured. That is what the rms stands for, the root of the mean square and it allows power to be measured by its equivalent heating power.
Gawd I'm amazed at the assumptions made by those that should know better here on/.
As far as the dc power debate is concerned, big convertors at the top of each rack makes sense to me if the busses are big enough. My last experience with that was a grass 300 video switcher that had 4 1.5 kw supplies in it. The bussing interconnect cables did get warm, with nearly a volts loss at the far end of them. When we replaced it with an echolab 3 years ago, we reduced out HVAC load by at least 10 kilowatts. Properly done, its ok, but that thing lost at least a kilowatt in hot cables.
Because of that, I have a tendency to make sure my bull shit grinder is running at peak efficiency when listening to the protagonists of dc power distribution for short haul use such as 'in rack' as suggested here.
57.6 volts? Under heavy charge rate and fully charged maybe. Thats so high the electrolyte in the batteries will be history in 3-5 days regardless of the formulation of the individual battery.
I at one time had an older NCR ups, a huge old 150 pound honk rated at 1.2 kva, but it could output that 1.2kva for quite a length of time, running these two machines and one of the monitors for about 2 hours one day before I go nervous and did a gracefull shutdown till Allegheny Power managed to roust out a crew into our neighborhood 3 damned days later.
It originally came with a 4 pack of 12 volt gelcell batteries in it of about 12ah each, but when it came into my posession they were toasted.
On checking the float voltage I found it about 2 volts above what I would have called a good float voltage when divided down to a per cell rating, so I knew they'd been overcharged and dried out. I put in 4 18ah motorcycle batteries after setting it down to 52 volts, and boiled them dry in 9 months. I dropped it another volt and replaced them again, this time they lasted about a year before they were bone dry. As I'd rigged the overflow tubes to dump into a small jar of soda, I checked to see if the soda was affected, but it was still as pristine and white as the day I set it up. As that was about $120 a year for batteries, I said to hell with it, stuck a 2 wheeler under it and parked it on the back porch, replaceing it with the same size Belkin, which turned out not to be anywhere near big enough, shutting itself off rather unceremoniously at about 60% of its rated load. I yelled at Belkin and they sent me a much larger unit thats worked for about 4 years now with one battery replacement about 8 months ago.
Idealy I should have been able to run the wet batteries in a stationary environment for 5 to 7 years, and possibly could have if I'd figured out the right float voltage for those batteries.
Perhaps even a fixed trickle of about a milliamp once charged would have worked, but thanks to NCR's habit of burning old docs, I had none on that unit.
I once ran a set of 225ah big truck batteries for 8 years on a standby generator after reducing the trickle charge till there was no more gassing, which was a current of about 5 ma. At the end of 8 years, they would still turn that Cummins 335 hard enough the first cylinder comeing up fired. And the next, second cylinder firing spun it on up enough to kick out the starter, a total elapsed time of maybe 1/4 second from hitting the button and it was only another second to make 1500 rpm and energize the alternator, for a total power outage to on generator elapsed time of about 3.5 seconds. Those 2 batteries would check at about 27.1 volts anytime.
When you've lived where car batteries can freeze and split overnight if not fully charged, one tends to finetune the voltage regulators in the vehicles that must just start, for each battery. I've had batteries that were happy at 15.8 volts without gassing excessively, but in that home made regulator I had strong negative temperature comp too, slopeing down to about 13.8 at 70F, and the next one boiled like crazy at 14 sloping down to 12.4. Each battery has its own 'personality' I guess. Go figure. Yeah, its the old fart again, pontificating a bit about that which he's played with.
-- Cheers, Gene
Re:Great... just what space entrepreneurs need...
on
Golf in Space
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· Score: 1
And in either event, given the result, a certified never mind only effecting the debris cloud's expansion velocity.:(
I'd say it would be visible from sea level given decent binoculars in either case.
-- Cheers, Gene
Re:Great... just what space entrepreneurs need...
on
Golf in Space
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· Score: 1
grains of bullet weight != grams of weight, and I'm too lazy to do that conversion. And its why I said to get out the calculators.
In any event, the crater size is immaterial since what you'd really want to do is figure out how to get your suit on and sealed in 20 seconds or so while the air is blowing out the golf ball sized hole where it came in, and the saucer sized hole where it went out the other side.
Slashdot Mirror
That would be people who didn't study history well enough the first time around I'd expect. :)
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Cheers, Gene
Chuckle :) I've been saying that for years, but somehow there doesn't seem to be a way to make a bash script "purty", but they sure are handier than bottled beer for stuff like that.
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Cheers, Gene
In fact I have about a 7 year history with amanda. Having worn out 4 of those 4 tape seagate changers & a couple of regular DDS2 drives, I've come to the conclusion that disks, having much more development money behind them, have indeed now exceeded the utility of tapes when I can buy a disk that lasts several years, possibly a decade, for 10% or less the cost per gigabyte of an equivalent tape drive and its backup medium. But thats just my opinion, the opinion of an old man these days as I'm now 71. So while I've been there, and done an awfull lot of that, the youngsters tend to discount that experience, prefering to get their own experiences. Oh, well. As has been said many many times, history will repeat itself.
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Cheers, Gene.
I've been running it for 4 nights now, replaceing the previous 2.4.5 version I've been running for quite some time, and its working just like the 2.4.5 version it replaced. So if you are worried about the upgrade breaking something, if it worked with your old configs, it should Just Work(TM) with the new version too. I used the same config/build script I've been useing for years to build and install it.
Newbies, please goto amanda.org or zmanda.org and read the top ten FAQ there, it will save you many headaches in getting it setup. To make it work, and work well, may require a re-thinking of how you think a backup should be done. Once setup its a background process you get nightly emails from, but requires little or no hand-holding on a daily basis other than making sure the tape needed is in the drive for tonights run. vtape users (where the tape images are kept on a humongous hard drive) don't even have to deal with that, the best of both worlds IMO. I've been doing that for about 18 months or more here at the coyote.den, my private domains name.
And I highly recommend subscribing to the amanda-user mailing list, details on amanda.org, where you can ask for help and get it from more knowledgable people than I, although you will find me there too. 10 messages is a busy day so it won't eat your lunch.
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Cheers, Gene
Only in your wildest dreams. That would be something similar to a zebra and a leopard tradeing skin patterns, it just tain't done. To the leopard, a zebra is lunch, not a sex partner.
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Cheers, Gene
Your attempt at sarcastic humor didn't get any laughs here. They have done exactly that and poor publicity over it has always been spun to say look, we caught another pie-rat.
I tend to run with the facts. Yeah, they go look at megacorp with their 10,000 employees & only 50 licenses, maybe, depending on what megacorp has those 10,000 employees doing. 9550 of them could be coal miners for all you know. Thats not to say those coal miners don't use windows at home, possibly pirated, but thats a seperate, totally unrelated problem.
Its precisely that these rebuilders are so high profile due to their emphasis on charitable giving in their advertising efforts to collect these machines, that they get the SPA's attention. Thats the real world we live in IF you do windows.
And thats why there's only one windows machine on the premises at the moment, its the neighbors and I'm trying to figure out why it self reboots randomly, or doesn't boot, not even post, also randomly. I left memtest86 running on it last night, in the 3rd pass, when I got up it was back on pass 0. Beginning to think its motherboard. It also has trouble reading a floppy even with a new, known good floppy hanging on the end of the cable. Its a &$^%#! older Compaq, 1Gig athlon, 256 memory, what can I say...
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Cheres, gene
No, and it won't ever be fixed until the patents on mp3 expire. So you might as well get used to it, its not gonna change in the near future.
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Cheers, Gene
Somewhere on MS's site it has a page about if you can receive donated Windows licenses and terms
Yeah, sure, and then they make you jump thru hoops by having the original bill of sale when the SPA comes calling. And they will, bet the farm on it as you are a VERY high profile target.
Put something like Ubuntu-5.10 on them. These people may not be already windows indoctrinated to the point that they can't learn how to run firefox in 5 minutes, and get their email setup and running in 15, most of which is negotiating a connection to the net from their ISP of choice. Make sure iptables, portsentry and tcpwrappers are installed and setup for outgoing requests establishing the path, and trash ANYTHING that comes in un-invited. And setup the update tool to do it every night, or if its not on then, makes sure anacron knows about it by makeing sure its running in the startup.
That combination is pretty bullet proof, I've had 3 attacks get as far as the log before they were turned off absolutely in 3 years on a dsl circuit. And 2 of those came from known addresses as they were from compromised DNS servers at my ISP, verizon. They're windows lovers, obviously.
You may have a few more questions to field early in the game, but in the end you will have made a new generation of computer savvy people who are NOT slaves to the M$ machine in Redmond. And that is of course a very desirable thing at the end of the day, you have shown that the M$ way is NOT the only way, and the linux way is far more secure.
Handle the root access by making them prove enough knowledge to be able to handle it before you give it out. That will save a lot of phone calls right there.
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Cheers, gene
Sure, and pigs fly too. I've never been too bashfull to stand up and be counted when it counts. I guess thats from growing up in rural Iowa in the 30's, watching my father & grandfather crying on the night of Dec 7th, 1941 because they knew what was next & going thru WW2 before things got better. If somethings not right, you can figure on me standing up to object. And when I do I don't much care who hears me, the more the merrier. Yeah, I've been slapped down a time or two for it. It goes with the territory and I sleep well at night.
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Cheers, Gene
I knew it was OT, but somehow related. Anyway, thanks for the flowers.
OTOH, real life can be interesting, and thats one example.
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Cheers, Gene
He's said that GB has the best legal environment for a coder. I don't think he can continue to say that if this becomes law.
I do hope there will be a modicum of common sense exhibited by the MP's when they toss this one into the trashcan of history, to be repeated at suitable intervals when there isn't anything else to stir up the sheeple with.
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Cheers, Gene
By the way, are you a current/former police officer?
Nah, just somebody who firmly believes in the Bill of Rights, all of them.
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Cheers, Gene
S/B Mountaineer, speeeling chuckar failure there. :)
:)
And I was using "star city" in the truckers parlance where star city means the capital of the state, whatever state you're in ATM, (I'd forgotten about WV actually have one of those) so I'm about 40 miles south of you in Weston. I was the CE at the ch5 you sometimes watch from 1984-2002.
But they never truely let you retire you know. I'm still doing the transmitter pm early saturday mornings.
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Cheers, Gene
Welcome fellow West Virginian, but you're new here I take it, any topic is fair game on /. :-)
I'll have to plead a certain amount of curiosity over the way they handled it. As a semi-retired technical person, I occasionally get shipped out of state to go 'put out fires' so to speak, and which pays me pretty well. But when I'm out doing those things, I may be running on my credit card for a couple of months at a time, paying it off when I get back & settled up for expenses etc. That can run to several thou and has, but I always call the card folks & let them know at least a rough idea of how long, where I'll be, and a swag on the how much. As far as I know, no flags were ever raised to the point that a deposit was held more than overnight. And I paid it as soon as I knew the totals. Interest-wise, I carry only one card, and negotiated a rate some would kill to get years ago.
But, and this I fail to understand at all, is whyinhell did they ever let a 23% penny's card get THAT far behind. Thats fscking financial stupidity at its worst if they had the money to pay it off. I've dealt with penny's over their acceptance of a non-penny's card with a 40k line of credit on it, the bitch was gonna keep the card because it wasn't signed. It had been once, nearly 4 years back from that day, but wore off. I blew up loud enough they heard me all over the store and my permitted 38 was 5 seconds from coming out before she decided she'd give me back the card. I was gonna put about a $290 suit on it, but you know the rest of that story & I've only been back in penny's once since then, to check out an adv in the paper, but of course it was that old bait and switch at work again, they didn't have it, and never did have it. Jerks, they'll go away just like monkey ward did ten years ago now.
We used to have a montgomery ward here, but thats all they ever did the last 5 or 6 years of their existance, was bait & switch. 15 years ago I needed a water heater & they had a good deal in the paper. But when I got there later that day, adv in hand, they only had the floor model & it wasn't for sale under any conditions as "it was the show model, but we've got this other one with the same 40 gallons and warranty for only $185 more". Sure... I went down to Ace Hdwe and got the one I wanted for a tenner more than the wards paper price. After a while you get the message & they went bust for wholely justifiable reasons. You simply cannot treat people like that if you want their business.
Yeah, that much on a 23% card is unconsiously stupid in the first place.
Ignorance can usually be fixed by education, but stupidity is for a lifetime I do believe. I give you that couple as evidence.
I'm on I-79, about a hundred north of star city, whats your 20?
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Cheers, Gene
Am I the oddball that gets away with it then? Here I am, 71 years old, retired, as is the wife, living on SS and Teachers Retirement. We're not social climbers that have to have a new caddy every year or anything like that. The house is paid off so we are 'stable'.
:-)
But when our 97 caravan with 125k on it started its inevitable slide into the cesspool of 500 dollar fixits, like the whole dash insert was going dead for the 3rd time, the heater blower only worked when it wanted to & well, you get the picture. Electrically, the wiring was all corroded and going to hell in a handbasket, it was sending me telegrams in escense.
We didn't really need that van anymore since the missus quit teaching music, and my own 88 nissan 4wd is slowly rusting in two & not worth much for a tradein. I'll get a few more miles out of it yet, I mean its only got 206k on it now, just broken in for one of the 3L V6's with an auto tranny behind it. Neither was the van although it was otherwise showroom bodywise and the engine wasn't using or leaking any oil & could still 'light them up' if you needed to get out of the way.
But I did need a bigger 4wd to haul construction materials as I'm going to redo a rotting out carport this summer, along with the cement floor under it thats slowly sinking. I did the retaining wall around it, hauling sakcrete in a ton at a time with the nissan over the last 2 years. Keeps me out of the bars that way.
But why a 4wd? Well, this IS West Virginia folks, where a higher percentage of people drive 4wd's than any other state in the union because our hills are right up in your face, personal hills. If you need to go without waiting for the roads to clear, you drive a 4wd, its that simple.
Shopping around I found a 99 GMC KingCab 3 door with 59k miles on it, the usual small V8, auto, 4wd, new BIG rubber, yadda yadda, showroom condition & we haggled around to where I wrote a check for a bit over $15k getting an extended warranty & a couple other things thrown in. One of them 'pewter' paint jobs theres at least a million of running around, or is in my neck of these hills.
AFAIK, that did not raise any red flags. If it had made trouble, I know the phone numbers of my senator and my reps and I have the freedom plan. Somewhat akin to saying I've got a shotgun and a shovel, any questions?
It may not be a 40mpg econobox, but I've loaded it up with an extra 500+ lbs and made a trip to western NY state already, getting 20 mpg at the speed limits, not too shabby for a bigger rig IMO.
Thats 5mpg better than the much smaller nissan pickup gets FWIW. And 2 to 3 mpg better than the van with its 3.6L v6 ever got.
You could say I'm a redneck, but I'm an import of only 22 years duration here in WV. Its a great place to live, retire, and eventually die in, really.
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Cheers, Gene
And which dog in this fight is yours?
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Cheers, Gene
You'll forgive me that I take the word of a respected professional over that of some random Slashdotter.
OTOH, respected or not is relatively immaterial. He is an employee, no doubt a valuable one to M$, BUT HE IS NOT M$ . Given the M$ rep for internal secrecy, its entirely possible those backdoors do exist, and frankly I'd be very surprised if they did not, however his ability to control their existance is probably minimal. He may, when they are disclosed like the previous ones were, flee the camp just to protect his reputation, but as for his imminent demise, that might be an unfortunate side effect of one of Steve Balmers apparently well documented chair throwing scenes.
When dealing with the likes of m$ and their corporate history, methinks you give this mans word way too much weight.
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Cheers, Gene
400+ dvd's? I might be able to find 5 or 6 if I really took the place apart. I guess I've never become a slave to h(b)ollywood. Ditto CD's, might have 40 or 50...
As far as it being buried, unless we make a concerted effort to replace our congresscritters with some that represent the people, that will never happen. And I fully intend to vote exactly that way in the next election.
If Jay votes for the patriot act (and I think he did), or this new audio flag just intro'd yesterday, or any single one of the other freedom reducing laws, he'll find my vote in the other column. With modern telephone abilities, pick up the phone and yell at the office type when something is about to go down thats undemocratic. I do.
If he votes to do a serious reform of our patent system, or to put copyrights back to what the founding fathers had in mind, he *might* get a free ride. But notice the emphasis.
I wish I could vote Sen. KingofPork into retirement, but he's not in my district. I do like what his pork has done for WV, but the nation as a whole cannot afford him and his "get it all for us" competition. It doesn't lead to the nations government being run in an economical manner at all.
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Cheers, Gene
Why not, they haven't policed the profanity on the ham bands in 30 years now, nor the profanity on 11 meters in nearly 40. What makes you think they'll do more than token enforcement in the future? The only enforcement is by the hams themselves, and on 80 meters in particular, its whoever has the biggest linear, with one rig I heard 4 or 5 years ago that had to have been at least 50kw. And it was being run by an idiot with no knowledge of proper modulation, just the steadier he could keep the power meter pegged, the better it had to be. He was covering 150khz either side of himself with overmod splatter from almost 3000 miles away. And he's probably still on the air for all I know, but the band is a lot emptier if he is, he's run the legal minded folks off. Maybe for good. Like a barrel of apples, it only takes one bad one to spoil all.
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Cheers, Gene
Listen carefully MPAA/RIAA. Re the aneurism, I hope its fatal. Damnit, you got your ransom for that disk when it was first sold, and it was sold with the understanding that the buyer had unlimited play rights. And if he/she/it gets tired of it and sells it to a used bookstore for 50 cents rather than add to the trash in the landfill, then those unlimited play rights go with the cd to the next buyer. The secret is that when the seller does sell it, he is legally expected to expunge any ripped copies from his possession. If he does not, then he should be held guilty of a copyright violation, not the buyer in the used book store that has no damned idea if the seller is honest or not, he just wants this rare out of print copy of whatever the hell he has in his hand when he walks to the checkout.
As for doing business with the RIAA, I do damned little, and what I do buy on cd is carefully inspected for the presence of the CD logo owned by Phillips, if its not there, then it goes back in the bin.
Now if I just could figure out how to apply similar rules to the purchase of dvd's. We all know that you can update a dvd player just by putting the update on a cd and inserting it into the drive, and I'll be damned if I'll have some shithead with an idea like sony/bertelsman figure out how to 'adjust' the software in my dvd player.
So listen carefully. Treat us comsumers as human beings, giving us quality product for your outragiously 'quality' price for a dimes worth of plastic, and we will treat you as human. Continue running roughshod over the consumers historical rights with artificial, legally unbreakable limits and there will be an escalation of hostilities and your name might as well be Gen. G. A. Custer at the Little Big Horn River meeting. Understand that we do vote, and that today we can pickup the phone and tell our congresscritters exactly what kind of scumbags you are, and that voting to support you will be measured in how many more votes they get to cast before being voted out of office at the next election.
Comprende?
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Cheers, Gene
I think so. But its not been historicly stated that way. The acronym 'rms' means the root of the mean sum of all squares, if the voltage was sampled at a high rate of speed compared to the cycle time, then the mean of all readings squared, ignoring the sign is determined, and the root taken of that mean, I think. Could be wrong, probably am. But that doesn't say in so many words thats its the square root of 2. Just the square root of the mean sum of all the squares.
By using the equivalent in heating power, distortions can be absorbed, such as the flat topping of the waveform when a majority of the load is the full wave bridges in todays switching power supplies, not all of which contain pfc correction circuitry. Thats rather visible on a scope these days if you look.
The $12 ea in case lots offshore 300 watt stuff certainly doesn't. Ditto for flourescent lighting loads, which generally have a rather poor power factor at the lamp sockets, which is converted into a highly inductive pf lag by the ballasts, or were by 1st generation ballasts. I think todays somewhat more expensive ballasts do a better job, as do the current crop of ccfl lamps that screw into std incandescent sockets.
But thats almost a whole 'nother field of discussion.
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Cheers, Gene
No it doesn't swing over the 115 to -115 range. Swings yes, but the range is such that the heating effect when applied to a resistor is the same as 127 volts today, which means that the peak voltage of the sineusoid wave is 127*1.414=179.578 volts peak, plus or minus as the case might be at the instant its measured. That is what the rms stands for, the root of the mean square and it allows power to be measured by its equivalent heating power.
/.
Gawd I'm amazed at the assumptions made by those that should know better here on
As far as the dc power debate is concerned, big convertors at the top of each rack makes sense to me if the busses are big enough. My last experience with that was a grass 300 video switcher that had 4 1.5 kw supplies in it. The bussing interconnect cables did get warm, with nearly a volts loss at the far end of them. When we replaced it with an echolab 3 years ago, we reduced out HVAC load by at least 10 kilowatts.
Properly done, its ok, but that thing lost at least a kilowatt in hot cables.
Because of that, I have a tendency to make sure my bull shit grinder is running at peak efficiency when listening to the protagonists of dc power distribution for short haul use such as 'in rack' as suggested here.
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Cheers, Gene
57.6 volts? Under heavy charge rate and fully charged maybe. Thats so high the electrolyte in the batteries will be history in 3-5 days regardless of the formulation of the individual battery.
I at one time had an older NCR ups, a huge old 150 pound honk rated at 1.2 kva, but it could output that 1.2kva for quite a length of time, running these two machines and one of the monitors for about 2 hours one day before I go nervous and did a gracefull shutdown till Allegheny Power managed to roust out a crew into our neighborhood 3 damned days later.
It originally came with a 4 pack of 12 volt gelcell batteries in it of about 12ah each, but when it came into my posession they were toasted.
On checking the float voltage I found it about 2 volts above what I would have called a good float voltage when divided down to a per cell rating, so I knew they'd been overcharged and dried out. I put in 4 18ah motorcycle batteries after setting it down to 52 volts, and boiled them dry in 9 months. I dropped it another volt and replaced them again, this time they lasted about a year before they were bone dry. As I'd rigged the overflow tubes to dump into a small jar of soda, I checked to see if the soda was affected, but it was still as pristine and white as the day I set it up. As that was about $120 a year for batteries, I said to hell with it, stuck a 2 wheeler under it and parked it on the back porch, replaceing it with the same size Belkin, which turned out not to be anywhere near big enough, shutting itself off rather unceremoniously at about 60% of its rated load. I yelled at Belkin and they sent me a much larger unit thats worked for about 4 years now with one battery replacement about 8 months ago.
Idealy I should have been able to run the wet batteries in a stationary environment for 5 to 7 years, and possibly could have if I'd figured out the right float voltage for those batteries.
Perhaps even a fixed trickle of about a milliamp once charged would have worked, but thanks to NCR's habit of burning old docs, I had none on that unit.
I once ran a set of 225ah big truck batteries for 8 years on a standby generator after reducing the trickle charge till there was no more gassing, which was a current of about 5 ma. At the end of 8 years, they would still turn that Cummins 335 hard enough the first cylinder comeing up fired. And the next, second cylinder firing spun it on up enough to kick out the starter, a total elapsed time of maybe 1/4 second from hitting the button and it was only another second to make 1500 rpm and energize the alternator, for a total power outage to on generator elapsed time of about 3.5 seconds. Those 2 batteries would check at about 27.1 volts anytime.
When you've lived where car batteries can freeze and split overnight if not fully charged, one tends to finetune the voltage regulators in the vehicles that must just start, for each battery. I've had batteries that were happy at 15.8 volts without gassing excessively, but in that home made regulator I had strong negative temperature comp too, slopeing down to about 13.8 at 70F, and the next one boiled like crazy at 14 sloping down to 12.4. Each battery has its own 'personality' I guess. Go figure. Yeah, its the old fart again, pontificating a bit about that which he's played with.
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Cheers, Gene
And in either event, given the result, a certified never mind only effecting the debris cloud's expansion velocity. :(
I'd say it would be visible from sea level given decent binoculars in either case.
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Cheers, Gene
grains of bullet weight != grams of weight, and I'm too lazy to do that conversion. And its why I said to get out the calculators.
In any event, the crater size is immaterial since what you'd really want to do is figure out how to get your suit on and sealed in 20 seconds or so while the air is blowing out the golf ball sized hole where it came in, and the saucer sized hole where it went out the other side.
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Cheers, Gene