Or note that the 4 "summer blockbuster" movies covered on the ABC nightly news the past few days all have some Disney affiliations... and compare the time given to each, compared to real news.
How many companies control "the media"? A close acquaintence of mine has a story she likes to relate about the media: Several years ago, she asked the head of Time Warner if it was true that 18 people controlled 90% of the western world's news outlets... She says he thought about it for about a second, and said it was more like 11.
Boardwatch got pissed on *instantly* after their acqusition by feckless media... Go compare the print editions of the magazine; damn near an instant 180 in one month. Go look at the older articles on the site, as compared to the newer ones.
I ranted and raved about boardwatch when it happened, and am still doing so because I really liked what they had going. 'twas the owner/editor's right to sell; I hope he made a mint and has all he wishes, but I'll bet even he knows that internet.com killed a good thing.
From what I've heard, it might be that your best bet is to get away from Linux for NFS completely. Linux NFS has improved markedly in recent times even to my ignorant-of-other-options eye; Solaris NFS is probably still going to be the winner in a reliability contest. ISTR Bruce Perens lauding SGI's NFS, too. I'd bet your specific problem is more likely to be software than hardware, but since you ask about hardware, and since I've been doing somewhat similar work with linux for a few years now...
If I was setting out to build a Linux NFS server for maximum reliability, I'd put down a Tyan Tomcat4 mobo, with a PC Power and Cooling power supply (just for it; put the drives on a different supply), Kingston RAM, etc. That's an HX chipset Pentium motherboard and I have 4 of 'em (the dual CPU model), one of which has ben running 24/7 for nearly 3 years with 0 trouble. You don't need a great deal of CPU power for this anyway, and I have yet to see anything newer that's anything like as stable.
The 3c509 10Mbit ethernet cards are the most stable NICs I've used under linux. The machine mentioned above is a partly a router and has 5 of 'em, barring lightning they just work.
In 100Mbit, I like the 3c905b cards. Those are hard to find anymore, the 3c905C has replaced 'em and while the hardware may be as good, the drivers are not quite there yet... I speak as one who has tried all 5 of the current drivers for that card, and ain't happy about that. Every Tulip based 100Mbit NIC I own seems to have one reliabilty problem or another after a few days or a few GB of traffic, I've long since given up on putting them in servers. Haven't heard good things about Intel NICs, and thus haven't tried any seriously.
The previous poster's comment about SCSI RAID is a good one; I've been told that reliability isn't even a design consideration for any but the high end SCSI drives, and hasn't been for several years. I buy that from examination of several dead drives, the cheaper SCSI's were identical to the IDE version but for the circut board, while the "server" drives were obviously better designed and engineered.
One gotcha that got me on hard drives was cooling; the warmer drives in my stable had the highest error rates, IDE or SCSI. If you've got big 10k RPM drives they'll want fans all their own. Once cooled, mine have had very few problems regardless of brand or interface, with one exception... (warning, rant follows)
I've got WDs, Segates, Quantums, IBMs, even a few Fushitsus, but up 'til recently I was very loyal to Maxtor. I've got 10yr old maxtor drives running error free today, but the last reliable maxtor I have is a 17GB IDE from back when that was the biggest they made... 2 years ago? Since then, I've had a better than 25% DOA rate, over 50% dead-after-a-few-days rate, and not one single drive that doesn't drop a bit here and there. Maxtor used to be rock solid, but they've apparently decided that all that quality and customer satisfaction wasn't worth the trouble.
I've had the least trouble from my IBMs, but they're not really old enough for me to really respect 'em yet. I've burnt up a couple of Quantum drives (IDE and SCSI), but have others of the same model, age, and running the same loads still alive. Seagates seem to have a shorter lifespan on average than most of the other brands I've tried, I've been avoiding them for several years. One point in their favor; the drives seem to give some warning before they die: suddenly becoming much noisier, and/or vibrating badly, or running hot... I had a Seagate 545MB IDE that died suddenly, all the rest gave enough warning to be replaced before failing. I avoid Western Digital 'cuz their stuff looks and feels cheap, and doesn't play well with other brands.
The only thing left for your server is a SCSI controller, I've had good luck with Adaptec 2940UW boards, bad luck with the UWPro and 29160, but no reliability complaints. Your application probably justifies hardware RAID which I know little about.
Oh, yeah, video cards. I don't think you'd care a lot about video in this application, but I'd put in a Matrox card, I've had good luck with 'em. I have in my pile of rarely used hardware a Diamond Stealth 500 (riva128 chipset, i think) VGA card that locks up any machine its in after about a week running. Never have figured out whay, but then I've never really tried that hard to diagnose it. I'm sure it's the video card though, as it happens on every motherboard from 486en to P2s I've tried it on, most of which are rock solid otherwise.
... that's a lot more than I meant to say when I hit the reply button, but perhaps it'll be of some use. I don't mean to imply special expertise; this is just the results of my own trip down the learning curve.
It's not well known, but there really was an 80186. Some Tandy 1000's had 'em, can't recall anything else that could be called a PC that did, though. the NEC v20 (wasn't it?) 8086 clone was a far better chip anyway.
deja vu all over again; I do believe I've read you saying the same thing (I'm too nice to say "spouting the same drivel") before.
My local computer shop has NICs cheap and easy, for nearly whatever network/connection I need, which run just fine on my linux router. When the surge comes down a notwork line, how much bux and how long does it take to replace that port on the dinky cisco? Can you replace it at all?
Not having used any sort of dedicated router I can't compare ease of use; I grant that building anything more than moderately complex out of PC parts and free software isn't gonna be anything like as easy as buying. It's much cheaper. Administering is about the same, I think: Once it's set up, it just runs.
Of course, there is the most telling argument, the source availability. Even if someone else doesn't fix a problem for me (usually before I'm aware of it's existance), I've got a shot at fixing it myself. That's a comfort that as far as I know just ain't available from dedicated vendors.
There's other arguments, rehash until satisfied...
Why would intel want to slow the PC market? Simple, they want a bigger slice of the price of each one sold, rather than a bit less even if more are sold...
Somewhere during the development of the PPro they decided that market leadership through excellence wasn't working for them, and began the predatory route. Reminds me of IBM's MCA fiasco (as others have pointed out); IBM had a couple of consent decrees that kept them from slaughtering their competition as Intel has done, which is why Intel's "leadership" is still with us 5 years later... IBM's fall from glory took, what, 12 months?
I've never dealt with any of them but I've seen ads for disk duplication services that are equipped to do that already. ISTR their charges being something less than $0.25 over the cost of a raw floppy, and included labels for some of 'em.
Is it possible to buy a reliable floppy anymore? I've got pre-1990 floppies that are still readable, but brand new ones in the same drives seem to develop bad spots in hours.
Making cheap PC's do the work of facy gear is great, I'm all for it. For a noise reduction system for fans, a recording isn't going to cut it; the fan isn't going to produce a regular sound... and thus your playback isn't going to be of opposite phase to the sound being generated by the fan now, and will almost certainly just add to the total noise.
As for tuning for speaker and room acoustics with a microphone, also a really cool idea... but impractical for most applications. The stupidity lies in doing such tuning with cheap (affordable) mics, which will give you more distortion than just twiddling knobs by hand and listening until it "sounds good".
...and to explain why I care enough to post an intemperate comment; well, I've spent too much time recently listening to ideas much like the above from my PHB's. My favorite so far is putting acoustic ceiling tile on the walls of the recording studio as soundproofing; 'cuz anechoic foam panels are so expensive and cheaper effective soultions like draped curtains "look unprofessional". It's "aucoustic" tile, after all... So now I'm supposed to eliminate that "tin can sound" somewhere after recording.
"variable-frequency signal through the speakers, and with a microphone, measures the speaker's frequency response,"
Got a audio catalog here, let's just look... Here's a Shure SM7A that claims 40Hz to 16KHz response, only $500+; of course if you want 20 to 20K that's gonna cost a bit more... Here's a Neumann M147 unit, only about $2,000.
The point is, just because it was done 20 years ago doesn't mean it's not still a stupid idea today.
The "MP patch to pppd" linked above works; with a bit of effort, I had a 2.2.15 version of it running last week... and then discovered that it wasn't going to be useful for what I needed it for. USR Courier ISDN modems don't do channel bonding without MPPP, unlike the motorola's used to.
If you use the "multipath routing" feature of 2.2.x kernels, you can set up two or more routes to an address, and they'll all be used for outgoing traffic. There's some magic so that a single TCP connection only uses one link during its lifetime, but for most purposes it should work well.
The EQL driver is odd, I've never used it, but it's my understanding that it only works between linux and linux or a Lucent Portmaster 2e (not 3+). There's been a "True Link Equalizer" since 2.2.9 or so, I think, but that's about all I know about it; whether it's functional, how it's used etc I have no clues about.
Lower framerates in DirectX would be my bet for the culprit. I used to could never play Doom for more than about 5 minutes; after turning the brightness and contrast on the monitor all the way up and darkening the room the problem became manageable.
Apogee peaked shortly after Commander Keen, didn't they? Who's suprised that the blood sucking vampires that took possetion of its corpse continue to suck even harder at the husk?
Really, ISTR that Apogee sort of helped get id off the ground with Wolfenstein, but ain't sure. Anybody got a quick history lesson?
MI/X will work without the included TWM; you start the bare X server (xs.exe or whatever) and have XDM or something work it from a real system. I've got several windoze boxes that run MI/X this way, with FVWM2 for the window manager.
IIRC, Ultraseek isn't actually written in python, it's got python embedded for use as a configuration language.
Thawte used python extensively in their site; and I think Yahoo's webmail is python based, too.
Re:these machines are shipping with Linux?
on
New Mega Alphas
·
· Score: 1
Well, as an example; say you've set up this wonderful web site that does lots of database and CGI work, on beefy intel hardware running linux, with horse killing amounts of bandwidth available... You show it to the world, they love it; your server begins to melt. For some reason you didn't take that possibility into account when designing your system, and so you can't break the functionality out into different machines very easily.
Either you let the existing system boil while you do a (more correct) reimplementation that can be spread across machines, or you replace your single server with a more powerful single server...
Try a different power supply, or perhaps lose some devices temporarily, and see if that helps. I've got a motherboard/power supply combination that beomes unstable much as you describe, except it's anything RAM intensive that hangs it up. Running it with less load on the PS makes it rock solid.
From the article: "simply being open source is no guarantee of security."... Most everybody can agree with that, I think. He does an excellent job of making that point, as expected.
For those of us who suffer from the horrible HTML at securityfocus.com: the unframed article and just for good measure the unframed BugTraq Archives. Really, guys, a banner ad is fine but you've got 3/4 of the browser filled with useless flashing crap. Stop it.
Slashdot Mirror
Or note that the 4 "summer blockbuster" movies covered on the ABC nightly news the past few days all have some Disney affiliations... and compare the time given to each, compared to real news.
How many companies control "the media"? A close acquaintence of mine has a story she likes to relate about the media: Several years ago, she asked the head of Time Warner if it was true that 18 people controlled 90% of the western world's news outlets... She says he thought about it for about a second, and said it was more like 11.
Boardwatch got pissed on *instantly* after their acqusition by feckless media... Go compare the print editions of the magazine; damn near an instant 180 in one month. Go look at the older articles on the site, as compared to the newer ones.
I ranted and raved about boardwatch when it happened, and am still doing so because I really liked what they had going. 'twas the owner/editor's right to sell; I hope he made a mint and has all he wishes, but I'll bet even he knows that internet.com killed a good thing.
Installing is not the same as maintaining; or recovering from the results of no maintenance.
I haven't seen a succsessful "Mom test" of Win98 yet; much less a "Grandma test" of RedHat; I think you may be optimistic about their ease of use.
From what I've heard, it might be that your best bet is to get away from Linux for NFS completely. Linux NFS has improved markedly in recent times even to my ignorant-of-other-options eye; Solaris NFS is probably still going to be the winner in a reliability contest. ISTR Bruce Perens lauding SGI's NFS, too. I'd bet your specific problem is more likely to be software than hardware, but since you ask about hardware, and since I've been doing somewhat similar work with linux for a few years now...
If I was setting out to build a Linux NFS server for maximum reliability, I'd put down a Tyan Tomcat4 mobo, with a PC Power and Cooling power supply (just for it; put the drives on a different supply), Kingston RAM, etc. That's an HX chipset Pentium motherboard and I have 4 of 'em (the dual CPU model), one of which has ben running 24/7 for nearly 3 years with 0 trouble. You don't need a great deal of CPU power for this anyway, and I have yet to see anything newer that's anything like as stable.
The 3c509 10Mbit ethernet cards are the most stable NICs I've used under linux. The machine mentioned above is a partly a router and has 5 of 'em, barring lightning they just work.
In 100Mbit, I like the 3c905b cards. Those are hard to find anymore, the 3c905C has replaced 'em and while the hardware may be as good, the drivers are not quite there yet... I speak as one who has tried all 5 of the current drivers for that card, and ain't happy about that. Every Tulip based 100Mbit NIC I own seems to have one reliabilty problem or another after a few days or a few GB of traffic, I've long since given up on putting them in servers. Haven't heard good things about Intel NICs, and thus haven't tried any seriously.
The previous poster's comment about SCSI RAID is a good one; I've been told that reliability isn't even a design consideration for any but the high end SCSI drives, and hasn't been for several years. I buy that from examination of several dead drives, the cheaper SCSI's were identical to the IDE version but for the circut board, while the "server" drives were obviously better designed and engineered.
One gotcha that got me on hard drives was cooling; the warmer drives in my stable had the highest error rates, IDE or SCSI. If you've got big 10k RPM drives they'll want fans all their own. Once cooled, mine have had very few problems regardless of brand or interface, with one exception... (warning, rant follows)
I've got WDs, Segates, Quantums, IBMs, even a few Fushitsus, but up 'til recently I was very loyal to Maxtor. I've got 10yr old maxtor drives running error free today, but the last reliable maxtor I have is a 17GB IDE from back when that was the biggest they made... 2 years ago? Since then, I've had a better than 25% DOA rate, over 50% dead-after-a-few-days rate, and not one single drive that doesn't drop a bit here and there. Maxtor used to be rock solid, but they've apparently decided that all that quality and customer satisfaction wasn't worth the trouble.
I've had the least trouble from my IBMs, but they're not really old enough for me to really respect 'em yet. I've burnt up a couple of Quantum drives (IDE and SCSI), but have others of the same model, age, and running the same loads still alive. Seagates seem to have a shorter lifespan on average than most of the other brands I've tried, I've been avoiding them for several years. One point in their favor; the drives seem to give some warning before they die: suddenly becoming much noisier, and/or vibrating badly, or running hot... I had a Seagate 545MB IDE that died suddenly, all the rest gave enough warning to be replaced before failing. I avoid Western Digital 'cuz their stuff looks and feels cheap, and doesn't play well with other brands.
The only thing left for your server is a SCSI controller, I've had good luck with Adaptec 2940UW boards, bad luck with the UWPro and 29160, but no reliability complaints. Your application probably justifies hardware RAID which I know little about.
Oh, yeah, video cards. I don't think you'd care a lot about video in this application, but I'd put in a Matrox card, I've had good luck with 'em. I have in my pile of rarely used hardware a Diamond Stealth 500 (riva128 chipset, i think) VGA card that locks up any machine its in after about a week running. Never have figured out whay, but then I've never really tried that hard to diagnose it. I'm sure it's the video card though, as it happens on every motherboard from 486en to P2s I've tried it on, most of which are rock solid otherwise.
... that's a lot more than I meant to say when I hit the reply button, but perhaps it'll be of some use. I don't mean to imply special expertise; this is just the results of my own trip down the learning curve.
It's not well known, but there really was an 80186. Some Tandy 1000's had 'em, can't recall anything else that could be called a PC that did, though. the NEC v20 (wasn't it?) 8086 clone was a far better chip anyway.
deja vu all over again; I do believe I've read you saying the same thing (I'm too nice to say "spouting the same drivel") before.
My local computer shop has NICs cheap and easy, for nearly whatever network/connection I need, which run just fine on my linux router. When the surge comes down a notwork line, how much bux and how long does it take to replace that port on the dinky cisco? Can you replace it at all?
Not having used any sort of dedicated router I can't compare ease of use; I grant that building anything more than moderately complex out of PC parts and free software isn't gonna be anything like as easy as buying. It's much cheaper. Administering is about the same, I think: Once it's set up, it just runs.
Of course, there is the most telling argument, the source availability. Even if someone else doesn't fix a problem for me (usually before I'm aware of it's existance), I've got a shot at fixing it myself. That's a comfort that as far as I know just ain't available from dedicated vendors.
There's other arguments, rehash until satisfied...
Why would intel want to slow the PC market? Simple, they want a bigger slice of the price of each one sold, rather than a bit less even if more are sold...
Somewhere during the development of the PPro they decided that market leadership through excellence wasn't working for them, and began the predatory route. Reminds me of IBM's MCA fiasco (as others have pointed out); IBM had a couple of consent decrees that kept them from slaughtering their competition as Intel has done, which is why Intel's "leadership" is still with us 5 years later... IBM's fall from glory took, what, 12 months?
I've never dealt with any of them but I've seen ads for disk duplication services that are equipped to do that already. ISTR their charges being something less than $0.25 over the cost of a raw floppy, and included labels for some of 'em.
Is it possible to buy a reliable floppy anymore? I've got pre-1990 floppies that are still readable, but brand new ones in the same drives seem to develop bad spots in hours.
Good point.
Making cheap PC's do the work of facy gear is great, I'm all for it. For a noise reduction system for fans, a recording isn't going to cut it; the fan isn't going to produce a regular sound... and thus your playback isn't going to be of opposite phase to the sound being generated by the fan now, and will almost certainly just add to the total noise.
As for tuning for speaker and room acoustics with a microphone, also a really cool idea... but impractical for most applications. The stupidity lies in doing such tuning with cheap (affordable) mics, which will give you more distortion than just twiddling knobs by hand and listening until it "sounds good".
...and to explain why I care enough to post an intemperate comment; well, I've spent too much time recently listening to ideas much like the above from my PHB's. My favorite so far is putting acoustic ceiling tile on the walls of the recording studio as soundproofing; 'cuz anechoic foam panels are so expensive and cheaper effective soultions like draped curtains "look unprofessional". It's "aucoustic" tile, after all... So now I'm supposed to eliminate that "tin can sound" somewhere after recording.
...More answer than you wanted, eh?
Got a audio catalog here, let's just look... Here's a Shure SM7A that claims 40Hz to 16KHz response, only $500+; of course if you want 20 to 20K that's gonna cost a bit more... Here's a Neumann M147 unit, only about $2,000.
The point is, just because it was done 20 years ago doesn't mean it's not still a stupid idea today.
...I feel better now.
Forward, Stop, and Reverse/Turn...
and it'll die after 30 minutes running when the "used condom" grade rubber clutch disc breaks.
"Aieee, killing interrupt handler"...
IIRC. It hasn't been that long since I've seen one, at that.
The "MP patch to pppd" linked above works; with a bit of effort, I had a 2.2.15 version of it running last week... and then discovered that it wasn't going to be useful for what I needed it for. USR Courier ISDN modems don't do channel bonding without MPPP, unlike the motorola's used to.
If you use the "multipath routing" feature of 2.2.x kernels, you can set up two or more routes to an address, and they'll all be used for outgoing traffic. There's some magic so that a single TCP connection only uses one link during its lifetime, but for most purposes it should work well.
The EQL driver is odd, I've never used it, but it's my understanding that it only works between linux and linux or a Lucent Portmaster 2e (not 3+). There's been a "True Link Equalizer" since 2.2.9 or so, I think, but that's about all I know about it; whether it's functional, how it's used etc I have no clues about.
Really? I'm not all the way through the site yet, but I haven't seen anything about an emacs port...
(actually I'm a righteous emacs zealot cleverly disguised)
Lower framerates in DirectX would be my bet for the culprit. I used to could never play Doom for more than about 5 minutes; after turning the brightness and contrast on the monitor all the way up and darkening the room the problem became manageable.
I don't know about Linus, but here's Alan Cox on a Chip.
Cheater.
Apogee peaked shortly after Commander Keen, didn't they? Who's suprised that the blood sucking vampires that took possetion of its corpse continue to suck even harder at the husk?
Really, ISTR that Apogee sort of helped get id off the ground with Wolfenstein, but ain't sure. Anybody got a quick history lesson?
MI/X will work without the included TWM; you start the bare X server (xs.exe or whatever) and have XDM or something work it from a real system. I've got several windoze boxes that run MI/X this way, with FVWM2 for the window manager.
It works as well as anything windoze.
IIRC, Ultraseek isn't actually written in python, it's got python embedded for use as a configuration language.
Thawte used python extensively in their site; and I think Yahoo's webmail is python based, too.
Well, as an example; say you've set up this wonderful web site that does lots of database and CGI work, on beefy intel hardware running linux, with horse killing amounts of bandwidth available... You show it to the world, they love it; your server begins to melt. For some reason you didn't take that possibility into account when designing your system, and so you can't break the functionality out into different machines very easily.
Either you let the existing system boil while you do a (more correct) reimplementation that can be spread across machines, or you replace your single server with a more powerful single server...
... just a possible "why".
there is no interval.
massive p0rn collection == test data == deductable
Try a different power supply, or perhaps lose some devices temporarily, and see if that helps. I've got a motherboard/power supply combination that beomes unstable much as you describe, except it's anything RAM intensive that hangs it up. Running it with less load on the PS makes it rock solid.
From the article: "simply being open source is no guarantee of security." ... Most everybody can agree with that, I think. He does an excellent job of making that point, as expected.
For those of us who suffer from the horrible HTML at securityfocus.com: the unframed article and just for good measure the unframed BugTraq Archives. Really, guys, a banner ad is fine but you've got 3/4 of the browser filled with useless flashing crap. Stop it.
I think I read that too; why then are all the OTC vitamin supplements these monster horse pills that Linda Lovelace would gag on?