Anyone else who's first Linux system was called "darkstar"?
My 2400bps modem had a bad resistor or something. When it got too warm it would drop the call. So I used a low-tech heatsink to solve the problem while downloading floppy images all night: Big glass of ice on the modem. Somehow it never occurred to me to worry about condensation, and I managed to not fry the thing.:)
I bought a 286 upgraded to a 386DX off some drunk frat guy at Lehigh one weekend. Don't even remember how much RAM was in it; probably 8MB. I'd been using Amigas, and had no idea what to do with the stupid Windows 3.1 it had. I'd heard about this "Line-ux" thing from somewhere, so I braved the download and gave it a try. Never looked back.
On the off chance that the potential author of a "... For Dummies" or "Idiot's Guide To..." book will see this, I just want to say that I refuse to purchase any book that forces me to place myself in one of those two categories. If I'm buying a book to learn about a subject, I am by definition neither a Dummy nor an Idiot. I may be ignorant about the subject, but I won't accept that I'm stupid because I need or want to buy a book to learn.
I doubt I'm alone. Oh, and for those who will say that I need to lighten up, trust me, I am very willing to poke fun at myself, and do so often. But I don't label myself a dummy or idiot (except when I am).
Perhaps a more accurate way to state it is that in America, you are valued for how hard you work, not for who you are. Outside of the USA, it's the other way around.
How wonderfully naive. I remember being like you, once.
Perhaps an even more accurate way to state is that just about anywhere, you are valued most for who you know.
Perfect example... Read the latest Time (3 October). There is a very interesting article about how various people wound up in pretty darned important Federal positions, with minimal or nonexistent qualifications for the jobs. It's not anything that Bush invented, of course. Cronyism has been around since the Roman Senate (at least!).
Not that I'm complaining... I've taken advantage of it on a number of occasions. Some call it cronyism, others call it networking. I call it using available resources to get the best jobs for me. I used to resent that (when I didn't know as many people), but eventually realized that no matter how hard I worked, unless I had 'ins' I wasn't going to compete with 'known quantities' who may have been less qualified but were less scary than hiring an unknown outsider. That's just the way the world works.
When the world's three music publishers only release in DRM form, you will buy it or not have current popular music.
O nos! What will I do without new Tittney or Chrislutna Ogle-ara? I think popular music sucks, and I don't think I'm alone. The decline in music sales isn't due to rampant piracy, it's because most new music sucks.
If musicians don't care enough to make sure their product isn't compromised by the distributor, then I don't care to support them. I'll keep listening to the music I already own, and only buy unencumbered music.
To complicate matters, some names are common for pets, but not people (e.g. "Spot", "Fido", "Max").
That's funny. I know two boys born within the past six months who are named "Max." Not short for Maximillian or anything, just "Max." In a pretty well-to-do town, too.
I was born in Lancaster (Lankister, not LAN-caster), grew up in Harrisburg/Hershey, and went to college in AH-MISH country. It wasn't uncommon to see/hear buggies in that town (clip-clop-clip-clop). Drunken college kids and horse-drawn buggies... That's a great combination.:)
Now outen the light and throw papa down the stairs his hat!
As for Flash, I don't even have it installed, right now. The advertisements were driving me bonkers!
Quote: Flashblock is an extension for the Mozilla and Firefox browsers that takes a pessimistic approach to dealing with Macromedia Flash content on a webpage and blocks ALL Flash content from loading. It then leaves a placeholder on the page that allows you to click to view the Flash content.
I guess if you don't use Firefox, or don't like installing extensions, this might not work for you, but I've found it to be very useful. Every once in a blue moon I want to be able to view flash content (some $#@E@!! sites REQUIRE it), but this way I'm not assaulted by flash-based popups and that #@#@^@!!! Amityville Horror trailer everywhere on the web.
We have to use analog lines for our incoming and outgoing lines because the VOIP providers are not caught up the reliability of asterisk.
Well, think about how VoIP works... Your reliability issues may not be due to the VoIP terminiation/origination providers at all. It may have a LOT more to do with your Internet connectivity. You don't say what you're using, but (e.g.) expecting a consumer-class cable connection to reliably give you the crystal-clear call quality of POTS is unrealistic.
Hell, I've seen a company with a fractional DS3 have call quality issues because the upstream wasn't willing/able to groom their network for VoIP traffic (even though they claimed to be working on it).
If I were setting up * for a business that absolutely relied upon its phones, I would never use only VoIP-based origination providers. It might be handy to have some secondary numbers coming in over VoIP, and have LD calls routed out to VoIP termination providers. I'd say that primary numbers should come in over PRI or (ick) copper pairs.
I haven't done anything 'official' with * yet, though. I run a system at home, and have messed with it at work. Before we dumped our old COMDIAL system I set up * as a proof-of-concept, and then a corporate partner took over and built a replacement system using * and SER.
These places tend not to have the overt physical rapes, but the insidious coercive type is rampant, with the wink wink, nudge nudge of the 'corrections officers' Stop prison rape now
Frankly, I don't have much sympathy for people in prison. It's supposed to be an unpleasant place to be. I don't think that officially-sanctioned rape (e.g. rumors of South American rape dogs) is right, but prison is full of sociopaths. If you don't want to be raped, or beaten, or humiliated, or subjected to whatever else happens to those who are less able to defend themselves from predators, DON'T DO THE CRIME!
As I see it, the only way to eradicate sociopathic behavior in prisons is to either spend a lot of money that no one wants to spend or do things that would probably be considered "cruel and unusual punishment" (e.g. full chemical restraint for all prisoners).
I go back and forth on my feelings about the state of the US justice/penal system. One on hand, I think it needs a complete overhaul, and on the other hand, I think that the larger problem is that society is failing large segments of the population. So many young minority males end up in prisons because they don't have anything better to do, and because they don't have a social structure that reinforces non-sociopathic behavior.
Bah. I think overall if I were going to spend any money, it would be on trying to improve the lot of people BEFORE they get themselves into prison. No one wants to talk about it or do anything, though. Humans being humans, no one trusts those who say that they'll take those increased tax dollars and really improve the lives of those who are in need of help. I certainly don't. So I grow more cynical every year, and focus on improving the lives of those I love and care about. Everyone else can screw themselves. Isn't that the American Way (tm)?
Oversold broadband to the point where I actually uncapped my modem.
Be careful about that... It wasn't Adelphia, but another company made some guy's life hellish because he uncapped his modem.
(more on topic) My in-laws have Adelphia in Cleveland. Seems fine to me. I periodically connect in to their network from Maine to work on stuff and I've never noticed any particularly poor performance.
Unless apt-get improved since 2000 when a co-worker had this happen. Also I remember the debian team in linuxworld 99 in NewYork had the problem on some sparcs.
You neglect to provide details, so I don't know what happened or what the solution might have been.
Whatever. You're entitled to your opinion about which flavor of *nix you want to run. I don't care, frankly. I have used FreeBSD (in production), and it was OK, but I found it tedious. That doesn't make you wrong, and it doesn't make me right.
Anyhow, do you really think it's fair to make judgements based on your experiences with technology from 1999??!?! Again, I don't know what the problem was, but I'm fairly confident that whatever bug cropped up (on Sparc... who uses Debian on Sparc?? (/me braces for the 4 Debian-Sparc users to flame him)) has been resolved in the 6 years since you saw it.
What if a dependency of the app you are trying to install conflicts with a dependency of a currently installed app?
... Well, if you had bothered to learn how to use the tools provided by the OS, you would have figured out that you had plenty of options to resolve the issue. For the record, I have not tried to install transcode on Warty. For the record, I just tried installing transcode on Hoary, and it wanted to install dependencies, but there were no conflicts. Had there been conflicts, I would have applied some forebrain to the issue and figured out what the problem was.
Y'see... Those dependencies and conflicts are created by the packager, who happens to be human. And humans can be fallible, but they also tend to be able to see problems that a simple program can't. So maybe there was a damned good reason for the conflict (e.g. incompatible libraries). I don't know, because you don't give enough detail. What I do know is that if you'd really tried to figure it out, you would have been able to reach a suitable resolution.
I guess you haven't used Gentoo.
No, I haven't. My job is systems administration, and I have better things to do than figuring out which 1337 optimizer flags to apply so that I get m4d sp33dz out of my binaries. I suppose Gentoo is kewl and all when you have a machine in your basement, but when you've got >50 machines, compiling tarballs gets old. "But you can compile one package and transfer it to other machines!" Uhh... Why not just use a packaged-based distro in the first place, where someone else has done the work of QA and compilation?
I use Debian on my servers (sure it gets long in the tooth, but it's Stable, damn it!), and Ubuntu on my personal computers (workstations and laptop). I like Ubuntu because things just work. I have paid my dues (started with Slack) and nowadays I just can't be bothered to track down lib.x.y.z and./configure --blah --blah && make -DFUNROLL_LOOPZ_OMG_I_MA_TEH_1337
For the record, I recompile packages which don't meet my needs (happens every once in a while), and for the record, I'm drunk at the moment.
Ubuntu is debian and uses apt. You'll be right back in dependency hell.
... Guh?
I'm flabbergasted. You keep using this word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Look, I'm not going to argue about source-based vs. binary-based distros or Ubuntu vs. MEPIS or whatever. I have no idea what you are talking about, man!
Maybe you have a fundamental misunderstanding of how Debian-based distros works. They have this cool concept of "Package Management." It's been around for a while, you should ask Google about it (or maybe you prefer AltaVista or Hotspot). The general idea is that you ask the package manager to get a package, and the package manager gets the package and all its dependencies! WOW!
Maybe you tried a Debian-based distro once, and hadn't taken time to understand how to use it. You were in the pre-apt RPM mindset of looking around for a.rpm, downloading it, and finding that you had to go find that RPM's dependencies by hand. I dunno... I'm trying to give you some credit here for not being a total idiot/troll.
You want to argue about source-based vs. package-based, or crazy optimizer flags for SUP3R-1337 FAST binaries (that load.10ms faster), fine. But saying that using Ubuntu will put you in dependency hell is just silly and stupid.
I'm already relaying via ISP - the only problem is that I have to use my ISP email address as my from address.
Ah, bummer. Makes sense, though. From their perspective, anyhow. Cuts down on shenanigans.
I'd rather use my own address as a from address so that I'm not locked in due to inability to switch email providers.
Well, I don't want to sound like a shill, so I won't mention my favorite fowarding service again. I'm sure that Google can tell you about other email forwarding services, though. Some are free, and some are pretty nominal in cost.
Really, there is no reason not to grant static IPs to all DSL users - that gets around the whole dynamic IP situation. However, the ISPs want to make money, and there is no law saying that we have to make it easy on them.
Well, I understand your pain, but there's more to the story than just corporate greed. Even if ISPs did assign static IPs, I don't think much would change in terms of blocklists. Personally, I would still reject mail coming from known DSL/Cable space, regardless of whether or not it's dynamic. The reason is as I stated previously: 99.9% of mail originating from that kind of space is going to be from zombied PCs. It's not worth it to me to increase the burden on my mail servers by going past the step of checking the address against lists of known DSL/Cable addresses.
Think about what must happen whenever a busy ISP's mail server receives a connect request... One of the first things my servers do is check to see if the client is in a pool of known DSL/Cable addresses. If it is, the connection is dropped and the server is immediately freed up to attend to other requests. If I started doing things like checking for SPF records (when I know the client is very likely a PC on a DSL/Cable connection), my servers would begin to suffer. Should I add more servers to the cluster just so that I don't accidentally drop the occasional legitmate email from someone playing with Postfix at home?
I'm not saying that I'm happy about the situation. In fact, I hate that spammers have ruined the relaxed atmosphere of the Golden Olden Internet. Unfortunately, just as people lock their cars and houses, we have to accept that there are lots of sociopaths on the Internet who will take advantage of whatever they can to make a buck.
However, I'll be happy once something like SPF is available for dynamic DNS users, and when recipients start allowing SPF-tagged mail through even if it is coming from a dynamic IP.
Well, I hate to rain on your parade, but I thought you should know that SPF likely won't solve your problem. Perhaps you have looked into it and just didn't include enough detail, but your post gives me the impression that you don't really understand how SPF works.
The idea behind SPF is that you, as the owner of a domain, publish TXT records of a certain format which specify which specific IP addresses may legitimately send mail purporting to be from your domain. I suppose that as part of your ddclient update operation that you could update the TXT record with your current address, but that's not particularly elegant or reliable. Additionally, since the connection would be coming from known dynamic space, it's highly likely that people will block your mail before even looking for SPF records. People who run high-volume mail servers (myself included) just can't be bothered to worry about someone who's running a mail server off of their DSL connection. For every hobbyist screwing around with their own mail server, there are thousands and thousands of zombied XP boxes trying to nail my customers' inboxes.
My advice to you is to stop kicking and screaming about how everyone blocks mail from dynamic IP space, and find a way to relay your mail. It's not difficult to configure your ISP's mail servers as a smarthost or relayhost or whatever your MTA calls it.
If you don't want to use your ISP's mail servers, there are services out there which allow authenticated relaying for a nominal annual fee. pobox.com is a good example. (I'm not affiliated with them in any way besides being a happy customer for 10 years)
Curiosity... Wouldn't that be better transliterated as å : oa?
I dunno, I took a semester of Swedish a few years ago on a whim. I don't really remember much beyond how to count to tjugo and say "Hjälp! Var är toaletten?"
I believe the patches allow trusted(?) applications to lock small amounts of this memory without requiring root.
Hmm... I haven't heard anything about this, but my gut response is bafflement. What's wrong with setuid or sudo? Why reinvent the wheel? (no pun intended)
I have to patch the vanilla kernel in the following way so that cdrecord works for non-root users.
Perhaps I'm being dense, but why go through the trouble of patching the kernel? Why not just set up sudo? Something like the following would allow anyone in the cdrom group to run 'sudo cdrecord...' with no password:
%cdrom ALL=NOPASSWD:/usr/bin/cdrecord
You could even set up an alias like this: alias cdrecord='sudo cdrecord' so that you don't have to remember the sudo bit.
Call me crazy, but patching your kernel every time just to be able to record CDRs seems silly. I can understand not wanting to be root to use cdrecord, though.
And actually, the more I think about it, why can't you just change the permissions on the devices(s) to be group-writable by some group (e.g. cdrom) and make your users part of that group? I feel like I must be missing something.
I dunno. Seems like there are two very easy solutions to your issue, but maybe I don't understand the scope of the problem.
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They were eating the brains and guts of their denmates.
Were they also shambling around and moaning "BRRRRRAAAAAAAIIIIIIINNNNNNNSSSSSS..." in little, high-pitched voices?
Anyone else who's first Linux system was called "darkstar"?
:)
My 2400bps modem had a bad resistor or something. When it got too warm it would drop the call. So I used a low-tech heatsink to solve the problem while downloading floppy images all night: Big glass of ice on the modem. Somehow it never occurred to me to worry about condensation, and I managed to not fry the thing.
I bought a 286 upgraded to a 386DX off some drunk frat guy at Lehigh one weekend. Don't even remember how much RAM was in it; probably 8MB. I'd been using Amigas, and had no idea what to do with the stupid Windows 3.1 it had. I'd heard about this "Line-ux" thing from somewhere, so I braved the download and gave it a try. Never looked back.
On the off chance that the potential author of a "... For Dummies" or "Idiot's Guide To ..." book will see this, I just want to say that I refuse to purchase any book that forces me to place myself in one of those two categories. If I'm buying a book to learn about a subject, I am by definition neither a Dummy nor an Idiot. I may be ignorant about the subject, but I won't accept that I'm stupid because I need or want to buy a book to learn.
I doubt I'm alone. Oh, and for those who will say that I need to lighten up, trust me, I am very willing to poke fun at myself, and do so often. But I don't label myself a dummy or idiot (except when I am).
Blah.
Sounds like a ID-10T problem. Could also be PEBCAK, but I'm not sure. Have you tried changing the coffee-cup holder on your Hard Drive?
Bravo, sir!
/. comment that gets me to belly-laugh. My hat's off to you.
It's a rare
When I retire, my 401k (among other diverse investments) will be worth nearly 2 million USD.
And what will that $2Mil be worth by the time you retire? Inflation happens.
Not to denegrate your hard work, but living off of $2Mil for twenty+ years twenty or fourty years from now is hardly "rich".
Just something to think about.
Perhaps a more accurate way to state it is that in America, you are valued for how hard you work, not for who you are. Outside of the USA, it's the other way around.
How wonderfully naive. I remember being like you, once.
Perhaps an even more accurate way to state is that just about anywhere, you are valued most for who you know.
Perfect example... Read the latest Time (3 October). There is a very interesting article about how various people wound up in pretty darned important Federal positions, with minimal or nonexistent qualifications for the jobs. It's not anything that Bush invented, of course. Cronyism has been around since the Roman Senate (at least!).
Not that I'm complaining... I've taken advantage of it on a number of occasions. Some call it cronyism, others call it networking. I call it using available resources to get the best jobs for me. I used to resent that (when I didn't know as many people), but eventually realized that no matter how hard I worked, unless I had 'ins' I wasn't going to compete with 'known quantities' who may have been less qualified but were less scary than hiring an unknown outsider. That's just the way the world works.
When the world's three music publishers only release in DRM form, you will buy it or not have current popular music.
O nos! What will I do without new Tittney or Chrislutna Ogle-ara? I think popular music sucks, and I don't think I'm alone. The decline in music sales isn't due to rampant piracy, it's because most new music sucks.
If musicians don't care enough to make sure their product isn't compromised by the distributor, then I don't care to support them. I'll keep listening to the music I already own, and only buy unencumbered music.
</curmudgeon>
To complicate matters, some names are common for pets, but not people (e.g. "Spot", "Fido", "Max").
:)
That's funny. I know two boys born within the past six months who are named "Max." Not short for Maximillian or anything, just "Max." In a pretty well-to-do town, too.
Haven't met anyone named Fido, though.
You, sir, have just earned a spot on my Friends list. For whatever that's worth. ;)
Is it AY-MISH, or AH-MISH.
:)
I was born in Lancaster (Lankister, not LAN-caster), grew up in Harrisburg/Hershey, and went to college in AH-MISH country. It wasn't uncommon to see/hear buggies in that town (clip-clop-clip-clop). Drunken college kids and horse-drawn buggies... That's a great combination.
Now outen the light and throw papa down the stairs his hat!
... sorry. :)
As for Flash, I don't even have it installed, right now. The advertisements were driving me bonkers!
Quote:
Flashblock is an extension for the Mozilla and Firefox browsers that takes a pessimistic approach to dealing with Macromedia Flash content on a webpage and blocks ALL Flash content from loading. It then leaves a placeholder on the page that allows you to click to view the Flash content.
I guess if you don't use Firefox, or don't like installing extensions, this might not work for you, but I've found it to be very useful. Every once in a blue moon I want to be able to view flash content (some $#@E@!! sites REQUIRE it), but this way I'm not assaulted by flash-based popups and that #@#@^@!!! Amityville Horror trailer everywhere on the web.
We have to use analog lines for our incoming and outgoing lines because the VOIP providers are not caught up the reliability of asterisk.
Well, think about how VoIP works... Your reliability issues may not be due to the VoIP terminiation/origination providers at all. It may have a LOT more to do with your Internet connectivity. You don't say what you're using, but (e.g.) expecting a consumer-class cable connection to reliably give you the crystal-clear call quality of POTS is unrealistic.
Hell, I've seen a company with a fractional DS3 have call quality issues because the upstream wasn't willing/able to groom their network for VoIP traffic (even though they claimed to be working on it).
If I were setting up * for a business that absolutely relied upon its phones, I would never use only VoIP-based origination providers. It might be handy to have some secondary numbers coming in over VoIP, and have LD calls routed out to VoIP termination providers. I'd say that primary numbers should come in over PRI or (ick) copper pairs.
I haven't done anything 'official' with * yet, though. I run a system at home, and have messed with it at work. Before we dumped our old COMDIAL system I set up * as a proof-of-concept, and then a corporate partner took over and built a replacement system using * and SER.
These places tend not to have the overt physical rapes, but the insidious coercive type is rampant, with the wink wink, nudge nudge of the 'corrections officers' Stop prison rape now
Frankly, I don't have much sympathy for people in prison. It's supposed to be an unpleasant place to be. I don't think that officially-sanctioned rape (e.g. rumors of South American rape dogs) is right, but prison is full of sociopaths. If you don't want to be raped, or beaten, or humiliated, or subjected to whatever else happens to those who are less able to defend themselves from predators, DON'T DO THE CRIME!
As I see it, the only way to eradicate sociopathic behavior in prisons is to either spend a lot of money that no one wants to spend or do things that would probably be considered "cruel and unusual punishment" (e.g. full chemical restraint for all prisoners).
I go back and forth on my feelings about the state of the US justice/penal system. One on hand, I think it needs a complete overhaul, and on the other hand, I think that the larger problem is that society is failing large segments of the population. So many young minority males end up in prisons because they don't have anything better to do, and because they don't have a social structure that reinforces non-sociopathic behavior.
Bah. I think overall if I were going to spend any money, it would be on trying to improve the lot of people BEFORE they get themselves into prison. No one wants to talk about it or do anything, though. Humans being humans, no one trusts those who say that they'll take those increased tax dollars and really improve the lives of those who are in need of help. I certainly don't. So I grow more cynical every year, and focus on improving the lives of those I love and care about. Everyone else can screw themselves. Isn't that the American Way (tm)?
Oversold broadband to the point where I actually uncapped my modem.
Be careful about that... It wasn't Adelphia, but another company made some guy's life hellish because he uncapped his modem.
(more on topic) My in-laws have Adelphia in Cleveland. Seems fine to me. I periodically connect in to their network from Maine to work on stuff and I've never noticed any particularly poor performance.
Unless apt-get improved since 2000 when a co-worker had this happen. Also I remember the debian team in linuxworld 99 in NewYork had the problem on some sparcs.
You neglect to provide details, so I don't know what happened or what the solution might have been.
Whatever. You're entitled to your opinion about which flavor of *nix you want to run. I don't care, frankly. I have used FreeBSD (in production), and it was OK, but I found it tedious. That doesn't make you wrong, and it doesn't make me right.
Anyhow, do you really think it's fair to make judgements based on your experiences with technology from 1999??!?! Again, I don't know what the problem was, but I'm fairly confident that whatever bug cropped up (on Sparc... who uses Debian on Sparc?? (/me braces for the 4 Debian-Sparc users to flame him)) has been resolved in the 6 years since you saw it.
Y'see... Those dependencies and conflicts are created by the packager, who happens to be human. And humans can be fallible, but they also tend to be able to see problems that a simple program can't. So maybe there was a damned good reason for the conflict (e.g. incompatible libraries). I don't know, because you don't give enough detail. What I do know is that if you'd really tried to figure it out, you would have been able to reach a suitable resolution.
I guess you haven't used Gentoo.
No, I haven't. My job is systems administration, and I have better things to do than figuring out which 1337 optimizer flags to apply so that I get m4d sp33dz out of my binaries. I suppose Gentoo is kewl and all when you have a machine in your basement, but when you've got >50 machines, compiling tarballs gets old. "But you can compile one package and transfer it to other machines!" Uhh... Why not just use a packaged-based distro in the first place, where someone else has done the work of QA and compilation?
I use Debian on my servers (sure it gets long in the tooth, but it's Stable, damn it!), and Ubuntu on my personal computers (workstations and laptop). I like Ubuntu because things just work. I have paid my dues (started with Slack) and nowadays I just can't be bothered to track down lib.x.y.z and
For the record, I recompile packages which don't meet my needs (happens every once in a while), and for the record, I'm drunk at the moment.
I'm flabbergasted. You keep using this word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Look, I'm not going to argue about source-based vs. binary-based distros or Ubuntu vs. MEPIS or whatever. I have no idea what you are talking about, man!
Maybe you have a fundamental misunderstanding of how Debian-based distros works. They have this cool concept of "Package Management." It's been around for a while, you should ask Google about it (or maybe you prefer AltaVista or Hotspot). The general idea is that you ask the package manager to get a package, and the package manager gets the package and all its dependencies! WOW!
Maybe you tried a Debian-based distro once, and hadn't taken time to understand how to use it. You were in the pre-apt RPM mindset of looking around for a
You want to argue about source-based vs. package-based, or crazy optimizer flags for SUP3R-1337 FAST binaries (that load
I'm already relaying via ISP - the only problem is that I have to use my ISP email address as my from address.
Ah, bummer. Makes sense, though. From their perspective, anyhow. Cuts down on shenanigans.
I'd rather use my own address as a from address so that I'm not locked in due to inability to switch email providers.
Well, I don't want to sound like a shill, so I won't mention my favorite fowarding service again. I'm sure that Google can tell you about other email forwarding services, though. Some are free, and some are pretty nominal in cost.
Really, there is no reason not to grant static IPs to all DSL users - that gets around the whole dynamic IP situation. However, the ISPs want to make money, and there is no law saying that we have to make it easy on them.
Well, I understand your pain, but there's more to the story than just corporate greed. Even if ISPs did assign static IPs, I don't think much would change in terms of blocklists. Personally, I would still reject mail coming from known DSL/Cable space, regardless of whether or not it's dynamic. The reason is as I stated previously: 99.9% of mail originating from that kind of space is going to be from zombied PCs. It's not worth it to me to increase the burden on my mail servers by going past the step of checking the address against lists of known DSL/Cable addresses.
Think about what must happen whenever a busy ISP's mail server receives a connect request... One of the first things my servers do is check to see if the client is in a pool of known DSL/Cable addresses. If it is, the connection is dropped and the server is immediately freed up to attend to other requests. If I started doing things like checking for SPF records (when I know the client is very likely a PC on a DSL/Cable connection), my servers would begin to suffer. Should I add more servers to the cluster just so that I don't accidentally drop the occasional legitmate email from someone playing with Postfix at home?
I'm not saying that I'm happy about the situation. In fact, I hate that spammers have ruined the relaxed atmosphere of the Golden Olden Internet. Unfortunately, just as people lock their cars and houses, we have to accept that there are lots of sociopaths on the Internet who will take advantage of whatever they can to make a buck.
However, I'll be happy once something like SPF is available for dynamic DNS users, and when recipients start allowing SPF-tagged mail through even if it is coming from a dynamic IP.
Well, I hate to rain on your parade, but I thought you should know that SPF likely won't solve your problem. Perhaps you have looked into it and just didn't include enough detail, but your post gives me the impression that you don't really understand how SPF works.
The idea behind SPF is that you, as the owner of a domain, publish TXT records of a certain format which specify which specific IP addresses may legitimately send mail purporting to be from your domain. I suppose that as part of your ddclient update operation that you could update the TXT record with your current address, but that's not particularly elegant or reliable. Additionally, since the connection would be coming from known dynamic space, it's highly likely that people will block your mail before even looking for SPF records. People who run high-volume mail servers (myself included) just can't be bothered to worry about someone who's running a mail server off of their DSL connection. For every hobbyist screwing around with their own mail server, there are thousands and thousands of zombied XP boxes trying to nail my customers' inboxes.
My advice to you is to stop kicking and screaming about how everyone blocks mail from dynamic IP space, and find a way to relay your mail. It's not difficult to configure your ISP's mail servers as a smarthost or relayhost or whatever your MTA calls it.
If you don't want to use your ISP's mail servers, there are services out there which allow authenticated relaying for a nominal annual fee. pobox.com is a good example. (I'm not affiliated with them in any way besides being a happy customer for 10 years)
It were a joke, son. I was going for the funny-funny. :P
å : aa
Curiosity... Wouldn't that be better transliterated as å : oa?
I dunno, I took a semester of Swedish a few years ago on a whim. I don't really remember much beyond how to count to tjugo and say "Hjälp! Var är toaletten?"
Hmm... I haven't heard anything about this, but my gut response is bafflement. What's wrong with setuid or sudo? Why reinvent the wheel? (no pun intended)
I have to patch the vanilla kernel in the following way so that cdrecord works for non-root users.
...' with no password:
/usr/bin/cdrecord
Perhaps I'm being dense, but why go through the trouble of patching the kernel? Why not just set up sudo? Something like the following would allow anyone in the cdrom group to run 'sudo cdrecord
%cdrom ALL=NOPASSWD:
You could even set up an alias like this: alias cdrecord='sudo cdrecord' so that you don't have to remember the sudo bit.
Call me crazy, but patching your kernel every time just to be able to record CDRs seems silly. I can understand not wanting to be root to use cdrecord, though.
And actually, the more I think about it, why can't you just change the permissions on the devices(s) to be group-writable by some group (e.g. cdrom) and make your users part of that group? I feel like I must be missing something.
I dunno. Seems like there are two very easy solutions to your issue, but maybe I don't understand the scope of the problem.