Well you can get the 64/40 bit WEP 802.11b Orinoco cards for $60 from places like JustDeals.com - wait, I see some Proxim ones for $40... I haven't dealt with JustDeals.com (got Dell OEMed Orinoco stuff before I found out about JustDeals) but the price sure sounds good.
I agree on loosing the omnidirectional stuff but another card would solve that problem;).
There are companies that you can pay to handle all these details. I remember one was either posted or mentioned in a comment here on/. at one point in time. Perhaps someone has a better memory than me? I don't know if it'll work out to be a better deal than just going for one of the other options but it might be worth considering.
You're not enthralled with Windows, you're enthralled with it's marketing!
Uhh... No, he is enthralled with being able to play the games he likes to play. What does this have to do with marketing? You could tie it together with a big spool of thread but if you aren't going to even bother to try at least plug the holes with some interesting personal flames or something...
Personally I happen to use Windows 2000 to play Counter-Strike but apparently it runs under wine so I'll be trying that soon. My servers run a mix of FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and Linux (debian and redhat) but I do have the solaris 8 ISOs (free download) so I'll be checking that out for the experience factor soon.
Jeeze dude - you could at least QUOTE the friggin article you are replying to because for those that browse above 0 (the majority i would think) your parent post won't appear and it is rather hard to figure out wtf you are talking about...
Yeah, this is a meta comment. So mod it +/- 0, not -1, not +1, and please remain calm.
Check out the Audrey but it was end of lifed by 3Com so yadda yadda. TigerDirect.com was selling them off for $100 so you can probably pick one up on eBay. You'll need a USB network adapter. The Audrey runs QNX and can be upgraded. TigerDirect has some other interesting devices too (like some MSN thingy right now?) so look around there.
Unfortunately surplus seems to be the best bet as no sane company is producing such devices at this time... AFAIK, YMMV, etc etc etc (god I hate this stupid disclaimers)
free rant:
Why do we feel the need to use all these disclaimers? Shouldn't any intelligent person recognize that anything one says is ones opinion unless it is explicitly backed up by fact? Wouldn't we just note the facts and if no notation is made there are no facts so it is obviously a personal opinion? Does this have something to do with the lawyers? Argh!
This is a good thing! Know why? Because everyone who brought Orinico/Lucent OEM'ed 802.11b cards (such as my Dell TrueMobile one) will get a new firmware update! For some reason Dell is still back on the old 6.x firmware while lucent is up to 7.x. Unfortunately AFAIK the firmware installer hasn't been hacked yet to make it possible to flash Lucent/Orinico OEM'ed (cards without their labels) devices... Someone got a hack?
In the meantime I'm waiting for Lucent to update the firmware and then Dell to repackage it for me!
All the notebooks I've seen have at least memory in sockets and usually the CPU too (especially the newer notebooks)...
The only problem with saying "hey, look how cheap all these components are" is that they are cheap because they are components. Once you put them all in a tidy little package the value/price goes way up...
Who decides what standards go on the "on standards based board"? If there is only one board we are going to have a ton of features on it and what about next months standards...
Think time == money (although I have some gut level annoyance with the idea).
I second Linux Journal. Now only if my mail man would quit steeling it, I could start reading it again.
Maybe it is too heavy to deliver once he is done with the metal smithing?
I agree with recommending Linux Journal. It's an excellent resource and when you subscribe you get access to all the back issues via interactive.linuxjournal.com. I've also been looking at subscribing to SysAdmin. As the previous post mentions it too has a great deal of great information.
Re:Bad screenshots for showing anti-aliasing
on
KDE 3.0 Screenshots
·
· Score: 2
Look at your XftConfig (mine has Type1 and TrueType for directories) and that your X isn't loading a font server/is loading a font server, etc... I had this problem with Debian unstable on my laptop. Finally got it working correctly but it took a while.
In the end I turned AA off. I'm not a big fan - in Windows it works great but in X it just looks funky.
Or go to UPS.com, fill out the shiping form, put in your credit card #, and go drop it off at Office Depot or somewhere similar (there is a locater on their website).
Having spent the last 6 months managing FreeBSD machines, I have mixed feelings about the whole cvsup/Ports concept. They're excellent for keeping a developer workstation in sync with updates. So far they've been horrible for homogenizing multiple production machines.
Can you explain the problems you've run into or give examples?
I've been doing okay with Ports by using "make package" on a master machine (though upgrading packages has been hit-or-miss), but there's no equivalent mechanism for the core OS.
What about exporting the/usr/src tree via nfs and doing installworld on each machine from the master? I've seen that suggested here. I haven't had a chance to expirement with it yet but it sounds ideal.
As a sysadmin, I'd really rather have official binary packages for most OS updates. And while I understand the reasoning behind the separation of the base OS from the add-on packages, it has proven to be very inconvenient in the field.
I guess what it comes down to is there is no 100% ideal solution for every single person. I'm glad we have a lot of choices. What keeps you running FreeBSD?
He's gotta be talking about a Putty like client for Windows or something... Why would you want graphical SSH under *nix? Or he could be full of something;).
Simply put, be real careful and research it a bit before making the decision. It's a big perf. improvement but I hesitate to take the risk on a server.
Oh I definately will research it quite a bit before having it on in production. I'm not one to risk anything but seeing as how this is more of a test server unused by anyone else at the moment it is ok to take the risk. Time to go to some reading...
If you want current software instead of highly patched old releases it is a pain to administer. At some point the boat load of patches on old software becomes more of a liability than benefit. I'm comfortable making my own decisions on when to upgrade software and I'd rather stay closer to the mainstream release than with lots of extra patches from debian packager(s) instead of the orginating code's authors.
If Debian could get stable releases out the door every 6 months (or god, dear we imagine 3 months) I doubt we would be having this conversation. Two+ years for a stable release is a bit much... I'm not willing to run testing or unstable on servers. For me the FreeBSD way of doing things just fits better...
This is for servers. Desktops are another story...
His BSD install started from one floppy, which had just enough smarts to get at IP address and start the FTP to get the rest of the smarts. Auto-detect of hardware, and voom! He's off and running.
I admire simplicity. If I were anything of a programmer, I'd help Debian fix their install.
Well you can get a 24mb ISO image and use that to boot Debian and do a net install. I prefer ISOs/CDs to floppies. See here:
I don't know what to say except that you must have come from the BSD world to Linux. I came from Linux to the BSD world. Debian is a piece of cake. Nice and simple. Everything makes sense. It doesn't have a slick GUI and it probably would help to have one but I don't have any problems with it... Maybe it was all that Slackware back in the day...
Anyway - if you still want to get Debian installed you can get the Progeny ISO and install that. Then you can use apt to upgrade from Progeny to plain jane Debian testing or unstable. It's very simple and there is a howto and everything at www.debianplanet.org.
Buildworld takes ages. It's very l33t, but takes ages. I still tend to just install from the CD.
Well we are talking servers here... I think buildworld takes about 1.5 - 2 hours on my lowly 550 Mhz Celeron (100 Mhz FSB). I'm not sure how long the kernel takes but it isn't too bad... The whole point here is that when you have a co-located server it is easy to upgrade without having to go burn an ISO. Or even if the server is at work and you are at home or in another location. It's just handy and practically essential no matter what it's l33tness rating is...
On the subject of DMA I believe that ata write caching (hw.ata.wc) was disabled in 4.3, but re-enabled again in 4.4. Partially as a result of getting hammered in benchmarks. I'd leave it off. Honestly. Turn softupdates on (much easier to do when installing afresh), and leave write caching off.
I have both softupdates and write caching on at the moment. I think I'll give it a good test run because the server in question is not in production. Everything seems to be cranking along ok...
Not scientific, but I do remember there being some potential difficulties with using hw.ata.wc=1 and softupdates together.
Supposedly this is fixed now but good thing to keep in mind...
Slashdot Mirror
I totally agree with you. The "|" stuff reminds me of HTML email/news postings and generally bugs the crap out of me.
I agree and friends justify for friends the benefits of buying Weller soldiering tools too :).
Well you can get the 64/40 bit WEP 802.11b Orinoco cards for $60 from places like JustDeals.com - wait, I see some Proxim ones for $40... I haven't dealt with JustDeals.com (got Dell OEMed Orinoco stuff before I found out about JustDeals) but the price sure sounds good.
;).
I agree on loosing the omnidirectional stuff but another card would solve that problem
There are companies that you can pay to handle all these details. I remember one was either posted or mentioned in a comment here on /. at one point in time. Perhaps someone has a better memory than me? I don't know if it'll work out to be a better deal than just going for one of the other options but it might be worth considering.
Benefits of Windows XP over Windows 2000?
You're not enthralled with Windows, you're enthralled with it's marketing!
Uhh... No, he is enthralled with being able to play the games he likes to play. What does this have to do with marketing? You could tie it together with a big spool of thread but if you aren't going to even bother to try at least plug the holes with some interesting personal flames or something...
Personally I happen to use Windows 2000 to play Counter-Strike but apparently it runs under wine so I'll be trying that soon. My servers run a mix of FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and Linux (debian and redhat) but I do have the solaris 8 ISOs (free download) so I'll be checking that out for the experience factor soon.
Jeeze dude - you could at least QUOTE the friggin article you are replying to because for those that browse above 0 (the majority i would think) your parent post won't appear and it is rather hard to figure out wtf you are talking about...
Yeah, this is a meta comment. So mod it +/- 0, not -1, not +1, and please remain calm.
Check out the Audrey but it was end of lifed by 3Com so yadda yadda. TigerDirect.com was selling them off for $100 so you can probably pick one up on eBay. You'll need a USB network adapter. The Audrey runs QNX and can be upgraded. TigerDirect has some other interesting devices too (like some MSN thingy right now?) so look around there.
Unfortunately surplus seems to be the best bet as no sane company is producing such devices at this time... AFAIK, YMMV, etc etc etc (god I hate this stupid disclaimers)
free rant:
Why do we feel the need to use all these disclaimers? Shouldn't any intelligent person recognize that anything one says is ones opinion unless it is explicitly backed up by fact? Wouldn't we just note the facts and if no notation is made there are no facts so it is obviously a personal opinion? Does this have something to do with the lawyers? Argh!
This is a good thing! Know why? Because everyone who brought Orinico/Lucent OEM'ed 802.11b cards (such as my Dell TrueMobile one) will get a new firmware update! For some reason Dell is still back on the old 6.x firmware while lucent is up to 7.x. Unfortunately AFAIK the firmware installer hasn't been hacked yet to make it possible to flash Lucent/Orinico OEM'ed (cards without their labels) devices... Someone got a hack?
In the meantime I'm waiting for Lucent to update the firmware and then Dell to repackage it for me!
All the notebooks I've seen have at least memory in sockets and usually the CPU too (especially the newer notebooks)...
The only problem with saying "hey, look how cheap all these components are" is that they are cheap because they are components. Once you put them all in a tidy little package the value/price goes way up...
Who decides what standards go on the "on standards based board"? If there is only one board we are going to have a ton of features on it and what about next months standards...
Think time == money (although I have some gut level annoyance with the idea).
Well good point. But what is decent that comes in with *.pif? Again, absolutely nothing...
why not just use paper and pencils. OR better yet, smoke signals.
Honestly, slashdot posters are some of the dumbest fartknockers around.
Oh yeah, definately. Sure Mr. Anonymous Coward. Do you have a valid suggestion? I can't think of anything that comes in *.scr that is of any benefit.
Why not just strip all attachments from incoming email? Or at least *.scr?
I second Linux Journal. Now only if my mail man would quit steeling it, I could start reading it again.
Maybe it is too heavy to deliver once he is done with the metal smithing?
I agree with recommending Linux Journal. It's an excellent resource and when you subscribe you get access to all the back issues via interactive.linuxjournal.com. I've also been looking at subscribing to SysAdmin. As the previous post mentions it too has a great deal of great information.
Look at your XftConfig (mine has Type1 and TrueType for directories) and that your X isn't loading a font server/is loading a font server, etc... I had this problem with Debian unstable on my laptop. Finally got it working correctly but it took a while.
In the end I turned AA off. I'm not a big fan - in Windows it works great but in X it just looks funky.
Or go to UPS.com, fill out the shiping form, put in your credit card #, and go drop it off at Office Depot or somewhere similar (there is a locater on their website).
Having spent the last 6 months managing FreeBSD machines, I have mixed feelings about the whole cvsup/Ports concept. They're excellent for keeping a developer workstation in sync with updates. So far they've been horrible for homogenizing multiple production machines.
/usr/src tree via nfs and doing installworld on each machine from the master? I've seen that suggested here. I haven't had a chance to expirement with it yet but it sounds ideal.
Can you explain the problems you've run into or give examples?
I've been doing okay with Ports by using "make package" on a master machine (though upgrading packages has been hit-or-miss), but there's no equivalent mechanism for the core OS.
What about exporting the
As a sysadmin, I'd really rather have official binary packages for most OS updates. And while I understand the reasoning behind the separation of the base OS from the add-on packages, it has proven to be very inconvenient in the field.
I guess what it comes down to is there is no 100% ideal solution for every single person. I'm glad we have a lot of choices. What keeps you running FreeBSD?
He's gotta be talking about a Putty like client for Windows or something... Why would you want graphical SSH under *nix? Or he could be full of something ;).
Simply put, be real careful and research it a bit before making the decision. It's a big perf. improvement but I hesitate to take the risk on a server.
Oh I definately will research it quite a bit before having it on in production. I'm not one to risk anything but seeing as how this is more of a test server unused by anyone else at the moment it is ok to take the risk. Time to go to some reading...
If you want current software instead of highly patched old releases it is a pain to administer. At some point the boat load of patches on old software becomes more of a liability than benefit. I'm comfortable making my own decisions on when to upgrade software and I'd rather stay closer to the mainstream release than with lots of extra patches from debian packager(s) instead of the orginating code's authors.
If Debian could get stable releases out the door every 6 months (or god, dear we imagine 3 months) I doubt we would be having this conversation. Two+ years for a stable release is a bit much... I'm not willing to run testing or unstable on servers. For me the FreeBSD way of doing things just fits better...
This is for servers. Desktops are another story...
corrected link:
http://markybob.sourceforge.net
note: there appear to be a few problems with links there, I think a machine is down or something... Should be fixed soon.
His BSD install started from one floppy, which had just enough smarts to get at IP address and start the FTP to get the rest of the smarts. Auto-detect of hardware, and voom! He's off and running.
I admire simplicity. If I were anything of a programmer, I'd help Debian fix their install.
Well you can get a 24mb ISO image and use that to boot Debian and do a net install. I prefer ISOs/CDs to floppies. See here:
http://markybob.sourceforge.net
I don't know what to say except that you must have come from the BSD world to Linux. I came from Linux to the BSD world. Debian is a piece of cake. Nice and simple. Everything makes sense. It doesn't have a slick GUI and it probably would help to have one but I don't have any problems with it... Maybe it was all that Slackware back in the day...
Anyway - if you still want to get Debian installed you can get the Progeny ISO and install that. Then you can use apt to upgrade from Progeny to plain jane Debian testing or unstable. It's very simple and there is a howto and everything at www.debianplanet.org.
You can take your package managers and shove them up your ass.
Slackware.
Uh... If you had half a brain you would realize that CVS is not package management.
Bad to feed the trolls but what the hell.
Buildworld takes ages. It's very l33t, but takes ages. I still tend to just install from the CD.
Well we are talking servers here... I think buildworld takes about 1.5 - 2 hours on my lowly 550 Mhz Celeron (100 Mhz FSB). I'm not sure how long the kernel takes but it isn't too bad... The whole point here is that when you have a co-located server it is easy to upgrade without having to go burn an ISO. Or even if the server is at work and you are at home or in another location. It's just handy and practically essential no matter what it's l33tness rating is...
On the subject of DMA I believe that ata write caching (hw.ata.wc) was disabled in 4.3, but re-enabled again in 4.4. Partially as a result of getting hammered in benchmarks. I'd leave it off. Honestly. Turn softupdates on (much easier to do when installing afresh), and leave write caching off.
I have both softupdates and write caching on at the moment. I think I'll give it a good test run because the server in question is not in production. Everything seems to be cranking along ok...
Not scientific, but I do remember there being some potential difficulties with using hw.ata.wc=1 and softupdates together.
Supposedly this is fixed now but good thing to keep in mind...