How about using XFS with Linux' software RAID functionality? (At least RAID0 anyway.)
I keep hearing "kernel people" say that "Journaling Filesystems don't work with Linux' software RAID" but I've been using ReiserFS on a 60GB RAID0 device at home for several months with no problems at all...
For those of us on a budget (like 90% of us are...) and have to use cheap IDE hardware with software RAID, but want the reliability of a journaled filesystem, this is an important question!
So now that you can get a development version of QNX for free, how to build our own i-Opener/WebSurfer type appliance with it? (Or use it to hack our way out of using the software that comes with one of those units if you happen to already have one?)
Unless you spend $25K+ for a fully-digital film body, you still are stuck with whatever crappy lens comes on your digital camera.
Since I've spent ~$1500 on lenses, (which is nothing compared to what a professional photographer might spend...) there is no way I'm going to dump that investment down the toilet by buying a digital camera with a built-in 35-80mm "zoom" lens and that's it. I want to be able to use my 18mm wide-angle, my 300mm zoom and my 50mm macro that lets me get 4" from my subject and still get a good focus and a sharp photo.
When someone can come up with a 16.8Mpixel digital camera *body* that will let me use all my store-bought Canon lenses and costs less than $25K, then I'll start going digital.
And even then, I'm going to bet that blowing up a digital image to 8x10 (or larger) is still going to look more crappy than blowing up a film negative to 8x10 (or larger).
There are lots of reasons why name-based virtual hosting won't work, namly many protocols that are NOT http.
Why do people seem to insist that "The Internet == The World Wide Web" anymore?
It reminds me of The Corinthians website issue. Just because a guy doesn't have a web page on a domain, or that page hasn't been updated for a while, The Powers That Be consider the domain unused. (May not be the exact case with this example, but in general that seems to be the opinion anymore.)
Seems like nowadays, if you're NOT running a high-profile website on your domain, you just aren't officially "using it."
Like for example, it would have been nice to see this "article" prefaced with the text:
"This looks a whole heck of a lot like an Ad from Veracity, but the product still looks like it might be worthwhile to check out. Sorry for the blatant advertising in what's ostensibly an interesting technical story."
Absolutely. It was extremely stable in my experience and I haven't really looked too closely at it for a year or so. (It has some other drawbacks that make it less than ideal for my personal use.)
The "worst" thing about Coda is not its maturity or stability, IMHO, it's all "ease-of-use" problems, in that it really isn't very. It took me a couple days just to understand it well enough to try to start getting a primary server up. Trying to set up a replicated secondary server was quite a chore.
As I said before, it's been a while since I've looked at it, so that might have gotten better as well.
I have requested numerous times. I've even indicated that if there were ever a Linux port of Lightwave, they would be receiving a large sum of money from me in terms of purchases. The response I've always gotten from them is a very cold "we have no plans to ever port to Linux."
I guess Lightwave is getting kicked from the machines and will now be learning Maya.
More importantly, as far as I'm concerned, than whether or not corinthians.com was hosting EMail, is the fact that I have a few domains that run EMail among other things, but don't have websites on them.
I'm dreading the day I get that "cease and desist" order that tells me since I don't have a website there, I've been found "guilty" of "domain squatting" and they've given my domain to some megacorp with enough money to buy lawyers.
The thing that bugs me the most about these sorts of "domain dispute" issues is that they invariably make a decision based on whether or not there is a website on that domain. It seems like the situation is that no matter if someone has been hosting 12,000 EMail addresses through a domain for the last 10 years, if there's no website on the domain, you're just domain squatting.
People seem to have completely forgotten that there's more to the Internet than the Web.
Your best bet is probably to get IPsec running on a Linux server farm and find IPsec clients for WinXX. At least that way, you'll be using a standard protocol, unlike most (read: all) proprietary VPN softwares out there. You'd then be able to support any OS that had an IPsec stack (which includes a lot of them nowadays).
Barring that, we've had good luck with VSgate by infoexpress in huge (and I mean huge) enterprise environments. Bonus: they directly support Linux not only as a server platform but client as well.
You could also look for PoPToP, which is a reverse-engineered hack of Microsoft's "Point-to-Point Tunnelling Protocol" to make a Linux box able to be a server for it, but take a look at some past issues of Schneier's Cryptogram (don't know the specific one, sorry) for some scathing commentary on the brokenness of PPTP.
Could anyone make sense of that "review"??? What was that about? I have no idea what the guy was trying to accomplish there. All I managed to derive, or think I derived, from that jumbled mess was: He runs Linux now (in many flavors); he got the Amiga SDK from Amazon.com (???); the new SDK uses gcc to output to something called "VP"; he had some trouble getting "ddate" to compile; he took some screenshots of some stuff.
If there are any open-source developers out there reading this article, please put some more easter eggs in your code that cause pants to drop. That's the kind of thing end-users really like...
Replace "workstation-IP" and "Pilot-IP" with appropriate values. (Make something up for your Pilot.)
Set up your Pilot Network prefs for Unix, with no username and no password, Direct Serial connection. Run the script above, (the trick is turning on IP Forwarding on your Linux box) then run any internet-enabled app on the Pilot and it'll connect and go out over the internet. As usual, YMMV - depending on your network setup, your version of the kernel, phase of the moon, etc. "It Just Works" for me. I've run a couple different browsers, NTP client, email apps, finger, and probably some other stuff.
The at-cost price of transferring a domain is about $10 I think, plus the annual fee for having your domain held in OpenSRS, although the affiliate may decide to charge the customer more for the service.
It's probably easier to find an OpenSRS affiliate to handle your domains for you than to become a new affiliate, unless you have hundreds of domains yourself. It was fairly painless for us, but requires a lot of setup and back-and-forth with the OpenSRS people so takes at least a few days, maybe as long as a couple of weeks.
The OpenSRS "affiliate" admin screen has an option to "transfer a domain" that as easy as clicking on the option, typing the name of the domain you wish to transfer to OpenSRS, clicking the "submit" button and they do all the rest of the work. We've transferred literally hundreds of domains away from NSI without a hitch.
Either try to contact the OpenSRS people directly about becoming an affiliate, or otherwise try to contact an OpenSRS affiliate to handle your domains for you.
I believe it's just an example of why open-source code is a Good Thing for the end users.
The project originally started as a GPL'd project, then disappeared for a while and returned as no-source-available and now seems to have disappeared entirely, but wouldn't surprise me if it returns as completely commercial.
In any case, the developers never have seemed to put communication with their users on a very high priority, which is something kind of critical for a successful project...
Can anyone say "Crusoe-based AOL set-top box that just might be running Linux inside"?
Not that I want an AOL-only set-top box, but the possibility of AOL sending out millions of under-$100 single-purpose set-top PCs in the mail instead of CDs is kinda kicky.
Ok, so maybe I'm living in fantasy land a little bit. At least they'd be more useful than those stupid CDs...
If you have a military GPS receiver, you can decode the encrypted military GPS signals that are on a different frequency than the civilian signals which will allow you to find your GPS coordinates down to a few inches.
But there are a lot of other reasons why GPS isn't very good for aviation use:
GPS does not handle altitude very accurately.
GPS does not handle very high speeds all that well.
I imagine the GPS system would break down entirely when you reach a good percentage of the altitude of the GPS satellites themselves. Not so good for the shuttle. (Seeing as this is what the article is about...)
I have two 50GB+ servers on my home network. One is a P133 and the other is a P166, both with 64MB of RAM, both running linux (although one ran FreeBSD for a while). They both serve NFS and Samba. One does DNS for my internal network. The cost to me for the two of them was probably about $500 and here's why:
The parts are mostly scrounged from pieces discarded during upgrades to my workstation, begged off of friends, and occasionally bought. (Like the Intel 10/100 Ethernet card and Promise PCI UltraIDE controller for the main server and the two 26GB and three 13GB hard drives used between the two boxes.)
The most expensive components were the hard drives, but you can now get 20GB+ hard drives for about a hundred bucks mail order. For the rest of the components, you can almost certainly find people who are willing to give up a piece here and a piece there from stuff lying around the same as most of the parts for my servers were. I would bet you could build a dedicated server with a good amount of hard drive space for just a couple of hundred dollars. (A friend of mine consistently claims he can build brand new K7 servers with buttloads of hard drive space for under $500, but I have no idea where he gets his prices.)
You don't need a lot of RAM and you don't need a lot of CPU - my 64MB P133 can easily keep up with at least half a dozen machines all talking NFS to its exported filesystems. The two most important things are: a) big disks, and big IDE is cheap and fairly speedy nowadays (although I still prefer SCSI), and b) fast network cards, and the Intel EEPro 10/100 cards are under $50 in the stores, forget about mail-order prices.
Because it's so cheap to do this sort of thing with the free OS's that it's been many a time I've contemplated putting together a $500 box with a mid-range CPU and a couple big-ass hard drives doing software RAID, build a little web-based interface to edit the/etc/exports file, make sure SWAT is enabled to web-configure Samba, and sell them as $5000 Networked-attached-storage machines. (Although the bigger corporations probably wouldn't touch them until they had a $25,000 price tag on them...)
You guys are being silly. The percentage of people buying I-Openers to take apart and put Linux on and hack around with must be an incredibly small percentage of the overall number sold. (I'd say at most, in the single-digit percentages.) A majority percent of your recent public image has been concentrated on a very small minority percent of your customer base. The attitude you guys are copping to prevent people from hacking the box (trying to retroactively apply "click-through" agreements, telling people if they don't sign up for a certain number of months of service, they're going to get a big bill on the credit card, etc.) are making you look bad to the large percentage of people who don't have any idea what Linux is or why you should be concerned about people using it on your products.
Example: I put an order in at Circuit City for an I-Opener that I was going to give to my girlfriend as a gift since all she wants to do is surf and check email. I ordered it just before this whole brouhaha stirred up. It's been over a month now and I still have yet to see it because all of CC's backorders have been held until you guys can do whatever it is you want to do to keep the hackers from fooling around with your box. Previously, not only was I excited about finding such a cool little gizmo for my g-friend, but I was considering ordering one for myself to play around with. At this point, because of the incredibly restrictive conditions of use you guys have been throwing around to try to head off "the Linux hacker threat" not only do I no longer want to buy one, but I'm considering canceling my order for the first one, because I don't want my g-friend to get stuck with a huge bill on her credit card if she decides she doesn't really need the service after a month or so, because I think you guys are being just downright stupid about the whole issue and frankly, because I'm tired of waiting around for the back-order to be filled while you guys "fix the hardware" so someone can't fool around with it.
You know what the best thing you could have done about this whole fiasco? Ignore it. Sure, you'd see a slight upswing of sales and downswing of service signups initially as a bunch of hackers bought boxes to play around with, but you know what would have happened after that? Business as usual as the novelty wore off. The hacker crowd is short on attention and big on novelty. Honestly, there's not a lot you can do with such a stripped-down box and once most of the options have been tried, a lot of people are going to want to find something new to play with.
Besides, if your business model is so shaky that a small percentage of sales going to hackers who aren't going to pay for your service is likely to cause it to collapse, you need to rethink what you're doing.
Trying to court the hacker crowd by making a slightly more expensive box that they can buy outright is a good idea, (and I know at least a couple people who say they would buy one for as much as $400, which I personally think is too much) but unfortunately, you've already left a bad taste in a lot of people's mouths. It's going to be hard to wash that out no matter what you do. (The best thing to do would be to retroactively stop all your silliness, like you tried to retroactively apply this "you must sign up for x months of service" license, but I'm sure at this point, you're seeing how well that works...)
I notice on your "Installation" instructions, it mentions that some of the requirements are:
* A static IP address * No Firewall or Proxy between your machine and the Internet
It goes on to say that a static address is not *strictly* necessary, but if your address changes, you will need to rejoin the network.
I am on Roadrunner, like I'm sure a great number of other people out there who would like to participate in Freenet. However, I also filter traffic between my machine(s) and Roadrunner with a box running NATD/IPFW. Simply telling NATD to forward traffic for the port(s) on which I have configured Freenet to listen does not seem to work. I have been told that this is a fairly well-known issue and that Freenet actually communicates over many ports, which really *does* require that you have a completely open and "unencumbered" network connection to be a Freenet node.
So the question is, doesn't this seem to be counter-intuitive to the sorts of people who would like to run Freenet nodes? Doesn't it seem that the type of person who would like to make available an anonymous, distributed repository for information would also like to keep that machine fairly well locked-down? Are there any plans to change the protocol or node implementation, or whichever part of the Freenet system that seems to require that you run it on a machine sitting out for the whole world to see? (Or have I been completely mis-informed and am just doing something wrong?)
This looks a lot like Ballmer's constant officially-denied claims that MS may consider open-sourcing Windows itself. Key words that give away that this just sounds like publicity: "Microsoft Corp. is contemplating giving Windows CE to some developers for free". In fact, it doesn't even really look like they're going to make it "open source" in the sense that Sun thinks of as "open source" meaning "Yeah, you can look at the source code, but if you do anything to it, you can't distribute the changes to anyone but us." It looks more like "you can look at the code, but don't even think about changing anything."
I think the article should have said something like: "Microsoft is contemplating the possibility of thinking about maybe considering letting some specific developers in certain situations look at parts of the WindowsCE source code."
Slashdot Mirror
I keep hearing "kernel people" say that "Journaling Filesystems don't work with Linux' software RAID" but I've been using ReiserFS on a 60GB RAID0 device at home for several months with no problems at all...
For those of us on a budget (like 90% of us are...) and have to use cheap IDE hardware with software RAID, but want the reliability of a journaled filesystem, this is an important question!
-=-=-=-=-
-=-=-=-=-
Unless you spend $25K+ for a fully-digital film body, you still are stuck with whatever crappy lens comes on your digital camera.
Since I've spent ~$1500 on lenses, (which is nothing compared to what a professional photographer might spend...) there is no way I'm going to dump that investment down the toilet by buying a digital camera with a built-in 35-80mm "zoom" lens and that's it. I want to be able to use my 18mm wide-angle, my 300mm zoom and my 50mm macro that lets me get 4" from my subject and still get a good focus and a sharp photo.
When someone can come up with a 16.8Mpixel digital camera *body* that will let me use all my store-bought Canon lenses and costs less than $25K, then I'll start going digital.
And even then, I'm going to bet that blowing up a digital image to 8x10 (or larger) is still going to look more crappy than blowing up a film negative to 8x10 (or larger).
-=-=-=-=-
Read the FAQ.
-=-=-=-=-
Why do people seem to insist that "The Internet == The World Wide Web" anymore?
It reminds me of The Corinthians website issue. Just because a guy doesn't have a web page on a domain, or that page hasn't been updated for a while, The Powers That Be consider the domain unused. (May not be the exact case with this example, but in general that seems to be the opinion anymore.)
Seems like nowadays, if you're NOT running a high-profile website on your domain, you just aren't officially "using it."
EMail? What's that? FTP? CVS? Telnet? SSH? Huh?
-=-=-=-=-
"This looks a whole heck of a lot like an Ad from Veracity, but the product still looks like it might be worthwhile to check out. Sorry for the blatant advertising in what's ostensibly an interesting technical story."
-=-=-=-=-
Absolutely. It was extremely stable in my experience and I haven't really looked too closely at it for a year or so. (It has some other drawbacks that make it less than ideal for my personal use.)
The "worst" thing about Coda is not its maturity or stability, IMHO, it's all "ease-of-use" problems, in that it really isn't very. It took me a couple days just to understand it well enough to try to start getting a primary server up. Trying to set up a replicated secondary server was quite a chore.
As I said before, it's been a while since I've looked at it, so that might have gotten better as well.
-=-=-=-=-
I guess Lightwave is getting kicked from the machines and will now be learning Maya.
-=-=-=-=-
I'm dreading the day I get that "cease and desist" order that tells me since I don't have a website there, I've been found "guilty" of "domain squatting" and they've given my domain to some megacorp with enough money to buy lawyers.
-=-=-=-=-
People seem to have completely forgotten that there's more to the Internet than the Web.
-=-=-=-=-
Barring that, we've had good luck with VSgate by infoexpress in huge (and I mean huge) enterprise environments. Bonus: they directly support Linux not only as a server platform but client as well.
You could also look for PoPToP, which is a reverse-engineered hack of Microsoft's "Point-to-Point Tunnelling Protocol" to make a Linux box able to be a server for it, but take a look at some past issues of Schneier's Cryptogram (don't know the specific one, sorry) for some scathing commentary on the brokenness of PPTP.
-=-=-=-=-
What was the point?
-=-=-=-=-
-=-=-=-=-
/usr/sbin/pppd
echo 1 >
Replace "workstation-IP" and "Pilot-IP" with appropriate values. (Make something up for your Pilot.)
Set up your Pilot Network prefs for Unix, with no username and no password, Direct Serial connection. Run the script above, (the trick is turning on IP Forwarding on your Linux box) then run any internet-enabled app on the Pilot and it'll connect and go out over the internet. As usual, YMMV - depending on your network setup, your version of the kernel, phase of the moon, etc. "It Just Works" for me. I've run a couple different browsers, NTP client, email apps, finger, and probably some other stuff.
-=-=-=-=-
It's probably easier to find an OpenSRS affiliate to handle your domains for you than to become a new affiliate, unless you have hundreds of domains yourself. It was fairly painless for us, but requires a lot of setup and back-and-forth with the OpenSRS people so takes at least a few days, maybe as long as a couple of weeks.
-=-=-=-=-
Either try to contact the OpenSRS people directly about becoming an affiliate, or otherwise try to contact an OpenSRS affiliate to handle your domains for you.
-=-=-=-=-
The project originally started as a GPL'd project, then disappeared for a while and returned as no-source-available and now seems to have disappeared entirely, but wouldn't surprise me if it returns as completely commercial.
In any case, the developers never have seemed to put communication with their users on a very high priority, which is something kind of critical for a successful project...
-=-=-=-=-
Can anyone say "Crusoe-based AOL set-top box that just might be running Linux inside"?
Not that I want an AOL-only set-top box, but the possibility of AOL sending out millions of under-$100 single-purpose set-top PCs in the mail instead of CDs is kinda kicky.
Ok, so maybe I'm living in fantasy land a little bit. At least they'd be more useful than those stupid CDs...
-=-=-=-=-
If Linux supports the sound chip on this weirdo thing, that is.
And anyone know if it has "line out" or just "speaker out"?
-=-=-=-=-
But there are a lot of other reasons why GPS isn't very good for aviation use:
GPS does not handle altitude very accurately.
GPS does not handle very high speeds all that well.
I imagine the GPS system would break down entirely when you reach a good percentage of the altitude of the GPS satellites themselves. Not so good for the shuttle. (Seeing as this is what the article is about...)
Here's a great URL for lots of info on how GPS works: http://www.trimble.com/gps/index.htm (It uses Shockwave, but you can still view it without.) Here's another with lots of information about GPS units: http://joe.mehaffey.com/
-=-=-=-=-
The parts are mostly scrounged from pieces discarded during upgrades to my workstation, begged off of friends, and occasionally bought. (Like the Intel 10/100 Ethernet card and Promise PCI UltraIDE controller for the main server and the two 26GB and three 13GB hard drives used between the two boxes.)
The most expensive components were the hard drives, but you can now get 20GB+ hard drives for about a hundred bucks mail order. For the rest of the components, you can almost certainly find people who are willing to give up a piece here and a piece there from stuff lying around the same as most of the parts for my servers were. I would bet you could build a dedicated server with a good amount of hard drive space for just a couple of hundred dollars. (A friend of mine consistently claims he can build brand new K7 servers with buttloads of hard drive space for under $500, but I have no idea where he gets his prices.)
You don't need a lot of RAM and you don't need a lot of CPU - my 64MB P133 can easily keep up with at least half a dozen machines all talking NFS to its exported filesystems. The two most important things are: a) big disks, and big IDE is cheap and fairly speedy nowadays (although I still prefer SCSI), and b) fast network cards, and the Intel EEPro 10/100 cards are under $50 in the stores, forget about mail-order prices.
Because it's so cheap to do this sort of thing with the free OS's that it's been many a time I've contemplated putting together a $500 box with a mid-range CPU and a couple big-ass hard drives doing software RAID, build a little web-based interface to edit the
-=-=-=-=-
Travolta's a big-name Scientologist....
-=-=-=-=-
Example: I put an order in at Circuit City for an I-Opener that I was going to give to my girlfriend as a gift since all she wants to do is surf and check email. I ordered it just before this whole brouhaha stirred up. It's been over a month now and I still have yet to see it because all of CC's backorders have been held until you guys can do whatever it is you want to do to keep the hackers from fooling around with your box. Previously, not only was I excited about finding such a cool little gizmo for my g-friend, but I was considering ordering one for myself to play around with. At this point, because of the incredibly restrictive conditions of use you guys have been throwing around to try to head off "the Linux hacker threat" not only do I no longer want to buy one, but I'm considering canceling my order for the first one, because I don't want my g-friend to get stuck with a huge bill on her credit card if she decides she doesn't really need the service after a month or so, because I think you guys are being just downright stupid about the whole issue and frankly, because I'm tired of waiting around for the back-order to be filled while you guys "fix the hardware" so someone can't fool around with it.
You know what the best thing you could have done about this whole fiasco? Ignore it. Sure, you'd see a slight upswing of sales and downswing of service signups initially as a bunch of hackers bought boxes to play around with, but you know what would have happened after that? Business as usual as the novelty wore off. The hacker crowd is short on attention and big on novelty. Honestly, there's not a lot you can do with such a stripped-down box and once most of the options have been tried, a lot of people are going to want to find something new to play with.
Besides, if your business model is so shaky that a small percentage of sales going to hackers who aren't going to pay for your service is likely to cause it to collapse, you need to rethink what you're doing.
Trying to court the hacker crowd by making a slightly more expensive box that they can buy outright is a good idea, (and I know at least a couple people who say they would buy one for as much as $400, which I personally think is too much) but unfortunately, you've already left a bad taste in a lot of people's mouths. It's going to be hard to wash that out no matter what you do. (The best thing to do would be to retroactively stop all your silliness, like you tried to retroactively apply this "you must sign up for x months of service" license, but I'm sure at this point, you're seeing how well that works...)
-=-=-=-=-
* A static IP address
* No Firewall or Proxy between your machine and the Internet
It goes on to say that a static address is not *strictly* necessary, but if your address changes, you will need to rejoin the network.
I am on Roadrunner, like I'm sure a great number of other people out there who would like to participate in Freenet. However, I also filter traffic between my machine(s) and Roadrunner with a box running NATD/IPFW. Simply telling NATD to forward traffic for the port(s) on which I have configured Freenet to listen does not seem to work. I have been told that this is a fairly well-known issue and that Freenet actually communicates over many ports, which really *does* require that you have a completely open and "unencumbered" network connection to be a Freenet node.
So the question is, doesn't this seem to be counter-intuitive to the sorts of people who would like to run Freenet nodes? Doesn't it seem that the type of person who would like to make available an anonymous, distributed repository for information would also like to keep that machine fairly well locked-down? Are there any plans to change the protocol or node implementation, or whichever part of the Freenet system that seems to require that you run it on a machine sitting out for the whole world to see? (Or have I been completely mis-informed and am just doing something wrong?)
-=-=-=-=-
I think the article should have said something like: "Microsoft is contemplating the possibility of thinking about maybe considering letting some specific developers in certain situations look at parts of the WindowsCE source code."
-=-=-=-=-