Yes, that works very well. Strange that it is used so little...
There are several different modules for compression with Apache (well, maybe *that* is the reason...). Some can compress everything, some can compress static content only, some store the compressed data so it does not need to be compressed every time, etc.
In PHP there is also an option to compress all PHP output, very useful when you run an application that outputs large tables.
The set of patches distributed that way is different from Windows Update. When you update your system like that, and visit Windows Update, it will still list critical patches that you need to install. The switches for silent install come in 3 different flavours. They are different for Windows updates, Internet explorer updates, and other application updates (Office, MDAC).
Do you think a patch tool that requires IIS and requires your server to be Windows 2000 is a nice handy tool? Our servers run NT4 and we don't run IIS. The Intranet runs on Apache (Linux).
Fortunately we have our patch deployment tool that is just 20 lines of KIX script running as part of the LOGON script. Works every time, but unfortunately Microsoft does everything it can to attempt to break it. (see other replies in this subthread)
There is a Windows 2000 downloads site but they provide very few fixes. Fortunately it turns out that the fix for this one is on that site and is working without the Internet link. But before, the fixes downloaded from Windows Update were actually the same files (only with a signature) as those available on the downloads site, but there were many more fixes on Windows Update. This fix seems to change that pattern.
Well, in fact about every 10th fix changes a pattern. The naming convention, the commandline flags supported, whatever, they change it all the time.
This MUST be to make life easier for the administrators!
Before, you could just download the Windows Update fix on a single computer, check the firewall log to see what.exe was downloaded to perform the update, get that file and store it on your server, and run it from the logon script using a couple of flags for silent installation.
With this update, Microsoft have disabled that! The.exe contacts a server at Microsoft, POSTs some info, and gets 80KB of data back in return. When you try to run the.exe on a PC without Internet connectivity, it fails.
Is this to help us to quickly patch all systems? To force us to rollout that SUS system quickly (today) to be able to apply this patch?
The ways of the force are getting more awful every day. How much longer are the customers going to accept this?
They were, but they did not realize it until an alternative appeared. Now they are accustomized to their exorbitant profits and "cannot" lower the price. So they blame the alternative, instead of blaming themselves.
People have boycot their product and it seems they do care. Only they have not recognized it as a boycot, they think the Internet is to blame. Of course the real reason their sales are dropping is a simple economic one: the price is too high.
if you have "Intel Inside" your web browsing will be much faster.
But more important: you usually get something that works. I am happy to pay for Intel stuff and have a stable system that works. And I love to giggle when people are struggling with their VIA or nVidia chipset motherboards. Should have bought the real stuff!
Actually, these ports are usually not supported when running the original firmware. The first thing you should always do with any Nokia Mediamaster box is to re-flash it with hobby software that runs faster and supports the hardware.
You may have misunderstood the situation in Europe. There is a single DVB standard, the encryption is standard, but the entitlement management isn't. There is a single standard interface to content access modules (it is very much like PCMCIA) and you will have to install a module in your receiver that in turn accepts a smartcard from your provider. There are several systems in use (Mediaguard, Viaccess, Conax, Cryptoworks, Nagravision, Betacrypt to name a few).
Receivers exist that support all systems without additional module, but of course they are always under close scrutiny and often removed from the market after they turn out to be "to open".
Why? Europe is not a single market for the entertainment industry. They are about the only industry that escaped the big "there has to be equal competition everywhere" dogma of the EU. So, when a German entertainment firm launches a service for German customers, Dutch customers are not allowed to view that, not even to subscribe to it! The only way to view other countries' services is through hacking. Which largely explains the large amount of activity you see in this field.
The entertainment industry of course does not get the message. Like with MP3 distribution over the Internet. They try to get out the message that they are treated unjustly, camouflaging the fact that they themselves are unjustly handling their customers.
I started out running Linux in January of 1994, using MCC on my 25MHz 486SX with 4 MB of RAM. I think the entire distribution was about 7 or 8 1.44 MB floppies, which I painstakingly downloaded using bitftp.
Well, I started in December of 1992, on a 33 MHz 486DX with 16MB of RAM. The distribution I used was called SNOW and was on about 25 floppies. It included X.
In fact, X ran quite well on this machine, and with its 800 MB SCSI disk that soared at 2.5 Mbyte/s it was a high-end box for those days. It ran circles around the DEC VAX 6200 we had at work:-)
I see little history from these days on that "historic" site... maybe if they are really serious about history I can upload them some old stuff.
The original reason was that ham bands were shared with other services, and those other services used morse code. To be able to notice that other operators were asking to make way (i.e. not transmit on top of their communication partner which the ham operator may not hear), there would be a requirement to be able to copy morse code even when you were not using it yourself.
Morse code is a code that can be generated with simple transmitters and received with simple receivers, under relatively weak signal circumstances. Ham radio operators often claim that it is the best w.r.t. spectrum efficiency and weak signal copying, but this is far from the truth...
Should governments (ANY government) directly fund the development of an OS? (Or for that matter, any application that will compete with commercial providers).
Maybe. But more important: should a government keep up legislation that allows commercial companies to become complete monopolies?
Should a government maintain a legal system that operates so slowly, so expensively, and so inefficiently that companies can file claims that take many years to be settled, and in the meantime can hamper other people's business by making unproven claims?
Probably not. So before throwing a stone at other countries' governments, please throw a stone at the US government first.
Right. In fact the US government is, by allowing software patents and tolerating that companies like SCO destroy other people's business without having to prove that they have a point, influencing the market much more than a government that stimulates the development of free software.
>That means no silent installs and no removing the mandatory reboot prompt. This was presented as being intentional since they supposedly wanted users to be forced to view/accept the EULA.
Easy to work around that! This is how we do it:
All our scripts are written using Kixtart, but similar possibilities exist in VB Script.
When a program cannot be "silently installed", we run it as a background program and then go send key presses to it from the.KIX script (this is for the Office SP3 and patches released this week):
$Y="\\server\installpoint"
RUN '$Y\o2ksp3.exe/q'
WHILE (SetFocus("Office 2000 Service Pack 3")0)
SLEEP 3
LOOP
$X=SendKeys("{ENTER}")
SLEEP 2
$X=SendKeys("{ENTER}")
RUN '$Y\Hotfix\office2000-kb822035-client-nld.exe/q'
WHILE (SetFocus("Beveiligingspatch voor Office")0)
SLEEP 3
LOOP
$X=SendKeys("{ENTER}")
RUN '$Y\Hotfix\office2000-kb824993-client-nld.exe/q'
WHILE (SetFocus("Beveiligingspatch voor Office")0)
SLEEP 3
LOOP
$X=SendKeys("{ENTER}")
In fact in this case it is a mix between selecting silent install and then clicking away the popup windows that it still, despite silent install, shows. The same can be done to install DirectX 9.0b.
All our installations and updates proceed from boot to working system without a single manual action, even for installers that completely refuse to be controlled by commandline switches,.ini files, or whatever...
>But with the PC's at my current company they were all direcly from a manufacturer bundled with Orifice installed locally.
We do that to. And the first thing that happens when they are unpacked is boot from the network, format C: and reinstall from the network installation point.
Interestingly, the KB article has the label "FIX" but it has this paragraph for the fix:
RESOLUTION When you perform the original installation from a network drive, Windows Installer can locate the files needed. However, the network location must be available when you apply the patch so that the source files can be found. Also, if you performed the original installation from a CD-ROM and the disc is still available, insert the CD-ROM disc when prompted.
So in fact, it is not a FIX at all. It does not tell you what to do when you don't have the CD-ROM. For an article promising a FIX, I would expect some workaround for the listed problem.
Fortunately we installed Office (in fact, everything) from the logon script as well, so on the default WS install there is no problem with the installation source (it is on the server where it was when Office was installed).
Just before going home I tried to update the Office on the Citrix server and of course it failed for the reason above. Now that will have to wait until tomorrow.
The MSI installer used for Word is indeed terribly slow. I took this opportunity to install Office 2K SP3 plus these two fixes, and it easily eats 10 minutes per PC, to install about 12MB of patches. That could be done in 10 seconds.
My impression from this document is that it is an optional feature, only active when the creator of the document specifies who can read it.
You must have missed the part about there being no backward compatibility. The only people who are going to be able to read your shiny new M$ DOC are people with shiny new M$ OS AND a network connection that can see your shiny new M$ $erver. It's going to be harder than ever to share Microsoft crap. Your impression, that you have any choices, is the false one Microsoft would like you to have.
What you seem to miss is that this only happens after you have specified that this should happen. So when a company specifies "only joe and bob should be able to read this document" they better make sure that joe and bob have Office 2003. When they want to put a document on their website and want to specify "everyone but saddam is able to read it", tough luck.
I am not an advocate of Microsoft domination, to the contrary. But I feel that the generic Microsoft-bashing attitude of/. contributors is not going to help us prevent that. Microsoft make available features that some of their customers like, and see as a motivation to go through the trouble of upgrading their software. That is clever. Some of these features are not so desirable to the rest of the world. So bring up good alternatives to their products and promote those, instead of complaining on a forum that the decision-makers are not reading.
If there is any effect from recent news, I would expect it to be from the EOLAS case, as that is about software patents. The SCO case is not about patents but about a contract.
You may have misunderstood the situation. The Knoppix site is one of several that has put up a replacement page to show what would happen if software patents would be accepted. The same was done on the Mplayer site. This is a protest action, not a stop of development.
Slashdot Mirror
Our mail virus scanner will detect this, and refuse your .exe that was renamed to .txt as an executable file (which is not allowed past the firewall).
.txt won't work either.
Renaming it, then zipping it and renaming the zip to
Or the same repeated a number of times.
Of course, commercial scanners often are too dumb to find things like that.
How do you enable gzipping inside squid?
Sounds interesting, everybody is talking about it, but I have never seen such an option in squid.conf...
Yes, that works very well.
Strange that it is used so little...
There are several different modules for compression with Apache (well, maybe *that* is the reason...). Some can compress everything, some can compress static content only, some store the compressed data so it does not need to be compressed every time, etc.
In PHP there is also an option to compress all PHP output, very useful when you run an application that outputs large tables.
The set of patches distributed that way is different from Windows Update.
When you update your system like that, and visit Windows Update, it will still list critical patches that you need to install.
The switches for silent install come in 3 different flavours. They are different for Windows updates, Internet explorer updates, and other application updates (Office, MDAC).
Only Gates knows what that is good for...
Do you think a patch tool that requires IIS and requires your server to be Windows 2000 is a nice handy tool?
Our servers run NT4 and we don't run IIS. The Intranet runs on Apache (Linux).
Fortunately we have our patch deployment tool that is just 20 lines of KIX script running as part of the LOGON script. Works every time, but unfortunately Microsoft does everything it can to attempt to break it. (see other replies in this subthread)
There is a Windows 2000 downloads site but they provide very few fixes. Fortunately it turns out that the fix for this one is on that site and is working without the Internet link.
But before, the fixes downloaded from Windows Update were actually the same files (only with a signature) as those available on the downloads site, but there were many more fixes on Windows Update.
This fix seems to change that pattern.
Well, in fact about every 10th fix changes a pattern. The naming convention, the commandline flags supported, whatever, they change it all the time.
This MUST be to make life easier for the administrators!
Before, you could just download the Windows Update fix on a single computer, check the firewall log to see what .exe was downloaded to perform the update, get that file and store it on your server, and run it from the logon script using a couple of flags for silent installation.
.exe contacts a server at Microsoft, POSTs some info, and gets 80KB of data back in return. When you try to run the .exe on a PC without Internet connectivity, it fails.
With this update, Microsoft have disabled that!
The
Is this to help us to quickly patch all systems?
To force us to rollout that SUS system quickly (today) to be able to apply this patch?
The ways of the force are getting more awful every day. How much longer are the customers going to accept this?
Were they forced to lower the price of CDs? Nope.
They were, but they did not realize it until an alternative appeared. Now they are accustomized to their exorbitant profits and "cannot" lower the price. So they blame the alternative, instead of blaming themselves.
I'm not talking about nVidia videocards, I have one myself. I am talking about nVidia chipsets. For the motherboard. They suck.
They don't care if you boycott their product.
People have boycot their product and it seems they do care. Only they have not recognized it as a boycot, they think the Internet is to blame.
Of course the real reason their sales are dropping is a simple economic one: the price is too high.
if you have "Intel Inside" your web browsing will be much faster.
But more important: you usually get something that works. I am happy to pay for Intel stuff and have a stable system that works. And I love to giggle when people are struggling with their VIA or nVidia chipset motherboards. Should have bought the real stuff!
Actually, these ports are usually not supported when running the original firmware.
The first thing you should always do with any Nokia Mediamaster box is to re-flash it with hobby software that runs faster and supports the hardware.
You may have misunderstood the situation in Europe.
There is a single DVB standard, the encryption is standard, but the entitlement management isn't.
There is a single standard interface to content access modules (it is very much like PCMCIA) and you will have to install a module in your receiver that in turn accepts a smartcard from your provider.
There are several systems in use (Mediaguard, Viaccess, Conax, Cryptoworks, Nagravision, Betacrypt to name a few).
Receivers exist that support all systems without additional module, but of course they are always under close scrutiny and often removed from the market after they turn out to be "to open".
Why? Europe is not a single market for the entertainment industry. They are about the only industry that escaped the big "there has to be equal competition everywhere" dogma of the EU.
So, when a German entertainment firm launches a service for German customers, Dutch customers are not allowed to view that, not even to subscribe to it!
The only way to view other countries' services is through hacking. Which largely explains the large amount of activity you see in this field.
The entertainment industry of course does not get the message. Like with MP3 distribution over the Internet. They try to get out the message that they are treated unjustly, camouflaging the fact that they themselves are unjustly handling their customers.
I started out running Linux in January of 1994, using MCC on my 25MHz 486SX with 4 MB of RAM. I think the entire distribution was about 7 or 8 1.44 MB floppies, which I painstakingly downloaded using bitftp.
:-)
Well, I started in December of 1992, on a 33 MHz 486DX with 16MB of RAM. The distribution I used was called SNOW and was on about 25 floppies. It included X.
In fact, X ran quite well on this machine, and with its 800 MB SCSI disk that soared at 2.5 Mbyte/s it was a high-end box for those days. It ran circles around the DEC VAX 6200 we had at work
I see little history from these days on that "historic" site... maybe if they are really serious about history I can upload them some old stuff.
The original reason was that ham bands were shared with other services, and those other services used morse code. To be able to notice that other operators were asking to make way (i.e. not transmit on top of their communication partner which the ham operator may not hear), there would be a requirement to be able to copy morse code even when you were not using it yourself.
Morse code is a code that can be generated with simple transmitters and received with simple receivers, under relatively weak signal circumstances. Ham radio operators often claim that it is the best w.r.t. spectrum efficiency and weak signal copying, but this is far from the truth...
Should governments (ANY government) directly fund the development of an OS? (Or for that matter, any application that will compete with commercial providers).
Maybe. But more important: should a government keep up legislation that allows commercial companies to become complete monopolies?
Should a government maintain a legal system that operates so slowly, so expensively, and so inefficiently that companies can file claims that take many years to be settled, and in the meantime can hamper other people's business by making unproven claims?
Probably not. So before throwing a stone at other countries' governments, please throw a stone at the US government first.
Right. In fact the US government is, by allowing software patents and tolerating that companies like SCO destroy other people's business without having to prove that they have a point, influencing the market much more than a government that stimulates the development of free software.
>That means no silent installs and no removing the mandatory reboot prompt. This was presented as being intentional since they supposedly wanted users to be forced to view/accept the EULA.
.KIX script (this is for the Office SP3 and patches released this week): /q' /q' /q'
.ini files, or whatever...
Easy to work around that! This is how we do it:
All our scripts are written using Kixtart, but similar possibilities exist in VB Script.
When a program cannot be "silently installed", we run it as a background program and then go send key presses to it from the
$Y="\\server\installpoint"
RUN '$Y\o2ksp3.exe
WHILE (SetFocus("Office 2000 Service Pack 3")0)
SLEEP 3
LOOP
$X=SendKeys("{ENTER}")
SLEEP 2
$X=SendKeys("{ENTER}")
RUN '$Y\Hotfix\office2000-kb822035-client-nld.exe
WHILE (SetFocus("Beveiligingspatch voor Office")0)
SLEEP 3
LOOP
$X=SendKeys("{ENTER}")
RUN '$Y\Hotfix\office2000-kb824993-client-nld.exe
WHILE (SetFocus("Beveiligingspatch voor Office")0)
SLEEP 3
LOOP
$X=SendKeys("{ENTER}")
In fact in this case it is a mix between selecting silent install and then clicking away the popup windows that it still, despite silent install, shows.
The same can be done to install DirectX 9.0b.
All our installations and updates proceed from boot to working system without a single manual action, even for installers that completely refuse to be controlled by commandline switches,
>But with the PC's at my current company they were all direcly from a manufacturer bundled with Orifice installed locally.
:-)
We do that to. And the first thing that happens when they are unpacked is boot from the network, format C: and reinstall from the network installation point.
Now this pays off
Interestingly, the KB article has the label "FIX" but it has this paragraph for the fix:
RESOLUTION
When you perform the original installation from a network drive, Windows Installer can locate the files needed. However, the network location must be available when you apply the patch so that the source files can be found. Also, if you performed the original installation from a CD-ROM and the disc is still available, insert the CD-ROM disc when prompted.
So in fact, it is not a FIX at all. It does not tell you what to do when you don't have the CD-ROM.
For an article promising a FIX, I would expect some workaround for the listed problem.
But maybe I am expecting too much.
Fortunately we installed Office (in fact, everything) from the logon script as well, so on the default WS install there is no problem with the installation source (it is on the server where it was when Office was installed).
Just before going home I tried to update the Office on the Citrix server and of course it failed for the reason above. Now that will have to wait until tomorrow.
The MSI installer used for Word is indeed terribly slow.
I took this opportunity to install Office 2K SP3 plus these two fixes, and it easily eats 10 minutes per PC, to install about 12MB of patches. That could be done in 10 seconds.
My impression from this document is that it is an optional feature, only active when the creator of the document specifies who can read it.
/. contributors is not going to help us prevent that.
You must have missed the part about there being no backward compatibility. The only people who are going to be able to read your shiny new M$ DOC are people with shiny new M$ OS AND a network connection that can see your shiny new M$ $erver. It's going to be harder than ever to share Microsoft crap. Your impression, that you have any choices, is the false one Microsoft would like you to have.
What you seem to miss is that this only happens after you have specified that this should happen.
So when a company specifies "only joe and bob should be able to read this document" they better make sure that joe and bob have Office 2003.
When they want to put a document on their website and want to specify "everyone but saddam is able to read it", tough luck.
I am not an advocate of Microsoft domination, to the contrary. But I feel that the generic Microsoft-bashing attitude of
Microsoft make available features that some of their customers like, and see as a motivation to go through the trouble of upgrading their software. That is clever.
Some of these features are not so desirable to the rest of the world. So bring up good alternatives to their products and promote those, instead of complaining on a forum that the decision-makers are not reading.
No. At least not when I tried it.
This may be fixed in 6.0 or in OpenOffice, I don't know.
If there is any effect from recent news, I would expect it to be from the EOLAS case, as that is about software patents.
The SCO case is not about patents but about a contract.
You may have misunderstood the situation. The Knoppix site is one of several that has put up a replacement page to show what would happen if software patents would be accepted. The same was done on the Mplayer site. This is a protest action, not a stop of development.