Yes, serial console servers are quite useful for remote administration.
Another option might be to build your own - take an older spare machine and stick a PCI USB controller in it and add a bunch of USB-to-serial dongle devices (possibly with a USB hub). These show up as/dev/ttyUSB#.
You can then ssh in and use minicom or whatever. You get added security since many terminal servers don't support ssh, plus you have a fully configurable system to manage stuff. You could write a program to page/email you on certain kernel events for example. It could be pretty flexible if that is what you need.
Just my two cents.
BTW, Bruce, thanks for your contributions to the community and to Debian. We all appreciate it.
1. network driver is initialized 2. kernel messages are what you want to capture 3. the kernel doesn't get itself foobarred so badly that it can't send packets 4. interrupts are enabled (right? can't talk to the network card otherwise)
Also, if you change mac addresses or network cards of the first hop between the sender and receiver, this all needs to be reconfigured.
This can certainly be useful, but recognize its limitations.
Yes, I agree there. There is no reason that any application should ever start up a sound daemon that locks the device. If I wanted to run a sound daemon, I would start it myself.
I don't know about MacOS.. but Windows has the standard "multimedia" sound API and the "directSound" API. These are both of course different from the Win16 sound API.
Windows goes through the same type of API revisions.
Actually, yes. The thing is, they don't stop on our street. They stop two streets over in a business district. If they continued on the business district instead of this residential street (to get to the same cross street), it would be much quieter, and wouldn't effect the route since there is no stop here. I wouldn't want them to move the bus stop, just change the preferred route to keep to the business district at 6am and not wake us up.
So, I would agree, busses in general can be a good thing. But driving through a residential neighborhood at 6am for no good reason is not.
Neat article. Inspried me to check my locality. Palo Alto, CA has a 7-ton "truck" classification. Maybe I can at least get the busses off my street then. Oh well.
This would be problematic for objects of just over your proposed 100km limit. For example, I land on the opposite side of your 102km object, stake my claim and start mining. After 9 months, I'm more than half way through the asteroid and eventually come out the other side. There goes your mineral rights.
Not to mention that the transfer of all of that mass would effect the orbit of the object.. possibly making the orbit unstable or on a collision course. Who gets to decide about that?
I didn't know about cygwin's security issues. Thanks for the tip. Windows is so odd, how can a program have global shared memory on a multiuser system? Sounds like a broken security model.
1. samba. The microsoft SMB or CIFS protocol is a big inefficient hog. Try transferring with FTP. The data is piped down a TCP stream, end of story.
2. hard drives. most hard drives can't push a gigabit/second from the platters (let alone write). Check out their sustained transfer speed (not burst cache). Also check out your bus medium. ATA-66 won't push a gigabit.
3. pci bus. Transferring data down the PCI bus from the disk controller and then back out the PCI bus to the network card means you need a 2x effective bandwidth. PCI can't hit 2 gigabit here. You might get better results with PCI Express.
Ok, POSIX is all about the system calls and C library functions. C89 is about compiler support. They are seperate and don't go hand-in-hand.
About POSIX and Unix compatibility. There are a handful of Unixes that remain important and widely deployed. They are:
Solaris HP-UX AIX Linux *BSD MacOSX
They pretty much all have modern APIs in recent versions. The older unixes have recently added a bunch of Linux-like modern APIs to make portability easier. This was the reason behind HPUX 11i (the 'i' denotes "internet ready", but what they really mean is glibc/*BSD apis). This is also the reason behind the AIX 5L name (AKA 5.1, 5.2) (L = linux affinity, same deal, new GNU/*BSD apis). You know that MacOSX uses a BSD-based userland, so you're fine there. Then there's Solaris, of which recent versions (>=2.6) are in good shape. Recent versions of the proprietary unixes even have/dev/[u]random and/proc filesystems. There's a lot of common interfaces, as long as you target relatively recent releases.
Ok, once you figure out what platforms you are targeting, you need to figure out what compilers you will support. All of the proprietary Unixes have their own C compiler (sometimes only available for a fee). Many are not fully ANSI compliant. They are definitely not all C99 compliant. That is the bad news.
The good news is that gcc is available for all of the major platforms. This is what gcc excels at, it is highly portable. You can use this to your advantage to get things working on these platforms. If your users then want to get them working with other compilers, that is worth a shot too (non-gcc compilers often produce better optimizations, etc.).. but it will be hit or miss.
Testing. I highly recommend the HP Testdrive program. They make available a bunch of machines with various HP hardware running various operating systems from Linux on Alpha to HPUX on IA64, including Tru64 (aka OSF/1). http://www.testdrive.compaq.com/
HPUX Note: Many people think that 11i is for the Itanium platform. That is not the case. 11i is version 11.11 and higher. 11.11 is for HPPA. 11.20 and higher are for IA64. Both are called 11i.
Display is up to the client. Deal with it. The client may chose to ignore your stylesheet or your color scheme or your images.
If your revenue model doedn't work with the realities of the general purpose web technology, which do you think is flawed, the revenue model or the technology?
And I suppose browsing with text mode browsers or by blind people rob you of your revenue too? Get real.
If you greatly want to decrease page load time, I suggest blocking the advertisements. They are often in an iframe, resulting in at least 2 GETs per image (not to mention html parsing). They are also kept on different servers usually, so you can't reuse your current HTTP session, you have to start a new one, with a TCP 3-way handshake that can take upwards of half a second on a modem (especially one with the bandwidth already saturated loading the rest of the page).
Use a proxy like privoxy or junkbuster (outdated, only does HTML 1.0, try privoxy first). Or, get a browser plugin to do the same (for example, AdBlock for FireFox).
Then setup a Squid caching proxy to keep you from repeating DNS lookups and retrieving the same page or image. This gives a huge boost, since images can be loaded from memory or disk instead of a network roundtrip. The more disk and memory you throw at Squid, the more cache hits you get.
BTW, junkbuster can be configured to use another proxy (like Squid) so you can use both together. I think privoxy will do that too.
Oh, one last thing.. if you know any web site admins, get them to turn on apache's mod_gzip compression. It compresses pages for http transmission and saves oodles of bandwidth. Most popular sites use it. Browsers like IE and Mozilla support it. Any decent cache (squid) will support it too.
These kind of changes make browsing over modem much more tolerable. Good luck.
Sorry, but no lock-in with the ipod for me. My ipod works under Linux with gtkpod. No problems. No itunes either, but thats not device lock-in, its client lock-in.
FYI, there has been a number of times that I've heard people swear on PBS, and even show some nudidty. This is of course before the recent changes. Now everyone is running scared from the FCC that is now taking a hard line.
The freedom of expression should not be limited by the government.
Mozilla is not 1%. This ignores Mozilla-derivatives such as Netscape 6.x and 7.x.
I'm not sure what "Netscape comp." is (component? things with Gecko in the user-agent?), but that is likely a mozilla derivative. Adding those in, that gives 3.14%. If you discount the "comp." entry, that gives 2.41%.
Note that the total for IE (all versions) is 94.65% on this chart.
Not a great improvement, but your statement of 1% is not correct.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, serial console servers are quite useful for remote administration.
/dev/ttyUSB#.
Another option might be to build your own - take an older spare machine and stick a PCI USB controller in it and add a bunch of USB-to-serial dongle devices (possibly with a USB hub). These show up as
You can then ssh in and use minicom or whatever. You get added security since many terminal servers don't support ssh, plus you have a fully configurable system to manage stuff. You could write a program to page/email you on certain kernel events for example. It could be pretty flexible if that is what you need.
Just my two cents.
BTW, Bruce, thanks for your contributions to the community and to Debian. We all appreciate it.
-molo
This only works/is helpful in certain situations:
1. network driver is initialized
2. kernel messages are what you want to capture
3. the kernel doesn't get itself foobarred so badly that it can't send packets
4. interrupts are enabled (right? can't talk to the network card otherwise)
Also, if you change mac addresses or network cards of the first hop between the sender and receiver, this all needs to be reconfigured.
This can certainly be useful, but recognize its limitations.
-molo
So one can imagine that Xiph could easily create a temporary JPEG replacement until some realy better (Wavelet based ?) patent-free format is created.
l ems_with_the_use_of_JPEG_2000
BTW, I believe wavelet patents is one of the reasons why jpeg 2000 is not being widely adopted.
See here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JPEG_2000#Legal_prob
-molo
stream MPEG4 Apple Lossless files
Since when is MPEG4 lossless?? What is this talking about?
-molo
Yes, I agree there. There is no reason that any application should ever start up a sound daemon that locks the device. If I wanted to run a sound daemon, I would start it myself.
-molo
I don't know about MacOS.. but Windows has the standard "multimedia" sound API and the "directSound" API. These are both of course different from the Win16 sound API.
Windows goes through the same type of API revisions.
-molo
Actually, yes. The thing is, they don't stop on our street. They stop two streets over in a business district. If they continued on the business district instead of this residential street (to get to the same cross street), it would be much quieter, and wouldn't effect the route since there is no stop here. I wouldn't want them to move the bus stop, just change the preferred route to keep to the business district at 6am and not wake us up.
So, I would agree, busses in general can be a good thing. But driving through a residential neighborhood at 6am for no good reason is not.
-molo
Neat article. Inspried me to check my locality. Palo Alto, CA has a 7-ton "truck" classification. Maybe I can at least get the busses off my street then. Oh well.
-molo
This would be problematic for objects of just over your proposed 100km limit. For example, I land on the opposite side of your 102km object, stake my claim and start mining. After 9 months, I'm more than half way through the asteroid and eventually come out the other side. There goes your mineral rights.
Not to mention that the transfer of all of that mass would effect the orbit of the object.. possibly making the orbit unstable or on a collision course. Who gets to decide about that?
-molo
They're talking about trademark registration, not domain registration.
-molo
Ah, that makes more sense, it at least follows the rest of the windows model. Thanks.
-molo
I didn't know about cygwin's security issues. Thanks for the tip. Windows is so odd, how can a program have global shared memory on a multiuser system? Sounds like a broken security model.
-molo
Cygwin and rsync. That should do it.
-molo
A couple likely bottlenecks:
1. samba. The microsoft SMB or CIFS protocol is a big inefficient hog. Try transferring with FTP. The data is piped down a TCP stream, end of story.
2. hard drives. most hard drives can't push a gigabit/second from the platters (let alone write). Check out their sustained transfer speed (not burst cache). Also check out your bus medium. ATA-66 won't push a gigabit.
3. pci bus. Transferring data down the PCI bus from the disk controller and then back out the PCI bus to the network card means you need a 2x effective bandwidth. PCI can't hit 2 gigabit here. You might get better results with PCI Express.
Good luck.
-molo
Sorry, I don't know of any. If you find them, let me know, I'd be interested too. Thanks.
-molo
Ok, POSIX is all about the system calls and C library functions. C89 is about compiler support. They are seperate and don't go hand-in-hand.
/dev/[u]random and /proc filesystems. There's a lot of common interfaces, as long as you target relatively recent releases.
i d=762&group_id=1#platforms You have to be a developer of a sourceforge project to get access, but its a good deal.
About POSIX and Unix compatibility. There are a handful of Unixes that remain important and widely deployed. They are:
Solaris
HP-UX
AIX
Linux
*BSD
MacOSX
They pretty much all have modern APIs in recent versions. The older unixes have recently added a bunch of Linux-like modern APIs to make portability easier. This was the reason behind HPUX 11i (the 'i' denotes "internet ready", but what they really mean is glibc/*BSD apis). This is also the reason behind the AIX 5L name (AKA 5.1, 5.2) (L = linux affinity, same deal, new GNU/*BSD apis). You know that MacOSX uses a BSD-based userland, so you're fine there. Then there's Solaris, of which recent versions (>=2.6) are in good shape. Recent versions of the proprietary unixes even have
Ok, once you figure out what platforms you are targeting, you need to figure out what compilers you will support. All of the proprietary Unixes have their own C compiler (sometimes only available for a fee). Many are not fully ANSI compliant. They are definitely not all C99 compliant. That is the bad news.
The good news is that gcc is available for all of the major platforms. This is what gcc excels at, it is highly portable. You can use this to your advantage to get things working on these platforms. If your users then want to get them working with other compilers, that is worth a shot too (non-gcc compilers often produce better optimizations, etc.).. but it will be hit or miss.
Testing. I highly recommend the HP Testdrive program. They make available a bunch of machines with various HP hardware running various operating systems from Linux on Alpha to HPUX on IA64, including Tru64 (aka OSF/1). http://www.testdrive.compaq.com/
Sourceforge also has a build farm which includes Solaris on sparc and x86 and MacOS X. http://sourceforge.net/docman/display_doc.php?doc
Good luck. Hope this helps.
-molo
HPUX Note: Many people think that 11i is for the Itanium platform. That is not the case. 11i is version 11.11 and higher. 11.11 is for HPPA. 11.20 and higher are for IA64. Both are called 11i.
Display is up to the client. Deal with it. The client may chose to ignore your stylesheet or your color scheme or your images.
If your revenue model doedn't work with the realities of the general purpose web technology, which do you think is flawed, the revenue model or the technology?
And I suppose browsing with text mode browsers or by blind people rob you of your revenue too? Get real.
-molo
er, junkbuster only does HTTP 1.0, not HTML 1.0. sorry.
-molo
If you greatly want to decrease page load time, I suggest blocking the advertisements. They are often in an iframe, resulting in at least 2 GETs per image (not to mention html parsing). They are also kept on different servers usually, so you can't reuse your current HTTP session, you have to start a new one, with a TCP 3-way handshake that can take upwards of half a second on a modem (especially one with the bandwidth already saturated loading the rest of the page).
Use a proxy like privoxy or junkbuster (outdated, only does HTML 1.0, try privoxy first). Or, get a browser plugin to do the same (for example, AdBlock for FireFox).
Then setup a Squid caching proxy to keep you from repeating DNS lookups and retrieving the same page or image. This gives a huge boost, since images can be loaded from memory or disk instead of a network roundtrip. The more disk and memory you throw at Squid, the more cache hits you get.
BTW, junkbuster can be configured to use another proxy (like Squid) so you can use both together. I think privoxy will do that too.
Oh, one last thing.. if you know any web site admins, get them to turn on apache's mod_gzip compression. It compresses pages for http transmission and saves oodles of bandwidth. Most popular sites use it. Browsers like IE and Mozilla support it. Any decent cache (squid) will support it too.
These kind of changes make browsing over modem much more tolerable. Good luck.
-molo
Sorry, but no lock-in with the ipod for me. My ipod works under Linux with gtkpod. No problems. No itunes either, but thats not device lock-in, its client lock-in.
-molo
However it is very common in the US to call any larger ground based burrowing rodents a gopher.
Hrm, no, not really. Most people use specific names. eg: Woodchuck Prairie dog California Ground Squirrel
Maybe "gopher" is more commonly used in the southern vocabulary?
-molo
Good call.
Market caps:
MSFT: 301 bln
CSCO: 150 bln
IBM: 143 bln
HPQ: 61 bln
DELL: 89 bln
INTC: 169 bln
ORCL: 57 bln
EBAY: 55 bln
SAP: 49 bln
NOK: 67 bln
FYI, there has been a number of times that I've heard people swear on PBS, and even show some nudidty. This is of course before the recent changes. Now everyone is running scared from the FCC that is now taking a hard line.
The freedom of expression should not be limited by the government.
-molo
Mozilla is not 1%. This ignores Mozilla-derivatives such as Netscape 6.x and 7.x.
I'm not sure what "Netscape comp." is (component? things with Gecko in the user-agent?), but that is likely a mozilla derivative. Adding those in, that gives 3.14%. If you discount the "comp." entry, that gives 2.41%.
Note that the total for IE (all versions) is 94.65% on this chart.
Not a great improvement, but your statement of 1% is not correct.
-molo
Thanks for this explanation. Please consider contributing this to Wikipedia (when its up, i'm getting blank pages now).
-molo