There were some lingering problems with NFS (even v2 using UDP) in the 2.2.x kernel series until 2.2.19.
I recommend that you upgrade the machine that's running 2.2.17, or else apply the NFS patches. If you're using NFS v3 or TCP, you definitely want to upgrade to the latest version, and get the latest NFS utils.
Yup. The situation is worse if you have multiple machines.
If I can hack a service on one firewall, and it doesn't have shadow passwords, then I'll eventually figure out the root password.
This has two serious implications:
1. I can now log in as root, and erase any previous evidence of a breakin. This'll make detection of a breakin much more difficult.
2. If any other firewalls/routers/etc. on the site have the same root password, I now have full access to those machines too.
In an ideal world, every machine and router would have a separate, strong password. And those passwords are changed every 3 months. And none of the admins ever forgets them or writes them down.
Unfortunately, no one I know does this. It's just too hard and cumbersome. So you end up with one password for each class of machines.
Kinda makes you wish everyone used Blowfish for encrypting the passwords, doesn't it? Viva OpenBSD!
Curiously enough, Jesse Jackson Jr. (the son of Reverend Jesse Jackson Sr.) is in court now to stop another guy named Jesse Jackson from getting on the ballot. It appears this other Jesse Jackson wanted his name spelled identically.
Presumably they're not in the same party, but there's a huge potential for consumer (voter) confusion due to lack of differences in labeling.
Re:It appears to actually be fixes
on
Kernel 2.4.17 Out
·
· Score: 2
Well, it's gonna be a while before I try 2.4.anything on a production machine.
On the one hand, I'm glad to be seeing a lot of bugfixes in the changelog. On the other hand, I'm worried about seeing lots of bugs in the changelog, because I wonder how many more serious ones are lurking in the codebase.
With 2.2.whatever, the bugfixes there have been recently have mostly been related to specific drivers, which I usually don't care about (unless I'm using that driver). But with 2.4.x I'm still seeing lots of fixes in the main kernel code, because so much fundamental structure has changed since 2.2.
I guess we'll have to see. Maybe if some decent RAID card support starts showing up in OpenBSD, I'll think about switching my servers to that.
Heh. I had a Genesis, and in a moment of demented thinking, I purchased that SMS adapter.
Boy was I sorry. The SMS game I purchased was crap. I don't know what I'm thinking.
On the other hand, I already have a PS1 and some games, so a PS2 is nearly a slam-dunk, since I don't have a DVD player either. I just need to save up my pennies (the entertainment budget has recently seen some cutbacks.:-)
It's been a long time since I've run a real R/C car, but I've played Re-Volt a lot. It's fun.
You're getting to do something that you wouldn't normally be able to. This is especially true with Re-Volt. You get to race some nice cars, over some really wild race courses, with a point-of-view right over the car itself. No worries about charging batteries either.
I think realistic physics adds a lot to the game. Learning how to handle the different surfaces. Learning how to bump off the wall just so without flipping your car. Learning how to power-slide. I would have ruined a dozen real cars just trying out jumping and stunts.
It helps that the game uses R/C cars instead of real ones. Because of mass-scaling laws, they have a much greater power-to-weight ratio than full-size cars. That adds a lot to the fun factor.
And maybe realistic physics would ruin other games, like Half-Life. Well, if you want super-jumps, fast running and so on, let's make a game with armored mechas instead of humans. You can have your rocket-jumps and realistic physics too.
(steps up to microphone) Um, hi. My name is James, and I'm a gaming addict.
True story: On a Saturday afternoon soon after getting Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, I started a new game. My friend was going to call me to go out to dinner, so I figured I would have just a few hours to play.
Gradually, the light from the window faded, but I barely noticed. My friend never called, and there were no interruptions, so I kept playing.
After a while, I stopped for a moment, and realized that: a) I had to go to the bathroom really bad, b) I had a splitting headache, and c) I was ravenously hungry. I look at the clock, and it's 4:30am!
That's right folks, 14 hours straight, and I didn't realize it until afterwards. But I can't blame anyone besides myself.
I didn't even win that game, I ran out of time fighting Yang and Sister Miriam, trading planet busters.
A friend of mine tried downloading MP3s from the Internet, and then recording them onto his Sony minidisc player. The result? It sounded like crap.
The problem here is that you're re-compressing something that's already been compressed once. That's going to introduce more noise, and amplify the compression artifacts.
And then there's the whole signed DRM drivers for Windoze, and the unavailability under Unix/Linux that others have mentioned.
Read further, and you probably won't be as worried.
Only when the filesystem is mounted at a lower access level (or as a plain ext2 filesystem) is there a danger of overwriting blocks of encrypted data.
If you're always using the filesystem with the highest access level, you don't have anything to worry about. It's only when there's a lot of data being written at a lower level that you have to worry.
If that's the case, like it's a partition that contains home directories for other users, you're already asking for trouble. This should be a filesystem that only you use on a regular basis.
I think Linux will see greater adoption in the enterprise. Why? Java and J2EE.
J2EE is the current wiz-bang development platform for enterprise applications. Looking past the hype, it appears to actually provide some good tools and structure. We're going to be seeing a lot more enterprise applications written on top of WebSphere or WebLogic or some other J2EE server platform. It seems to be the way to go if you don't want to be beholden to M$ and.NET.
The thing is, since this is most all pure Java, all you need is a stable OS that supports your database (Oracle, DB2, etc.) and, of course, has a Java VM. Enter Linux.
I agree that regression tests are not a substitute for other testing and thinking. However, if such-and-such patch does break test #4751, then that's an indication that the patch and maybe the test need to be investigated further.
I've loosely followed the progress of 2.4.x. Because of NFS problems until recently, I wouldn't have dreamed of puttint it into production. Every time it's gotten close to stable (by my standards), something else has cropped up (like the VM change).
I'm gonna wait until we go at least 2 months without a major bugfix before I implement 2.4.x. I want to see a ChangeLog that mostly consists of "added new driver for NNN".
Re:A PS2 with different games
on
XBox Released
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Some of the higher quality TVs now will de-interlace incoming NTSC signals, and smooth out the picture by interpolating between the lines.
The result is that the picture looks like it has a higher resolution than it actually posseses.
So having NTSC input isn't as bad as it used to be.
You can't do zone transfers using djbdns for one thing. DJB thinks that zone transfers are evil, and has his own method for doing the task (rsync over ssh I believe)...
The point he's trying to make there is that there is already an easy, secure way to transfer data over the Internet. Rather than inventing a new protocol (which may have bugs), why not just use existing tools that are probably already on your system. (I use rsync and ssh all the time for other tasks.)
The "DJB Way" is to make small modular programs, which is very much in the original Unix tradition. The power of this comes in the ability to quickly create new applications out of exisiting components.
Re:Can development work without centralization?
on
SourceForge Drifting
·
· Score: 2
Source code control (a la CVS, ClearCase, whatever) is not the same as project management.
CVS is a tool that can help with project management, but only a tool.
Someone has to be helping manage this. There is no way to get out of that. If the project is big, and this is difficult, then maybe it's time to break the project into smaller pieces that communicate with each other through well-defined interfaces.
If you don't have some coordination and communication between developers, then you're gonna have chaos, like you said.
The metal tape measure is a toy compared to a well designed NASA antenna system.
Oh, you mean like the high-gain antenna on Galileo? Yeah, that's working really well.
For those not keeping track, the high-gain antenna on Galileo failed to deploy, severely cripping the probe's ability to send back science data. The mission wasn't completely ruined because the low-gain antenna still works.
While this is an interesting idea (equating OSS with barter, and thereby taxable), I'm not too worried about it.
IANAL, but with barter, there is a specific exchange of goods that could have used money instead. With OSS, I am giving you the right to use some program, but there is nothing explicit in the license agreement that says you must give me something back.
This is not actual barter, ergo not taxable.
I'd be more worried about IP issues and proprietary, patented protocols than this.
Yup, that short film had me laughing so hard I couldn't breathe. The expressions on the faces were just excellent. It was just about worth the price of admission all by itself.
I also thought that the animation of Goodman's character was excellent. The little girl was very good too, though Billy Crystal's character didn't do much for me.
Linux is a whole lot easier to use than Windows. At least in this case.
At least yer not grovelling through the registry trying to figure out how to disable something. With Linux, it's all there and documented in the config files.
Suppose I install some fancy-dancy new linux distro that starts up some stuff I don't like/want/need. 99% of the time, the config file will be in/etc, and I know it's going to get started through some init script. A recursive grep, a look at the man page, and it's taken care of.
The disabling procedure that Phil Wherry posted seems to be a lot less straight-forward than that. The documentation that M$ provides isn't nearly as helpful in your task, either.
...but buy the same number of hard disks as you'd buy tapes...
Yup. The exact type of the medium shouldn't be changing your backup strategy.
Tape prices vary wildly, but figure on a buck or two per GB. Hard Drives aren't quite there yet, somewhere around four or five bucks per GB if you include a decent enclosure.
I guess I'm old-school, but I still prefer tapes. They are also more robust to physical/temperature abuse, which I like.
Slashdot Mirror
There were some lingering problems with NFS (even v2 using UDP) in the 2.2.x kernel series until 2.2.19.
I recommend that you upgrade the machine that's running 2.2.17, or else apply the NFS patches. If you're using NFS v3 or TCP, you definitely want to upgrade to the latest version, and get the latest NFS utils.
Yup. The situation is worse if you have multiple machines.
If I can hack a service on one firewall, and it doesn't have shadow passwords, then I'll eventually figure out the root password.
This has two serious implications:
1. I can now log in as root, and erase any previous evidence of a breakin. This'll make detection of a breakin much more difficult.
2. If any other firewalls/routers/etc. on the site have the same root password, I now have full access to those machines too.
In an ideal world, every machine and router would have a separate, strong password. And those passwords are changed every 3 months. And none of the admins ever forgets them or writes them down.
Unfortunately, no one I know does this. It's just too hard and cumbersome. So you end up with one password for each class of machines.
Kinda makes you wish everyone used Blowfish for encrypting the passwords, doesn't it? Viva OpenBSD!
Curiously enough, Jesse Jackson Jr. (the son of Reverend Jesse Jackson Sr.) is in court now to stop another guy named Jesse Jackson from getting on the ballot. It appears this other Jesse Jackson wanted his name spelled identically.
Presumably they're not in the same party, but there's a huge potential for consumer (voter) confusion due to lack of differences in labeling.
Well, it's gonna be a while before I try 2.4.anything on a production machine.
On the one hand, I'm glad to be seeing a lot of bugfixes in the changelog. On the other hand, I'm worried about seeing lots of bugs in the changelog, because I wonder how many more serious ones are lurking in the codebase.
With 2.2.whatever, the bugfixes there have been recently have mostly been related to specific drivers, which I usually don't care about (unless I'm using that driver). But with 2.4.x I'm still seeing lots of fixes in the main kernel code, because so much fundamental structure has changed since 2.2.
I guess we'll have to see. Maybe if some decent RAID card support starts showing up in OpenBSD, I'll think about switching my servers to that.
Since you mentioned LaTeX...
I thought I'd just put in a plug for LyX which takes all the creamy goodness of LaTeX and spreads it onto all the nooks and crannies of a GUI.
My apologies to the writers of "The Tick".
Heh. I had a Genesis, and in a moment of demented thinking, I purchased that SMS adapter.
Boy was I sorry. The SMS game I purchased was crap. I don't know what I'm thinking.
On the other hand, I already have a PS1 and some games, so a PS2 is nearly a slam-dunk, since I don't have a DVD player either. I just need to save up my pennies (the entertainment budget has recently seen some cutbacks. :-)
Well, I occasionally want realistic physics.
It's been a long time since I've run a real R/C car, but I've played Re-Volt a lot. It's fun.
You're getting to do something that you wouldn't normally be able to. This is especially true with Re-Volt. You get to race some nice cars, over some really wild race courses, with a point-of-view right over the car itself. No worries about charging batteries either.
I think realistic physics adds a lot to the game. Learning how to handle the different surfaces. Learning how to bump off the wall just so without flipping your car. Learning how to power-slide. I would have ruined a dozen real cars just trying out jumping and stunts.
It helps that the game uses R/C cars instead of real ones. Because of mass-scaling laws, they have a much greater power-to-weight ratio than full-size cars. That adds a lot to the fun factor.
And maybe realistic physics would ruin other games, like Half-Life. Well, if you want super-jumps, fast running and so on, let's make a game with armored mechas instead of humans. You can have your rocket-jumps and realistic physics too.
(steps up to microphone) Um, hi. My name is James, and I'm a gaming addict.
True story: On a Saturday afternoon soon after getting Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, I started a new game. My friend was going to call me to go out to dinner, so I figured I would have just a few hours to play.
Gradually, the light from the window faded, but I barely noticed. My friend never called, and there were no interruptions, so I kept playing.
After a while, I stopped for a moment, and realized that: a) I had to go to the bathroom really bad, b) I had a splitting headache, and c) I was ravenously hungry. I look at the clock, and it's 4:30am!
That's right folks, 14 hours straight, and I didn't realize it until afterwards. But I can't blame anyone besides myself.
I didn't even win that game, I ran out of time fighting Yang and Sister Miriam, trading planet busters.
A friend of mine tried downloading MP3s from the Internet, and then recording them onto his Sony minidisc player. The result? It sounded like crap.
The problem here is that you're re-compressing something that's already been compressed once. That's going to introduce more noise, and amplify the compression artifacts.
And then there's the whole signed DRM drivers for Windoze, and the unavailability under Unix/Linux that others have mentioned.
Actually, they talked about that when they found his "mother". He's supposed to appear to age as well, even though his body will last for millenia.
Read further, and you probably won't be as worried.
Only when the filesystem is mounted at a lower access level (or as a plain ext2 filesystem) is there a danger of overwriting blocks of encrypted data.
If you're always using the filesystem with the highest access level, you don't have anything to worry about. It's only when there's a lot of data being written at a lower level that you have to worry.
If that's the case, like it's a partition that contains home directories for other users, you're already asking for trouble. This should be a filesystem that only you use on a regular basis.
StegFS (Linux only) is another steganographic filesystem. It's licensed under the GNU GPL, unlike Rubberhose.
http://www.mcdonald.org.uk/StegFS/
Yup. The last I read, there was only a slight performance hit, and very acceptable for the truly paranoid.
I think Linux will see greater adoption in the enterprise. Why? Java and J2EE.
J2EE is the current wiz-bang development platform for enterprise applications. Looking past the hype, it appears to actually provide some good tools and structure. We're going to be seeing a lot more enterprise applications written on top of WebSphere or WebLogic or some other J2EE server platform. It seems to be the way to go if you don't want to be beholden to M$ and .NET.
The thing is, since this is most all pure Java, all you need is a stable OS that supports your database (Oracle, DB2, etc.) and, of course, has a Java VM. Enter Linux.
I agree that regression tests are not a substitute for other testing and thinking. However, if such-and-such patch does break test #4751, then that's an indication that the patch and maybe the test need to be investigated further.
I've loosely followed the progress of 2.4.x. Because of NFS problems until recently, I wouldn't have dreamed of puttint it into production. Every time it's gotten close to stable (by my standards), something else has cropped up (like the VM change).
I'm gonna wait until we go at least 2 months without a major bugfix before I implement 2.4.x. I want to see a ChangeLog that mostly consists of "added new driver for NNN".
Some of the higher quality TVs now will de-interlace incoming NTSC signals, and smooth out the picture by interpolating between the lines.
The result is that the picture looks like it has a higher resolution than it actually posseses.
So having NTSC input isn't as bad as it used to be.
You can't do zone transfers using djbdns for one thing. DJB thinks that zone transfers are evil, and has his own method for doing the task (rsync over ssh I believe)...
The point he's trying to make there is that there is already an easy, secure way to transfer data over the Internet. Rather than inventing a new protocol (which may have bugs), why not just use existing tools that are probably already on your system. (I use rsync and ssh all the time for other tasks.)
The "DJB Way" is to make small modular programs, which is very much in the original Unix tradition. The power of this comes in the ability to quickly create new applications out of exisiting components.
Source code control (a la CVS, ClearCase, whatever) is not the same as project management.
CVS is a tool that can help with project management, but only a tool.
Someone has to be helping manage this. There is no way to get out of that. If the project is big, and this is difficult, then maybe it's time to break the project into smaller pieces that communicate with each other through well-defined interfaces.
If you don't have some coordination and communication between developers, then you're gonna have chaos, like you said.
The metal tape measure is a toy compared to a well designed NASA antenna system.
Oh, you mean like the high-gain antenna on Galileo? Yeah, that's working really well.
For those not keeping track, the high-gain antenna on Galileo failed to deploy, severely cripping the probe's ability to send back science data. The mission wasn't completely ruined because the low-gain antenna still works.
While this is an interesting idea (equating OSS with barter, and thereby taxable), I'm not too worried about it.
IANAL, but with barter, there is a specific exchange of goods that could have used money instead. With OSS, I am giving you the right to use some program, but there is nothing explicit in the license agreement that says you must give me something back.
This is not actual barter, ergo not taxable.
I'd be more worried about IP issues and proprietary, patented protocols than this.
Yup, that short film had me laughing so hard I couldn't breathe. The expressions on the faces were just excellent. It was just about worth the price of admission all by itself.
I also thought that the animation of Goodman's character was excellent. The little girl was very good too, though Billy Crystal's character didn't do much for me.
Overall, well worth it.
Linux is a whole lot easier to use than Windows. At least in this case.
At least yer not grovelling through the registry trying to figure out how to disable something. With Linux, it's all there and documented in the config files.
Suppose I install some fancy-dancy new linux distro that starts up some stuff I don't like/want/need. 99% of the time, the config file will be in /etc, and I know it's going to get started through some init script. A recursive grep, a look at the man page, and it's taken care of.
The disabling procedure that Phil Wherry posted seems to be a lot less straight-forward than that. The documentation that M$ provides isn't nearly as helpful in your task, either.
Yup. The exact type of the medium shouldn't be changing your backup strategy.
Tape prices vary wildly, but figure on a buck or two per GB. Hard Drives aren't quite there yet, somewhere around four or five bucks per GB if you include a decent enclosure.
I guess I'm old-school, but I still prefer tapes. They are also more robust to physical/temperature abuse, which I like.
It obviously wasn't a DLT tape. I've damaged those by dropping them. Sometimes you can "fix" them by doing a retension, but sometimes not...
I've never had a problem with DAT or VXA tapes, and those have had a fair amount of abuse from me.