...making Linux just a little more fun!
Benjamin A. Okopnik [ben at linuxgazette.net]
Thu, 21 Dec 2006 18:55:17 -0600
On Wed, Nov 22, 2006 at 08:17:28PM +0000, Bradley Chapman wrote:
> I just went back and reread all of the adventures of Woomert Foonly > again, and found myself still lamenting the lack of new stories about > this Hard-Nosed Detective and his sidekick Frank Ooblick. > > Are there really no more fantastically mundane Linux problems that can > be solved with a bit of obfuscated Perl?
Well, OK then. Since you guys aren't going to stop bugging me, fine - I'll write it already!
[grin] Bradley, thanks to your prodding, as well as reminders from other folks, I've just written a Woomert&Frink story - all but the ending, which is coming apace (I just sorta ran down, after typing 400+ lines all in one go.) Might even go out this month; handy, that, since we're a bit short on content.
And so it did... http://linuxgazette.net/134/okopnik.html - Kat
-- * Ben Okopnik * Editor-in-Chief, Linux Gazette * http://LinuxGazette.NET *
Tyler Spivey [tspivey at pcdesk.net]
Fri, 15 Dec 2006 02:31:25 -0800
Hi. I'm looking for a quick solution to getting at the hds of this beast, and am asking wherever I can. Being blind, this precludes looking at photos, or I probably would have had it. I succeeded in removing the large back panel with the thumbscrews, but according to an article I read somewhere, I have to remove the cd-rom/floppy and the front grill. Any tips for doing that? I can't figure out how it goes in, let alone how to get it out.
Thanks,
Tyler
Genner R. Cerna [genner at adzu.edu.ph]
Wed, 13 Dec 2006 14:49:07 +0800
can you help me? this my reverse squid configuration, can you help me tweak my squid.conf to optimal performance...
squid.conf below:
# ========== Logs ========== cache_access_log /var/log/squid/access.log cache_log /var/log/squid/cache.log log_icp_queries off cache_store_log none cache_effective_user squid cache_effective_group squid client_db off # ========== Accelerated Virtual Host and Port ========== http_port localhost:80 vhost vport icp_port 0 # ========== Cache Peer IP ========== cache_peer localhost parent 81 0 no-digest originserver default # ========== Caching ========== cache_mem 128 MB cache_replacement_policy heap GDSF memory_replacement_policy heap GDSF #========Cache object size====== maximum_object_size 1 MB minimum_object_size 0 KB maximum_object_size_in_memory 512 KB #=======Cache directory size======= cache_dir ufs /var/spool/squid 20480 256 256 #=======Other settings========== pipeline_prefetch on vary_ignore_expire on # ========== ACL ========== acl all src 0.0.0.0/0.0.0.0 acl manager proto cache_object acl localhost src 127.0.0.1/255.255.255.255 acl accel_hosts dst localhost http_access allow accel_hosts http_access allow manager localhost http_access deny manager http_access deny all #=========Refresh Pattern ========== refresh_pattern ^http://.*\.gif$ 1440 50% 20160 reload-into-ims refresh_pattern ^http://.*\.asis$ 1440 50% 20160 refresh_pattern -i \.html$ 10080 60% 40320 refresh_pattern -i \.png$ 10080 100% 40320 reload-into-ims refresh_pattern -i \.jpg$ 10080 100% 40320 reload-into-ims refresh_pattern -i \.jpeg$ 10080 100% 43200 reload-into-ims refresh_pattern -i \.bmp$ 10080 100% 40320 reload-into-ims refresh_pattern -i \.gif$ 10080 100% 40320 reload-into-ims refresh_pattern -i \.ico$ 10080 100% 40320 reload-into-ims refresh_pattern -i \.swf$ 10080 100% 40320 reload-into-ims refresh_pattern -i \.flv$ 10080 100% 40320 reload-into-ims refresh_pattern -i \.txt$ 1440 100% 20160 reload-into-ims refresh_pattern ^http:// 1 100% 20160 reload-into-ims ignore-reload refresh_pattern -i \.css$ 1440 60% 20160 refresh_pattern ^ftp:// 240 50% 20160 refresh_pattern ^gopher:// 240 40% 20160 refresh_pattern . 0 100% 20160 reload-into-ims ---------------------------------------------------------------- This message was sent using IMP, the Internet Messaging Program.
J.Bakshi [j.bakshi at icmail.net]
Wed, 29 Nov 2006 20:27:18 +0530
Could any one suggest how to run egroupware address-book with ldap ? thanks
Britto I [brittocan at gmail.com]
Wed, 6 Dec 2006 12:03:42 +0530
Hi Folks:
In machine A
/dev/sda6 /workarea /dev/sdb5 /workarea/module1/mydata/projectdata ls /workarea module1 module2 module3 ls /workarea/module1/mydata mails reports projectdataSo other than projectdata everything is on /dev/sda6
Now in machine B
I want the same directory stucture ,entire /workarea to be seen including "projectdata"
Since "/workarea/module1/mydata/projectdata" is a separate hardisk I need to export it separately.
I couldnt mount it on the same place as A in B
Thanks & regards, Britto
Amit Saha [amitsaha.in at gmail.com]
Sun, 17 Dec 2006 11:29:38 +0530
Hi all!
I recently installed FC5 and FC6 on a newly acquired AMD 2800+ Sempron processor(64-bit). There are a few things i would like to get cleared
1. While the packages were being copied, I noticed the i386 extension packages being copied. Isnt i386 supposed to mean intel 80386?
2. The FC5 and FC6 that i installed on my 64-bit AMD was also installed on my 32-bit celeron. That means i am using 32bit OS on my 64-bit machine right? Will i gain performance by using FC5 for 64-bit?
Which is the best distro to use on AMD sempron 2800+ ?
-- Amit Kumar Saha GSM :+91 9903140286 http://amitsaha.in.googlepages.com **Linux is user-friendly. It's just very selective about who its friends are.**
Martin Hooper [martinjh at blueyonder.co.uk]
Thu, 30 Nov 2006 07:37:09 +0000
Is it possible to connect from Windows to a Samba share without requiring a password and user?
It's getting on my nerves having to input a password all the time!
Configuration file at http://martinjh.myby.co.uk/smb.conf
[ Thread continues here (2 messages/1.48kB) ]
baskar baskar [baskarkpm at yahoo.co.in]
Tue, 28 Nov 2006 16:22:25 +0000 (GMT)
i have configured nis with solaris and linux boxes
i have done automount with sudo
it works in all solaris boxes in linux boxes it displays cannot execute binary file
is there any other way to do sudo in nis
send any documents with sudo in nis.
thanks in advance
Regards
Baskar.N
[ Thread continues here (5 messages/4.60kB) ]
Ramanathan Muthaiah [rus.cahimb at gmail.com]
Fri, 22 Dec 2006 06:09:23 +0530
Gang,
Recently, there were some discussions at my workplace regd packet losses in WAN interface. And then, one folk in IT dept came up with output of "ping" command to highlight that there are no packet losses.
Am sure, this is not the correct way to measure packet losses.
I feel, they should be monitored over a period of time at the gateway router and the traffic in this router should be analysed for dropped packets / timeouts.
Is this true ?
NOTE: Am not working in the IT dept but one of the affected parties.
/Ram
[ Thread continues here (8 messages/23.04kB) ]
Neil Youngman [ny at youngman.org.uk]
Sun, 26 Nov 2006 20:55:39 +0000
I've got some video recorded on DVD-RAM and I've spent much of today trying to figure out how to get from DVD-RAM to a regular DVD, playable in a DVD player. I started out thinking this was going to be simple. Just a case of copying from one DVD to another.
It's become clear that it's far from simple. The format used for recording to DVD-RAM is not the same as the format used for regular DVDs. I could shell out $100+ for Windows software that might (or might not) do what I need, but I'm not happy with that concept.
I have spent a lot of the afternoon on Google and come up with next to nothing of use. Do the gang have any pointers to information, software (preferably Linux software) and other resources that will help me get video from DVD -RAM to DVD.
Neil Youngman
[ Thread continues here (6 messages/7.30kB) ]
Suzanne Pilon [suzanne_pilon2002 at yahoo.com]
Tue, 12 Dec 2006 10:35:46 -0800 (PST)
I've taken the liberty of giving this thread a proper subject, rather than "(no subject)". Anyone reading this who doesn't know already, it really is better to have an informative subject line! - Kat
I'm doing an article on 'Hubs vs repeaters' and 'Hubs vs Routers'. Could you send me some articles or where I can get this information? I will greatly appreciate it.
Suzanne Pilon
suzanne_pilon2002@yahoo.com
[ Thread continues here (5 messages/5.30kB) ]
Amos Elberg [amos.elberg at gmail.com]
Wed, 29 Nov 2006 21:39:02 -0500
Hi. I attempted to run your script at http://linuxgazette.net/issue66/tag/2.html on a directory on a USB drive, ext3 partition, on a gentoo box with a 2.4 kernel. The result (it seems to be from your script, but maybe I'm wrong) is that many of the subdirectories linux now thinks are not, in fact, directories, and for many others, it gives an "Input/Output Error" on ls. Any suggestions?
[ Thread continues here (3 messages/2.93kB) ]
raj [raj at technofina.com]
Wed, 29 Nov 2006 15:20:39 -0500
Hi,
My Name is Raj and i work as a technical recruiter in a software consulting firm.
At our office we have a Red hat Linux based system at our office which we use to train students on java/j2ee, the problem is that students are able to access the linux server(using ssh) from within the office intranet, but not via internet from their homes. They get a pop up from the ssh client saying that "the host x.x.x.x is unreachable. the host may be down, or there may be a problem with the network connection. some times the problem is caused by a misconfigured firewall"
The students are able to ping the server(we have a static IP assigned to us by the ISP) from their homes. I need your help in resolving the above problem.BTW the server is behind two switches, the first witch is connected to the DSL modem provided by the ISP ,and i have set the required port forwarding settings
Thanks in advance
Thanks,
Raj
Technical Recruiter
[ Thread continues here (7 messages/8.64kB) ]
Thomas Adam [thomas.adam22 at gmail.com]
Tue, 5 Dec 2006 23:30:09 +0000
[Bcc'ed tag@lists.linuxgazette.net for inclusion into LG at some point.]
On Tue, Dec 05, 2006 at 11:21:52PM +0100, Jonas Fonseca wrote:
> On 12/4/06, Michael Thompson <miket@ilm.com> wrote: > >does such a thing exist? > > I've never personally used ELinks to edit a wiki, however > I have heard about various problems related to the poor > caching and encoding support of ELinks. Maybe you can > share a bit more about any problems you have encountered?
I am assuming more that Michael meant one that displays properly in ELinks. Of course, this is related to the limited CSS capabilities that ELinks currently has, but it's not all doom and gloom depending on the wiki engine ELinks is looking at.
In my experience, Wikipedia, and other sites which use Wikimedia are the worst if only because they're very CSS-intensive -- and don't really give much, if any, consideration for people who use text-based browers or even screen-readers. If you look at the preferences page for, say, wikipedia, the best skin to choose I have found is "Classic". This reduces the rather long list of options at the end of the document (the "sidebar that wikipedia has which displays to the left-hand side in Firefox). Of course, the default theme wikipedia has displays fine -- it's just that ELinks renders the CSS part without positioning at the end of the document.
Moinmoin, OTOH, is perhaps the better wiki engine that's ELinks friendly. If you look here:
You'll note that the main options are at the top of the page instead (because ordinarily they'd appear horizontally across the page in some other browser). Since MoinMoin hides any user preferences in a separate page, and doesn't list all sorts of weirder options for you to choose from in some sort of sidebar like wikimedia does, visually, it's much nicer, IMO.
Again, along similar lines is the all-perl wiki engine "UseMod" which is very Elinks friendly, since it's a very simple wiki engine:
... is such an example.
Now, you're probably going to ask what you can do in order to try and improve the look of wikipedia, aren't you? ;) The truth is there isn't a lot you can do unless you decide to script replacement operations via either Lua, Guile, Perl or Ruby. Since I've done a tiny bit of work in ELinks with Ruby that'd be my first choice. Not that it matters, of course.
Perhaps the biggest thing which annoys me about wikimedia with ELinks is how wikimedia decides to link images. If you look at this, for instance:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squirrel
[ ... ]
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Cheri Roberdes [reneesummers2004 at yahoo.com]
Thu, 30 Nov 2006 19:07:49 -0800 (PST)
I've taken the liberty of renaming this thread to something informative. (The original was entitled, "Hi!".) -- Kat
I'd like to find out if someone used a headless redirect during the installation of the operating software...how would I go about finding that out?
Thank you for any and all help! take care!
~cheri~
Thank You, and Have A Great Day!!
-cheri-
reneesummers2004@yahoo.com
[ Thread continues here (2 messages/1.83kB) ]
Ramon van Alteren [ramon at vanalteren.nl]
Wed, 29 Nov 2006 10:06:21 +0100
This message is a followup to http://linuxgazette.net/133/misc/lg/Get_HW_and_SW_inventary.html - Kat
ada * wrote:
> thank you all for your answers, everyone of them have been pretty useful.You're welcome.
> I feel there's one item i did not ask properly. It's the following: > > "Another question I'd like to ask is the best linux distribution to > work with. I´ll work with virtual machines so high requiriments do not > represent huge problems." > > what I meant was that which distribution has the easiest way to access > packages, or which has packages?I don't think the question wasn't asked properly. It's a question that none of us can answer. What is easy for you ???
I personally use gentoo. It has several tools to query installed software. Others will use redhat or redhat derivates, they have several tools to query installed packages as well. Again others will use $Distro which has several tools to query installed packages. And then there are a lot of people who use Debian which....... you get my drift.
Important to note is that both redhat and debian have a large group of so-called derivate distributions:
Redhat -> Fedora, Mandrake, Suse, Centos, and more are all based on the RPM-package system Debian -> Ubuntu, Knoppix, Freespire/Linspire (or whatever their latest marketing name is) and more are all based on the apt-package systemYou need to think about criteria which make it easy or not easy for you. Other criteria may also be of interest f.e. the amount of people using a given distro and/or it's derivates. Maybe you could design that part of the software to be easily plugable so new package-database query engines could be written fast and easy ?
I believe distro-watch keeps a list of the top-10 most-used distributions. You may want to take a look at those ten and decide based on that.
Depending on your decisions on the above matter you may choose one over the other, from a technical/functional perspective I cannot think of a single distribution that would make sense to recommend you.
Best Regards,
Ramon van Alteren
Mike Orr [sluggoster at gmail.com]
Sat, 2 Dec 2006 23:17:57 -0800
[Please cc me on replies coz I'm not subscribed to TAG.]
In November I said I'd gotten a Mac laptop and switched from Linux. http://linuxgazette.net/132/misc/lg/Nokia_tablet_article.html Well, a funny thing happened on the way to MacWorld. After being pleased as punch that I had a working webcam and could see my buddies in Europe on yahoo messenger, and could plug in multimedia devices and CDs and printers and have them just work immediately, and not have all these "plugin not available" messages in my web browser, other things started getting to me. My non-programmer friend who went from Windows to Mac and just raves about it does not understand any of this, but I miss being able to ...
- right-click windows and make them go to the back - hide the maximize button or make it maximize only vertically - change the window decorations or have the entire window border be a resize control - cut & paste by drag-move-click instead of drag, cmd-X, move, click, cmd-V - install the Gimp by just clicking an entry in the system package manager - find cool free software, which used to exist by the ton for the Mac but now all the worthwhile programs seem to be written for Unix, and you have to use third-party package managers (Fink or DarwinPorts) to install them -- which may or may not work. - compile a program that depends on Tk, even though I have Tk installed. (./configure doesn't recognize it even though it's in the default Mac location) - switch to a second desktop. (Multiple desktops are coming to the next version of Mac OS X, with much fanfare.) - have X apps that are first-class citizens. (Mac X11 is an application, and X apps are subapplications. Focus-follows-mouse works between X applications, but you have to click on an X window to raise it before using it if you're coming from a Mac application.)
Finally I thought, why am I knocking myself out trying to accommodate myself to the Mac when it's so easy on Linux. So I switched to my desktop computer again and installed Kubuntu (from Gentoo). Ahh, nice look-and-feel comes back! Configurability again! Thousands of software titles can be downloaded and installed and removed in a few easy steps!
As I've explored more of KDE as it's preconfigured on Kubuntu, I found that this version it does automatically start a player when you put a CD on, and opens a image directory when you plug a camera in. (Actually, you get a choice of several programs to open these in.) The new Yahoo Messenger for Linux has webcam options, so maybe if I get a USB webcam it will actually work on Linux now (I have a bunch of friends in Europe that I see only every 2-3 years. Hi bro's!) You can even drag n drop from one application (GQview image browser) to another (Firefox upload file dialog) and it pastes the absolute path of the file. That pretty much covers everything I wanted from the Mac.
[ ... ]
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clarjon1 [clarjon1 at gmail.com]
Mon, 27 Nov 2006 08:43:45 -0500
This is a continuation of a discussion begun last month http://linuxgazette.net/133/misc/lg/Grub_Disk_Error.html - Kat
On 11/24/06, Benjamin A. Okopnik <ben@linuxgazette.net> wrote:
> > Yep. The first thing to look at - and, of course, the first thing that > Jonathan should have sent in - is the content of his GRUB configuration > and the output of 'displaymem' and 'geometry' GRUB commands. However, at > this point, the advice that he got from Neil should be sufficient to fix > the problem. If it's not, then it'll be time to come back here, to > checkpoint #1, and try again. >
Thanks guys. Neil's suggestion worked (with a little tweaking). Here's what I did to fix it:
grub> root (hd0,0) grub> find /boot/grub/stage1 grub> setup (hd0)Now it works.
Ben, you are right, I should have brought in the config files, I'll remember that for next time. Thanks for your help! And to clarify, the error from grub, upon boot, was: Grub Hard Disk Error Not much help. I was able to boot because the LiveCD, which I installed from, has an option to boot hda1. Very useful. Once again, thanks for the help.
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CDT IS Administrator Cpl Room [jroom.hq at defenceacademy.mod.uk]
Wed, 13 Dec 2006 13:28:11 -0000
Hi,
I'm totally new to Linux and IT fullstop, so please teach me to suck eggs!! I have been asked to build a Linux (server) firewall it is to sit between a small part of our LAN and the rest of the LAN. The small part of the network is called GB and is on192.*.*.2, it goes straight into the firewall eth0 192.*.*2. Eth1 is 10.*.*.1, now whatever I do I cannot get the GB to see the rest of the network, I have enabled ip forwarding. I've tried a couple of things, 'iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -i eth1 -o eth0 -j MASQUERADE' this came back saying POSTROUTING and -i couldn't be used togeather! When i took -i out I got an error saying 'invalid argument'.
Regards,
John
Email: jroom.hq@da.mod.uk
[ Thread continues here (4 messages/6.96kB) ]
Peter Knaggs [peter.knaggs at gmail.com]
Wed, 6 Dec 2006 01:30:25 -0800
Greetings!
I guess Emacs users (and all non-vim users) can cheerfully skip this question.
Have you ever noticed when you're typing quickly in "vim" that things sometimes go haywire? I only recently got around to figuring out how to reproduce this "vim" glitch, I guess because I was so used to "vi" that I didn't consciously remember the names of the keys I was pressing.
So anyways, if you open a file with some text in it, then pick a line of reasonable length, and use shift A to append, then press the Esc key to leave append mode, then immediately press shift O to insert a new line above and start typing immediately, bad things happen. It seems that occasionally after pressing shift O that it takes vim almost half a second to catch up, during which I guess it's not yet in insert mode.
Does the same thing happen for you?
And why only for shift O, not for any of the other ways of getting into insert mode?
I didn't find the answer in the vim FAQ. I guess I might have to go to the source code, any hints on where to start looking?
Cheers, Peter.
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Amit Saha [amitsaha.in at gmail.com]
Tue, 19 Dec 2006 11:26:58 +0530
Hi list! Which distro has best performance on an AMD 2800++ ?I would like to have the sound system working. Currently i have got FC5 and the sound system doesnt seem to work though the card is detected!
Thoughts/ suggestions are required!
-- Amit Kumar Saha GSM :+91 9903140286 http://amitsaha.in.googlepages.com **Linux is user-friendly. It's just very selective about who its friends are.**
[ Thread continues here (9 messages/9.81kB) ]
Rick Moen [rick at linuxmafia.com]
Sun, 17 Dec 2006 13:34:17 -0800
[Microsoft-specific character-encoding has been corrected, throughout.]
About to Belltown Media
A privately held company, Belltown Media is the leading Linux authority, publishing the original magazine of the international Linux community: Linux Journal.
http://www.belltownmedia.com/node?from=1
Belltown Media Acquires Linux Journal
Houston, TX -- Dec. 4, 2006 -- Belltown Media, Inc., a privately held Houston, TX-based media corporation today announced the acquisition of the premier Linux publication, Linux Journal. Since its first issue was published in April of 1994 Linux Journal has established a strong position in the industry by catering to the loyal base of the Linux audience.
Well-known as the original magazine of the Linux community, Linux Journal has grown significantly in readership and editorial reputation since its first issue and has come to be recognized worldwide as the premier source for information, news and opinion on issues affecting the Linux community. The 153rd issue of Linux Journal goes on sale December 5, 2006.
Belltown Media was founded by Carlie Fairchild who has worked closely with Linux Journal founder and Linux luminary Phil Hughes for more than ten years. "As Linux Journal grew over the years," said Hughes, "Carlie took on many publisher-related tasks and became increasingly active in the Linux community. I promoted her to associate publisher a few years back where she naturally excelled. That pretty much only left one more possibility for her and that was to run the place. So, she has been. And, well, now it is official." In addition to Fairchild, the majority of the Linux Journal team will continue in their current roles for Linux Journal under Belltown Media.
"This is a great opportunity for Linux Journal and for the industry as a whole," said Fairchild. "We intend to take a hands-on approach, working very closely with community leaders and our base of loyal constituents to ensure that the magazine's content will be relevant and useful, and that Linux Journal will be an enduring resource. We're looking forward to taking LJ to the next level by focusing on this core capability - delivering a highly specialized source of information for Linux enthusiasts."
About Linux Journal
Linux Journal is the premier Linux magazine, dedicated to serving the Linux community and promoting the use of Linux worldwide. A monthly periodical, Linux Journal is entering its thirteenth year of publication. Linux Journal may be purchased at all major bookstores and newsstands and may also be ordered by calling 1-888-66-LINUX or visiting www.LinuxJournal.com.
About Belltown Media
Belltown Media, Inc. is the leading provider of integrated information and media in the open source marketplace. Media offerings span print and online, custom publishing, e-newsletters, and other web-based services. Belltown Media is based in Houston, TX, with offices throughout the United States.
staff - December 4, 2006 - 12:00pm.
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JOHN INGRESS [ingress at sbcglobal.net]
Thu, 14 Dec 2006 22:54:53 -0800 (PST)
I'd be interested in reading the best, most BASIC book about Linux and the joys of migrating from Windows XP. Mine is a stand-alone eMachines T1120, about 5 years old, used just for personal idiotics, not for business. XP crashes regularly and often, usually when I click on Minimize, maximize or close. I'll need a stable system if I'm goin' to whup the IRS's butt, which I know can be done. I'll need a quick, easy, and reliable installation. Is that too much to tax...I mean ask?
[ Thread continues here (5 messages/6.46kB) ]
raj [raj at technofina.com]
Wed, 29 Nov 2006 14:53:27 -0500
Hi James, My Name is raj and i work as a technical recruiter at technofina Inc, we are a NewYork based Software consulting firm. I work as a unix admin too some times(i suck at it tough). Well comming to the problem, i have a Red hat Linux based system at our office which we use to train students on java/j2ee, the problem is that students are able to access the linux server(using ssh) from the office intranet, but not via internet from their homes. The students are able to ping the server(we have a static IP assigned to us by the ISP). I need your help in resolving the above problem.
Thanks in advance
Thanks,
-- Raj Technical Recruiter Technofina Inc. 45 West, 34 street. New York 10001, NY. E-Mail: raj@technofina.com Phone : 212-629-7483. Fax : 646-219-2466
[ Thread continues here (7 messages/13.70kB) ]
Thomas Adam [thomas.adam22 at gmail.com]
Sun, 26 Nov 2006 09:56:40 +0000
This is a continuation of a discussion from last month: http://linuxgazette.net/133/misc/lg/USB_Drive_Bad_Sectors.html - Kat
On Fri, Oct 27, 2006 at 05:04:01PM -0400, Brandon M. Reynolds wrote:
> My problem is that I get file system corruption and "bad sectors" some > times, presumably due to an unclean shut down. I am using an ext2
That depends, based on the error you're getting. If they're actually bad sectors that's typically indicative of a much more serious hardware issue. If, however, running fsck on it repeatedly doesn't help, then it really is screwed.
> filesystem with the thinking that a journal would just wear out the > drive in a certain spot. Maybe that's not correct -- I am not sure if > the drive has a wear-leveling algorithm implemented or not.
Of course not -- software cannot determine that. Every piece of hardware has a finite life-span.
> Questions: > > 1. Is ext2 the right choice? Or would reiserfs be better? Vfat??
How long's a piece of string, and by-the-by what type of fish is that? VFAT would be good for cross-platform. Ext2 is good for read-only mount points. Ext3 is somewhat better thanks to the fact that it's ext2 with a journal bolted on to it. Reiserfs' killer feature is its developer (:P) and works well with lots of smaller, sporadic files.
> 2. Is their a quick way to detect bad sectors? I tried running e2fsck > -c but it has been 45 minutes so far!
man badblocks
> sd 5:0:0:0: SCSI error: return code = 0x08000002 > sdb: Current: sense key=0x3 > ASC=0x11 ASCQ=0x0 > end_request: I/O error, dev sdb, sector 598730
It's screwed, Backup whatever you can from it, and bin it. -- Thomas Adam
-- "Wanting to feel; to know what is real. Living is a lie." -- Purpoise Song, by The Monkees.
[ Thread continues here (4 messages/4.99kB) ]
Bob van der Poel [bob at mellowood.ca]
Sat, 16 Dec 2006 09:48:41 -0700
A fellow asked me the other day "what is your total IP (up and down) per
month)?" I figured that since I was using Linux it'd be an easy answer
... well, really I have no idea 
I do have a little "net-applet" on my desktop which shows the total since the last login (to the desktop, not the computer). Is there a log file tracking this or a daemon I can install?
If it makes a difference I'm running Mandriva 2007.
Thanks.
-- Bob van der Poel ** Wynndel, British Columbia, CANADA ** EMAIL: bob@mellowood.ca WWW: http://www.mellowood.ca
[ Thread continues here (8 messages/8.58kB) ]
Rick Moen has been forwarding messages from various other Linux venues ([ILUG], the [conspire] list, the comp.os.linux.setup newsgroup, etc.) for quite some time. These discussions have been sitting patiently waiting for me; the end of the year roundup seemed like the right time to dust them off with care and send them out to the world. Enjoy! - Kat
Rick Moen [rick at linuxmafia.com]
Mon, 14 Aug 2006 12:03:41 -0700
From: Michael Soibelman <not-here@there.net> To: TAG <tag@lists.linuxgazette.net> Subject: How do we know when we're there yet ? Newsgroups: alt.os.linux.suse User-Agent: KNode/0.10.4 Date: Fri, 11 Aug 2006 03:08:51 GMTThis is not flame bait. Just an observation. As many of you know, I am a regular here. I try to help as many posters as I can. Though I am not a guru, I do have some knowledge and often get a "Thanks very much" from OPs. I've been using Linux since 1999 for 99.5% of my computer needs, and have finally made the transition to 100% after I got my scanner working. Though it did work for a while, the change to the 2.6.x kernel broke something needed for my scanner to work. So I kept a copy of W2K around just for the occasional image scan.
One of the programs I found while still a Windows user was a virus scanner from Trend Micro called PCcillin. Probably the best virus scanner for Windows users available. I say that because I had tried a few others and then, when I tried PCcillin it found several viruses the others had missed. Take it from someone who had actually had a hacker break into my box and physically fry my hard drive...this was a lesson well learned. Since the time I switched to Linux, I still have friends who use Windows. And I always recommend that if they are going to continue using Windows that they should buy PCcillin... I don't recommend using Windows, but if they must, at least they should get the best protection possible. I've convinced several people of the wisdom of using this anti-virus software and all have thanked me several times over. All have been saved by this program...
So, going back to my original question in the title of this article, how do we know when we're there? I have several anti-virus and anti-spam applications that are all free as in cost and free as in freedom installed. Also, a couple of rootkit detectors as well as port scan detectors, etc... So I think I'm pretty safe. Never have had any problems since I switched OS. But I'm sure the day will come when some clever hacker will (finally) produce a Linux virus... Mark my word, the day will come! But, as I said, I'm ready, as I'm sure most Linux users are. I just wanted to point out the fact that my favorite Windows anti-virus company has realized that the Linux users are a substantial market force. And, after all the wait, there free as in cost, online virus detection service is available for Linux! It's called 'House Call' and it works.... Free... Just like in Windows... You'll need to use Firefox or, well I forget the other Linux browser that works, but it does work.
I'm NOT saying anyone should spend there money on this product.. Just pointing out that there is one more commercial company to recognize the Linux community and offer their services/products. In the meantime, I'll just keep using the other free products available to Linux users. F-Prot is free for personal use. Of course ClamAV (with KlamAV front end) is a must. Spam Assasin, Bogofilter, etc... are all great programs that I highly recommend.
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Rick Moen [rick at linuxmafia.com]
Tue, 18 Jul 2006 13:53:02 -0700
-- forwarded message --
From: Rick Moen <rick@linuxmafia.com> To: TAG <tag@lists.linuxgazette.net> Subject: Re: Making your own distribution Newsgroups: alt.os.linux.suse Date: Tue, 18 Jul 2006 16:17:58 -0400bowman <bowman at montana.com> wrote:
> houghi wrote: > >> Don't like ?the distribution you are working with? Make your own. Not >> that hard with some dedication to base it on SUSE. > > http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1982942,00.asp?kc=ewnws062806dtx1k0000599 > > The gist of the article is providing the source can be a hassle.
But it really isn't. E.g., you can cut source CDs for the few people who receive copies of your GPLed binaries and request source within three years, charging them in advance for the cost of producing and mailing them. If that's a "hassle", outsource it to one of the cut-rate CD-burning houses such as Cheapbytes; I'm sure they'd appreciate the business, and you'd bear neither expense nor hassle yourself.
> We got into this with Cygwin. We install Cygwin on some customer sites > solely for some of the popular Unix CLI utilities our support people > prefer. Other than that, we do not modify, compile with, or otherwise > touch a thing. Referencing the current Cygwin source is not > sufficient; the reasoning is the source may change and no longer match > the packages we distributed.
Cygwin is a mixture of GNU GPL and MIT X11 licensing. For the GPLed packages, if your distribution of it was non-commercial, you can meet your source-access obligation by referring people to where you got the software from. Otherwise, you have the above-referenced three-year obligation, for which you may pass along all costs to those requesting source.
Going by experience, the number of people actually willing to order a source CD once you've clarifed that it's not on your dime is almost nil. (I used to take care of this issue at a large Linux hardware firm that maintained and distributed its own full version of Red Hat Linux. Care to guess how many people requested source CD sets? One, over three years. We sent them free, with our compliments.)
The eWeek article? Oh, right. It's mostly notorious whiner Warren Woodford of MEPIS Linux complaining because he didn't bother to read the GNU GPL, massively violated the copyrights of programmers whose terms he failed to obey, and got his hand slapped.
Reporter Steven Vaughan-Nichols, who's usually really good, said:
Woodford recently ran afoul of the GNU GPL (General Public License) requirement that downstream distributors of GPL code are obligated to provide source code to users in an easily accessible format.
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Rick Moen [rick at linuxmafia.com]
Wed, 6 Sep 2006 11:20:17 -0700
[ boggle ]
----- Forwarded message from ronan at iaa.es -----
Date: Wed, 6 Sep 2006 19:07:10 +0200 To: ilug at linux.ie From: ronan@iaa.es To: TAG <tag@lists.linuxgazette.net> Subject: [ILUG] Porting drivers from Windows (rant)
Hi all, I'm currently writing Linux support for a piece of custom hardware - I have Windows source code for hardware drivers and data conversion algorithms, and I'm porting/re-writing that to Linux and I am beyond unhappy at some of the intrinsically stupid things I am seeing.
Today's little bundle of joy regards writing to device registers. It's not actually so complicated - the I/O regions are set up automagically during boot, your driver basically just has to tell the kernel (a) that it now owns the appropriate region, and (b) how it wants the region to be made visible to it. Then you go and poke the registers that live there, and the hardware goes and does what you said to. Drive carefully.
Now, in the Windows driver, there is a little snippet of code like the following. It's part of the wake-up sequence for the hardware:
#define CTR_REG 0x4000
...
WRITE_REGISTER_ULONG(CTR_REG,0);
How obvious - it writes the value 0 to a 32-bit register located at
0x4000. This is kindergarten stuff. If you don't believe me, read
this page:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/Kernel_r/hh/Kernel_r/k103_af58a3ec-4102-4a89-9c58-e56f99d793d0.xml.asp
which says (the very first line): The WRITE_REGISTER_ULONG macro writes a ULONG value to the specified address.
So, yea, we nod wisely, and write the equivalent under Linux, which happens to be
iowrite32(0,CTR_REG);
And yea, we would make many attempts to get a response. We would poke
and prod. We would reboot into Windows and check that the hardware
still worked. Was the hardware sulking because we missed some
vanishingly obscure initialisation step? We would examine our
documentation again and again - was it possible? We would try and trick
the damn thing. We would sacrifice goats. Nada. Not a whisper of
response.
Because, of course, the register isn't at 0x4000 at all.
It is (where else?) at 0x10000 (i.e. 0x4000 * 4).
Think about it...... and let the nausea sink in.
For those it hasn't hit yet, some genius in Redmond decided that, when talking about 32-bit quantities, they were going to count 32-bits at a time, like C array notation. ("Hey Bill! I know this really cool way of implementing WRITE_REGISTER_ULONG!"). Of course, they're still going to call them "addresses".
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Rick Moen [rick at linuxmafia.com]
Mon, 17 Jul 2006 08:28:39 -0700
----- Forwarded message from Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com> -----
Date: Mon, 17 Jul 2006 02:50:25 -0700 To: conspire at linuxmafia.com From: Rick Moen <rick@linuxmafia.com> To: TAG <tag@lists.linuxgazette.net> Subject: [conspire] Compromise of a Debian Project hostEarly in the morning (European time) of last Wednesday, July 12, the Debian Project figured out that one of its shared Internet hosts, "gluck.debian.org", had been security compromised, and immediately took it down to be studied, rebuilt from trusted program files, and back within a day. It look like, as with last time this sort of thing happened, they detected the compromise pretty much immediately -- probably courtesy of monitoring from the intrusion detetion software "AIDE". As before, the package archives weren't penetrated. ("gluck" currently fills these roles via DNS aliases: "cvs", "ddtp", "lintian", "people", "popcon", "planet", "ports", and "release". The machines where packages are created and cryptographically signed are much more heavily restricted.)
Their quick detection and correction are worth noting. So is the avenue of compromise (detailed below).
Also worth noting is that, if you use your security token on a compromised machine anywhere, it's equally prone to be stolen regardless of whether it's a strong or weak password, or a public SSH keypair, etc.
Debian believes in transparency on security matters, which is why the earlier (2003) compromise of "klecker", "gluck", "master", and "murphy" was immediately and extensively analysed in public, on a set of pages maintained by Wichert Akkerman: http://www.wiggy.net/debian/explanation/
...which I then wrote about, here: http://linuxgazette.net/issue98/moen.html I'm looking forward to a similar disclosure about the 2006 compromise.
Meanwhile, there's this Debian News article: http://www.debian.org/News/2006/20060713
At least one developer account has been compromised a while ago and has been used by an attacker to gain access to the Debian server. A recently discovered local root vulnerability in the Linux kernel has then been used to gain root access to the machine.
At 02:43 UTC on July 12th suspicious mails were received and alarmed the Debian admins. The following investigation turned out that a developer account was compromised and that a local kernel vulnerability has been exploited to gain root access.
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Rick Moen [rick at linuxmafia.com]
Mon, 15 May 2006 19:17:25 -0700
Just so you know, this few nits for a domain is utterly outstanding.
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Rick Moen [rick at linuxmafia.com]
Thu, 20 Jul 2006 18:41:22 -0700
Ben recently called my attention to incoming mail being rejected at my SMTP server because the system SPF daemon could not be reached. More recently, about an hour ago, a flurry of spam snuck through the system because the SpamAssassin daemon had died. And Exim4 (the SMTP daemon) has occasionally entered a fault mode where a queued-up message is processed repeatedly.
All of these epiphenomena turn out to have the same underlying cause: Baby needs new shoes.
Just as a frog put in a pot of cold water and brought slowly to a boil will not jump out and save himself, mail servers reach the brink of failure by... um... degrees. In this case, what's been happening is that my server's meagre 256MB of RAM is being badly overstressed.
The repeat-sending syndrome was an early clue: The queue-handling Exim4 instance would send the queued mail out, and then call a different routine to process final steps including deletion that just happened to require more RAM, which was not available so the Exim4 instance died before cleanup could occur.
At the same time, I've sung the praises of GNU screen so effectively that several other shell users (Hi, Karsten! Hi, Ben! Hi, Thomas![1]) have joined me in leaving it running 24x7 running (sometimes) large jobs -- more RAM gone. And last, the volume of incoming spam continues to increase and find new tricks, while my primary SMTP-layer defence of Exim4 rulesets isn't being updated because the host is a lame-duck installation intended to be retired.
Right behind the primary defence, intended to backstop spam that gets past Exim4's rules, is -- guess what? SpamAssassin, a rather large, slow, and RAM-grabbing Perl script, running in daemon mode and spawning more instances as needed. The busier and slower it gets, the more RAM-grabbing instances.
So, we've been getting weird MTA repeated-mailing behaviour, and mysteriously dying processes: The kernel OOM-killer gets set loose, and starts shooting large and/or busy processes in the head. If I'm lucky, it's one of my mutt instances running under screen and reading one of my carelessly overlarge mbox files. Or screen itself. If I'm unlucky, it's spfd. Or SpamAssassin. Or Exim4. Or Apache httpd. Or BIND9. All of those have happened.
The pattern was obvious, but I've been reluctant to see it, in part because it's a pain to deal with.
The only fix is to debug my problems with the intended replacement box (needs a kernel with ability to load the root FS from software RAID1), configure its daemons for the needed services, sync up all data files, and do a flag day. The new box is better in every way, including its 1.5 GB of system RAM.
I need to do that. You guys really can't. I just need to find the time.
In the meantime, I'm using screen less. (Karsten, if you can help in that area, too, that would be appreciated.)
[1] Latter two names being a guess -- and it's not like there's anything wrong with using screen. It's great stuff.
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Rick Moen [rick at linuxmafia.com]
Thu, 6 Jul 2006 17:56:55 -0700
I used to wonder what "unroutable address" meant in SMTP Delivery Status Notification messages, as it has always seemed more than a bit vague. It turns out, it is vague. ;-> It's the default Exim return value if a message gets evaluated against all the Exim "router" handling routines to see if it meets any of their criteria for acceptance. If not, it falls through and generates return value text "unrouteable address" by default (http://www.exim.org/exim-html-4.40/doc/html/spec_3.html#SECT3.10). The question then becomes why, in each case. For TAG subscriber Barry O'Donovan <gazette at barryodonovan.com), only a little checking was required to find out:
$ dig -t mx barryodonovan.com +short ;; connection timed out; no servers could be reached $ dig -t a barryodonovan.com +short ;; connection timed out; no servers could be reached $ whois barrydonovan.com | more Whois Server Version 2.0 Domain names in the .com and .net domains can now be registered with many different competing registrars. Go to http://www.internic.net for detailed information. No match for "BARRYDONOVAN.COM". >>> Last update of whois database: Thu, 06 Jul 2006 20:35:56 EDT <<< [...]Because Barry's domain no longer exists, I've been getting one of the below-cited nastygrams every time anyone posts to TAG. So, I'm setting his subscription to "nomail" in case he fixes his domain. ('Course, he might never figure out why he's ceased to receive TAG mail, but that's the breaks.)
----- Forwarded message from Mail Delivery System <Mailer-Daemon at linuxmafia.com> ----- Return-path: <> Envelope-to: rick at linuxmafia.com Delivery-date: Thu, 06 Jul 2006 16:58:46 -0700 Received: from Debian-exim by linuxmafia.com with local (Exim 4.61 #1 (EximConfig 2.0)) id 1Fydk5-0000uS-5f ; Thu, 06 Jul 2006 16:58:45 -0700 X-Failed-Recipients: gazette at barryodonovan.com Auto-Submitted: auto-repliedFrom: Mail Delivery System <Mailer-Daemon@linuxmafia.com> To: TAG <tag@lists.linuxgazette.net> To: tag-bounces at lists.linuxgazette.net Subject: Mail delivery failed: returning message to senderMessage-Id: <E1Fydk5-0000uS-5f at linuxmafia.com>Date: Thu, 06 Jul 2006 16:58:45 -0700X-SA-Do-Not-Run: Ja X-SA-Exim-Connect-IP: <locally generated> X-SA-Exim-Mail-From: X-SA-Exim-Scanned: No (on linuxmafia.com); SAEximRunCond expanded to false This message was created automatically by mail delivery software. A message that you sent could not be delivered to one or more of its recipients. This is a permanent error. The following address(es) failed: gazette at barryodonovan.com Unrouteable address ------ This is a copy of the message, including all the headers. ------ [ ... ] ----- End forwarded message -----
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Rick Moen [rick at linuxmafia.com]
Tue, 18 Jul 2006 15:03:09 -0700
----- Forwarded message from Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com> -----
Date: Tue, 18 Jul 2006 14:34:02 -0700 To: conspire at linuxmafia.com From: Rick Moen <rick@linuxmafia.com> To: TAG <tag@lists.linuxgazette.net> Subject: [conspire] Safe NTFS read/write driver for Linuxhttp://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_id=23836054&forum_id=2697
(I'm posting that URL for future reference, since I expect to keep hearing people say for years into the future that Linux NTFS support is unsafe.)
The author is the same gentleman who wrote ntfsresize, and helped me extensively with my knowledgebase's article on NTFS resizing.
From: Szakacsits Szabolcs <szaka at sienet.hu> [announcement] ntfs-3g: open source read-write driver 2006-07-14 10:39
As part of the Linux-NTFS project, I'm happy to announce my contribution to ntfsmount and libntfs which resulted ntfs-3g, a read-write ntfs driver, capable for unlimited file creation and deletion. The driver was successfully tested very exhaustively for a longer period of time by many ways and methods, creating and destroying millions of files and directories on newly created images, and on over 40 real, very diverse NTFS images collected over the last four years. The README file is copied below which includes more general, performance and quality information with answers and future plans. Please make a backup of your NTFS volume by ntfsclone and try to reproducible break ntfs-3g, if you can. If you are able to do so then please let us know, preferable providing your NTFS metadata image, if it couln't be reproduced by other ways. The driver can be downloaded from http://mlf.linux.rulez.org/mlf/ezaz/ntfs-3g-20070714-BETA.tgz Please note that I'm leaving for an over 5,000 km long Far North and Arctic Ocean advanture on Sunday morning (European time) and won't be able to read and answer emails for almost a month (no, I'm not escaping, I plan to come back alive ;). Originally I planned to fix all the minor issues listed below but no more time left for me and I think it's better to release now, in case I would get lost somewhere on the road ;) Well, actually I hope that most issues will be resolved when I'm back! Happy testing, problem reporting and coding, -- Szaka
[...]
I expect I'll be needing to Google-search this post quite a lot, in the future, to refute the inevitable claims to the contrary.
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Rick Moen [rick at linuxmafia.com]
Fri, 23 Jun 2006 12:42:04 -0700
Being submitted as grist for the TAG-publication mill. Attached.
Date: Fri, 23 Jun 2006 11:14:32 -0700 From: Bill Kendrick <nbs@sonic.net> To: TAG <tag@lists.linuxgazette.net> To: LUGOD Tech <vox-tech at lists.lugod.org> Subject: Re: [vox-tech] Purpose of "nobody" user?Yesterday, I was helping Melissa add a user account to her laptop. I decided to just point her at KDE's "Kuser" (K->System->"User Manager") GUI tool, mostly because I wanted to see it. ;) ("adduser" is not hard to use, but I figured most non-Unix-types would go hunting a GUI tool, so wanted to familiarize myself with it.)
One thing she noticed was the user "nobody", which sounded supsicious. And it had quite an insane UID (65534), compared to other user accounts. Her first thought was to Google for 'nobody 65534', and found many, many posts where people had obviously dumped their /etc/passwd to a mailing list for help with this-or-that. Based on this, she seemed happy enough to know it's just some "thing" that Linux does/has.
For the life of me, I couldn't really explain what "nobody" is used for. I'm familiar with it in terms of NCSA httpd and Apache, but beyond that... A little help, here? :^D
Thx!
-bill! (PS - Google for '"nobody user" OR "user nobody" purpose linux' wasn't as helpful as I had hoped. :^/ I also tried throwing 'FAQ' in there ;^) )
From: Rod Roark <rod@sunsetsystems.com> To: TAG <tag@lists.linuxgazette.net> To: LUGOD Tech <vox-tech at lists.lugod.org> Date: Fri, 23 Jun 2006 11:50:20 -0700 Subject: Re: [vox-tech] Purpose of "nobody" user?On Friday 23 June 2006 11:14, Bill Kendrick wrote:
I'll take a stab at this.> For the life of me, I couldn't really explain what "nobody" is used for. > I'm familiar with it in terms of NCSA httpd and Apache, but beyond that... > A little help, here? :^D
The way I would explain it is that a *nix system has a variety of users that are non-human.
They are users in the sense that they run processes that do not require privileges to other parts of the system, and they maintain resources (e.g. files and directories) to which other parts of the system do not need access. Therefore it is convenient and sensible to isolate them from human users and from each other in the same way that human users are isolated from each other.
The general idea is that your system is more secure if access is not granted where it is not needed. A non-human user may be a security risk if, for example, it runs a program containing a flaw that lets someone break in and run tasks with the privileges of that user.
I suppose someone chose the name "nobody" for one of these users simply to emphasize that it's not human. But there are many other examples of such users, like apache, bind, daemon, mail, mysql and news.
I hope this is not too condescending... I wrote it this way so that newbies may also find it useful.
Rod
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Rick Moen [rick at linuxmafia.com]
Wed, 30 Aug 2006 19:22:58 -0700
Ben suggested I forward this mailing list post here, as it's relevant to my recent article submission. [http://linuxgazette.net/131/moen.html]
----- Forwarded message from rick -----
Date: Wed, 30 Aug 2006 19:00:21 -0700 To: luv-main at luv.asn.au Cc: ben at linuxgazette.net Subject: Re: SRS developmentQuoting Daniel Pittman (daniel at rimspace.net):
> I wish you wouldn't. SPF is great, in theory, but not really so hot in > practice. Using it will only encourage others to adopt it.
There's a lot of confusion about this. Let's dissect it into parts:
o SPF reference records within a domain's DNS: These allow the domain administrator to specify which IPs are those of the domain's (and optionally, various subdomains') sole intended MX hosts -- along with suggestions as to the degree of confidence that the admin feels receiving SMTP hosts should grant to that data. o SPF-checking routines executed by a receiving SMTP host's MTA during the incoming SMTP session, prior to saying yes or no to the delivery attempt. (It's also possible to check SPF RRs at later points, such as during MDA execution, but less useful.)Speaking from a domain administrator's perspective, one has _no downside_ from publishing SPF RRs for one's domain. It's good and useful data, providing the public with a definitive means of detecting and rejecting mail forged to dishonestly claim your domain as its origin, even mail competently forging the 'envelope From' and Return-Path headers (Joe Jobs). It's categorically useful even to domain admins who favour alternate approaches. I.e., is you think Hadmut Danisch's Reverse-MX (RMX) proposal was better designed, or Yahoo's DomainKeys, or SPF plus Meng/Microsoft's Purported Responsible Address (PRA) header, or S/MIME, or Email Postmarks, or a full gpg web-of-trust architecture, or BATV, or Jim Fenton's Identified Internet Mail -- then nothing stops you from participating in all of them, if you wish.
It would be a Good Thing even if nothing like SRS (Sender Rewriting Scheme) had even been attempted, and every forwarding mechanism on the globe other than mailing lists (which have rewritten 'envelope From' and Return-Path all along) were to instantly and permanently break.
Why? _Because I own domains._ I'm therefore tired of spammers and malware authors being able to Joe Job them believably. Why would I not spend five minutes writing a TXT RR that makes crystal clear that mx4.pinkmeatproducts.com isn't a legitimate source for my domains' mail?
'No so hot', you say? OK, compared to what? The relevant comparison for a domain owner is: extant SPF record versus none. Do you honestly assert that my domains would be better off without them? If so, please do explain.
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Rick Moen [rick at linuxmafia.com]
Tue, 18 Jul 2006 16:15:16 -0700
From: "magnate" <chrisc@dbass.demon.co.uk> To: TAG <tag@lists.linuxgazette.net> Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.setup Subject: Debian installer does not recognise ataraid array Date: 18 Jul 2006 03:14:30 -0700I have two SATA HDs on a Silicon Simage 3112 RAID controller. This is known as "fakeraid" or "ataraid" because it's not a proper hardware RAID controller, it just buggers about with on-the-fly address translations in the controller's BIOS. So it's a bit like software RAID - and indeed inferior to Linux software RAID - but this is a dual-boot box, which is why I'm using it. (Honestly, it makes Windows a lot faster, like 50%+.)
So, I want to install Debian on it. I managed it under 2.4 by manually coaxing the medley.o module into place, to recognise the array and let me install on it. On the way I found and reported several bugs: a conflict between siimage.o and via82cxxx.o (which is still unsolved in kernel-source-2.4.27), the fact that ataraid modules were not loaded by the installer, and the fact that medley.o was missing from the mkinitrd script, which meant that I couldn't boot after the install!
I'm not sure if that second one is solved yet, but it doesn't matter because this time I'm trying to install 2.6 (I am reinstalling rather than upgrading because I made a ton of changes to the partition structure). I know that 2.6 doesn't use the medley module, and that all the fakeraid stuff is dealt with by something called the device mapper, and a user-space tool called dmraid.
Unfortunately I don't know any more than that, like how they work. When I use the latest Debian installer CD, it boots 2.6 and finds all my hardware and offers me sda and sdb as my HDs - it completely fails to notice the fakeraid array.
Yes I have brought this to Debian's attention, but I'm asking here because I really need to just know a few more basics about ataraid handling in 2.6.x and the device mapper - can anyone point me towards a HOWTO or idiot's guide for that?
Grateful also for any other advice on how to diagnose this problem. I presume that the low-level hardware driver (sata_sil.o in this case) is still needed - this is what's finding sda and sdb. But I don't know what to do once that's loaded to find the ataraid array, and therefore I don't know how to find out where the Debian installer is going astray.
Rgds, CC
From: Michael Heiming <michael+USENET@www.heiming.de>
To: TAG <tag@lists.linuxgazette.net>
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.setup
Subject: Re: Debian installer does not recognise ataraid array
Date: Tue, 18 Jul 2006 22:13:55 +0200
User-Agent: tin/1.9.1-20060409 ("Benmore") (UNIX) (Linux/2.6.17-mh (i686)) tinews.pl/1.1.7
In comp.os.linux.setup magnate <chrisc at dbass.demon.co.uk>:
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[ In reference to "Build a Six-headed, Six-user Linux System" in LG#124 ]
Thiago [mascc2 at gmail.com]
Wed, 6 Dec 2006 15:09:19 -0200
Good afternoon
I've been trying to get multihead to work for 2 months now. I saw several different solutions for the problem but no that meet my needs. I'm trying to run a two seat gaming station. I proved that it is actually possible since i could run a dual head with xinerama and one game in each screen ( but only one keyboard controlling both screens ). I'm running on two nvidia video cards, with nvidia drivers :
00:09.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation NV18 [GeForce4 MX 4000 AGP 8x] (rev c1) 01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation NV34 [GeForce FX 5200] (rev a1)Thanks to the at nvclock i could do some tweaking to get reasonable speed. My problem is altough i could run it with xinerama, when i try to separate the seats- put one keyboard, one mouse, one video card for each seat - the system does not show the second screen. I tried with both gdm and kdm to get the thing to work. When i try to start each head individually i can, but i cannot separate each mouse and keyboard: they work as if they were the same.
That problem has keep me up several nights. My xorg.conf follows so you would point up were i screwd up or if i didn't :
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[ In reference to "Boosting Apache Performance by using Reverse Proxies" in LG#132 ]
René Pfeiffer [lynx at luchs.at]
Sat, 2 Dec 2006 14:28:12 +0100
Hello, Clement!
Sorry for the late reply, but our office got redecorated with Gigabit wiring and our backup mail servers ate some mails.
On Nov 17, 2006 at 2347 -0800, Clement Huang appeared and said:
> Nice article, Rene.
Thank you!
> I also saw apache_mod_proxy can do the reverse-proxy function. How > is the performance comparing to squid proxy? any benchmarking > on this proxy performance between these two?
To be honest I didn't do any benchmarking in order to compare both proxies. I usually stick to Squid because I use it for many years now and it has a very rich configuration file with options that can do (almost) anything you want. In my personal opinion Squid does a better job handling memory and disk cache than Apache's mod_proxy. You can tune the amount of memory it uses, define maximum object sizes, configure fetching of aborted requests and the like. This is often more important than having an extra couple of hits per second.
Best regards, René.
-- )\._.,--....,'``. Let GNU/Linux work for you while you take a nap. /, _.. \ _\ (`._ ,. R. Pfeiffer <lynx at luchs.at> + http://web.luchs.at/ `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.' - System administration + Consulting + Teaching - Got mail delivery problems? http://web.luchs.at/information/blockedmail.php
[ Thread continues here (2 messages/3.61kB) ]
[ In reference to "The Monthly Troubleshooter: The USB Subsystem" in LG#133 ]
Mon, 4 Dec 2006 10:30:41 +0200
Hi,
Is there any common way to communicate with USB devices which aren't mass storage - like Motorola mobile phones, some Canon photo cameras and so on?
thanks, Vitaly
[ Thread continues here (8 messages/12.10kB) ]
[ In reference to "Poor Man's Laptop" in LG#132 ]
Gerrit Renker [grrtrr at yahoo.co.uk]
Tue, 19 Dec 2006 09:07:08 +0000 (GMT)
Sorry the initial question never got copied to me, I realised that after reading the talkback some time later. I hope that the below clarifies.
> Any particular reason for not just using a tool, which already exists > - such as Unison (http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/) which is > cross platform/OS ?
Unison synchronises between directories - this means if you intend to use it in combination with a USB stick then your USB stick carries an identical copy of all the directories which you intend to synchronise.
But this is not what the article is about.
If you intend to have an identical copy of some of the computer's directories then there are two other alternatives:
(a) mount the USB stick (or USB hard drive) underneath such working directories as you intend to use at home and at work (bind/rbind/move options to mount) In this case you neither need the solution in the article, nor unison.
(b) carry a synchronised version of some work directories on your USB stick. ==> Again you don't need the solution in the article. And you don't even need unison. For this purpose, rsync is useful, has been tested by thousands and is much better than plain cp since it only copies the updates: rsync -a --delete source destination
The solution in the article works and is designed for when you have neither (a) or (b): the former is expensive in terms of hardware, the latter is expensive in terms of space.
Unison or rsync are not sufficient for this purpose.
With regard to solution (b), it may be interesting to see whether there is anything which unison can do that rsync can not.
Gerrit
[ Thread continues here (6 messages/7.89kB) ]
[ In reference to "Apache2, WebDAV, SSL and MySQL: Life In The Fast Lane" in LG#131 ]
Jan Büren [jan.bueren at bvl.bund.de]
Tue, 05 Dec 2006 13:06:30 +0100
> One thing to bear in mind is that I had to use Apache 2 instead of > Apache 1.3.x as there is no WebDAV patch for Apache 1.3.x
WebDAV does exists for Apache 1.3.x Perhaps the quota patch is missing?
[ In reference to "The Monthly Troubleshooter: The USB Subsystem" in LG#133 ]
Stephane Chauveau [stephane at chauveau-central.net]
Mon, 4 Dec 2006 15:35:50 +0100 (CET)
I was reading the article about the USB subsystem yesterday and the posts at the end reminded me that I wanted to change the label on my USB key.
Unless I mistaken, the proposed commands (mkdosfs and mke2fs) are also going to reformat the partition. I wonder how many users are going to wipe out their partition while trying to change their label.
-- Stephane Chauveau http://www.chauveau-central.net
[ Thread continues here (2 messages/1.43kB) ]
[ In reference to "Easy Shell Scripting" in LG#133 ]
s. keeling [keeling at spots.ab.ca]
Sat, 2 Dec 2006 16:18:43 -0700
Having suffered through Ben's many yammerings in TAG about nonportable
shell features, hey Ben, I found another!
-------------------------------------------------
Comments in a Shell
In shell scripting, all lines beginning with # are comments.
# This is a comment line.
# This is another comment line.
You can also have comments that span multiple lines by using a colon and single quotes:
:' This is a comment line.
Again, this is a comment line.
My God, this is yet another comment line.'
-------------------------------------------------
-------------------------------------------------
#!/usr/bin/zsh
#
:' Good grief. After all this time, I learn that a colon
followed by a single tick produces a block comment in
*nix shel.
That even includes blank lines!
'
# usage:
#
# calc '2 + 7'
#
function calc ()
{
awk 'BEGIN { OFMT="%f"; print '"$*"'; exit}'
}
# not necessary.
# export -f calc
# from linuxgazette.net Dec2006
#
function putargs () {
IFS="|";
echo "$*";
}
-------------------------------------------------
(0) heretic /home/keeling/procmail/ocelot_ source ~/.funcs
/home/keeling/.funcs:9: command not found: : Good grief. \
After all this time, I learn that a colon\n followed \
by a single tick produces a block comment in\n *nix \
shel.\n\n That even includes blank lines!\n
[long line manually broken]
-- Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced. (*) http://www.spots.ab.ca/~keeling - -
[ Thread continues here (8 messages/11.48kB) ]
Mulyadi Santosa [mulyadi.santosa at gmail.com]
Sat, 16 Dec 2006 21:12:28 +0700
After you start a memory-hogger application such as manipulating a large bitmap graphic file, some portions of RAM are likely pushed away to swap. This is normal especially if you have not so big RAM (256MB or less). The problem is, after you finish with this application, whatever you do will be creepingly slow since those pages must be brought back to RAM.
One way you can try is to do these:
# swapoff -a (wait for some seconds... continue after hard disk's LED stops blinking) # swapon -aSwapoff will push everything back to RAM and eventuall disables the swap spaces. Simply execute swapon to enable them again. If you want to play safe, check free output first:
# free -m
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 249 170 79 0 12 45
-/+ buffers/cache: 111 137
Swap: 376 0 376
There you can find out that the free RAM (free+buffers+cached) exceeds the
size of used swap space (in this case, since nothing is there, it is zero).
Knowing this, swapoff will sucessfully push things back to RAM
Another way you can try, is to use swap prefetch feature included in Con Kolivas patchset (-ck). You can find it in kernel.kolivas.org and it's also included in -mm (Andrew Morton) patchset.
I hope this tip is useful for all of LG readers.
regards,
Mulyadi Santosa, RHCE
[ Thread continues here (2 messages/2.60kB) ]
Benjamin A. Okopnik [ben at linuxgazette.net]
Tue, 31 Oct 2006 15:06:37 -0500
Well, I've just learned something important.
In rewriting the mini-MTA I've been working on, "bssmtp", I've stayed with the original code and procedure where I thought they were OK; at least where I assumed they were OK. I just got bitten, hard, by that assumption - with the result that I could send mail to anyone but TAG and Lgang for the past X hours.
Here's the relevant part of my 'bssmtprc':
# Information about the local host domain=linuxmafia.com # domain=linuxgazette.net hostname=Fenrir # Information about the mail relay # preconnect=/usr/bin/ssh -f rick 'sleep 10' preconnect=/usr/bin/ssh -f lg 'sleep 10' mailhost=localhost port=2025 # port=2525In order to switch hosts, I have to flip the 'domain', the 'preconnect', and the 'port' options - and I fat-fingered the first one, so Rick's MTA has been rejecting my mail left and right.
The very next code tweak to go into "bssmtp" is to have a "domain:hostname:port:preconnect" line per *bloody* host. I spent enough hours battling this problem this morning that I never want to do that kind of crap again - or expose anyone else to it.
-- * Ben Okopnik * Editor-in-Chief, Linux Gazette * http://LinuxGazette.NET *
By Aditya Nag and Howard Dyckoff
Please submit your News Bytes items in plain text; other formats may be rejected. A one- or two-paragraph summary plus a URL has a much higher chance of being published than an entire press release. Submit items to bytes@linuxgazette.net.
OpenSUSE Opens Up to Questions
About the Microsoft DealOpenSUSE project developers held a public IRC meeting to discuss the recently announced and highly controversial Microsoft/Novell agreements. Nat Friedman, chief technical and strategy officer for open source at Novell, fielded most of the questions, with assistance from Andreas Jaeger, OpenSUSE project manager, and others.
As expected, the one-hour long session generated a lot of discussion. There were almost 200 participants, and the questions touched on all aspects of the deal, the validity of GPLv2 and the upcoming GPLv3, Mark Shuttleworth's controversial letter to the community, Microsoft's covenant not to sue, and so on. Novell talked about how Microsoft does make legal mistakes, such as in the Lindows fiasco, and, tongue firmly in cheek, how they would "make fun of them in public" if Microsoft did not keep its promises.
The whole GPLv2 vs. GPLv3 issue was also mentioned by the Novell representatives, saying that they are "interested" in seeing the wording used in GPLv3 that will invalidate such deals.
The complete log is available, while a lightly edited version can be found on linux.com. More information is available at the OpenSUSE site.
Richard Stallman says that the
Novell/Microsoft Deal Does Not Violate GPLv2Richard Stallman, the leader of the FSF (Free Software Foundation), said at the fifth international GPLv3 conference in Tokyo on Nov. 21 that the Novell/Microsoft patent agreement is not in violation of GPL version 2. According to a transcript published by the FSFE (FSF Europe), Stallman stated that "what has happened is, Microsoft has not given Novell a patent license, and thus, section 7 of GPL version 2 does not come into play. Instead, Microsoft offered a patent license that is rather limited to Novell's customers alone."
Stallman points out that this is a good thing for several reasons, since the new version of the GPL had not taken such an eventualty into consideration. However, GPLv3 is now being re-written in light of the Novell/Microsoft deal, "It turns out that perhaps it's a good thing that Microsoft did this now, because we discovered that the text we had written for GPL version 3 would not have blocked this, but it's not too late and we're going to make sure that when GPL version 3 really comes out it will block such deals. We were already concerned about possibilities like this, namely, the possibility that a distributor might receive a patent license which did not explicitly impose limits on downstream recipients but simply failed to protect them."
Stallman said that the GPLv3 will block the kind of language used in the Novell/Microsoft agreement. Stallman explained, "We're going to say not just that if you receive the patent license, but if you have arranged any sort of patent licensing that is prejudicial among the downstream recipients, that that's not allowed. That you have to make sure that the downstream recipients fully get the freedoms that they're supposed to have. The precise words, we have not figured out yet. That's what Eben Moglen [FSF's general counsel] is working on now."
This statement from the original author of the GPL should remove any lingering doubts about the validity of the Novell/Microsoft deal.
Novell Axes Support for the
Hula ProjectNovell has abandoned a much-hyped open source project slated to challenge Microsoft Outlook and Exchange by becoming the "Apache" of e-mail and collaboration software. Engineers are "moving to other roles", according to the Hula mailing list.
Novell had announced Hula at LinuxWorld, Boston, in February 2005 by donating 200,000 lines of code from its NetMail collaboration server to the community. Novell wanted Hula to "become for collaboration what Apache is to servers". This move was greeted with strong support from the Mozilla Foundation, Open Source Applications Foundation, Open Source Development Labs, and O'Reilly Media's father of Web 2.0 Tim O'Reilly.
The Hula server featured SMTP, IMAP, and support for the CalDAV calendar access protocol. The future of the project is as yet uncertain, with some developers fearing the worst, while others are confident that it will survive the loss of Novell engineers. More information on the Hula Project is available on the project Web site.
Thailand Delivers a Double
Whammy: Cancels Open Source Policy and OLPC Project ParticipationThailand's newly appointed Information and Communications Technology Minister slammed open source software as useless and full of bugs, "With open source, there is no intellectual property. Anyone can use it and all your ideas become public domain. If nobody can make money from it, there will be no development and open source software quickly becomes outdated." This marks a shift from the previous government's stance on open source. Critics have pointed out that the Minister seems to have based his decision on an incomplete understanding of the open source movement.
This was quickly followed by Thailand's new junta-appointed Education Minister cancelling Thailand's participation in the One Laptop Per Child project and scrapping a plan to give a 2B1 laptop to every primary school student. He also cancelled plans to roll out computers and a broadband connection to every school in Thailand. He cited the lack of readiness of teachers, and the need to focus on basic education standards, "We will not focus too much on technology and materials. We will focus on substance." The previous government was deposed in a bloodless coup earlier this year.
More on this at The Inquirer
France Announces Plan to Switch
Members of Parliament from Windows to LinuxIn June 2007, PCs in French deputies' offices will be equipped with a Linux operating system and open source productivity software. The project, backed by MPs Richard Cazenav and Bernard Carayon of the UMP party, will see 1,154 French parliamentary workstations running on an open source OS, with OpenOffice.org, Firefox and an open source e-mail client.
This is the first time a French public institution has switched its OS to an open source solution. The French government had previously tried open source solutions, but they were either limited to servers or involved using open source software (e.g., Firefox and OpenOffice.org) on Microsoft Windows.
There is no news on the exact distribution or e-mail client they will use. Mandriva Linux might be a strong contender, given its French roots, but this is mere speculation. The French Parliament considered the results of a study conducted by Atos Origin, an international IT services company, and stated that, "The study showed that open source software will from now on offer functionality adapted to the needs of MPs, and will allow us to make substantial savings despite the associated migration and training costs."
Supporters of open source have welcomed this decision, especially following the news of the Thai government dropping its support for open source solutions.
Linux 2.6.19 ReleasedAfter 2 months, 2.6.19 has been released. "It's one of those rare 'perfect' kernels," Linus joked, "so if it doesn't happen to compile with your config (or it does compile, but then does unspeakable acts of perversion with your pet dachshund), you can rest easy knowing that it's all your own damn fault, and you should just fix your evil ways." He went on to add, "you could send me and the kernel mailing list a note about it anyway, of course. (And perhaps pictures, if your dachshund is involved. Not that we'd be interested, of course. No. Just so that we'd know to avoid it next time)." Besides these essential technical details, this release includes the clustering GFS2 filesystem, Ecryptfs , the first experimental version of EXT4 (aimed at developers), support for the Atmel AVR32 architecture, sleepable RCU, improvements for NUMA-based systems, and much more.
The kernel can be downloaded from your closest kernel mirror.
Novell Inc. Announces Novell Open Enterprise Server 2 (OES 2)
Due to be released early in the second quarter of 2007, OES 2 has already received support commitments from Novell's software partners. The list currently includes backup solution vendors CA, Commvault, Symantec, and Syncsort, along with anti-virus software vendors McAfee and Trend Micro.
OES will be based on Novell's SLES 10 (SUSE Linux Enterprise Server). It is designed to be a drop-in replacement for Novell NetWare servers, and it will be a direct competitor to Microsoft's Server 2003. This next version will complete the shift to workgroup services running completely on the Linux platform. The optional NetWare kernel included in previous versions will be removed. OES 2 hopes to make traditional NetWare workgroup services run on Linux as well or better than they do on NetWare and Windows, and will simplify the migration of those services to Linux. Xen virtualization capabilities in SLES will be leveraged to offer extended hardware support for traditional NetWare applications. Novell's ZENworks Virtual Machine Management will provide capabilities for managing Xen virtualized environments in OES.
Novell's recent technology partnership with Microsoft should lead to improved interoperability with Windows.
Earlier versions of OES have been well-received both by testers and by Novell's channel partners. In this year's VARBusiness survey, OES ranked number one in server operating systems, ahead of Novell's own SLED and Microsoft's Server 2003.
More information is available at Novell's Web site.
OpenSUSE 10.2 ReleasedOpenSUSE 10.2 has been released. Quoting the OpenSUSE News/10.2-Release site, "After a lot of work, we proudly announce the availability of OpenSUSE 10.2, formerly known as SUSE Linux 10.x . As usual, we ship all the latest open source packages available at the time. But we want to give a special mention to the redesigned GNOME and KDE desktop, Firefox 2.0, ext3 as the new default file system, support for internal SD card readers, new power management and, last but not least, our improved package management. We'd like to thank you all for testing heavily, reporting bugs, giving feedback on mailing lists. Have a lot of fun!"
OpenSUSE 10.2 features numerous improvements to the package manager stack, including a new update notification applet (opensuse-updater) and a console application called zypper, which are both non-ZMD based. It ships with Linux kernel 2.6.18.2, using only SMP kernels, glibc 2.5, X.Org 7.2rc2, autoconf 2.60, bison 2.3, and gcc 4.1.2. It will have a lifetime of 2 years.
The full release announcement is available. The CD and DVD images for the i386, x86_64, and PowerPC architectures are available via BitTorrent protocol or directly from the OpenSUSE download mirrors. The DVD images are available directly from (MD5): openSUSE-10.2-GM-DVD-i386.iso (3,701MB) and openSUSE-10.2-GM-DVD-x86_64.iso (3,750MB).
Yellow Dog Linux 5 for the PS3
ReleasedYellow Dog Linux v5.0 featuring E17 is now available for the Sony PlayStation 3. Derived from Fedora Core 5, YDL is a complete Linux distribution optimized for the PPC architecture. The YDL 5.0 release features a fairly simple installation routine and the Enlightenment e17 desktop environment. This is the second distribution compatible with PS3 and the first one specifically developed for it. The installation routine involves partitioning the PS3 HDD, and requires a keyboard and mouse to be attached.
YDL 5.0 comes with kernel 2.6.16, gcc 4.1.1, and glibc 2.4. It includes Cell SDK 1.1, OpenOffice.org 2.0.2, Firefox 1.5.0, and Thunderbird 1.5.0. The usual personal accessories, development tools, sound & video, Internet, and networking applications are also included.
More information on their website.
SimplyMEPIS 64 beta
ReleasedMEPIS LLC has released Beta1 of SimplyMEPIS-64 Version 6.0-4 with the same look, feel, and function as the 32 bit edition. This includes Firefox 2.0.0.1, Flashplayer 9, OpenOffice.org 2.0.2, a very stable 3.5.3 build of the KDE desktop, and a security-patched 2.6.15 Linux kernel. Beta1 of SimplyMEPIS-32 Version 6.0-4, aka SystemUpdate1(SU1) is also available.
Both versions are almost identical and are on a fast-track schedule with a targeted release date of approximately January 10, 2007.
Apache Harmony Leaves
'Incubator' StatusApache Harmony has left its "incubator" status. The Harmony project's mission is to create a compatible, independent implementation of J2SE 5 under the Apache License v2 and to "create a community-developed modular runtime (VM and class library) architecture to allow independent implementations to share runtime components, and allow independent innovation in runtime components."
They are actively looking for contributors. If you feel you can help visit http://harmony.apache.org/.
KVM To Be Merged Into Linux
Kernel 2.6.20According Andrew Morton's merge plans for 2.6.20, the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) for Linux will be merged into the Linux kernel. Besides VMware, Xen, qemu, etc., Linux users now have a full virtualization solution built in the kernel, which supports running unmodified Linux or Windows images. Details are sparse currently; head over to http://kvm.sourceforge.net/index.html, for the latest.
Novell, LPI partner to release
LPIC-3 Senior CertificationLinux Professional Institute (LPI), provider of vendor-neutral Linux certification, announced a series of initiatives to promote Linux professional credentials and the global adoption of open source software. In particular, LPI cited the cooperation of Novell on the development of LPI's upcoming enterprise-level certification program: LPIC-3.
LPIC-3 will be LPI's senior certification level for Linux professionals, requiring candidates to hold both LPIC-1 and LPIC-2 designations. LPI will launch the program in January 2007, holding the first North American exam lab at Novell's BrainShare event in March 2007. Mr. Lacey praised the involvement of Novell in the development of LPIC-3 and noted that they brought important enterprise-level perspective to the certification program. Mr. Lacey also noted the growing interest of LPI training partners in Novell's recent announcement of an innovative free online "Train the Teacher" program.
"Novell has always supported LPI's dedication to the development of Linux professionals," said Dan Veitkus, Vice-President, Novell Training Services, "We believe in offering our customers and partners the best set of choices for raising their Linux IQ, and we're in full support of LPIC-3 as the next step for Novell's Linux Certified professionals. LPIC-3 specifically targets the needs of large enterprise, IT professionals, and IT consultancies that require a broad architect level professional credential." Mr. Veitkus added that a number of Novell's technical trainers, engineers and developers have been engaged to assist LPI in the development of LPIC-3.
LPI separately announced that candidates who have earned LPIC certifications will have to re-certify every five years or alternatively earn a higher certification. Recertification was previously required only after ten years.
solidDB for MySQL Sets
Performance RecordSolid Information Technology announced that solidDB for MySQL outperformed other MySQL transactional database engines in a public TM1 benchmark test. Benchmark results confirmed that solidDB for MySQL meets the performance requirements of high-throughput, mission-critical applications. Publication of the results also coincided with general availability of solidDB for MySQL, an open source relational database management system (RDBMS) developed in partnership with MySQL.
The TM1 Benchmark results shows that, on multi-CPU hardware, solidDB for MySQL offers customers shorter response time and higher levels of scalability than equivalent MySQL implementations that use Oracle's InnoDB. Results demonstrated that solidDB for MySQL processed more than twice the number of transactions than did Oracle InnoDB, and stayed constant with increasing database size, while InnoDB's performance significantly decreased as the database size increased beyond 100,000 rows.
solidDB for MySQL is designed for transactional applications, and supports full ACID compliance with configurable transaction isolation levels, both optimistic and pessimistic concurrency control, Multi-Version Concurrency Control (MVCC) with non-blocking reads and writes, row-level locking, and foreign keys and referential integrity. For more info, go to http://www.solidtech.com/.
Open Source BPM solution under
MPLIntalio has announced that Intalio|BPMS Community Edition will be released under the Mozilla Public License (MPL) amended with the Generic Attribution Provision (GAP) submitted to the Open Source Initiative (OSI) earlier this year. [1]
"There has been a need for Open Source BPM solutions in the market place, but we haven't seen any candidates that meet the market need to date," said Jim Sinur, vice president and analyst at Gartner. "That need is predicated on making BPM easy for lesser skilled process developers, and our hope is that this will evolve quickly enough to compete with the BPMS leaders."
Users of the Open Source Intalio|BPMS Community Edition can later upgrade to Intalio|BPMS Enterprise Edition through a yearly subscription plan.
[1] Please see Rick Moen's article about the current conflict/non-conformance of GAP with OSI licensing in this issue.
Talkback: Discuss this article with The Answer Gang
![[BIO]](../gx/authors/nag.jpg)
Aditya was bored one day in 1997 and decided to take a look at this "linux thing". After installing Red Hat 5, and looking at the blinking cursor, he promptly removed it and went back to Windows. And then reinstalled a few days later, determined to figure it out. So far, he's figured some stuff out, but he's still trying, and he's still having fun.
Howard Dyckoff is a long term IT professional with primary experience at
Fortune 100 and 200 firms. Before his IT career, he worked for Aviation
Week and Space Technology magazine and before that used to edit SkyCom, a
newsletter for astronomers and rocketeers. He hails from the Republic of
Brooklyn [and Polytechnic Institute] and now, after several trips to
Himalayan mountain tops, resides in the SF Bay Area with a large book
collection and several pet rocks.
Filesystem in Userspace (FUSE) is a very neat innovation in the Linux kernel which allows users to homogeneously mount almost anything as a directory with files, and opens up a new and fun way of handling various operations. For example, imagine being able to use your space in GMail as a disk, or mounting your Flickr photo page as a directory in your machine. Moving files to and from the service boils down to simple copying of files to and from the mounted directory. Sounds fun, right? So lets get our hands dirty with FUSE!
FUSE is available for the Linux kernel, as well as for FreeBSD and OpenSolaris. It acts as a layer between the service you wish to "mount" as a file system and the kernel, thus acting as a convenient means to access the service as an ordinary directory/file structure. There is an API which allows one to program the file system behaviour, so FUSE can be extended to any situation where it is useful to represent objects as files.
If you are running Linux kernel 2.6.14 or higher, in all likelihood, you already have FUSE in the kernel as a module. Otherwise, just get the sources from the FUSE home page and compile it for your kernel. Once you are done, you can test whether the module got loaded using:
sudo modprobe fuse(Or modprobe fuse as root).
If you don't get errors, then we are ready to make FUSE dance. You might want to automate the process of loading the FUSE module every time you start your computer. This is usually accomplished by adding a line containing fuse to the /etc/modules file.
Also, ensure you have the userspace files as well, which come with the FUSE tarball, or get the fuse-utils package for your distribution. I would strongly recommend that you use FUSE using an ordinary user account and not as root. To do this, just adding yourself to the fuse group should be sufficient on most distributions. This is usually done with:
adduser <username> fuse
(Depending on your distribution, your "/dev/fuse" may belong to
another group. Check with ls -l /dev/fuse. In that case,
add yourself to group that you see when you run the latter command.)
I have used Debian GNU/Linux for trying things out, but I can assure you that things won't vary much in any other distribution.
Now, we'll look at two of the interesting FUSE file systems I use often.
|
Category: File systems
... imagine being able to use your space in GMail as a disk, or mounting your Flickr photo page as a directory in your machine. Moving files to and from the service boils down to simple copying of files to and from the mounted directory. |
Flickrfs is available from the author's home page. It is written in Python and uses the FUSE API. As the name suggests, it provides a convenient interface to most of the things you can do on the Flickr service's website through a convenient file system interface.
To start using it, extract the flickrfs tarball, edit config.txt there to set the preferred resolution, browser and timeout values. Create a directory called .flickrfs in your home directory, and place the config.txt file there. Create a mount point for your Flickr account; I chose ~/Flickr, but you can choose any directory. If you use a proxy server to access internet, set your HTTP proxy by doing export http_proxy="http://proxyserver:port" with appropriate proxy server and port. Then, it is just a matter of doing
python flickrfs.py ~/Flickr
Now, your sets are automatically loaded. To see all your photos, create a directory called stream, and cd to it or load it in your file or photo manager (Konqueror, nautilus, gwenview, F-spot, to name a few). The directory will be populated with all your Flickr images. Similarly, there exist two subdirectories in the tags directory, namely public and personal. Now, to see all of your images which you tagged with tag1 and tag2 and tag3, merely create a directory called tag1:tag2:tag3 in personal, and cd to it or view it in a file manager. A similar subdirectory in public would show everyone's public images with those tags. Just copy photos from the directories to your hard disk folders. Nice?
Many more features, like uploading being a simply copy, editing metadata, changing date, time, permissions, license etc. are available. See http://manishrjain.googlepages.com/flickrfs for information.
To unmount when you are done using the Flickr account, just use fusermount like this:
fusermount -u ~/Flickr
Replace ~/Flickr with your mount point.
This is something that I really love! Accessing a FTP server as though it's contents were on directories on your own computer! Just get curlftpfs from the curlftpfs page, install it using the standard ./configure; make; make install, or install the package available for you distribution, and just do something like this:
[kumar@debian ~] mkdir IITM_Mirror [kumar@debian ~] curlftpfs ftp.iitm.ac.in IITM_Mirror/ [kumar@debian ~] cd IITM_Mirror/ [kumar@debian ~/IITM_Mirror] ls ... README debian...
That's it! I have used IITM_Mirror as the mount point for the mirror. You can now mount FTP servers, even with password login, so that you can do uploads as well. Do curlftpfs -h for learning how to mount servers with login for write access and using proxies. To unmount, use fusermount -u ~/IITM_Mirror.
Also you can add
curlftpfs#ftp.iitm.ac.in /home/<youruser>/IITM_Mirror fuse rw,uid=1000,user,noauto 0 0to your /etc/fstab and then use mount /home/<youruser>/IITM_Mirror to mount and umount /home/<youruser>/IITM_Mirror: to unmount the FTP directory
(Change uid of 1000 to the userid you get when you type id on your console).
So, do you think this is cool? Don't say no before you have seen the other possibilities at the FUSE file system list. There are some very useful file systems to be explored; do try them out. Also, FUSE is not restricted to just network based services; it acts as a layer for using various filesystems and external devices as well. For example, gphotofs mounts a GPhoto compatible camera as a file system. DVDfs allows a DVD video structure to be recreated on another disk. A filesystem for mounting iPods is also available. The possibilities with FUSE are endless!
Before signing off, I'll give you one tip which might be useful. Sometimes, especially when you have an erratic network connection, the network based FUSE filesystems might not respond well, and cause a bit of trouble. Under those situations, you may not be able to do a clean unmount using fusermount -u. Under those situations, you can force a lazy unmount using fusermount -u -z and try mounting the file system again.
Although I know that I haven't written much in this article, I hope that it was sufficient to provide you with a glimpse of how powerful and convenient FUSE can be, with two sample file systems. Please try it out, and enjoy the benefits of mounting almost anything as a file system; be sure to try out other file systems, especially the popular gmailfs, smbnetfs and the like.
Talkback: Discuss this article with The Answer Gang
Kumar Appaiah is studying to earn a B.Tech in Electrical Engineering and M.Tech in Communication Engineering (Dual-degree) at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras. He has been using GNU/Linux for the past five years, and believes that Free Software has helped him do work more neatly, quickly and efficiently.
He is a fan of Debian GNU/Linux. He loves using Mutt, GNU Emacs, XCircuit, GNU Octave, SciPy, Matplotlib and ConTeXt.
Oracle World: A Mega Conference. 40K attendees, 16K hotel rooms. Thousands of people crossing in 3 different directions at 4th and Howard Street, with the SFPD waving arms and blowing whistles frantically. A huge dining tent in the middle of the street. And very literally "tons of food" for after-sessions parties. Almost overwhelming.
This is Oracle's trophy event. It is a multiverse of user conferences from all of its assimilated purchased companies. It's J.D. Edwards World, the forum for the multitudes of PeopleSoft users, a DBA conference, a mini-Java conference, and now a major Linux conference.
Billed as the world's largest computer software conference with 42,000 attendees [but didn't COMDEX crack the 100 K mark back in its day?], it was a veritable city within the City of San Francisco. Streets were blocked off for Oracle events, and the conference sessions overflowed all three buildings of the Moscone Center and took over several local hotels for tracks such as those dedicated to CEOs and CIOs, and to the Life Sciences.
Partly because so many of the attendees were executives and business principals, the perks and party favors were often an order of magnitude better than the pizza and pretzels you would see at a strictly techie event. The OracleWorld conference bag, for example, was a well-tailored cross between an attache case and a laptop carrier, just perfect for my notebook and very smart, and included a folding umbrella for the unseasonably warm SF October weather. There were special events and separate receptions for developers, DBAs, business analysts, international guests, long-term J.D. Edwards users, and the now-annual Linux Install-a-thon where RHEL AS 4 was available to attendees willing to install it on their laptops. [This was the night before the Oracle Linux announcement.]
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Category: Conferences
This is Oracle's trophy event: J.D. Edwards World, the forum for the multitudes of PeopleSoft users, a DBA conference, a mini-Java conference, and now a major Linux conference. |
As for hardware, the star of the show wasn't one of the Oracle Clusters running on the Expo floor from Dell, HP, or IBM - it was the America's Cup yacht owned by Larry Ellison on display in the central corridor between Moscone Center's North and South Halls. Quite a lovely machine. [I could almost hear Larry Ellison saying, "I have bigger toys."] To show appreciation to their customers and conference attendees, Oracle and NetApp threw a finale party for over 20,000 attendees with 5 stages, mountains of food, an open tap, and headliners Joan Jett, Devo, and Sir Elton John. With an extended, anthemic version of "RocketMan", Sir John rocked the overflow crowd and kept everyone out very late.
The killer announcement at OracleWorld '06 was Oracle Linux, during Larry Ellison's keynote on the last day. As if digesting PeopleSoft and JD Edwards weren't enough, Oracle is now offering Linux operating system support in the form of an Oracle-tweaked version of Red Hat with the logos stripped out.
"Oracle Unbreakable Linux 2.0" provides enterprises with global support for Linux via Oracle's own support staff. This makes Oracle both a partner and a major competitor for Red Hat, whose stock plunged 24% the day following. Red Hat responded by sporting a new "Unfakeable Linux" banner on its Web site, and a Q/A page that notes that Oracle differences
