Digg or be Dugg - digg-dugg the game

Hmm, it seems some guy posted one of my articles on the news trash dump of the internet “digg”. I hate digg, well, I don’t actually hate it but I see it as a second rank news source. I usually read /.

Ok, some people have actually read this Linux vs the BSDs article. This was in no way a comparison and it wasn’t meant to be. It’s just the opinion af a real Linux fanboy who has worked with Linux since he could remember and never actually installed a full BSD system. Only worked with it.

Today I’ve started installing my test system I wrote about with one of the BSDs. I started with FreeBSD. It worked until the second floppy. My compaq hasn’t got any room left for a cd drive so I had to use the floppy install. The second FreeBSD 6 floppy kept giving trouble. I have checked the download, used new floppy disks and dd didn’t give any errors. FreeBSD couldn’t load it’s kernel. Oh well, on to OpenBSD. I downloaded the floppy image that would give me extended SCSI support. My compaq has got a very old well supported Adaptec 7xxx SCSI controller. OpenBSD couldn’t find any hard disk. I gave up and started the NetBSD install. This was a good one for a change. My system is running NetBSD right now. I have to check how this system works (ports and stuff) but I think I can manage to get X running and have a NetBSD desktop system.

I’d like to do a total comparison, but it takes some highly skilled experts to configure the boxes. I can manage a Linux box but I’m really new to BSD systems and Solaris. So if someone or some company wants to help us compare the operating systems by donating hardware or just help out in any way you are free to contact me. I haven’t got the financial backup to buy a new system just to make a good comparison on. Maybe I’m going to use Qemu or something. That’s fair. So if people can send me a fully configured Qemu image from one of the BSDs I’d be really happy. With something like Qemu the comparison is 100% equal.

And say, if I manage to get some mail witch Qemu images my comparison won’t be pro-Linux. Yes, it will run on top of a Linux install but that shouldn’t matter. I’ll just run some benchmarks on all the systems. Things that I would like to see in a fully configured system: X.org, Apache2, PHP5, MySQL and some other stuff your OS can’t do without. You are free to send me any OS when you are allowed to redistribute all it’s contents.

Sysadmin Toolbox Top Ten Revised

I’ve read this article about the ten(?) most handy pieces of software you can use on a Linux box. I do not agree. I’m making a list of tools a sysadmin should have on his desktop. Here’s a list that makes more sense:

GNU tools

Ehm, imagine a Linux box without them. Does the term “GNU/Linux” ring a bell?

htop

Top is nice. Htop is better. Why? You can sort, tree view and kill within an nice colorful ncurses interface.

netcat

What ever you want to do on your network, netcat is your friend. It’s a transparent TCP tunnel for binary safe data transport. You can put data into it and take the same data out of it on the other side of the world. It does a lot of other tings too like network sniffing.

The P in “LAMP”

You need a scripting language like Python, Perl or PHP on your machine. You could use Bash for all your scripting but that’s simply not advisable. Ok, Ruby counts for all of you Ruby users.

Bash

Yes, I’m into Bash. What gives? This shell just works as I’d like it to work.

Aterm

I have to admit, this is the best X terminal emulator. Light, customizable and ehm, well, just good.

Fluxbox

You need a window manager to manage your Aterms. Fluxbox is light, fast and very workspace efficient. When you learn to work with the window tabbing thingy function you’ll be hooked. It works well with the X.org composite extension too.

OpenSSH

The Sysadmin has to admin his boxes on a distance without having to lay down lots of serial cables to access their shells. To make it secure and simple I’d use OpenSSH.

Mozilla Firefox

To visit my blog and Slashdot of course.

dnetc

The distributed.net client. All the real Sysadmins have some kind of heavy monster below their desks and only run XMMS and some Aterms on top of Fluxbox. Where do the other gigaflops go? Right: Distributed.net.

Make and Brake PCs

It has been pretty tough these day for the machines I work with. Two machines at work died shortly after my arrival. The central server, built by me, had a failing hard drive. This server operated at remote.jrrzz.net and was a nice 2.4Ghz P4 on a DFI uATX all-in board running Debian GNU/Linux. The ext3 filesystem got remounted as read only. The disk was a P-ATA Maxtor diamondmax 8 120GB. The same disk a friend of mine ran in his pcrelaxt.nl.eu.org Celeron Mendocino machine. His disk crashed a few months ago. It seems these Maxtor drives can’t handle 24/7 uptime with low loads. Another guy I know still has got problems with his Maxtor daimondmax S-ATA disk. I don’t know what’s up with Maxtor, but this isn’t really the stuff I like to see when I arrive at work. Most of my machines still run Maxtor drives. My primary file backup system is running a P-ATA diamondmax 10 200GB. I know I can’t expect the same quality from these disks as from my Barracuda SCSI array. But they have to be able to run for a year or so? I have deceided not to buy any Maxtor disks anymore. The second machine at work that died was a Duron 1300 running Windoze XP. After a reboot it failed to load the OS. I think Windoze has screwed itself again, as usual. I’ve been able to fix that one just yet. Actually it magically fixed itself. Microsoft Logic(tm).
I’ve just ordered a new machine to serve as my primary desktop system. My old system, an XP 2500+, couldn’t handle HD video and some other heavy stuff like Yafray high def rendering. I’ve always wanted SMP and AMD64. Now I can do this without expensive Opterons and Tyan boards. Thanks to the X2 we can all enjoy a beefy 64 bit SMP kernel. The exact specs of my new system follow:

  • AMD Athon64 X2 4400+
  • Corsair TWINX 2048M (dual)
  • Western Digital Caviar SE16 250GB S-ATA II
  • Asus A8N-E nForce4 Ultra
  • Point of View GeForce 7800GTX 256MB
  • OCZ ModStream 520W
  • Debian GNU/Linux AMD64 and Windoze XP SP2 (win32) dual boot

I’m going to replace my old 19″ CRT with a nice LCD panel soon. This machine is going to boost my distributed.net score, too.

Update:

I’m writing this on my new box, as you can see when you take a look at my user agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.8.0.1) Gecko/20060314 Debian/1.5.dfsg+1.5.0.1-4 Firefox/1.5.0.1.

But I’m running with only 1GB of RAM right now. My Corsair DIMMs were DOA (dead on arrival). I hope I can get a new pair soon. To give you an idea how this sytem performs: Kernel build took 9m 34s. 15000fps in glxgears with Xcomposite running. Booting takes less than a minute. I still have to figure out why my custom kernel can’t see my PCI-e cards though. It can, but X.org can’t.

Terrorism in the Snow

It’s time for another monthly dump. Hooray.

I’ve been doing nothing at all and a lot of things at once both at the same time one month long. Sounds ridiculous doesn’t it? httpWM got released, my webshop scripts are finally doing their job at work and I’m really close to buying my new Debian godbox. But most of the time I’ve been doing absolutely nothing at all. It has been very, very easy going at school. On top of this I had a lot of spare time because some teachers kept calling in sick or some idiotic bastards had to celebrate the carnaval.

I didn’t want to spend my spare time in some small noisy booze cafe filled with these idiotic carnaval people. Usually I go somewhere else. This year I went to Germany to have some fun in the snow with friends. Indoor. Oh well, it’s cheap. We had found this nice indoor piste just over the Dutch border. We could eat and drink all we could eat and drink. That means a lot. While my mates chose to go out skiing I picked a snowboard to fool around with. I have got some experience with a skateboard (well before the Jackass days) so I guessed it would be a nice start. I never touched a ski or snowboard before so this was just plain stupid to go down that piste without any lessons. The people who know me know I don’t care about pain or anything like that. That’s maybe because I never break anything, hehe. So off I went, climbing uphill towards a spot where I could get a feeling for this thing. Damn, it was huge compared to my maplewood boards. It got a bit scary after I managed to secure my snowboots in the triple secured locks. I couldn’t just jump off, I was one with the board. After a while I managed to stand upright. Not for long. Soon after I stood on both my legs I automatically wanted to put my rear foor next to the board to give it some speed. I fell down. Oh crap, my feet are still stuck on the board. This might be just a little harder than I thought. After some more failed tries I got on my feet again. Now I wanted to go down that slope. It actually worked, I just had to use the position I’m in when a skateboard is rolling off a hill and I was fine. As I went down I noticed I picked up some speed. Down I went, faster and faster sliding towards an innocent crowd. I had to brake, but how? I had to plant my face in the snow to stop me from hurting people besides myself. But that felt good, again! Now I figured out I was able to accelerate by leaning backwards, lifting the front end of the board a bit and I could cruise at the same speed or even brake a little by leaning forward. I don’t know if it’s meant that way but it worked for me. The only way to brake fast was to drop myself to the ground for now. I never tried to steer with that thing, because my friends convinced me to start skiing. What could go wrong? So I had to switch gear. It was quite hard to explain to the blonde girl behind the counter I wanted to swap. I could have seen that one coming. My German sucks, I can only give out orders in German, and she was blonde. I finally managed to swap my gear after paying 5 euros to the another employee so I could swap that coin she gave me against some skis and plastic mech-like boots. Damn, those boots were bad. You can’t walk in them, it actually hurts to walk wearing them. You can’t stand upright anymore. One of my friends and his dad were pro at skiing. They would learn me the basics. If snowboarding went that well, skiing can’t be that hard, right? Wrong. I’m gonna kill the bastard who invented skiing. No, torture him first in a Hostel ™ and then kill him with a chainsaw. No! First I’m going to learn him to skate- and snowboarding, then torture him and then kill him with a chainsaw. I’m getting seriously off topic. Continue. First of all, you have to put yourself in a position like you are taking a dump against a tree with your trousers half way up your knees. You have to use these weapons, spears if you wish, to keep you from falling face down in the snow. Lethal things made out of super light composite material and a really sharp end. Perfect for making “Homii Kebabus”, several dead people on a stick. Excuse me for my Latin, it has been a while. Anyway, I was learning how to ski. The easiest thing would be standing still. You had to twist one of you knees in a way you normally never would to make one ski bury itself in the snow. Okay, I wasn’t moving and already aching. Now I had to move forward. To move forward one must do the unlogical thing of bending forward and moving all one’s weight to the front. I’ll compare this to other things I’ve done. If I try this on a motorcycle going 200 I’ll die. If I try this on a snowboard I’ll fall and if I do this an a skateboard it will hurt, I can tell. Hmm, I managed to go forward, but how do I stop? My friend’s dad told me I had to put the fronts of the skis close to eachother. So my position while braking felt like both my kneecaps were shot off and this was my only way of walking. Wooh, I slowly grinded to a halt. This wasn’t going to save the innocent group of people I met earlier, but that wasn’t one of my conceirns right now. My friends deceided that it was time for me to learn how to steer, brake turns, whatever. Now this is weird. I had to stay in this crap-against-tree/kneecapless position and only move one of my legs sideways. There is no way I can use all my strength to push me sideways in that position. Besides, I automatically leaned towards the corner like I do on a motorcycle or a skateboard. So what happened? Both my automatic functions that I was used to doing kicked in. I got upright to force one leg off in the right position and I leaned towards the corner. This resulted in catastrophical situations. Some of the positions I was in after falling reminded me of Yoga class. Did I mention the boots sucked? Somehow they didn’t support my feet well enough and I developed somekind of pain in my left foot. I wasn’t able to continue by lessons. To be honest, I’m seriously in doubt what’s worse, skiing or being unable to ski. I wished I had never stopped fooling around with that friendly mister snowboard. After a while sitting on a bench I deceided to go to the apres ski. I hate apres ski, but this apres ski had free beer. I promised I would try the German beer and I kept my promise. The beer made me sick. Homesick. I wanted to go back home, to Bavaria beer. And the way those people treated the beer, it was horrible! They filled the glasses half way and let the beer die. Afterwards they fill it up. I know they do this to preserve the foam on top, but it also points to the bad quality of the beer. Another thing wanted me to go home. It was the beer or just my imagination, but he girl behind the bar in the corner of my eye looked just like my English teacher back in high school. I had a lot of “fun” with her, but I never want to meet her in public. Especially in an apres ski bar. Luckaly it wasn’t her. I catched up with my mates and we went home. What a day. It was fun though, really.

Another thing I’m really getting annoyed about is the whole anti terrorism thing. Yesterday I received a leaflet printed by the Dutch government about how much they are trying to protect us against the terrorists. I don’t believe in god, so whay should I believe in terrorists? I won’t deny 9/11, Madrid and London but I think the governments make good use of this new situation. New laws have been created to aid in the war against terrorism. These laws also make it easier for governments to just arrest some guy they don’t like, interrogate (read: torture) and punish him without a fair trial, if any. The US bastards are ahead with this. They totally don’t care about the Geneva convention and just bacause they are the “superpower” they can do what ever they want with sometimes completely innocent foreigners. And if your’e not with them you are against them. That sounds the same as bin Laden’s cry for power. Now the US have mangled law some European countries, including the Netherlands, think they have the right to do the same. The first steps to total government control have been taken. We have to be able to identify ourselves at all times. All our internet traffic is being logged. Telecommunication is being tapped without approval. I can continue a while with this. Just bacause CNN reports it’s not safe anymore to walk across the street bacause anyone could be a terrorist the people blindly accept every stupid law thrown at them with an “anti terrorist” label stuck on it. We’re not blind you see. Some of us see what’s going on. This is not just another conspiracy theory. Not at all. This is the only reality. The theory I’ve got about the war against terrorism is the following: 9/11 happens. The world was shocked. I still don’t believe a muslim terrorist organisation is responsible for the attack on the pentagon. Even the attack on the twin towers is still a big mystery when you look at the proof. Shortly after the US pointed to bin Laden as the guy responsible. Bin laden liked the fame and agreed, the fame would make him very powerful. He sent out a video message he was responsible for the 9/11 attacks. The actual reason for the Bush administration to go to Afghanistan was to take down bin Laden’s organisation. The US sponsored the same arganisation a while ago with weapons to fight to communists. Now the soviet Union has crumbled the people started to use the weapons for criminal activities. Afghanistan became one of the biggest opium producing countries. The Americans didn’t like this so they wanted a good reason to attack. 9/11 was the chance they were waiting for. The muslim world, especially the radical muslims, saw this attack as a straight attack to all muslims. They declared a global Jihad against the Americans and their allies. After the US forces were done with Afghanistan they left the place in rubble for their allies to clean up. And including we, the Dutch, willingly clean up the mess they have made. This anti terrorism thing was making Bush very popular in his country. He needed another big one, bigger than Afghanistan, to win the next elections. His father started a war in Iraq but wasn’t allowed to go back and finish them all. He was going to finish the job. Besides, he could use the oil. The international community didn’t approve Bush his plan to attack Iraq. He didn’t care and attacked Iraq anyway. The muslim world got really pissed about all this. Now the Americans attack an Arabic nation right in front of their doorstep. Again, we, the Dutch joined Bush in his crimes against humanity. Officially Bush is a war criminal for attacking Iraq and ignoring international conventions. But hey, it’s the super power, they can do what ever they want. The war in Iraq made it a new place for a bloody civil war. There’s a shift in balance of power and the people who once had the power want to keep it and the people who should get more power want to get it. The Americans haven’t filled up the power vacuum properly. Thanks Bush, the second nation in rubble. Bush has (indirectly) killed more people in his reign over the world than Hitler in Nazi Germany. Bush triggered a chain reaction of events possibly leading to global agression. A reaction we cannot stop anymore. Thanks Bush, for WW3.

And thanks Holland for collaborating with the enemy of the free world!