Readers of my blog will want to update their URLs. As of right now, I've
moved my blog to http://blog.fortytwo.ch/.
Reading LWN's coverage of the Linux Plumbers Converence, it occured
to me that while I as somewhat experienced Linux user may know many of the
components of a modern Linux desktop system, technically interested but less
experienced users may have no idea what goes where. So here is a very rough high-level
introduction to the “under the hood” components I could think of.
As you can see there are many gaps in my knowledge, too...
I see Martin is proud to have started this...
altfrangg, calvados, faegnaescht, gazpacho, gin, gluggsi, lumpesammler,
papillon, syydelaervli, tonic, zbasel
If you can guess this, you're invited to gatecrash anytime. If you can
guess this and don't live close to me (or did at some time in the past, and
didn't use Google), I'd be curious to know how...
I had to rewire a DSL concentrator (thunderstorm blew one of the ports...)
today. The concentrator has two fan-out cables (input, output) with 25 RJ-11
connectors, color coded, so I had to find the colors of the remaining
non-defective ports (there are 12 ports on this concentrator, the other 13
pairs are not connected. Presumably there isn't a 12 pair cable.) Google
shows tons of references to the apparently standard 25 pair color code
(first pair is white/blue), but unfortunately “my” cable had a
light blue/light yellow first pair with most other pairs made up of cables with
a base color and a colored stripe. I couldn't find the color chart on the
Internet.
Finally, the strange thought of RTFM entered my mind (and I even found the
manual of the concentrator), and found that the importer has added a color
chart leaflet to it; the cable is referred to as a “Telco50” cable.
So here we go:
| Pair | First Wire | Second Wire |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | red | red — white |
| 2 | yellow | yellow — black |
| 3 | green | green — white |
| 4 | blue | blue — white |
| 5 | brown | brown — white |
| 6 | black | black — white |
| 7 | purple | purple — white |
| 8 | orange | orange — white |
| 9 | light green | green — black |
| 10 | blue — black | purple — black |
| 11 | light blue — black | light blue — red |
| 12 | light green — green | light green — blue |
| 13 | light green — black | light green — red |
| 14 | light blue — blue | light blue — green |
| 15 | light yellow — red | light yellow — black |
| 16 | light yellow — green | light yellow — blue |
| 17 | gray | gray — black |
| 18 | gray — green | gray — red |
| 19 | red — black | light red |
| 20 | light red — blue | light red — green |
| 21 | light red — black | light red — red |
| 12 | white | orange — black |
| 13 | white — blue | white — green |
| 24 | white — red | white — black |
| 25 | light blue | light yellow |
It is most irritating when the Laptop choses to blank its display at the
exact moment when I unplug the mobile phone charger located behind it.
That is all.
Got this gem today:
This is to bring to your notice that I am delegated from the United Nations to Central bank of Nigeria to pay 100 Nigerian 419 scam victims $10 Million each, you are listed and approved for this payments as oneof the scammed victims, get back to as soon as possible for the immediate payments of your $10Million compensations funds.Quite clever — the kind of stupidity that lets you believe this kind of email the first time will also get you a second time with this one... (Oh, yes: if you really want, you can contact mrjohnwilliamy2k1@live.com yourself.)
A while ago I decided that my desktop computer would be a test platform for
a few things. So at the moment it's KDE 4.1
and OpenOffice.org 3.0 beta, both from Debian's experimental distribution. Which, on a
system which originally was an installation of Debian etch, means that by now
not much is left over from that etch system. Long live Debian's dependency
handling, which so far has never really let me down! Conclusion: thankfully I
have a laptop for actually doing stuff...
PostgreSQL upgrade from 8.2 to 8.3.
This really should be automated (... but I guess I understand
why it's not.) At least it does work as advertised, thanks a lot to Julien
Danjou. And thanks to Martin Pitt and the PostgreSQL developers for making it
so painless to run several PostgreSQL versions side by side. Now there's a
serious database.
Who or what is tech-faq.com? I just found out that they listed my server,
without asking, on their list of public DNS servers. There also is no obivous
way to contact them.
(The fact that zbasel.fortytwo.ch wasindeed a public DNS server was
my own configuration mistake, of course, not theirs...)
Christian,
I used to block quite aggressively (essentially blocking all IPs sending me
spam for a few months) and remember seeing free.fr very, very often.
Apparently this was before the block outgoing port 25 policy — I just had
a grep through my log and see almost no spam coming in from free.fr. So, as
I've said just recently, this is a note to all ISP: please, please, please
block port 25! (ISP who don't offer unblocking will obviously lose the techie
clients, but that's their own thing to decide...)
It has been mentioned very often, but xkcd captures this idea perfectly: face to face
meetings help. (This is no comment on any conversation that might be going on
right now, it's just the most recent cartoon.)
Watched De Gr nne
slagtere (great black comedy even if it moves a bit slowly. I think if you
have to chose you'd better watch Adams bler with which it
shares writer/director Anders Thomas Jensen and a big part of the cast).
And this just has to be said: I can't believe anybody
could call eXistenZ
“quite a good see”. One of the worst movies I've ever seen, on a
level with “Tweed” (a late 90s Bond parody I distinctly remember
having seen but can't find on imdb right now.) I agree with Adeodato's
assessment of Billy Elliot,
though.
For once, the the
action of an otherwise stupid ISP, namely blocking port 25 outgoing, was
probably the right thing to do. Yes, in comcasts case, it apparently was
communicated badly, and of course you have to be able to get it unblocked
easily, but I think if all big providers would either block 25 outgoing
alltogether for their consumer offerings or would block it for hosts they see
spamming (pattern: smtp connections to more than 20 hosts within one minute
perhaps?) the world would be a better place.
OTOH spammers are already reacting: the percentage of spam I'm receiving
through regular MXen (as per reverse DNS), including Yahoo and Google, (but not
gmx so far, interestingly) is increasing markedly these months.
Errors were encountered while processing: debian-policy E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)(I haven't looked closer yet, but I had to laugh.)
Adeodato Sim complains
about the many ways to regulate sound volume on his system. I can only add
that on my Dell Inspiron 9300, the “Master” is actually not usable
because it is mapped only to the tiny stereo speakers while leaving the
subwoofer alone, which is mapped to “Master Mono”. So I have to
use the pcm mixer.
At least I can map the buttons (both Fn+keyboard key and the additional
buttons at the front of the laptop) to the pcm mixer. But it took quite some
fiddling for something the non-technical user will expect work out of the
box.
Andrew Pollock writes about visiting Prague, coming through
Z rich on the way:
Immigration [at Z rich airport] was the biggest joke ever. There was no paperwork at all, and we just handed our passports to the guy, who just looked at them casually, and waved us through. No stamp, no scan, no nothing. It was a bit disappointing really.Hey, this is Switzerland, what did you expect? :-) I don't say that bad experiences don't exist, but so far I always have been able to interact with officials (customs, police, judges, clerks, whatever) on the basic assumption that things will work out without too much hassle. Often the most difficult part is finding the office that is responsible for whatever I should do. Knowing what realistically can be expected and what might not be easily possible helps, too.
Going just from the title of Cameron's post about
his apt-p2p tool: How about automatically running a zeroconf-enabled
webserver serving /var/cache/apt/archives (and any mounted local
repositories?) during install and while aptitude is running (and, if the user
allows, as a daemon by default on a running system) and of course a
corresponding sources.list line and apt retrieval module. This would hugely
improve installation time for people with just a few machines who are too lazy
to set up their own apt cache.
Obviously, the details would be tricky, but since there is a security chain
from Release.gpg to the .deb, downloading packages from untrusted peers
shouldn't be a problem, even if the package name / version pair is not really
unique (or even if someone actually tries a spoofing attack.)
(There's a thought: running a tftp / dhcp server with a fai network boot in addition
would be a step towards world domination, too, closely followed by automated hacking tools to install Debian on
all computing devices on the network. Support call: “My printer only
prints one page saying debian:~# after power on and then
stops.”)
Update 2008-05-07: Both Nijel
and Florian Ludwig himself pointed out his apt-zeroconf project,
which is unfortunately not very actively developed at the moment. Yet another
thing I should/could do if I had the time.
Or should I say dear
Lucas? Although this is more relevant for the people wanting to talk
to Lucas on IRC. I recommend to use the leading edge technology set
forth in rfc 2821 and 2822 for this mode of
communication. I admit this is extremely experimental technology, but it might
be worth looking at nonetheless.
With Hans Reiser convicted
for murder, some seem to feel that reiserfs is more or less dead. Jason Perlow writes a very
strange article on ZDNet to which I'm replying to it mainly because he alludes
that Debian so far has failed to react.
First, default installations of Debian create ext3 and not reiserfs
filesystems (Please correct me if I'm wrong. I've just recently installed a
fresh etch, but I didn't specifically look at the fs.) And even if it were
reiserfs (v3), I don't see why a reaction would be called for now. The
stability of reiserfs has come up every once, before the whole murderer story
begun, and that the interaction between the reiserfs developers (including, of
course, Hans Reiser) and the kernel team were always difficult has also been
known for a long time. This is the kind of reason where I think it's
appropriate for Debian to take steps (i.e. switching to a different
filesystem), not a single event, where it is not even clear yet how the
reiserfs (v3 and v4) efforts will move on.
On to the technical stuff: Perlow tries, but doesn't really arrive at
understanding the issues he's writing about. Reiser 4 is discounted without a
single remark on its technical merits (I can't comment either as I have not
looked at it so far.) Why he discounts ext4 is not clear to me (because it is
not ripe for production use yet — but that's even more true of ZFS and
this Linux-NTFS thingy he rambles about further down...) He discounts JFS2
because it hasn't got a new release for several years (is that bad in a
filesystem?) but then touts ZFS as a great idea with minor licensing problems,
without speaking of patents which is
where the real problems lie (not to mention the fact that the Linux ZFS
port probably is much less tested than ext4 or JFS.) And in a final jump
into fantasy-land he mentions that NTFS might just be ideal for Linux, and
Microsoft is said to have started cooperating nicely with the Free Software
world, so all licensing and patent issues are certainly going away Real Soon
Now™. At least for Novell, these issues shouldn't be a problem, I
guess.
Not mentioned by Jason are btrfs (which has a quite
tightly coupled network filesystem brother, crfs and is in a very early
state of development), and hammer,
which comes from the BSD world and currently lacks a Linux port. Both efforts
are probably more likely to replace ext3 or reiser on Linux than both ZFS and
NTFS: no patent issues, no license issues, and the development is actually done
by a community and not a single company.
Update: Julien Blanche ha a much more succinct response to Jason
Perlow. More intersting to read than mine, too.
Next.