Re: Time to upgrade - 64bit?
On Wed, Apr 29, 2009 at 01:03:47PM +1200, Phill Coxon wrote: It's time for me to upgrade my main desktop - currently running 8.04 32bit - I've been waiting for KDE 4 to become more usable on a day to day basis. I'm going to upgrade to k/ubuntu 9.04 64bit. Just wondering if there are any remaining significant issues with 64bit on Ubuntu these days? Looks like most things are covered these days - skype, flash plugin etc. Thanks! I've been using 64 bit Windows 7 and 64 bit Ubuntu for a while now. I've had more concerns with 64 bit support in Windows than Linux by far. And in Windows I have *one* 64 bit application that I use that doesn't come with Windows - Putty - Which doesn't even need to be 64 bit. At first I had to use a 32 bit web browser in Linux. Then opera had a 64 bit version with support for 32 bit flash. Then there was finally a 64 bit flash. Now everything is peachy. That said, I'm still not sure how much benefit you really get ;) Ben.
Re: Basic cache for IP addresses
On Wed, Jun 11, 2008 at 07:38:56PM +1200, David Merriman wrote: Hi there, I'm looking for a way to cache website addresses to speed up page finding and loading. I'm using Firefox 2.0.0.14 on SuSE 10.3, with a D-Link DSL-502T broadband modem and D-Link DI-524UP wireless router (though I'm plugged directly into that, not wireless). At the moment, whenever I select a webpage from Firefox's bookmarks, or type in a URL, it takes approximately 10 seconds before the IP address is found, and the page starts loading. Firefox's status bar says Looking up Slashdot.org... (or whatever) for that long, before the page starts loading. Try dnsmasq. It easily uses your ISP's nameservers. And just caches. Small and simple. Also it has the added advantage that you can just create domain names in /etc/hosts and have it serve them to your LAN. It's also got a DHCP server. You don't need to use that component if you've got a decent DHCP server already though. That said, it's strange that your DNS is that slow. It sounds terribly broken. There are a couple of free DNS resolvers you can try from anywhere. One is 4.2.2.2, and another is 208.67.222.222.Both of these are hosted in multiple places (in the US predominantly). And performance tends to be reasonably good. Although there's a short latency increase for using a DNS server in the US ... it should be nothing like 1 second let alone 10! Ben.
Re: Free computers
Because it makes performance issues rather obvious to the eye. If something doesn't go smoothly on 16 mhz, then it's inefficient. That means when using faster computers, under higher load, performance will continue to be optimal... Ben. On Tue, Nov 18, 2003 at 06:58:58PM +1300, Paul William wrote: On Tue, 2003-11-18 at 18:31, Ben Aitchison wrote: it won't underclock to 16 mhz, will it? i want a 16 mhz 386 :) Why would you want a 16 mhz? On Tue, Nov 18, 2003 at 09:42:10AM +1300, Luuk Paulussen wrote: ok, only the 386 left now (although somehow I don't think I'm going to have a lot of luck) All it needs is a monitor... (I just remembered I have it's original keyboard as well) -- .''`. Paul William : :' :Debian admin and user `. `'` `- Debian - when you have better things to do than fixing a system
Re: Free computers
Some older computers have fixed clocks.. They don't always have jumpers to underclock. On Wed, Nov 19, 2003 at 08:55:31AM +1300, Luuk Paulussen wrote: I don't see why not... I'm sure you could just change some jumpers on the motherboard - Shall I put your name down? :) From: Ben Aitchison [EMAIL PROTECTED] Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Free computers Date: Tue, 18 Nov 2003 18:31:35 +1300 it won't underclock to 16 mhz, will it? i want a 16 mhz 386 :) On Tue, Nov 18, 2003 at 09:42:10AM +1300, Luuk Paulussen wrote: ok, only the 386 left now (although somehow I don't think I'm going to have a lot of luck) All it needs is a monitor... (I just remembered I have it's original keyboard as well) _ Download MSN Messenger @ http://messenger.xtramsn.co.nz - add your friends!
Re: Free computers
it won't underclock to 16 mhz, will it? i want a 16 mhz 386 :) On Tue, Nov 18, 2003 at 09:42:10AM +1300, Luuk Paulussen wrote: ok, only the 386 left now (although somehow I don't think I'm going to have a lot of luck) All it needs is a monitor... (I just remembered I have it's original keyboard as well)
Re: MANDRAKE 9.2
what kind of specs do modern distros like this need? For use on an evaluation box that is.. would a 64 mb pentium pro be sufficient? and any idea if you can do network installs, with the cd mounted in a different box? On Mon, Oct 20, 2003 at 10:39:04AM +1300, Paul Swafford wrote: Available from e-caf for the usual fee :) Can be seen in action... Regards Paul Swafford (Manager, [EMAIL PROTECTED] Arts Centre) (Level 2/28 Worcester Boulevard, Christchurch, NZ) (ph/fax +64 3 3656480 www.e-caf.com)
Re: MANDRAKE 9.2
Well, headless or head-only can be done. Remote X is always the best way to go for me anyway. With music/movie/etc playing locally, and everything else remote. My current desktop box at home has got 64 MB of ram and no-hard disk; it's only a P2 266, but it plays movies and music with ease, even without. But I enabled swap recently, anyway.. But I'm running OpenBSD on it currently, mostly because it's so much more effort to get Linux going remotely. I do want to compare performance though. On Mon, Oct 20, 2003 at 02:59:29PM +1300, Brad Beveridge wrote: The CPU is probably enough (mandrake optimises for i686) to run lightweight window managers, but I'd doubt the RAM would be enough to get much performance in while running X. It would be fine for a headless box.. Brad -Original Message- From: Ben Aitchison [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, October 20, 2003 2:58 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: MANDRAKE 9.2 what kind of specs do modern distros like this need? For use on an evaluation box that is.. would a 64 mb pentium pro be sufficient? and any idea if you can do network installs, with the cd mounted in a different box? On Mon, Oct 20, 2003 at 10:39:04AM +1300, Paul Swafford wrote: Available from e-caf for the usual fee :) Can be seen in action... Regards Paul Swafford (Manager, [EMAIL PROTECTED] Arts Centre) (Level 2/28 Worcester Boulevard, Christchurch, NZ) (ph/fax +64 3 3656480 www.e-caf.com)
Re: OpenBSD
On Tue, Jun 10, 2003 at 05:23:59PM +1200, Matthew Gregan wrote: On Tue, Jun 10, 2003 at 03:31:45PM +1200, Ben Aitchison wrote: The default kernel image doesn't use much memory for caching your disk - 5% of ram. This is easy to change, you can run: config -e -o /nbsd /bsd cachepct 25 mv /bsd /obsd; cp -f /nbsd /bsd And that'll give you 25% percent instead, which is a lot nicer. I think I use 60% on my desktop system which has 512 MB of ram, and never seems to be able to actually use up all of it's free ram let alone swap. This is a real shame. OpenBSD's caching behaviour is fairly antiquated nowadays, but this will improve once Chuck Cranor's NetBSD UVM code is merged into the tree. Yeah, that's what prompted me to try FreeBSD out a couple of years ago. But I got disk corruption under FreeBSD for some reason. And then I decided to do an OpenBSD install instead, and never looked back. I don't actually find it to be a problem of a serious enough nature to care. There's some low limits on system resources by default - you can't suddenly run 1000 xterm processes on a default install like you can on Linux 2.4. This is done for security reasons. It is? I thought it was because of having static versus dynamic limits. root's shell defaults to /bin/csh, which is icky. You can login as root and type chsh and change the line that says /bin/csh to /bin/ksh and then you'll have a decent shell that isn't bloated, but still has tab completion, support for vi key bindings, and I think emacs key bindings too, but I don't use them. No need to change the root shell, use sudo(8). Also note that csh is still a decent shell, and has command completion and other modern features. And csh is not bloated, either. Yeah, I was thinking of in comparison to bash, zsh etc. I don't mind csh that much. Most other people seem to find it harder than me, and I was trying to inculude what other people don't like. I do prefer ksh, though. I actually use zsh as my user shell - which *is* rather bloated, but nice and flexible :) (and ksh as my root shell) $ size `which csh` textdatabss dec hex 249856 16384 25140 291380 47234 $ size `which ksh` textdatabss dec hex 299008 12288 23928 335224 51d78 (From an OpenBSD 2.9 system) From OpenBSD 3.3.. zsh 3132 % size `which zsh` textdatabss dec hex 372736 16384 20080 409200 63e70 zsh 3133 % size `which bash` textdatabss dec hex 499712 32768 4052536532 82fd4 zsh 3134 % size `which ksh` textdatabss dec hex 303104 12288 25136 340528 53230 zsh 3135 % size `which csh` textdatabss dec hex 253952 16384 25620 295956 48414 Hmm, it seems that it's smaller than bash at least. There's no NZ mirror that's up-to-date that I know of. I've got the base system i386 tarballs, and source tarballs and I can make them publically accessible if anybody's keen. (but you'd still have to get packages). There is a mirror that's about an extra 50 msec away in Australia, on www.wiretapped.net/pub/OpenBSD, and there's also PlanetMirror (Australia again) - which seems to go fine sometimes, and pretty slow other times. The i386 directory from the June 5th 2003 snapshot of OpenBSD-current is 154MB. Not a huge download, but it is a shame there is no OpenBSD mirror, particularly for the likes of CVS. I'd be happy to provide the hardware if there was somewhere to connect it to the net. I might be able to host one. I have hardware and net connectivity. I'm not sure how much bandwidth it'd use though. zsh 3141 % du -ks openbsd3.3/i386 133823 openbsd3.3/i386 It's even smaller for OpenBSD 3.3. I was kind of scared off running a cvs server, by the fact that the documentation said that it wanted lots of resources. My server only has 256 megs of ram. Not that it's anywhere near to running low on RAM - I had 64 megs for ages, and I only tended to go into swap by about 10 megs - screen, epic, and mutt are all memory hogs. Single floppy install. I've done this many times, on many different computers, and it's easy, fast, convenient, and flexible. The install is very quick once you're used to it. Very little mucking around. Yeah, it's my favourite install by far. I got used to it very quickly. installed by default, apache just needs: httpd_flags= instead of httpd_flags=NO set in rc.conf, or httpd_flags=-u if you don't want to chroot. (apache defaults to chrooting, which means that if the web A few other services are also chroot()ed by default. The list of set[gu]id is reviewed regularly by the developers and reduced where and when possible. I think the number of setuid=0 binaries is well below 10 now, but don't quote me on that. Yeah, I wasn't really empathizing security, as I kind-of thought that everybody knew that OpenBSD was good for security. I
Re: Software development
On Tue, Jun 10, 2003 at 05:29:36PM +1200, Adam Martin wrote: Hello all, I am looking for a software developer willing to take on a project that I have in mind.. the work would be unpaid until completion of the project.. whereby programmer would be paid a 50% royalty (of profits). The skills needed Windows Programming Mail protocol xml protocol encryption technologies If anyone is interested please contact me off list for more information, - please provide a brief background too. Uhh, if this is specifically Windows related, and commercial in nature, does this really belong on the list? Ben.
Re: Gentoo (was Re: OpenBSD)
On Tue, Jun 10, 2003 at 06:04:31PM +1200, Matthew Gregan wrote: On Tue, Jun 10, 2003 at 05:39:20PM +1200, Ben Aitchison wrote: Well, you have to update for security issues. And often there are dependicies that decide they want to be updated too. I much prefer just having upgrades every 6 months. If you update something that other packages depends on, you need to rebuild the dependant packages, or install the binaries of them anyway. So nothing is different there. Where is this 'constantly changing' system? Six month upgrade cycles don't include fixes for security or correctness. You have to keep up-to-date with them as anybody else does--as the fixes become available. Yeah, but won't security updates also need core system components to be updated? That's what I seem to remember. I realise you can do apt-get update, without doing an apt-get -u upgrade, and then just apt-get install package with security update and then specifically upgrade packages. I'm just not sure that's good enough. I used to use Debian unstable once a time. But that's back when I had too much spare time. I didn't get many breakages. But things did break and things did change. Ben.
Re: OpenBSD
On Sat, Jun 07, 2003 at 12:11:19AM +0100, Jim Cheetham wrote: On Sat, Jun 07, 2003 at 10:46:40AM +1200, Dave Lilley wrote: Hi there folks, Anyone played or using OpenBSD ?? What's your opinion of it ??? I have an OpenBSD 3.3 boot cd (and floppy) if you wanted to borrow it. IMHO, the system is well suited to a BSD-aware administrator (I co-admin a set of FreeBSD boxen in the UK), who wants to know the setup is more secure than flexible, and will be running stable, standard services. It's not really a base for experimenting with the bleeding edge :-) and isn't really a desktop system, either. Why not? OpenBSD makes a better desktop system than Debian, I've found - much more current with KDE, Gnome, et cetera. If you want to achieve security of your data, use a live CD with portable storage (like Knoppix with a USB drive). If you want to have a stable, safe server, OpenBSD is worth considering. The trust level I'd ascribe to the distribution management of OpenBSD is extremely high, based on past experience. *BSD is excellent for servers, moreso than Linux which is very well suited to an active administrator. BSD admins are much more laid back :-) and they always know who has tested their software first. NetBSD is great for high-network-traffic machines. FreeBSD is almost as flexible as a Linux, and more stable in a qualitative way. OpenBSD sacrifices current features for an intelligent code review, leading to a lower need for security updates. What's not current about OpenBSD's features? It's a bit sparse on hardware support - but I don't have any issues other than the lack of PCI DSL support, which is marginal at best on Linux, anyway. Ben.
Re: OpenBSD
On Sat, Jun 07, 2003 at 10:46:40AM +1200, Dave Lilley wrote: Hi there folks, Anyone played or using OpenBSD ?? What's your opinion of it ??? interested in it. I've tried a lot of different OS's, and different Linux distributions, and I've found that OpenBSD is the only one that doesn't constantly piss me off. It's got it's problems, but they're problems I know, and understand, and can deal with. So let's start with what sucks about OpenBSD. The install doesn't work with a USB keyboard unless your bios will do emulation. Which often seems to require the USB keyboard to be plugged into a specific port. The default kernel image doesn't use much memory for caching your disk - 5% of ram. This is easy to change, you can run: config -e -o /nbsd /bsd cachepct 25 mv /bsd /obsd; cp -f /nbsd /bsd And that'll give you 25% percent instead, which is a lot nicer. I think I use 60% on my desktop system which has 512 MB of ram, and never seems to be able to actually use up all of it's free ram let alone swap. There's some low limits on system resources by default - you can't suddenly run 1000 xterm processes on a default install like you can on Linux 2.4. XFree86 isn't configured by default - after a fresh install you can run xf86config and setup your X. I don't find this a big deal. You can then edit /etc/rc.conf and change the line that says xdm_flags=NO to xdm_flags= to start xdm on bootup. root's shell defaults to /bin/csh, which is icky. You can login as root and type chsh and change the line that says /bin/csh to /bin/ksh and then you'll have a decent shell that isn't bloated, but still has tab completion, support for vi key bindings, and I think emacs key bindings too, but I don't use them. There's no NZ mirror that's up-to-date that I know of. I've got the base system i386 tarballs, and source tarballs and I can make them publically accessible if anybody's keen. (but you'd still have to get packages). There is a mirror that's about an extra 50 msec away in Australia, on www.wiretapped.net/pub/OpenBSD, and there's also PlanetMirror (Australia again) - which seems to go fine sometimes, and pretty slow other times. That said, these issues don't really phase me, especially seeing as I just did an OS/2 install - I'm still not sure how to make my keyboard mapping in OS/2 stick, and OS/2's config.sys is really scary, and I had many many other issues. Now, onto what I like about OpenBSD. Single floppy install. I've done this many times, on many different computers, and it's easy, fast, convenient, and flexible. There's no software raid in the default kernel. You have to change the default kernel image to include raid support, and build a new kernel. This isn't too hard. You don't have to know what all your hardware is or anything, as you're not starting from nothing, you're starting from the default kernel. There's no PXEBOOT support currently. This is actually a bit annoying :) You can just download the i386/ directory on a local ftp server, plug the computer you're installing into ethernet, and specify your l/p and path and get a fast install that doesn't require a cdrom drive, or floppy changing, or even a monitor/keyboard if you know that the computer will boot without. If there's no video card, output will default to the first serial port, else you can just tweak the disk slightly. (google and you'll find out how, it escapes me, but I remember it's simple) The configuration is simple, /etc isn't scary, /etc/rc.conf is a joy to work with for configuring many aspects of your system. SSH is installed by default, apache just needs: httpd_flags= instead of httpd_flags=NO set in rc.conf, or httpd_flags=-u if you don't want to chroot. (apache defaults to chrooting, which means that if the web server is compromised, none of rest of the system is visible, but this also means that if you want to access anything out of the web server root then you have to copy it into the chroot area) The filesystem layout is quite different to any Linux distribution that I've used, but I like it. Apache lives in /var/www, locally installed packages live in /usr/local, the base system lives in /usr. There's a convenient rescue disk kernel image called bsd.rd. You can type in bsd.rd at the boot loader, and you have a nice rescue system, with tar etc on it, that you can do installs, upgrades, or get a shell, and you're always safe :) USB support works out-of-the-box, and you can just plug in a USB mouse, or a USB keyboard while X is running and you suddenly have two mice or two keyboards that both work. I'm actually using a USB keyboard, and a USB mouse an my desktop system at home using OpenBSD. You can still run Linux programs under emulation. I use the Linux version of Opera, as Opera 7 is nicer than Opera 6 which is the latest version available for FreeBSD, which can also be emulated. Manpages are well written, and very useful. Everything in general is
Re: OpenBSD
On Tue, Jun 10, 2003 at 09:23:16AM +1200, Nick Rout wrote: On Tue, 10 Jun 2003 08:39:41 +1200 Simon Hansman [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hi, yeah far enough. On a slower computer Gentoo's probably not the best option (likewise Gentoo may not be the best option on a dialup connection)...But when you upgrade or buy a new one, you'll be able to run Gentoo :). Cheers Simon Re dialup, neither is any other distro any good if you rely solely on dialup to install and maintain your distro. People on dialup generally beg/steal/borrow a CD to install. Anyone who wants to do the same with gentoo can do so. Its simply a matter of finding someone with an up to date portage tree and dumping /usr/portage on a cd, then dumping the contents of the cd onto the 56kuser's hard drive. Bang, up to date emerge scripts and source code. I have done this for several people and it saves heaps of time. Then all you have to fear is an update to xfree or kde, which will take a while to download. But it will for binary packages too. Anyway, 56k with gentoo is no nore restrictive than any other distro which gets updated frequently - and face it who wants old versions when updates are released. I see binary distro users fluffing about looking for their distro's binaries for kde-latest when I have done emerge -u world and been running it for days or weeks. 56k's no big deal for network installs. You just don't install cruft that you don't need. (and you then get pissed off at Debian's constant minor upgrades of glibc which involve a complete download) Ben.
Re: OpenBSD
On Tue, Jun 10, 2003 at 09:40:17AM +1200, Nick Rout wrote: On Tue, 10 Jun 2003 09:35:29 +1200 Simon Hansman [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Yeah, I've helped a couple of dialup users using the same method...the problem is updating but as you say it'd be the same for any distro. So there you go, as Nick has made clear, dialup shouldn't stop you from using Gentoo :) Now having said that,doing _any_ major upgrade over 56k is enought to make you want broadband. That includes windows update thru to any of the free OSes. If it takes longer than overnight, you've got too many packages that you don't need installed imo. Ben.
Re: Gentoo (was Re: OpenBSD)
On Tue, Jun 10, 2003 at 12:00:48PM +1200, Fisher, Robert (FXNZ CHC) wrote: I suggest going to http://gazza.citylink.co.nz/gentoo/releases/1.4_rc4/x86/x86/livecd/ and get gentoo-3stages-x86-1.4_rc4.iso And there is another great thing about Gentoo - there is a New Zealand mirror. PS - I will stand corrected if others have better suggestions. Anyone have any idea how to install gentoo without a cdrom drive? I googled once without much success. I want the most minimal system that involves being able to remotely access the box, even if via null modem cable. Then I can stick the noisy computer away from me, and not mind the long compile times :) Actually, now I think about it. I have a Dual PPro 200, that has a scsi cdrom drive, which I have no idea how to boot off. But if I can boot off of a floppy drive and hardness a cdrom image, it'd be fine? It's got Debian on it at the moment (FreeBSD wouldn't go on it) but it's not even turned on, because I don't really have any use for it :) Ben.
Re: Hardware
On Mon, Jun 09, 2003 at 12:24:53PM +1200, Adam wrote: Hello all, Apologies if this sort of post is not allowed I have about 15 boxes that I want to get rid of, brought them awhile ago and realise that They aint quite what I need. Digital PC3000 200MHZ MMX 64MB RAM 10/100 NIC FDD 2Gig HDD Keyboard Mouse Just wondering what they are worth, and if anybody wants any. Would make good firewalls, proxy servers etc. Even dumb terminals. I could be interested in some. I could give you $300 for 8 boxes. Ben.
Re: Hardware
On Tue, Jun 10, 2003 at 02:58:15PM +1200, Adam Martin wrote: I have been getting lot of questions regarding the boxes I have available, so here are the answers Digital PC3100 64MB SD-Ram (168pin) FDD Keyboard (Digital) Mouse 2GHZ HDD 200MHZ MMX Onboard S3Trio64V2 2 USB Ports ESS Audiodrive Soundcard No Monitor I paid $120+GST for each box, As such I would like to get $120 for each one. And there I go selling P2's for under that. :) You could try trademe, that's where I buy lots of stuff I don't need from. :) Ben.
Re: Gentoo (was Re: OpenBSD)
Who really wants to deal with a constantly changing system though? Only a geek with too much time, and too few projects? On Tue, Jun 10, 2003 at 04:36:32PM +1200, Matthew Gregan wrote: On Tue, Jun 10, 2003 at 01:55:24PM +1200, Brad Beveridge wrote: Sorry - that's not apples and apples. You're comparing Gentoo stable vs Debian testing. However I can't see how to get the website to Yes, I repeatedly mentioned it was Debian testing. I chose Debian testing because most Debian users who want a stable system with fairly recent packages are likely to be running testing. Sure, it is not _called_ 'stable', but you'll find it is (simplistically speaking) as stable as another distribution running the same versions of each package. display it's unstable packages :) Maybe Debian unstable might be a closer comparison (I won't suggest trying Deb stable - that's just unfair!) Did you look at the list? Debian testing was already fairly competitive. Debian unstable is not appropriate to compare because it really is unstable, and is likely to contain broken packages at any time. Cheers, -mjg -- Matthew Gregan |/ /|[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Gentoo (was Re: OpenBSD)
On Tue, Jun 10, 2003 at 05:33:28PM +1200, Matthew Gregan wrote: On Tue, Jun 10, 2003 at 04:37:49PM +1200, Ben Aitchison wrote: Who really wants to deal with a constantly changing system though? How is it constantly changing? It only changes when you perform an upgrade. Much the same as an up-to-date Gentoo system would. Well, you have to update for security issues. And often there are dependicies that decide they want to be updated too. I much prefer just having upgrades every 6 months. Ben.
Re: adsl ISP's. was: Telstraclear cable: 128kb - 256kb no extra charge in May?
On Mon, Apr 07, 2003 at 12:59:46PM +1200, Mahesh De Silva wrote: Dam i was thinking of switching to paradise dsl, hoping to get the same performance as cable. Is the speed issue with telecom/ADSL? Any one recamend a good ISP. I was with Net4u, but there fait is uncertain. % /usr/local/sbin/mtr --report www.nzherald.co.nz HOSTLOSS RCVD SENTBEST AVG WORST 202-49-70-51.plain.net.nz 0%16 160.620.750.85 202-0-60-254.paradise.net.nz 0%16 16 50.40 51.29 52.66 192.168.253.225 0%16 16 51.30 59.58 74.63 kelly.ipnet2.paradise.net.nz 0%16 16 52.95 72.35 120.33 fa7-0.bertha.paradise.net.nz 0%16 16 53.84 70.36 113.17 g1-0-1042.u21.tar.telstraclear.net0%16 16 57.16 66.38 92.56 fa0-1.b1.lqy.wlg.tsnz.net 0%16 16 57.11 77.86 265.02 fa4-0-0.b2.sxb.akl.tsnz.net 0%16 16 68.35 78.67 184.59 wilsonh.b2.sxb.tsnz.net 0%16 16 68.47 80.08 103.87 whgc7.wilsonandhorton.co.nz 0%16 16 67.56 75.44 92.58 nzherald.co.nz0%16 16 69.07 73.70 83.68 They're variable. Right now they're not too bad. But there's still congestion on 192.168.253.225. The first hop's confusing, because when using ADSL I'm natting internet ip numbers. Anyway, look at 192.168.253.225 .. that ip number sometimes rises to 150 msec. And you can't get anywhere useful without traversing it. In the evening or weekend it's worse. With cable there was only a few msec of congestion unless things were really screwed, like over second pings, but I noticed that less than once a week. Even Christchurch to Christchurch ADSL seems to hit it... Paradise seems to have national traffic routing via Sydney occasionally - but other than that, their core network seems pretty decent. Paridse ADSL actually had a period of time when it took like an hour to connect, with frequent disconnections. But now the connection seems to last for days. (I'm hoping this will move to months, damn dynamic IP) Ben.
Re: Telstraclear cable: 128kb - 256kb no extra charge in May?
On Sun, Apr 06, 2003 at 07:06:05PM -0700, G. M. Bodnar wrote: Ben Aitchison is on permanent record as saying: :The central city isn't even cabled up yet! sigh ADSL is really really :annoying. Oh and Paradise ADSL is more variable than Paradise Cable. :Often national pings are in excess of 150 msec. You'd really think they :could at least cable up everywhere between the four avenues. Is there an actual coverage map? I was looking around for one earlier today and couldn't find anything. Not that I know of. They won't say when your area will be covered, even. I tried to push, and they said that they'd ring me back in a few days about when it's likely to be available. They never returned my call. Ben.
Re: uname
On Tue, Nov 12, 2002 at 04:27:25PM +1300, Michael JasonSmith wrote: On Tue, 2002-11-12 at 16:11, Simon Hansman wrote: So tell me, what are the benefits of running a 2.5 kernel? Is there anything revolutionary different to 2.4? For now, no. When it becomes 2.6 you should think about upgrading as it will be a lot faster than 2.4, and sound-support should be a lot better. What's with the desire to constantly upgrade? There probably isn't *that* much performance benefit. There will be, probably, but you'd get more of an upgrade from having a faster cpu, or hard-disk, or more RAM, or such generally. When you realise you're lagging way behind, .. that's when you need to upgrade. Mind you, software-wise ssh etc are getting better security implemented now days which *is* important upgrade-wise. Oh well, here's a uname -a of mine.. purple% uname -a OpenBSD purple.muck.net.nz 3.1 PURPLE#0 i386 I prefer OpenBSD (: Ben.
Re: Weird-as problem
On Fri, Aug 30, 2002 at 09:24:25AM +1200, C Falconer wrote: Gidday all. I'm going to describe a problem that I was having with my work machines, and I'm going to see who comes closest to the correct answer to the problem (which took three days to solve) I have a Ppro 166 doing firewall duties. It has eth0, 192.168.1.1 with netmask of 255.255.0.0 for internal, and eth1, 202.0.37.196 / 255.255.255.0 for the cablemodem side. On the firewall, ping works fine to internet hosts, localhost, and internal hosts. It is runningf 2.4.19 with an iptables firewall script. Internally there is a machine called belt, which is the main linux box. It runs bind9, squid, exim, and samba. belt has two nics eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:02:E3:16:7F:FE inet addr:192.168.1.2 Bcast:192.168.255.255 Mask:255.255.0.0 eth1 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:02:E3:15:D4:CB inet addr:192.168.1.12 Bcast:192.168.255.255 Mask:255.255.0.0 eth0 is bound to squid and other IP related stuff, eth1 is used for samba and windowsie stuff. Both NICs are plugged into the same 100 Mbit switch. Destination Gateway GenmaskFlags Metric Ref Use Iface 192.168.0.0 * 255.255.0.0 U 0 00 eth1 default 192.168.1.1 0.0.0.0 UG0 00 eth0 All internal pinging from belt works fine. What seems to be the problem? I'd haszard to guess it's because you're running two interfaces on the same subnet, and you're binding to one ethernet interface, and the packets are being sent with a source address of 192.168.1.12, and then you're sending them out eth0, but receiving via eth1. You should turn reverse path filtering off, which seems to default to on for some brain-dead reason. Or it's doing some kind of load-balancing and using both interfaces. If you wanted to use two interfaces, wouldn't it make more sense to make them both into a bridge, and both be virtual interfaces, hooked up to two different switches. Assuming you can do STP on your switch. Or maybe you can just do trunking on your switch, and make one 200 megabit interface out of both interfaces? The other thing is that the ping problem could partially be rate-limiting icmp-echo/icmp-reply packets. (RedHat seems to default this way now days) Also why are you using 192.168.0.0/16 when it's an area set aside for /24s? It means you're sure to get a clash if you connect your network with another using address space within 192.168.0.0/16. Ben.
Re: cp patch
On Mon, Jul 15, 2002 at 03:58:47PM +0200, kza wrote: I am working on a patch to cp (and eventually mv) that provides a status output with speed and eta etc. This is standard with most gui file managers etc, but belongs in cp too. How many times have you stared wating for a long network copy, only to realise much later, that the server or network went down? Could be useful when using unreliable systems... I know its got a long way to go before it is acceptable by GNU, (if it will be accepted at all). I just want some comments at this stage, I am still working on it. Oh. It patches against GNU fileutils 4.1 and is found here: http://cratos.ath.cx/~kza/cp.patch It is activated with the -o flag. I am posting here in case anyone wants to try this patch and can give me constructive criticism. Debate as to whether this belongs in GNU fileutils is also appreciated. I'd definitely say that it shouldn't be a part of the normal cp. You could have a super-cp akin to the super-ls that some people use which has colours support. There's already default output of speeds when using dd: % dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/null count=1000 1000+0 records in 1000+0 records out 512000 bytes transferred in 22.960 secs (22300 bytes/sec) But I'm assuming you're trying to show stuff in realtime -- which could screw up anything interactive. And GNU utilities are already bloated as-is. Actually, that reminds me... has anybody tried GIT? GNU Interactive Tools? Ben.
Re: which user is a process running as?
On Tue, May 28, 2002 at 02:34:16PM +1200, Nick Rout wrote: How about wrapping the actual process up in a script that dumps the userid (?whoami?) to a file, then calls the real executable? ahh yes I like that, I'll try it tonight (don't you love being able to ssh to the office and administer the box you don't have time to manage during the day) I love being able to. But I love even more not having to :) Ben.
Re: Almost converted...
On Thu, May 23, 2002 at 09:36:00AM +1200, Zane Gilmore wrote: Most of us programmers/geeks love to expound our knowledge ;-) and we definitely need people who are not afraid of asking questions. Because there are often so many ways of solving a problem, all of us often will read answers from others and learn something new, no matter the level of expertise. The problem that tends to come up though, is that all the easy answers get answered and the complicated problems get ignored. This is a trend in mailing lists in general. I wish I knew an easy answer :) For instance, I want to figure out what country an AS number is in, without doing mass whois querys. Like for instance: % whois -h whois.apnic.net AS9800 Will tell me that that AS number is in China. I'd like to be able to (say) block all of China from accessing my SMTP port for instance. I've got a BGP dump of prefixes to AS numbers, so that I can figure out what IP subnets belong to which AS number. Now this is a challenge to see if anyone has any ideas :P Ben.
Re: how to stuff up your day
On Tue, Apr 30, 2002 at 04:28:34PM +1200, Nick Rout wrote: as well as a whole lot of other crap. Luckily I had stayed logged in as root, and had some backups of the most important files (/etc/passwd was a REAL worry until I realised there was a backup of it dated [date You really should be doing backups, or cvs or such if you care about your files. There's no excuse -- you were lucky. Next time you might not be as lucky. Ben.
Re: Sound Cards under Linux
On Mon, Jan 14, 2002 at 07:13:27PM +1300, Julian Visch wrote: Can anyone recommend a good sound card for running under linux as I suspect my Sound Blaster has given up the ghost. I am especially interested in anyone who has tried using it with Sound Studio. Personally I'm using Winfast 4x, and Winfast 6x sound cards, one on work computer and one on home computer. They're affordable, they do digital input/output, and they don't resample digital like SoundBlaster Lives do. In both situations I'm using an external DAC[1]... So I haven't used the 4 or 6 channel analogue outputs, and have no idea how well they're supported under Linux. There's a few annoyances, but nothing too major (like they can't do under 44.1khz when using digital). They use CMI8738 chipset. About $80ish from memory. Their DAC's suck though. Analogue output is terrible just like any other consumer card. Another thing is that it wants to occupy two external slots to make way for all of the inputs/outputs. Overall, I'd still buy another one ... if I but had another DAC. Ben. [1] Digital to Analogue convertor, input S/PDIF output stereo analogue. Significantly improves sound quality in my experience.
Re: Interesting url
On Wed, Dec 19, 2001 at 12:04:52PM +1300, Russell Sargent wrote: Although this is Microsoft it has a relevance to others http://www.microsoft.com[EMAIL PROTECTED]/pub/mskb/Q209354.asp It's interesting to note that Opera warns you when trying to load this page that you are actually goignto www.wewebyou.net. Pretty nice (: Ben.
Re: Detach program from tty?
On Wed, Oct 24, 2001 at 09:18:24AM +1300, Nick Rout wrote: Thanks all, I used screen succcessfully, although nohup was the word I was originally thinking of I think. Damn this BSD packaging system is good! screen was not installed, but all i had to do was: su'd to root That's my main complaint about the BSD Ports system. Other than that it's pretty good. That said, Debian is less effort. It is just apt-get install screen. Of course Debian has the same damn annoying root problem.
