Re: FreeBSD I LOVE YOU
On Wed, Jan 19, 2005 at 09:10:09PM +0100, Anthony Atkielski wrote: faisal gillani writes: fg hmmm exactly right .. u know i have a 750MHz At halon fg with 256MB ram .. still my processor is 80% idle fg most of the time .. fg i also have some windows server on my network but fg thats a compulsory rather then choice . I'm gradually migrating legacy aps off my older NT server and I think it might be extremely interesting to install FreeBSD on that machine once it is free--if only I could persuade it to boot from diskette (for some reason, the diskette drive no longer seems to be recognized by the OS). It's an old HP Vectra, but like all vintage HP high-end machines, it still works perfectly, after nearly a decade of continuous use. Can anyone tell me how to install FreeBSD on a machine that is running Windows NT and refuses to boot from CD or from diskette? I don't suppose there's any magic program I could run from NT that would start a FreeBSD installation, is there? I've used loadlin before to boot up a linux installer when I had neither a floppy driver nor a cdrom drive to boot from, it works quite well. For freebsd, I'm not sure if there is a similar program or not, but one possibility would be to use loadlin to start a basic linux environment, then use linux to install the freebsd bootloader to the hard drive and start the freebsd installer. -- Anthony ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- I sense much NT in you. NT leads to Bluescreen. Bluescreen leads to downtime. Downtime leads to suffering. NT is the path to the darkside. Powerful Unix is. Public Key: ftp://ftp.tallye.com/pub/lorenl_pubkey.asc Fingerprint: B3B9 D669 69C9 09EC 1BCD 835A FAF3 7A46 E4A3 280C ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: FreeBSD I LOVE YOU
Matthias Buelow ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) [050121 17:21]: David Gerard wrote: So something around 500MHz will happily run Pango and the other cutting-edge internationalisation stuff if you fill it with memory. My experience is that with a 500Mhz Pentium 3 (512K cache, 512mb RAM, Matrox G450 AGP graphics), Gnome (2.6 tested) is unbearably slow. A large factor here is the Xft font rendering (Ok, you could use xterm instead of gnome-terminal, or switch off antialiasing), which is unaccelerated (at least was then), and _brutally_ slow. If you run something with copious output in gnome-terminal, it'll more or less lock up the entire machine. I don't normally use Gnome, but evaluated it on that old machine for some reason that is of no interest here. KDE is a bit faster, don't know why, but seems to use more RAM. IMHO you need at least a 2.8 or 3GHz P-IV for that kind of desktop to get things to run well, and, in my experience, raw CPU power here is the dominating factor. Hrmmm. OK, I was guessing on GNOME. I have read that pango is grossly CPU-hungry, but that the project is keenly aware of the problem. (But refuses to do the easy thing of special optimisation for ISO-8859-1, specifically so that the international stuff will actually get attention.) And that this is the big problem with Gnome terminal. Of course these machines are still perfectly usable with windowmaker, or fvwm, or similar. That's why the underpowered Debian laptop uses twm with programs launched from an xterm ;-) - d. ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: FreeBSD I LOVE YOU
David Gerard wrote: My experience is that with a 500Mhz Pentium 3 (512K cache, 512mb RAM, Matrox G450 AGP graphics), Gnome (2.6 tested) is unbearably slow. A I have read that pango is grossly CPU-hungry, but that the project is keenly aware of the problem. (But refuses to do the easy thing of special I never understood why they couldn't use pre-rendered glyphs when the background is a uniform white, or sth. like that. Anyways. Compare it with Quake3, which ran very well on the above hardware. Just to see in what ballpark today's modern desktops are, when apparently they don't seem to do much, they do in fact burn CPU cycles like hell. Of course Q3 is hardware accelerated, but still. mkb. ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: FreeBSD I LOVE YOU
Overite it with randomness so dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/drive would do the trick? -- /Xian Technological progress is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal. Albert Einstein ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: FreeBSD I LOVE YOU
On Fri, 21 Jan 2005 01:47, Anthony Atkielski wrote: Matthew Seaman writes: MS If your drive contains or once contained military secrets, then in the MS USA and probably anywhere in the West, standard disposal procedure is MS that the drive be completely overwritten with specific patterns of MS random data several times, and then taken to a secure facility where MS the whole thing is literally stamped flat and chewed into small lumps MS of scrap. Assuming one doesn't have the resources to do this, what might one do to secure disk drives before disposal. I've thought of opening them up and scratching the platters or chopping them into pieces (not sure how hard this might be to do), or something. Home incineration isn't very practical, nor are machines that can chop metallic platters into confetti. Also, is there anything like a bulk degausser for disk platters (after removal from the drives)? Come to think of it, I can't remember the last time I saw a tape degausser, and I still am not quite sure what to do with old backup tapes that are unreadable but still filled with backup data. I open up my old backup tapes use a cutting blade to cut through the tape spool in a couple of places, to you end up with hundreds of pieces of tape, no more than a couple of centimetres long. Then I generally throw them in a couple of different bins. Tape de-gaussers usually aren't much good - they were mostly made for erasing open reel tape that used ferric oxide particles. Backup tapes normally use metal particle tapes that need a much stronger magnetic field to effectively erase them. Cheers, -- Ian GPG Key: http://homepages.picknowl.com.au/imoore/imoore.asc pgpxi3BerQl83.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: FreeBSD I LOVE YOU
Ian Moore wrote: Tape de-gaussers usually aren't much good - they were mostly made for erasing open reel tape that used ferric oxide particles. Backup tapes normally use metal particle tapes that need a much stronger magnetic field to effectively erase them. More powerful degaussers are available, like the one found at http://www.datalinksales.com/degaussers/hd1.htm Not cheap (about $5k if memory serves), but seems to do the job on both HDs and modern tapes (what the company calls coercive media). We have not found it necessary to remove the HD platters from their enclosures, although I imagine that might yield more thorough results. We just make two passes for better peace of mind. I also imagine that data on degaussed platters might still be available to the kinds of inspection techniques used on platters overwritten with random data, but our acceptable cost/reward balance tops off somewhere above preventing casual inspection and below stopping the NSA. One way that degaussing is more effective than random data writing is that the disk's servo tracks are also destroyed, meaning you'd probably need to return the device to the OEM for factory reconditioning before anyone could usefully attach it to another computer. I hope it's true, as that was our primary justification for the cost of the degausser. -- Greg Barniskis, Computer Systems Integrator South Central Library System (SCLS) Library Interchange Network (LINK) gregb at scls.lib.wi.us, (608) 266-6348 ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: FreeBSD I LOVE YOU
On Wed, 19 Jan 2005 15:26:49 -0500 daniel quinn [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On January 19, 2005 03:06 pm, Anthony Atkielski wrote: [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Fac I think the junky old PC market is just what the current FreeBSD team Fac is targeting. At least someone is thinking of it. There are a lot of PCs out there that are still in perfect working order, but are too slow to run the hugely bloated desktop operating systems (and the server versions thereof) that are popular today. Efficient operating systems like UNIX can give these machines new life and purpose and save tremendous resources in the process. Indeed, someone in the Third World without the means to buy a new PC and an expensive Windows license could find a junk PC and install FreeBSD on it for nothing, and be up and running in no time. While UNIX doesn't have the advantages of Windows on the desktop, you can't beat the price, and it'll run on anything. not to mention the huge environmental implications of producing newer hardware every year to support said bloated hardware. if the same job can be done with a 10 year old box, i'm glad freebsd is here to help me do it. The recent discussion in this thread causes me to wonder whether FreeBSD's performance on older, slower equipment could be a contributing factor to why hardware vendors like Dell and ATI are willing to provide only limited support for LINUX and none at all for FreeBSD. After all, if FreeBSD lets a Pentium II w/MMX handle, for example, a moderately loaded web site or large network firewall or some other reasonable use and thereby obviating many purchases of hardware upgrades, why would they want to encourage its use? Scott Bennett, Comm. ASMELG, CFIAG ** * Internet: bennett at cs.niu.edu * ** * A well regulated and disciplined militia, is at all times a good * * objection to the introduction of that bane of all free governments * * -- a standing army. * *-- Gov. John Hancock, New York Journal, 28 January 1790 * ** ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: FreeBSD I LOVE YOU
On Thu, 20 Jan 2005 01:09:10 +0100 Matthias Buelow [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Anthony Atkielski wrote: Indeed, someone in the Third World without the means to buy a new PC and an expensive Windows license could find a junk PC and install FreeBSD on And where do you think would they find this junk PC? Don't you think that's a bit condescending? Like, let's give those negroes our old shoes? And so your preference would be that the machines should go to a landfill rather than to someone who can't afford a computer at all? They can perfectly well buy new machines at local retailers (there are some in bigger cities) for a fraction of the money that it would take you to ship'em your old rustbucket. Why don't you send some money instead? You sound awfully willing to spend other people's money. Perhaps you should ask them to buy you some texts on economics. Scott Bennett, Comm. ASMELG, CFIAG ** * Internet: bennett at cs.niu.edu * ** * A well regulated and disciplined militia, is at all times a good * * objection to the introduction of that bane of all free governments * * -- a standing army. * *-- Gov. John Hancock, New York Journal, 28 January 1790 * ** ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: FreeBSD I LOVE YOU
On 2005-01-20 04:30, Anthony Atkielski [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Giorgos Keramidas writes: I've seen Windows machines lose CD-ROM or floppy drives, on perfectly working systems. You may find that booting the installation CD-ROM of some FreeBSD version locates the floppy drive just fine. The problem is external to Windows. The machine won't even boot off a diskette. I see. I hadn't realized that, until I read the entire thread. The floppy drive makes the usual noises as the BIOS goes through its paces, but then the BIOS says that the diskette isn't there. It's frustrating. The machine is so old and has been so reliable that I don't remember much about configuring the BIOS, and I have no idea where the documentation is now. It _seems_ like the diskette drive may have a problem, but I'm not sure. This is likely too. Floppies have mechanical moving parts that are more prone to failure than other pieces of hardware. Your best choise may be to install by physically moving the disk to an other system. Then you can return the disk to the Vectra system and let it boot. No other systems available currently, alas. And this machine has SCSI drives; the other machines have cheaper IDE or SATA drives. Hmmm, that could be a problem. Any chance of installing a SCSI controller to one of the other machines? :-) ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: FreeBSD I LOVE YOU
Scott Bennett wrote: And so your preference would be that the machines should go to a landfill rather than to someone who can't afford a computer at all? Here in the Civilized World, we recycle the materials used in computers (well, most of them), we don't throw them into the sea. You sound awfully willing to spend other people's money. Perhaps you should ask them to buy you some texts on economics. Perhaps you should attempt to do some calculations and try to find out which is actually less expensive, and at the same time, provides bigger benefit. Apart from the fact that a person who speaks Arabic or Indonesian, or Pashtu probably has little use for a kewl-themed blackbox desktop, or something like that. That works for us latin-script Unix geeks with a working knowledge of English but certainly not for an average user in the 3rd World. And anything that gets near internationalization on Unix or Linux, namely KDE and Gnome, requires even more powerful hardware than Windoze and probably still doesn't have the kind of local language integration that a localized version of Windows has. Wake up from your pipe dreams. Shipping decommissioned computers to the 3rd world is not going to solve any development problem. Cheap Asian computers with a pirated localized version of XP Home and Office are a lot more effective here. ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: FreeBSD I LOVE YOU
Matthias Buelow wrote: Apart from the fact that a person who speaks Arabic or Indonesian, or Pashtu probably has little use for a kewl-themed blackbox desktop, or something like that. That works for us latin-script Unix geeks with a working knowledge of English but certainly not for an average user in the 3rd World. You seem to forget that in most african and central/south american countries the official languages are still English, French, Spanish, Portugese, or other European language, while local languages are only slowly getting recognized. Further, the European languages are particularly strong in areas that actually have electricity to hook up a computer, not to mention internet access. Also, in many developing countries, people are much more aware of the need to learn in particular English than in many European countries. So, shipping of used pc's to a second life may not be a bad idea. Also, these old machines are less sensible to fluctuations in electricity, and this may be important factor in parts of these countries. That said, ofcourse, one should consider the cost against buying new computers, the risks that personal data is not properly deleted before shipping etc. (personally I believe that harddisks should always be destroyed). Cheers, Erik -- Ph: +34.666334818 web: http://www.locolomo.org S/MIME Certificate: http://www.locolomo.org/crt/2004071206.crt Subject ID: A9:76:7A:ED:06:95:2B:8D:48:97:CE:F2:3F:42:C8:F2:22:DE:4C:B9 Fingerprint: 4A:E8:63:38:46:F6:9A:5D:B4:DC:29:41:3F:62:D3:0A:73:25:67:C2 ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: FreeBSD I LOVE YOU
On Jan 20 at 12:53, Erik Norgaard opined: (personally I believe that harddisks should always be destroyed). Eh? Surely you don't meant trashed - physically annihilated? Phew! I believe in radical solutions certainly, but..umm..isn't that going just a little bit too far? :-) I'm assuming you mean destructively formatted... Regards, -Colin -- Colin J. Raven FreeBSD 5.3-RELEASE - http://www.FreeBSD.org - There can be only One Thu Jan 20 13:11:00 CET 2005 1:11PM up 2:01, 1 user, load averages: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00 ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: FreeBSD I LOVE YOU
Colin J. Raven wrote: Eh? Surely you don't meant trashed - physically annihilated? Phew! I believe in radical solutions certainly, but..umm..isn't that going just a little bit too far? :-) I'm assuming you mean destructively formatted... Surely that depends on what was on them. The disks from Internet Cafe computers are most likely unproblematic. mkb. ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: FreeBSD I LOVE YOU
On Thu, 20 Jan 2005 02:55:39 -0600 (CST), Scott Bennett wrote On Wed, 19 Jan 2005 15:26:49 -0500 daniel quinn [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On January 19, 2005 03:06 pm, Anthony Atkielski wrote: [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Fac I think the junky old PC market is just what the current FreeBSD team Fac is targeting. At least someone is thinking of it. There are a lot of PCs out there that are still in perfect working order, but are too slow to run the hugely bloated desktop operating systems (and the server versions thereof) that are popular today. Efficient operating systems like UNIX can give these machines new life and purpose and save tremendous resources in the process. Indeed, someone in the Third World without the means to buy a new PC and an expensive Windows license could find a junk PC and install FreeBSD on it for nothing, and be up and running in no time. While UNIX doesn't have the advantages of Windows on the desktop, you can't beat the price, and it'll run on anything. not to mention the huge environmental implications of producing newer hardware every year to support said bloated hardware. if the same job can be done with a 10 year old box, i'm glad freebsd is here to help me do it. The recent discussion in this thread causes me to wonder whether FreeBSD's performance on older, slower equipment could be a contributing factor to why hardware vendors like Dell and ATI are willing to provide only limited support for LINUX and none at all for FreeBSD. After all, if FreeBSD lets a Pentium II w/MMX handle, for example, a moderately loaded web site or large network firewall or some other reasonable use and thereby obviating many purchases of hardware upgrades, why would they want to encourage its use? AFAIK Dell only provides support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Which is a company. There's probably profit in it for Dell as well. So why would a company that want more money give support for an operating system where is no money to be gained from? Of course, I could be completely wrong in here. So feel free to correct me if I am :) Cheers, Jorn ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: FreeBSD I LOVE YOU
Colin J. Raven wrote: Eh? Surely you don't meant trashed - physically annihilated? Phew! I believe in radical solutions certainly, but..umm..isn't that going just a little bit too far? :-) I'm assuming you mean destructively formatted... You always have to classify the data and take appropriate measures, as well as consider the costs of various methods of data destruction. It may actually be cheaper to melt the disks and by new ones rather than do a destructive format. Remember, if you have no trust relation with the ones who receive the pc's then the trusted employee will most likely be one from your organization and high paid. It has happened that companies have shipped of a load of used pc's for reuse in poor countries and then sensitive data has reappeared where it shouldn't, causing more than just embarasment to the original owner. If a harddisk contains sensitive information such as personal infor- mation, information about your security infrastructure (passwords), or other, then I would prefer a complete meltdown of the disk and recycle it as scrap metal. EOR Erik -- Ph: +34.666334818 web: http://www.locolomo.org S/MIME Certificate: http://www.locolomo.org/crt/2004071206.crt Subject ID: A9:76:7A:ED:06:95:2B:8D:48:97:CE:F2:3F:42:C8:F2:22:DE:4C:B9 Fingerprint: 4A:E8:63:38:46:F6:9A:5D:B4:DC:29:41:3F:62:D3:0A:73:25:67:C2 ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: FreeBSD I LOVE YOU
On Jan 20 at 14:55, Erik Norgaard launched this into the bitstream: Colin J. Raven wrote: Eh? Surely you don't meant trashed - physically annihilated? Phew! I believe in radical solutions certainly, but..umm..isn't that going just a little bit too far? :-) I'm assuming you mean destructively formatted... You always have to classify the data and take appropriate measures, as well as consider the costs of various methods of data destruction. It may actually be cheaper to melt the disks and by new ones rather than do a destructive format. Remember, if you have no trust relation with the ones who receive the pc's then the trusted employee will most likely be one from your organization and high paid. It has happened that companies have shipped of a load of used pc's for reuse in poor countries and then sensitive data has reappeared where it shouldn't, causing more than just embarasment to the original owner. If a harddisk contains sensitive information such as personal infor- mation, information about your security infrastructure (passwords), or other, then I would prefer a complete meltdown of the disk and recycle it as scrap metal. I always thought that formatting/fdisk'ing twice completely erased *permanently* whatever had been on the disc. You make an interesting case that previously I never thought about in any detail. Thanks for real info from the field, it's definitely food for thought! Regards, -Colin -- Colin J. Raven FreeBSD 5.3-RELEASE - http://www.FreeBSD.org - There can be only One Thu Jan 20 14:59:00 CET 2005 2:59PM up 3:49, 2 users, load averages: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00 ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: FreeBSD I LOVE YOU
Colin J. Raven wrote: I always thought that formatting/fdisk'ing twice completely erased *permanently* whatever had been on the disc. You make an interesting case that previously I never thought about in any detail. Thanks for real info from the field, it's definitely food for thought! I am not an expert on this, but AFAIK formatting/fdisking only rewrites the disktable and file information while the file content remain. To actually delete the files you need to overwrite each sector with random data (I think there are tools in the ports for this). Some security companies suggest that you need to overwrite each sector 20 times or more. Due to inacurracies in the writing, there may be remnants of data left after the first overwrites that can be recovered with the right tools, allthough for most users, it may be considered sufficient security to do a single overwrite. If this is required, it may actually be cheaper simply to ship new disks rather than have someone destroy data manually. But ofcourse, if you need that much security you'd also use encrypted file systems, right!? OK, this is getting off topic... end of thread (or start a new one?) Erik -- Ph: +34.666334818 web: http://www.locolomo.org S/MIME Certificate: http://www.locolomo.org/crt/2004071206.crt Subject ID: A9:76:7A:ED:06:95:2B:8D:48:97:CE:F2:3F:42:C8:F2:22:DE:4C:B9 Fingerprint: 4A:E8:63:38:46:F6:9A:5D:B4:DC:29:41:3F:62:D3:0A:73:25:67:C2 ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: FreeBSD I LOVE YOU
Scott Bennett writes: SB The recent discussion in this thread causes me to wonder whether SB FreeBSD's performance on older, slower equipment could be a SB contributing factor to why hardware vendors like Dell and ATI are SB willing to provide only limited support for LINUX and none at all SB for FreeBSD. After all, if FreeBSD lets a Pentium II w/MMX handle, SB for example, a moderately loaded web site or large network firewall SB or some other reasonable use and thereby obviating many purchases of SB hardware upgrades, why would they want to encourage its use? An excellent point. Certainly Intel has shown in the past that it is interesting in promoting technologies that gobble processor time, and so logically it and other hardware-oriented companies are not going to be interested in anything that extends the life of older hardware. -- Anthony ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: FreeBSD I LOVE YOU
Giorgos Keramidas writes: GK This is likely too. Floppies have mechanical moving parts that are GK more prone to failure than other pieces of hardware. The eerie part is that the diskette drive worked find right up until the moment where I tried to boot from it. Now it doesn't seem to work at all, or at least the BIOS and OS don't see it. It still makes the same noises when the system is reset, though. Additionally, I can't persuade the BIOS to boot from CD, even though it's supposed to be able to. GK Hmmm, that could be a problem. Any chance of installing a SCSI GK controller to one of the other machines? :-) The FreeBSD machine already has a SCSI controller, but I use it only for the external tape drive. I have a much fancier Adaptec SCSI controller somewhere, but it wasn't supported by my old hardware. I don't know if it would be supported by the new hardware. In any case, I don't like to move hardware bits and pieces around; it just encourages hardware problems. -- Anthony ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: FreeBSD I LOVE YOU
Colin J. Raven writes: CJR Eh? Surely you don't meant trashed - physically annihilated? Absolutely. That's the only safe way to protect data. Any disk drive with platters that are even remotely intact can still be read. I have yet to throw away any disk drives for this reason (can't find a convenient place to have them destroyed). -- Anthony ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: FreeBSD I LOVE YOU
Colin J. Raven writes: CJR I always thought that formatting/fdisk'ing twice completely erased CJR *permanently* whatever had been on the disc. Information can be recovered from disks even after a dozen or more overwrites. The data is never safe with the platters intact. -- Anthony ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: FreeBSD I LOVE YOU
On Thu, Jan 20, 2005 at 02:59:13PM +0100, Colin J. Raven wrote: I always thought that formatting/fdisk'ing twice completely erased *permanently* whatever had been on the disc. You make an interesting case that previously I never thought about in any detail. By no means. You may need specialised equipment to extract the data, but you can generally recover anything that was recorded on a hard drive even after reformatting/overwriting etc. The police do that sort of recovery quite a lot when they bust people for trading in child porn and the like. If your drive contains or once contained military secrets, then in the USA and probably anywhere in the West, standard disposal procedure is that the drive be completely overwritten with specific patterns of random data several times, and then taken to a secure facility where the whole thing is literally stamped flat and chewed into small lumps of scrap. Cheers, Matthew -- Dr Matthew J Seaman MA, D.Phil. 8 Dane Court Manor School Rd PGP: http://www.infracaninophile.co.uk/pgpkey Tilmanstone Tel: +44 1304 617253 Kent, CT14 0JL UK pgpExotRzbIGk.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: FreeBSD I LOVE YOU
Matthias Buelow writes: MB Wake up from your pipe dreams. Shipping decommissioned computers to the MB 3rd world is not going to solve any development problem. It helps solve an environmental problem, though. And they need not be shipped anywhere. It is sufficient to just continue using them, instead of throwing them away. That's true everywhere in the world. -- Anthony ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: FreeBSD I LOVE YOU
On Wednesday 19 January 2005 23:11, Tim wrote: faisal gillani wrote: hmmm exactly right .. u know i have a 750MHz Athalon with 256MB ram .. still my processor is 80% idle most of the time .. i also have some windows server on my network but thats a compulsory rather then choice . --- Anthony Atkielski [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Jorn Argelo writes: JA Either way, I never want another server OS again. This is great. If I had to install a dozen more servers today, they would all get FreeBSD. It makes extremely good use of whatever hardware you care to give it. Indeed, FreeBSD can turn even junky old PCs into productive systems, since it is fast enough to do useful work even with creaky old hardware. Of course, this is presumably true with most versions of UNIX (those without a GUI to support, at least), but since my experience is with FreeBSD and it has been uniformly positive, I'll just continue with that. The thought of going back to a Windows server now makes my teeth chatter with terror--how awkward Windows servers seem now! (Then again, they seemed awkward even back when I used them regularly--have you ever tried to maintain a distant Windows server over a dial-up line with pcAnywhere?) -- Anthony ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] = *º¤., ¸¸,.¤º*¨¨¨*¤ Allah-hu-Akber*º¤., ¸¸,.¤º*¨¨*¤ snip Since we're posting specs and such, my P3 800MHz. w/ 256 RAM does all I ask of it, with plenty of room to spare. FreeBSD Extacy.homeip.net 5.3-RELEASE FreeBSD 5.3-RELEASE #2: Sun Dec 19 04:59:10 EST 2004 [EMAIL PROTECTED]:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/EXTACY i386 last pid: 77942; load averages: 0.05, 0.09, 0.08up 2+17:49:55 17:52:00 107 processes: 2 running, 104 sleeping, 1 zombie CPU states: 4.7% user, 0.0% nice, 4.3% system, 1.2% interrupt, 89.9% idle Mem: 89M Active, 49M Inact, 62M Wired, 9092K Cache, 34M Buf, 33M Free Swap: 650M Total, 69M Used, 581M Free, 10% Inuse Now, on this server I run: PF Nat, serving my entire internal LAN. It is my gateway from the DSL to my LAN. Nfs client and server. It's my file and back up server. Apache2 W/ PHP and SSl, it's my web server for various projects, and acts as a back up web server for a friends project. MySql (For some database driven web projects, and for virtual domain e-mail.) DNS - Zone authoritave and caching. DHCP - For the times when I need to add another machine to lan quickly. SMTP, IMAP, POP (and their Secure equivalents) - Handles e-mail for a few domains, probably ~5000 mails a day, with all the lists and groups some of these people are on. (Myself included). Spam filtering. SSh VNC over SSh. X.org enlightenment (So I can use synergy, since the server and my workstation are right next to each other.) A few eggdrop bots. Top and PFTop are constantly running, so I can be constantly in awe of just how well this thing runs. A few other random and various daemons for monitoring and the like. All on a generic + PF kernel. I never did any real kernel tuning. That's next week's project. - Niy. snip My Athlon 3200 is always running seventeen or bust (www.seventeenorbust.com) so the load average is usually 1. Its at a low priority tho so there's not really a performance drop -- /Xian Lady Astor to Winston Churchill: 'Sir, you're drunk.' Winston Churchill to Lady Astor: 'Madam you're ugly but I'll be sober in the morning.' ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: FreeBSD I LOVE YOU
On Wednesday 19 January 2005 23:11, Tim wrote: faisal gillani wrote: hmmm exactly right .. u know i have a 750MHz Athalon with 256MB ram .. still my processor is 80% idle most of the time .. i also have some windows server on my network but thats a compulsory rather then choice . --- Anthony Atkielski [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Jorn Argelo writes: JA Either way, I never want another server OS again. This is great. If I had to install a dozen more servers today, they would all get FreeBSD. It makes extremely good use of whatever hardware you care to give it. Indeed, FreeBSD can turn even junky old PCs into productive systems, since it is fast enough to do useful work even with creaky old hardware. Of course, this is presumably true with most versions of UNIX (those without a GUI to support, at least), but since my experience is with FreeBSD and it has been uniformly positive, I'll just continue with that. The thought of going back to a Windows server now makes my teeth chatter with terror--how awkward Windows servers seem now! (Then again, they seemed awkward even back when I used them regularly--have you ever tried to maintain a distant Windows server over a dial-up line with pcAnywhere?) -- Anthony ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] = *º¤., ¸¸,.¤º*¨¨¨*¤ Allah-hu-Akber*º¤., ¸¸,.¤º*¨¨*¤ snip Since we're posting specs and such, my P3 800MHz. w/ 256 RAM does all I ask of it, with plenty of room to spare. FreeBSD Extacy.homeip.net 5.3-RELEASE FreeBSD 5.3-RELEASE #2: Sun Dec 19 04:59:10 EST 2004 [EMAIL PROTECTED]:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/EXTACY i386 last pid: 77942; load averages: 0.05, 0.09, 0.08up 2+17:49:55 17:52:00 107 processes: 2 running, 104 sleeping, 1 zombie CPU states: 4.7% user, 0.0% nice, 4.3% system, 1.2% interrupt, 89.9% idle Mem: 89M Active, 49M Inact, 62M Wired, 9092K Cache, 34M Buf, 33M Free Swap: 650M Total, 69M Used, 581M Free, 10% Inuse Now, on this server I run: PF Nat, serving my entire internal LAN. It is my gateway from the DSL to my LAN. Nfs client and server. It's my file and back up server. Apache2 W/ PHP and SSl, it's my web server for various projects, and acts as a back up web server for a friends project. MySql (For some database driven web projects, and for virtual domain e-mail.) DNS - Zone authoritave and caching. DHCP - For the times when I need to add another machine to lan quickly. SMTP, IMAP, POP (and their Secure equivalents) - Handles e-mail for a few domains, probably ~5000 mails a day, with all the lists and groups some of these people are on. (Myself included). Spam filtering. SSh VNC over SSh. X.org enlightenment (So I can use synergy, since the server and my workstation are right next to each other.) A few eggdrop bots. Top and PFTop are constantly running, so I can be constantly in awe of just how well this thing runs. A few other random and various daemons for monitoring and the like. All on a generic + PF kernel. I never did any real kernel tuning. That's next week's project. - Niy. snip I also have a P90 128MB ram as a home web server (Apache/PHP/MySQL/FTP) and that is mostly idle. I dos all the odds and ends that I want to continuously. -- /Xian The greatest glory in living lies not in never failling, but in rising every time we fall Nelson Mandela ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: FreeBSD I LOVE YOU
Matthew Seaman writes: MS If your drive contains or once contained military secrets, then in the MS USA and probably anywhere in the West, standard disposal procedure is MS that the drive be completely overwritten with specific patterns of MS random data several times, and then taken to a secure facility where MS the whole thing is literally stamped flat and chewed into small lumps MS of scrap. Assuming one doesn't have the resources to do this, what might one do to secure disk drives before disposal. I've thought of opening them up and scratching the platters or chopping them into pieces (not sure how hard this might be to do), or something. Home incineration isn't very practical, nor are machines that can chop metallic platters into confetti. Also, is there anything like a bulk degausser for disk platters (after removal from the drives)? Come to think of it, I can't remember the last time I saw a tape degausser, and I still am not quite sure what to do with old backup tapes that are unreadable but still filled with backup data. -- Anthony ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: FreeBSD I LOVE YOU
Anthony Atkielski wrote: Indeed, someone in the Third World without the means to buy a new PC and an expensive Windows license could find a junk PC and install FreeBSD on And where do you think would they find this junk PC? Don't you think that's a bit condescending? Like, let's give those negroes our old shoes? snip They can perfectly well buy new machines at local retailers (there are some in bigger cities) for a fraction of the money that it would take you to ship'em your old rustbucket. But they can get used machines for a fraction of the fraction of the cost of an old rustbucket... to use your expression. What was it that the 3rd world Windows license costs... $20? Or was that just for India or something. Anyway, after living a year in Nigeria, West Africa, where the average National salary is roughly $900 ($300 or less in rural areas), $20 is alot of money. Hardware will, in almost all cases, cost even more, so if the whole junk system with *NIX costs 70 USD w/ an old monitor (A quite large investment for a Nigerian) , and the junkiest system that can run Windows XP decently costs them 150 USD with a monitor... than I think that a junkie system would be the best choice. Just for my two cents... I recently sent an old laptop to a student in Nigeria who was getting ready to take a basic introduction to computer course (I.E. click the box to close the window, hit the keys on the keyboar to enter text into the word processor), and his teacher said that, though the laptop was about 10 years old, it would do perfectly fine. I got it for $40 off ebay... still more than this Nigerian college student or his family could afford. Yes, we could have sent money. But giving hand-me-down computers is useful to them, at no cost to us (We don't need those old computers), while giving money puts us at a loss, which is a feeling that Americans generally disdain. Giving money would help, as it would with alot of things in 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and all the rest world countries, but old computers, I say, are better off in the hands of those who may never have a chance to use or own a system of their own than in our dumps or garages. Cheerio, SigmaX ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: FreeBSD I LOVE YOU
Anthony Atkielski wrote: Assuming one doesn't have the resources to do this, what might one do to secure disk drives before disposal. I've thought of opening them up and scratching the platters or chopping them into pieces (not sure how hard this might be to do), or something. Home incineration isn't very practical, nor are machines that can chop metallic platters into confetti. Open up take out the plates. The rest can be disposed normally. Either melt the plates or expose to strong fluctuating magnetic field for a long time. The simple/cheap way of doing this is to send the metal for recycling, it will be melted and all data is lost. Be sure to separate different types of metal. Ofcourse you always need to trust that noone picks out the plates. Before you get paranoid, be sure to consider the risks against the costs and make a sane decision :-) Erik -- Ph: +34.666334818 web: http://www.locolomo.org S/MIME Certificate: http://www.locolomo.org/crt/2004071206.crt Subject ID: A9:76:7A:ED:06:95:2B:8D:48:97:CE:F2:3F:42:C8:F2:22:DE:4C:B9 Fingerprint: 4A:E8:63:38:46:F6:9A:5D:B4:DC:29:41:3F:62:D3:0A:73:25:67:C2 ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: FreeBSD I LOVE YOU
Anthony Atkielski ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) [050121 02:12]: Matthias Buelow writes: MB Wake up from your pipe dreams. Shipping decommissioned computers to the MB 3rd world is not going to solve any development problem. It helps solve an environmental problem, though. And they need not be shipped anywhere. It is sufficient to just continue using them, instead of throwing them away. That's true everywhere in the world. Last year's model is more usable than you might think if you fill it with memory. My desktop is a PII-450. I got two more identical ones free. It's running FreeBSD 5.3 with KDE 3.3 just fine; it would have no problems running current GNOME. The main thing needed in such boxes is *memory* - it's got 768MB. So something around 500MHz will happily run Pango and the other cutting-edge internationalisation stuff if you fill it with memory. Oh, and I *really* want a much bigger hard disk so I can rip more of my CDs at higher quality. I have 60 gig of stuff and it's not enough ;-) The main reason for MHz is media tasks that involve number crunching. I have a Debian laptop, a Pentium MMX 233MHz (Pentium I, not Pentium II). Minimal install - base, then XFree86 4.3 with twm, Firefox, VNC. It has enough CPU to play MP3 or Ogg, but not to play any sort of video. However, 500MHz is enough to play 320x240 video files and to do pretty well on DVDs. So I expect the next big jump in what people think of as CPU requirements will be the next CPU-intensive media format. Or, of course, Longhorn. I'm not sure even KDE with SVG for everything could outdo that ;-) - d. ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: FreeBSD I LOVE YOU
And anything that gets near internationalization on Unix or Linux, namely KDE and Gnome, requires even more powerful hardware than Windoze and probably still doesn't have the kind of local language integration that a localized version of Windows has. Um... never had it work quite that way. Especially at the server level things almost always work smoother on older systems for me than with Windows boxes, and at the user level it's generally the same. Of course, it depends on how much eye candy I enable with KDE on my Pentium w/MMX @ 233MHz, but I get better performane (And fit more apps and more usefullness on the 2 GB HD) by far than Windows XP, and does good compared to Windows 2000 (Which, granted, runs alot faster than XP). I don't care to argue about older operating systems on older hardware, or newer operating systems on newer hardware, but when it comes to *NIX vs Doze on old hardware, Windows is designed to require a hardware upgrade. Who in their right mind would try to run Windows XP on a 233MHz system? I use it as a router :-P, and can't bare much of anything else. I used it as a secondary workstation for a while with *NIX, however, and found it very usefull and enjoyable to use under KDE 3.1 (And a 1 GB HD at the time, which was plenty enough space for the apps I needed) Wake up from your pipe dreams. Shipping decommissioned computers to the 3rd world is not going to solve any development problem. Cheap Asian computers with a pirated localized version of XP Home and Office are a Many countries have localized versions of Linux or other *NIX systems as well, and in my opinion SuSE, Mandrake, or Fedora (And maybe others) are easy enough to use by now to be a viable alternative to Windows on the desktop (Granted KDE or Gnome). Though I do agree, that people shouldn't be forced to learn English or other more commonly spoken languages to use their computers. Cheerio, SigmaX ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: FreeBSD I LOVE YOU
The recent discussion in this thread causes me to wonder whether FreeBSD's performance on older, slower equipment could be a contributing factor to why hardware vendors like Dell and ATI are willing to provide only limited support for LINUX and none at all for FreeBSD. After all, if FreeBSD lets a Pentium II w/MMX handle, for example, a moderately loaded web site or large network firewall or some other reasonable use and thereby obviating many purchases of hardware upgrades, why would they want to encourage its use? Here is an interview with ati. The sad part is they give a solid no to bsd support. http://www.rage3d.com/index.php?node=getarticleu=content%2Finterviews% 2FATIChats%2Fp=4 ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: FreeBSD I LOVE YOU
On Thu, Jan 20, 2005 at 03:52:29PM +0100, Anthony Atkielski wrote: Colin J. Raven writes: CJR I always thought that formatting/fdisk'ing twice completely erased CJR *permanently* whatever had been on the disc. Information can be recovered from disks even after a dozen or more overwrites. The data is never safe with the platters intact. Good gosh, what are you people doing on your machines - designing weapons systems? What what you are all saying is TRUE, it is not TRIVIAL. After a security erase on a disk drive, or a full over-write, it takes increasingly sophisticated levels of lab equipement and environments to do the sort of things that you are describing - including disassembly and clean-room stuff. In otherwords, someone has to be willing to invest at least a few hundred dollars (if it has simply been overwritten) to several THOUSAND dollars to do these sorts of recoveries, and some patience, because it takes TIME, and often, like million-year-old DNA, there are gaps that need to be reconstructed. What do you folks have on your hard drives that is worth thousands of dollars and weeks of time for someone to recover? If it was as easy as you describe, we'd rarely need backups. Your disk drive crash? Oh, just bring it to the local recovery service and they'll get all your data back for $9.95. NOT -- John Lind [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: FreeBSD I LOVE YOU
On Thu, Jan 20, 2005 at 03:51:01PM +0100, Anthony Atkielski wrote: Colin J. Raven writes: CJR Eh? Surely you don't meant trashed - physically annihilated? Absolutely. That's the only safe way to protect data. Any disk drive with platters that are even remotely intact can still be read. I have yet to throw away any disk drives for this reason (can't find a convenient place to have them destroyed). Most disks nowadays use a metallic surface as the magnetic medium. If you're really paranoid about destroying the data on the drive, then heating it up beyond it's Curie temperature should do the trick. For iron the Curie temperature is 1043K (or 770 degC) -- other ferromagnetic metals should be in the same ball park. Thus heating the disk platters until they glow red-hot (about 800 degC) should be enough to wipe any magnetic data on them. You can achieve that sort of temperature readily enough using a good bed of charcoal and a bellows, or you might be able to use a butane powered blow-torch. But on the whole, unless you're dealing with people's confidential medical information or with state secrets why got to that degree of expense? Just overwrite the data with a series of different patterns of 1s and 0s, which will be sufficient to render the data unrecoverable for all practical purposes and send the drives for scrap. If you're really paranoid, you might render the drives definitively unsable by drilling a hole through them as well as overwriting. Cheers, Matthew -- Dr Matthew J Seaman MA, D.Phil. 8 Dane Court Manor School Rd PGP: http://www.infracaninophile.co.uk/pgpkey Tilmanstone Tel: +44 1304 617253 Kent, CT14 0JL UK pgp26hCE8Lcos.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: FreeBSD I LOVE YOU
-Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Anthony Atkielski Sent: Thursday, January 20, 2005 3:51 PM To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: *** SPAMMY *** Re: FreeBSD I LOVE YOU Colin J. Raven writes: CJR Eh? Surely you don't meant trashed - physically annihilated? Absolutely. That's the only safe way to protect data. Any disk drive with platters that are even remotely intact can still be read. I have yet to throw away any disk drives for this reason (can't find a convenient place to have them destroyed). I find installing windows on them does the trick ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: FreeBSD I LOVE YOU
John wrote: On Thu, Jan 20, 2005 at 03:52:29PM +0100, Anthony Atkielski wrote: Colin J. Raven writes: CJR I always thought that formatting/fdisk'ing twice completely erased CJR *permanently* whatever had been on the disc. Information can be recovered from disks even after a dozen or more overwrites. The data is never safe with the platters intact. Good gosh, what are you people doing on your machines - designing weapons systems? What what you are all saying is TRUE, it is not TRIVIAL. After a security erase on a disk drive, or a full over-write, it takes increasingly sophisticated levels of lab equipement and environments to do the sort of things that you are describing - including disassembly and clean-room stuff. In otherwords, someone has to be willing to invest at least a few hundred dollars (if it has simply been overwritten) to several THOUSAND dollars to do these sorts of recoveries, and some patience, because it takes TIME, and often, like million-year-old DNA, there are gaps that need to be reconstructed. What do you folks have on your hard drives that is worth thousands of dollars and weeks of time for someone to recover? If it was as easy as you describe, we'd rarely need backups. Your disk drive crash? Oh, just bring it to the local recovery service and they'll get all your data back for $9.95. NOT Sorry, this spun of from my initial post about destroying harddrives before donating old machines. Many larger companies have a fixed upgrading schedule, a pc lives 3 years. But for many people, schools and developing countries such a pc is absolutely not dead. In most cases the average home pc will not be worth throwing that amount of money to recover data, and hence nor will it be worth to go through all that trouble to destroy data. However, it has happened that pc's donated (this was the topic) to schools or to developing countries by companies or government institu- tions still contained confidential data, personal data or industrial secrets, that were recovered and revealed against the will of the original owner. My consideration was that it might be cheaper to donate such pc's with new harddrives rather than go through the trouble to overwrite the disk to destroy data properly. If you are paranoid about your home pc you keep secret data on an encrypted partition. One should however, not neglect that most home pc's contain confidential or personal information such as credit card numbers, passwords and embarrasing photos. In case you didn't find the top of where this discussion span of, I hope this clears things up. Cheers, Erik -- Ph: +34.666334818 web: http://www.locolomo.org S/MIME Certificate: http://www.locolomo.org/crt/2004071206.crt Subject ID: A9:76:7A:ED:06:95:2B:8D:48:97:CE:F2:3F:42:C8:F2:22:DE:4C:B9 Fingerprint: 4A:E8:63:38:46:F6:9A:5D:B4:DC:29:41:3F:62:D3:0A:73:25:67:C2 ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: FreeBSD I LOVE YOU
Erik Norgaard writes: EN Many larger companies have a fixed upgrading schedule, a pc lives 3 EN years. One must wonder why. After all, they don't rebuild their offices every three years (although some seem to replace company cars fairly quickly--but mostly due to wear and tear, I presume, which is not much of a factor with PCs). EN My consideration was that it might be cheaper to donate such pc's with EN new harddrives rather than go through the trouble to overwrite the disk EN to destroy data properly. If one can be confident that the drive will not be opened, it's probably safe to just wipe the drive with overwrites. Getting any but the most recent information off the drive usually requires opening it (although some drives allow calibration that might get around this). Unfortunately, most people will probably need Windows on the machine, and unless they happen to have an old copy of Windows around to install, an older PC may not be fast enough to suit them. Of course, if they want FreeBSD, no problem. -- Anthony ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: FreeBSD I LOVE YOU
On Thu, 2005-01-20 at 16:17 +0100, Anthony Atkielski wrote: Assuming one doesn't have the resources to do this, what might one do to secure disk drives before disposal. I live in Kona on the Big Island of Hawai`i. One mile from shore the water is over 4000 feet. Send your hard drives and $5 US and I will take care of it. :-) ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: FreeBSD I LOVE YOU
Robert Marella wrote: On Thu, 2005-01-20 at 16:17 +0100, Anthony Atkielski wrote: Assuming one doesn't have the resources to do this, what might one do to secure disk drives before disposal. I live in Kona on the Big Island of Hawai`i. One mile from shore the water is over 4000 feet. Send your hard drives and $5 US and I will take care of it. :-) Don't you have a vulcano? :-) Erik -- Ph: +34.666334818 web: http://www.locolomo.org S/MIME Certificate: http://www.locolomo.org/crt/2004071206.crt Subject ID: A9:76:7A:ED:06:95:2B:8D:48:97:CE:F2:3F:42:C8:F2:22:DE:4C:B9 Fingerprint: 4A:E8:63:38:46:F6:9A:5D:B4:DC:29:41:3F:62:D3:0A:73:25:67:C2 ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: FreeBSD I LOVE YOU
On Thu, Jan 20, 2005 at 04:17:50PM +, Jason Henson wrote: Here is an interview with ati. The sad part is they give a solid no to bsd support. Oh, that's not a problem, their drivers suck anyway. At least I wouldn't like to have them on one of my machines. cu, Uwe ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: FreeBSD I LOVE YOU
On Thu, 2005-01-20 at 21:45 +0100, Erik Norgaard wrote: Robert Marella wrote: On Thu, 2005-01-20 at 16:17 +0100, Anthony Atkielski wrote: Assuming one doesn't have the resources to do this, what might one do to secure disk drives before disposal. I live in Kona on the Big Island of Hawai`i. One mile from shore the water is over 4000 feet. Send your hard drives and $5 US and I will take care of it. :-) Don't you have a vulcano? :-) Erik For Volcano disposal I will have to have $10 US per hard drive. :-) http://hvo.wr.usgs.gov/kilauea/update/main.html Hazardous duty pay! -- Robert Marella [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: FreeBSD I LOVE YOU
On Jan 20 at 15:10, Matthew Seaman confidently asserted: On Thu, Jan 20, 2005 at 02:59:13PM +0100, Colin J. Raven wrote: I always thought that formatting/fdisk'ing twice completely erased *permanently* whatever had been on the disc. You make an interesting case that previously I never thought about in any detail. snippo If your drive contains or once contained military secrets, then in the USA and probably anywhere in the West, standard disposal procedure is that the drive be completely overwritten with specific patterns of random data several times, and then taken to a secure facility where the whole thing is literally stamped flat and chewed into small lumps of scrap. Goodness me, nothing like being completely certain eh? This gives MilSpec a whole new (expensive, yet exciting) meaning. Regards, -Colin -- Colin J. Raven FreeBSD 5.3-RELEASE - http://www.FreeBSD.org - There can be only One Fri Jan 21 01:01:00 CET 2005 1:01AM up 13:51, 3 users, load averages: 0.08, 0.02, 0.01 ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: sensitive data on disks (was: FreeBSD I LOVE YOU)
John wrote: What do you folks have on your hard drives that is worth thousands of dollars and weeks of time for someone to recover? Err.. I'd guess that most people who use their machine for business have sensitive data on it that can easily be at least a couple thousand dollars worth... for companies that could easily be many millions, of course. Customer databases, or strategy plans can ruin a company, if falling into the wrong hands. If it was as easy as you describe, we'd rarely need backups. Your disk drive crash? Oh, just bring it to the local recovery service and they'll get all your data back for $9.95. NOT It doesn't cost $9.95 but for $9950 you'd probably stand a good chance of getting (hopefully large) parts of your data back. After all, there're enough companies specialized in just that. A friend of mine did employ a data recovery company on such an incident not too long ago. mkb. P.S.: As a side note, I recommend using some kind of crypto block driver for laptops, on NetBSD I use cgd, which works very well, on FreeBSD there's gbde, although I've never used it and don't know how reliable it is. The performance hit is acceptable, with cgd, I get ca. 50% the write performance on my old Armada my700, so it doesn't really affect ordinary use. I understand that there exist similar things for Windoze aswell, don't know if it's in XP Pro out of box, aswell as probably for MacOS X. ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: FreeBSD I LOVE YOU
David Gerard wrote: So something around 500MHz will happily run Pango and the other cutting-edge internationalisation stuff if you fill it with memory. My experience is that with a 500Mhz Pentium 3 (512K cache, 512mb RAM, Matrox G450 AGP graphics), Gnome (2.6 tested) is unbearably slow. A large factor here is the Xft font rendering (Ok, you could use xterm instead of gnome-terminal, or switch off antialiasing), which is unaccelerated (at least was then), and _brutally_ slow. If you run something with copious output in gnome-terminal, it'll more or less lock up the entire machine. I don't normally use Gnome, but evaluated it on that old machine for some reason that is of no interest here. KDE is a bit faster, don't know why, but seems to use more RAM. IMHO you need at least a 2.8 or 3GHz P-IV for that kind of desktop to get things to run well, and, in my experience, raw CPU power here is the dominating factor. Of course these machines are still perfectly usable with windowmaker, or fvwm, or similar. mkb. ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
FreeBSD I LOVE YOU
Well it has been almost a year now since I first tried FreeBSD 5.2.1 on my production server :-) I like playing with danger since then it has been just giving me 110% always forever ... my FreeBSD server is responsible for transferring large media files on my network with Samba2 Apache2 . Since I installed it I have had loads of problems with my other Linux windows servers but never with FreeBSD its just always there for me .. just DELIVERING all the time I must say I have been more then impress with it , I have never seen a better faster performing server operating system EVER !! also recently I discovered that the version I have been using 5.2.1 was a Beta :-O ... Amazing if this performance you get with a beta then .. speechless so now I smooth upgraded to 5.3 now ... Although I don't think FreeBSD with desktop OS but with server OS I more then recommend . here is my little success story with FreeBSD .I LOVE IT !!! next stop OpenSolairs .. :-) take care = *º¤., ¸¸,.¤º*¨¨¨*¤ Allah-hu-Akber*º¤., ¸¸,.¤º*¨¨*¤ __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - 250MB free storage. Do more. Manage less. http://info.mail.yahoo.com/mail_250 ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: FreeBSD I LOVE YOU
On Wednesday 19 January 2005 08:17, faisal gillani wrote: Well it has been almost a year now since I first tried FreeBSD 5.2.1 on my production server :-) I like playing with danger since then it has been just giving me 110% always forever ... my FreeBSD server is responsible for transferring large media files on my network with Samba2 Apache2 . Since I installed it I have had loads of problems with my other Linux windows servers but never with FreeBSD its just always there for me .. just DELIVERING all the time I must say I have been more then impress with it , I have never seen a better faster performing server operating system EVER !! also recently I discovered that the version I have been using 5.2.1 was a Beta :-O ... Amazing if this performance you get with a beta then .. speechless so now I smooth upgraded to 5.3 now ... Although I don't think FreeBSD with desktop OS but with server OS I more then recommend . here is my little success story with FreeBSD .I LOVE IT !!! next stop OpenSolairs .. :-) take care = *º¤., ¸¸,.¤º*¨¨¨*¤ Allah-hu-Akber*º¤., ¸¸,.¤º*¨¨*¤ I installed FreeBSD on a machine with an Athlon 3200 that I accident under clocked to 1.4GHz. I didn't notice for quite a while as the performance was amazing any way. It didn't half go some when I put the clock speed up to 2.2GHz. -- /Xian In C we had to code our own bugs. In C++ we can inherit them unknown author ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: FreeBSD I LOVE YOU
Xian ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) [050119 23:21]: On Wednesday 19 January 2005 08:17, faisal gillani wrote: Well it has been almost a year now since I first tried FreeBSD 5.2.1 on my production server :-) I like I installed FreeBSD on a machine with an Athlon 3200 that I accident under clocked to 1.4GHz. I didn't notice for quite a while as the performance was amazing any way. It didn't half go some when I put the clock speed up to 2.2GHz. I bought an old PC of a friend (-bat from the UK FreeBSD list). I just knew I wanted a free Unix. He said FreeBSD works flawlessly on these. THANK YOU, PETE! I now administer Red Hat as part of my work duties. It's stable, it's industrial strength, it does the job and by crikey it's a stupid incoherent ill-conceived pain in the backside. I may respect Linux, but I don't have to like it. (The GNU tools are lovely IMO. It's doing anything with the kernel. Why they couldn't come up with a simple and elegant idea like /etc/rc.conf ...) next stop OpenSolairs .. :-) I also admin Solaris. It too has its stupidities (mostly cruft from failed marketing initiatives - it's hard to be a good Solaris admin without knowing far too much Unix history), and the userland tools need to be replaced with GNU or FreeBSD equivalents, and it's sorely underoptimised for single-processor boxes. But it's industrial strength and very well documented. Of course, when I was learning Solaris, I tended to read the OpenBSD man pages to understand the command and the Solaris ones for the particular switches in that version ... - d. ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: FreeBSD I LOVE YOU
Xian writes: X I installed FreeBSD on a machine with an Athlon 3200 that I accident under X clocked to 1.4GHz. I didn't notice for quite a while as the performance was X amazing any way. It didn't half go some when I put the clock speed up to X 2.2GHz. I think people nowadays forget how fast computers are. Remember, UNIX was designed long ago, at a time when a computer that could hit one million integer instructions per second was nearly science fiction. UNIX was therefore designed to be fast, and even today, despite the gradual evolution that the OS has undergone, it still is extremely fast compared to certain very bloated operating systems that were written at a later time, when increasing hardware speeds could conceal laziness on the part of systems programmers. Given what older hardware used to support under UNIX, I wouldn't be at all surprised if you could support 1000 simultaneous timesharing users on FreeBSD with a modern PC. If you add X then you naturally gobble up resources and bring UNIX closer to Windows or the Mac, but if you run a straight text-only OS, it can be hard to ever come close to the machine capacity with any kind of real-world load (meaning a realistic load of the type for which UNIX was intended). I never seen less than about 97% idle my machine, and the average over time is closer to 99.9% idle. The machine is definitely working, but with a streamlined OS and straightforward applications that don't have to drive GUIs or play music or animate movies, it flies. -- Anthony ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: FreeBSD I LOVE YOU
On 2005-01-19, faisal gillani [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Although I don't think FreeBSD with desktop OS but with server OS I more then recommend . FreeBSD desktop has become better in the last 2 years. Thanks to applications like: Gnome Evolution OpenOffice and AbiWord Firefox Thunderbird GUI Instant Messenger app (I forgot its name) I'd say that PDF support is good now. ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: FreeBSD I LOVE YOU
On Wed, 19 Jan 2005 16:14:22 +0100, Anthony Atkielski wrote Xian writes: X I installed FreeBSD on a machine with an Athlon 3200 that I accident under X clocked to 1.4GHz. I didn't notice for quite a while as the performance was X amazing any way. It didn't half go some when I put the clock speed up to X 2.2GHz. I think people nowadays forget how fast computers are. Remember, UNIX was designed long ago, at a time when a computer that could hit one million integer instructions per second was nearly science fiction. UNIX was therefore designed to be fast, and even today, despite the gradual evolution that the OS has undergone, it still is extremely fast compared to certain very bloated operating systems that were written at a later time, when increasing hardware speeds could conceal laziness on the part of systems programmers. Given what older hardware used to support under UNIX, I wouldn't be at all surprised if you could support 1000 simultaneous timesharing users on FreeBSD with a modern PC. If you add X then you naturally gobble up resources and bring UNIX closer to Windows or the Mac, but if you run a straight text-only OS, it can be hard to ever come close to the machine capacity with any kind of real-world load (meaning a realistic load of the type for which UNIX was intended). I never seen less than about 97% idle my machine, and the average over time is closer to 99.9% idle. The machine is definitely working, but with a streamlined OS and straightforward applications that don't have to drive GUIs or play music or animate movies, it flies. I'm running FreeBSD 5.3 on my server and it has periods it's just 100% idle. I'm running some perl scripts every five minutes, but that doesn't put too much load in the machine either. As a matter of fact, it's rare that the machine has a higher load of 0.15. And I'm running quite a bit of things on that machine (Apache, MySQL, Postfix, amavisd with spamassassin and clamav, RRDtool, SNMP, samba and some more stuff). Though it's a Pentium 4 2 Ghz with 512 MB ram, but I don't have any other hardware. Figured I might as well make it a relatively fast machine. Either way, I never want another server OS again. This is great. Jorn ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: FreeBSD I LOVE YOU
Jorn Argelo writes: JA Either way, I never want another server OS again. This is great. If I had to install a dozen more servers today, they would all get FreeBSD. It makes extremely good use of whatever hardware you care to give it. Indeed, FreeBSD can turn even junky old PCs into productive systems, since it is fast enough to do useful work even with creaky old hardware. Of course, this is presumably true with most versions of UNIX (those without a GUI to support, at least), but since my experience is with FreeBSD and it has been uniformly positive, I'll just continue with that. The thought of going back to a Windows server now makes my teeth chatter with terror--how awkward Windows servers seem now! (Then again, they seemed awkward even back when I used them regularly--have you ever tried to maintain a distant Windows server over a dial-up line with pcAnywhere?) -- Anthony ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: FreeBSD I LOVE YOU
In a message dated 1/19/05 2:27:15 PM Eastern Standard Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: If I had to install a dozen more servers today, they would all get FreeBSD. It makes extremely good use of whatever hardware you care to give it. Indeed, FreeBSD can turn even junky old PCs into productive systems I think the junky old PC market is just what the current FreeBSD team is targeting. ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: FreeBSD I LOVE YOU
hmmm exactly right .. u know i have a 750MHz At halon with 256MB ram .. still my processor is 80% idle most of the time .. i also have some windows server on my network but thats a compulsory rather then choice . --- Anthony Atkielski [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Jorn Argelo writes: JA Either way, I never want another server OS again. This is great. If I had to install a dozen more servers today, they would all get FreeBSD. It makes extremely good use of whatever hardware you care to give it. Indeed, FreeBSD can turn even junky old PCs into productive systems, since it is fast enough to do useful work even with creaky old hardware. Of course, this is presumably true with most versions of UNIX (those without a GUI to support, at least), but since my experience is with FreeBSD and it has been uniformly positive, I'll just continue with that. The thought of going back to a Windows server now makes my teeth chatter with terror--how awkward Windows servers seem now! (Then again, they seemed awkward even back when I used them regularly--have you ever tried to maintain a distant Windows server over a dial-up line with pcAnywhere?) -- Anthony ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] = *º¤., ¸¸,.¤º*¨¨¨*¤ Allah-hu-Akber*º¤., ¸¸,.¤º*¨¨*¤ __ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: FreeBSD I LOVE YOU
hmmm exactly right .. u know i have a 750MHz Athalon with 256MB ram .. still my processor is 80% idle most of the time .. i also have some windows server on my network but thats a compulsory rather then choice . --- Anthony Atkielski [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Jorn Argelo writes: JA Either way, I never want another server OS again. This is great. If I had to install a dozen more servers today, they would all get FreeBSD. It makes extremely good use of whatever hardware you care to give it. Indeed, FreeBSD can turn even junky old PCs into productive systems, since it is fast enough to do useful work even with creaky old hardware. Of course, this is presumably true with most versions of UNIX (those without a GUI to support, at least), but since my experience is with FreeBSD and it has been uniformly positive, I'll just continue with that. The thought of going back to a Windows server now makes my teeth chatter with terror--how awkward Windows servers seem now! (Then again, they seemed awkward even back when I used them regularly--have you ever tried to maintain a distant Windows server over a dial-up line with pcAnywhere?) -- Anthony ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] = *º¤., ¸¸,.¤º*¨¨¨*¤ Allah-hu-Akber*º¤., ¸¸,.¤º*¨¨*¤ __ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: FreeBSD I LOVE YOU
[EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Fac I think the junky old PC market is just what the current FreeBSD team Fac is targeting. At least someone is thinking of it. There are a lot of PCs out there that are still in perfect working order, but are too slow to run the hugely bloated desktop operating systems (and the server versions thereof) that are popular today. Efficient operating systems like UNIX can give these machines new life and purpose and save tremendous resources in the process. Indeed, someone in the Third World without the means to buy a new PC and an expensive Windows license could find a junk PC and install FreeBSD on it for nothing, and be up and running in no time. While UNIX doesn't have the advantages of Windows on the desktop, you can't beat the price, and it'll run on anything. -- Anthony ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: FreeBSD I LOVE YOU
faisal gillani writes: fg hmmm exactly right .. u know i have a 750MHz At halon fg with 256MB ram .. still my processor is 80% idle fg most of the time .. fg i also have some windows server on my network but fg thats a compulsory rather then choice . I'm gradually migrating legacy aps off my older NT server and I think it might be extremely interesting to install FreeBSD on that machine once it is free--if only I could persuade it to boot from diskette (for some reason, the diskette drive no longer seems to be recognized by the OS). It's an old HP Vectra, but like all vintage HP high-end machines, it still works perfectly, after nearly a decade of continuous use. Can anyone tell me how to install FreeBSD on a machine that is running Windows NT and refuses to boot from CD or from diskette? I don't suppose there's any magic program I could run from NT that would start a FreeBSD installation, is there? -- Anthony ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: FreeBSD I LOVE YOU
On January 19, 2005 03:06 pm, Anthony Atkielski wrote: [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Fac I think the junky old PC market is just what the current FreeBSD team Fac is targeting. At least someone is thinking of it. There are a lot of PCs out there that are still in perfect working order, but are too slow to run the hugely bloated desktop operating systems (and the server versions thereof) that are popular today. Efficient operating systems like UNIX can give these machines new life and purpose and save tremendous resources in the process. Indeed, someone in the Third World without the means to buy a new PC and an expensive Windows license could find a junk PC and install FreeBSD on it for nothing, and be up and running in no time. While UNIX doesn't have the advantages of Windows on the desktop, you can't beat the price, and it'll run on anything. not to mention the huge environmental implications of producing newer hardware every year to support said bloated hardware. if the same job can be done with a 10 year old box, i'm glad freebsd is here to help me do it. -- love makes you do the wacky - willow, buffy the vampire slayer, some assembly required ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: FreeBSD I LOVE YOU
Anthony Atkielski wrote: At least someone is thinking of it. There are a lot of PCs out there that are still in perfect working order, but are too slow to run the hugely bloated desktop operating systems (and the server versions thereof) that are popular today. Efficient operating systems like UNIX can give these machines new life and purpose and save tremendous resources in the process. We have here at work a whole load of p3 450's, tad old and not of great use as student machinesodd's where a lot of them where ultimatley desined for the bin, however a little while ago a getleman from our LRC asked me if it as possible to configure a printer to behave in a certain manner, intialy i said no but after some thought i got back to him and told him i might be able to develop a unix based system to do the job and here i am several months later in the process of producing a boot cd for the first release and having 5 print stations and a one development station all running freebsd, all the previously doomed p3 450's and hopefully i'll have about 10 more deployed before i go to my new job. The server too is a Recycled machine, the only new parts are it's raid controller, drives and raid cage and psu (old one was too small for the 4 drives), most everything else came from an old p3 600 the boss was playing with and the case came from an old p2 300 server that was decommisioned when i was a student :) I think it's fair to say *nix oses in general reinforce the idea that just because it's not bright spangly and new it doesnt mean it's useless but freebsd moreso purley because of it's superb hardware support and the fact that generaly it's just a case of install it and go :) - Mike Woods IT Technician ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: FreeBSD I LOVE YOU
On Wed, 2005-01-19 at 15:10, Anthony Atkielski wrote: faisal gillani writes: fg hmmm exactly right .. u know i have a 750MHz At halon fg with 256MB ram .. still my processor is 80% idle fg most of the time .. fg i also have some windows server on my network but fg thats a compulsory rather then choice . I'm gradually migrating legacy aps off my older NT server and I think it might be extremely interesting to install FreeBSD on that machine once it is free--if only I could persuade it to boot from diskette (for some reason, the diskette drive no longer seems to be recognized by the OS). It's an old HP Vectra, but like all vintage HP high-end machines, it still works perfectly, after nearly a decade of continuous use. Can anyone tell me how to install FreeBSD on a machine that is running Windows NT and refuses to boot from CD or from diskette? I don't suppose there's any magic program I could run from NT that would start a FreeBSD installation, is there? I presume you have tried changing the boot order in the BIOS settings? You should be able to make the CD or floppy drive come ahead of the hard disk in the boot sequence. My apologies if this is too trivial an answer! ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: FreeBSD I LOVE YOU
On 01/19/05 03:17:22, faisal gillani wrote: Well it has been almost a year now since I first tried FreeBSD 5.2.1 on my production server :-) I like playing with danger since then it has been just giving me 110% always forever ... my FreeBSD server is responsible for transferring large media files on my network with Samba2 Apache2 . Since I installed it I have had loads of problems with my other Linux windows servers but never with FreeBSD its just always there for me .. just DELIVERING all the time I must say I have been more then impress with it , I have never seen a better faster performing server operating system EVER !! also recently I discovered that the version I have been using 5.2.1 was a Beta :-O ... Amazing if this performance you get with a beta then .. speechless so now I smooth upgraded to 5.3 now ... Although I don't think FreeBSD with desktop OS but with server OS I more then recommend . here is my little success story with FreeBSD .I LOVE IT !!! next stop OpenSolairs .. :-) take care = *., ,.** Allah-hu-Akber*., ,.** I was having problems using mount_smbfs to transfer files. It would throttle itself up and down because of some weird windowing thing windows does. That is what I found on the web anyway. On a what type of network(some config info please, like any switchs?) do you share files and what is the throughput? I would get between 1-12mbits(it was a while so these numbers might not be right, but it was slow like 10mbit or less). I was transferring tv episodes between 2 pcs on a 100mbit switched network. FreeBSD to windows. Finnally I would like to ask all those servers/pcs that are mostly idle to run [EMAIL PROTECTED] if you can. Email me if you have any questions on it. It runs itself at nice 20. Thanks, Jason ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: FreeBSD I LOVE YOU
On 2005-01-19 21:10, Anthony Atkielski [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I'm gradually migrating legacy aps off my older NT server and I think it might be extremely interesting to install FreeBSD on that machine once it is free--if only I could persuade it to boot from diskette (for some reason, the diskette drive no longer seems to be recognized by the OS). It's an old HP Vectra, but like all vintage HP high-end machines, it still works perfectly, after nearly a decade of continuous use. Hi Anthony, I've seen Windows machines lose CD-ROM or floppy drives, on perfectly working systems. You may find that booting the installation CD-ROM of some FreeBSD version locates the floppy drive just fine. Can anyone tell me how to install FreeBSD on a machine that is running Windows NT and refuses to boot from CD or from diskette? I don't suppose there's any magic program I could run from NT that would start a FreeBSD installation, is there? Your best choise may be to install by physically moving the disk to an other system. Then you can return the disk to the Vectra system and let it boot. If you are a bit careful during the installation process _not_ to make configuration changes that depend on the particular sort of hardware the 'install' system has, you shouldn't face any show-stoppers when you move the disk back to the Vectra. When the Vectra boots into FreeBSD, you can configure the network locally and you're set to go :-) - Giorgos ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: FreeBSD I LOVE YOU
faisal gillani wrote: hmmm exactly right .. u know i have a 750MHz Athalon with 256MB ram .. still my processor is 80% idle most of the time .. i also have some windows server on my network but thats a compulsory rather then choice . --- Anthony Atkielski [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Jorn Argelo writes: JA Either way, I never want another server OS again. This is great. If I had to install a dozen more servers today, they would all get FreeBSD. It makes extremely good use of whatever hardware you care to give it. Indeed, FreeBSD can turn even junky old PCs into productive systems, since it is fast enough to do useful work even with creaky old hardware. Of course, this is presumably true with most versions of UNIX (those without a GUI to support, at least), but since my experience is with FreeBSD and it has been uniformly positive, I'll just continue with that. The thought of going back to a Windows server now makes my teeth chatter with terror--how awkward Windows servers seem now! (Then again, they seemed awkward even back when I used them regularly--have you ever tried to maintain a distant Windows server over a dial-up line with pcAnywhere?) -- Anthony ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] = *º¤., ¸¸,.¤º*¨¨¨*¤ Allah-hu-Akber*º¤., ¸¸,.¤º*¨¨*¤ __ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Since we're posting specs and such, my P3 800MHz. w/ 256 RAM does all I ask of it, with plenty of room to spare. FreeBSD Extacy.homeip.net 5.3-RELEASE FreeBSD 5.3-RELEASE #2: Sun Dec 19 04:59:10 EST 2004 [EMAIL PROTECTED]:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/EXTACY i386 last pid: 77942; load averages: 0.05, 0.09, 0.08up 2+17:49:55 17:52:00 107 processes: 2 running, 104 sleeping, 1 zombie CPU states: 4.7% user, 0.0% nice, 4.3% system, 1.2% interrupt, 89.9% idle Mem: 89M Active, 49M Inact, 62M Wired, 9092K Cache, 34M Buf, 33M Free Swap: 650M Total, 69M Used, 581M Free, 10% Inuse Now, on this server I run: PF Nat, serving my entire internal LAN. It is my gateway from the DSL to my LAN. Nfs client and server. It's my file and back up server. Apache2 W/ PHP and SSl, it's my web server for various projects, and acts as a back up web server for a friends project. MySql (For some database driven web projects, and for virtual domain e-mail.) DNS - Zone authoritave and caching. DHCP - For the times when I need to add another machine to lan quickly. SMTP, IMAP, POP (and their Secure equivalents) - Handles e-mail for a few domains, probably ~5000 mails a day, with all the lists and groups some of these people are on. (Myself included). Spam filtering. SSh VNC over SSh. X.org enlightenment (So I can use synergy, since the server and my workstation are right next to each other.) A few eggdrop bots. Top and PFTop are constantly running, so I can be constantly in awe of just how well this thing runs. A few other random and various daemons for monitoring and the like. All on a generic + PF kernel. I never did any real kernel tuning. That's next week's project. - Niy. ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: FreeBSD I LOVE YOU
Since we're posting specs and such, my P3 800MHz. w/ 256 RAM does all I ask of it, with plenty of room to spare. AMD K6 350MHz 320 MB RAM ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: FreeBSD I LOVE YOU
Anthony Atkielski wrote: Indeed, someone in the Third World without the means to buy a new PC and an expensive Windows license could find a junk PC and install FreeBSD on And where do you think would they find this junk PC? Don't you think that's a bit condescending? Like, let's give those negroes our old shoes? They can perfectly well buy new machines at local retailers (there are some in bigger cities) for a fraction of the money that it would take you to ship'em your old rustbucket. Why don't you send some money instead? mkb. ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: FreeBSD I LOVE YOU
Since we're posting specs and such, my P3 800MHz. w/ 256 RAM does all I ask of it, with plenty of room to spare. I have a few machines running FreeBSD. The first is a AMD 766mhz. With about 768 Megs of ram. This box is used as a Nat / Firewall / Dansguardian (AV) Proxy / Secondary DNS server / DHCP server. I Then Have a P4 2.4 gig box with about 512 megs of ram that serves as my web / webmail / email / Primary DNS server. This box also runs PHP, Apache, Squirrelmail, MySQL. and a few other scripts and tools. The third box is a 1 gig AMD T-bird. This is just a test webserver with a few cool tools and utilities on it. It also monitors the APC UPS that is at the bottom of the rack. If Power goes out, I get emails about it, and if time starts to run out, it will shutdown the other 2 servers 1 by 1. I have been using NX systems for about 6 or 7 years now. I learn more and more each and everyday. And thanks to people on the FreeBSD mailing List, I have been able to fix any issues that I have come across. Not only is the OS a great OS, but this list helps me to keep it running smooth, and figure out new ways to accomplish complicated tasks. Thank you. ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: FreeBSD I LOVE YOU
Mike Jeays writes: MJ I presume you have tried changing the boot order in the BIOS settings? MJ You should be able to make the CD or floppy drive come ahead of the hard MJ disk in the boot sequence. Yes, I've tried lots of stuff. It's a HP motherboard and apparently a HP BIOS. I've tried all sorts of variations on boot order and enabling and disabling of boot devices. The structure of the BIOS options makes it clear that it should be possible to boot selectively from either diskette or CD, but I can't get either of these to work; it won't boot from CD unless diskette boot is also activated, and it won't boot from diskette because it says it cannot see the floppy disk reader. I don't know what's going on. The machine has been running for so long that I don't remember much about how to configure the BIOS! -- Anthony ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: FreeBSD I LOVE YOU
Giorgos Keramidas writes: GK I've seen Windows machines lose CD-ROM or floppy drives, on perfectly GK working systems. You may find that booting the installation CD-ROM of GK some FreeBSD version locates the floppy drive just fine. The problem is external to Windows. The machine won't even boot off a diskette. The floppy drive makes the usual noises as the BIOS goes through its paces, but then the BIOS says that the diskette isn't there. It's frustrating. The machine is so old and has been so reliable that I don't remember much about configuring the BIOS, and I have no idea where the documentation is now. It _seems_ like the diskette drive may have a problem, but I'm not sure. GK Your best choise may be to install by physically moving the disk to an GK other system. Then you can return the disk to the Vectra system and let GK it boot. No other systems available currently, alas. And this machine has SCSI drives; the other machines have cheaper IDE or SATA drives. -- Anthony ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: FreeBSD I LOVE YOU
Matthias Buelow writes: MB And where do you think would they find this junk PC? The first world could send it to them, instead of throwing perfectly good PCs into a landfill. MB Don't you think that's a bit condescending? No, I think it's pretty realistic. Right now a lot of completely usable PCs go into the trash. Why not put them back to work instead? The most obvious way to use them is for people and organizations that cannot afford to buy new machines, and the Third World contains more such people and places than the First World. It makes a lot more sense than trying to sell them Microsoft Longhorn at $400 a pop and requiring them to spend $1000 each on PCs powerful enough to run that OS. Of course, in some countries they just pirate the software, but they still need hefty hardware to run it, and that cannot be pirated. MB They can perfectly well buy new machines at local retailers (there MB are some in bigger cities) for a fraction of the money that it would MB take you to ship'em your old rustbucket. I wasn't suggesting doing this on an individual basis, but in a more organized way. Additionally, they can recycle their _own_ machines in this way, since for every person with a PC today in the Third World, there are 100 or more without one. If you have an OS that will run on anything, you can continue to use the older PCs indefinitely. If everyone has to run Windows XP SP2, then the older PCs will just gather dust, even though many people still may not have a PC. All of this applies in the developed countries, too, of course. Why throw away two-year-old PCs when you can use them for something else? Indeed, I wonder where all these PCs are going, since people upgrade constantly. You'd think there'd be a huge used-PC market, but I hardly ever hear of anyone buying a used PC (and if one is running bloated OS or application software, sometimes only the fastest thing on the block will do). -- Anthony ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
FreeBSD I LOVE YOU !!!
Well it has been almost a year now since I first tried FreeBSD 5.2.1 on my production server :-) I like playing with danger since then it has been just giving me 110% always forever ... my FreeBSD server is responsible for transferring large media files on my network with Samba2 Apache2 . Since I installed it I have had loads of problems with my other Linux windows servers but never with FreeBSD its just always there for me .. just DELIVERING all the time I must say I have been more then impress with it , I have never seen a better faster performing server operating system EVER !! also recently I discovered that the version I have been using 5.2.1 was a Beta :-O ... Amazing if this performance you get with a beta then .. speechless so now I smooth upgraded to 5.3 now ... Although I don't think FreeBSD with desktop OS but with server OS I more then recommend . here is my little success story with FreeBSD .I AM LOVE'N IT !!! next stop OpenSolaris .. :-) = *º¤., ¸¸,.¤º*¨¨¨*¤ Allah-hu-Akber*º¤., ¸¸,.¤º*¨¨*¤ __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - now with 250MB free storage. Learn more. http://info.mail.yahoo.com/mail_250 ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
