78 new of 122 responses total.
I seem to need root privileges to do much of anything so I have been running as root for four years with no problems. 'user' could not use zgv, and when I typed mutt (telnetted with Windows to linux) I got very loud noise.
Literally a loud noise? I think the only noise you're likely to hear from a telnet session is the bell, but perhaps if the speakers were cranked up, that might be surprising. If you have to be root all the time, then your unix is broken.
Re resp:43: Some of the PCI adapters sold for use with wireless cards are not actually generic PCMCIA slots, but rather adapters specially designed for that company's cards.
The noise sounded like very loud static. Windows seems to be set up to make noises on that computer despite my checking off Mute - is there some place to tell it not to make system noises? My linux is designed to run as root. svgalib has problems when used as user, so does Xvesa, then I would need to give myself privileges to save files to various directories. Most of the time I spend doing administration (adding and modifying programs, compiling, etc.).
There is something wrong with the MS Windows machine (either with the hardware, or with the driver software) if it is making a loud hash noise while you have mute selected. It seems as though data that doesn't represent sound is somehow finding its way to the digital-to-analogue convertor (DAC). If your Linux is designed to run as root, then I consider its design broken.
That's the way "Linspire" (formerly "Lindows") is designed to run, though I doubt that's the distro she's using. I wouldn't want to run that way, but some people do.
/me shudders
I have the same software on several machines and can easily restore it. I am root in DOS, why not in linux? Win98 also played all the WIndows noises at the library despite being muted. How do I turn off Windows noises? I can turn off online Opera noises.
> I am root in DOS, why not in linux? For the very same reason you shouldn't be root in DOS (which, admittedly has no other options) or in Windows (which, nowadays at least, does) -- that always running at the highest privilege level makes it trivially easy for a rogue program to corrupt the entire system.
Some of us who have to follow accepted security practices in our work generally do the same at home because it keeps up our "A" game. On top of that I consider a lot of the data I keep at home to be fairly important and I like to see it protected against loss.
But I don't have any rogue programs and have not had problems in four years and if I did I would just copy back the software from one computer to another. Today I am trying to figure out why udhcpc does not work with my small laptop kernel but does with another, so I tried a third. Stuck in a wireless card in the kitchen, forgot to plug in the router, got an IP number and three dns numbers from some network with signal strength -139dB (noise -156dB) but it did not last long, went back to signal strength 1/48 to 17/48. For the 20 seconds it lasted I could go online with two browsers, so all I need now is to wait for the free county wireless signal, or take the linux computer to the library instead of windows. Victory! (I still need to fix my laptop kernel to use udhcpc). I have detected four networks with iwconfig too.
Regarding #55; That you know of, you mean. In general, running is root is considered bad form. If you can get away with it, then great; but don't be surprised if it bites you in the butt one day.
Where would a rogue program come from and what is it?
It could come from anywhere. The `rm' command, if used without caution as root, could become a `rogue' program.
That's a good point: Running as a user helps to protect you not just from other systems or people with hostile intent, but also from yourself. rm * in the wrong directory is a great example of that.
It also provides more protection from a userland application that loses its mind.
But I have an identical computer next to this one linked by ethernet cable. And I could also just copy everything to another partition here. It is a 10GB drive and my linux fits fine in 1GB or less. I keep what I have compiled at a shell account.
If they're separate partitions on the same disk, or even seperate disk drives connected to the same computer, then they provide no significant redundancy (since an errant program, run as root can simply erase all connected disks). Having an identical computer connected via a network cable is a handy thing (I do something similar myself), but if they're running the same system software, they're going to share any vulnerabilities that it has. In your case replacing the data may be trivial, but for most people that is probably not the case. Besides, isn't it a bit like saying "I don't lock my front door because I have home- owner's insurance"?
Keesan, I have fat fingered a single "." into "..". The guy who hired me at my current job has still never lived down a "chmod -R 600 .." instead of "chmod -R 600 .", which made everything in the entire machine unreadable by anyone except root and unexecutable by anyone including root. Had he been running as his normal login, he would have done very little damage, but because he was using the root login, he and a colleague wound up having to reimage the server and restore settings and data from backup, which is a royal P.I.T.A.
Sindi, you can do what you want. But like I said, it might bite you in the ass. If you don't care, then great, I really have *no* interest in trying to convince you otherwise, but it is bad form.
Most of what I do in linux is not doable by user. The only damage I have done is crashing things, and e2fsck fixed it all but once (when I think the drive was bad). I read email and browse mostly in DOS (kermit, lynx, pine). And replacing the contents of a house is a lot different from copying software between computers, which I do every time I change drives anyway. I don't want to have to change write permissions on a bunch of directories, or write only to one directory with subdirectories, wastes time. I discovered iwlist (on the card that supports it) shows 8 available connections. I need to compile a newer pcmcia module for the other card to work with iwconfig. I have the source code. Do I uncompress it into the pcmcia source code directory and make all again? Can I make just the one module and if so how? I think udhcpc (a small dhcpc) can choose between connections by address with -r .
I live inside my computer ;-)
Re resp:56: I learned not to run as root when I accidentally typed "rm -rf /usr" instead of "rm -rf ~/usr".
I would be extremely nervous to run as root all the time. On modern Unix and Linux systems, I find that the "sudo" command provides a rational middle ground, providing reasonable protection against unfortunate accidents while not requiring a full-blown root login every time I want to do something requiring administrative privileges.
Sudo has a lot of advantages: among them, it logs commands via syslog. So if someone does something mistakenly, there is at least a lot which one can look at to see what happened.
Regarding #32; I wanted to write more about this last week, but was tremendously busy. This is not universally true; in some contexts, a kilobit is canonically taken to be 2^10 bits. The wikipedia article, for instance, includes this interpretation.
S.I. says one k is 1,000.
The problem is that both pow(10,3) and pow(2,10) are correct, depending on the context. System Internacional uses it to represent the former, while computers (which 'think' in base-2 rather than base-10) use it to refer to the latter. As an approximation, they are close, but the difference does matter.
That's the great thing about standards: there are so many to choose from. Why is one kilobyte considered to be 2^10 = 1024 bytes? Why do disk vendors give capacities of hard drives measured in 1k = 1000 bytes, when the operating system views things as power of two block sizes? Which is more standard than the other? I'll grant that the 1,000 bits == 1 kilobit definition is standard, but it is not universal.
10^3 is k, per SI. 2^10 is K, per longstanding convention.
Disk vendors don't specify disk capacity in K or k. They use Gbytes or Mbytes and adhere to the S.I. definitions of those.
Regarding #74; I don't ever remember seeing that, but maybe I wasn't looking in the right places. Regarding #75; Actually, if you want to pick nits, they do: the G or M or K just refers to 9, 6, or 3 as an exponent for 10. So, technically, Gbytes are in the same equivalence class modulo 10. But my point was that disk vendors rate their products in terms of powers of ten, not powers of two. Saying KB was just convenient, as the kilobyte is essentially the first `real' unit in common usage after the byte (that is, few people talk in terms of decibytes or centibytes).
resp:76 Picking more nits, decibyte is 1/10th of a byte. Dekabyte is 10 bytes. Of course, with word-lengths in powers of 2 (32 or 64), dekabyte is sort of an awkward amount of data.
My bad.
Re #73: k != K
Like I said, that's the first I've heard of that. Got a citation?
K != k just as M != m (M is 1,000,000 and m is 0.001).
Ah, I see what you mean now. I thought you meant K = 2^n while k = 10^n or something. Yes, you are right.
Apparently the International Electrotechnical Commission (whoever they are) want us to use "Ki" in place of K for 1,024. Computer people have been using K for 1,024 for a very long time though.
Re #81: 1K = 1,024 1k = 1,000.
Erm, that was Re #82 ;-)
Regarding #84; You know, I've never heard that before. Like I said, do you have a citation?
I'll have a rummage for one.
This is interesting: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kibibit They seem to use ``Kib'' or ``Kibit'' (with a capital K) instead of ``Kbit'' or ``Kb.'' They do acknowledge that ``kilobit'' can be either 2^10 or 10^3 depending on context.
This is also interesting: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefix Note that they say that in the SI system, `K' (capitalized) stands for Kelvin, as a unit of temperature, and `k' (lowercase) only stands for `kilo.' They say that outside of SI, K and k are mostly interchangable, and can refer to either 2^10 or 10^3, as I had originally said. To wit: 'The one-letter abbreviations are identical to SI prefixes, except for "K", which is used interchangeably with "k" (in SI, "K" stands for the kelvin, and only "k" stands for 1,000).' However, they do say that as of 2005, the binary meanings are deprecated.
k (as a multiplier prefix) should only ever be used to mean 1,000. Everywhere I've ever worked or studies, K has been capitalised to differentiate it from k. Telecomms people talk in terms of kbits/sec, and mean 1,000 bits. Computer people talk in Kbytes and mean 1,024. It's not rocket science ;-)
Here's an example of K from a PDP-11 manual... http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.828/2005/pdp11/pdp11-40-000009.html
Here's a KIM-1 manual from 1976... http://users.telenet.be/kim1-6502/6502/usrman.html
re #90: You're right that "it's not rocket science", but it's not universally or consistently applied, either, which means making assumptions based on the use of "k" or "K" is dangerous if you need better than approximate numbers.
It's been consistently applied in my experience, but it's true that a few people don't use it correctly.
Take a random sample of computer manuals, text books (I hope they're right!) or EPROM / SRAM data sheets. K = 1,024 is a long-standing convention.
Yes, but you were talking specifically about K = 1024 and k = 1000, and in neither of the two references that you posted can I find such a distinction. Everyone knows that most computer manuals refer to K as 2^10 = 1024. Your claim was that they also refer to k as 1000, which is not universal, and in fact, is a convention I've never heard of before, and is not supported by your evidence. If telecom people refer to kbits as 1000 bits, that's great, but what McNally says is true: if you want to be exact, you've really got to specify.
k is 1,000 because of S.I. (km, kg, kW etc.) It's only necessary to specify because some people seem underinformed.
*sigh* It's not being underinformed, Andy, it's recognizing that standards aren't universally followed. I don't know how to explain it better than that. Really, though, it's true: not everyone follows the same standards.
Never mind. Let's talk about wireless networking. My next wireless networking task is to find a PCI 802.11g adaptor that works with NetBSD. This could take a while.
How are you searching, in BSD online discussions?
I'll probably start with the man pages for common device drivers such as ath(4) and perhaps wi(4). Hopefully I'll be able to find a card that has an appropriate chipset.
There are lists of linux-compatible pcmcia cards. Why don't you search on BSD PCI wireless?
The man pages that I mentioned include lists of cards that are supposed to work. Sadly some manufacturers will change the chipset in a product without changing the model number so it can be something of a lottery.
Re resp:75: My impression is that the computer world pretty universally used K=1,024 until marketing types realized they could put a bigger number on hard disk packages if they used K=1000. For a while they tried to avoid confusion (and presumably false advertising claims) by using the phrase "million bytes" instead of "megabytes."
I never saw them use K=1,000, but I did see them use M=1,000,000 which makes sense in the context of S.I. They could have excusably used k=1,000 but I never saw that either.
I now have a D-Link DWL-G510 802.11g PCI wireless network adaptor working under NetBSD-current.
What module(s) and what else did you need to do?
I didn't use any modules, but I had to upgrade to NetBSD 4 which is not quite released as stable yet (it's in Beta testing). My kernel includes the ath(4) driver and for some reason that I'm not clear about yet, bpf (the Berkeley packet filter) was also required. I have to launch a thing called wpa_supplicant because the wireless network uses WPA, which is supposedly less insecure than WEP. The usual procedure for launching the supplicant didn't work for me, so as a temporary measure I launch it from the rc.local script. Hopefully that will be fixed before 4.0 is released.
It annoys me that some Linux distributions no longer have an rc.local script. There are some applications where creating a full SYSV init script is major overkill.
Do you include SATCOM in the list of wireless networking techniques/technologies? When I deploy in the wake of natural disasters, I am responsible for backhauling unclassified voice and data communications over a satellite link, as well as management and maintenance of the solution. -DTK
Sure! Sounds reasonable to me.
Probably like a less cool version of the rig your brothers took out to the mountains or the sandbox. -DTK
Re. #110: That qualifies. Is that done using VoIP or something else? It's telling that even though years have passed since I asked the question, adding a NetBSD host to a WiFi network is still awkward to the point where I tell people not to bother.
We use VoIP phones, connecting back to a phone switch at the HQ. The phones use lightweight codec-specific signalling, common to both the phones and the switch. Nothing terribly novel.
Is latency much of an issue with the satellite link or is that better with today's LEO birds?
We do not bounce off a LEO bird; they move too much. Instead, we bounce off of a geostationary bird. We set expectations about latency, and people adapt pretty quickly to the latency, as long as it is consistent. Jitter is your big killer, not delay. Oh, and SAA on Cisco gear, or SmokePing on UNIX (or Linux) is absolutely your friend, followed closely by any NetFlow analyzer you can cope with.
I'll ask the packet pushers what SmokePing is.
http://oss.oetiker.ch/smokeping/
resp:115 Latency is almost always an issue for satcom. Pushing on Ka or X band to geo-sync/geo-stationary is going to be slow because, well, the speed of light isn't just a good idea, it's the law. :-) I've never had great luck with LEO for anything. Maybe DAMA voice, but I don't recall what birds those were bitting.
Here here. GEOS is great for resilience, and as long as you can tolerate delay, you can go anywhere in its shadow. That said, it takes people a while to get used to the delays involved in a voice call, but as long as the delay is pretty consistent (i.e. low jitter), people adapt. Oh, and for the fans following along at home, remember that the speed of light in the atmosphere is a lot slower than the speed of light in a vacuum. I never tried using a LEO-provider; having to track a bird that is in motion relative to your frame of reference either requires the dish to be in constant motion, or accept drop-offs frequently. Neither seems like much fun, and not worth the small improvement in round-trip-time. -DTK
Indeed. It's a pain in the butt.
re #114 Back in the stone ages, we used analog phones through a multiplexer over VHF. VOIP is a very specific protocol overhead for packet node sites. I haven't looked at Network44 in years, though.
You have several choices: