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Right now I’m feeling extremely pissed off and sad, both at the same time. I have been using Linux for more or less 10 years now. By “using” I mean that it has been my primary OS for every purpose you could possible use a computer for. Ok it’s not entirely true, I replaced Linux with FreeBSD for about a year back in 2000 or somewhere around that time. The reason I switched to Linux was simple and I think many of you will recognize it. The major operating system on home computers at the time, you know the one, was extremely bug ridden and unstable and had very little to offer in terms of functionality. Some will argue that it is still unstable and bug ridden but in my limited experience things are much better now than back in the older days in those terms.

Very quickly I learned that Linux had a lot of powerful tools to offer which helped you in everyday matters if only you spent a little time getting to know them. Tools such as find, grep, sed, vi and so on are invaluable and I feel utterly lost without them. The other operating system has virtually no useful tools installed in the base install and even if you go out and waste (a lot of) money on their horrible development package you’ll find yourself with the definition of a bloated GUI where every power tool will be hidden under layers and layers of menus without offering console equivalents. It’s not like the GUI was usable in the first place. Why do focus follow mouse clicks and why on earth isn’t this configurable? Why is it that there are no system logs whatsoever? Why does the system hang for minutes upon minutes during boot if there is no DHCP reply leaving the user in limbo as to what is going on? Now all these issues are moot to me as I do not use this operating system and have no plans on doing so in the near future but to a lot of people this is very much the reality and to an unlucky bunch has been forced upon them. How fascist!

Where was I .. oh, yes .. In recent years Linux adoption by “regular” users has started to grow rapidly. I though this was a great thing at first and I even did my best to help these people ease into the transition. As time went by I started realizing that more and more people around me were Linux users and several of them had jumped on the bandwagon in the last year or so. “Great!”, I thought at the time but recently I have slowly started to come aware of the dark side of it all.

To me applications like Samba are a solution which makes it possible for people who choose to use lesser operating systems to interact with the rest of the world. Personally I like NFS and SSHFS (FUSE), depending on the purpose I think both these solutions do a very good job. If you want service discovery multicast DNS services such as Rendezvous, Avahi etc do an excellent job. You have a portable system which cannot be beaten, why on earth would I need a severely crippled system like SMB other than when interacting with someone on a crippled system?

Back to the issue at hand. Recently I’ve started hearing complaints from the recent Linux switchers. This is all good as no system is perfect and in the beginning I thought it would be refreshing to hear complaints from someone with a different background. Now I’m starting to realize the surmounting disaster that we are soon to face. These people want Linux to plug right into their legacy infrastructure built on top of SMB and other bad solutions. It doesn’t matter that they have replaced their systems with Linux which offers all these “new” shiny features, they still cling to the legacy crap. In the beginning I tried to reason with them but I soon learned that this was impossible. Stupid people don’t get smart just because they made one smart move in their life. With the growing presence of commercial interests I fear that we are going to see major Linux distributions move more and more towards being a bolt-on replacement to their original systems. Resources are going to be spent on making Linux compatible with legacy solutions rather than getting these companies to invest in upgrading their existing infrastructure. Others should be forced to adapt to modern, intelligent standards than forcing Linux to implement proprietary, badly designed, protocols. I fear that Linux is going to become the “new” OSX. All the power tools will be present on the system but most users will have no idea that they exist or how to use them.

The reason I’m pissed is that I am really really fed up with people trying to explain to me why I should be using SMB or why vi is so bad. Why KDE is so much better than GNOME and then having no clue about all the other options like Fluxbox (which I am using), Enlightenment and so on. Why some distribution is bad because it doesn’t automatically call WINE when double clicking an EXE-file, if they had just bothered to STFW they would have set that up in less than 2 minutes btw. If they don’t like the Unix philosophy then why on earth are they using Linux?
Maybe I’m a digital millenium racist but right now I feel that all the switchers should simply go back to their old operating system and leave the rest of us be. I don’t tell them that of course as it would be counter productive.

I’m seriously considering going back to FreeBSD. I loved FreeBSD and the only reason I went back to Linux was due to two drivers, one of which exists for FreeBSD today and the other I don’t need anymore. The BSDs are (luckily) further away from mainstream adoption and do not suffer from the mass of ignorant people infesting the Linux community.

I’ve never been a fan of blurting out RTFM or STFW but I’m seriously considering starting now.

I was investigating the possibility of making the Sun a bit more silent this weekend. In an act of unimaginable stupidity I accidentally pulled the wrong drive out of the RAID. Since I was running RAID5 I kind of assumed I would spend the day waiting for a parity check to finish before my system would be back online again but I was so terribly wrong. I’m using software RAID in OpenBSD, as my SCSI-controller apparently does not come with RAID support, and this is a feature which is not enabled in the supported kernel meaning I only have myself to blame.

Since I don’t own a VGA monitor I drove to work on Saturday evening in order to borrow a monitor so that I could investigate why the system didn’t come up. Instead of recalculating the parity the system refused to boot and waited for me to manually run fsck_ffs on the partitions residing on the RAID. I manually executed a parity recalculation and then ran fsck which found a ton of errors on both the partitions. To top it all off this was the day before my weekly tape backup was to be run. When I finally was able to boot the system it turned out it had killed so many files on /var that it was pretty much useless. I decided to recover the entire tape from last week as I had no idea how far the problems had spread. The posts from last week were recreated by copy pasting from planets where I’m aggregated but I lost the comments, drafts and a couple of other things.

My plan now is to switch to the concatenated disk driver and solely rely on tape for backups. ccd is officially supported by OpenBSD so I assume it doesn’t have as many hidden problems.

The lesson I’ve learned this weekend is to always run the tape backup before messing with the drives. Stupid me!

I saw Resident Evil: Extinction today. Unlike some other people I know I really did enjoy the first movie in the installment. The acting wasn’t bad for the genre and the story and setting was well developed. Apocalypse, the second one, was a travesty not much unlike most sequels these days. Milla Jovovich made a barely passable job at acting and the story didn’t really encourage anyone to make an effort to begin with. I did not have high expectations when I heard there was going to be a third one.

My first impression was that this was going to be better than Apocalypse and after having watched the entire movie the final decision was that yes, it is slightly better. What put the entire movie down was that it is as if someone took Day of the Dead and cross pollinated it with Land of the Dead only changing minuscule details. Now both of these movies were great in their own way but putting them together and neither adding nor subtracting virtually anything does not make another great movie.

Extinction had potential and it is not as if they did not have the means to have made something more out of it, they simply didn’t do it. If you haven’t seen Day of the Dead and/or Land of the Dead I recommend you see them first. If you have watched every other decent movie in the Zombie genre out there give Extinction a go. It’s watchable and mildly entertaining if you are looking to kill an hour and a half but it will leave you with a feeling of sadness left inside.

A while back I was tasked with prototyping a system for transferring large amounts of data across the Internet to a wide array of nodes without making any assumptions about how they were connected. This took some research on my part as I hadn’t really designed anything network-wise which was to hold up under extreme load or service a huge amount of simultaneous connections. During the investigative period I found a couple of links which I found to be particularly well written which I would now like to share with you.

The first one is “High-Performance Server Architecture” by Jeff Darcy. This is a good introduction into the subject and mainly covers how to manage resources. It will help you avoid the most common mistakes.

After that we have “The C10K problem” by Dan Kegel. This article digs a little deeper and offers many recommendations on how to manage the problem of handling tens of thousands of requests by leveraging existing solutions present in many of the largest *NIX operating systems. This is a typical don’t reinvent the wheel scenario where the OS already has several solutions canned and ready for you as long as you know where to look.

Finally I consulted CiteSeer and found a couple of really good articles on a bit more scientific level which handed me the last pieces of the puzzle. As I can’t divulge too much about our system in particular I’m going to leave the more specific articles out of this blog post.

To top it all off I want to share this excellent but unrelated link to “Capturing that Special Moment“.

At the last MöLUG meeting I was recommended the talk given at TED by Richard Dawkins on atheism. I like his “Selfish Gene Theory” so naturally I’m interested in any other theories he can put forward. This talk was a bit on the short side and a bit basic but still quite amusing.

If you do not believe in atheism you probably won’t find this very interesting.

Link in case you cannot see the embedded object or simply want to download the movie.

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As you might have experienced if you’ve visited my site recently it has become quite unresponsive. It appears that MySQL doesn’t run very well on the UltraSPARC. I’ve tried increasing it’s memory footprint and put the entire database on a 4-disk SCSI RAID5 but to no avail.

Therefore I’m looking for a blogging engine, preferably similar to Wordpress in functionality, that does not depend on MySQL. I’m not sure what database backend would be appropriate but something that is much more lightweight than MySQL should do, like SQLite or Berkley DB. I’d like a system that will handle blogging, content uploads (images, tarballs etc), RSS and preferably something which will allow me to create simple pages where I can place downloads and textual content.

Although static HTML would accomplish all this something along the lines of Wordpress with a WYSIWYG editor and what not is preferable.

If you know how to optimize MySQL, if that is even possible, let me know.