April 2006 Archives

From: Ask Bjørn Hansen: D-Link abuses public NTP server

Poul-Henning Kamp wrote an open letter to D-Link as a last-ditch attempt at getting them to show any interest in resolving the mess their badly configured software has caused (and is still causing).

Netgear did something similar in 2003.

Those of you who know me know that I go by my middle name instead of my first. This of course has been the source of unbelievable frustrations in my life in the constant explanation to just about everyone. Well I've discovered an unexpected benefit: Telemarketers That's right, the telemarketer. All of my legal paperwork is with my first name, not my middle. So when a mortgage company calls to offer me a fantastic rate to refinance they ask for me by first name. My response:

I'm sorry, he's not in at the moment. Would you like to leave a message?

Works every time.

Thanks to this quote:

"...the RIAA has been known to suggest that students drop out of college or go to community college in order to be able to afford settlements."

This article (Run Over by the RIAA Don't Tap the Glass) has been showing up everywhere. It's a sensational quote but it distracts from the fundamental issue. The author broke the law, they do not dispute this - only the penalty for doing it. If you robbed a bank and were sentenced to 5 years in jail I don't think complaining to the Judge that incarceration is going to affect your education and future will have much of an effect.

I am in no way saying that the RIAA is a warm and fuzzy organization - in fact they are conducting a strong arm campaign with questionable tactics. Listen people, if you haven't figured it out already it is not a good idea to pirate media (music, video, etc.). Even if the odds are small that you will be caught; a) can you afford the penalty when you are, and b) don't whine about it.

Prior to FreeBSD 6 if you wanted to mirror your hard drives you could use Vinum to get the job done. However it was not possible to actually mirror the root partition because of the way the boot loader worked. Now with the introduction of gmirror it's possible to easily mirror your system hard drive without having to worry about your root partition.

# sysctl kern.geom.debugflags=16 kern.geom.debugflags: 0 -> 16 # gmirror label -v -b round-robin gm0 /dev/ad0 Metadata value stored on /dev/ad0 # echo geom_mirror_load="YES" > /boot/loader.conf # vi /etc/fstab Change each ad to a gm, and insert a mirror after /dev. For example, /dev/ad0s1a becomes /dev/mirror/gm0s1a. Unless you've made extra partitions, you'll have ad0s1 devices ending in a, b, d, e, and f and will need to edit each of those lines. # reboot # gmirror insert gm0 /dev/ad2 GEOM_MIRROR: Device gm0: provider ad2 detected. GEOM_MIRROR: Device gm0: rebuilding provider ad2. # gmirror list | more # gmirror status

See: ONLamp.com -- Using Software RAID-1 with FreeBSD for more information.