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Old 02-24-2001, 02:09 PM   #1
mbpark
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Tony,

I've never seen such a good explanation of the Linux/Open Source/31337 h4x0r community.

You hit it right on the head. The people who are involved in Open Source want to have that barrier to entry so that everyone cannot get involved, because if they did, it wouldn't be l337 and cool andmore. The man pages for most of these products are also horrible too. They want to keep people who don't know or who are like me and don't have the time to hack C/C++ code and still do my job all day. I'm not beholden to any OS, and use four of them do do my job (Windows 2000, Solaris, OpenBSD, and Linux).

I shouldn't need 3 O'Reilly books to configure Sendmail, or 2 to configure mySQL. Heck, Oracle 8i is easier to set up than many of these open source databases, even under linux! (And I've run mySQL under Linux and FreeBSD, and Oracle 8i under Solaris and Linux). I can use just one to configure Oracle. Sure, it's big, but it's one . Same with SQL Server 7.0 or 2000. The scary part is that both do a pretty good job of managing data.

This is a community that prides itself on making things hard to use, such as Debian Linux. Meanwhile, we've just swapped out all our Linux boxes for OpenBSD 2.7/2.8 because:

1. Man Pages actually explained the products and the OS in extreme detail. We were happy.
2. Ports system allowed us to install without hacking.
3. Everything worked the first time.
4. OpenSSH wasn't a royal pain to install.
5. Mark can spend his time planning, and not worrying about configuration issues.
6. BIND was a joy to configure on OpenBSD, as was networking.

I wanted to post as a corollary to what you said, because I find it very true. The Linux community seems to hate anyone who wants anything explained properly, and isn't going to get anywhere until people start doing so. It's an OS, and it has some features.

For me to claim it's the greatest OS ever would go against any shred of scientific objectivity and credibility that I have. I know that it gets it's butt whipped by *BSD, Solaris, Windows 2000, and QNX in many categories. However, it's an OS and has features. I don't believe in blind advocacy based on the GPL like most of the Linux community does (and I feel sorry for those that do).

Personally, I think that most people should just get over the "3l337ness factor" of open source and start working toward solutions. Then again, what would those open source people have cynicism toward next?

Mitch
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Old 02-24-2001, 08:34 PM   #2
Undertoad
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Thanks man.

What happened at /. was: there was a story about ESR's take on something, and someone asked whether ESR was "relevant" or not.

To the uninitiated, "ESR" is geek-eese for Eric S. Raymond, one of the folks behind the entire open-source movement.

This other guy wrote:
<i>Not hardly. If a tree fell on ESR in a forest filled with Linux users, would anyone notice? The guy is, and always has been, all talk. Say what you will about RMS (a communist), Larry Wall (a pseudo-scientist babbler), or Theo deRaadt (a sociopathic cult leader), but they produce working code. Until ESR does more than a simple mail downloader (is he capable of it?), he is simply not needed.</i>

I then wrote:
<i>So, despite the community's protest that people are needed to do things other than write code, the one criterion that you express is that what ESR wrote ISN'T HARD ENOUGH. And then you get modded up in a reply, suggesting that the community agrees with you. You know, the most damning writers at ZD have figured it out. The open source community ensures that end users are systematically locked out. The community has a genuine contempt, not only for "users", but also for the simple. And so it produces sendmail -- and a whole set of similar interfaces that are so complex to configure that you need more 3" thick O'Reilly books. ESR is not given some respect for having coded a utility that you don't care about. ESR is given respect because he helped a gigantic and very powerful set of users to understand the revolutionary and important nature of open source. If open source fails at its alleged "mission", we will be running Microsoft (TM) TCP-IP.NET by 2005 and the state of freedom across the world will be endangered. (OK, allow me a little melodrama.) But ESR will be responsible for holding off that state of affairs for a few years. Do you believe me? Do you care?</i>

Stupidly, I had forgotten that my default post type on /. is "HTML Formatted", and my careful paragraphing of the above text was turned into one big long rant.

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Old 02-26-2001, 12:29 AM   #3
mbpark
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That post again :)

That's funny. I view Open Source as a way of establishing standards so that interoperability between systems actually happens. Those established standards (which I view BIND, innd, sendmail, POP, and LDAP as) keep companies like Microsoft, Sun, Oracle, IBM, Apple, and HP from creating the mess we had back in the 80's and early 90's (aka the complete pig's breakfast) of separate e-mail standards, name lookup standards, protocol standards, and even database standards.

Right now we have the browser issues between MS and Netscape, however we wouldn't have gotten that far if the browsing technology both are based on didn't have a reference implementation that was open source (Amaya and Lynx come to mind), as well as the underlying protocol as open source, and the name resolution technologies as open source, and even the same e-mail standards in the same fashion.

You and I both know Microsoft would scrap NNTP, POP3, and sendmail support in a second in Exchange server if they had the chance to. Sun would do the same thing with their iPlanet products. From what I remember, IBM had to add POP3 and SMTP into Notes because of customer demand.

However, it seems that it IS a way of locking out the end user when taken to an extreme by about 5% of the people who like the ideals behind it. The one person with the balls to even go to Microsoft and talk about Open Source and its ideals gets stabbed in the back by a bunch of Slashdot (read: Drooling Blind Linux Advocacy) users.

It's gotten to the point where most of the people I know who use Linux (who represent quite a cross-section of the tech community from this area) won't even go on many of the Linux/Open Source sites because these idiots rant and rave all day about political philosophy, and stabbing anyone in the back who wants to show non-techies why Open Source is good (hint: Having universal standards like Sendmail and POP3 makes a developer's life easier) for establishing a core protocol set of universal standards that can be easily followed and duplicated. Do you think I honestly want to deal with having Notes, PROFS, Exchange, and POP3 clients to just read my mail ever again? I've had accounts on all four of those systems just for work, and it was a hassle connecting to all of them except the one with 10,000 Open Source implementations.

ESR BTW wrote an awesomely practical and easy to use piece of code. Fetchmail is da bomb. I am a big fan. It's better than what passes for Open Source these days, which usually is another graphical mp3 playing front end that never compiles quite right. Either that or something to catalog and file pr0n.

TCP-IP.NET. Hahahaha. In a way that's already true. What's the metric of people using Microsoft to connect to the net and browse these days? It's about 75% I am guessing? (I know I am one now, using IE 5.5 with Windows 2000 Pro here). If there wasn't an Open Source implementation of TCP/IP that quickly got accepted as the open standard that it is today, we'd be using Micnet (the protocol from Xenix), NetBEUI, or something even worse from the bowels of Redmond (shudder). Even MS gets Open Source. Of course they check the license to make sure it's BSD and then incorporate it wholesale into Windows 2000 (specifically the TCP/IP stack, FTP client, and Telnet client) .

However, I am one for advocating why Open Source is a good thing. Explaining how it can be used to effectively communicate standards to developers, and using the e-mail debacles of the 80's and 90's as an example, people catch on quick. Unfortunately, too many people confuse Open Source with GPL, which it is not (and there is much good GPL code). There will always be free and non-free software, and Stallman even says so himself. Some of his idolizers just need to get off the crack pipe and stop being blind advocates for pushing away those who actually want to prevent the alphabet soup of standards for everything from ever happening again.

Mitch


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Old 02-26-2001, 01:22 PM   #4
russotto
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Maybe I'm missing something about Linux Sendmail, but it is my impression that Sendmail is MUCH easier to set up now than it used to be, thanks mostly to a set of macros. Shouldn't take more than one O'Reilly book, I would think. Back (before the "Open Source" movement) when you had to write your sendmail.cf file by hand, getting it right was much more difficult.

And yes, Oracle is very easy to set up today. Didn't used to be, 5 years ago. mySQL, the one time I dealt with it, was a PITA.

And if BIND is a joy to configure ANYWHERE, it has DEFINITELY come far.

But I'm not a Linuxhead and the only marginally open-source OS I use is Darwin (the base of Mac OS X), a NetBSD derivative IIRC.
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Old 02-26-2001, 04:14 PM   #5
Undertoad
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Yes, and you should see that set of macros. I'd rather just edit the cf file by hand. Here are the macros that used to be used for my setup:

divert(-1)
include(`../m4/cf.m4')
define(`confDEF_USER_ID',``8:12'')
OSTYPE(`linux')
undefine(`UUCP_RELAY')
undefine(`BITNET_RELAY')
FEATURE(virtusertable,`hash /etc/virtusertable')
FEATURE(`always_add_domain')
FEATURE(`use_cw_file')
FEATURE(`local_procmail')
FEATURE(`nodns')
MAILER(procmail)
MAILER(smtp)
HACK(check_mail3,`hash -a@JUNK /etc/mail/deny')
HACK(use_ip,`/etc/mail/ip_allow')
HACK(use_names,`/etc/mail/name_allow')
HACK(use_relayto,`/etc/mail/relay_allow')
HACK(check_rcpt4)
HACK(check_relay3)

Isn't that just great? Do I know what this stuff does? Well some of it.

It's been a real eye-opener to be studying the interface and usability gurus. You get a new sense of certain things. Some interfaces are beautiful, others are just crap. It's so important, because interfaces have such a direct link to productivity.
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Old 02-26-2001, 04:20 PM   #6
mbpark
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Interfaces

That's where MS gets it right. They have simple interfaces for everything. Ever try to set up a DHCP server for a subnet, let along multiple subnets, and set different lease times by MAC address? Or even try and set up an HP Laserjet over the network for remote communication? I can do either without touching text files under Win2K.

However, Linuxconf is getting there, but I still won't use it to configure my networks at all. It screws a lot up still, and I feel bad that I don't have the time I want to go in there and debug it all.

On the other hand, I am so looking forward to OS X. I want to see what they do for a user-friendly interface to UNIX based on the fact that I got an iMac DV for testing today. I have never seen such an easy machine to configure for a LAN. It beats Windows 2000 hands down, and that's a major compliment (and my metric for configuration).

Then again, I'm buying a G4 to run OS X on, so that won't be much of an issue

Mitch
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Old 03-07-2001, 03:46 PM   #7
Svartalf
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Re: Interfaces

Quote:
Originally posted by mbpark
That's where MS gets it right. They have simple interfaces for everything. Ever try to set up a DHCP server for a subnet, let along multiple subnets, and set different lease times by MAC address? Or even try and set up an HP Laserjet over the network for remote communication? I can do either without touching text files under Win2K.
Under Linux:

The DHCP, no.
The LaserJet, yes.

However, I will offer that while DHCP setup is a nice thing- more complex situations and the whole thing becomes unusable. For some user interfaces, MS gets it ok, for others, it doesn't. I offer the Interface Hall of Shame at http://www.iarchitect.com/mshame.htm as an example of what they do wrong as well.

Quote:

However, Linuxconf is getting there, but I still won't use it to configure my networks at all. It screws a lot up still, and I feel bad that I don't have the time I want to go in there and debug it all.
What distribution are you running? Under Mandrake, it's been doing it "right" since the 7.0 version of that distribution. I do all my normal, day-in, day-out configuration of network stuff from there. Of course, I could be doing different networking tasks than you and may not have encountered your problems.

Quote:

On the other hand, I am so looking forward to OS X. I want to see what they do for a user-friendly interface to UNIX based on the fact that I got an iMac DV for testing today. I have never seen such an easy machine to configure for a LAN. It beats Windows 2000 hands down, and that's a major compliment (and my metric for configuration).

Then again, I'm buying a G4 to run OS X on, so that won't be much of an issue
From what I can tell, OS X seems to need a G4 to really be usable. The copy of server I had on this loaner G3 I have for driver development seemed to be bog slow compared to even LinuxPPC 2000. That's not to say that it's a VERY nice environment to work in. But then, so's BeOS.
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Old 03-07-2001, 04:02 PM   #8
mbpark
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Wow..quoting works :)

Quote:
Originally posted by Svartalf
Quote:
Originally posted by mbpark
That's where MS gets it right. They have simple interfaces for everything. Ever try to set up a DHCP server for a subnet, let along multiple subnets, and set different lease times by MAC address? Or even try and set up an HP Laserjet over the network for remote communication? I can do either without touching text files under Win2K.
Under Linux:

The DHCP, no.
The LaserJet, yes.

However, I will offer that while DHCP setup is a nice thing- more complex situations and the whole thing becomes unusable. For some user interfaces, MS gets it ok, for others, it doesn't. I offer the Interface Hall of Shame at http://www.iarchitect.com/mshame.htm as an example of what they do wrong as well.

Quote:

Agreed. Doing any sort of firewall, multiple IP addressing with different subnets, or wacky routing and 2000 becomes as impossible to grok as Debian Especially load balancing of adapters.

However, it's not too bad for 99.9% of what else I do with multiple NIC's.

However, Linuxconf is getting there, but I still won't use it to configure my networks at all. It screws a lot up still, and I feel bad that I don't have the time I want to go in there and debug it all.
What distribution are you running? Under Mandrake, it's been doing it "right" since the 7.0 version of that distribution. I do all my normal, day-in, day-out configuration of network stuff from there. Of course, I could be doing different networking tasks than you and may not have encountered your problems.

Quote:

This was under Red Hat 7.0, Mandrake 7.0-7.2, and Red Hat 6.2. Personally, I prefer Mandrake. Multiple NIC's with different subnets and different configs will hose Linuxconf pretty bad. Besides, those text files in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-ethx or ifcfg-pppx are not too bad

I've also had a fair share of issues with its PPP config, but I taught myself that so I could avoid using Linuxconf.


On the other hand, I am so looking forward to OS X. I want to see what they do for a user-friendly interface to UNIX based on the fact that I got an iMac DV for testing today. I have never seen such an easy machine to configure for a LAN. It beats Windows 2000 hands down, and that's a major compliment (and my metric for configuration).

Then again, I'm buying a G4 to run OS X on, so that won't be much of an issue
From what I can tell, OS X seems to need a G4 to really be usable. The copy of server I had on this loaner G3 I have for driver development seemed to be bog slow compared to even LinuxPPC 2000. That's not to say that it's a VERY nice environment to work in. But then, so's BeOS.
OS X = nice environment, waiting until DVDs play

I do agree with you that MS has some nasty interfaces as well, specifically Office and the user admin console for Windows 2000 under Active Directory. I hope that changes!

MBP
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Old 04-24-2008, 10:19 AM   #9
Shawnee123
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Old 04-24-2008, 10:39 AM   #10
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TONY?
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Old 04-24-2008, 10:50 AM   #11
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Man, and here I thought UT had been in a dustup at Slashdot.
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