Week of 20 December 2004

10:50 - It got even colder than forecast last night. Down to -11.2°C (12°F), according to our electronic recording thermometer, which is cold for Winston-Salem. And the sensor is just outside the kitchen window, warmed by air leaks, so the true low temperature was probably closer to 10°F. The Weather Channel was reporting 11°F this morning when our thermometer was reading 13°F, so there's probably a couple degrees of warming by the window. There was also a 25 MPH (40 KPH) wind, which must have taken the wind chill down to below zero Fahrenheit. It's actually chilly in my office, which isn't usually the case with all these computers running.

Roadrunner connectivity was nearly dead when I tried to check my email Saturday morning. I spent the better part of an hour on the phone with their tech support people. They quickly escalated me to second-tier tech support, where I spoke to a nice woman named Sandy, who did her best to help but was hampered by Roadrunner's anti-Linux policies. She probably violated their rules by accepting the output of a Linux traceroute command I gave her, when according to policy she's supposed to accept only the output from a Windows tracert command or whatever Apple uses. Come to think of it, I should probably have told her I was running OS/X

She asked me to connect a Windows box directly to the cable modem to remove Linux and the D-Link DI-624 wireless router from consideration. I said, "You want me to connect a naked Windows box to the cable modem? How long is that going to last before a worm nails it? Two minutes?" I told her I'd do it, but that meant I'd have to format the drive and reinstall Windows later. She sympathized, but said she had to ask me to do that per company policy. She said I might be surprised by how many of their subscribers have Windows boxes connected directly to their cable modems. I told her I wouldn't be.

So I connected a Windows box, by which time the cable modem had died anyway. She said they did have some reports of dead cable modems in Greensboro and were working on the problem. She gave me a trouble ticket number and asked me to call back if the problem wasn't fixed in the next few hours.

I called around the neighborhood and found we weren't alone in being down. That's good, because Roadrunner has an obnoxious policy. If I call them to say I'm down, they do essentially nothing about it until they have multiple outage reports, I believe five. In the evening, that's not a problem, because enough people are using their systems that many call in problem reports soon after the outage occurs. But during the day if the problem is localized to the neighborhood there may not be five people aware that something's wrong.

They did eventually get the cable modem back up Saturday, but then this morning about 7:30 a.m. it died again. I called Roadrunner tech support to tell them my cable modem light was alternating between out, slow flashing, and fast flashing, and they said they'd have someone out between 7:30 a.m. and noon tomorrow. Wonderful. Down for another 24 hours. One thing is for sure. We can't depend on Roadrunner IP connectivity to replace our phone service. Before I dispense with standard telephone service, I'll need to have a second broadband connection of some sort.

I sure am looking forward to broadband over power line. Every power company in the US wants to deploy it, because it'll allow them to read meters remotely and, more important, institute charges that differ according to the load on their system. During the summer when everyone's air conditioners are running flat out, electricity will cost a lot more per kilowatt-hour than at times when the load is light. Delivering broadband Internet service over power lines is only a secondary purpose of this deployment, but one that will allow power companies to recoup their costs. I expect that service to be priced very competitively, because the power companies will have the infrastructure in place to support their own needs, so every dollar they can get for broadband subscriptions is icing on the cake.

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: file server
Date: Tue, 21 Dec 2004 08:06:12 -0800
From: Mark Huth
To: Robert Bruce Thompson

Bob,

I'd like to issue a minor challenge for you, in your new role as linux advocate.

Let's see you, by yourself and without Brian's (or Rolands, or any other *nix gurus) help, set up and configure a file server running multiple raided hard drives in a raid 5 configuration! You've got to do it by yourself....grin. How about we build a terabyte server? Ideally it should work in a multi-os environment and serve files for windows, linux, and mac os. I'd prefer that you use software raid, natch.

You can use how-to's, user forums, books, etc but you can't call anyone and ask them to do it for you. You also can't call Brian and ask him which distribution to use or how to do it. In other words, I'd like you to do it like someone without excellent industry contacts.

We could add to the complexity of all of this by asking you to set up a public mail server and a Web Server and secure them from the web, but let us just stick to setting up a file server. This is a task that any reasonably sophisticated end user should be able to do in a minimal period of time...a day or two. This is just the sort of the kind of thing that a small business user or advanced home user would do.

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: RE: file server
Date: Wed, 22 Dec 2004 11:04:02 -0800
From: Mark Huth
To: Robert Bruce Thompson
CC: Brian Bilbrey, Jerry Pournelle

Bob,

A bit of snarling at you...Duncan like.....

To continue yesterdays conversations....a couple of other things....respectfully...my memory of what you reported you did and your memory are a bit different. Natch, it is your memory and you know what you did, but you told us in January of 2004 that you hadn't been able to get samba working with fedora core. In 2001, you set up a samba page in which you were going to document your efforts replace theodore your file server with a purpose built linux server running samba. As a loyal reader, I just presumed that the linux server effort disappeared because you have reported on a number of occasions (as recently as last week) that you are still running windows 2000 as your file server.

In any event setting up Samba is fairly easy although perhaps not on Fedora core...the trick is in dancing through the steps necessary to get the server to recognize the raid 5!

As to your monopoly in getting help...well you've more of a monopoly than you think. Access to people like Brian, Greg, and Roland is really, really, really expensive out here in the real world. None of them is in the $50/hour range and mostly they have other things to do with their lives. Frankly, if you had to pay them what they are worth...well the Thompson coffers might feel the impact. I've spend about 3.5 hours on the phone with Brian while he used ssh to log into my debian mail server...and I'd suggest that his worth for that was between $400-600. Understand that he was wonderfully gracious about it, but it was still an imposition. That was to help set up a mail server...understand I had it 98% set up, I just couldn't figure out why it wasn't working....he made a minor change in a configuration file (he changed the server name to localhost in the file...despite the fact that the damned how-to specifically said to specify the server name)... and I was alive...

As to setting up sendmail...well it is fairly easy to set up Sendmail on a server, just follow the instructions in the distribution. However, lets get spamchecking working, run antivirus software, and virtualize the users so that they all don't have to have accounts on the box....suddenly we are deep in guru-land. We're not talking just any guru either, we've got to find us a guru who speaks sendmail or qmail or postfix and spamassassin and clamav and knows debian or fedora core or Xandros....there aren't lots of them just waiting around to be called.

I've got Apache running...as you suggest it was fairly easy once you understand that there are a couple of versions of Apache (1.3 and 2.x) and a couple of versions of Apache support files, but I'm sure finding it more difficult to get Apache configured so that it can do anything. Again, I've got several books, I've read the how-to's and I'm a daily visitor to the Apache mailing lists...but I'm still deep in guru-land. I know how to do what I need to do (I'd like to have ip addresses inside our domains go to one page and ip addresses outside our domain go to another!), Brian suggested one way...what he called a crude hack, I know there is another way, but the number of people in the world who know how to configure mod_rewrite in Apache 1.3 must reach at least three and I've not happened on any of them yet. I'll get it figured out, but 'tis non-trivial. We've got it configured on our windows server....one types the ipaddresses for one page into one configuration file and the ipaddresses for the other page into another. I had it working on my cobalt qube, but that was an earlier version of apache and things don't seem to work the same way....

Everything is easy once you know how...it is the knowing how that is the challenge. I figure that I'm brighter than the average guy and I once earned a living pushing database bits for Burroughs so that I'm not afraid to jump into things and try to make them work. Getting systems that work under linux is hard work.

That said.....please, don't be glib and wave your hands in the air and say it's easy. It isn't and that is why Microsoft keeps selling software. That's why Roland, and Greg, and Brian have jobs! Full employment for Gurus!