Marc Balmer has a wonderful writeup of a bug in the BSD directory handling code that laid dormant for 25 years. The only tragic thing was that Samba programmers encountered and worked around the bug several years ago and somehow the message never got back to the BSD folks.
The other day, I got an email from Edd, an OpenBSD user, claiming that Samba would crash when serving files off an MS-DOS filesystem. This was Samba built from sources and not the one from ports. Since I use myself Samba a lot and for a quite large user base, I got interested in the issue and started investigating it.
What I found out in the end is a surprise and was not expected: A bug that has been there in all BSDs for almost all the time, since the 4.2BSD times or for roughly 25 years…
With the moving of ubuntu from the old fashioned init to the modern upstart, the daemontools package doesn’t cleanly install. Here’s how to fix it. You really do need daemontools if you’re going to run djbdns or qmail.
The daemontools-installer package modifies /etc/inittab to cause the svscan process to launch. With upstart, there is no /etc/inittab, instead it is replaced with a collection of config files in /etc/event.d. There’s currently a bug for this misbehavior, however it is over a year old, but has the workaround documented.
The solution is to first create an empty, bogus /etc/inittab, then run the installer, and then put a manually created file in /etc/event.d to actually launch svscan.
Create a bogus inittab, touch /etc/inittab
Install the installer, apt-get install daemontools-installer
Fetch the code, get-daemontools
Build the package, build-daemontools (and, of course, install it when prompted)
Create /etc/event.d/svscan
Run initctl start svscan
If desired, rm /etc/inittab
The following is the contents of /etc/event.d/svscan:
start on runlevel 2
start on runlevel 3
start on runlevel 4
start on runlevel 5
stop on shutdown
respawn
exec /usr/bin/svscanboot
Now you will get the desired behavior of svscan starting at boot and being kept running by upstart.
As someone who must saddle his students with pricey textbooks, I try as much as possible to avoid requiring anything but the barest essentials. However, sometimes there are materials the student needs to have in order to be successful in a class. Frankly making the tradeoff between recommended (i.e. never-bought and never-read) and required (i.e. bought but never-read) texts is a hard one.
I am in full agreement with the following passage from Why Do Textbooks Cost So Much which describes the three party pricing that occurs in healthcare.
Welcome to the world of textbook pricing, where, it would seem, the usual market forces don’t apply. The textbook market in no way resembles the trade book market, in which the same person - the consumer - desires the book (the new War and Peace, the latest diet guide or whatever), acquires it, and pays for it, so that price points and competition are crucial. What the textbook market resembles most is the market for health care, in which one entity (the physician/the professor) desires - that is, assigns or prescribes - the product, a second entity (the patient/the student) consumes it, and a third set of entities (insurance companies/parents) foot the bill. Spiraling prices for textbooks, like spiraling medical costs, seem to be the inevitable result.
However, I’m not as negative about the spiraling costs of healthcare that most people are. I believe the US medical system delivers high value for dollar, and the only thing that’s really missing is pricing transparency. For example, I actually spent MORE on healthcare than was strictly necessary because the price I thought a particular procedure would cost was actually the “insurace” price, and had I paid directly I would have saved several thousand dollars. I look forward to the day that I can see a plain statement of costs and services from a doctor.
How, exactly, is this advice different than the advice they gave for Windows 3.1, Windows 95, Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows ME, Windows XP…. ?
Of course, I write this on a computer that was last rebooted 5 days ago while connected to a computer that was last rebooted 300 days ago, but I guess that’s because I’m not using windows.
I shouldn’t be, but I’m amazed that there are still gullible crackpots who are earnestly working every day toward achieving free energy. Not in a tongue-in-cheek, or steampunk-cybergoth manner, but in an actual effort to achieve the impossible of free, perpetual energy. A world filled with alleged friend-of-a-friend witnessing of a running perpetual motion/free energy machines and crazy plans.
Seriously, the number of assertions I see where someone says they are ‘close’ and only need a ‘bit more work’ to get a working bench model are dizzying. Of course, one wise person on the Intarwebs pointed out…
The Internet has been taken over by truth seekers and things like free energy, and then of course all the scams that I assume are funded by the oil companies hoping that people will buy in to them and get scammed and then never touch free energy again.
So, if you ever get burned by some free energy plans or schemes, just remember, it’s the oil companies that are seeding disinformation.
The one thing that might be said about exercise with certainty is that it tends to makes us hungry. Maybe not immediately, but eventually. Burn more calories and the odds are very good that we’ll consume more as well. And this simple fact alone might explain both the scientific evidence and a nation’s worth of sorely disappointing anecdotal experience.
Marcus Ranum has an excellent article which I find myself going back to often, it’s titled The Six Dumbest Ideas in Computer Security. My favorite is number five, Educating Users.
On the surface of things, the idea of “Educating Users” seems less than dumb: education is always good. On the other hand, like “Penetrate and Patch” if it was going to work, it would have worked by now.
This ties directly into password policies as users (in the aggregate) have shown themselves to be completely incapable of managing something as complex as passwords and authentication. For several years now I’ve been operating a lab with a very simple password policy. Your password is random and no, you can’t change it. It works because every human I’ve encountered thus far, when asked to type in a string of 8 completely random symbols on a daily basis rather quickly memorizes it. For those who do not log in on a daily basis, they are the ones most likely to pick duplicate or otherwise insecure passwords, or write it down anyway. So, they have a slip of paper that says ‘your password is:’ anyway, it just happens to be a good one.
And yes, I have been tracking the number of password resets requested, and no, there aren’t very many. Also, those that do get reset, are often repeat customers who never bother to keep track of their password in the first place.
An excellent article, Animals Are Not Things which describes animal welfare from a very pragmatic point of view. My favorite quote:
I am not required to keep a pair of screwdrivers in my toolbox, so that they can socialize with other screwdrivers.
Although, I should point out that I have several dozen screwdrivers in my screwdriver drawer. Therefore my bases are covered should we discover that we are wrong about them. (I for one welcome our new robot masters.)
Project Blackbox by Sun is certainly a fascinating concept. The infrastructure needs are significant, and what would be truly awesome is if they came up with a standardized set of quick-release power and cooling couplers. That would make this a truly useful piece of technology. Nicholas Carr’s comments regarding the utilitization of electricity and its applicability to computing are quite correct.
You can always read the NY Times take on it, but I doubt the link will work for very long and I’m always disappointed in the quality of the reporting when I read a times article about something I do know about.
