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Thursday, April 11, 2002TABLE OF CONTENTS
1) Sean’s Notes
2) Linux News
Loki: A Promising Plan Gone Terribly Wrong
Red Hat to use CVE Naming
Open Office, Almost 1.0
Religious Wars3) Linux Resources
'cal 9 1752' Explained
Lots O' Tutorials
mod_perl in 30 Minutes
QCAD Tutorial
Speed Up Samba!4) App o’ the Week
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1) Sean’s Notes
I’ve been on DSL for ever since I can remember. Well, that’s pushing it, but it’s been a good three years. For the most part, I’ve weathered the upgrades, including having to move over to that ugly PPPoE (PPP over Ethernet) standard that many DSL providers have gone to (even though where I live, you can only really buy it from one place)
http://www.isi.edu/in-notes/rfc2516.txt
The latest series of upgrades to the DSL network promised much higher speeds. By pushing the DSLAM (a sort of concentrator) out to the neighbourhood (rather than back at the main office), the speeds can be increased. If a building weren’t in the way, I’d be able to make out an ugly looking cabinet down the street where my phone line plugs into, splitting off my voice and DSL service.
Until a few months ago, I’d never had to call tech support. Outages were infrequent, I’d just wait an hour and my system would be back up. However, after waiting around 12 hours one time, I finally called the support line. After waiting on hold for 30 minutes, I talked to a support representative who eventually told me that someone was working on the DSLAM, and that service would be restored soon. True to his word, service was restored later that day.
(and now you start wondering when he’s going to work Linux into this)
A few days later, the service goes down again. Looking outside, I don’t see anything. Call tech support. Wait 40 minutes for a human. Lights green? Check. Filters in place? Check. Reboot modem? Check. “What error message are you getting?”, I’m asked.
“Well, I’m not getting anything. I’m running Linux, I get a message that the system is trying to initialize, but it’s not getting a response. I can see the packet counters, and I’ve verified I’m not getting any responses”. Oops.
The answer is simply, “Oh, we don’t support Linux”, to which I reply ”I’m not asking you to support my Linux box, I’m trying to find out why I don’t get any responses.” Soon after, he claims that someone will look at it on their side, and we end the call. 12 hours later, and service is restored.
“Freak occurrence”, I tell myself. Until the next time it happens. 40 minutes on hold. Check. Lights, filters, reboot. Check. Yep, running Linux. No received packets. Telco doesn’t support Linux.
This time, I couldn’t even get the call escalated, I was told I was on my own. (Actually, first I was told I should try changing some settings, because “Linux has a lot of settings”) So I did what anyone would have done. I switched to cable.
Time to draw a couple of lessons from this.
If you’re running a customer support organization, it’s one thing to say “we don’t support Linux”. Fine. Don’t. But please recognize when it’s a problem with the OS (“How do I install Netscape?”), or a problem that could be on your end (“I can’t connect to your web site”). I would have been much happier in my case if I’d been passed on to someone that would have at least humored me, and tried to find out why I wasn’t getting a response. I’m willing to accept that the problem is on my end, I just want someone to show me why.
If you are running your email off a cable or DSL connection, use a site like dyn.dhs.org for one of your MX records. You’ll quickly be able to redirect your mail to your new address, rather than waiting for normal timers to expire. On the same token, the email address for the technical contact on any domains should not depend on your own email service being up. Some registrars require you to initiate changes through email.
I’d be interested in hearing of any stories, good or bad, of your Linux tech support experiences. Maybe I was unlucky and got a couple of new techs. Maybe I’m not the only one.
Long live the Penguin,
Sean mailto:swalberg@cramsession.com
2) Linux News
Loki: A Promising Plan Gone Terribly Wrong
I’m not sure what it is about the Loki story that makes me read every article about it. Now that some of the finances have been investigated a bit more thoroughly, this article was able to untangle some of the web that hid just how shady the owners were.
http://www.linuxandmain.com/features/lokistory.html
Red Hat to use CVE Naming
The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures naming scheme has been adopted by Red Hat. What this means for you is that it should be a bit easier to correlate vulnerability reports with the patches that come out. What I hope it doesn’t mean is that Red Hat will fall for any of that so-called “Responsible Disclosure” garbage that is being proposed by the likes of Microsoft.
http://www.redhat.com/about/presscenter/2002/press_cve.html
Open Office, Almost 1.0
Open Office sprung from Star Office. Now that the latter is not going to be free for use, Open Office becomes one of the next best things. The latest release, build 641d, is the final one before 1.0. Download it, give it a shot, and send in your feedback! So far, I’ve been able to open all my documents, and some bugs that I found in Star Office 6.0 beta have been fixed.
http://www.openoffice.org/dev_docs/source/build_641d/index.html
Religious Wars
Nothing like a religious war to stir up a board! This time, it’s the KDE vs GNOME debate. Which is your favorite? Why? KDE’s beating GNOME at the moment!
http://boards.cramsession.com/boards/vbm.asp?mR6824
3) Linux Resources
‘cal 9 1752’ Explained
cal is a program that prints calendars for any given date. The calendar for September 1752 is quite odd because, according to the man page: “The Gregorian Reformation is assumed to have occurred in 1752 on the 3rd of September.”. Of course, not thinking to look there first for the explanation, I stumbled across this web page offering a different perspective.
http://www.csd.uwo.ca/staff/magi/personal/humour/Computer_Audience/ ‘cal%209%201752’%20explained.html
Lots O’ Tutorials
There are nearly 20 short tutorials on this site, mostly centred around web programming. The three Perl tutorials, and the basic UNIX for Web developers are well worth going through.
http://www.extropia.com/tutorials.html
mod_perl in 30 Minutes
mod_perl is an Apache module that lets you precompile Perl code within the web server. Trust me, there is a huge speed improvement! This article goes over the installation, and a rather painless way to covert existing CGIs (most will run untouched!). It finishes off with a small taste of other things that this versatile module will let you do.
http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2002/03/22/modperl.html
QCAD Tutorial
QCAD is a great 2D CAD tool for Linux. It is quite powerful, but its usability leaves something to be desired. With this tutorial in front of you, though, you shouldn’t have much difficulty producing professional drawings.
http://www.linuxfocus.org/English/January2002/article132.shtml
Speed Up Samba!
Windows users complaining that their file sharing is too slow? It might be time to tweak some settings in smb.conf. Here are a bunch of hints, direct from the Samba team.
http://de.samba.org/samba/ftp/docs/textdocs/Speed.txt
4) App o’ the Week
Who would have thought a 3D tank game would be so addicting? Pilot your tank around a field and destroy other tanks, either in teams or alone. Collect flags to give different powers, or sometimes you pick up a dud which takes away something. It’s all network based, and loads of fun. It requires Mesa or other OpenGL libraries.
http://www.bzflag.org
(C) 2002 BrainBuzz.com, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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