How I set up Greymatter for Weblogging. First things first: I'm sure everyone's asking how much hardware you need. I'm using a Pentium-120 with 64 megs of RAM, and it's plenty fast most of the time. It takes a little while to regenerate all the templates, but other than that it's mostly sitting idle. Any Pentium-class machine should be plenty. I'd be hesitant about using a 486 because the templates will take an awfully long time to rebuild. Remember, Greymatter's written in Perl, and Perl's an interpreted language. Interpreters are slow for the same reason emulators are slow--the translation is real-time.

I lost my notes for today somehow, and I've been home a grand total of 14 hours the past 48 hours (I think), so you'll have to excuse this quickie.

Free memory tester. I found this over the weekend:

http://reality.sgi.com/cbrady_denver/memtest86/

It's a memory test disk. Self-booting, about 74K in memory, builds from DOS, Windows, or Linux (and possibly others too). I use and recommend RAM Stress Test, by Ultra-X Inc. ( www.uxd.com ), but this seems nearly as good and it's free. If you've got frequent bluescreens, download this and try it on your PC. A lot of problems are caused by bad memory, and the power-on memory test usually won't find it. Neither will most DOS-based memory utilities.

MemTest is still no substitute for buying brand-name memory, though I'd never let commodity memory sit on the same table with my hardware without testing it first. About 1 in 1,000 brand-name sticks are bad, as opposed to about 1 in 12 commodity sticks, in my extensive experience. One of the first things I do when faced with an unstable system is test the memory overnight, just in case.

Linux (and Unix) tip of the day. If you vaguely remember a command but can't completely recall it, type the part you remember, then hit tab. A list of possibilities will appear. Hopefully the command you're looking for is among them.

And if any of the possibilities sound interesting, type man command. The online documentation will come up and explain usage.

Don't let anyone fool you. You never master this OS. You just learn how to find what you need to get a job done quickly. And hopefully you develop a long memory.

Outta here. And if you've mailed me over the last couple of days, my apologies. I'll get back to you tonight after work.

Mandrake Squid. To turn a Mandrake server install into a Squid server, here's all you have to do. Issue the command squid -NCd1 to build the cache directory structure. Then, issue the command mv /etc/rc.d/rc3.d/K25squid /etc/rc.d/rc3.d/S25squid so that Squid runs at startup (assuming your server's set to run in text mode, as servers should be--why waste all that memory and CPU cycles keeping a GUI running when those resources can be dedicated to server tasks?). If it you boot and run GUI mode automatically, (maybe you want to run Squid on your workstation), add the command mv /etc/rc.d/rc5.d/K25squid /etc/rc.d/rc5.d/S25squid to the mix.

Now to start Squid, you can do one of two things. You can reboot, which is the Windows way of doing things, or you can just start the daemon, which is the Unix way of doing things. I like the Unix way. Run Squid's startup script manually by issuing the command /etc/rc.d/rc3.d/S25squid restart. (There are other ways to do it too of course but I like this way.)

Single-floppy Squid. And just in case you haven't seen everything yet, you can get a single-floppy FreeBSD-based Squid server. Head over to www.ryuchi.org/~ilovefd/1fdsquid/1fdsquidus.shtml for the goods. It uses the system's hard drive for storage. You want a semi-powerful CPU (a Pentium-133 is sufficient for a small workgroup) and a fair bit of memory (I'm thinking 64 megs is the minimum). That's less power than you need for a Windows workstation these days, but considering you can do a light-duty Unix-based fileserver with a 33 MHz 486, it's a comparatively powerful machine.

Innovation. And of course I can't let this slip by. Microsoft is trying to say that open source stifles innovation. Steve DeLassus and I have been talking about this (he was the one who originally pointed it out to me), and I think he and I are in agreement that open source by nature isn't inherently innovative. It may improve on another idea or add features, but most open source projects (and certainly the most successful ones) are clones of proprietary software. Then again, so was a lot of Microsoft software, starting out. Pot, meet Kettle. Kettle, meet Pot.

But although the programs themselves aren't always innovative, I think the open source atmosphere can stimulate innovation. Huh? Bear with me. Open source gets you in closer contact with computer internals than a Microsoft or Apple OS generally will. That gets you thinking more about what's possible and what's not--the idea of what's possible starts to have more to do with the hardware than it does with what people have tried before. That stimulates creativity, which in turn stimulates innovation.

Need an example? A calculator company called Busicom accidentally invented the personal computer. I've heard several versions of the story, but the gist of it was, Busicom wanted to create a programmable calculator. In the process of creating this device, they commissioned the Intel 4004 CPU, the first chip of its kind. There are conflicting accounts as to whether the resulting product even used the Intel 4004, but that's immaterial--this calculator's other innovation was its inclusion of a tape drive.

Intel bought back the rights and marketed the 4004 on its own and became a success story, of course. Meanwhile, people started using their Busicom calculators as inexpensive computers--the built-in tape drive worked as well for data storage as it did for program storage. This was in 1970-1971, several years before the Altair and other kit computers.

Four years later, Busicom was out of business but the revolution was under way, all because some people--both engineers at Intel and end-users who bought the calculators--looked beyond the device's intended use and saw something more.

Open source software frequently forces you to do the same thing, or it at least encourages it. This fuels innovation, and thus should be encouraged, if anything.

Last week's flood. No, I haven't answered all the mail about it. I'm going to give it another day before I deal with it, because dealing with a ton of mail is frankly harder than just writing content from scratch. I don't mind occasionally, but I'd rather wait until a discussion reaches critical mass, you know?

One reader wrote in asking why foreigners care about U.S. gun laws. I don't really have an answer to that question. I find it very interesting that no American has yet voiced any strong objections to anything I said--I even had a lifelong liberal Democrat write in, and while she stayed to my left, she advocated enforcement of the laws we already have on the books, rather than an outright ban. She'd force more safety classes, but I don't have any real objections to that notion.

An interesting upgrade approach. The Register reported about a new upgrade board, about to be released by Hypertec, that plugs into any PC with an available ISA slot and upgrades the CPU, video, and sound subsystems. I'm assuming it also replaces the memory subsystem, since pulling system memory through the ISA bus would be pitifully slow.

The solution will be more expensive than a motherboard swap, but for a corporation that has a wide variety of obsolescent PCs, it might be a good solution. First, it's cheaper than outright replacement. Second, it creates common ground where there was none: two upgraded systems would presumably be able to use the same Ghost/DriveImage/Linux DD image, lowering administrative costs and, consequently, TCO. Third, corporations are frequently more willing to upgrade, rather than replace, existing systems even when it doesn't make economic sense to do so (that's corporate management for you).

Depending on the chipset it uses and the expected timeframe, I may be inclined to recommend these for the company I work for. We've got anywhere from 30-100 systems that aren't capable of running Office 2000 for whatever reason. Some of them are just old Micron Client Pros, others are Micron Millenias who were configured by idiots (a local clone shop that we used to contract with way back when--I've never seen anyone configure NT in a more nonsensical manner), others are clones built by idiots, and others are well-built clones that just happen to be far too old to upgrade economically.

Many of these machines can be upgraded--the Microns are all ATX, so an Intel motherboard and a low-end CPU would be acceptable. Most of the others are ATs and Socket 7-based. An upgrade CPU would likely work, but will be pricey and compatibility is always a dicey issue, and most businesses are still stuck in the Intel-only mindset. (Better not tell them Macintoshes don't use Intel CPUs--wait... Someone PLEASE tell them Macs don't use Intel CPUs! Yeah, I'll be an Intel lackey in exchange for never having to troubleshoot an extension conflict on a Mac again. But that's another story.) They all need memory upgrades, and buying SIMMs in this day and age is a sucker bet. Average price of the upgrades would be $550, but we'd have a hodgepodge of systems. If we can get common ground and two years of useful life for $700 from Hypertec, upper management would probably approve it.

Gateways. I worked with Gatermann last night after I got back from church (three Macs and an NT server died yesterday--I needed it last night) on trying to get his Linux gateway running under FloppyFW . We were finally able to get it working with dual NICs, able to ping both inside and outside his LAN (I finally found an old Pentium-75 board that didn't have compatibility issues). But we weren't able to actually get his Web browsers working.

I suspect something about the IP masquerading configuration just isn't right, but it's been so long since I wrote one of those by hand (and it was really just copycating an existing configuration), so since I have working Linux boxes at home I finally just gave up and downloaded the shell script version of Coyote Linux  and ran it. It's not foolproof because you have to know what kernel module your Ethernet cards use, but assuming you know that (make it easy on yourself--get a pair of Netgear 10/100 cards, which use the Tulip module), but it's definitely a two-edged sword. It makes it a little harder to configure, but it means it'll work with a much wider variety of cards. If Linux supports it, so does Coyote, whereas a lot of the other single-floppy distributions just support the three most common types (NE2000, 3Com 3c509, and DEC Tulip). So an old DEC Etherworks3 card will work just fine with Coyote, while getting it to work with some of the others can be a challenge.

I'm disappointed that Coyote doesn't include the option to act as a caching DNS, because you can fit caching DNS on the disk, and it's based on the Linux Router Project, for which a BIND tarball is certainly available. I'll have to figure out how to add BIND in and document that, because there's nothing cooler than a caching nameserver.

I was messing around briefly with PicoBSD , a microdistribution of FreeBSD, but the configuration is just different enough that I wasn't comfortable with it. FreeBSD would be ideal for applications like this though, because its networking is slightly faster than Linux. But either Linux or FreeBSD will outperform Windows ICS by a wide margin, and the system requirements are far lower--a 386, 8 megs of RAM, floppy drive, and two NICs. Can't beat that.

Rarely used trivia department: Using Linux to create disk images. To create an image of a floppy under Unix, use this command: dd if=/dev/fd0 of=filename.img bs=10k . There's no reason why this command couldn't also be used to clone other disks, making a single-floppy Linux or FreeBSD distribution an alternative to DriveImage or Ghost, so long as the disks you're cloning have the same geometry.

Test this before you rely on it, but the command to clone disk-to-disk should be dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb while the command to clone disk-to-image should be dd if=/dev/hda of=filename.img and image-to-disk should be dd if=filename.img of=/dev/hda .

And yesterday. While the computers (and I'll use that phrase loosely when referring to those Macs) were going down all around me at work, the mail was pouring in. Needless to say, some people agree and others don't. We'll revisit it tomorrow. I've gotta go to work.

Amiga lives! (Well, sort of). When it comes to GUIs, I'm a minimalist. Call me spoiled; the first GUI I used was on a 7.16-MHz machine with a meg of RAM, and it was fast. Sure, it wasn't long before software bloat set in and I had to add another meg, and then another, but at a time when Windows 3.1 was running like crap on 4 megs and only decently on 8, I had 6 megs on my Amiga and didn't really know what to do with all of it. So I left 3 megs available to the system, ran a 3-meg ramdisk, and all was well with the world. Until Commodore's raw dead fish marketing caught up with it and pulled it and the company under.

Thursday, 6/15/00

My Linux gateway likes to fall off the Internet occasionally. I think it's Southwestern Bell's fault, because it always seems to happen right after it tries to renew its DHCP lease. Rebooting fixes the problem, but I wanted a cleaner way.

Want the smallest, fastest OS possible? I stumbled across several Linux assembly language projects today. There's asmutils, which attempts to give full functionality of various common Linux tools but in smaller, faster assembly language packages, and there's Tiny ELF, a page of assembly language utilities that are somewhat useful, but the intent appears to be more to just see how small of a program he can write.

I had an old system open today. I'll call it Austin Powers because it lost its mobo. But anyway, it had 64 MB of RAM in it that I didn't realize I had (I thought it had 32, or at most, 48). So I pulled out the four 16-MB SIMMs, opened up my P120, pulled its four 8-MB SIMMs, and replaced them. While Linux is OK in 32 megs if you set it up right (using a lightweight window manager instead of KDE or, worse yet, Enlightenment, pulling out the daemons that provide services you never use, such as BIND and sendmail), it's a lot happier with 64. I still need to really optimize it, but for a P120 I'm very impressed. If I could get AbiWord to work with O'Reilly's templates, I could use it to write books.