David L. Farquhar on technology old and new, computer security, and more
Over at Ars Technica, there’s a thread expressing horror and dismay that the Navy is using WordStar in some of its departments–or, for that matter, that anyone alive is using WordStar.
Which leads me to ask, have any of these critics seen WordStar?
I said yesterday I didn’t remember exactly how to add a network card to Linux machines. I found instructions today. They weren’t entirely correct. So here are instructions (hopefully more correct–I have access to exactly one Linux box right now) for adding a NIC in Linux.
First, determine which module your NIC uses, then install it temporarily with the following:
insmod [module name]
For example:
insmod rtl8139
In RPM-based distributions (Red Hat, Mandrake, Caldera, TurboLinux, UnitedLinux), edit the file /etc/modules.conf or /etc/conf.modules to add an alias for the module. In Debian-based distributions, edit the file /etc/modutils/aliases and then run the command update-modules. In any case, the format of the line to add is the same:
alias eth0 rtl8139
More likely, you’re adding a second NIC, in which case the line would look more like this:
alias eth1 rtl8139
In RPM distros, next you create an interface config file in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts. The file is called ifcfg-[interface]. Here are a couple of example ifcfg-eth0 files:
# Static IP
DEVICE=eth0
IPADDR=192.168.0.33
NETMASK=255.255.255.0
BROADCAST=255.255.255.255
ONBOOT=yes
# DHCP
DEVICE=eth0
BOOTPROT=dhcp
ONBOOT=yes
In Debian, all network configuration info is kept in /etc/network/interfaces. Here’s a sample configuration:
iface eth0 inet dhcp
iface eth1 inet static
address 192.168.1.1
netmask 255.255.255.0
network 192.168.1.0
broadcast 192.168.1.255
SuSE is likely to be a bit different. Slackware is virtually guaranteed to be different. I haven’t looked at SuSE in three years and Slackware in five. Hopefully they’re similar enough that this can give you a start.
I’m sure there’s a graphical way to do this in some, if not all distributions, but I prefer to hit the configuration files directly. It’s much easier to explain, and the knowledge is much more portable.
A single-floppy firewall mini-distribution can be a quick and easy way to save yourself some money if you’ve got an old PC in a closet not doing anything, assuming you stumble across a combination of hardware that works right.
If you don’t stumble across a combination of hardware that works together, you can just as easily spend a weekend and accomplish nothing but uttering strings of four-letter words in combinations never before heard by mankind.
In case you came here looking for hardware that works, here are a few hints. A 10-megabit PCI NE2000 clone in combination with virtually any 10/100 PCI card ought to work fabulously. A pair of 10/100 PCI cards based on the RealTek 8139 chipset, which includes the majority of today’s inexpensive cards, probably will not. If you’re buying new stuff and want ease of use, get a 3Com card and a cheapie. If you want cheap and a little inconvenience, get a Netgear FA311 or 312 and a Realtek 8139-based card, such as a D-Link DFE-530+ or a Linksys. You’ll have to hunt down and install the natsemi.o module to get the Netgear working; most other inexpensive cards on the market will work with the rtl8139.o driver.
Freesco doesn’t supply a driver for the Intel EtherExpress Pro series out of the box. If you’ve got an EEpro, you can make it work by downloading the module and copying it to the floppy, but don’t rush out to buy one. And yes, the 3Com and Intel chipsets are high-performance chipsets, especially compared to the 8139, but remember, routers are machines that pull packets out of a 1.5-megabit pipe (if you’re lucky) and shove packets down an even smaller pipe. In this application, a $40 big-brand card doesn’t give you any advantage over a no-name card that costs $6 at Newegg.com
While these firewalls will technically work fine even on a 386sx/16, trying to make them work with ISA cards can be a long, difficult road. Used Pentium-75s are dirt cheap (and Pentium-60s and 66s are even cheaper, when you can find them) and they’re a lot less trouble because PCI cards don’t require you to rejumper them or hunt down a plug-and-play configuration disk to find out its IRQ and address. I’ve had the best luck with Pentiums that used an Intel Triton chipset or newer (the 430FX, HX, VX, or TX). I’ve tried a couple of boards that had a SiS chipset of 1995 vintage or so, and I could get one network card or the other working, but not both. I don’t want to generalize and say that based on two isolated incidents that all Taiwanese chipsets are junk for this application–for all I know, the problem could have been the BIOS on those boards–but I’ve done this on a handful of Triton-series boards and done well on all of them, and on two SiS boards and failed. Your mileage will probably vary.
How much memory do you need? 16 megs is sheer luxury.
Once you put all this together, the question becomes whether you use a floppy distribution or a full-blown distribution. If you want peace and quiet and cheap, the answer is pretty easy–use a floppy and pull out whatever hard drive was in there.
A full-out distribution like Red Hat or Debian will give you more versatility. You can run meaningful Web and FTP servers if you want (and your ISP allows it). You can run a caching nameserver to speed up your Web browsing. If you feel adventurous, you can even install the Squid caching proxy and speed up your browsing even more (but either use a SCSI drive or put in a bunch of extra memory and run Squid’s cache out of a ramdisk–Squid’s performance on IDE is, to put it mildly, terrible).
I’m having a hard time finding the documentation on how to set up a second network interface quickly. I believe it involves the file /etc/interfaces and the files /etc/sysconfig/ifconfig.eth0 and .eth1, but I don’t have a Linux box handy to investigate at the moment.
Anyway, I like Debian for this application (of course) because I can easily fit a minimal Debian on a 100-meg hard drive.
Once you get your network cards all working and talking to each other, you can build your firewall using this online tool. I just copy it, then Telnet into my Linux box using PuTTY, fire up a text editor, and right-click in the window to paste.
If you want versatility and quiet and don’t mind spending some cash, pick up a CompactFlash-to-IDE adapter and a CompactFlash card of suitable size. Don’t create a swapfile on the CF card–you’ll quickly burn it up that way. Your system will recognize it as a small IDE drive, giving you silent and reliable solid-state storage on the cheap.
I think I have a new most favoritest Web browser of all time for Windows. Or I will soon.
Phoenix is Mozilla on a diet. The idea is to cut out all the stuff not related strictly to Web browsing in order to make it as small and fast as possible.
Early releases were slightly faster than Mozilla. But the Mozilla feature I use most was missing: The ability to right-click on an image and select “Block images from this server.” It’s a good way to block objectionable content, be it an especially annoying ad (though most ads are tolerable if I keep animation turned off, I’ve found) or anything else I don’t want to look at.
Version 0.3 brought that feature back and nearly halved the memory consumption. It’s still not as slim and fast as Galeon on Linux, but it’s getting there. The last time I tried using a Mozilla theme to change its appearance (I like the TinyMozilla theme because it lets me use my screen space to display Web pages at the expense of big buttons–since I don’t need big buttons, that’s a good thing) I crashed it. But I can live without my fave theme for a while.
The nice thing is we’ve got a reasonable-sized Web browser that incorporates popup blocking without having to run additional programs. You can easily chew up 4, 8, 12 megs of RAM by keeping a popup blocker running. That’s the amount of memory a Web browser all by itself should be using.
Check it out. It’ll keep getting smaller, faster, better.
I spent the night fighting off telemarketers. I lost count of how many calls I got. It might have been as low as three. It seemed like a lot more though. Two different companies wanted to sell me alarm systems. Well, right now I can’t really afford an alarm system.
I thought about getting caller ID, or call-block on anonymous calls, but that’s like $7 a month. That’s not a lot, but I think I’m paying $20 a month for basic phone service (I called the phone company and told them I wanted two things: a dial tone and DSL. Nothing else.) so raising my phone bill by 33% to avoid telemarketers doesn’t quite seem right. I’m better off stashing that $7 a month into a repairs fund.
Then I remembered that at the apartment I got about five telemarketing calls a month. Missouri has a pretty liberal no-call law that eliminates most telemarketing calls to those who put themselves on a list. I signed up months ago, when it was first offered, and then I forgot about it. I just enjoyed not getting the telemarketing calls my friends always complain about. Those I do get usually are during the day, so my answering machine gets them. You can report the infringements and Missouri will go after them, but I’ve never bothered.
So, in between calls, I went and put my name on the no-call list.
I’ll have peace and quiet soon.
In response to Apple, Microsoft started its own “Switch” campaign featuring a freelance writer who ditched a Mac for a PC that runs Windows.
Well, the Associated Press tracked down this freelance writer and found she was a Microsoft PR hack. She said she really did switch. But Microsoft pulled the ad.
The AP tracked her down from the personal metadata Microsoft puts in all Office documents.
Can’t you just see the Apple “Switch” response now?
“Hi. I’m a CIA spy. I got rid of my insecure PC and switched to a Macintosh.”
I always thought the “Switch” campaign was really dumn, but suddenly Microsoft seems to have made it interesting.
There was a thread on Slashdot on Friday about self-publishing, the result of a review of a self-published novel. I found it pretty interesting.
People complained about the price of the book. I looked at Xlibris’ pricing. Had they published Optimizing Windows, it would have sold for about $4 less than it did.
People talked about self-publishing as a sign of poor quality. Unfortunately, anything is a sign of poor quality. If it’s published by a publishing house, marketing is paramount, rather than quality. Don’t listen to the publishers who claim they think about quality and nothing else. It’s a lie. Some publishers are worse than others. There are a lot of publishers I just won’t buy a book from, period. There are a lot of authors I won’t buy a book from, period. (And don’t bother trying to give their books to me either; I don’t want the other books on my bookshelves to look bad by association.)
The author of the book complained about Xlibris’ pricing being designed to make money off the author rather than the readers. That’s true of every self-publishing company. To a degree that’s true of the big publishing houses too. The terms of places like iUniverse and Wildside may be more favorable.
The author of the book complained that he made $2 per copy of the book. If I remember right, my royalties for Optimizing Windows, had everything gone well, would have worked out to about $1.75 per copy. And that’s actually not bad. Some of the authors of Dummies books make 25 cents per copy. The hope is that they can make it up in volume. Sometimes that happens and sometimes it doesn’t. If your name is Andy Rathbone and your book is titled Windows [whatever] for Dummies, you’re going to sell a million copies so even if you only get 25 cents per book it’s worth your while to do it. Though I’m pretty sure Andy Rathbone gets better terms than that.
While Optimizing Windows didn’t sell terribly well, it outsold some of the Dummies books, including some written by authors who were more established than me.
There’s a misconception out there that writers are rich. Writing books isn’t like big-league baseball, where the minimum salary is more than $200,000 and you get a minimum of three months off (and that’s assuming you’re a pitcher or a catcher and went to the World Series). You get an advance and you write your manuscript. Hopefully the advance is enough to pay your bills while you write, or you have money from somewhere else. The advance is taxable income. You’re self-employed. So the government’s going to take half of it. Some creative financing and tax planning can soften that blow a little.
Authors pay that advance back in the form of deferred royalties. Once a book sells enough copies that royalties cover the advance, the author starts getting checks every quarter. But when you pay $25 for a book, the author’s getting a small percentage of it. It might be as low as 25 cents. If it’s five bucks, that’s really high. Paper isn’t cheap and presses aren’t cheap, so most of what you’re paying for is the printing cost. The publisher and retailer make a few bucks and the author makes a couple of bucks.
I met an author last month who’s sold more than half a million books. He drives a Hyundai.
An awful lot of authors could make more money doing something else for a living. Those who choose to make a living writing are doing it for prestige or independece or enjoyment, much more so than for the money.
So I’m not convinced that self-publishing–especially print-on-demand self-publishing with little or no up-front cost–is a bad idea. Now that’s not to say I’m going to run out and self-publish immediately. But the thought’s crossed my mind a few times, yes. And if I had enough material already written for one reason or another to make up about half of a book (the half-book I wrote two years ago about Linux doesn’t qualify–I’d have to buy back the rights to parts of it), I’d probably write the other half and do it, for exactly the same reason that some musicians choose to self-publish.
I don’t remember how I stumbled across it, but textfiles.com tries to collect documents from the classic days of BBSing, which the curator defines as having ended in 1995. I wouldn’t have thought it that recent. I was still BBSing in the summer of ’94, but by the fall of ’94 I’d discovered the Web, and I thought I was the last one to wake up to it.
I’d learned FTP and Gopher when I went to college in 1993, and I’d been using Usenet via local BBSs for even longer, but as everyone knows now, it was the Web that put the Internet on the map. I think a lot of people think the Web is the Internet.
Anyway, before the Internet, hobbyists would take computers, get a phone line, hook up a modem, and see who called. There were usually discussion boards, file transfers, and at least one online multiplayer game. The really big BBSs ran on 386s with hard drives, but an awful lot of the BBSs I called ran on 8-bit computers and stored their data on floppy drives. I remember one board I called used seven or eight floppy drives to give itself a whopping 6 or 7 megs of online storage. It was called The Future BBS, and the sysops’ real names were Rick and Jim (I don’t remember their handles), and it ran on a Commodore 64 or 128 with, ironically, a bunch of drives that dated back to the days of the PET–Commodore had produced some 1-meg drives in the early 80s that would connect to a 64 or 128 if you put an IEEE-488 interface in it. Theirs was a pretty hot setup and probably filled a spare bedroom all by itself for the most part.
It was a very different time.
Well, most of the boards I called were clearinghouses for pirated software. It was casual copying; I didn’t mess with any of that 0-1 day warez stuff. We were curmudgeons; someone would wax nostalgic about how great Zork was and how they didn’t know what happened to their copy, then someone would upload it. I remember on a couple of occasions sysops would move to St. Louis and complain about how St. Louis was the most rampant center of software piracy they’d ever seen, but I see from the files on textfiles.com that probably wasn’t true.
Besides illegal software, a lot of text files floated around. A lot of it was recipes. Some of them were “anarchy” files–how-to guides to creating mayhem. Having lots of them was a status symbol. Most of the files were 20K in length or so (most 8-bit computers didn’t have enough address space for documents much longer than that once you loaded a word processor into memory), and I knew people who had megabytes of them in an era of 170K floppies.
A lot of the stuff on the site is seedy. Seedier than I remember the boards I called being.
But a lot of the content is just random stuff, and some of it dates itself. (Hey, where else was I going to find out that the 1982 song “Pac-Man Fever” was recorded by Buckner & Garcia? Allmusic.com forgot about that song. If I recall correctly, that’s probably proof that God is merciful, but hey.)
Mostly I find it interesting to see what people were talking about 10 and 20 years ago. Some of the issues of yesterday are pretty much unchanged. Some of them just seem bizarre now. Like rumors of weird objects in Diet Pepsi cans.
Actually that doesn’t sound so bizarre. I’m sure there’s an e-mail forward about those in my inbox right now.
ExtremeTech has an article about building a home Linux server. They’re recommending high-end P4s for the task. And I say, get real.
If what you want is a simple file/print server, anything that’ll take a 100-megabit NIC and has room for some good-sized hard drives will do great. You want a machine that’s running its PCI bus at 33 MHz, so a Pentium-133 is a better server than a Pentium-120, or, believe it or not, a Pentium-150. If the machine is marginal, get something other than an $8 D-Link 10/100 card or another card with the RealTek 8139 chipset. A pricier 3Com or Intel card will conserve CPU cycles for you.
Remember, too, that Linux doesn’t use the BIOS, so if a machine refuses to recognize that 200-gig hard drive you just bought, set the drive type to “none” in the BIOS and keep another, smaller drive in the system to boot from. Linux will pick up the monster drive and use it.
SCSI is much better for servers than IDE, but when two or three people (or one person) will be using it, the only advantage SCSI really offers is being better-built.
And the video recommendations in the article are absolutely ridiculous. You don’t need a GeForce 4MX 420. Dig around in your parts closet and find that 1-meg PCI video card you bought back in 1995 and haven’t used in five years. We’re talking a system that’s going to be using text mode. Or buy the very cheapest OEM AGP video card you can find to save a PCI slot for something useful–last time I looked, Newegg.com had a cheap AGP card based on an old ATI chipset for 18 bucks.
So don’t listen to those guys. If you want to build a Linux server and all you’ve got to work with is a Pentium-100, go for it. It won’t perform like their aging 1.13 GHz P3 (the slower machine in their benchmarks) but for a home network, it’s plenty. Keep in mind this Website is running off a P2-450. I’ve watched it under heavy traffic. There are two bottlenecks when it’s serving files to someone on broadband: My DSL connection, and the Web browser on the other side. The only time I’ve ever seen CPU usage on this box top 50% for more than a few seconds is when someone loads that giant GPS thread (the post with more than 200 comments).
Just be aware that some Linux distros aren’t too wild about older BIOSes. I’ve got a P133 that won’t boot the Mandrake 7.2 CD (yeah, it’s old–that’s how long it’s been since I used Mandrake) or the Debian 3.0 CD, but Debian 2.2 works fine. So be aware that you might have to experiment a little.
My friend Brad came over last night to help me move. He brought his wife, Denise, and their two kids, Faith, 4, and Luke, 2.
Faith calls me “Davefarquhar.” One word. She pronounces it right. It’s funny. I’ll see them at church, and Faith will say, “Davefarquhar, watch this!”
I guess that means I’m famous, like Raphael or Michelangelo. Or Prince.
[So what does that say about Jacques Pierre Cousteau Vermouth Bouillabaisse “Ham’n’Cheese” Croissant Rendezvous Nouveau Riche Au Jus Clousseau le Raunche de la Stenche? –R. Collins Farquhar IV] [On second thought, not everyone who uses just one name is rich and famous. Raunche’s Bentley goes out to the first caller who knows who Christophe was. –RCIV]As they drove up to my apartment complex, Faith said, “Boy, mom, Davefarquhar has a lot of porches!”
Denise told me the story. I laughed. Then I told Faith that means I’m really rich. The more porches you have, the richer you are.
“You know she’ll run around church telling everyone that Davefarquhar is really rich,” Denise said.
But everyone else knows the truth. It’s my evil twin brother that’s really rich.