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I have previously blogged about Ethernet bonding on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Now I have a need to do the same thing on Debian Etch – to have multiple Ethernet links for redundancy so that if one breaks the system keeps working.
The first thing to do on Debian is to install the package ifenslave-2.6 which provides the utility to manage the bond device. Then create the file /etc/modprobe.d/aliases-bond with the following contents for a network that has 10.0.0.1 as either a reliable host or important router. Note that this will use ARP to ping the router every 2000ms, you could use a lower value for a faster failover or a higher value
alias bond0 bonding
options bond0 mode=1 arp_interval=2000 arp_ip_target=10.0.0.1
If you want to monitor link status then you can use the following options line instead, however I couldn’t test this because the MII link monitoring doesn’t seem to work correctly on my hardware (there are many Ethernet devices that don’t work well in this regard):
options bond0 mode=0 miimon=100
Then edit the file /etc/network/interfaces and inset something like the following (as a replacement for the configuration of eth0 that you might currently be using). Note that XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX must be replaced by the hardware address of one of the interfaces that are being bonded or by a locally administered address (see this Wikipedia page for details). If you don’t specify the Ethernet address then it will default to the address of the first interface that is enslaved. This might not sound like a problem, however if the machine boots and a hardware failure is experienced which makes the primary Ethernet device not visible to the OS (IE the PCI card is dead but not killing the machine) then the hardware address of the bond would change, this might cause problems with other parts of your network infrastructure.
auto bond0
iface bond0 inet static
pre-up modprobe bond0
hwaddress ether XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX
address 10.0.0.199
netmask 255.255.255.0
gateway 10.0.0.1
up ifenslave bond0 eth0 eth1
down ifenslave -d bond0 eth0 eth1
There is some special support for bonding in the Debian ifup and ifdown utilities. The following will give the same result as the above in /etc/network/interfaces:
auto bond0
iface bond0 inet static
pre-up modprobe bond0
hwaddress ether 00:02:55:E1:36:32
address 10.0.0.199
netmask 255.255.255.0
gateway 10.0.0.1
slaves eth0 eth1
The special file /proc/net/bonding/bond0 can be used to view the current configuration of the bond0 device.
In theory it should be possible to use bonding on a workstation with DHCP, but in my brief attempts I have not got it working – any comments from people who have this working would be appreciated. The first pre-requisite of doing so is to use either MII monitoring or broadcast (mode 3), I experimented with using options bond0 mode=3 in /etc/modprobe.d/aliases-bond but found that it took too long to get the bond working and dhclient timed out.
Thanks for the howtoforge.com article and the linuxhorizon.ro article that helped me discover some aspects of this.
Update: Thanks to Guus Sliepen on the debian-devel mailing list for giving an example of the slaves directive as part of an example of bridging and bonding in response to this question.
James Purser writes about the current plans for Internet filtering in Australia and concentrates on the technical issues (whether it will degrade the ISP service) and the issue of who’s moral standards should be enforced for the entire country.
But the fact is that children have never had any problem accessing porn. When I was in grade 4 at primary school (~9yo) a group of boys decided to walk to the local shopping centre at lunch-time and I joined them. At the shopping centre the other boys read Playboy (that was before such magazines were required to be displayed in sealed plastic bays). I didn’t read Playboy because there were some electronics magazines that were more interesting. When in grade 6 (~11yo) a friend told me about his parents video collection which featured fellatio and sodomy. I don’t recall whether he offered to show me the videos but being a good friend I’m sure he would have done so if I had asked. In the early years of high school some boys ran a black-market for second-hand porn magazines (ick), they also sold new magazines that were significantly more expensive. When in year 12 digital porn was just becoming popular and the exchange of porn on floppy disk began.
I’m sure that now children use USB sticks to exchange porn that they get from the Internet or other sources.
When I was in year 10 a female dancing instructor ceased working for the school after an up-skirt picture of her was stuck on a notice-board (I guess that her resignation was related to the picture but can’t be sure).
The evidence that I witnessed while at school is that 15yo boys are prepared to photograph unwilling women and exchange the pictures, and that the exchange and sale of all manner of porn is not uncommon at school (including primary school). I don’t think that the schools I attended were in any way unusual in this regard.
When I was at school cameras were large. Unless you had a polaroid camera (which was even larger) the film had to be developed – and the staff at the photo company were potential witnesses. I expect that these factors significantly decreased the amount of such activity.
Now a significant portion of children have a mobile phone and it seems that a built-in camera is a standard feature in all new phones now. Digital cameras (which have much better quality than phone-cameras) are becoming quite cheap. It’s widely regarded that giving a teenager a mobile phone is good for their safety (and it certainly makes it easier to discover where children claim to be) and it’s also widely regarded that a digital camera is a good toy (babies as young as 2 are often given the old camera when their parents get a new one). We should expect that the number of children who have digital cameras to rapidly approach 100% of children who desire them.
Given these factors it seems to me that it would be a good idea to allow teenage boys access to better quality porn than they are unable to produce (with either willing or unwilling subjects). It has already been shown that increased access to porn reduces the incidence of rape. I expect that the same also applies to the issue of making porn, people who have good access to porn will be less inclined to make their own.
There is some nasty porn out there. If they were to try and prevent access to porn that is illegal under Australian law (IE pictures of children, animals, rape, etc) then I don’t think that anyone would object. But preventing access to soft porn such as Playboy (which is so tame that it’s hardly porn by modern standards) is a really bad idea if it will increase the risk of up-skirt photos and the production of child rape movies.
Let’s be sensible and accept the fact that children who want to see porn will see it and focus our attention on what type of porn will be seen by children and whether the “actors” are consenting adults.
PS I spent several years living in Amsterdam and working as a sys-admin for ISPs there.
The Washington Post has an article about handwriting, apparently for some university entrance exams in the US 85% of students write their essays in block letters. The article claims that students who have poor writing skills demonstrate lesser ability to construct sentences – and claims that this indicates that there is a link between hand-writing and mental processes.
While the article didn’t cover the evidence in much detail I was left wondering whether there were any tests of teaching students to touch type and then assessing them on the same tests. I suspect that increasing the ability to record text in any way would increase the sentence length and the use of long words. While students who can only write slowly will have an incentive to write more briefly.
My handwriting is quite poor, I was never able to write quickly or particularly legibly and since completing university I have had little incentive to improve my writing skills. When laptops became cheap enough for me to own one (in 1998) my hand-writing skills decreased and when I started seriously using a PDA about a year ago they decreased again.
I don’t believe that my writing skills (in terms of conveying ideas and instruction to other people) have declined during this time. In fact the steadily increasing amount of writing that I have done has improved my skills a lot.
I think that children should be taught cursive writing, but it shouldn’t be regarded as especially important – or more important than touch typing! Then there’s the issue of the Dvorak keyboard. If the government wanted to improve the efficiency of the nation (which is what they claim to be doing) then maybe teaching all students touch-typing on a Dvorak keyboard and subsidising the purchase of such keyboards for everyone would be better than some of the current ideas in education. Dvorak keyboards would certainly be better than flag-poles!
News reports indicate that hand-writing skills are decreasing dramatically in Japan due to word-processors – and a significant number of students are never learning how to write any significant portion of the Japanese letters. But the sky doesn’t seem to be falling on them either.
Mark Greenaway writes about having bad hand-writing and is apparently considering some sort of remedial course. I have to wonder how good Mark’s touch-typing skills are and whether he would benefit more from improvement in that area.
One thing that I don’t like is blogs that provide no method of feedback. When I want to read something with little or no possibility of feedback I’ll read one of the many newspapers that are available.
Craige McWhirter’s blog is one of them. The CAPTCHA system doesn’t work (I must have tried at least 20 times with both Konqueror and Iceweasel) and he doesn’t provide an email address. He does provide a mobile phone number which is handy for people in the same country.
AKISMET works fairly well on my blog and makes the spam quite managable. As the number of legit comments are not that great I manually approve them thus avoiding having a spam ever appear on my blog – showing a spam encourages more of the same.
The comment I wanted to make on his post was to reference my previous blog post on this topic and suggest that one thing that can be done is to improve public transport which will increase the area of land available to people who work in central city areas. This means that the land prices can decrease and housing prices will follow.
Another issue is that he suggests assisting people in paying rent. While this may sound like a good thing the current system of Negative Gearing is designed to decrease rent, but instead merely increases the price of owning a house.
news.com.au reports that MS has hired former Miss Australia Erin McNaught to sex up the computer industry’s geeky image and describes her as a “University Drop-Out” (later in the article it’s revealed that she deferred her course so she might end up completing it). Hiring her is supposed to demonstrate that IT careers have “gone from geek to chic”.
There are lots of more professional ways of demonstrating that idea. One way is to compare the median income of IT people ($54,422 according to payscale.com) to the median for the Australian population ($13,200 to $20,000 for females and $31,200 to $41,600 for males in 2006 according to the ABS) which clearly indicates that IT people get paid more than most Australians.
Another way is to use adverts such as the Apple adverts for Mac vs PC, and Novell adverts for Linux vs Mac vs PC. Note how the female Linux character in the Novell adverts is cool and cute while still keeping all her clothes on.
Yet another possibility would be to find some cute female MS employees and get them to do the promotion. MS is one of the largest IT companies in the world and has a large presence in Australia, surely they have enough female employees that they can find someone to do this promotion who isn’t famous for wearing a bikini!
Hiring a model who is famous for swim-suit work to promote the computer industry isn’t going to affect the career choices of any but the least talented male students and if anything will scare off female students (who are already under-represented in the computer industry). The fact that the news.com.au story included a set of pictures of her in swim-suits and lingerie with the title Erin McNaughty really says it all.
It seems to me that Danni Ashe (wikipedia link) is better qualified for the MS job – after all she has even been recognised by the Guinness book of records for her work in sexing up the computer industry. Unlike Erin she has created web sites herself and started a very successful online business. Surely if being famous for wearing bikinis makes Erin suitable then being famous for wearing no clothes at all makes Danni even more suitable! :-#
But seriously, has anyone ever hired the Chippendales (wikipedia) to advertise in the computer industry? There is a reason why that sort of thing doesn’t happen, and the same reason would apply to hiring an ex miss-Australia.
Updated to fix a bad link.
- We always underestimate the number of stupid people
- The probability of a person being stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person
- A stupid person is someone who causes damage to another person, or a group of people, without any advantage accruing to himself (or herself) — or even with some resultant self-damage
- Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid people. They constantly forget that at any moment, and in any circumstance, associating with stupid people invariably constitutes an expensive mistake.
- A stupid person is the most dangerous person in existence
- Stupid people don’t know they are stupid
The above has been floating around the net for a while. While it makes an interesting read I think that having a boolean criteria of labelling someone as stupid is not necessarily accurate. While there are a small number of people who are stupid, there are many more people who are good at some things and stupid when they act outside their area of expertise. There is a saying “never take investment advice from your dentist” which is apparently due to the incidence of con-artists targetting wealthy people (such as dentists) who sometimes then pass on the bad advice to their customers.
One stupid thing that I did a few years ago was to spend more effort in choosing a mobile phone than on choosing a car. I was totally happy with my mobile phone but not totally happy with my car – and the car cost a lot more… Of course the difference between pure stupidity and tactical stupidity (for want of a better term) is that a smart person who is about to do something stupid can generally be persuaded not to do it with a logical argument. If someone had pointed out to me the fact that the amount of time spent on background research for a decision should be in some way proportional to the amount of money involved (maybe proportional to the log of the value) then I would have been convinced.
So for rule 4 maybe it would be best to say taking advice from someone in an area where they are stupid is a mistake. For rules 5 and 6, if someone is known to be smart in other areas then tactical stupidity may be overlooked (until it’s too late).
Update: Don Marti commented with this link http://www.math.wisc.edu/~miller/old/incomp.txt about incompetent people being unable to judge their own level of incompetence as further evidence for point 6.
I have created a new blog page for suggestions for future posts. If you want to suggest future topics that you would like me to write about (or vote for topics that are already on my list) then please make a comment on that page.
Also I now have enough post pages that they don’t all display at less than a 1080 pixel window width (with the fonts used on my system at least). I guess I need to use a theme that supports multiple rows of pages or hack my CSS to increase the minimum window size. Any advice on WordPress themes in this regard would be appreciated.
In response to a blog conversation on Planet Debian, Wouter Verhelst writes about voting tactics in which he claims that Instant-Runoff (wikipedia) (the method used in Australia to elect members of the house of representatives) is broken.
I have read the Wikipedia review and neither it nor my previous understanding of Instant-Runoff leads me to believe that it is broken or prone to tactical voting problems.
The main tactical voting issue in Australian elections is to give first preference to a small party (such as The Greens) in a seat where there is almost no chance of the small party winning. The idea is to have the vote effectively be a vote for whichever of the two major parties the voter prefers while also sending a message (by the first-preference votes which are widely publicised) as to their desires. If a major party wins a seat while 20% of the first preferences went to the Greens then they might find it an incentive to try and get some Green policies adopted if they want to win the next election (whether this actually works is debatable but it is a fact that people try it).
There are many people who don’t understand how the Australian voting system works and believe that they have to vote for one of the major parties to avoid a “wasted vote”. This is not due to the voting system but due to American media – and ill-educated Australians who can’t work out which parts of the news apply to them. Wouter has an advantage in living in a country where English is not the primary language – English news does not directly concern him and his country-men can probably work out that English-language voting instructions should not be followed!
The condorcet.org site has a useful analysis which demonstrates one theoretical flaw in IR, but realistically getting the average voter to use Condorcet would essentially be an IQ test as a pre-requisite to voting (numbering all the candidates in order for IR is difficult enough).
The fact that an election system is not theoretically fair is not a valid criticism unless there is a viable alternative which is better. If the lower house is to actually represent the people of each electorate (which is rarely the case nowadays) then IR seems to be the best option. If members of the lower house are not expected to represent geographic regions then Wouter’s advocacy of proportional representation makes sense.
As for the Australian Senate, the voting system for that is far too complex and I think that as a matter of principle any voting system which can not be understood by the majority of voters is wrong. A good case could be made for proportional representation in the senate.
Update: In response to Wouter’s post – tactical voting that doesn’t change the outcome of the election and merely sends a message to a political party is OK IMHO. But if you convince enough people that tactical voting is the only option in the US then the result may change.
What do you think is the most important single-sentence of advice that you can offer to someone who wants to contribute to the free software community? I intentionally didn’t mention what area or type of advice or what “contribute” means, interpret it how you wish and give multiple answers for different interpretations if that seems appropriate to you.
If you had the opportunity to say one sentence to someone who knows about computers and free software (EG they have used both Linux and Windows and done a small amount of programming) to convince them that they should join the free software team, what would it be?
Writing an essay about your thoughts is fine (and I’m sure that many readers of my blog could easily write an interesting essay on each of those topics). But please preface it with what you consider to be the most important sentence.
Please either track-back to this blog post or post a comment with a URL of your post (comments are moderated but I usually approve them in less than 12 hours and often much faster – I approve all sensible non-spam comments). If you only offer two sentences (and decide not to write an essay) then the comment section can contain your entire answer.
Note that by Serious Free Software Contributors I am referring to people who feel that they are serious about it. If free software matters to you and you go out of your way to help the cause in the way that best suits your abilities then it means you.
I will write another post with a summary of what I consider to be the most interesting responses (including links to any blog posts with long answers).
PS This post is not what I consider to be a “meme”.
A common pattern in blog communication is referred to as a Meme. Here is one example of the commonly used definition of the term as applied to blogs. One common factor that doesn’t seem to get directly mentioned much when people define the term (but which always seems to be mentioned in passing) is the idea of tagging people. So the definition of a meme as applied to blogs seems to be a silly question that you answer in a blog post and then request that some other bloggers (usually 5) answer as well.
At the end of this post I have included the dictionary definition of the term (here is the Wikipedia definition).
I believe that it is incorrect to call a question such as “which superhero do you most identify with” a meme. Instead I think that there is a Memeplex associated with such posts. One meme is that when someone “tags” you (requests that you answer a question) it should be considered an honour (someone in the blog-sphere likes you enough to ask you random questions in a public forum). Another meme is that such discussion is a good thing (although an increasing number of people in the more serious part of the blog-sphere oppose this). A final one that is apparent to me (I’m sure that there are others) is that so-called memes and lazyweb posts are the same thing (I believe this to be wrong).
I believe that lazyweb posts if written about interesting topics can contribute significantly to the community knowledge base. I also believe that chain lazyweb posts (here is a link to the only such post I’ve made so far) can also contribute if created in a sensible manner. Chain posts that don’t require any thought or input from the person re-posting them (EG “please post this message to all your friends so that they can know of the terrible war/famine/earthquake/whatever in some foreign part of the world”) are of course quite useless (you can make a post of links once a month if you want to spread the news about such things).
Now I agree that some amount of conversation among bloggers in a community that is personal and not directly related to the main topics of discussion is good for building the community.
From Jargon File (4.4.4, 14 Aug 2003) [jargon]:
meme
/meem/, n.
[coined by analogy with `gene’, by Richard Dawkins] An idea considered as a {replicator}, esp. with the connotation that memes parasitize people into propagating them much as viruses do. Used esp. in the phrase meme complex denoting a group of mutually supporting memes that form an organized belief system, such as a religion. This lexicon is an (epidemiological) vector of the `hacker subculture’ meme complex; each entry might be considered a meme. However, meme is often misused to mean meme complex. Use of the term connotes acceptance of the idea that in humans (and presumably other tool- and language-using sophonts) cultural evolution by selection of adaptive ideas has superseded biological evolution by selection of hereditary traits. Hackers find this idea congenial for tolerably obvious reasons.
PS This evening I had planned to go to a LUV meeting and see my friend Andy Fitzsimon (blog) give a talk about Inkscape (for which he is famous). I also had a day off work, so it was going to be a day of non-stop fun. But instead I got some sort of cold/flu, stayed in bed for much of the day, missed the meeting, and was late in my blog post. This sucks.
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