moreentropy

Just disable password authentication, problem solved. Changing the SSH port does not add security against people who are determined to break into your system, but as you said, it helps to keep the noise down so you're more likely to notice suspicious activity early.

Correct me if I'm wrong, i don't know the rules in the us, in Germany you're simply not allowed to work more than an average of eight hours per day. So you can not only not be forced to work more, you can't even be asked to. Even if it seems to be voluntary, often it isn't.

Well if you're the boss it's your right to work as long as you want, but it's not OK to abuse your employees and make them work ridiculous hours.

Yes, you're right if you take it that way. I didn't mean the internet is built exclusively with open source software, but the majority of developed applications contain at least a bit of open source software, like a library, curl, Apache, PHP etc. That's much closer to 100% I think. Something where you can say "we took something for free, we give something back". Not that that's required in any way.

There's some high profile exceptions like the infrastructure parts you mentioned, but noone expects you to open source your router and unix config, there's nothing worth contributing and collaborating on here.

True dat.

I think close to 100% of the internet is built on/with open source software.

But it's a major headache to get your in house libraries/software released as open source. There's reservations because by default everything developed is considered proprietary and a trade secret. It's difficult to convince management to give stuff back and/or see a benefit, the larger the org the harder it gets. Then comes legal with the legal derp.

And finally you can't just put stuff on Github and expect it to thrive, you need resources to maintain your open source projects and again convince management beforehand that it's not just a liability.

You can view the answer from the koding guy without signing in.

We used to call that a fileserver.

Bizarre it is, at least to someone who is used to a modern environment. I once hat a gig setting up a open source softare stack on AIX, it was very painful to do. AIX admins aren't really helpful either because their knowledge is really domain specific and everything they usually run is well documented / supported by IBM.

For anything open source related on AIX, http://www.perzl.org/aix/ is a lifesaver.

But, the hardware just scales brutally. You can add/remove LUNs/CPUs/RAM from LPARs without interrupting operations. The Powers hosting the machines I worked on were basically bought, installed and switched on and are now up and running until they are decommissioned years later.

Power has LPARs, so why bother?

If I use Linux on Power by choice, I'm either doing OLAP/OLTP or I'm an AIX shop that needs a few Linux boxes without the hassle of a completely different platform (x86) in the mix.

But I can't imagine anyone wants to use IBM Power to host a large number of Linux KVM VMs, that just doesn't make sense.

In Germany the president is the head of state, but is not involved in running the government. Sort of like an elected king, he's there for ceremonies and signing federal laws.

Edit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/President_of_Germany

That paired messaging protocol we used was called email. Filtering was pretty sophisticated using scorefiles and killfiles. You didn't have rich media because the Usenet was about exchange of thoughts and knowledge, but people were pretty opinionated about formatting to make reading your posts pleasant for everyone.

That bit about total anonymity is just not true. Usually you would use your organization's news server (because every ISP/university had one), so you could be easily located. Plus, it was part of the netiquette to post using your real name / well known identity.

Thinking of the 90s internet makes me all sentimental.

That's valuable advice here, thanks for sharing.

I have one of those sitting on my desk. It still feels a bit like early adaptor stuff, the edge router line is quite new, but looks very promising.

I really like vyatta, but now that vyatta is basically dead, I'm happy that it lives on in edgeos.

Don't be fooled by the GUI though, it's very incomplete, but the full feature set of vyatta/edgeos is there accessible in the CLI.

I would say OpenWRT wins in this category. It's not based on open sourced Linksys firmware anymore, it's a embedded distribution designed from scratch for modularity and portability. It really is a awesome piece of engineering which is fun to use and well documented in detail. If you want to extend the features of the router and add things like openvpn, ntp server, traffic shaping, asterisk pbx, tftp server or whatever comes to mind, openwrt most probably has it packaged and ready to use.

I usually use tp-link gear for openwrt, it's readily available from our distributor and dirt cheap. Don't just look for recent models, pick your hardware from the openwrt hardware compatibility list based on the specs you need.

If you can disregard the fact that the firmware isn't open source, have a look at www.ubnt.com and www.routerboard.com . Those don't run openwrt, but price/performance and features beat everything else that's on the market. The mikrotik routers are performing so well and have so many features it's ridiculous. If you really need Cisco, you'll know. If you're not sure, get a mikrotik, it will cover everything you'll ever need.

Yes, I have a Github ID, but have mostly interacted with projects not hosted on Github. Yes, they still exist. :)

Yes, definitely. My personal experience is that it's not always missing appreciation but more practical issues that keep companies from contributing more (money/time/developers). My clients usually understand the benefits of using free software and express an intention to contribute back, but the process of contributing is not well understood. If you take some piece of open software and customize the hell out of it for a few months, you can't just expect the upstream project to gratefully merge all your stuff because it's "free features". So it takes time and energy to work with the upstream project to identify useful parts and carefully integrate them into the upstream project, all while the customer is already in "works for me" mode and doesn't care to change already deployed software....

Exactly.

I'd really love to contribute more to Open Source projects and/or put more stuff on Github, but that's not going to happen after 8+ hours of software development. I'm doing my share of bug reports and patches here and there, but I wouldn't take a role like maintainer/developer for a FLOSS project in my spare time. I admire those who are able and willing to do this, but it's not for me.

Dude,

I've never used BART/Caltrain so I can't say if it's that horrible, but most of the stuff you talk about sounds like totally normal train riding issues you'll find everywhere.

How to get there, what's their take on fares, how are the lines organized, how bad will the ticket machine suck, how to not miss my destination, how does entry/exit/transfer work, that's it. Nothing special or challenging for anyone who uses public transit on a semi regular basis.

I usually research the workings of the local public transport before i go somewhere. That's 20 minutes (on the plane/train) well spent, because all cities have a slightly different approach to the same problem. Someone should really make a website for this that boils all the facts of the world's transit systems down to a cheat sheet.

Nothing really. Let them to what they want with their resources.

I'd just say that with the current state of Unity and Gnome 3, it doesn't really make sense to have them both, since they're quite similar in look & feel. So I might suspect that right now Ubuntu's vision is to have something own they control. Which doesn't make sense to me but is their right.

I haven't really used Unity apart from launching a terminal and a browser on someone else's desktop. Unity and Gnome 3 seem very similar, both visually and by paradigm. I guess Unity is a brainchild of Ubuntu's NIH attitude.

Personally as a Gnome 3 user, when having to use Unity i got annoyed because my muscle memory keystrokes didn't work as expected (hit win, type "term" hit return, hit win-uparrow, expect a fullscreen terminal), but there's no point in expecting Unity to behave exactly like Gnome 3, I'm sure a similar workflow exists in Unity.

Well I beg to differ. I really like the Gnome 3 Shell, and I think it's a mature and usable interface. Of course paradigm stealing is happening since 1984 Mac OS (or before), but there's enough to Gnome 3 to make it not just a bad copy of something else.

Of course there's some stuff that sucks badly, for me it's some changes in Nautilus' drag&drop and keybindings, they seem to just change stuff there for the cause of being different. And the crude notification space on the bottom of the screen is pretty unimaginative and annoying.

I can honestly say that I'm generally very happy and productive with Gnome 3. It looks and feels way better than Unity.

With Gnome 3 I can launch, place, and switch all applications with a few keystrokes and without touching the mouse at all, all while "normal" people can still use the very same configuration. I like that it's basically just an unobstrusive shell to launch and switch applications.

People always complain that Linux desktops just mimic Windows 95, now that Gnome has done something entirely new (and good!), people complain that it's different to what they're used to.

Maybe. But that goodbye post is a joke. No facts, no reason, just a friendly fuck you.

Pfsense is in no way more hardened than a OpenWRT box. Both are vastly superior to the stock firmware on any soho router available. OpenWRT and pfsense come from different backgrounds, OpenWRT was intended as a replacement firmware for consumer wifi routers, while pfsense wanted to be a secure and easy to use firewall appliance on x86 hardware.

We use both, OpenWRT on cheap TPLink consumer routers as a VPN router in home and branch offices, and a bunch of virtualized pfsense firewalls for network security in our hq and datacenter rack.

If you're after real routers as in routing protocols like bgp and ospf and not security devices, both are not of much use. this is where vyatta, a open source Debian based router distribution is better suited.

Wireless performance of openwrt depends on the hardware it is running on, but It's generally not great compared to proprietary gear from ubiquity and mikrotik. Both make dirt cheap wireless gear and routers that can match and outperform Cisco routers that cost 10x more. Wireless ISPs everywhere rely on those vendors.

Made my day. I need this for my 404 pages.

Is anything known about the author or license of this work? Will Comedy Central likely object?

But why?

HostEurope and happy with it.

I've been part of some of large scale setups where usually location (even numbers = DC A, odd nubers = DC B), operating system (linux/aix/win etc.) and machine type (physical vs. virtual) are encoded in the hostname.

It can only get error prone if you have two hosts with similar names in the same project (made up example: lnx4739p34 vs. lnx4793p34) in the same project, i've seen hostnames getting reassigned because of regular mix ups.

If you happen to do ssh logins and manual troubleshooting, to make sure you're not messing with the wrong machine it's great to have puppet maintain CMDB data like service level, machine purpose, owner and open tickets etc. in a nicely formatted /etc/motd file, along with a autmatic "who" output in .bashrc to see who else is logged in.

Another question regarding hostnames is the use of (sub)domains. I find it highly annoying to deal with hosts like "mysql04.customer.vlan33.berlin2.intranet.my-company.com" instead of "lnx4739p34.myco.net", regardless of the global location.