OT: Comparison of Unix systems and window managers

Thanks! I'd never heard of them before -- that looks really useful.

Reply to
Joe Pfeiffer
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Reply to
Joe Pfeiffer

FWIW, when I was director of the regional Science Fair I wound up doing quite a bit of the database stuff with postgresql. It works fine (and I'm sure mysql also works fine). Use whatever is easier for your web host.

Reply to
Joe Pfeiffer

Yes. Exactly. It was very funny and to the point. Very many sites can be hacked with SQL injection. I think that somehow, PHP is especially vulnerable, but I do not know for sure. I use perl and there are some easy quoting functions like $dbh->quote( $username ).

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Reply to
Ignoramus1285

I'm not against using CSS. CSS works great for setting colours, fonts, indents, etc. But I've found that if you have a layout which is essentially tabular, even if it isn't a table of data that you're displaying, HTML tables are a much simpler and more reliable way of achieving it than CSS. To me, trying to do that with CSS is hard to understand, and what you get often varies from browser to browser, particularly with older browsers. So you sacrifice the ideal of complete separation of content and formatting, but in return get something easy to understand which works even in older browsers. There is of course the argument that pages which use tables for layout don't work well with screen readers. I'm not entirely convinced by that, because many sites which use tables for layout work fine in Lynx, and I'd have thought that Lynx has quite a few similarities with screen readers. Lastly there's the argument that pages which use CSS for layout are quicker to load. I think this is a myth.

It's a matter of opinion. You take your choice.

Best wishes,

Chris

Reply to
Christopher Tidy

It's a hobby project, so I'm not watching the clock. I'd like to learn more about programming, which is why I'd like to design the system myself.

Thanks for the offer. If I have a query I'll get in touch.

Best wishes,

Chris

Reply to
Christopher Tidy

I am not against CSS either. Not at all.

I think so, too.

I feel the same.

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Reply to
Ignoramus1285
[ ... ]

That was a lot more than I had -- because I didn't have the CPU board with the proper memory management --just the SWTP 6809 card, which had memory mangement of sorts, but not really good memory management.

On the Unix v7? There were some. (Obviously, no GUI based ones. :-)

For that matter, I ran adventure on the SWTP 6800 (SSB DOS-68) which preceded my 6809. It was interesting the way they squeezed it all into that limited address space. Each string in all the messages was replaces by a run of 16-bit numbers which were pointers into an array of individual text words, the final character of each was marked with the parity bit set instead of clear. At the time, I had a FORTRAN deck of it for the CDC 6600 (which would not compile on other systems, since it was using 6H10 formats instead of 30H2 (if I remember FORTRAN FORMAT strings properly. The 6600 did not have enough core to compile with the standard format strings for other FORTRANS, but the ability to get ten six-bit characters into a single word made it able to handle things a lot better.

Isn't the volume manager used for auto-mounting CDs and DVDs (and floppys) -- not for being a RAID system? I thought that it was the META commands on earlier Solaris. From the "SEE ALSO" on Solaris 10 for metainit:

====================================================================== SEE ALSO mdmonitord(1M), metaclear(1M), metadb(1M), metadetach(1M), metahs(1M), metaoffline(1M), metaonline(1M), metaparam(1M), metarecover(1M), metarename(1M), metareplace(1M), metaroot(1M), metaset(1M), metassist(1M), metastat(1M), metasync(1M), metattach(1M), md.tab(4), md.cf(4), mddb.cf(4), md.tab(4), attributes(5), md(7D) ======================================================================

while zfs only has two command, "zpool" and "zfs" (with lots of options of course. :-) It even has automatic sharing of file systems in the ZFS pool if you select that.

While I am home full time these days (retired, dontya know), and am quite happy to use Solaris for almost everything.

[ ... ]

The 280R was from a hamfest -- and a friend and neighbor who is still working spotted it for me. I hadn't seen ones that new, and didn't recognize it.

Hamfests can be good -- if you are lucky. eBay can also be good.

So am I. I guess that the commercial writers don't want to write for open-source platforms (for fear that their proprietary rights will be contaminated), and the open source people can't afford the potential of lawsuits -- it takes a really large user base to make that profitable for them.

Enjoy, DoN.

Reply to
DoN. Nichols

O.K.

??? -- I thought that you had over 1GB of RAM, which means that at least some of your DIMMs are the maximum size -- probably half of them.

Hmm ... for that you could possibly get an Ultra-60 *with* 2GB of RAM and the dual 450 MHz CPUs -- though the shipping to the UK might be a killer.

O.K. One auction (290174751151) is *three* Ultra-60s, but with

360 MHz CPUs, and only 448MB RAM each. The DIMMs are under the power supply shown to the left in the opened view.

No drives visible, but your two 36 GB drives would fit.

O.K. This one (250179441529) is the dual 450 MHz CPUs, but only

1GB of RAM. One 36 GB and one 18 GB drive. But it is $349.00 not the $100.00 I suggested. The prices do vary, of course. DVD-ROM drive, but no floppy drive.

This one (330180925896) is 1GB, 18 GB hard drive (possibly only single) 450 MHz CPU. No DVD-ROM drive -- you would have to transfer the one from your Ultra-2. Currently at $34.95.

(270179641558) 450 MHz, 512 MB RAM, 36 GB disk, $100.00 (maybe only one CPU, and only one disk. And at 512 MB RAM, you would certainly have to replace all of the RAM to expand it.

BTW -- you can use the Ultra-2 CPU modules in the Ultra-60 -- that is how similar they are. And the DIMMs are interchangible between the two systems as well.

However -- the disk cage will accept 1.6" high drives, instead of only the 1" ones which the Ultra-2 limits you to.

(270181880587) 450 MHz CPUs (maybe only one), 73 GB HD (single drive), 1GB RAM, DVD-ROM (but no floppy).

While I'm here, my search turned up this, which may be of interest to you: (170164237248) It is eight DIMMs adding up to 1GB, which would fit your Ultra-2 or the Ultra-60 -- sixteen DIMM sockets in either system. The price? Buy-it-now $18.00 for the set of eight. And, he has ten sets available, so you could get a full 2GB for the worst case situation for $36.00 (plus shipping).

And this one (280168344128) is the dual 450 MHz, 512 MB of RAM, and (single) 18 GB disk. No DVD-ROM or floppy visible. $95.00 Buy-It-Now.

And just as a teaser for the Sun Blade 2000:

(300164734882) dual 900 MHz CPUs, 4GB of RAM, (you would need to change them all to go to the max of 8GB). These are the Cu (copper) CPUs -- faster than the equivalent aluminum conductor ones. And it has two 73 GB Fibre Channel drives in it. This one sort of tempts me. :-) It is currently at $212.50. Hmm -- no DVD drive -- again move from your Ultra-2. (BTW -- you may need to upgrade the firmware in the DVD drive to be able to boot DVDs from it with the Sun Blade 2000. I had to do that with the one from my Ultra-2 which I put in an Ultra-60.

The small dayglow green circles in one of the photos are the jackscrews for the CPUs, and the larger (but thinner) dayglow green circle below and to the left is the torque wrench shipped with it so you don't over-torque the CPUs.

Note the serious power supply wires in the next to bottom-most photo. The Sun Fire 280R (same system board and CPUs) has dual hot-swappable power supplies, and dual hot-swapable Fibre Channel drives, but in the 280R they are limited to 1" high like the Ultra-2.

Did you check it while you had a lot of images open in the GIMP?

While it does *not* dump core for me under Solaris 10 -- in either the Ultra-60 or the Sun Fire 280R. (It is just *faster* in the

280R. :-)

O.K. Good luck -- but I would keep the unix and Windows operations on different hardware, just to be sure. :-)

And to you, DoN.

Reply to
DoN. Nichols

[ ... ]

Well ... I don't know whether the PCI version of the Creator-3D is still made -- but if so, it *does* have the 13W3. Generally, the higher quality monitors and framebuffers have 13W3 instead of VGA, because the proper coax termination of the R, G, and B feeds gives a much cleaner signal than the VGA with coax hot and shield simply connected to adjacent pins. Go for a long cable, and you will see ringing on vertical lines of high contrast.

The Sun Fire 280R only has a PCI card with a VGA connector, but it is not expected to be used as a workstation, so the lower budget framebuffers are supplied with it -- and the chassis prevents installing the Creator-3D -- on the theory that a file server does not need that for administration. :-)

Enjoy, DoN.

Reply to
DoN. Nichols

I've got 4 x 128 MB and 12 x 64 MB modules. So I'd need to replace at least 12, and people seem to sell them in 8s or 16s.

By the time I've paid the shipping and got screwed by the English taxman on importing, I don't think I'll save anything. I tend to only buy from the US if I can't get stuff elsewhere. If I buy from within Europe, I don't have to pay duty. Thanks for the thought, though!

Best wishes,

Chris

Reply to
Christopher Tidy

[ ... lots of eBay items snipped ... ]

Hmm ... can't you limit your eBay searches to the UK locations?

And I sometimes see people offering things in the UK in the usenet newsgroup comp.sys.sun.hardware, which would get you things already past the taxman's barrier.

FWIW The Sun Blade 2000 which I pointed out closed at $300.00. It makes me wish that *I* had bid on it. :-) (Of course, no clue how high the actual top bid of the winner was -- but the fact that it closed at precisely $300.00 suggests that was his real top bid.

Good Luck, DoN.

Reply to
DoN. Nichols

I forwarded that to our DBA team the day it came out, yup.

Reply to
Dave Hinz

Understood and appreciated. Sometimes doing things for the exercise of doing them is more rewarding than taking the easy way.

Reply to
Dave Hinz

I'm trying to remember how I did it. Had to do with a 6883 SAM and a

74LS138 3-to-8 bit MUX, I seem to recall, but the specifics are lost in the mists of time. But it was 4116's I tore out of CoCo's I had upgraded with 4164's, and the perfboard from Radio Shack and a bunch of spaghetti-wire. It's probably 20 feet from where I am now, I know what shelf it's on. (see previous re: I really need to clean this stuff up)

Well, technically, the star trek game and nethack have _a_ GUI, they're just a text GUI. Damn good gameplay, I still play nethack from time to time.

You know, it's funny. The iPhone games that are coming out are impresive, dozens of KB each. Amazingly compact given today's trends of package size. Warms the heart, it does, to see developers who actually care about memory and optimize their code.

Um, sort of. vold is I think what you're thinking of, it's more or less automountd of times past. But Solaris Volume Manager, derived from Online Disk Suite and it's varients, isn't horrible these days. "Here, mirror this to that and just work please, thank you" seems to work just fine.

Yup. metastat, metadetach, metattach, and friends. These days, doesn't suck. Not sure if I just got more tolerant or smarter over the last 10 years, or if it got non-evil in the meantime. But it's sure better than dealing with Veritas volume manager.

Yup, that's the one. Doesn't suck.

Isn't zfs more about the journaling than raid? Dunno, we're not there yet.

Yeah yeah, you retired guys make me envious. But I'm decades away from it.

Go by color. Sun's packaging folks must be color-blind so if it's fugly, it's worth a second look.

I have to be careful that there is no question about the equipment in my basement having come from my employer. I'm real careful about that

-when I built my house, I used square-D circuit breakers rather than GE just so nobody would have any reason to accuse me of stealing stuff out of stock for my house. Same with my cat-5 wiring, we used black at work so I bought blue. And so on. Stories still circulate about the guy who had a racecar, which should have had the number "46" because the part numbers at our part of GE started with the prefix "46-". I don't want to be "that guy".

There's always the windows-emulation stuff for Mac, I guess. Or WINE. Or, boot to windows to do a single task. Or just pay the local guy 100 bux and get on with life, saving all that time and stress. I'm thinking of the latter approach for this year, I don't enjoy doing it.

Oh, hell yes, I always do, Dave

Reply to
Dave Hinz

O.K. I played with Level-I on a CoCo -- just to see how much of a real OS could work on such toy hardware. (It still had the bit-banger serial interface from a few pins of a parallel port chip, which even SWTP had dropped when they went from the 6800 to the 6809. :-) But still, the SWTP 6809 hardware felt a *lot* better in use. (Of course, I had real hard disks on it, unlike the CoCo. :-)

O.K. I never really spent enough time on NetHack to get hooked, even though I did compile it for the v7 machine.

The Star Treck I've played in so many versions that they all blur together by now.

*Real* hackers are coming back. :-)

O.K. I hit it earlier -- I think on Solaris 8 or Solaris 9, and had too many things go flakey so I never committed to it. It was especially difficult to recover after a system shutdown. (With zfs, I simply do a "zfs export" followed by a "zfs import" if zfs tried to start before all of the disks were spun up and it thus complained about that. And the same sequence will let me move a zfs filesystem from one interface to another -- even with different SCSI IDs in the new location. (I moved one set from a 6-slot Multipack on the 280R's built-in external SCSI interface to a D-1000 connected to a HVD PCI card and I had to do nothing to make it happy other than export and import.

I also used the export/import sequence to move it from an Ultra-60 to the Sun Fire 280R. Again, no problems.

*That* I never dealt with. There was someone else who was managing the backups in a rather extensive tape library using the Veritas software for that.

Personally -- I would worry about trying to recover the license keys after a major crash before I could start to recover the rest of the system.

I'm using Amanda for my tape library.

[ ... ]

O.K. But at this point I am really happy with zfs.

It does the journaling -- making it recover from unplanned shutdowns more gracefully. But it has two versions of RAID5, which are called raidz and raidz2. The latter does more journaling (so it chews up more disk) but it is still quite good from my point of view.

Here is the output of "zpool status"

====================================================================== Burke:csu 14:56:20 # zpool status pool: home-p state: ONLINE scrub: none requested config:

NAME STATE READ WRITE CKSUM home-p ONLINE 0 0 0 raidz2 ONLINE 0 0 0 c5t8d0 ONLINE 0 0 0 c5t9d0 ONLINE 0 0 0 c5t10d0 ONLINE 0 0 0 c5t11d0 ONLINE 0 0 0 c5t12d0 ONLINE 0 0 0 spares c5t13d0 AVAIL

errors: No known data errors

pool: photo-p state: ONLINE scrub: none requested config:

NAME STATE READ WRITE CKSUM photo-p ONLINE 0 0 0 raidz2 ONLINE 0 0 0 c2t0d0 ONLINE 0 0 0 c2t1d0 ONLINE 0 0 0 c2t2d0 ONLINE 0 0 0 c2t3d0 ONLINE 0 0 0 c2t4d0 ONLINE 0 0 0 c2t8d0 ONLINE 0 0 0 c2t9d0 ONLINE 0 0 0 c2t10d0 ONLINE 0 0 0 spares c2t11d0 AVAIL

errors: No known data errors ======================================================================

Two pools -- one formed on the D1000 (home-p), and one formed on a Kingston disk tray with 12 slots for 68-pin drives (photo-p) which is the backup of my photo data.

And the output from "zfs list" is:

====================================================================== Burke:csu 0:49:26 # zfs list NAME USED AVAIL REFER MOUNTPOINT home-p 3.54G 45.7G 49.1K /home-p home-p/home-1 1.86G 45.7G 1.86G /home-p/home-1 home-p/home-4 555M 45.7G 555M /home-p/home-4 home-p/home-6 1.14G 45.7G 1.14G /home-p/home-6 photo-p 37.2G 62.2G 61.7K /photo-p photo-p/DoN.photos 26.3G 62.2G 26.3G /photo-p/DoN.photos photo-p/Dolores.photos 423M 62.2G 423M /photo-p/Dolores.photos photo-p/csu.photos 10.5G 62.2G 10.5G /photo-p/csu.photos ======================================================================

As I have it configured, the various partitions sharing a pool all have access to any as yet unused space in the pool -- though they can be set up with quotas limiting each.

You can also ask the system to make a static image (a snapshot) of a partition which in reality only stores the changes from the moment the snapshot was taken. As time goes on, it takes more and more space to store the information to get back to the original image -- but you do this for a short while to make backups from a static filesystem, and then destroy the snapshot, releasing what little space it consumed.

Sorry. I stuck with Uncle Sam (an Army R&D lab) for a long time, and at times the only thing which made it tolerable was that unlike the GIs, I could always quit if I needed to. :-)

For a lot of that time, I was an electronics technician, and for about the last five years, I was a unix systems admin (a welcome change, because the interesting tasks were by that time being contracted out, so life was rather boring as a technician.)

They didn't used to be that bad -- just rather bland. The Sun Fire 280R seems to be sneering at me (the swing-aside panel which gives access to the hot-swapable FC-AL drives and one of the two hot-swappable power supplies. :-)

I can understand that. I used to pick up things at the local DMRO auctions, and made *sure* that I kept my receipts. Later (after I retired), I picked up some things at a hamfest which even had recognizable initials on them -- one of the people who had left the lab some years before, and whose property equipment was passed on from person to person until if finally got turned in by someone tired of having to locate it every six months and account for it. :-)

There is a version of the tax software which I used for the Mac. It is on the same CD-ROM as the Windows stuff -- and I would be more willing to connect an OS-X system to the net to download the required last-minute updates than I ever would with a Windows 2000 Pro system, which I have never applied the security patches to, because I *never* intend to let it talk to the net. :-)

We did that for a while, starting after my parents died and the tax forms got really hairy. Then, about the time they settled down, the accountant we were using retired, and left us a name of someone to move to. We opted to go back to doing it ourselves, and a couple of months later, we got a warning from the original accountant that this replacement was not a good choice after all -- so it is just as well that we dropped back to doing it ourselves.

Enjoy, DoN.

Reply to
DoN. Nichols

Hey, DoN. I've got a couple of SB-1000 you can have. But, I'll want to drop them off at a UPS store and have them boxed up and shipped on your nickle. Zero hassle for me and you pay the full freight on them. Otherwise, they're free..

(I've shifted over to using SunRays and have no further need for individual workstations.)

If interested, let me know and I'll forward detailed descriptions..

Reply to
Hank Zoeller

That sounds great to me.

The e-mail above is valid, as is the e-mail in my .sig (the same).

Please don't use HTML (not that I would expect it from a Sun user. :-) But if you do, it is likely to automatically wind up in the spam folder and I'll have to spot it.

Great!

I am. Though if you are in South Africa or someplace lik that, the shipping could be a killer. :-)

Thanks, DoN.

Reply to
DoN. Nichols

Let's not forget adventure, rogue, and vms-empire. I'm still addicted to empire.

Reply to
Maxwell Lol

Oh, we had hard drives, eventually. But they were _tiny_ and _huge_.

Oh, yeah, it's basically the basis for most or all of the mmorpg's folks go nuts over these days.

Never left, just hiding.

Hm, we've got over 1000 8 & 9 boxes running it, without problem. Might be a patch issue or, well, someone doing it wrong?

Yeah, I want to play with ZFS but we're not ready to go to it just yet it seems.

RUN AWAY.

Yes, this has prolonged several outages.

Cool. Can I do straight disk mirroring instead of Raid5? (googles) looks like I can. Should play with that in the lab.

Yup. Those drives are a pain to hot-swap though.

Reply to
Dave Hinz

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