Morning
I've always wondered if someone `famous' used Linux.
Someone you'd know from TV or movies.
Also, I wonder why women don't seem to get into Linux or
`the community'. Girls are usually a lot more social than
guys, so it would seem that this is a really screwed up
world we all live in. Then again, the girls I know are
highly susceptible to gossip, which can easily destroy
social circles..
Hmm. I used `girls' instead of `women'. Blah, I'm not
feeling PC today.
Anyway, I'm currently trying to do some wacky NFS sharing
that is going to involve mounting loopback filesystems and
other weird nonsense. There's probably another solution
which is easier, but I haven't found that one yet.
Evening
Well, the loopback filesystem trick actually works (the
problem was that the disk being shared didn't have enough
space left, and it was supposed to be pretty much an exact
mirror of another system. Symlinks to another filesystem
don't work all that well with NFS, but maybe I could have
still found a way..). Never thought I'd find a real use for
loopback devices (other than viewing ISOs that haven't been
burned and whatnot..). Then again, I guess a loopback fs is
an important part of those bootable business cards, among
other things.
Spent much of the afternoon mucking with TCP Wrappers on
Solaris. Some of the daemons just don't want to run from
tcpd.. Annoying..
I see that there are versions of tcpd that support IPv6.
Might be fun to play with.. I've been interested in IPv6
for a long time, but it's only now really getting any use on
the Internet at large. Debian 2.2 supports it though.
Hopefully it will finally start to displace IPv4.
Kind of along the lines of why we need IPv6, I'm always
scared by the DSL and Cable modem setups where you
essentially get 25% efficiency WRT addresses. The lower
number is the network number, the higher is the broadcast.
The two left over are gateway and client IP. Scary..
And this brings me to a question I've had for a long time --
is there a system for NAT in IPv6? Ideally, this won't be
necessary, but we all know that the service providers will
only want to give you a single address if at all possible,
meaning that they can bilk you for cash if you want more
than one computer on your connection..
Annoying companies..
Late
It's raining, and I'm getting interested in how Free
Software can be used to distribute weather information.
There's a system called EMWIN that I've
looked at before, but I don't have the time/money/hardware
to play with it. The best way to get info right now is
probably to have a satellite downlink. They have a
moderately powerful transmitter up there, so the dishes only
have to be 2-3 ft in diameter. Not as small as the digital
satellite TV dishes, but not exactly huge.
The important thing is that you can get real-time or at
least close-to-real-time data, which is often better than
what you can say for most of the current Internet sources.
With EMWIN, you can get notified of watches and warnings at
the same time as or earlier than your local TV and radio
stations. Weatherguys.com is
largely powered by EMWIN data.
At any rate, I have been wondering if the National Weather
Service will make at least some radar data publically
available on the Internet after some contracts expire at the
end of next month. It looks like they have defined the layout for
how things will be on their FTP server. This
sort of thing is a prime candidate for mirroring and
multicasting.