So like, there's this message on my machine, mild panic, can you call me back, s'real serious; it's early, it's sunday, but hey, what are friends for? I call him up.

"What do you know about spyware and viruses?" begins a long story of a desktop machine, Windows of course, left in a utility room, used by nearly everybody in the department but officially the property of maintenance, the co-op kid hits an alarm, You've got SPYWARE! -- the machine is dispatched at once to IT-Central

long pause

Central comes back, none-too-happy, having found oodles of questionable material in various folders, the sort they'd rather not find on machines with such visibility, and the axe gets poised over the official registrants of the network node.

"So, like, how could that stuff have got in there? When the co-op kid found it, we saw the download thing just whirring along, pause, whirring again over and over -- is this what that stuff does? Download porn over and over?"

Yes, it seems they have a website-filtre, how quaint, and then they also quite freely allow Hotmail accounts to click on any arbitrary attachments, so 2 and 2 together it's pretty easy to plot a dozen courses for how this machine arrived in the present state but ...

if you ask me, and you did, I don't know much about what's what and who does which in the virus spystuffs or what's possible or practical in the post-mortem sleuthing of the Compromised DOS Machine, but if you ask me, there is no excuse for avoidable situations: the real idiot they should fry is the dunce who chose to loose an insecure O/S into an accessible unsupervised location with open full-priviledge access to 'untrusted' websites ...

but I don't suppose that's the 'expert advice' they want to hear.

Going back a few years, I remember the review in either Byte or more probably Dr. Dobbs talking about the new Intel 486 as providing developers with blazing speed that would result in "a killer re-inforcement schedule" -- following on my last post, while waiting for the 14MB of the db4 rpm to trickle out of python.org (I eventually had to use Prozilla to get a robust connection) I had bandwidth to spare to explore this whole Apt/Yum thing

Another anecdote, I was at one of the very early meetings of the Toronto Linux User's Group, back when Yaggi hosted them upstairs in the North York Library, and the conversation rolled around to ponding topics for future meetings. "What bugs you most about Linux?" was thrown into the ring, and I said, "I hate how, when configuring your kernel, you realize by the current question that you'd answered some previous question wrong and the only way out is to Ctrl-C and start all over again!" -- and I looked around at a room full of oddly confused faces.

Why don't you just use make menuconfig?

Dammit Janet, who has time to re-read the READMEs on every single release?

Anyway, for those snoozers like me who got stoned and missed it, the magic answer to the RedHat semi-automagic update without having to subscribe to anything is not up2date (which needs new certs if you want to use it on RH9 now) but all fully described by DAG with intallable RPM packages going back to RedHat 6.2.

Aye and it's one of those days ... started last night, late, I was washing up the dishes when I realized that a pretty expensive and elaborate system at work could be replaced, in a few hours, with a simple and elegant chain of free software. I ripped through the last of the pots so I could get back to my desk; this was just too good to be true.

Along the way I refined the idea, worked through how it could scale way beyond the existing system, ran through the sequence of installations in my head, and yes, still, only maybe a morning's work, something I could slip in and deliver to the boss by total surprise, which I would have to do because it's not likely anyone would authorize this little diversion or really understand the advance it makes until they had it in their hands ...

Back at my desk, past midnight by now. The idea had been triggered by a new Sourceforge project release that came across the Freshmeat RSS, so that was my first stop. And then reality steps in:

1. Minimum requirements: Python 2.3 -- all our machines are RedHat 9.0 and right there I knew I was in for a long haul because Python is pretty deeply embedded in the RH utilities, and there's no way anyone will sign for a fleet upgrade, but I figure, just one machine to illustrate the point and think to myself, how hard can it be to just trash the RH-config utils and upgrade only Python? Next stop, Python.org
2. Python 2.4 just released -- like, literally hours ago, but unfortunately there are no packages for RH9 yet, so I'm stuck with the 2.3 release and that means there'll be another upgrade in my near future but at least they have them, 30 rpms for download, so I set lftp on the list and go to bed.
3. server timeout! -- python.org it seems, has pretty bare hardware support; several attempts to pull the rpms over FTP all fail due to timeouts, so I shift to doing it one RPM at a time over HTTP. It's now nearly noon and I still don't know what I'm up against trying to wrest RedHat of it's ancient Python

I hope this is all worth the both because the preparation to development has already taken longer than my worst-case estimate of the time to deliver the application, and I haven't even really started the real muck and mire of actually upgrading these third-party Python RPMS. There's been some side-roads too since I spent some time trying to find out if RedHat had any equivalent to urpmi, of which Apt and Yum were mentioned at the DAG site, but with no further easy pathways to discover more about them and this was already taking way too long (leave that for another day -- anyone care to recommend one over the other?).

So that's the day so far, killer-app idea on a back burner while I haul the hardware out of it's Rip Van Winkle lapse in upgradings, and people wonder just why it is that software developers almost never meet their initial timeline estimates.

This is interesting, via Graham Burnett, Why Events Are A Bad Idea (for high concurrency servers):

Event-based programming has been highly touted in recent years as the best way to write highly concurrent applications.
Having worked on several of these systems, we now believe this approach to be a mistake. Specifically, we believe that threads can achieve all of the strengths of events, including support for high concurrency, low overhead, and a simple concurrency model. Moreover, we argue that threads allow a simpler and more natural programming style.