Computers

Look! A blog post!

This morning I posted a link to an anti-DRM comic on my Facebook feed.

There was a comment thread that I wanted to save, so I decided to put it into a blog post.

A friend posted the following comment (slightly edited):

A. I use that very same system to legally download audiobooks from Henn Cty Library and once you figure it out the first time it's fine.

B. I think that DRM is meant to protect the rights of the artist and isn't just something created by lawyers to bug us.

C. DRM wouldn't need to be so complicated if people were honest and just simply didn't desire to steal copyright content.

My response was as follows:

A. I'm glad it works for you. But why should I have to "figure it out" to listen to an audiobook? But what about the people who don't run Windows? Can I listen to these audio books on my Linux laptop? I doubt it. Also, any extra software you have to install adds more complexity to the computer. I already have at least three ways to play mp3s on my computer. Can you listen to these audiobooks on your non-iPod MP3 player? Can you burn them to a CD and listen to them in your car? These are all legal uses, but the DRM stops you from doing them. Additionally, DRM software quite often slows the whole system down, or worse, has rootkits or backdoors in it. Google for Sony rootkit sometime.

B. DRM is designed to prevent consumers from using content in legal ways, not protect the artists. When you buy a book, it's yours to do what you like with (within reasonable copyright limits). You can lend it do someone - try that with a DRM audiobook. You can sell it - try that with a DRM audio book. "But we are talking about a library book here" you say. Okay, when you check a book out of the library you can't sell it, but you can lend it to a friend. DRM is a product of the media corporations and is designed to cripple your rights as a consumer so they can make more money. The media giants scream about piracy, but there have been many studies that show its less prevalent then they say it is. As a matter of fact, studies have shown that many people who download music illegally go out and buy the albums. Other studies have shown that releasing content in non-DRM forms results in MORE sales, not fewer. There are many artists that have spoken out against DRM and there are even artists that would like to release their art in non-DRM formats but the media corporations will not let them.

C. See my comments in B. But also, why do you think it is acceptable to punish the legal consumers because other people do illegal things? DRM does not stop anyone from downloading the content illegally. I guarantee you that any audiobook you download in DRM format from the library is available in non-DRM format on the internet. How is the DRM protecting the content? It's not. All DRM can be and is broken. The only thing that DRM does is add hassle for the legal consumers. Why is this acceptable?

DRM and the media lobbyists also brought us the DMCA - one of the worst laws ever passed.

If you are truly interested in why so many people are anti-DRM you can start your research at these links:


http://www.wired.com/listening_post/2007/02/how_to_explain_/

http://www.eff.org/issues/drm

http://www.learnoutloud.com/content/blog/archives/2006/11/the_top_10_argu.html

And for information about the DMCA and why it's so bad, you can start here:

http://www.anti-dmca.org/whats-wrong.html

Hey, a technical blog post with real, useful information in it!

I was trying to get a server setup at work with 802.1q VLAN tagging and it wasn't working. It turns out that if you don't want to use a native VLAN configuration on your switch the doco is all WRONG. I could not find anything on teh Google that explained the correct configuration for this to work.

First off, you need the 'vconfig' package installed. All 2.6 kernels support VLAN tagging, so you don't need anything special there.

If you have a native VLAN configured on the switch, it's easy. You just configure your NIC device (eg. eth0) to use the native VLAN and then add the tagged VLAN information in an ifcfg-eth0.tag file for each VLAN. That works as described all over the net.

But if you don't want to have a native VLAN configured on your switch then you have an issue.

Even the RedHat doco is wrong. They say that you can strip out all the lines in your ifcfg-eth0 file leaving just these two:

DEVICE=eth0
ONBOOT=yes

Then you create your tagged interface files (eg. ifcfg-eth0.9) like this:

DEVICE=eth0.9
BOOTPROTO=static
BROADCAST=10.9.255.255
HWADDR=00:22:19:19:52:BB
IPADDR=10.9.0.100
NETMASK=255.255.0.0
NETWORK=10.9.0.0
TYPE=Ethernet
ONBOOT=yes
VLAN=yes

But this DOESN'T work. When you restart the networking stack it tosses an error about wireless networking (?) and then the VLAN creation errors out with "eth0 device doesn't exist" errors because eth0 doesn't come up.

WTF?

After beating my head on the desk for a bit, I thought "maybe it's trying to do a DHCP request or something for eth0 and failing." And that's what it appears to be doing.

Adding the line:

BOOTPROTO=none

to the ifcfg-eth0 file makes it all work just fine.

I got an email from a user on the FreeNAS help forum asking me if I had tested the write speed of my ZFS RAID array.

He was upset that he was only getting 45 MB/second.

So I tested it:

# dd if=/dev/zero of=mytestfile.out bs=1000 count=1000000

1000000+0 records in
1000000+0 records out
1000000000 bytes transferred in 49.676133 secs (20130391 bytes/sec)

Pretty abysmal.

I'm running on three 500GB IDE drives plugged into three Promise Ultra100 TX2 dual channel IDE controllers on a 2.3GHz Xeon with 1 GB of RAM, so it's not the speediest of hardware.

Just for grins I tested the read performance by reversing the dd command:

# dd of=/dev/null if=mytestfile.out bs=1000
1000000+0 records in
1000000+0 records out
1000000000 bytes transferred in 21.032432 secs (47545619 bytes/sec)

As you would expect, the read performance is much better than the write.

I had run a whole bunch of tests on the hardware when I was building my OpenFiler box, I suppose I should run those tests again using FreeNAS.

I'll have to figure out how to get bonnie++ running under FreeBSD.

I built my FreeNAS box last night. Then I built it again tonight.

I installed the three new 500 Gig hard drives, dug up an old CD ROM drive to boot off of and tried to install FreeNAS version 0.70 (BETA) to a 2GB USB flash drive. The FreeNAS doco claims it will run from a 32MB USB stick.

That didn't work. I'm not sure what the problem was. The conf directory and config file got written to the USB drive, but when it tried to lay down the boot image it failed.

After trying that a couple of times I just decided to install the OS onto an 80 Gig hard drive that I had used for the OpenFiler OS drive. That worked fine.

Installation from the CD is pretty quick. Then you set the IP address on the console and point your web browser at it. It's all GUI from there. (Well, almost all.)

The web based interface is beautiful. All the pages have the same look and feel, all the controls work the same way. It's very nice.

After setting all the drives up in a RAIDz1 array (RAID5 I guess) and make the shares and such, I decided to make some tuning changes per HarryD's suggestions.

After putzing around for a bit and messing things up, I discovered that my windows machines didn't have rights to write to the CIFS shares. I figured I'd messed up something and maybe a reboot would help, so I rebooted the FreeNAS box.

After a few minutes I tried to reload the web GUI. No-go. Hmm.

I head to the basement and on the console I see: kernel panic - rebooting in 15 seconds

Oops. Looks like I busted it. So I turned it off and quit for the night. I'm going to blame the tuning changes I made, because I made them without understanding the implications.

This evening I reinstalled the OS and rebuild the RAID and shares. It's all working fine except I had to change the group ownership on the shares (using the CLI) so I could write to them from my windows boxes. There are no permissions really, anyone can write anywhere. Fine for home use, but the SAMBA/AD integration still isn't really there (this was a problem with OpenFiler for me too.)

So now I'm rsyncing my data back. When I copied the data off the OpenFiler box I plugged the USB drive into the front of the server and rsynced it directly. Unfortunately the server only supports USB 1.1 with a max speed of 12 Mb/s. Painfully slow. It took a week to sync around 400GB of data.

Now I have the USB drive plugged into my desktop (USB 2.0) and am using the Cygwin rsync client to send the data back.

The graph on the FreeNAS box shows that I am shoving the data in at a rate of almost 55 Mb/s! Whee!

According to this article, FreeNAS v0.69 includes BitTorrent services!

Is there anything FreeNAS can't do?

My new hard drives should arrive today, but I don't think I'll be able to build my new FreeNAS server until tomorrow at the earliest.

UPDATED

Apparently there isn't anything FreeNAS can't do. Here is a forum posting about how to add a Usenet client (sabnzbd) to FreeNAS.

Da-amn!

Thanks to a comment left on my Backup Your Shit! post by HarryD, I have learned how to implement Snapshots on FreeNAS and also got a link in the comments on HarryD's blog to LearnFreeNAS.com.

HarryD also has a posting about tuning FreeNAS that looks pretty useful.

Thanks HarryD!

Last night I sat down to watch an episode of The Practice that I had downloaded to my OpenFiler server in the basement.

I fired up the Xbox and launched Xbox Media Center. (I should probably upgrade that.) I tried to browse to the share on the OpenFiler server, but it told me it couldn't connect.

That can't be good.

So I headed down to the basement and turned on the monitor. No output. There's a green light on the front of the box, so it's on. I hit the reset button.

The server came up and booted, but the RAID 5 array with the data on it didn't come online. Rut-row.

It appears that I have lost one of the disks in the array. According to the md man page, md won't bring a degraded RAID array online at reboot unless you pass it a kernel argument:

If a RAID4, RAID5 or RAID6 array is degraded (missing at least one drive) when it is restarted after an unclean shutdown, it cannot recalculate parity, and so it is possible that data might be undetectably corrupted. The 2.4 md driver does not alert the operator to this condition. The 2.6 md driver will fail to start an array in this condition without manual intervention, though this behaviour can be over-ridden by a kernel parameter.

So, I have backups, right?

Nope.

I've been meaning to buy a 1TB USB hard drive to back up all my stuff (mp3s and photos mainly) but hadn't gotten around to it yet. I bet you can guess what I'll be buying on my way home.

It looks like I will be able to bring the RAID array up in degraded mode so I can copy the data off of it, so I think I'm okay there.

I went to Newegg today and bought three new 500GB hard drives. I'm just going to replace all the old drives that are currently in the server as they are all the same age and will probably start failing.

I'm also thinking about rebuilding the filer from scratch. The version of OpenFiler that I am running is a little old, and the last upgrade didn't go so well so the OS is in a weird state. I might install FreeNAS instead and see if that's a little easier. It doesn't look like FreeNAS has any snapshot support, but it does have a Recycle Bin option on the CIFS share page so undelete might be possible (something I could have used last week when I deleted a bunch of stuff by accident.)

FreeNAS is also very small and can run off a USB drive. That could be entertaining to try. I'll have to see if the motherboard I have will boot off a USB drive.

To another friend with a Mac:

> Yup, saw that. You're just jealous because you don't have one!

Um. No.

Please give me one compelling reason I should go spend thousands of dollars on a piece of hardware so I can run MacOS when I already have a perfectly good Windows PC that does everything I need it to.

What is the one thing that I need to do, but don't know about, that you can do on your Mac that I can't do on my PC? What is the Mac's "killer app" that would justify my buying one?

Video editing? I've already demonstrated that's not true. Sony Vegas was plenty easy for me to figure out and adding a firewire card was plug and play. And I hear Adobe Premier is pretty good too.

Photo editing? Photoshop runs on my PC just fine.

Page layout/DTP? Hell, I've run Quark on my PC for years.

CAD? Can you even run SolidWorks or AutoCAD on a Mac? Probably under Parallels, but then you are running Windows, aren't you?

GarageBand? Well, that's one that doesn't run on my PC. But there are others out there - see GarageBand for Windows - but I don't do music editing. Rosalyn wants to though. But that's not a compelling reason.

On the other hand there are lots of apps that I use that will not run on a Mac.

Sure, I could run Parallels, but then I'm running Windows on the Mac and what's the real advantage of that? Why not just run Windows on a PC?

And I don't want to hear "it's just easier." Or "hey, it's a Mac." Give me concrete examples that are worth thousands of dollars to me.

I'll accept that you like your Mac. But stop telling everyone they should throw away all their PC hardware and spend thousands of dollars on one.

It's very annoying.

This morning at work this article was passed around in email. It's about a hacking contest and tells how the MacBook Air was hacked in under two minutes with a browser exploit.

We have Macs and Windows PCs (and advocates and zealots) at work so this started a thread about Macs are better/no they are not.

After a bit of back and forth, John Stephenson wrote what I consider to be an excellent screed that can be summed up as "All software sucks, all hardware sucks, the only secure computer is one that's been melted down to slag."

You can read John's full commentary, and my "me too" response below the fold:

This is a beautiful thing.

Have you ever noticed how many companies send out emails with a return address of something@donotreply.com in hopes that they won't get any replies?

Well.... Some enterprising soul has registered donotreply.com and setup a mail server.

Wow. Talk about a security hole.

Go read the scary blog of what they are receiving over at www.donotreply.com.

And check out the fine print at the bottom of the page:

Use of the domain donotreply.com is billed at $100 per day or $1 per email minimum - post billed. This domain is not for sale, nor to be used in unauthorized mailings,addresses, or automated systems. Any use of the domain that results in damage to the server may incur additional billing. Please contact chet at poe-news.com for other pricing and the billing mailing address. Unauthorized use of this domain gives me full rights to post any emails involved using the unauthorized address. Don't like it? Don't use it.

Ah, I just learned something. There are four reserved domain names that you are supposed to use for testing and examples per RFC 2606:

• example
  
• test
  
• invalid
  
• localhost

These four domains can never be registered. Interesting.