*Snort* *Chuckle* *Guffaw*

[elfs]

"I shut down my Tablet PC most evenings and start it up from a fresh boot. Why do I do that? Because I've been using computers for 20 years and have learned that's the best way to work." - MS Blogger Robert Scoble, explaining why he loses valuable time every day dealing with a bug in his employer's software.

Holy Toledo, if I reboot my laptop it's a seismic event. A properly built operating system should never require a reboot for software-based reasons. Scoble defends his position arguing that crafting, certifying and deploying a single change, like the one needed to replace tabtip.exe, the program at fault here, is "hard".

Isn't that what your customers pay you for? Aren't your repeated growth in earnings over the past sixteen quarters there precisely because MicroSoft can do the "hard" things?

A security flaw was found in emacs yesterday. Emacs is my editor, word processor, news reader, and LJ posting engine (among many, many other things). The patch fixing it is already installed; I saw it and approved it this morning. Linux users can do the hard things, because they've made it easy to do the hard things. From what I've seen, Mac OSX users are getting similar benenfits.

Comments

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

*sigh* "But we've always been at war with Oceania!"

They've been indoctrinated.

Meanwhile, all of my boxen have been up more than two weeks (that's when the last kernel patch came out), the production kickstart server here at work has been up 50 days, the Mac at my old work has been up 17 days, and the primary mail server at my old work (which is FreeBSD firewalled to hell and gone) has been up two hundred and thirty days.. A certain colo box I have access to has been up 224 days, running Debian Woody.

Shut down every night, my ass. How the hell do they expect the Internet to stay up? We don't work banker's hours here.

But then, I realize I'm preaching to the lead Baritone...

details on the vulnerability?

[norikos-author.livejournal.com]

My google-fu is weak, and I can't find anything on it...

[mundens.livejournal.com]

This one of the reasons I no longer read Scoble, he seems to know very little about real computing or even about his employers products.

I'm the last one to defend Microsoft as a company, and think Windows is a bloated piece of crap, but thinking you need to restart a portable running Windows every day just means you don't know how to set up your computer properly. I run an XP laptop (because I have to , it's the one given me by the company I work for) but it is only rebooted when necessary, which isn't often, usually only when I need to install a major piece of software or a patch that requires a reboot.

I can't remember when I last rebooted my XP laptop, it was before I travelled to Australia.
I regularly explicitly _hibernate_ the laptop, as otherwise it sometimes runs longer than I would like on the batteries before automatically shutting down as I also run two web servers on it (Apache and Weblogic).

I never shutdown any machine unless I have to, the start -up shutdown period is the time things are most likely to fail. I once had a BBS running off a 386-based Windows 3.0 box that didn't need a reboot in over a year, and until I replaced my home NT Domain server with a SuSe Samba box (no way am I using non-standards compliant crap like Active Directory when I don't have to), that server was only rebooted if there was a power cut or a servicepack came out.

A properly configured MS OS machine can run for as long betwen reboots as your average unix machine.

Of course, it will rarely do so "out of the box" so your average luser like Scoble is likley to have all sorts of problems.
^___^

Re: details on the vulnerability?

[elfs.livejournal.com]

Max Vozeler discovered several format string vulnerabilities in the movemail utility of Emacs, the well-known editor. Via connecting to a malicious POP server an attacker can execute arbitrary code under the privileges of group mail (or worse, depending on the permissions of the movemail binary).

http://list-archive.xemacs.org/xemacs-patches/200501/msg00184.html

http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=79686

What manner of Baritone?

[(Anonymous)]

Would that be 'Baritone' as in 'vocalist' or as in 'brass instrument'?

Just curious... I'm going to have to fuss at you if it's the latter, my wife was a Baritone player in her college marching band.

... though that would explain a lot of things.

In that same marching band, the Baritones were traditionally the most injury-prone ones. Things tended to go something like this:

Crunch! ... "f'n OWCH!"
"Was that a Baritone?"
"Yup."
"MEDIC!"

Heh... ah, the memories.

Bryan.

Re: What manner of Baritone?

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

As in vocalist. As in not just preaching to the choir, but to one of its more, umm, vocal members.

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

He's not smacking on Scobie. He's smacking on the OS. The Unix-like OS'en only ever ever have to reboot when there's a kernel upgrade. And you don't *have* to upgrade the kernel, if that particular vulnerability doesn't affect your machine, or you've protected it another way. New software or upgrades to non-kernel programs never EVER require a reboot. It Just Isn't Done. You may have to restart a *service*... quite frequently, actually.... but the longest I've ever seen that take is 20 or 30 seconds; most of the time two or three. And then only that service is out of commission. There's no strain on the hardware, no praying that the machine survives reboot when you do it from remote, and the users rarely even notice. Note that that's plural; Unix(/Linux/FreeBSD and to a certain extent OS/X) is inherently multi-user. Something else Windows is just now sorta kinda getting around to figuring out.

It's a design issue. Unix was designed to be multi-user, reasonably secure from an architectural standpoint... and "user friendly" was an afterthought. But it's finally coming into its own. Windows was designed to be user-friendly (sort of), to make it easy to do a lot of whiz-bang things... many many of which are inherently as secure as a straw house in the face of the Big Bad Wolf. And a heck of a lot of things are designed to initialize only at boot time in Windows, which stuff is designed to restart at the whim of the super-user in Unix. (There's even a standard design now for a startup script, which must support "start", "stop", "restart" (which is often just "stop" followed immediately by "start"), and optionally "status". The better distributions go so far as to provide a skeleton script you can adapt.)

Apple has managed to come up with reasonable compromises between the two architectures and added some stuff of its own; combine that with an increasing amount of marketing savvy and you may well see Apple steal the desktop right out from under both Bill and Linus' nose... at least on the consumer side.

And I still say that anybody that can keep his Windows box both secure and up for >60 days is either a slacker or making blood sacrifices to Redmond. Neither of which I want to think about.

Re: What manner of Baritone?

[(Anonymous)]

Ah.

Okay then.

I like the mental image... will have to use it on the wife -- and savor the mis-interpretation -- when she gets home.

Thanks,
Bryan.

[elfs.livejournal.com]

Now, to be fair, that's not entirely true. Even having drunk the Gentoo kool-aid, I've still managed to lock up a Linux boxen once or twice in my lifetime, usually when trying to push a 3D card too hard and using advertised beta or even alpha software. And it's possible for a runaway server to bring a stock configured box to a grinding halt-- not quite a crash, but if you don't allocate enough memory and scheduling to the kernel, a memory hog can make rebooting more attractive than waiting for the system to recover.

It just seems to me that this is much more acceptable with Windows people than it is with those of us who grew up around the notion of stability and service.

Quote of the day: "Well, that took about twelve hours." (Cory Doctorow on the time between noticing that Mozilla-based browsers' correct implementation of Internationalized Domain Names could lead to spoofing, and the release of an equally correct implementation that forbids such spoofing. IE doesn't do IDN correctly at all.)

Using Windows XP

[cadetstar.livejournal.com]

Well, I'm somewhat ashamed to say that I still use Windows XP on my machine, I got it very cheap (legally) and just never had a reason to switch. Also, considering I still haven't really learned in-depth OS coding, I didn't want to have to deal with Linux.

That being said, I do use Firefox unless absolutely necessary to use IE and I'm running Litestep as my shell rather than Explorer.

I think the last time I restarted was two weeks ago and that was because I needed to unplug the power cord or some such to move the computer.

[mundens.livejournal.com]

I'm not going to argue about Unix being better, I prefer unix*.

But it's pretty easy to keep a windows box up for a long time. And you don't need blood sacrifices either!

What you do need is an understanding of what causes window managers to crash, and the difference between an OS and a window manager, because in the vast majority of cases, it's not the OS that has crashed when a Windows machine "falls over", it's the windowing system. On multi-user Windows boxes you can often log on using terminal services and kill the affected process, just as you would if the X Window system crashed in a unix box (and that can happen quite regularly if you're a Unix GUI developer!).

As I don't develop Windows software anymore (I write mainly Java apps these days), and as I don't use I.E. and have a well-configured firewall, the primary causes of Windows window manager crashes never occur on my machine, so I can use it nine hours a day or more and not have to restart it for weeks. I'm no slacker, but I don't tend to do the sort of things that cause crashes, and I make my machine safe. Of course on a server box, the things that cause crashes rarely occur either.

I agree that Windows is not as well designed, and has significant issues, but that doesn't stop people from making it reliable when they need to.

*Well actually I prefer an OS almost no-one outside of Grenoble, France, has heard of, called Amoeba. It's a pure OO OS, but it has a unix-like CLI for those that can't handle pure OO! : )

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

Aha! But therein lies the rub. I don't mind a certain amount of unreliability in my GUI's... if they don't take the whole OS down! Because of the nature of some of the games she plays, the wifekitty occasionally has her GUI hang on her. But nine times out of ten I can shell in, kill off the offending process, and usually the GUI shell will recover and she can just re-crank the game/browser/whathaveyou and go on. And Firefox, at least under Linux, has session recovery, so that if it does go boom, you just crank it back up and you were back where you started in a few seconds...

and I could be in Timbuktu and do that for her.

She also tends to complain when she gets a spam. One! I can count on my fingers and not run out the number of spam she's gotten in 2005. Nay, one handed!

I think the point is that folks have come to expect to reboot their machines for the least little thing, just as they've come to expect spam, and they're putting up with mediocrity, when modern Unix-based software systems make it possible for ordinary people to be (nearly) spam- and reboot-free, with a little help from their friendly neighborhood penguinista or machead. The expectation is what's truly sad.