Journal of a Sysadmin

A project and a patch

So, I finally finished a project last night that I started on some time ago. Basically, it’s a simple web app that allows an authenticated user to "Invite" an outsider to upload/download a file. You know, kind of like how you have to transfer files to ad agencies and give people general methods for transfering large files (too big for email) securely. I’ve put it up at http://www.lnxsys.ca/software/filetrans/. it’s Beta, it could be broken, but it works. Best off all I started it in July and it’s just down now!

Second is a patch. I use (on lnxsys.ca) a little piece of software called User Fingerprints. It tracks people as they bounce through the web site and leaves a small trail of stuff behind. Kind of neat, but whatever. It was broken. For whatever reason it was built without register_globals in mind, so I fixed that. Patch is at http://www.lnxsys.ca/software/user-fingerprints/

Fun Fun Fun!

Farscape

Quick note, we’ve watched ALL of Farscape now. Season 1 through Season 4 and now Peace Keeper Wars too. The internet is great for TV shows isn’t it?

What I want to do is build a small tower, decent TV out and cable in video card, and a big drive or two for lots of video. Basically, build a home-made Tivo.

NVidia 6111 and FC3T3 Linux

So, I have an nvidia FX5200 video card and we use it to watch things like Red Dwarf, Farscape, and Gilmore Girls on the TV as well as play some 3D games. It’s a decent card but (big but here) a lot of times the drivers flake out and crash X.

A lot of peoples answers to this are that nvidia should open source the drivers. I do agree with that but there’s also the realism that they are not open source and a lot of us just have to live with it. Vendors saying that because the driver is closed source, it’s not fixable is a complete crutch.

You see, only part of the driver is closed source. There’s a binary library and the driver acts as an abstraction layer between the kernel and this library. If it’s done correctly, there’s no reason at all that it won’t work as well as an open source driver. What needs to happen is that people need to stop acting like this is some kind of huge sin and start being more proactive. Here’s an example, if the driver breaks (and starts locking up) instead of saying “Black box, we can’t fix it” say, “here’s your fix, but it’s not as good as it could be. Open your drivers and we can fix it the right way”. If more vendors took this approach, it would help ease the hardware vendors into doing OSS instead.

It reminds me of the Aesop fable The North Wind and The Sun. No matter how hard you fight someone they will still do what they want to do. But with that in mind, Persuasion is always better than Force.

Oh I almost forgot, the fix! The Patch is here. Just apply it to the 6111 NVidia driver and run nvidia-install. The README has other locations of the patch as well as a couple threads about this discussion. Why hasn’t NVidia already released this?