I was reviewing some of my old Slashdot posts, and I came across some interesting arguments from June of this year that, it’s interesting to note, my own opinions sway slightly from.

Part of this is my being honest: I got a C&D (Cease And Desist) from Universal a month or so after I wrote these comments. I’d tried out a program called “eMule” (apparently a clone of another program called “eDonkey”), got myself a username, and went out hunting for what sort of copyright-infringing stuff I could download. Along with the usual assortment of cracked software, mp3’s, and pornographic crap that’s floating around that network, there is also a large assortment of movies.

Including one called “The Hulk”.

I’ve seen it in the theater, and I’ve seen the version that was trading on eMule. They BOTH stink. I’m not joking, it’s just a really bad movie. I loved the TV show, and I had a few of the comics as a teenager. It just didn’t work for me.

But anyway, I decided to download it. I left up eMule overnight, came by the next morning to see that it was all transferred, turned off eMule, burned the two video CD’s on my CD burner, and watched the first CD. Other than the fact I was watching a really crappy camcorder version of the movie, it looked pretty much the same as “The Hulk” is seen in theaters. There were some editing and post-production things that changed, but by and large it was the same movie. I thought nothing of it, really, blew away the files from my hard drive, stuck the two copies of The Hulk on my CDR spool, and went about my business. eMule sat, forlorn and forgotten, on my hard drive.

About three weeks later, I received a notice from my DSL provider that Universal Studios had sent them a cease & desist order, and that my identity could be requested and would have to be provided, without even a subpoena from a court, due to the Digital Milennium Copyright Act.

BUSTED.

I felt sick. Literally. I quickly responded to the message with a cryptic “The offending material has been long since removed” (and that was backed up by Universal, they had only found it on the network one night) “and the offender has been lectured”.

Never mind that it was me lecturing myself on getting caught!

Anyway, my opinion on copyright has been swayed a bit since I wrote the original article, mostly due to that C&D experience. I still value copyright, and favor its limitation, but also seriously think the system needs massive evaluation that incorporates an understanding of the existence of easy duplication of any copyrighted work.

At the time the Constitution was written, duplicating a copyrighted work was an enormous investment of time and money. Today, to do the same can often be as simple as a cut & paste. The Digital Millenium Copyright Act was an attempt to address these concerns, but it was done so with little concern for the legitimate file-trading of individuals, and no foresight as to enormous peer-to-peer networks and the role of fair use.

I don’t know that I’m qualified to answer the questions, either. But I feel an allegory coming on:

When I was a kid, I remember sitting next to my radio and listening to songs for hours on end. Sometimes I would read a book, but quite often I could just be found chilling out to the tunes. From time to time, I’d want to make a “collection” for a friend, so I’d put a trusty cassette into the deck, and patiently wait for the announcer to tell me that certain songs were about to be played. The advent of dual-cassette tape decks made this even better and easier. My friends and I used to trade these, often interspersed with our own comments and banter, as a show of affection or joking around.

This is perfectly normal, natural behavior. If we didn’t have recordings, we’d probably have just sung songs that we heard to one another.

How do you handle this same altruistic behavior, the desire to share, in a situation where millions of people are doing the sharing, and you have no personal relationship with the one doing the sharing?

I’m not sure.

But I am sure of one thing:

Telling them they are criminals for sharing, and sending threatening letters to inspire fear in hopes they’ll do what the copyright holder wants, is *not* the solution. It’s a stopgap, inhumane method of criminalizing social human behavior. To outlaw the sharing of ideas and art without a cover charge, when the successful history of our race built on intuitive, imitative behavior, is to outlaw much of what makes us an human.

What a shame.

Afterword: I think the ultimate solution is probably going to be a ‘cover charge’ of some sort for participation in activities which lead to significant copyright infringement. Much as buying blank music CD’s carries a tariff paid directly to the Recording Industry Association Of America, if you participate in a legal peer-to-peer network you’re going to be required to pay a tariff so that those people who’s works are infringed may be compensated. How do you enforce that on a global scale, though? That’ll probably take someone smarter than me to figure out.

I just read an excellent piece by Bruce Perens (a personal hero of mine that I’ve heard speak on several occasions) which was based on SCO’s recent slide show on “offending” code in the Linux kernel which they claim is their stolen IP.

Rather than link to the story, I’ll add my own mirror and an “Amen, brother”. I would be terrifically offended if some company claimed ownership on code that I had written, and the Linux kernel development community is right in calling for SCO to show more of the source they claim is infringing.

To continue this dog and pony show of not allowing anybody to see the source that is in dispute (or even to name the line numbers of the disputed code in the publicly-available Linux kernel) is just dishonest. They are intentionally playing a game of fear, uncertainty, and doubt with the future of Linux in order to support their greatest financier, Microsoft, and try to wring sales out of an unwilling public through intimidation.

Yes, I realize the Microsoft part is simple unsubstantiated allegation (although the multi-million dollar contract for the “source” really seems like an MS payment for services to be rendered, to me), and the intimidation claim is speculation (based on observation and correlation from the desparate actions of the failing company, however). I stand by it: they are desparate for cash, paid a handsome sum by the richest corporation on the planet to discredit GNU/Linux, and using that blood money are attempting to blackmail Linux kernel users everywhere into paying them exhorbitant sums of money.

Bruce’s document follows, my rant is over:

---

Analysis of SCO’s Las Vegas Slide Show

Bruce Perens, Perens LLC <bruce@perens.com>
With help from Linus Torvalds and the Open Source community.

You may re-publish this material. You may excerpt it, reformat it and translate it as necessary for your presentation. You may not edit it to deliberately misrepresent my opinion.

An SCO presentation shown in Las Vegas on August 18th alleged infringement by the Linux developers. The presentation, in Microsoft PowerPoint format is here, and an conversion of the presentation that can be viewed using a web browser is here .

SCO released the presentation to Bob McMillan, a reporter for IDG News Service, without any non-disclosure terms. Bob asked me to comment upon it. here’s his story.

I will start with SCO’s demonstrations regarding "copied" software. It is likely that SCO would present the very best examples that they have of "copied" code in their slide show. But I was easily able to determine that of the two examples, one isn’t SCO’s property at all, and the other is used in Linux under a valid license. If this is the best SCO has to offer, they will lose.

Slide 15 shows purports to show “Obfuscated Copying” from Unix System V into Linux. SCO further obfuscated the code on this slide by switching it to a Greek font, but that was easily undone. It’s entertaining that the SCO folks had no clue that the font-change could be so easily reversed. I’m glad they don’t work on my computer security 🙂

The code shown in this slide implements the Berkeley Packet Filter, internet firewall software often abbreviated as “BPF”. SCO doesn’t own BPF. It was created at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory with funding from the U.S. Government, and is itself derived from an older version called “enet”, developed by Stanford and Carnegie-Mellon Universities. BPF was first deployed on the 4.3 BSD system produced by the University of California at Berkeley. SCO later copied the software into Unix System V.

The BPF source code is here on the Lab’s web site. A paper on its design, published in 1993, is here

BPF is under the BSD license. That license allowed SCO to legally copy the code into Unix System V in 1996, but since SCO doesn’t own the code, they have no right to prevent others from using it.

So, in this case the SCO “pattern-recognition” team correctly deduced that the Linux and SCO implementations of BPF were similar. But I was able to determine the origin of BPF after a few minutes of web searches on google.com . Why couldn’t a “pattern-recognition team” do the same? It’s difficult to believe they simply didn’t bother to check. It’s also likely that SCO dropped attribution of the Lab’s copyright from the System V copy of the BPF source code, or the team would have known.

The Linux version of BPF is not an obfuscation of the BPF code. It is a clean-room re-implementation of BPF by Jay Schulist of the Linux developers, sharing none of the original source code, but carefully following the documentation of the Lab’s product. The System V and Linux BPF versions shown in slide 15 implement the same virtual machine instruction set, which is used to filter (allow, reject, change, or reroute) internet packets. And the documentation for that VM even specifies field names. Thus Schulist’s and the Lab’s implementations appear similar. Had Schulist chosen to directly use the Lab’s code, it still would have been legal. But the version in Linux is entirely original to the Linux developers. There is no legal theory that would give SCO any claim upon it.

Slides 10 through 14 show memory allocation functions from Unix System V, and their correspondence to very similar material in Linux. Some of this material was deliberately obfuscated by SCO, by the use of a Greek font. I’ve switched that text back to a normal font.

These slides have several C syntax errors and would never compile. So, they don’t quite represent any source code in Linux. But we’ve found the code they refer to. It is included in code copyrighed by AT&T and twice released as Open Source under the BSD license: once by Unix Systems Labs (a division of AT&T), and again by Caldera, the company that now calls itself SCO. The Linux developers have a legal right to make use of the code under that license. No violation of SCO’s copyright or trade secrets is taking place.

The oldest version of this code we’ve found so far is in Donald Knuth’s The Art of Computer Programming, published in 1968. Knuth was probably working from earlier research papers. He didn’t write in C, so details differ but the algorithm is the same. The implementation shown in the slides was written by Dennis M. Ritchie or Ken Thompson at AT&T, in 1973. You can see the 1973 version of the function in this file, originally called dmr/malloc.c. The code is from Unix version 3, the oldest known version of Unix that still exists in machine-readable form. The complete source for that system can be found here on the net. In 2002, Caldera released this code as Open Source, under this license. Caldera is, of course, the company that now calls itself SCO. The license very clearly permits the Linux developers to use the code in question. Historical information on why Caldera released the Unix source code to the public is here, and contains some information relevant to the SCO court cases.

Another version of the code is copyrighted by the University of California as part of the BSD Unix system that they produced for the U.S. Army and released as Open Source. That code is also under the BSD license, and appears here in this file released in 1984. It’s interesting to consider how this code came to belong to the University.

In the early 1990s, AT&T’s Unix Systems Labs (USL) sued BSDI, a company vending the BSD system, and the University of California, over this and other code in the BSD system. The claims that SCO is making are very similar to the AT&T claims. AT&T lost. It was found that AT&T had copied heavily from the university without attribution, and thus AT&T settled the case. In the settlement, the University agreed to add an AT&T copyright notice to some files and to continue to distribute the entire system under the BSD license. AT&T agreed to pay the University’s court costs. Some details of the lawsuit are here.

AT&T was actually found to have lost its copyright to the code in question during the lawsuit, because the code wasn’t published. This would not be the case today, as there have been changes in copyright law. But the judge’s decision back then was:

Consequently, I find that Plaintiff has failed to demonstrate a likelihood that it can successfully defend its copyright in [Unix version] 32V. Plaintiff’s claims of copyright violations are not a basis for injunctive relief.

The result is that between the judge’s finding and 1996, when there were additional changes to the Bern copyright convention that would have made the AT&T code copyrightable, the code was essentially in the public domain. Code derived from Unix before and during that time would be legal.

The AT&T code that was subject of this lawsuit survives into SCO’s current system. SCO’s “pattern analysis team” found this code and correctly concluded that it was similar to code in Linux. But they didn’t take the additional step of checking whether or not the code had been released for others to copy legally.

The code in question has already been removed from the most recent development versions of the Linux kernel, for technical reasons. It duplicated a function provided elsewhere, and thus never should have been included. The code was intended for one SGI system that was never sold, and another that is extremely rare, and was not used in the mainstream Linux kernel.

In slide 20, SCO alleges that it owns essentially all of the code in Linux that has been touched at all by IBM, SGI, and other Unix licensees. These contributions constitute over 1.1 Million lines of code, 1549 files, totalling 2/3 of the new code developed between the releases of Linux 2.2 and 2.4. But how could SCO possibly own all of this code that is copyrighted by other companies and individuals? SCO’s legal theory, explained in slide 6, is that the AT&T Unix license compelled all of these companies to assign to AT&T, and later SCO, all derived works that they created incorporating the Unix source code. Here is the key clause on slide 6:

Such right to use includes the right to modify such SOFTWARE PRODUCT and to prepare derivative works based on such SOFTWARE PRODUCT, provided the resulting materials are treated hereunder as part of the original SOFTWARE PRODUCT.

Under SCO’s theory, if any code created by a Unix licensee ever touches Unix, SCO owns that code from then on, and can deny its creator the right to make use of it for any other purpose.

SCO’s legal theory fails, because they ignore the fact that if a work doesn’t contain some portion of SCO’s copyrighted code, it is not a derived work. This is especially glaring on slide 20, in which SCO claims ownership of JFS, IBM’s Journaling File System. The version of JFS used in Linux was originally developed for the OS/2 operating system, and was later ported to both Unix System V and Linux. SCO’s claims fail in a similar manner for the other products they mention: RCU or Read Copy Update, software that keeps processors in a multi-processor system from interfering with each other, was developed by Sequent, a company later purchased by IBM. Sequent developed RCU under Dynix, a Unix-derived operating system. They later removed RCU from Dynix – separating it from any code owned by SCO – and added it to Linux. Similarly, SGI’s XFS, the eXtent FileSystem, was separated from IRIX, a Unix-derived operating system, and ported to Linux.

SCO’s contention is that copyrighted software can never be separated, that any code created by a Unix licensee that ever touches SCO Unix or is even loosely based on Unix is entirely SCO’s from that moment on, and can never be used for another purpose by its creator without authorization from SCO. SCO’s contention goes against any reasonable understanding of the boundaries of intellectual property. It’s unlikely that it would survive a court room.

SCO’s responses to this document are We own Unix and would know what it looks like, and It’s his word against ours. I’m not, however, asking you to rely on my word. I’ve presented you with links to the evidence, most of which is available at web sites not under my control. Please examine it and make your own conclusion.

Bruce Perens

Links

• Older version of this article, from when I only had two slides.
• Bruce Perens’ web site.

So I’ve had the lovely task of dealing with the recent sobig.f outbreak on the Internet where I work. The same dunderheads that let themselves get infected by the last big virus failed to run Windows Update so that they could be prevented from getting this one.

It just goes to show that border security, basically, isn’t. People set up ways of blocking the bad stuff from getting to them, but they don’t bother to fix the underlying reason the “bad stuff” can cause problems in the first place. The moment anything makes it through the border, it can cause all the havoc it wants to. People aren’t taking responsibility for keeping their nodes secure on this big, wide Internet world, and the lack of their adequate policing is causing problems for the rest of us.

I ran into a related experience with my daughter this morning. I’m working from home today, since I have been keeping an eye on the pain to our mail server from virus transmissions. Anyway, she was getting some laundry out of the washer and the washer lid fell on her head. The obvious, rational conclusion is that she bumped the washer, causing the lid to dislodge from its open position and land on her head. I responded to the screaming wail of pain, brought over an ice pack, and asked for the explanation of what happened.

Now, we could propose alternative explanations, I suppose. But Sara insisted, “I didn’t bump the washer. It wasn’t my fault. The washer lid hit me in the head, and I don’t know how it happened!” I carefully explained cause and effect to her, that our goal is not to place blame but to figure out what happened, and how it happened, so that, in this case, we can prevent it from happening in the future.

She sullenly accepted my explanation and stalked off back to the washroom to move her laundry, this time without the accompanying crashing noises and loud crying.

But it made me think of the whole virus, and the tendency we human beings have to avoid responsibility for bad things. In one way, the recent outbreak of the RPC worms attacking Windows workstations was a good thing: the annoyance factor of rebooting your machine every 3 minutes or less forced people to update their PCs and take responsibility for helping police the Internet. I know it will be short-lived, but it’s progress. I’m just glad it wasn’t a very destructive worm, or recovery would have been far more painful than it was.

So, anyway, sobig.f is floating around today and I’m updating postfix rules. Here’s the meat of it.

Add these two entries to /etc/postfix/main.cf (or, if you’re using FreeBSD, /usr/local/etc/):

 body_checks = regexp:/etc/postfix/body_checks header_checks = pcre:/etc/postfix/header_checks.pcre 

Then you need to create the files “/etc/postfix/body_checks” and “/etc/postfix/header_checks.pcre”. I distinguish “.pcre” files this way, because that stands for “Perl Compatible Regular Expressions”, which are slightly different than normal “regex” regular expressions. If you don’t have PCRE support compiled into Postfix, the header_checks.pcre file won’t help you at all, and will actually cause Postfix to not start up at all, or in some cases just spit an error message out to your syslog.

Anyway, this is body_checks:

 # sobig rejection # The following statement should all be on one line, # with a space before "reject" # It's two lines due to formatting constraints. /^TVqQAAMAAAAEAAAA\/\/8AALgAAAAAAAAAQAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA$/ REJECT keep your viruses

# Klez rejection # The following statement should all be on one line, # with a space before "reject" # It's two lines due to formatting constraints. /^<iframe src=3Dcid:\S+ height=3D0 width=3D0>/ REJECT No IFRAMEs please /^<FONT>/ REJECT No viruses wanted here

##############################

This is header_checks.pcre (this can be multi-line as formatted):

 /^\s*Content-(Disposition|Type).*name\s*=\s*"?(.*\.( ade|adp|bas|bat|chm|cmd|com|cpl|crt|dll|exe|hlp|hta| inf|ins|isp|js|jse|lnk|mdb|mde|mdt|mdw|msc|msi|msp|mst|nws| ops|pcd|pif|prf|reg|scf|scr\??|sct|shb|shs|shm|swf| vb[esx]?|vxd|wsc|wsf|wsh))(\?=)?"?\s*(;|$)/x REJECT Attachment name "$2" may not end with ".$3" 

#################################

So, the nice thing here, is that these two rules will check for any attachments of known nasty types, and simply refuse to allow them to be delivered, period. The unfortunate weakness here is that if someone uses base64 encoding on the mail, we aren’t really checking it. You really need a virus-scanning package on the back-end for that. On the plus side, few virusses use base64 — it’s mostly reserved for spammers and people who aren’t using a native English mailers.

Hope that helps! It took a little bit of digging on mailing lists to get this far, but so far it seems to be helping us a lot. On the back-end, I have a script that just uses iptables (on Linux) to stop abusive mailers. Once I’ve sanitized out the stuff that definitely won’t apply to someone else’s environment, I’ll post that here, too.

P.S. Yeah, I know “view as PDF” is broken for this doc right now. I’m not certain how to properly handle <pre> tags when formatting for PDF, so you’ll have to be content with what’s here for now 🙂 Besides, I expect you would rather just cut & paste what’s above, rather than print it out and type it, wouldn’t you? Thought you would.

The headline:

U.N. HQ in Baghdad Car Bombed – FLASH: Large car bomb attack at U.N.’s Baghdad HQ. [Winds Of Change]

What, they don’t have JERSEY BARRIERS in Baghdad? I mean, the White House wasn’t even a war zone 15 years ago when I remember them wheeling in the big concrete barricades to stop any potential vehicular bomb from getting anywhere near the building. I note with some twisted humor that the Salt Lake City Wallace F. Bennett Federal Building seems engineered to prevent drive-ups, with large decorative, but obviously stout and concrete, pylons. I was just thinking the other day, “Wow, someone driving a car bomb would have a heck of a time getting near that building. Maybe a motorcycle bomb or something could make it, but how much damage could something that small do?”

Important buildings should have a perimeter of Jersey Barriers preventing casual drivers-by from unloading a car bomb into them. Even if they’re temporary. I wonder which U.N. genius dropped the ball deciding not to Jersey-Barrier this puppy?

I’m in the midst of a discussion with a close friend, via email, of some of the fundamental questions regarding the Bible, Christian thought, and the evolution of religion. In my searches, I came across this simply amazing, honest article, written by Richard Packham and entitled “How I Became An Atheist”.

And, of course, the title itself will put off some of my readers. Try another of Packham’s essays, The Man Who Bought A House, to really understand where he’s coming from. If you find yourself strongly disagreeing, perhaps you, too, have bought the house? His web site is an excellent collection of essays he’s written and links he’s collected over a lifetime of skepticism.

I kept saying to myself, “Oh, man, this is me. Did this guy read my mind?” Only obvious dissimilarities (like the fact he’s at least 35 years older than me, and graduated from college with a law degree) kept me grounded in the reality that this wasn’t my history I was reading. I could see myself writing an essay similar to this.

As a matter of fact, it was research into how I’d write a similar essay that led me to his site. Now I’m not so sure I want to write one of my own, since I’ve found one that so closely mirrors my own perceptions. Time will tell.

I’m just using this node to play trackback games with outlanders-outfit.org to make sure they are talking.

The auto-discovery node is here.

Ran across an interesting post over at http://windsofchange.net/archives/003927.html regarding the establishment of permanent “paramilitary” operations. My useless commentary below.

On the one hand, I think it’s a really good idea to involve the locals more when we are forced into involvement on foreign soil. Patriots freeing their own country seems much more of a productive idea than a bunch of ugly Americans watering the fields of another nation with the blood of its defenders. At the same time, I fear the permanent establishment of an international paramilitary police corp.

Will the U.S. miliatary have the wisdom to administer this kind of program on a permanent basis? While on the one hand I have high hopes, on the other hand the beaurocracy inherent to these organizations will really get in the way.

I guess I’m conflicted about the arrangement. On the one hand, I realize it’s probably necessary for us to have greater involvement in international affairs, and to reduce our handprint worldwide at the same time, but on the other hand I just wish we could mind our own business and be left alone.

Would be kinda’ nice, wouldn’t it? Particularly the part about having four hands…

This is yet another excerpt from a conversation I’ve been having on one of my mailing lists. If you’re not into religious recovery, you probably won’t be into this one. If you are into discussion about theology, philosophy, and personal choice, you might be interested.

We have a newcomer to the list, by the name of Leanne. She had this to say:

I have been reading lots of the posts since I joined this group awhile ago now. I feel like a freak. Are there any members of this group that actually miss the church? I wish it was so true I wish I could go back in time to the time before I knew the church wasnt true. There must be some people out there that are sad about having all your memories and dreams dashed??? I would appreciate hearing from anyone that shares my feelings. Thanks Leanne

---

Leanne,

I apologize in advance for the length of my post. I generally only write if something has touched a nerve…

It’s taken me a year to get where I am now (still quite “attached” to the church in family and environment, yet being completely open with all about my non-belief). A year ago, I was right where you are now. I was on the cusp; the decision lay before me to continue to say one thing with my mouth, and believe something else.

The night that I told my wife about my nonbelief, I cried into my pillow for over an hour. I normally don’t cry. As I wept, my wife comforted me, and I kept saying “it’s just so hard; I really want it to be true.” I look back now and think it’s a testament to my wife’s devotion that she chose not to try to dissuade me; if she had, at that vulnerable point, I may have chosen to live a lie the rest of my life. I’m certain that, had I done so, my life would have been short. Forcing myself to say one thing yet believe another had driven me to the brink of despair, where I needed to either put a bullet in my head and be done with it, or face my disbelief squarely and try to mend the gulf in my mind between what I wanted to believe, and what was real.

The more outspoken ones on this list tend to be those who have gone past that hard part, and are growing more firm (or are firm) in their newfound beliefs/non-beliefs — whatever those are. I’ve been on this list only a little over a month, and the reassurance I’ve gained from people has helped enormously, for me to take positive strides in my life, slowly end my fence-sitting, and improve my relationship with my wife and children. I feel less like a freak than I did before.

What you’re feeling is perfectly normal. Once you’ve gained the perspective that your hope for the church to be “true” is right there with your longing for the days when you believed your parents invulnerable, or when you thought yourself immortal, it gets easier.

Losing faith is a painful experience. With my current non-religious perspective, it seems like you face a choice:

1. Replace your faith with another. You may choose to seek comfort in another congregation of believers in something. In particular, Christian or non-denominational religious bodies would welcome you with open arms, and you might find that what you really miss is the fellowship of others who believe in God or Jesus (or something else). That’s up to you. There are many who go this road, and find it satisfying.
2. Rebel against this system, and choose some belief system that is widely despised in the U.S. (assuming you’re in the U.S.), such as Wicca, Satanism, or New-Age psychology.
3. Learn to live without faith, and figure out a label for yourself. Or live without a label. Agnosticism/Atheism/Bright-ism/non-dogmatic Taoism or Buddhism and other philosphies bring strength to some who research them. Many incorporate portions of those philosophies into their own lives and draw strength from them. Living without the comfort of another “Church” is very difficult, but can also be satisfying. For those who wish fellowship to still be some portion of their non-religious practices, the Unitarian Universalists or Secular Humanist congregations can still grant that feeling of fellowship without much in the way of dogma to interfere in the lives of their patrons.

My road was to choose to live with a naturalistic worldview. Who knows, one day I may embrace faith, if I have a sufficiently compelling subjective experience to cause me to wish to do so. I don’t think that’s going to happen, though, and I think I’d question my subjectivity if I did.

You’re not weird for desparately wanting the Church to be true. It would make life so much simpler. But for those who see past the lies, attempting to gain true fulfillment through faith in the Church just doesn’t work. There are some for whom it’s a fit, and some for whom it is not.

Welcome to the world of the rest of us misfits.

I, for one, am happy to hear someone else express the same feelings I’ve had. I feel less like a freak for feeling that way now .

I wrote up a blurb on Slashdot today about my perspective on creating highly reliable, available, or fault-tolerant systems, and how you really need to choose which of the three you are going for in designing your compute environment.

I’ve also adjusted my opinion since I posted this. There are a couple more factors, which include initial expense and maintenance cost, that need to be factored in. They are normally the domain of the bean counter, but it’s important that the admin/systems architect be aware of what tradeoffs he is willing to make in order to bring those costs down, and where the sacrifice of reliability, availability, or fault-tolerance needs to be made. And he also needs to appraise the bean counter of the importance of those factors that are being lost, as well.

Proper machine administration is a balance of: * reliability * availability * fault-tolerance

Reliability generally refers to the components of a piece of hardware not breaking very often. In our Compaq DL360 and DL380 rackmount units, reliability is a critical factor in their power supplies. The power supplies are simply crap. The fans die, the supplies blow up. It’s terrible.

Availability, on the other hand, even if you have components or a system that is not highly reliable, it can still be highly available. For instance, 1U chassis systems with dual power supplies, although the power supply reliability tends to be low, nevertheless tend to be available despite the low reliability.

Fault-Tolerance is how well the system handles unusual circumstances. A system may be highly available and reliable, but if it does not handle system faults well, you may have a problem. Fault-Tolerance really refers to how well the system handles unusual conditions.

Now, I realize the distinctions seem rather vague. That is intentionally so! But separating the question into three parts helps grant admins a better look at what the weak points are of a system.

I generally prefer 1U or 2U units to have a single, reliable power supply, rather than dual power supplies with lower reliability. Because of the higher reliability of their PS, they tend to also be available more. However, you have very poor fault tolerance in the power area with just a single power supply, so you’ll normally need redundant systems in order to have a fault-tolerant environment. If that is the case, availability may suffer, for when the first machine goes down in that rare situation that the highly reliable power supply dies, you have some cutover time to the secondary system.

Really, you have to evaluate what’s most important for you. In the bank where I work, reliability is critical; fault-tolerance, somewhat less so. Availability is not so much of an issue. We close at 5:30, and really don’t do any business after that, so from 5:30 PM through 5:30 AM, our availability can be nonexistent for certain types of maintenance, and we’re just fine.

Like I said, the designations there are pretty arbitrary. But if you can come to an approach covering at least three angles on your machines and evaluate by those criteria, your overall uptime goals can be met in a way that suits your organization.

Me, I’m just sick of cheap hardware. I enjoy 1U rackmount systems, but I’d much rather have two higly reliable 2U boxes than four inherently less-reliable 1U units. Of course, vendors come into play there… Sun makes some killer 1U’s that never seem to die, while Compaq and Dell’s 1U (in my subjective experience) have horrible failure rates, particularly in power supplies. Of course, with a sample size of only a few dozen of each type, it’s possible I’m drawing too much of a generalization from too limited a set 🙂

I read a posting on one of my mailing lists today that just really got my goat. Unfortunately, my response was, I think, a bit too much advocacy of a certain point of view to be tolerated on that mailing list, so I’ve posted it here where I control what I think is OK and isn’t 🙂 The thread of conversation was this (paraphrased):

“Don’t blame Jesus for [a certain faith]”

To which another poster, apparently a fellow nonbeliever, responded:

“Your words have more wisdom than you know! Blaming Jesus would be like blaming the Pink Easter Bunny for Easter, including egg rolling and too much candy!”

Lumping Jesus in the same category as the Easter Bunny touched off a nerve in the raving Catholic of the list, someone known only pseudonymously as “ELC”. Below is my complete response to his short rant.

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Note that I’m trying hard to avoid preaching here 🙂 Unfortunately, reasoned argument is the key evangelical method for atheist advocacy. The handle of this blade also cuts. Realize I’m not advocating atheism, just correcting a misconception.

ELC said:
> Oh, the blind faith [and stupidity] of atheism!

First, I’ll address the “blind faith” of atheism, relevant definitions from Dictionary.com:

a-the-ism, n. [syn: godlessness] [ant: theism] 2: a lack of belief in the existence of God or gods.

faith, n. 2. Belief that does not rest on logical proof or material evidence
4. The theological virtue defined as secure belief in God and a trusting acceptance of God’s will.

I’m guessing, like many theists, you define atheism by this alternative entry, also at dictionary.com:

atheism, n. 1b. The doctrine that there is no God or gods.

If atheism were simply dogmatic assertion that there is no God, I’d agree with you that it would require blind faith. However, for most, atheism is just the default position if you have *no* faith. If there is any “faith” to be found among many atheists, it is that there must be logical proof or material evidence for everything.

As far as the “stupidity” of atheism: have you ever met an unintelligent atheist? I admit, this is a limited subset of all atheists, but the atheists I know arrived at that position after a great deal of study. There are also enormous numbers of “closet atheists” in various religions (including LDS) who often refer to themselves by a different term: intellectuals.

Now, if you’re asserting that atheism itself is stupid, I must assume you mean this definition of “stupid”:

stupid, adj 5. Pointless, worthless: a stupid job

To the contrary, the refusal of faith itself promotes critical thinking in all aspects of life. But I suspect, rather than the clinical definition, you meant “stupid” as a simple perjorative, as in “something I don’t like”.