A tribute to the other side

By cormander

A few weeks ago I learned of the Linux Hater’s Blog, and I’ve got to say, the author makes a lot of very good points. Now for those of you who are unfamiliar with some of the terminology used there that I’m sighting here; “luser” is “Linux User” (L user), and “freetard” is, well, a “retarded user of free software”. I’m not fond of the choice of the word “retard”, but I do see the humour in it and have since gotten over it.

Linux is far from perfect, Open Source is not the saviour of the world, and as much of a “freetard” and “luser” that I am, I actually use Windows XP as my choice for desktop environments in most situations. Right now my laptop is running Fedora 9, but only because I have a very specific need for it, but all my other desktops I’ve ever had have had a windows OS on them 99.9% of the time.

Microsoft is a software giant for a reason- they aren’t all bad- and there is a lot of very innovative people who work there. One of my college professors (an avid luser) used to work at Microsoft, and I’ve never once heard him speak poorly of his experience there.

What sparked me to write this post is a Challenge a luser put up against Linux Haters. GOD! How stupid can you be? The person who writes these rants has _obviously_ kicked everyone’s ass in debate in high school, and unless you’ve done the same, be prepared to get ripped a new one. I mean, it’s like Godzilla on a rampage and you go and throw a rock at it. It’s going to stop, look you in the eye, and then squash you like a bug.

Linux Haters, whoever you are, keep it up. I enjoy reading the imperfections of Linux. After all, it’s the imperfections that I learn from. I’ve spent so much of my carrier fixing things in GNU/Linux and various software that runs on it that I have a very deep understanding on how operating systems work. Seven years of being a system administrator and programmer certainly has made me witness the good, the bad, and the ugly.

Oh, and If you’re reading this Linux Hater, this comic strip about Firefox reminded me of what you stand for. I mean, what IS the hell wrong with us freetards? Sometimes I have to wonder if the people at the heart of the Free Software Foundation are Socialists; but I don’t have the energy to write about that tonight. Maybe another day.

kernel oops on nfsd startup

By cormander

So I was configuring a server today which was running my kernel-grsec-2.6.24.7-200805121951.7.i686.rpm RPM, and I tried to start nfs to mount a share. I was (not) pleasantly surprised to see a nice big kernel OOPs spit onto my screen. The system didn’t crash, but the nfs process segfaulted (of course) and I was left there without my share mounted. Damn.

So I load my nopax kernel, then my chocolate kernel, same thing on those. By this time I was freezing my butt off because I didn’t have a jacket, the data center is cold, and this Dell 2850 takes so freaking long to boot, before it even gets to the grub prompt (even when you skip the mem check). Too bad the Dell DRAC sucks, I would have rather remote consoled this.

Anyway, I finally boot with the vanilla kernel, and no OOPs, my nfs share gets mounted and works. So I go and find one of my non-chocolate grsecurity kernels and, yep, that boots up with no OOPs on nfs either. So, it’s one (or more) of the thousands of patches that I put into this kernel that is mucking things up.

Well, I have to say that the whole automated patch pull from the upstream kernel git was a neat project, taught me a lot. I knew in the back of my mind the whole time I would eventually run into a problem like this and I’d then have to scratch the whole thing. After all, don’t patch code when you don’t _really_ know what the hell that patch is doing, and I had thousands of them. Literally.

With my wife not being pregnant any more and things settling down at work as well, I’ll push out my next kernel update pretty soon with a few more CVE patches, and all that other stuff removed. No more chocolate kernel, no more NFS oops, and an experience behind me.