Recent blog entries for rasjani

It was buggy as hell when it came out and somehow i just didnt feel my thing so i ended up my subscribe to the free month. Few months passed and i got offer from Funcom via email that if i want, i have new free month to give AO a new testrun since they had fixed most of the bugs and made the game better. So i thought, why not.. But when i got to website to re-activate my account, i couldnt because they informed that i hadnt paid from my played month. Which was supposed to be free anyway. Nice way to go Funcom.

Obviouysly i was bit disappointed about that and i tried to petition but i got few mails saying that i need to pay up my cued month or i wont get that new free month (which was said i allready have it). Bye bye, Funcom i thought, im still happy customer to Sony/Everquest and i removed all my email addresses from their databases and send unsubcription emails to *all* lists i had joined then. So, no more Anarchy Online and Funcom for me. Who more wrong could i be.

Some time passed and then it began, first spams arrived. "We have done this new thing, would you come back to look us". "Bug fixex bug fixes". "Rubi-ka Report this rubi-ka report that". Yeah yeah, its few emails montly or so which is nothing compared to rest of the spam i get but this just proves how fscked up funcom is.

I've tried to unsubscribe from all the lists i stil get. Nothing happens. I send emails to their helpdesk. Nothing happens. It seems my account even still works in their customer website but nothing can be done from there. And i still get the frigin rubi-ka messages that i really really really dont want.

Face it. FUNCOM is SPAMMER. AVOID THEM AT ALL COSTS!

And you can belive i was extatic when XD2 was released few days ago. Finally! And for my current distro redhat 9! I was wiser from the previous installation which took ages because of the heavy load on ximians network but so i waited a day to ease it off and i started the installation process few hours ago..

Now, in this point lets review how ximian wants to make money from home users: They are selling red-carpet express access to get "faster downloads and installs". All this sounds good but how does it work in real life ?

Now, each of you who have started the ximian installer knows that in the way to actually installation, user can choose out of many mirrors. I chose Tampere Univercity since its the closest because i live in finland. Also because i *know* it delivers fast since i use it as my red-carpet mirror.

But what the heck, downloading is taking really really long time. I'll go and try to pull of the whole ximian tree from my mirror with ftp, i get around 2-3MB/s which is something i was actually expecting. So what is the problem ? I fire tcpdump and see where the data actually comes in..

Voilã!

The datastream is coming still from red-carpet.ximian.com (aka axon.ximian.com) but why ? I chose my mirror, twice, before the installation download started and in both cases it pointed to Tampere Univercity.

But why? Of i remember. Ximian is selling red-carpet express access for "faster installations and upgrades". Now, Is ximian's business model to cell bandwidth and limit it from voluntery mirror providers like Tampere University (note that there where many other univs in the mirror list) ? I dont think so, not that it wasn't possible politically but i bet it wouldnt be possible technically either..

So, Lets think it a bit more. Slow download, even from "selected mirror" leads to frustration. Advertisement just before installation about faster downloads and install. Why "Different" installation program, why not just use the ximian installer red-carpet ?

1+1=3 or.. is it..

UPDATE:

Just to be fair, i found out after a bit of digging what the problem was. My Redhat 9 wasnt up2date with all current redhat rpms and XD2 installer tried to pull them off ximian mirror (without a warning i might add). But allthou i ran up2date and updated all packages.. This "slow download" problem still was present. I got pass this by downloading xd2 iso image off from BitTorrent.

• Promotes their new product called ScoSOURCE
• Acts as propaganda engine in their lawsuit against IBM

Ok so what would the case then be ? In Gartner: Warning To Linux IS Shops page on scosource site, there are slight hints where people might want to look for clues. Lets see the following paragraph:

SCO's claim against IBM of theft of intellectual property contributed during Monterey for a high-end Unix OS for Intel is arguable. Sequent (later acquired by IBM) was another member of the Monterey Project that had expertise in high-end Unix capability for scalable Intel servers -- for example, nonuniform memory access (NUMA) scaling. However, Sequent was a licensee of System V source code.

So there might be a change that their claims are true ? Time will tell.. But also there's been some talk that some of the ip code has been in the kernel for years. Could they still use ibcs2 and linux abi some way ? Or is there something other too that we dont know off. I dont know and i dont care. I know one thing for sure. With this lawsuit and Scosource product, they are shooting themselves on the head in the eyes of oss community. And they are after scoring a lot of money since their "head product" after sco/caldera sell-out, tarantella, wasnt that big hit. Gartner warning puts its quite nicely:

If IBM is found to be in violation according to the complaint, its options will be to settle on a compromise in damages or to buy out SCO. It is unlikely IBM will acquire SCO and add to an already complex portfolio with SCO's aging OSs, especially with Linux as IBM's mainstream direction. However, IBM is committed to protect its users and maintain Unix license rights. Thus, IBM would opt for a settlement (0.8 probability if the suit is upheld).

This thing gets really messy when "ip code" gets revealed ...

I got email over the last weekend that was a bit funny to me even thou it was about serious matter to that poster. It seems that maintainer of cols faq is posting also a lot of anti-semitistic material to newsgroups and someone had decided to inform people credited in security faq about this. I can imagine that most people would like not to associate with such people but i was more supprised that im credited in the faq ;) W00t for me!

I also did some digging and it seems that my fire-waller was quite well spread few years ago when it was released. I guess i should rewrite it a bit to allow new iptables and/or cisco style acl logs to be reported.

I guess im now a security guru! ;)