Linux-Advocacy Digest #304, Volume #31 Sat, 6 Jan 01 17:13:05 EST
Contents:
Re: Remote Kiosk Web Application Administration (Shane Phelps)
Re: RPM Hell (win2k version) ("Les Mikesell")
Re: RPM Hell (Glitch)
Re: RPM Hell (win2k version) ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
Re: RPM Hell ("kiwiunixman")
Re: Linux can be made unstable, too. ("kiwiunixman")
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: Shane Phelps <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Crossposted-To:
alt.os.linux,comp.os.linux.development.apps,comp.os.linux.misc,comp.os.linux.networking,comp.os.linux.security,comp.os.linux.setup,comp.os.linux.development.systems,comp.os.linux.hardware
Subject: Re: Remote Kiosk Web Application Administration
Date: Sun, 07 Jan 2001 08:43:00 +1100
Hmmmm, free consulting :-)
Isn't the money in Open Source supposed to come from consulting services?
Well, here goes. Remember, free advice is worth what you pay for it..
Knowledge Seeker wrote:
>
> Need help with a new assignment. Company wants to distribute systems
> (kiosk-like) to about 10,000 locations throughout the US. These
I can't get over the *scale* of some of the US deployments. AWESOME!!
> systems would include a printer as well as the CPU and monitor. The
> systems would allow semi-captive audience customers to retrieve static
> pages as well as video/audio stored locally (application is therefore
> a fat client) of content pertinent to the customer interest (via a
> nice easy to use menu). (Probably similar to systems available at
> many public libraries but specific content would also be different
> from libraries). In addition we want the kiosks to allow customers to
> retrieve content not stored locally via the Internet. So the kiosks
> need a (probably broadband?) connection to the net.
>
> What issues should we expect to encounter?? What solutions exist to
> those issues??
>
> 1. Permission for the placement of the kiosk is not a problem nor is
> physical security at the sites.
> 2. What about electronic security??
I assume you're not worried about EMF from atmospheric H-bombs,
so you should just need a decent UPS (say 20 min standby) and a
line filter for the 'net conection.
> 3. Generation of pertinent content is not a problem but surely there
> are issues surrounding delivery of said content (i.e. update of 10,000
> remote locations)?? Content might change each week. What are
> practical alternatives??
a. Squid with a *big* cache
b. rsync, cvsup or sup (remote upgrade packages). Set the client
boxes to try to pick up changes every couple of hours overnight.
For that scale, you'd need to run a farm of servers which all sync
themselves to a master. The number of servers will depend very
heavily on the number of files and the amount of data to transfer.
> 4. What are the communications issues?? How to solve them??
Depends on how much you want to spend. Small routers are cheap
and nearly bulletproof. Run a cat-5 crossover between the client
and the router, and let the router do all the comms work.
You might have a bit of fun seting up the routing, though.
> 5. What are the hardware failure issues?? How to solve them??
Keep the number of boxes down and buy quality hardware. Run
monitoring software and / or have somebody on-site contact
your help desk if something falls over. You *could* cluster
at each of your kiosks, but this is generally not cost-effective.
Sign a maintenance contract with a *big* organisation (Getronics,
Unisys, etc) for hardware swapout in the event of failure.
Price goes up as response time goes down!
> 6. What are the application software upgrade issues?? How to solve
> them??
See 3.
> 7. Hardware is intel based. Would Linux or NT/W2000 be the better
> operating system for this kind of application??
Has this been definitely decided? I would seriously consider
Sun's Ultra5. You'll get a *great* deal on that quantity, and
they're a very robust box.
If it's definitely Intel, Linux / *BSD is more robust than W2K.
OS selection boils down to how well the application runs on the
platform.
> 8. If the operating system has a problem, how do we fix and reboot??
Linux / *BSD shouldn't cause any problems, but the WM may be
less stable. You could kill the WM weekly on a cron job if
necessary. Absolutely, definitely, positively run sshd on the
clients - compile with tcp wrappers, use a minimal /etc/hosts with
at least your critical central hosts (avoid using DNS if possible)
and trust at least 1 of your central hosts.
NT is nowhere near as stable as Linux / *BSD, so look at automating
a reboot at least weekly (possibley nightly). W2K is supposed to
be much more stable than NT but I only have limited experience
with W2K. Use ssh with NT as well, but NT's remote admin is more
limited.
> 9. Since most of the content is static there does not seem to be a big
> need for a big DB (at least for content). However, we do want to
> capture customer demographics and store them in a DB at a central
> host. Which DB?? And do all 10,000 kiosks "phone home" each night to
> deliver data or does the host initiate a contact to each remote
> station each night to pull data??
Depends what's at the back end. I assume you're using a big Sun
or HP or IBM box, but that's just a guess. Oracle is very capable
and runs on virtually everything, but it's not cheap. Sybase is
in the same league. PostgreSQL is quite good, but not really in
the same league. I've been at a mostly Oracle site for ages, so
I'm out of touch on the RDBMS front.
My preference is always for the central site to initiate data
pickup, using ssh/scp. Given the sheer volume, you should look
at using your upgrade distribution boxes to do the pickups.
The distribution boxes could update the DB directly, or for the
really paranoid you could get the central DB server to pick up
from the distribution boxes.
>
> Other issues??
>
Seriously consider using touch screens. It makes it much harder
for the customers to cause any problems :-)
> --
> eCommerce Knowledge Seeker
------------------------------
From: "Les Mikesell" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: RPM Hell (win2k version)
Date: Sat, 06 Jan 2001 21:43:47 GMT
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message
news:[EMAIL PROTECTED]...
> On 6 Jan 2001 07:30:57 GMT, [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Donovan Rebbechi)
> wrote:
>
>
> >Look, KDE is the f*cking GUI for god's sake. Do you upgrade the Windows
> >GUI without an "operating system upgrade" ? The fact that Linux even
gives
> >you flexibility to upgrade the GUI while leaving the rest of the
> >system untouched is a testimony to its power and flexibility.
>
> Bullshit. The Penguinista's are constantly extolling the virtues of
> Linux's package management over Windows Install shield. Tell the
> person who runs kde, has all his applications launch from kde and may
> or may not even know what a CLI is that kde is just the GUI. To him it
> is his entire system.
> What good is flexibility when the choices presented all suck?
>
> I'd rather have one consistent and high quality UI like Windows or Mac
> than have a collection of half done inconsistent UI's that don't even
> interact well with each other.
OK, I'll give you a fairly exact equivalent with Win2k and an
update downloaded from the MS web site.
> >The fact that you're not bright enough to do it properly is not Linux's
> >fault.
>
> In my case I used the Mandrake update CD they were kind enough to send
> me. Click on Live-Update in Drakconf and away it goes as per the
> instructions. Restart kde and it is completely dead, as is X and just
> about everything else.
>
> So now what Einstein?
I'm developing a web site based on xml/xsl transformations. The code
shipped with Win2k server has non-standard xsl handling and the
component used to retreive data via http is the same one used by
IE as a client with the same tiny 6-concurrent-session limits that
would be appropriate for a single user client, not a production
server. Microsoft does have an update that claims to correct
these problems. It is packaged in an exe file that self-extracts
and installs. The default installation is supposed to not affect
your original objects because it installs under different names,
although they have a separate tool that can be used to install in
'replacement' mode after you are sure that you have fixed all
of your broken xsl that Microsoft originally encouraged. There
is also some mention of a utility to configure the new http
component if you need to use a proxy to reach external servers.
Now, what really happens when you install this exe file (and this
is a release version, not a beta) is that not only does the component
fail to work but the old version which it wasn't supposed to affect
now fails after every few runs *and* this completely kills the IIS5.0
server which makes the claim of not being brought down by component
failures. Just what I needed with several developers trying to preview
their code on this server... Of course there was no indication of what
was causing the IIS failure - just an event log message that it died, and
since I installed several things at once I had no idea that the two
problems were related. After banging my head on the wall for a week
and searching everything on dejanews, I found a message where someone
had stumbled across the fact that even if you don't need to use a proxy
you must download and run the proxycfg tool with the -d option to tell
the new object to use direct access to the internet (haven't these people
ever heard of reasonable defaults?). After doing that, I was able
to use the new object, and not only that, the original one (remember, the
one this install wasn't supposed to affect...) came back to life and IIS
no longer crashes every time after viewing a few pages. Poking around
a bit on msdn trying to make sense of this, the best I could find was that
proxycfg sets some registry values that are documented as being
undocumented.
> So much for Linux's package management.
And so much for the wonderful world of windows. The Linux approach
at least provides alternatives to the broken black magic of self installing
exe's. If a particular RPM won't work in your system there is no need to
bang your head against the wall - you can grab a source rpm and rebuild
it or just the non-packaged source which you can replace on the next
upgrade.
Les Mikesell
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
------------------------------
Date: Sat, 06 Jan 2001 16:58:40 -0500
From: Glitch <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: RPM Hell
Ignoring the original problem won't make it go away,even if u do say
they are trolls.
Just b/c it works fine for you doesn't mean it does for everyone else.
remember YMMV?
I had a similar experience with installing the AVI plugin for xmms,
which i had to end up downloading SDL just b/c i needed the sdl-config
file, even though i had all the other files. I then also had to compile
SDL which had a couple errors and I had to fix those.
So don't assume everything is peachy keen when installing things just
b/c they go good for YOU.
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>
> In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
> J Sloan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> [snip]
> > I've put kde 2 on several boxes, simply downloaded the
> > rpms - all the rpms including qt - from ftp.kde.org, and
> > simply did an an rpm -Uvvh - no problems noted.
>
> Another Steve/Claire/whatever troll. The pseudonyms are too numerous to
> list anymore. What you're responding to didn't actually occur to the
> original poster; he/she just surfs for problems in other newsgroups and
> then adds a great deal of elaboration and posts here for the pleasure of
> seeing the responses.
>
> Sent via Deja.com
> http://www.deja.com/
------------------------------
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: RPM Hell (win2k version)
Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Sat, 06 Jan 2001 21:57:37 GMT
On Sat, 06 Jan 2001 21:43:47 GMT, "Les Mikesell"
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>OK, I'll give you a fairly exact equivalent with Win2k and an
>update downloaded from the MS web site.
I'd rather pay for a quality product than pay with my time trying to
work with an inconsistent, convoluted and buggy free product like KDE.
>I'm developing a web site based on xml/xsl transformations. The code
>shipped with Win2k server has non-standard xsl handling and the
>component used to retreive data via http is the same one used by
>IE as a client with the same tiny 6-concurrent-session limits that
>would be appropriate for a single user client, not a production
>server. Microsoft does have an update that claims to correct
>these problems. It is packaged in an exe file that self-extracts
>and installs. The default installation is supposed to not affect
>your original objects because it installs under different names,
>although they have a separate tool that can be used to install in
>'replacement' mode after you are sure that you have fixed all
>of your broken xsl that Microsoft originally encouraged. There
>is also some mention of a utility to configure the new http
>component if you need to use a proxy to reach external servers.
>
>Now, what really happens when you install this exe file (and this
>is a release version, not a beta) is that not only does the component
>fail to work but the old version which it wasn't supposed to affect
>now fails after every few runs *and* this completely kills the IIS5.0
>server which makes the claim of not being brought down by component
>failures. Just what I needed with several developers trying to preview
>their code on this server... Of course there was no indication of what
>was causing the IIS failure - just an event log message that it died, and
>since I installed several things at once I had no idea that the two
>problems were related. After banging my head on the wall for a week
>and searching everything on dejanews, I found a message where someone
>had stumbled across the fact that even if you don't need to use a proxy
>you must download and run the proxycfg tool with the -d option to tell
>the new object to use direct access to the internet (haven't these people
>ever heard of reasonable defaults?). After doing that, I was able
>to use the new object, and not only that, the original one (remember, the
>one this install wasn't supposed to affect...) came back to life and IIS
>no longer crashes every time after viewing a few pages. Poking around
>a bit on msdn trying to make sense of this, the best I could find was that
>proxycfg sets some registry values that are documented as being
>undocumented.
Your point being?
Are others having the same troubles as you?
Was your entire system rendered useless like the Mandrake CD update
did so graciously for me?
>> So much for Linux's package management.
>
>And so much for the wonderful world of windows. The Linux approach
>at least provides alternatives to the broken black magic of self installing
>exe's. If a particular RPM won't work in your system there is no need to
>bang your head against the wall - you can grab a source rpm and rebuild
>it or just the non-packaged source which you can replace on the next
>upgrade.
II'm tired of having to try 15 different ways to make something work
under Linux that should work from the start.
Maybe the fact that there ARE seemingly 15 different ways of doing
things under Linux IS the root of the problem.
Problems don't get fixed because people use the work around's even
though they are wasting their time finding them and trying different
methods to make something work.
Flatfish
Why do they call it a flatfish?
Remove the ++++ to reply.
------------------------------
From: "kiwiunixman" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: RPM Hell
Date: Sun, 7 Jan 2001 11:06:13 +1300
Well, he wanted a fucking solution, there it is, a solution!
kiwiunixman
"Todd" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message
news:937pnm$4ie$[EMAIL PROTECTED]...
>
> "kiwiunixman" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message
> news:[EMAIL PROTECTED]...
> > rpm -i --nodeps --replace *.rpm
>
> Now *that's* intuitive.
>
> -TOdd
>
> >
> > kiwiunixman
> >
> > "BradyBear" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message
> > news:[EMAIL PROTECTED]...
> > > Well, I decided to give KDE 2.0.1 a shot. So I downloaded all the
> > > relevent rpm,s. But before I can install my shiny new desktop, I need
> > > to install the latest version of QT. So, I go grab QT2.2.3. Great. Got
> > > the rpm, type rpm -i and I get failed dependancies... qt needs lib.so
> > > this and that etc. So I do a search on rpmfind and find three packages
> > > that I need. Package one needs me to upgrade rpm. So I go get the rpm
> > > update. Package one now installs. Package two still needs another
> > > lib.so.etc. Installing pakage three will break App A. So now I need
> > > to upgrade App A and the whole damn thing starts over (more failed
> > > dependencies, more broken app's) and the whole thing escalates
> > > exponentially until I've basically had to update the whole damn OS.
> > > The whole time I'm doing this, I keep thinking of the last line from
> > > the movie "The Bridge over the River Kwie" ... Madness...Madness.
> > > And it seems appropriate. Build a bridge so you can blow it up.
> > > That's Linux
> >
> >
>
>
------------------------------
From: "kiwiunixman" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Linux can be made unstable, too.
Date: Sun, 7 Jan 2001 11:08:36 +1300
yeap, murpheys law, what CAN go wrong WILL go wrong
"Tom Wilson" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message
news:QRK56.1680$[EMAIL PROTECTED]...
>
> "Aaron R. Kulkis" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message
> news:[EMAIL PROTECTED]...
> > Tom Wilson wrote:
> > >
> > > "Peter Köhlmann" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message
> > > news:936otu$mrd$00$[EMAIL PROTECTED]...
> > > > Tom Wilson wrote:
> > > >
> > > > >
> > > > > Undoing the damage from an inopportune power outage (and they
happen
> > > > > eventually regardless of how stable your power grid may be) costs
> more.
> > > > > Especially if you're a developer or handle any sensitive
> information.
> > > > >
> > > > > A UPS and a good backup plan are essential if you use your system
> for
> > > more
> > > > > than playing games and surfing the net.
> > > > >
> > > > >
> > > > > --
> > > > > Tom Wilson
> > > > > Sunbelt Software Solutions
> > > > >
> > > > I am a developer, and i do regular backups. But just to reinstall
> > > > everything would take at least a day, then even 400 Dollars is not
> very
> > > > much. Remember, this is a UPS ratet at 1000 Watts, this is enough to
> power
> > > > 2 Computers with the monitors
> > >
> > > Sounds about like my set-up.
> > > We have a lousy power grid here (Tennessee) that's complicated by
idiot
> > > drivers plowing into utility poles. Mine kicks on at least once a
week.
> > >
> >
> > One of the major reasons why new subdivisions now have underground
power.
> >
>
> The idiot drivers around here would STILL manage to take it out somehow.
>
>
> --
> Tom Wilson
> Sunbelt Software Solutions
>
>
------------------------------
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