So, in building the broadband access machine I’ve found a gift computer (twice as powerful as anything else I owned) that was ‘not working’. After loading XP onto and futzing with it for a while, I figured out that doing anything with the USB port locked up the computer… after a while. I tested the theory by running up a memory/CPU intensive game and letting it run for a few hours. It was happy until I transfered some files off the USB stick. Fault identified. If I want to transfer stuff off the machine, I’ll need to get a USB card, or hook up a network. And I think I’ll do the later.

With fault identification complete, I hooked up the broadband modem (Netcomm NB5) via the ethernet connection (given the USB connection wasn’t going to be working on this machine). Entered the IP of the modem into the browser, and got the modem’s login screen. Everything was good, and I shut down all access other than web via port 80 using the modem’s built-in firewall. Connection to the ISP was established, proxies entered into Firefox (not IE – CERT says there are no secure versions), and Google was available. Connectivity proven.

The web browsing machine got Fedora Core 3 loaded on (a simple process), and the proxy setup was repeated with the same results. FC3 comes with a pre-release version of Firefox, so I loaded up the CD with the .gz for 1.0.4 and loaded that onto the desktop. Then I spent a couple of hours figuring out that I needed to be root to install the browser, and where to install it. Having done that, I still haven’t got it as the default browser – that’s still the prerelease Firefox. But I can run up 1.0.4 from the command line, so at least it’s available, and adBlocker is installed, so well and good.

I figure that I’m going to lock the modem down to a single IP address it’s going to talk to, the FC3 machine. Anything else that wants data from the net is going to have to transfer it from the FC3 machine and won’t be exposed to the big bad internet, because I’m not ready to migrate our entire PC collection over to Linux just yet.

Which means I need to buy a switch.

Sun has announced Solaris has gone open source — or at least bits of it, with the rest following soon. An interesting move, against what must be seen as the threat from Linux.

It’s not, of course, under the GNU licence, oh no, but under something called the Common Development and Distribution Licence, which Sun claims is basically pretty flexible, but without requiring derivative works to also be open source.

If you feel like trying it but don’t want the hassle of the 2.5Gb download, Solaris found its way onto magazine cover DVDs recently, including Australian Personal Computer.

Want to grep, sed, awk, ps, kill on Windows? Try Microsoft’s Services for Unix.

(via Raymond Chen)

The print dialog in KDE is tabbed, and one of the tabs allows you to pick via a radio button:
a) Print everything (default)
b) The following page range, from x to y.
The x and y boxes are enabled. Fiddle with them, drop your enormous graphics document to a single page, press ‘Print’.

And you’ll get the whole document. Because you didn’t pick (b), even though you clearly wanted it, what with changing the page range. And the developers haven’t either greyed out the x and y boxes in response to (b) not being picked, or made it so that changing x or y causes (b) to be selected.

Stupid Linux developers.

Subsequent investigations have discovered that it’s the print dialog from the Gnome PDF viewer. What’s that doing under KDE?

While wrestling with automated FTP jobs at work, thanks to a colleague I’ve discovered a cute little buglet when Windows talks to FTP servers using the Unix standards (which includes IIS by default). Actually it’s not so much a bug, it’s more of an issue of a supposedly user-friendly way of showing file dates still being used even when the “user” is another machine.

It goes like this… let’s say the Unix FTP server is 1 minute faster than the Windows client one, and the file is brand spanking new, just placed there. It’s 10am, and your Windows client goes looking for a file.

Windows says “What time was this file dropped?” Unix, being the kind of laid-back casual user-friendly operating system that it is, abbreviates its answer to exclude the year, and replies “Nov 4 10:01″.

Windows sees this, and the logic says “Right now it’s only 10:00am. This file can’t be from the future. I’ll assume it’s from last year.”

Evidently this can happen if the Unix server is a second or many minutes ahead. It may be further complicated if they’re running on different timezones, GMT vs AEST etc.

The solution is probably down to your individual circumstances. For us, we know we’d never be getting files that are a year old, so we can easily code around it. Ultimately though, surely something should be changed so that the client can get the full picture, not an abbreviated form of the file date/time.

• Same behaviour shown in IE
• Under some circumstances it’ll show a later year instead
• Other FTP products have variations on this problem too
• Heaps more reports in Google Groups, too.