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Leading itemsSuSE has announced its financial results through March 31, 1999. See their press release for the details. These results are more interesting than one might think: for the year ending in March, SuSE's revenues were just under $10 million; they have 130 employees. Remember the numbers from Red Hat's SEC filing: just under $11 million and 127 employees. The common perception is that Red Hat is by far the biggest and most successful distributor; these numbers show that SuSE is just as big. SuSE is no longer just a European distribution either: much of their growth is attributed to increases in U.S. sales. The clear conclusion from this release is that the Linux distribution business is not as one-sided as it sometimes seems. Competition is alive and well, and there more than one big player - even before companies like Corel move in. This is, of course, a good thing. A diversity of distributions is one of Linux's biggest strengths; it is encouraging to see that this diversity is alive and well. Report from Linux Expo Paris. Thomas Clouet has sent us a summary of Linux Expo Paris, held on June 17-18. By this account the event was a great success, with over 5,000 attendees. There are also a dozen photos from the event. The latest draft of a license for postfix has been distributed by the author, Wietse Venema. The original clause to which many people objected has been replaced. From our perspective, it looks much better. These comments from Henning Makholm on debian-legal indicates that he agrees. If there are no dissenters, Debian, at least, will acknowledge the license as compatible with the Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG), which are equivalent (at least currently) to the OSI Guideslines for Open Source software. Eric Raymond spoke at Microsoft this week. Summaries of the event can be found on the Linux Mall and Linux Resources. As might have been expected, the talk appears to have been a somewhat contentious event. The art of war. Matt Michie sent in an editorial titled "Microsoft and the Art of War." It's all about how Microsoft may respond to Linux and free software in general. "I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that instead of slapping together a Linux distribution they could just as easily put out MS BSD. Think about the advantages for one moment. No so called 'GPL Virus' to contaminate any of Microsoft's crown jewels, a strong developers base, binary compatibility with Linux, superior networking, and it can be modified internally without having to release any source code back." Ten European industry leaders raise concerns about software patents is the title of this communiqué issued last week. Linus Torvalds is on the list of those worried about European software patents. " According to pioneers of the software industry, the use of patents to protect software may actually lead to less innovation, less competition and eventually job cuts in the European Software Industry instead of generating new businesses and stimulating innovation as it is often believed." This Week's LWN was brought to you by:
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June 24, 1999
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Sections: Main page Linux in the news Security Kernel Distributions Development Commerce Announcements Back page See also: last week's Security page. |
SecurityNewsProposed security updates to the POSIX standard which languished in committee and were eventually discarded have been made available for public download in their unfinished form from Winfried Truemper's site, through his effort, with assistance from Mary Shepherd (IEEE) and Casey Schaufler (SGI), the former technical editor of the standard. Redistribution is not allowed, but now the ideas that were included for process capabilities, audit and information labeling are available for review and hopefully development, where appropriate. Open source implementations may provide a base for an unofficial standard, since the official process was unsuccessful. IEEE is to be applauded for their decision to release these materials.Winfried's comments on why the standards remained unfinished and were eventually dropped are very polite. If you are interested in a more complete comment, check out Jason Zions' comments as well. The Security and Freedom through Encryption (SAFE) Act has made it out of the House sub-committee, further than it got last year. ComputerWorld commented on the bill's passage and on the amendments that were slapped onto it before it made it out the door. The most potentially dangerous one they mentioned, "One of the amendments grants the Secretary of Commerce the authority to deny the export of any "custom-made" encryption products designed for "use in harming national security, use in the sexual exploitation of children [or] use by organized crime." The actual bill text we found did not include the text of this amendment, which will be critical to determine whether or not it can be used to restrict products produced for other purposes that could possibly be misused for one of these categories. The LOMAC Loadable Kernel Module (Low Water-Mark Mandatory Access Control) version 0.1 is now available. This is a security enhancement to protect the integrity of processes and data and includes a partially functional prototype for non-SMP Linux 2.0.X systems. For more information, source code and documentation (all available under the GPL), check out ftp://ftp.tislabs.com/pub/lomac. Security ReportsTcpdump was the subject of a bug report on Bugtraq which pointed out that tcpdump would go into an infinite loop upon receipt of a specific mal-formed package. This is not considered to be a large problem, since routers generally drop malformed packets, but it leaves tcpdump vulnerable to packets on a local network. A patch for the problem has been provided.A serious security problem with sdr, the session directory tool for the MBONE, was discovered and reported to the sdr developers by Olaf Kirch. They confirmed the problem and are working on a fix. Until one is available, they recommend that you do not use sdr. UpdatesRed Hat has put out three security-related updates in the past week, including updates for XFree86, PHP and KDE. All of these updates replace packages that had exploitable security problems, so they are essential upgrades for anyone using them.Debian released an updated mailman package to fix a problem in the current package that could be used to forge authentication cookies and get unauthorized access to administration webpages. For more information on the vulnerability, check out this information from the mailman developers. This is a recommended upgrade for anyone using the mailman package. ResourcesGNU autoconf test macros to test for functions from older systems that may emulate secure functions without providing the improved security have been created and made available by Duncan Simpson. For more information, check out his Bugtraq posting.Securing your File System in Linux is the title of this article from Jim Reavis at Security.com. It is a good introduction to people new to the topic and serves as a well-organized review for the more experienced. The Linux Security Audit Project now has a website on which members of the audit project can record what software packages they have found and the result of their audits. For more information, check out the announcement. Note that the website has been created, but there are no entries in the database as of yet. The ISN mailing list, whose archives we list as a resource, appears to have ceased abruptly on June 10th, according to both our records and the archive. Mail to the mailing list address fails with "user unknown". If anyone knows the status of this list, or why it terminated, we would be interested to hear. EventsJune 28th is the deadline for papers for the SANS 1999 Workshop On Securing Linux coming up in December in San Francisco.Section Editor: Liz Coolbaugh |
June 24, 1999
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Sections: Main page Linux in the news Security Kernel Distributions Development Commerce Announcements Back page See also: last week's Kernel page. |
Kernel developmentThe current development kernel release is 2.3.8 (announcement here). This is still a "be sure you have good backups" release. Many of the worst bugs in the new I/O system have been shaken out in this release, but some still remain. This is a release to be careful with. So what are the massive changes here? Essentially, the filesystem code has been changed to eliminate the use of the buffer cache for write operations. File blocks that had been written to used to be copied first into the buffer cache, then into the page cache, then to disk. Removing the buffer cache step eliminates one copy of the data and reduces memory usage, resulting in faster operations. Access to the page cache has also been threaded, which can lead to much faster I/O on multiprocessor systems. Finally, the file read code has been optimized somewhat. These are all massive changes, so it's not surprising that some glitches remain. Shaking out the remaining problems may take a little while yet - that is what development kernels are for. The actual, observed results from these changes seem to be mixed thus far, with some people reporting impressive speedups and others seeing slight slowdowns. Expect the end result, when all is ironed out, to be a big performance win. It was asked whether this work would be backported to 2.2. The answer seems to be a very strong "no." It's too much of a change to go into the 2.2 series, and the Powers That Be are still claiming that 2.4 will be out sometime in the fall. The credit for this work goes to Linus Torvalds, Ingo Molnar, and David Miller. See this message from Linus for a bit more information on what was done. The current stable kernel release remains 2.2.10, unchanged from last week. Alan Cox has released 2.2.10ac3, which contains a substantial set of fixes and updates. There have been consistent reports of file corruption errors in 2.2.9 and beyond. This is a strange problem - it affects relatively few people, and has proved to be very hard to nail down. It was initially thought to be hardware-related, but enough evidence has come in to strongly indicate the existence of a kernel bug. Alan Cox is hot on the trail of this problem - see his first and secondsummaries of what he has turned up so far. It may well be that the problem will have been nailed down by the time you read this; if so, information can be found in the LWN daily updates page. Is khttpd a good idea? Khttpd, as mentioned in previous LWN kernel pages, is a kernel-based web server which is meant to provide high-speed response to queries for static pages. It can answer simple queries, and has the ability to pass off everything else to a user-space process, such as Apache. There has been a lot of debate over whether khttpd is a good idea or not. Detractors claim that khttpd represents kernel bloat, that it is insufficiently general, and that some userspace servers (phhttpd, for example) can get better performance anyway. Proponents see khttpd as a way to beat Microsoft at the benchmark game, point out that nobody is forced to use it, and dispute the performance claims. Resolution of the debate seems distant, to say the least. Interested people may want to see the comments of Arjan van de Ven (the author of khttpd) on the subject. The status of IEEE-1394 ("firewire") development. The developers of two competing firewire implementations - Emanuel Pirker and Andreas Bombe - would appear to have resolved their differences. This note from Emanuel describes the way forward: Andreas's code, being generally better, will replace much of the earlier code put out by Emanuel. The best parts of Emanuel's system will be merged in, and firewire development will continue with a single implementation and code base. The future of Linux architecture and development became a topic of discussion after Eric Raymond posted this noteextolling the virtues of the Erosexperimental operating system. Expressed (over) simply, Eros provides (1) an integrated, persistent object store instead of a filesystem, and (2) a full capability-based model. Eric suggests that Linux developers may want to consider a similar model for the long term. This suggestion was controversial, to say the least. Prominent kernel developers seem to feel that a lot of the capabilities provided by Eros - garbage collection, persistent object store, etc. - are best provided in user space. Whether you are operating in an object store model or in a more conventional mode, the capabilities needed are about the same: memory allocation and protection. Best to provide only those underlying capabilities and layer the rest in user space. See also Hans Reiser's posting on how current filesystems are inadequate for the future. He proposes bringing in a number of the capabilities provided by database (and other) systems into the filesystem level. Patches and updates posted this week include:
Section Editor: Jon Corbet |
June 24, 1999
For other kernel news, see: |
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Sections: Main page Linux in the news Security Kernel Distributions Development Commerce Announcements Back page See also: last week's Distributions page. |
DistributionsDifferences between distributions, or at least between some of the major distributions, are starting to be documented as part of the development work going on at the Linux Professional Institute, in preparation for developing their certification exams. Check out the Distribution Differences Project to find the beginning of information on the Caldera, Debian, Red Hat, SuSE, Slackware, and TurboLinux distributions. If you work with these distributions, or better than that, multiple distributions so that you have some familiarity with some "unique" characteristics, contributing to this project would definitely provide a service to the community. My credit last week to people who sent me notes about missing distributions triggered a windfall of new information this week as well! First, in the mini-linux category, Thomas Lundquist sent me a note about his distribution, floppyfw, which is also a single floppy firewall/router. Then Florian La Roche wrote in to point out that Jurix was also missing from our lists. Jurix has been around since 1993 and, in fact, is the distribution that SuSE was originally based on. Florian still maintains Jurix, as well as now being one of SuSE's core developers. Joining the rank of Linuces with specific language-support, KSI-Linux is aimed at supporting "Russina and Ukrainian' users requirements". KSI-Linux was developed by Global Ukraine, a large Ukrainian ISP that has been working with Linux for over five years. Their comments on why they chose to work with Linux and what they try to provide with their distribution are very interesting as well. [Thanks to Khimenko Victor]. A lawyer told me once that he felt publishing companies were the one industry guaranteed to make money from Linux, even if no one else managed to do so. It seems that MacMillan Software is a publishing company that agrees with him. In addition to announcing new titles for "Quake" and "Civilization: Call to Power", they have now joined the distribution business, with The Complete Linux Operating System 6.0. They've also traced new ground by basing the distribution on Mandrake, which is in turn based on Red Hat. We know a bit about how Mandrake differentiates itself from Red Hat. It would be curious to know whether there is a real difference between Mandrake and Complete Linux, or whether this is a case of just repackaging the original product for greater market appeal. [Thanks to Damon Poole] Additional new distributions are included under their specific title below, along with appropriate thanks. The prize for this week, though, (well, there is no prize, which reminds us that the Linux Weekly News T-shirts haven't been designed or created yet ...), goes to Matthias Kranz, who found a total of 22 distributions that we were not yet listing! That pretty much astounded us, since we listed forty distributions last week and thought we were finally on our way towards a comprehensive list. He mentioned that he found most of them at Woven Goods for Linux, where Lutz Henckel has been maintaining a long list of Linux distributions, along with good basic links for each distribution, including manufacturer, download site and more. Rather than flood this week's edition with good descriptions of these new distributions, we've just added them to the list and we'll introduce a subset of them each week for the next few weeks. CalderaThe OpenLinux Tour 1999 is a free seminar from Caldera, IBM and Oracle for value-added resellers, systems integrators and independent software vendors. It will be touring a total of 15 cities from June 3rd through August 9th. Each seminar is a half-day session and appears to be aimed at people who have not yet added Linux to their portfolio of offerings for clients. See the tour page for itinerary and other details.DebianUpdates from the Debian world comes again this week from the Debian Weekly News. From it, we got to learn about Dale Scheetz' message to debian-private (made publicly available with his permission) in regard to problems with official Debian CDs, which are still getting published without being guaranteed not to be broken. Hopefully his message and suggestions will generate some specific actions to improve the situation.A new version of Apt, version 0.37, has been released. It contains many bug-fixes, should now support the downloading of any package and will happily retrieve source, extract and build the binaries for you. NoMad LinuxFor scientists, engineers and geeks who know what they want and don't want anything additional, NoMad Linux was created. It is not a mini-Linux, in that it isn't designed to be booted from a floppy, but it weighs in on the light stage, with 10.5MB for the primary distribution plus 26MB+ for X Windows. It has been around since the summer of 1997 and uses the encap package management system. [Rudolf Jaksa]Red HatA Signing RPMS HOWTO, or at least a draft version of one, was posted to the redhat.rpm.general by Dan Anderson, who has filed a bug report about the inaccuracies he sees in Red Hat's 6.0 Documentation for RPM 2.0. While we're waiting for a bug fix from Red Hat, he thought he'd pass on his hard-earned knowledge.Rock LinuxA "Pure Server" Linux intended for Linux/Unix experts, Rock Linux is based on a different concept than most distributions. Instead of providing pre-built binaries, it manages the source code for all packages and compiles them for the target platform. Obviously, this is intended to give an automatic performance win. For a bit more information, this note from the Rock Linux maintainer Clifford Wolf mentions that Rock Linux is currently based on glibc 2.1.1, kernel 2.2.10, and may be the only disribution currently using Richard Gooch's devfs patches. [Rudolf Jaksa]SlackwareNo updates since May 17th, 1999.SuSEThe rumor is that SuSE will no longer split upcoming releases into multiple revision, e.g., German versus International, etc. This is an obvious good business decision, given the work that supporting multiple revisions probably is at the current time, plus the disadvantage of having a lag between the initial release and the later "revisions". The difficulty will be to guarantee that the release is stable and dependable in all situations.We also heard that SuSE 6.2 will be glibc 2.1 based, according to this note posted by Thorsten Kukuk. It will use glibc 2.1.1 unless glibc 2.1.2 makes it out in time. Section Editor: Liz Coolbaugh |
June 24, 1999
Please note that not every distribution will show up every week. Only distributions with recent news to report will be listed.
Known Distributions:
Apokalypse |
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Sections: Main page Linux in the news Security Kernel Distributions Development Commerce Announcements Back page See also: last week's Development page. |
Development toolsCOBOLGNU COBOL is now under development, as a result of Rildo Pragana's decision to release the source code for a COBOL compiler he created for MSDOS years ago. Alan Cox has apparently thrown in some patches, as has Rildo, and now it actually produces GNU assembler (gas). Of course, the goal is actually to get it to produce C code. That would definitely help a lot of old COBOL projects move in the right direction ... [Thanks to David S de Lis]JavaTYA 1.4 has been released. Albrecht Kleine posted the download location and some excepts from the README file in this posting to java-linux.No updates to the JDK 1.2 status have been posted in the last couple of weeks. PerlYet Another Perl Conference (yapc 99) starts today in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA. The folks at the Perl News Site have promised good updates from the conference, so keep checking ..Mark-Jason Dominus has made available his Very Very Short Tutorial on Modules for perl. EarthWeb, which recently purchased The Perl Journal (TPJ), posted a letter to TPJ readers. It sounds like they'll try to address some of the complaints they've received, but others, such as the amount of advertising on the on-line site, will not be resolved. "Advertising. We definitely plan to offer advertising on the Perl Journal site. Just as in print, ad revenues keep subscription prices lower than they would otherwise be. We will try to keep the site from being too busy, but we can't restrict ads to Perl-only products. As always, you have the right to not read or click on ads that don't interest you. " PythonFor those waiting for Oliver Andrich's Python distribution on recent distributions (Red Hat 6.0, Mandrake 6.0, SuSE 6.1): he's working on it. According to this note that he posted, he hopes to have an interim distribution available by the beginning of July. Apparently it's a lot of work to pull everything together, and he's running a little behind.Jpython 1.2 beta 2 is out, it's another bug fix release. See the announcement for details. Stackless Python 0.2 is available for those who feel like experimenting with an especially twisted piece of code. Details in the announcement. XML-RPC 0.9.8 is available. This module allows for communication with other processes with Userland's XML-RPC protocol. With Userland's move to Linux (more information in the Commerce section), Zope, too, will soon speak this protocol. More information in the announcement. Section Editor: Liz Coolbaugh |
June 24, 1999 |
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Development projectsGanymedeGanymede 0.99.2 is here. This is a bug-fix release, according to the announcement. Ganymede is a network directory management system.GnomeThe latest Gnome news is available in this week's Gnome summary from Havoc Pennington. This week has several items are of particular interest. First, he reports back from the Corel Linux Advisory Council, with lots of good news about coordination and cooperation with Christian Tiberna from KDE. Expect to see the gnome-kde-list@gnome.org start to warm up, hopefully just with creative energy, no flames.Next, he mentions that his request for Visual Basic help was answered by over 30 people ... he got everything he needs and is just now waiting for review from his lawyer before he digs into the Excel IDL. The Gnome Multimedia Framework is now available for review. Havoc comments that, yes, Gnome is moving outside the strict desktop arena and into other areas where development can "make the free Unix clones a nice platform for desktop use". Help closing bug reports has also been requested in this week's summary. If you've reported a bug and notice that it has been fixed, you can help them out by making sure the bug has actually been closed. Sometimes the developers have difficulty verifying that, especially if the bug is difficult to reproduce. And last, Gnome for Kids may be a new project developing, to produce an interface for the computer for kids four years old or younger. If you have an interest in this area, check it out. It is just starting out and, as always, all volunteer. High AvailabilityAlan Robertson has released an updated version of his heartbeat code, including the PPP/UDP bidirectional ring code that has been recently discussed on the linux-ha list.KDEAs usual, Navindra Umanee has sent us an excellent KDE weekly summary.MagicPointMagicPoint is an open-source, text-based presentation tool that has been around for a couple of years. Development on the tool, which has some strengths and some notable weaknesses, has been slow over the past year, so the announcement of magicpoint 1.05a is of more interest than the average alpha release. The latest release contains a "forwarding cache" to improve display performance.MidgardHere is this week's Midgard report, thanks to Henri Bergius.WineDevelopment news for Wine is covered in this week's Weekly News from the Wine project, from Ove Kaaven. He reports that some improvements have gone into exception handling, threading and wine server efficiency.In addition, the Micro-Windows project came to their attention. It might make a good base for a WineCE project. Patrik Stridvall is now working with Micro-Windows author Greg Haerr on a possible merge of Micro-Windows with Wine. For more Wine development news, check out the Wine Kernel Cousin, which summarizes several threads from the wine-devel list.
ZopeZope 1.10.2 RPMs for Red Hat are available, thanks to Jeff Rush. See his announcements for details and download information.A new ZClasses tutorial is available, thanks to Amos Latteier. The tutorialdescribes Zope 2.0, and comes with a warning that it's not quite ready for prime time yet. ZScript 0.5 is available. ZScript is a DTML preprocessor aimed at those (like your editor) who get awfully tired of typing things like: <!--#var foo-->See the announcement for details. (Note that Zope 2.0 will also have a more typist-friendly DTML syntax). And, speaking of 2.0, Zope 2.0 alpha 3 has been released, some information can be found on the Zope 2.0 download page. Folks trying to mix Zope and LDAP may want to look at the Zope LDAP connection object announced by Scott Robertson. Section Editor: Liz Coolbaugh | |
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Sections: Main page Linux in the news Security Kernel Distributions Development Commerce Announcements Back page See also: last week's Commerce page. |
Linux and businessNew HP Linux workstations. Hewlett-Packard has announced a couple of new workstations - with Linux installed. They are relatively high-end systems, apparently aimed at electronic design and similar applications. (Thanks to Christof Damian). New Linux administration course offered Eklektix, Inc., producer of the Linux Weekly News, is proud to announce a new addition to its line of Linux professional training courses. Linux System Administration for Unix Administrators is intended for students who already know how to work with Unix systems. By assuming familiarity with the basic material, this course is able to delve deeply into the issues which are truly Linux-specific in just two days. This course will be taught in Boulder, CO in September; it is also available on site. Userland Frontier moves to Linux - sort of. For the time being, Frontier will continue to run only on proprietary systems, but it is now possible to host Frontier-managed sites on Linux. Their Linux-side code is being released in source form, and the underlying platform will be Zope. See Linux.userland.com for the official story of the beginning of Frontier's move to Linux, and their adoption of Zope. "And Zope is open source, which made it easier to invest. After all, we own it just as much as anyone else does. So we asked the Zope people if they would include our code in the standard Zope distribution and they said yes. Excellent! This is more proof that collaboration is possible, not only across operating systems, but across economic systems." VA supports Linux Demo Day. VA Linux Systems announced a corporate sponsorship of Linux Demo Day, a volunteer oriented project in collaboration with local Linux user groups (LUGs) and corporate sponsors. The goal of the project is to hold an international demonstration of Linux which coincides with the anniversary of Linux, from September 12-18, 1999. Training materials released. Something that slipped through the cracks and didn't get into this week's newsletter: the folks at GBdirect in the UK have announced that they have released some of their Linux training materials under an open license. The materials released thus far make up the first part of a "how to use Linux" course. 800Linux.com announces Linux training. 800Linux has announced a pair of Linux training classes which are aimed at Windows users. Details on the courses may be found on their training page. Open source XML application server released. Planet7 Technologies has announced the release of its XML application server under an open source license. They present the server as a valuable tool in the creation of e-commerce (and other) sites using XML technology. Steve Ballmer on Linux Here's a transcript of Microsoft president Steve Ballmer's speech delivered to the Washington Software Assocition a couple of weeks ago. "I mean, it sounds dumb, but, you know, guys like Sun always missed the boat. They can?t beat us if they don?t ride on the PC platform, because the volume economics are on the side of the PC platform. And I don't know why nobody figured that out, but Linux is -- and SCO did a little bit, but Linux is the first sort of unit that always thought about itself as PC-based and as trying to be kind of -- and has gotten to a critical -- some kind of critical mass of share." (Toward the bottom, in the Q&A). There are also some scary comments about security and other things - an illuminating, if rambling and incoherent, read. (Thanks to Alexander Voinov). PLOC announced its existence this week. PLOC (per-line-of-code) is another attempt to arrange payment for developers of free software. The twist here is that they have set up a scheme (evidently intresting enough to have a patent applied for) wherein each contributor to an open source project will be paid according to how many lines of code they write. There are currently no active projects listed on the PLOC web page. It will be interesting to see if this works at all. The link between lines of code written and the true value of a programming effort is tenuous at best. It is very often the case that higher-quality code is more compact. Creating an incentive for programmers to inflate their line counts does not seem like the way to create quality software. And how should a patch which removes code - and improves the program - be compensated? Press Releases:
Section Editor: Jon Corbet. |
June 24, 1999 |
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Sections: Main page Linux in the news Security Kernel Distributions Development Commerce Announcements Back page See also: last week's Linux in the news page. |
Linux in the newsThis week's recommended reading:
Linus in the News:
Microsoft:
Business news:
and finally:
Section Editor: Jon Corbet |
June 24, 1999 |
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Sections: Main page Linux in the news Security Kernel Distributions Development Commerce Announcements Back page See also: last week's Announcements page. |
AnnouncementsResourcesInformazioni relative a linux e domande ricorrenti. In other words, a new version of the Italian Linux FAQ is available. It includes not only "howto" information, but also has a section on getting Linux into companies.Linux in Business - Case Studies is a new page put up by Bynari Systems. It is quite an impressive list. EventsAtlanta Linux Showcase deadline approaching. The folks from the Atlanta Linux Showcase have sent us a reminder that paper submissions for this October's event are due on July 1. Interested people still have time to pull something together; see the call for papers for details.Pictures of Linux. Marc Merlin has put up a page about Linus's BALUG talk in his usual fashion: lots of information and lots of pictures. Worth a look. Ziff-Davis's Open Source Forum is next week - it is being held on June 30 and July 1 in Austin, TX. Details on their web page. Web sitesFreeLinuxSpace announced its existence this week. Their hook is that anybody can get 25mb of free storage there in exchange, presumably, for being advertised at. The connection to Linux is not entirely clear...User Group NewsAn installfest will be held in Brussels on July 8. It is hosted by two Brussels LUGs. See the announcement for details. |
June 24, 1999
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Sections: Main page Linux in the news Security Kernel Distributions Development Commerce Announcements Back page See also: last week's Back page page. |
Linux links of the weekFolks on the move may want to check out the Dynamics HUT mobile IP project. They have put together a set of software facilitating connectivity to mobile systems via a number of media. C|Net's Download.com has set up a Linux area. They offer downloads of various distributions as well as other interesting packages. (Thanks to Benji Selano). Section Editor: Jon Corbet |
June 24, 1999 |
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Letters to the editorLetters to the editor should be sent to letters@lwn.net. Preference will be given to letters which are short, to the point, and well written. If you want your email address "anti-spammed" in some way please be sure to let us know. We do not have a policy against anonymous letters, but we will be reluctant to include them. | |
To: letters@lwn.net
Subject: antivirus software for linux...
Date: Wed, 23 Jun 1999 09:07:48 +0100
From: kevin lyda <kevin@suberic.net>
a recent poll in comp. reseller news said that 26% of vars cited
a lack of antivirus software was hurting linux. ok. here's
version 1.0 of antivirusd for linux:
/* antivirusd.c - virus checker for linux. copyright kevin lyda *
* licensed under the gpl. see some link at www.gnu.org */
#include <stdio.h>
#include <unistd.h>
#include <limits.h>
int
main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
close(0); close(1); close(2);
chdir("/");
if (fork()) {
exit(0);
}
for (;;) {
sleep(INT_MAX);
}
}
kevin
| ||
Date: Thu, 17 Jun 1999 20:57:22 +1000 (EST) From: Conrad Sanderson <conrad@hive.me.gu.edu.au> To: editor@lwn.net Subject: Mindcraft Times Three Microsoft The first Mindcraft report was muddled in execution, and we were lucky that there was so much negative press about it, mostly for a good reason. But it also showed that Apache and Linux both have performance weaknesses which need to be addressed. In effect we got the benefit from the benchmark without the bad publicity. Microsoft is pissed off because of this. Mindcraft wants this as well, because their reputation got hurt badly the first time around. It is fairly evident that Mindcraft (or should I say Microsoft) wants to force the Linux Community's hand into a benchmark, from where Microsoft will make Many Press Releases (tm) about NT vs Linux. Using their standard marketing and FUD tactics they will take lots of liberty in the interpretation of the results and ignore others - eg. non-SMP performance of Linux and NT, where Linux wins right now. MS smells blood and is willing to follow this Mindcraft benchmark up to the end. In version 3 of this benchmark, all the previous "publicity" and PR bugs have been fixed - we now have a involvement of Linux people (two from Red Hat and one from Penguin Computing), and the place of testing is apparently independent. We know that we will lose this benchmark, so why on earth did Red Hat get involved ??? We could have refused participation until the kernel and the web server had performance enhancements. Refusing participation is nowhere near as bad as hard benchmark data, which is going to stick around for years. Microsoft can and will use all the mileage it can get out of it, and then some. It is our right to do refuse participation until we are ready - after all, one of the main strengths of OSS is that stuff isn't released until it's ready. But instead, we are playing directly into Microsoft's hands. Related sites for performance enhancements in Linux: kernel based web server: http://www.fenrus.demon.nl/ Mindcraft Redux: http://www.kegel.com/mindcraft_redux.html -- Conrad Sanderson - Microelectronic Signal Processing Laboratory Griffith University, Queensland, Australia http://hive.me.gu.edu.au/ | ||
Date: Fri, 18 Jun 1999 11:52:03 +0200 (MDT) From: Maurizio de Cecco <Maurizio.de.Cecco@ircam.fr> To: letters@lwn.net Subject: Trademarks ? Talking about "Open Source" or "OSI Certified" trademark, i think you this time miss completely the point. The power behind the "Open Source" term never came from being a trademark (that never was); the power came from having a community reconizing the value of the concepts behind the term, and actively controlling its usage. Having a single organization, any single organization, certifing the membership of a project to the open source/free software community is a non sense, exactly because we are speacking of a community, not a closed club, with undefined borders; the only thing the community can gain from this is an infinite series of conflicts and division. Maurizio | ||
Date: Fri, 18 Jun 1999 07:23:33 +0100 (BST) From: Richard Corfield <Richard-Web@littondale.freeserve.co.uk> To: Alessandro Muzzetta <Muzzetta@geocities.com> Subject: Re: Your letter on Linux Weekly News about patents Lack of awareness, at least of the issues, does seem a problem. I read the computing section of a newspaper over here and they appear to be afraid to mention anything more complex than the latest MS Word features. In coverage of the Explore.Zip virus for example its has been stated that it erases "Word and Excel files and some others" as if mentioning of the words "source code" would be too much. Whenever the words "Operating System" are mentioned an explanation is generally given as to what an operating system is so explaining Unix, even though it still runs most of the 'net, may just go too far. Given this, coverage of Linux in the mainstream press is limited or not at all. It seemed strange to me to see an article about competition to Microsoft that only talked about the Mac. A non technical friend of mine thought that the book "Open Sources" looked "heavy going". If you want to get the issues of software patents in Europe widely known you'd be best getting into the mainstream press. The hurdle would seem to be justifying to them the relevance of open source to their audiences and the relevance of patents to open source - sufficiently to be worth having to explain the concepts to their target audiences. Otherwise it would just be like the many other EU rules that come out and are ignored. Maybe they should read "Open Sources" first. - Richard. _/_/_/ _/_/_/ _/_/_/ Richard Corfield _/ _/ _/ _/ Web Page: http://www.littondale.freeserve.co.uk _/_/ _/ _/ Dance (Ballroom, RnR), Hiking, SJA, Linux, ... [ENfP] _/ _/ _/_/ _/_/_/ PGP2.6 Key ID: 0x0FB084B1 PGP5 Key ID: 0xFA139DA7 | ||
Date: Sat, 19 Jun 1999 12:12:44 +0100 To: letters@lwn.net From: dps@io.stargate.co.uk Subject: 2.3.6 misinformation Claiming that 2.3.6 features the boredom of code that works is misinfomation, at least given some libraries. It features a nasty mmap bug (at least) that produces problems like the inability to load dynamic libraries even with arbitary amounts of free memory. I was hoping a 2.2.x and 2.3.x bug that seems to stuff processes that seg fault into permanent disc wait status (exploits include the current gcc-2.95 pre-release and at least one of the things in the testsuite). I was hoping 2.3.7 might be a version without this particular feature... and the (locking methinks) permanent disk wait status bug). I am not the only one affected by the mm/mmap.c bug either. Getting a relaibel boot from 2.3.6 still eludes me after I fixed that particular bug. I suppose 2.3.6 does feature the boredom of code that does not trash your file system, prefering merely to hit lethal problems it the boot process. I was proposing to take a look at changing the sheduling code to use a heap for faster reschedules. Duncan (-: | ||
To: jp@ncfocus.com From: sharkey@superk.physics.sunysb.edu Subject: Re: Look Before You Leap Into Linux Adoption Date: Sat, 19 Jun 1999 02:23:48 +0900 Mr. Morgenthal, This message is regarding your article at: http://www.internetwk.com/columns/logic061499.htm With a title like "Look Before You Leap Into Linux Adoption" I was expecting a well written article debating the advantages and disadvantages of adopting Linux. Linux has many pitfalls associated with it and I expected you to mention a few of them. However, I was greatly disappointed to read your article and find criticisms which ranged from misleading to just plain wrong. Let's go through some of the points you bring up. > Linux is an open-source project; therefore, all changes to the > kernel are subject to review and approval by a small team that > controls this portion of the operating system. True, but misleading. Any company may make any changes it wishes, it may distribute those changes, it may even call their modified version "Linux". Only those copies of the code which are distributed by Linus Torvalds need to have code approved by Linus Torvalds. Every user is on equal footing. If Toshiba Corporation wants to distribute a custom Toshiba Linux, they are free to do so. (Of course, I am using Toshiba as a generic example. It works equally well with any company.) > Companies that add features they need, but that are not accepted > into the core distribution, may find themselves in a redevelopment > and retesting cycle every time a new version of Linux is released. This would only happen if said company wishes to included new developments of Linus Torvald's Linux into their own version. If their code is working well without those developments, such testing is not needed. There is no need to upgrade, just for the sake of upgrading. But more to the point, how is this any better than other operating systems, where the kernels are closed? Your statement in this paragraph amounts to: "If you change the kernel, you may need to maintain those changes." Is an operating system where you are prohibited from making the choice of whether or not to modify the kernel really better? Finally, this core group of programmers you refer to (which ultimately means just Linus Torvalds himself), is generally considered to be a rather intelligent group of people. When a feature is rejected, it is done so with explicit reasoning which is publicly announced. If a company's modification is truly a good thing, then it will be accepted. Can you provide a single example of a company which has been put in the position of maintaining a Linux kernel fork? > Windows supporters still outnumber Linux supporters because > Microsoft provides a better value proposition. Perhaps, for some individuals, this is true. Linux still lags behind in multimedia and entertainment software, and for the home market, where such applications are essential, Linux may not provide the best value proposition for all users. Given this, I was very surprised to read your supporting arguments to this statement: > Windows NT Server Enterprise Edition ships with a full complement of > Internet services, including Web, proxy, index, messaging, database, > transaction and firewall services. With Linux, these services will > soon be available as a multivendor product. The first statement is true, you can get all that from Microsoft (for a *very* hefty price tag for unlimited clients), but such services are also included with any fully fledged Linux distribution. For example, Debian Linux 2.1 (released in March '99) includes: Web: Apache, Boa, Cern, dhttpd, and Roxen Challenger Proxy: socks (generic ip proxy), squid, and transproxy (www), plus other specialized applications for particular protocols index: swish++, and others messaging: Zephyr, and many others database: msql, mysql, postgresql, others firewall: support built-in to kernel Everything you need is included right there, from a single source, all in one box, with no hefty licensing fees. Now, it's true that these various pieces of software were developed by different individuals, but the same is true of the Microsoft code. There are different departments inside Microsoft corporation devoted to these pieces of software. They are not coded by a single individual. Furthermore, this is not a new development. Linux has been a strong performer in the internet server market for several years now. The assertion that these services will "soon be available" is laughable. > Linux is just beginning to be retrofitted for symmetric > multiprocessing. Now, this is just plain wrong. The first officially released SMP code I know of was included with Linux 1.3.26, released September 13, 1995, almost four years ago. At that time, Linux was "just beginning to be retrofitted for symmetric multiprocessing". In June of 1996, over three years ago, Linux 2.0.0 was released which contained full, stable support for SMP systems. The release of 2.2.0 at the beginning of this year provided significant SMP performance and reliability improvements. I purchased four dual processor Pentium Pro servers in December of 1997 and they have been running Linux quite satisfactorily since day one. ale% uptime 1:18pm up 124 days, 36 min, 13 users, load average: 1.95, 1.91, 1.84 I can live with that. :) > Without robust SMP, Linux servers can support only small companies > and single applications. Again, I can't seem to make any sense out of this statement whatsoever. Very few companies *need* the kind of SMP support provided by NT or Linux. Having two or four processors in a box is nice, but it's not going to give you the edge that will make or break your business. If your business really needs heavy parallel computing, then you'll buy some 32 or 64 processor system from Sun and run Solaris, and do the job right, but for most companies, that's overkill. Using cheap PC hardware, today's dual processor machine will be outperformed by tomorrow's uniprocessor system under any OS. This statement also seems to imply that without SMP support, an operating system is incapable of multi-tasking. That can't be more wrong. Linux has been multitasking since it's inception in 1991. > If you're managing multiple servers for increased scalability, > you're better off using multiple NT servers all participating within > the same domain. Are you not familiar with Cplant? (Currently 129 on the top 500 list): http://www.cs.sandia.gov/cplant/ Or Avalon? (160): http://cnls.lanl.gov/avalon/ These testaments to the scalability of Linux speak for themselves. I don't see the need to belabor this point any further. > Also, remember that Linux is still Unix. One of the reasons for > Windows' growth has been the complexity of configuring and > maintaining Unix operating systems. Simply because a low-cost > version of Unix is now available, it does not automatically generate > more people capable of managing and configuring these systems. This is your best point so far, but I think the ease-of-use issue has been overstated by the press. At the current time, Linux is still difficult for beginners to use, but when you think about it, this is true of all operating system. If you're used to one operating system, (or not used to any) it takes some time to learn another. But seriously, I think it's important to keep in mind that many high school students can manage to install and run Linux on their home computers just fine. How hard can it be for an experienced computer professional? If you're in the position to be worrying about databases, firewalls, proxy servers, and distributed processing, then you better have enough basic knowledge of computing to be able to flip through Linux for Dummies and have a server up and running in 24 hours. It's just not that hard. I find the continued portrayal of Unix as an impossibly difficult system to master as condescending the "Math is hard." Barbie doll. It's a self- fulfilling prophecy. > Linux is a college student's project gone astray. This is just a low jab, with no meaningful content. Lots of projects began as something small and grew to something much larger. Remember Netscape? Hell, the whole internet itself grew out of the original ARPANET project to link three universities, and SRI. > The version that will be supported by Sun Microsystems and IBM on > its hardware will fall far short of each of these company's own Unix > operating systems in features and capabilities. In general, the feature sets of any two operating systems will not overlap completely. One will almost always contain a feature the other lacks. So, I'm sure you could find a case where you could say "Solaris can do THIS, while Linux cannot.", but as a regular user of both Solaris on Sun hardware and Linux on Intel, I'll pick Linux on Intel 9 times out of 10. It suits my needs better. One striking difference between my Solaris boxes and my Linux boxes is the contents of /usr/local. My Solaris boxes all have /usr/local full to the brim with GNU and other third party utilities which make the operating system easier to use. GNU utilities tend to have more options, features, and command line switches than their commercial counterparts. Under Linux, /usr/local is almost barren. The operating system comes with almost everything I need. In summary, I feel you had a valid point to make. We should all take a look before we leap. I just have a hard time figuring out what it was you were looking at when you wrote that article. Eric Sharkey sharkey@superk.physics.sunysb.edu | ||
Date: Mon, 21 Jun 1999 11:40:00 -0400 From: Anand Srivastava <anand@nmi.stpn.soft.net> To: metcalfe@idg.net, letters@lwn.net Subject: Linux's '60s technology, open-sores ideology won't beat W2K, but what Hi, Thanks for the ethernet, my world wouldn't have been anything like this without it. With due respect I want to disagree with you on your thoughts about Open Source and Linux. Saying that Unix has turned senile due to old age, is like telling that Wine gets bad when it gets old. Its like ethernet although its no match for newer technologies like ATM etc. But still it exists because its simple. The others are complicated, and they will take a long time to become stable enough. And Ethernet can take advantage of any technical advancements, as fast or maybe faster than the more complicated technologies. Unix is similar, its simple. And I don't see anything yet that is better. May be Plan9 or BeOS would be better, but how do they compete, with MS. Linux can compete because it is free, the rules of the business doesn't apply to it. Also its Unix, ie its simple, it will be adapted faster and better with the newest technologies (BeOS and Plan9 are anyway dead because they don't have the resources, I am just talking about the rest of the OSs out there). Linux would not win because its better or anything, it will win because it will always be optimized for the most common tasks and it is free. As people using GUIs become more common on Linux, its GUI will keep on increasing. You must know how many bad technologies have won because they were open and cheaper. Linux in not that bad, its open and its free. It is bound to win. If the Unix that you see is senile, all the kudos should go to the Unix Vendors, who conceded defeat before the war had begun. They just kept on fighting for the ever smaller Unix server space, because that gave them huge profit margins. If MS is a bully, they are fools. Have you ever wondered what drives Open Source developers? It is egotism. Ever read Ayn Rand, that is the character she associated with capitalism. At least as far as she is concerned, Open Source Developers are capitalistic. The only difference is that they don't deal in money, they deal in intellectual thoughts and peer respect. Why does one want to earn lots of money? If it was only for living comfortably and with peace, I don't think you need all that money. There are many reasons you would want to earn more money, to show the world, to gain respect, to gain power. Some are plain misers, they want to amass the money. Some others don't care about the money but they would not let others get the fruits of their labour, which they do because they enjoy it. Open Source developers also want to do the same things, but they don't care about everybody. They just care about people who are like them. They want to show them, they want to gain their respect, they want to gain some power over them. There are others who just want to hog all the limelight. And their are those who want to just program they don't care whether anybody likes thier programs or not, but they would not let anybody earn money from their labour. Hence the GPL. So effectively Open Source is really Capitalism, without the money ;-). Communism also involves force. You won't find any force in Open Source. They don't use anymore force than software companies use. They just use GPL to preserve their right to give their software to anybody who would not try to benefit from them in an unethical way. Open Source would win, but that doesn't mean proprietory software would be extinct, it would just be relegated to niches, just like Open Hardware (with open interfaces) (intel PCs) relegated the proprietory hardware (Sun, SGI, HP, etc) to a niche market. MS is acually killing the goose, by closing their interfaces, with everybody. They prospered once, because they were a lot open. But now they are trying to do too many things and using their proprietory interfaces to support their software. I hope you would think about it. thanks again for the ethernet :-). -anand | ||
Date: Mon, 21 Jun 1999 15:09:55 +0000
From: Dave Finton <dfinton@leonine.com>
To: metcalfe@idg.net, letters@infoworld.com, letters@lwn.net
Subject: Response to Metcalfe's recent article regarding "Open Sores"
I've just recently read your article entitled "Linux's '60s
technology, open-sores ideology won't beat W2K, but what will?" I
have a few issues with this article, and would like to point out a few
items that you've brought up.
> Why do I think Linux won't kill Windows? Two reasons. The Open
> Source Movement's ideology is utopian balderdash. And Linux is
> 30-year-old technology. >
This argument has been thrown around before, and it was shown to be
hogwash. Linux, as you know, is based off of Unix, which was
originally developed 30 years ago. Unix was designed from the very
beginning to handle things that the original inventors could not
envision. Therefore, the Unix framework is very bare-bones. But it
was also designed to be extensible. The fact that Unix is being used
today for a wide variety of purposes only serves to prove my point.
Did AT&T actually think that one day Unix would be used for desktop
applications like modern-day word-processors like Word Perfect or
(soon-to-be) Lotus Notes? Heck I don't think they thought Unix could
handle having a GUI. But today it has those things, and LOTS more.
And to your assertion about Open Source. Open Source is NOT utopian
balderdash. It is the highest form of pragmatism a computer
programmer can think of. No secret little API's, no hidden
"features". If I want to know if something works, I look at it. If
it's broken, I fix it and then get my work done. No more spending
hours (or days even!) finding workarounds or wondering why my
application won't work as advertised. In this light, it is the "black
box" model of thinking that most software companies today subscribe to
that is utopian balderdash. Why do I care that Microsoft considers
its API's and the underlying code its private property? That's MS's
problem, not mine. I'll stick to something that won't try to hide
from me the important details of a toolkit just because some
multi-billion dollar corporation thinks I don't "need to know" those
vitally important details.
> The Open Source Movement reminds me of communism
Funny, the Open Source Movement reminds me of capitalism. No one has
some sort of proprietary lock on the market, and the rules of
competition decide who wins. Hey, isn't that how a free market is
supposed to work?
I'll make another analogy: The closed-source model reminds me of a
dictatorship, with one ruling class (Microsoft) reigning with an iron
fist over subjects friends, and foes. *This* is the system you like
to work under? Yeesh!
> Stallman's EMACS was brilliant in the 1970s, but today we demand
> more, specifically Microsoft Word, which can't be written over a
> weekend, no matter how much Coke you drink. >
You're comparing apples with oranges. I wouldn't dare use Word for
application development. Why use Emacs for writing business
documents? Your analogy fails here, too.
And, BTW, Emacs is *still* a fine piece of work. I use it. Daily.
Beats the hell out of any other IDE I've ever used (including
Borland's IDE, among others).
> Unix and the Internet turn 30 this summer. Both are senile,
> according to journalist Peter Salus, who like me is old enough, but
> not too old, to remember. The Open Sores Movement asks us to ignore
> three decades of innovation. It's just a notch above Luddism. At
> least they're not bombing Redmond. Not yet anyway. >
The Open Source movement asks us to use the last three decades of
innovation that have been put into Unix and related technology, and
extend it even further. It's Microsoft that asks us to throw away all
that hard work. And for what? A cheap knock-off? Don't get me
started over NT. It only *wishes* it were Unix.
And this "senile" internet you speak of... um, yeah right. The
greatest engineering feat in decades that allows people across the
world to communicate transparently without any hassle (and without
long-distance phone charges). This senile old internet has done more
for this civilization than anything else since the industrial
revolution.
So what you ask? What about the next-generation (not-so-senile)
internet? Last time I checked, Microsoft *still* doesn't have good
support for IPv6, and it was damned expensive too. Linux has it. If
I actually had a connection to this new network, I could connect to it
using the utilities I already have on my hard drive. So much for
"senile".
> All Unixes make up 17 percent, and Linux is a small fraction of
>that.
Nope, Linux is in it's own category. That 17 percent are Unix OS's
*other* than Linux. Linux market share went up 212% last year. NT
and Netware share went *down*.
I'll make this prediction: Sure W2K will go up in market share,
temporarily. But its price tag (concerning support, hardware, and
licensing costs) will keep it from destroying Linux. Quite the
opposite in fact. NT is going to have a struggle ahead of it just to
survive. So much for that.
In a departing note, I'll ask this question. Remember IBM, or DEC,
The unstoppable juggernauts of Christmas past? IBM barely made it
into the 90's with the shirt on its back, and DEC is now a subsidiary
of Compaq. Oops, looks like those juggernauts weren't so invincible
after all. ;^)
- Dave
Unix Systems and Applications Consultant
| ||
Date: Mon, 21 Jun 1999 14:45:21 -0700
From: Ariel Faigon <ariel@cthulhu.engr.sgi.com>
To: metcalfe@idg.net
Subject: Re: your column: linux reality check
[Response to Bob Metcalfe's linux column, Cc'ing letters@lwn.net and
jallison@sgi.com]
Dear Bob,
As a pretty practical person watching the computer industry who is
nevertheless, a strong believer in linux, I have to say your column
was so far off and detached from reality that I'm not sure where to
start.
To start: seems like you've misquoted the IDC report on server
operating systems. All commercial Unix'es combined, *not* including
linux were 17.4%, while linux is an *additional* 17.2%, up 17% from
nowhere five years ago and almost tripling from 6.8% a year ago
(please go and reread those IDC numbers.) In the same report,
Microsoft NT remained at a stable 36%, not 60% as you write.
Unfortunately, your column doesn't mention the source for the numbers,
this is hardly responsible journalism.
Here's one possible source for the numbers I'm quoting:
http://www.news.com/News/Item/0,4,30027,00.html?st.ne.fd.gif.a
Your assessment of the amount of talent applied to linux is just as
wrong. At my company alone there is a large number of people paid
full time to work on linux. They may not be on your radar screen yet,
but as some linux companies go public in the next few months this
trend will become clearer. In the meantime, you may search the linux
kernel mailing list or sources, for some big company names.
I recently checked the netcraft web-servers survey at
www.netcraft.com. Updated monthly, it is the only fully automated,
unbiased survey of web servers on the open Internet, and noted that
Microsoft IIS has slipped in market share for the third month in a row
(after rising for over two years), while web servers running on Linux
continue their steady rise (see note on the new CnG server who took
1.45% away from Apache). While all the web servers behind firewalls
aren't represented, this is the best I can rely on. Serious readers
should keep checking this site for a cue on linux market share, rather
than relying on anyone's opinionated columns.
Linux is winning not because of the ideals (yes, some of its
proponents are extreme idealists, more power to them, so what?). It
is winning market share because it is a very practical, flexible, and
cost efficient solution for many computing needs. One example is
network file-serving to Microsoft clients which Samba does better and
much more cheaply than Microsoft's own NT server. [Cc'ig Jeremy
Allison of the Samba team who is a full-time employee of SGI]
To anyone who have witnessed the greatest boost to capitalism (read
Internet commerce and services) ushered by free software like TCP/IP,
HTTP, BIND, perl, Apache, etc. the reasons should be obvious: linux
commoditizes the OS layer. This is unlike your perception, capitalism
at its best. And this is not an anti-MS statement. MS is an
extremely clever company. Expect MS to jump on the Linux bandwagon
(shifting its point of "lock and control" up to the API) just as it
standardized on TCP/IP when it realized LAN-Manager cannot win. If and
when this happens, it'll be great for consumers.
If you have any question about Linux and free software, with regards
to business models, commercial potential etc. please don't hesitate to
email me. I may have the answers for you.
Could this be another "I'm eating my column as promised" column in the
making ? :-)
--
Peace, Ariel
| ||
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