Re: [Sheflug] I hate Windoze, Samba and RAID.

["Chris J/#6" <nospam [at] nccnet.co.uk>]

> 
> (Disclaimer: not an ftp expert ;) Not always the case, is it? Or perhaps
> I've always misunderstood the whole passive / active thing. Certainly, at
> York Uni you're only allowed 'passive' (for crappy firewall reasons ;), but
> I suppose I'm in the minority. And probably passive means something
> completely different to what I thought it did ....
> 

I always thought this...but then I tought I'd check the RFC before actually 
following this up :) And I found I was wrong (unless I reading the wrong 
parts of the RFC) so wasn't going to say anything...until now :)

Right ... from what I can work out: passive RFC: instead of waiting for a 
command from the server saying "open a port and get ready to receieve", the 
FTP client opens a port an listens by itself awaiting data on the the port 
without being told to open it in the first place.

Without reading the whole RFC though, I can't give you any more than 
that...but that's the impression I get. Passive is nothing bad really...it's 
just less likely to be supported client-side (example: how the fsck do you 
get netscape to do passive FTP? This annoyed me for ages with a firewall 
until I found out how to unlock the firewall to allow active FTP but still 
leave it vaguely secure (ie, allow incoming connections from anywhere to port 
20 internally).


> Oooooo cutting ;) I personally rate WinNT/2000 as a 'real' OS; in the same
> way as I rate EPOC as a 'real' OS. Dos isn't (IMO), neither is PalmOS, and
> stuff like that. But, definitions once more ;)
> 

I quite like DOS - it /is/ an operating system in the strict definition as it 
installs a layer between you and the hardware to allow you (the user) to do 
stuff on the box. Good things about DOS: fast...why: nothing to get in the 
way - to copy in & out of memory like there's no tomorrow, easy to get a 
pretty good performance out of the machine... okay, it single tasks, but 
until I found the internet, I never really multi-tasked so this is moot (for 
me anyhow). No restrictions on how you access the hardware == 
hardware-hobbyists paradise ... its just a grown up version of the 
speccy/BBC/Pet I used to have :)

Win2k itself however, is getting very good reviews in the computing press 
(Computing, Computer Weekly) - it seems MS have finally released the first 
decent OS since DOS 5.0. I've yet to play and evaluate it myself, but its 
only a matter of time. The datacenter is going to be intriguing...the only 
downside I can think of off the top of my head is the beef of the machine you 
need to run it (lots of CPU, memory, disk) which has always been a problem 
for MS. It's a large leap forward for MS from NT4, which has been plagued 
with problems...take heed that large sites such as Nasdaq (US technologies 
stock market) have enough faith in Win2k that they make heavy use of it.

But that said, a full install of Solaris 7 eats up about 700MB, from what I 
remember...I managed to trim the installation down to about 160MB after an 
hour and a bit of playing with what gets installed...even so, that's quite a 
chunk (though it was a development box, so needed all the devel libs). 
Without knowing Solaris better (and I have a Sol2.4/OpenBSD2.6 box sitting 
here at home beside me with which to learn more :), I'm not sure how much it 
can be trimmed down to...unlike Linux where I've stripped a base SuSE 6.2 
machine and installed it on a 486SX25 laptop and have it only eat up 10MB of 
disk space :)

Chris...


-- 
@}-,'--------------------------------------------------  Chris Johnson --'-{ [at] 
    / "(it is) crucial that we learn the difference / sixie [at] nccnet.co.uk  \
   / between Sex and Gender. Therein lies the key  /                       \ 
  / to our freedom" -- LB                         / www.nccnet.co.uk/~sixie \ 


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