Linux Guru turned MS Fanboy

MOVING DAY!!!

2009-04-20T21:26:00.001-04:00

I am moving all of my blogs to a new site. Please join me at http://hackersbasement.com/

Fires back

2009-02-08T12:07:00.004-05:00

While looking at someone that attacked another of my posts I found this survey on his blog. I figured to be fair to him and his fellow Linux fanboys I would complete the same survey. (Also after responding to him I read more of his blog to find… while he is almost twice my age and attacking my reputation I have been using Linux longer than him… go figure)

Since when are you a Linux user?
Freshman Year… so 1996

Was it difficult to do your first install?
Not really, Slackware 3.6 had a nice textual menu system (and last time I checked they still do)

Did you especially select your hardware for Linux?
No, I just grab extra hardware I had sitting around.

Was there hardware you never got to work with Linux?
I have had issues with the latest and greatest hardware in the past.

Did you have any prior knowledge of Unix?
I first started working with System V

Have you ever compiled a kernel?
Yes. Pretty much a must if you want the computer to really work for you.

Have you ever written a device driver?
For from scratch for Linux, but I have patched a few on my own

Have you ever compiled a device driver?
oh yeah…

Have you ever compiled an application?
Yes, and I’m not referring to ones I write. It’s a little nuts to have to compile everything just to stay on the cutting edge

Does every application have to be compiled this way?
No, if you feel like waiting, or you find the nice maintainer you can get compiled packages.

Can't you upgrade?
Upgrade on Linux. You want it to work correctly right? Sure some user apps can be upgraded relatively easy. But Linux makes DLL hell seem nice.

Are you a proficient programmer?
Umm, I think so. I have been programming since I was about 5 years old an

Linux is a FOSS system. Do you have your own projects?
Yes. I wrote cl4others. Allowing Linux users a taste of ClientTrust when Novell was still saying they were never going to support it.

You are pretty much a FOSS person. Do you hate Microsoft users?
I used to be all for Free/Open source. And I used to hate Microsoft. I have been a convert to the “dark side”. There is just something that makes more business scene about spending your time to make money and then enjoy the rest of your life.

What is your Windows experience?
I have used every version of Windows since 3.1

Do you hate Microsoft?
Used too.

Are there times you require Microsoft products?
Yeah, and now I prefer them.

How much time do you spend on the CLI?
Okay, I really started working with computer hardcore in 1992. Was there really much beyond CLI back then :)

Is Linux really much more secure than Windows?
Linux is much less secure. Especily when you have physical access to the machine. Anyone can be “hacked” on any system if they don’t think about security. Just look at the newest attacks for Mac OS-X

What is the biggest hurdle to move to Linux?
Not that much, at least for me. I came from a command line background. I still do some of my best working in CLI. But it does take a lot more time to get a Linux system running than it does for a Windows machine. It’s also nice having a central service for updates like Windows Update.

Is there something you can't do with Linux?
No, not really. But it does take much longer and require more “pieces”

What do you like about Linux?
It’s a great tool. And for some things it just simpler. But I enjoy spending my time working on app not supporting the platform.
What do you recommend to Windows users who want to convert to Linux?
Stick with windows.

People might find it difficult to choose a distribution.
My preference has always been Slackware. And it will drive most people crazy. Too me Linux doesn’t need a GUI so I might be the wrong person to ask.

What desktop should I choose?
When I do use a GUI on Linux I perfer KDE

What if I run into a problem?
about the only thing I use google for is search. You can also try the ”man” file in your distro.

I gladly want to switch to Linux, but there is this single application I need to have.
you can use VMs but it really depends on what you are trying to do. If it is hardware dependant such as 3D games or video editing, you will either dual boot or have a second system.

Something else?
nope.

Windows Backwards Compatibility

2008-04-23T18:45:00.000-04:00

I hear people whine and complain every time a new version of Windows comes out. The number one complaint is always, “Microsoft sucks!!! My applications no longer work.” Being a software developer I have a little insight on how the world of computing works. And I have to admit… a long time ago I used to be one of those people that would complain. A few years ago I started to realize how difficult code maintenance can be on my relatively small applications. And it got me thinking about what it would be like to maintain a beast like Windows (beast in lines of code).

With the latest version of windows, and hearing the same complaints, I started doing some research. I have found Microsoft puts more effort into backwards compatibility then anyone could reasonably ask for. Poking around on channel9 (http://channel9.msdn.com) and looking for “Application Compatibility” I was amazed by the teams of people that test and shim almost every application ever written. They admit there are some applications they cannot get to work. And most of these are due to developers trying to “be creative”. Examples are things such as people trying to write their own implementations of the stack and heap as well as hard coding file paths.

In a few of the interviews I kept hearing about the “Application Compatibility Toolkit” or “ACT” so I figured I would take a look (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/windowsvista/aa905078.aspx). In kit there is an application called “Compatibility Administrator”. This tool allows you to look at the existing application shims. (Simply put a shim can be thought of as an operator that helps to direct calls to where they need to go, and at times even forward the call to a different number.) In this tool I was surprised to see thousands of applications that have been patched. As well as, the ability to add to the shim database for your own applications.

Some of the standard shims are for things such as faking a version number of the operation system and redirecting file paths. I am still a little lost why people would do a version number check (especially an equal to instead of greater than or equal to) on the operation system. Personally I would test for a the required feature or just let the system throw an exception that I can handle myself. Other things that people have been known to do are using undocumented “features” that were never meant for production, such as parsing the registry for a version number or path enumeration.

Here is a hint folks… When you want to write an application that works with other peoples stuff you need to do it using the development kits and documented APIs that has been released, or understand that when the next version is released YOUR application might get broke.
While I do not work for Microsoft, I believe they have gone well out of their way to help every make applications work. I could rant about other vendors, but I will leave that for another time.

-Thanks,
Matt

PlayStation3, Xbox360, and Wii (yeah right on the last one ;)

2008-04-18T10:45:00.000-04:00

This is a hard question. When I first bought a PlayStation3 (February 2007), I made the choice because it was primarily an upgrade from my existing PS2. At the time I had the option of getting a 360 or a Wii as well. (Sorry Nintendo… the Wii just isn’t for me…) My thought behind getting the PlayStation where based on the fact that I had a PS2 and it was starting to have problems playing DVDs, all of my PlayStation 2 game would still work, and I got a sweet Blu-ray player to use on my nice fancy HD 1080P Television.

One of my friends was still trying to convince me that I should get the Wii… but who are we kidding. With 1080P and only 480P possible on a lucky day that option was out. He was also telling me that Blu-ray would never win over HDDVD (we see how correct he was ;).

Now over a year later my brothers arm twisted me enough to get an Xbox. Having both a PS3 and a 360 lets me compare the two systems side-by-side. First I bought the Elite version of the Xbox because I wanted to make sure I had the highest possible graphics possible (and the black system matches all of my other AV gear great). With having both systems I will admit that the selection of games for the 360 far surpasses anything directly written for the PS3. But I can still play most all PS2 games on the PS3 and a lot of the original Xbox games on the 360. But from a graphics standard, that doesn’t help me much.

Wii…

I don’t have one and have no interest in getting one so I can’t speak on it. (I have used one so I could complain about it if I want :D)

Both Systems…

Remote access to Media Center systems for browsing person Photos, Music, and Videos.

PlayStation gets a bonus for better Randomize and easier access user controls

Xbox wins one for being able to play music from inside of any game as well as full support of Windows Media formats (yeah… I agree it’s an unfair advantage)

Web camera support

Online purchase of games, downloads and movies

Friends, chat, voice chat

Home brew capable

Xbox has XNA which gets the big “W”

PS3 can boot to Linux. While cool in theory… proves to be a typical Linux pain in the butt for maintenance.

Wireless controllers

DVD up-scaling

PlayStations does a much better job

Playstation 3…

Blu-ray ... If you can’t see the difference between a DVD and a Blu-ray (or HD-DVD for that matter) then you need to go to your ophthalmologists.

Built in web browser

Boot to other OS (supported)

Cell Processor (this is just cool… but I’m a geek)

Ability to use a standard USB mouse for navigation and use printers if you want

Bluetooth Controllers and support

Xbox 360…

Native support to play music from a Zune

Can directly download full length movies and television shows

XNA… already covered… but this is SWEET!!!

Personally, I think both systems have great features. I like both interfaces and controllers. Both have their pluses and minuses. All in all I am glad I have both. I hope the vendors learn from each other and maybe even work together (cold chance in hell I know).

Singularity RDK

2008-03-09T12:10:00.000-04:00

In the past 20 to 30 years nothing dramatic has changed to the base fundamentals of how an operating system works. Linux, Mac-OS, and Windows have all relied on what is called a monolithic kernel. Simply put these means you take all of your hardware and their drivers and stuff them in the same run space on your computer. If one driver goes nuts or a piece of hardware overheats… that all she wrote and the computer will crash. This has been seen as a “Blue Screen of Death” in the Microsoft world and as a “Kernel Panic” in Linux.

There is a different paradigm that has been tried before. It is called a Microkernel. The idea behind a microkernel is each driver and system service (such as the networking protocol stack) has its own run space. With the current thoughts of using unsafe and unmanaged code (assembly, C and C++) each of these parts needs to run in its own protected memory. This protected memory is a implementation in hardware that pretty much acts like a mother trying to prevent a child from getting to the cookie jar right before dinner. If you make a request to someone else’s memory space the hardware throws and exception and the kernel lets you know (smacks your hand). If you really need to access something in someone else space you have to ask the kernel to copy (marshal) the data for you. This comes with several downsides. The kernel needs to copy the memory from one memory space to another. It also needs to perform some magic in the hardware called context switching. Overall both of these actions are rather expensive.

What Microsoft Research has done with Singularity it to create a fully safe and managed operating system. They have provided a software protection that allows all application to safely run in the same address space. And using managed code had provided garbage collection and memory page management all in the same space as the user applications. This mandated by the fact that you cannot run unsafe, un-typed code outside of the kernel, simply put your program can only talk to other programs if it shares a channel (communication contact or interface) with another application. These channels build a standard form of communication that can be statically checked and verified at compile time and at runtime. They also provide a queuing process to allow for safe and clean recovery if a peer application fails. Keep in mind that system drivers are given this same level of protection. So if your video card or CPU overheats. The system would have the ability for pause everything and wait for the temperature to come back in range instead of causing a system panic that leads to a reboot, blue screen, or just locking up.

I am very impressed by this project and I can’t wait to see the outcomes. As a developer and engineer myself I cannot wait to see some of the principals learned by singularity show up in my person desktop.

-Matt

MySQL versus MS SQL and SQL Express

2008-02-25T07:05:00.000-05:00

Is there any real use for the piece of trash known as MySQL. In my adventures working with MySQL lately, I have seen the bottom of crap. I can hardly believe that I (or anyone else for that matter) considered MySQL an "Enterprise" class database. No groups, no roles, horrible ADO and ODBC connectors. Honestly... If you want to save a few dollars go get SQL Express from Microsoft.

As I have said before I have recently become a huge fan of Microsoft. While everyone complains that the costs to buy their software are high. I believe the "TRUE" ROI becomes apparent as soon as you try to do anything with it. For example; I used to enjoy programming in PHP and MySQL. But as of late I just can't get myself to be tortured enough to leave the wonderful world of Visual Studio, .Net, and SQLExpress. If you have a small business or are a team of few, really there is no excuse to not use Microsoft’s products. You can say… well I don’t want to spend several thousand dollars on their software. (you could say inferior… but you would just be flat out lying) But what about the Express Suite of Visual Studio and SQL. At the entire cost of “FREE” and as well as royalty “FREE” how can you complain. Also with the extended ROI and pure bliss of development you just get less and less things to complain about.

I think my true turning point on PHP and MySQL was on a custom web product I wrote simply using IIS, MSDE, and ASP (classic). Even using ASP without OOP I still enjoyed the reduced headache and lack of maintenance (and the product looked and worked much better)

Windows Home Server: 6 months later

2008-02-18T00:56:00.000-05:00

Back in 1998 to 2000 I ran Slackware Linux as my primary operating system on my home computer. This was my access to the internet, web development and just plain programming for 2 years. I did have the system configured to dual boot with Windows 98 for the occasions when I wanted to play games (WINE and all that other stuff was just [and still is] crap).

After 2000 I decided that I was don’t with the dual boot thing I and setup a full home network using Linux as my file and internet sever while using Windows 98, 2000, and XP for my workstations. For years I was one of the biggest complainers about Microsoft and their greed for money.

Working as a network administration and systems engineer for a school district I had the job of finding the best way to maintain and manage our network systems. Running a Novell shop with Windows workstations seemed like a great combination for year. But after researching my options and realizing that the choices between the slow decline in Novell’s quality and the painful maintenance of Linux systems I started to realize that the “Evil Microsoft” wasn’t so evil after all. With Windows 2003 server, Active Directory, and (my favorite) Tablet PC, I started to see that maybe Bill had a good idea after all. I mean I loved playing games and writing programs in DOS, so why was I so bigoted against Windows. Then one day in 2004 I had an epiphany…

Microsoft and Windows equals good…

This was a frightening thought; fore I was a long term believer that any possible action on my part of give money to Mr. Gates was a very bad thing. But this realization was came from looking at the total cost and return of Microsoft products. Was it bad to pay for software (even if it seemed too much) if it was easier to manage and maintain over time. What about the added benefit of not having to tweak drivers and kernels just because I bought the latest and greatest hardware. Was there a problem with every time a security update was released I would have to recompile every piece of software on my server. What about all those “Great” free program? I mean who can go wrong with OpenOffice and SS7.

Don’t get me wrong… I love Linux (especially Slackware) but when I can sit down and manage thousands of accounts and hundreds of computers without having to look at “make” or “gcc”; I just get this little happy feeling inside. Now still using Novell I didn’t see the major benefit of switching to Windows servers… I mean it was easy for me to manage… I can run any computer you set in front of me (yes I can use a Mac, but I personally don’t qualify them for much more than a very expensive and heavy toy) System V, AIX, Slackware, Redhat, Fedora, CentOS, DOS, Windows… I get around ;)

All the while I was still running my faithful Slackware server at home. I do have to admit that it was now running for 6 years and while it lost one hard drive (damn IBM) the only other times it was offline was during power outages. But it was also getting very behind on updates. I hate updating all of the security patches for Linux. The only true “clean” way is to update the Kernel (patch and recompile). Then update services: sendmail, apache, rsync, openssh, openssl, Washington imap, php, openvpn, svn… (patching and recompiling all of them!!!) It typically took less time to backup everything to CD (pain in the ass using command line) and just download and reinstall the latest copy of my favorite disto. But I never took the time, mainly because I knew that with the hours I work this would be a several week if not month process. I did notice something on Microsoft’s forums though.

While browsing the MSDN forums I started to see references to something I was kinda wishing to see for years “Windows Home Server”… What could it be? Maybe just a “service” for XP pro… No it was a full server based on the Windows 2003 server platform. I thought there is no way I can be this lucky. I noticed that there was a programming contest for this product so I figured I would sign-up and try it out. I honestly did have the intention of working on the contest but again due to my long hours I really only had time to setup the server and configure it for my basic uses.

It was wonderfully easy to install… Start setup, enter server name, and walk away for an hour… and viola! I looked at the interface and I realized… wow! It was so simple I would even be able to teach my mother and grandparents how to use it. Peaking under the covers I saw that it was a totally unlocked copy of Windows 2003 server with IIS6 and fully .Net capable. (It just keep getting better) After using it for two weeks I had decided that as soon as it went on sale I was going to get myself a copy, so in December 2007 (yeah it was a month after it went on sale… but you’ll get over it) I got my copy. I installed it on a very low end HP desktop I purchased 9 months prior and migrated all of my services from my Linux server over to it… Sendmail/IMAP/Fetchmail to hMailServer, Freepopsd (the Windows version doesn’t scale very well, but that seems to be a problem for most open source software), MySQL to SqlExpress 2005, Rsync to the WHS backup agent, Apache 2/PHP to IIS6 and .Net 2.0 (now 3.5), OpenVPN/OpenSSL CA to OpenVPN/Microsoft CA, svn to Visual Server SVN (that is a wonderful package) , OpenSSH to CygWin/OpenSSH and then I realized something. About four hours after I started the install of my OEM copy of Windows Home Server, I had all of my services from my Linux server replaced with versions for Windows that were considerable easier to manage, maintain… and just plain install. All I could think was it took me months of tweaking, researching, and just play messing with my Linux server to get it to the point where I was “Okay” with how it worked. And in four simple hours (that’s 1,2,3,4) I had replaced all of that with Windows. The only cost I was out was $389 for the hardware and $89 for an OEM copy of WHS. Less than $500 and another $100 to $200 for my time; compared to free software, free hardware, and HOURS upon HOURS (if not weeks and weeks) of my time (well if I managed the Linux system for 20 hours or less it would have been cheaper… but I know it was hundreds of hours over several years to get it just right)

From that point on I have decided that I am going to back Microsoft. Despite what people try to say about them… their stuff works… and it costs MUCH less over time. As well as it takes much less time and effort to do so much more.

-Matthew Whited

P.S. My Linux server was turned off new year’s weekend… I never looked back (I don’t even miss it)