Re: [OT] Sun Fire v440 servers
On Thu, Apr 28, 2011 at 2:20 PM, Kfir Lavi wrote: > Hi all, > Is anybody interested in some old beasts? > http://www.sun.com/servers/entry/v440/ > > Regards, > Kfir > > Ok, > 6 x Sun Fire v440 quads, raid, 2 power supplies > 2 x Sun 220 (not sure but are older) > 1 x IBM pizza box server (very old) Hi Kfir, I would be interested in a couple of the v440s. Where are you located? I'm near Yerushalayim. Thanks, Israel ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Fw: [OT] Sun Fire v440 servers
and maybe one of the 220s... Thanks again, Israel ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Re: Disk I/O as a bottleneck?
On Sun, 08 May 2011 07:28:49 +0300 Nadav Har'El wrote: > Instead of buying a huge SSD for "thousands of dollars" another option you > might consider is to buy a relatively small SSD with just enough space to > hold your "/" partition and swap space. Even 20 G may be enough. > The rest of your disk - holding your source code, photos, songs, movies, > or whatever you typically fill a terabyte with, will be a normal, cheap, > hard disk. I don't agree with this setup. Regular consumer drives setup with RAID to stripe are going to be much, much faster and have less problems in the long run than single SSDs at this point as well as being a better value until prices change a lot. Consider not using swap, because swap when in use causes a lot of thrashing and kills performance especially if you only have 1 or 2 drives. If you have a reasonably fast CPU (as the OP wrote) and more than 1G of RAM you can live without swap. Try it and like it: /sbin/swapoff -a Run for a few days and see if your performance doesn't improve. The only problem I can think of is if you run leaky code and don't have swap your system will lock up sooner. If you do have swap perhaps you will be able to see it coming. Another thing to consider is what filesystem(s) you use and what your mountpoints are. That's a religious debate and I'm not going to get into it except to say different filesystems have different advantages and disadvantages and it's worthwhile to do a bit of research to see which one(s) will work for you. You might consider one filesystem for volatile directories like /tmp and /var/log and others for relatively static filesystems like /. You should also consider your whole filesystem structure and the way you have mountpoints set up. If you have one big filesystem for everything (common but incorrect desktop config) you are not going to get the best performance possible. ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Re: Disk I/O as a bottleneck?
On Sun, 08 May 2011 09:55:35 +0300 Nadav Har'El wrote: > On Sun, May 08, 2011, is...@zahav.net.il wrote about "Re: Disk I/O as a > bottleneck?": > > I don't agree with this setup. Regular consumer drives setup with RAID > > to stripe are going to be much, much faster and have less problems in > > the long run than single SSDs at this point as well as being a better > > value until prices change a lot. > > Having two hard disks will, at best case, *double* your seek time. This is > still pretty slow, isn't it? Won't an SSD, even cheap one, have a better > random access read performance? Striping works because the controllers can overlap I/O. There's no reason you have to seek on two drives, that's the *worst* case and probably shouldn't happen. The best case is the controller knows the data is on one drive and seek remains the same. Of course a physical drive is always more beneficial for sequential access than random, but striping is still better for random than not striping because of the caching- your system may be doing other work that needs data found on the other drive, and that means seek that you totally avoid. The more drives you spread your data across the less likely you are to thrash any one drive. As we say, "six barbers, no waiting." I don't think any cheap SSDs cache enough to beat a good striped setup of even 2 physical disks and the page sizes aren't usually matched to Linux's requirements. I read an article about how SSD design was mostly made to Windows filesystems and can work against you somewhat if you use them on Linux or other OS. I don't know how true it was but it makes you think. Anyway as you add more disks you keep increasing performance with a striping setup, there is no downside except if you mirror but then again there is no free lunch. You can have it fast or reliable or cheap, but you can't have it all. The question is how much RAID and how many drives you can buy for the price of a good SSD, how much cache will you get with striped RAID and how much cache do you get with a good SSD, and how long will everything last? SSD still has some nasty issues like wear leveling, lifetime problems, etc. Enterprise servers are still using physical drives. Those guys can pay anything and they buy the "old" stuff so that must tell us something. Personally I'm staying with drives that spin until technology improves and I start reading about production servers that are totally SSD. YMMV ;-) > > Consider not using swap, because swap when in use causes a lot of > > thrashing and kills performance especially if you only have 1 or 2 > > drives. If you have > > Even without any swap space, you can have a lot of thrashing: Clean pages > - program text (the code), shared libraries, memory-mapped files, and so > on - are simply "forgotten" when the page cache is needed for other > things, and when you get back to that other program, suddenly all its > code and libraries are not in memory, and getting them back requires a > lot of random-access reads from disk, and (especially if the disk is > doing other things at the same time) causes the program to appear "stuck" > or "sluggish". That's true but swap only makes it worse since it's many magnitudes slower than RAM and in my experience, Linux doesn't do a very good job of managing it. If I have 4G of RAM and less than 2G is in use, I still see a few meg being used by swap. What's the reason for that? I don't want to start swapping until my RAM is very close to maxxed out. And then I want swap to get cleaned out very quickly after RAM is available. Swapping should be an absolute last resort on a modern machine. It looks like swap processing is something that hasn't received much attention since it was designed and things have changed a lot and it's time to stop using it until they revisit how it should work. If you have a monitoring program that tells you how much RAM and swap are in use, you will see a dramatic slowdown in performance when you swap even a little. I think the OP said he had a fast CPU and tons of RAM so if the system feels sluggish then the obvious things to look at are filesystem layout, choice of filesystems, turning off swap. If that doesn't work then maybe look into another OS...at this point Linux (and BSD) still aren't doing SMP as well as other OS but there may not be any better choices on Intel hardware. As you or somebody else pointed out, many apps don't thread enough to exploit a hyperthreading quad. Maybe the OP should look into running Solaris, which is known to do well in this area. It's probably going to be a long time until Linux and Linux apps really exploit multicore well. ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Re: Disk I/O as a bottleneck?
On Sun, 08 May 2011 10:02:18 +0300 geoffrey mendelson wrote: > One of the bad things is that standard *NIX files systems are designed > with magnetic media in mind, they update the access time of files > every time you open them. This is bad for files that are opened often. You can stop this with noatime in the fstab. It's something I do whenever I set up a new install. > The way around this is to mount a file system read only. Using a > compressed read only file system, such as that on a "live" CD works > well in this case. The problem with it is that you can't > add software or change settings. You don't need to mount the fs r/o to use noatime. ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Re: Disk I/O as a bottleneck?
On Sun, 08 May 2011 10:15:30 +0300 Nadav Har'El wrote: > On Sun, May 08, 2011, Nadav Har'El wrote about "Re: Disk I/O as a > bottleneck?": > > Having two hard disks will, at best case, *double* your seek time. This > > is > > Of course, I meant *half*, not *double* :-) Actually it might do a lot better than that because of caching. Aside from the fact striped data is spread across drives, it exploits caching better since data from more than one MRU file is likely to be in cache. ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Re: Disk I/O as a bottleneck?
On Sun, 08 May 2011 17:28:07 +0300 Gilboa Davara wrote: > On Sun, 2011-05-08 at 07:31 +, is...@zahav.net.il wrote: > > > > at this point Linux (and BSD) still aren't doing SMP > > as well as other OS > > Care to elaborate? I think it's well-known Solaris exploits multicore better than Linux or BSD. I see quite a few problem reports on the various BSD SMP mailing lists. I don't track Linux very much but I can see from conky on my boxes Linux just doesn't do that well. And race conditions are unfortunately an ongoing problem in many apps. I work on a different platform where multithreading and multiprocessing were a very early part of the design and I have seen a big difference in performance and lack of race conditions in that environment because it was based on a native multithreading model whereas UNIX was based on process forking and threading came much later and you could argue was not exactly implemented seamlessly. It's not an apples and apples comparison but the difference in software issues on those systems is night and day. As far as I can see those problems still haven't been resolved at the design or implementation levels. ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Re: Disk I/O as a bottleneck?
On Sun, 08 May 2011 18:11:24 +0300 Gilboa Davara wrote: > On Sun, 2011-05-08 at 14:56 +, is...@zahav.net.il wrote: > > On Sun, 08 May 2011 17:28:07 +0300 > > Gilboa Davara wrote: > > I don't track Linux very much but I can see from conky on my boxes Linux > > just doesn't do that well. And race conditions are unfortunately an > > ongoing problem in many apps. > > I don't think race condition means what you think it means... > You're most likely mixing race condition and resource / lock contention. I'm not talking about contention which I understand they're trying to solve with the removal of the BKL, I'm talking about bugs in application code. But both contribute to software quality/usability issues for the end-user, especially with multicore processors. > More-ever, you're mixing SMP kernel issues (Such as the > soon-to-be-officially-dead BKL [big kernel lock] and SMP scheduler > issues) and application design issues. (Read: Application that are not > design with big/huge-SMP in mind) I'm not mixing anything, I'm saying *all* those things contribute to performance problems. > > I work on a different platform where multithreading and multiprocessing > > were a very early part of the design and I have seen a big difference in > > performance and lack of race conditions in that environment because it > > was based on a native multithreading model whereas UNIX was based on > > process forking and threading came much later and you could argue was > > not exactly implemented seamlessly. It's not an apples and apples > > comparison but the difference in software issues on those systems is > > night and day. As far as I can see those problems still haven't been > > resolved at the design or implementation levels. > > A specific example will go a long way to explain your POV. As I said my development experience is on a different platform with a fundamentally different design. In that system, process forking is very expensive and threading is very cheap- the opposite of the *NIX model. And there are three or so decades of symmetric SMP exploitation so that stuff is done and works and is not part of ongoing development and doesn't break or cause problems and most of the software is designed to protect against application level misuse and resource contention and deadlocks by killing offending work to keep the system running well. Those kinds of protections are not available in Linux or BSD AFAIK. For example you cannot spin the processor on System Z from an application for very long without being killed by the supervisor, but you can easily write userland code to hog the machine in *NIX. As *NIX was and is being changed to exploit SMP (and look at all the code that has been added let's say in the last 5 years to do this) it's very apparent to exploit the hardware threading is more useful than process forking. But that way of thinking is newish in *NIX and not all the tools and facilities (resource serialization etc) that are available in other systems (System Z for example) are available to *NIX so there are growing pains. A lot of progress has been made, no doubt. But there is still a lot of room for improvement. ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Re: Disk I/O as a bottleneck? [OT]
On Sun, 08 May 2011 19:19:25 +0300 guy keren wrote: > and how is all this related to solaris Vs. linux? solaris is *nix, at > least was the last time i heard ;) Yes, you are right, but for some reason Solaris has the reputation for handling multicore better than Linux and BSD. Maybe you guys know why, it's not my area. I do use it and it has plusses and minuses like any other OS. I don't have a monster box to run it on yet so I can't confirm what I have been reading for the past few years. > care to tell us the name of this operting system you are working on, > instead of sounding so mysterious? is it a commercial general-purpose > operating system? if so - what is it's name? or is it a proprietary > system of the company you work for that does not work as a > general-purpose operating system? > > when you say "system Z" - do you refer to what IBM formerly called > "MVS"? Sorry this is going off topic, but just to answer your question ;-) Yes, no mystery...it's z/OS on z/Architecture (hardware platform). It's a very tightly coupled OS/platform that has been evolving since the 1960s. Extremely nice software/hardware environment to work with. It's a general purpose computing platform that is designed specifically around high throughput and RAS and has many design features in the OS and subsystems to make sure applications can't bang each other on the head too badly and can't do anything to system code at all. For example in the OLTP systems you can set various timers in the tuning parameters so that any deadlock or resource contention will be resolved by killing the offending party or waiter after the prescribed interval expires. It's granular and not an all-in-one setting. You can also set timers for elapsed or CPU time consumption by various work classes and kill runaway jobs, change their priority, etc. Anybody who wants to talk about it email me anytime. ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Re: sending mail from the command line
On Tue, 10 May 2011 17:37:10 +0300 guy keren wrote: > > according to the logs - the mail was not delivered to an external > machine. check your sendmail's mail queue (using 'mailq') to see if the > message is still there. > > it could also be that the mail was delivered to some local mailbox, > instead of to google. the fact that it claims that the relay is > 'localhost' implies that your sendmail is not configured properly. you > should configure the relay to be the mail server of your ISP. To this advice I would add, most email providers will not accept mail from dynamic IPs. You probably got blacklisted the moment you tried it unless you have static IP and reverse DNS. Otherwise you will have to configure sendmail to use your ISP's mail server a relayhost as Guy said, and then send mail out from there. If that is all you want to do then some mini sendmail replacement is going to be much easier to live with than full-blown sendmail. Look for ssmtp, msmtp, etc. ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Re: Disk I/O as a bottleneck? [OT]
On Tue, 10 May 2011 21:57:53 +0300 Oron Peled wrote: > On Sunday, 8 בMay 2011 19:42:55 is...@zahav.net.il wrote: > > On Sun, 08 May 2011 19:19:25 +0300 > > guy keren wrote: > > > > > and how is all this related to solaris Vs. linux? solaris is *nix, at > > > least was the last time i heard ;) > > > > Yes, you are right, but for some reason Solaris has the reputation for > > handling multicore better than Linux and BSD. > > Repeating this claim does not make it true: Reading what I wrote might help you a little. I said "Solaris has the *reputation* for handling multicore better." > http://www.nas.nasa.gov/Resources/Systems/columbia.html > - Smallest node have "only" 512 (Itanium) cores > - Biggest system have 2048 (Itanium) cores > - These systems are from ~2006 (5 years ago) > - They are SSI (single system image), not clusters. > > If Solaris was so much better in multicore handling, I'll bet you would > be able to point to similar Solaris systems, now can you? I'm sure I could if I was an Oracle marketing rep, but I really don't care. I use Linux, Solaris, and 3 different BSD and they all have their good and bad points. YMMV. I didn't bother to look at your link but if you don't like what I wrote, think of the value of comparing whatever OS you are talking about running on *Itanium* to running it on x86. That's not exactly a sound basis for comparison :rolleyes: I was suggesting to the OP it might be good to try a different OS on *his* hardware if he has a nice box and isn't happy with the performance. I don't see the crime in that and sorry some of you found it so offensive. Maybe you should just buy him an Itanium farm if you feel so strongly about it ;-) Have a nice day. ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Re: RMS, Hosts Must Support Boycott?
> I may act differently if the FSF boycotts israel. Is the FSF not boycotting Israel? I guess it depends on how you see things, but when Stallman signs on a letter as President of the FSF that he will not come to Israel unless it is at a venue that sponsors an anti-Israel boycott, I don't know what more would be required in order to be able to say with confidence that constitutes a boycott of Israel by the FSF. > I will probably not go to any of RMS lectures. I do not think he is > anti-Semitic, but he have been at least insensitive. Does everybody not realize Stallman was born Jewish? I wonder if the Arabs who are sponsoring his visit realize that. Or maybe since he has declared himself an atheist they are ok with it. ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Re: USB I/O draining my userspace (Ubuntu Natty 64b)
On Wed, 15 Jun 2011 16:19:08 +0300 Ira Abramov wrote: > First, an appology. I added another message on the RMS fiasco only to > find out later the threads all died out and I was committing a faux pas. > my appologies! please ignore I posted it if at all possible. It's too late! You've done it now ;-) > Second, here's my problem: I have here a workstation running an Athlon > 3700+, and part of my job is to occasionally write out an image file to > USB universal card reader, testing the product of my builds. The writing > takes forever (since I haven't discovered how to get dd to write out the > sparse image to the CF card sparsely). Also, untill I moved the card > reader to one of the backpanel ports, the write would drag my entire > environment to a halt at the same time - even the mouse pointer gets > stuck at some point, until dd would finish. switching from front to back > panel and adding the oflag=dsync option solved the freַ¯ing of the > userspace but not the horrible writing speeds. I do hourly rsyncs between two drives and it often causes my system to bog heavily. I won't speculate on the reason because that topic is apparently as inflammatory as the Stallman's boycott (!) but it does happen. It also happens on my system with dd between disks. System in question is E8400 with Seagate 16M Barracudas with Slackware and 2.6.29.6 kernel. I have seen this behavior in every desktop OS I have tried (NetBSD, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Slackware, the "W" word) except for Slamd64 (no longer maintained). > I have a feeling this is a major bug with the USBstorage driver or some > related module, but as this is old hardware running on the latest kernel > from Ubuntu, I am surprised. Anyone got a clue? > > Thanks, > Ira. > Are you using the default blocksize for dd? It may not be optimal for your USB device. I wonder if it would be possible to find out what blocksize the device uses and if it would make a difference. I know bs does make a big difference when copying big files to a physical disk. ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Re: secure data export
On Fri, 24 Jun 2011 00:35:16 +0300 Orna Agmon Ben-Yehuda wrote: > Hello all security experts, > > I would like to export data from a machine on a business's internal > network on a safe media, such that only the files I want exported are on > the media. Specifically, I consider the possibility that the machine may > already be infected by a malware which adds business-sensitive data to > all outgoing media, and would like to defend against such a theoretical > malware. The question may be limited to text files. If I understand the problem, and you have no trusted reference file, then there is no way to do what you want to do, since you have nothing to verify against. If you have a trusted file, then you can use digital signatures to make sure the contents aren't altered and to make sure you will be able to detect if the contents are altered. > Things already considered: > *The media is a CD, which will be written and then finalized. No USB > devices. If you have a trusted reference copy and a digital signature of that file then the media become irrelevant in that you will be able to verify that the copy is either intact or not. > *An artificial file will be added to the data file, to fill the media as > much as possible. This, however, leaves a part of the disk capacity > unused - the part used for the structure table (what used to be FAT), > which is a place where additional data can hide. Sounds like a very unproductive approach. > What about a malware compressing the data, using the extra space for > additional data? That's an interesting attack but it all gets back to what you can trust and what you can't. If you have a known, good copy then you can preserve that or at least detect unauthorized alterations. If you don't, it's over. > If I compress the data to avoid further compression, how can the person > verify it contains exactly what it should? Digital signatures. There are two ways to do it. For text files, you can wrap the signature around the text file and the whole bundle can be sent in one piece. The recipient can verify the signature against your public key that you make available and verify the copy they have is valid and unchanged. For binary files you can create what is called a detached signature. That's a separate file that contains the digital signature of the file you want to protect. Then you or anybody you wish can verify the contents of the file in question against the detached signature. > What can I not defend against? The recipient cannot trust that the digital signature you issued was really made at the time stamp contained in the digital signature and conversely you cannot prove message chronology. For example if you are making a stock trade a digital signature by you on the trade will not be enough to prove that you issued the trade at a certain time, to do that you need a trusted third party called a time stamping service. The recipient can also not trust that the digital signature belongs to you, unless they involve a trusted third party called a Certification Authority, or unless they trust you to issue your own certificate (which contains your public key). I run a Root Certification Authority but I am not licensed by the State so my signatures are not accepted in legal proceedings. One very popular and well known Root Certification Authority in the country was also not licensed the last time I checked, so if you are intending to defend against claims in court you must establish that any Certification Authority or time stamping service you use has been properly licensed here in this country or your digital signatures won't have legal validity. Depending on what size keys you choose, a motivated attacker could factor (crack) those keys. If so, they will be able to forge documents in your name and alter documents you signed without any way of being detected. If you're in an embedded environment key size tradeoffs are critical for performance reasons. On the desktop or server, much less so unless you are doing much signing and verifying. You have to have a way to verify that all of the software you use in generating key material, signing, verifying etc. hasn't been tampered with. The way to do this is to have a known good copy of openssl, PGP or GPG so that you can verify the signatures on your tools. ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
[somewhat OT] simple machine forums software update
I noticed today the simple machine forums software that is used for many tech bulletin boards and forums has a new country in the countries list: "Palestinian Territory, Occupied" I didn't realize Palestine was a country and I thought the Israelis left when they created the PA, if so, who is occupying it? But I often get confused about politics so maybe I missed some important fact. Or maybe the UN voted and made Palestine a country and the Israeli Army moved its headquarters and the PM's mansion to Ramallah and they just haven't publicized it much yet. I wonder if Richard Stallman will get a copy of the forum software for the FSF website. Anyway if you run a forum and use this software and object to the propaganda you might want to make your opinion known. ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Re: [somewhat OT] simple machine forums software update
On Tue, 05 Jul 2011 00:08:55 +0300 Mordecha Behar wrote: > You should send an email to RMS asking his opinion about it. > Make sure he replies as president of the FSF so people can argue about his > views in the future. No doubt, just as all those respectful and well written emails to Stallman were so successful, saved us all from pointless arguments, and in the end got him to give his speech at a local university just as everyone had hoped. > Although, a level-headed email to the SMF dev team requesting > clarification might be a lot more useful, and save us all from pointless > arguments. Your idea is so simple, I'm surprised I didn't think of it. Actually, I found there is no point arguing with people who put out propaganda so I decided the best way to deal with it is to make people aware of it, so they can stop using the software. You could even call what I am suggesting a boycott. It's pretty obvious that the people who added that inflammatory, false language did it for a reason and it would be silly to think they would be open to discussion. So I have no intention wasting my time with them. But, I thought it could be productive to let people on this list know, since the implication is that everybody who lives in this country is guilty of occupation, war crimes, etc. I don't know about you, but I never occupied a foreign terrority (although I feel like it living here sometimes) and never oppressed anybody. So I resent the insinuation. If you don't, then good for you. ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
Re: [somewhat OT] simple machine forums software update
On Tue, 05 Jul 2011 00:38:18 +0300 Nadav Har'El wrote: > On Mon, Jul 04, 2011, is...@zahav.net.il wrote about "[somewhat OT] > simple machine forums software update": > > I noticed today the simple machine forums software that is used for many > > tech bulletin boards and forums has a new country in the countries list: > > > > "Palestinian Territory, Occupied" > > Do you seriously think that the authors of that specific software sat down > and compiled a list of all 200 or so countries, and had a political debate > on which country to accept, and decided on the fate of this "Occupied > Palestinian Territory" based on a serious debate of the merits of Israel's > position and that of the Palestinian position? No, but based on posts on the simplemachine forums I think it's reasonable to believe somebody with an agenda made the addition, since there were debates on exactly the subject you mentioned, on their forum. The country list was touted as a new feature on one of the forums I read, and this was the first time I saw this. I guess I don't get out enough. > Definitely not. They probably just took a country list that someone else > compiled. E.g., perhaps they took a list from the United Nations: > > http://unstats.un.org/unsd/methods/m49/m49alpha.htm > > Or perhaps they took the official list of "country names" from ISO, the > International Organization for Standardization? > > http://www.iso.org/iso/english_country_names_and_code_elements Thanks for those references, I was not aware of them. > As you can see, both lists officially list the "Occupied Palestenian > Territory". So this is definitely not some anti-Israeli decision by > some rogue antisemite free software developers, but rather a very sensible > decision by those developers to take a list from organizations (like the > UN and ISO) which they thought were impartial and professional. > > So please don't complain about this "simple machine forum" or Richard > Stallman (!?). If you want to pick a fight, pick one with the UN and ISO. There we disagree. I appreciate and accept your explanation that the country list probably came from elsewhere. But that does not mean the people hosting forums or using software can throw up their hands and claim it's out of their control. Free software is about nothing if not about taking responsibility for content. I say responsible people would not accept such a designation for a place that isn't even a country, and the fact they got the data from elsewhere does not absolve them from responsibility for using it. > > Anyway if you run a forum and use this software and object to the > > propaganda you might want to make your opinion known. > > Please don't you spread propaganda against the poor guys who write free > software, and just need to get an impartial country list from somewhere. Why is it propaganda when I object to something, but not propaganda when they make baseless assertions? And really, how do you call these lists impartial, especially after all the points you made! And why do you feel people who make content available aren't responsible for the content? > So again, pick your fight with the UN or ISO - or create an alternative > country-list project (good luck walking out of that minefield...). Point taken. I'll leave that to somebody else. But I remain free to object in public when I see propaganda in public. Freedom is a two way street. > Just don't insult the free software developers who use the existing lists. It's not an insult. Everybody is responsible for what they put out there and nobody can blame the other guy. It's reckless to take data from anywhere and just start using it. Using it constitutes approval. Thanks for your post, Nadav. ___ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
