Entries in Life

David McCusker is looking at sharing file systems from MacOS X to Linux. I'm not so sure about the specifics of OS X, but since it's UNIX underneath and I've been looking at network file systems lately, I'll share what I know.

Dethe Elza says OS X can share files using SCP, WebDAV, SAMBA, or NFS. Each of those will work with Linux, of course, with various levels of completeness.

• SCP Manually copy each file over. Yuck.
• WebDAV Yes, you could mount this under Linux as a regular file system, but that would mean compiling a kernel module and using alpha-quality code.
• SAMBA This works, too. I use it every day at work to mount the shares from our Windows 2000 servers. It seems ok, except that it isn't really made for sharing files between UNIX systems. For example, smbfs on Linux doesn't have a way to map multiple user ids. For a single user on the client, it is probably fine.
• NFS If you want to share files from one UNIX machine to multiple UNIX clients, this is probably your best bet. If you start cross-mounting, then you run into the problems mentioned in the Jargon File. But, for a single server, it should be fine.

  Plus, NFS is stateless, so you can turn off the client and the server will continue chugging away. I managed a network at at university where clients would be up and down and the server didn't have any problems. If the server goes down and you are accessing the data, your client will hang until the server comes back up.

• SFS Ok, they didn't mention this, and I don't think you can use OS X, but the Self-Certifying File System offers an encrypted file system using a public key system. For a systems level hacker interested in security, this would be a great project on OS X.

Note: This is written assuming that Linux is the client. If Mac OS X is the client, the NFS case is probably the same, but I don't know anything about the others.

Trees. I miss 'em.

My office doesn't have windows. Just four grey walls with a large wooden door. Plush Rocky and Bullwinkle characters decorate my walls. It is a pretty sad place. The most color is on that 19 inch screen that I stare at all day long.

Almost every day I take a long walk to a coffee shop a few blocks away just to get out, see the sun, see some green, and get cafinated. My little sanity break. Yahoo! I love trees. Maybe I'll try to get a wireless access point set up and work from the park — I wonder if that would work with all those buildings in the way.

Did I mention there are too many parking lots downtown?

A glimpse into the life of another layoff. When they cut 30% of the staff here last week, one of the managers told someone who was cracking up, "Oh, it only affects IT." She replied, "Yeah, and everyone who worked with them for the past 20 years.".

One wonders if Management considers their employees human. Of course, the answer is that they don't. They can't. If you cut people, you can't consider them to have lives. When you refer to someone loosing the job they had for the past 20 years as a "staffing event", you can distance yourself from their pain and the fear you've caused them. Its over now you can reassure those gullible suckers left behind, hoping that they don't remember eight months ago, two years ago, you did the same thing. And there will be more staffing events in the future.

"Surely there's no law that says you have to watch commercials'' — Rep. Rick Boucher, a Virginia Democrat.