If you don’t, the ip rule add command will answer “RTNETLINK answers: Operation not supported”.

I really love my iPod nano (1st gen). I also love Linux, but I’m told you don’t like the two things to live together. Fortunately, I’m also told that some good guys already worked around the protection, but still this really makes me wonder if I should keep buying your products; I didn’t know the story about DAAP and RAOP either. I’m not going to sell my nano outright, but why would I buy the new one if I can get the same functionality, minus the closeness, from my Nokia phone, for example? And I can also install any software I like on it.

Really. Your products are good. Your policy is not. Fix that, please.

Submitted this through Apple’s iPod feedback form, let’s see if I get an answer.

echo 128 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_default_ttl

The road to this hack is quite easy, anyway:

1. install OpenBSD in a virtual machine;
2. look hard at /etc/pf.os and look for possible useful differences;
3. see that Linux uses a TTL of 64 while Windows XP uses 128;
4. profit!

Item 1 was needed because I couldn’t find a copy of /etc/pf.os quickly, so I figured that it’d take less to just install an OpenBSD.

Here’s a very nice add-on called GnuBox for your Symbian phone: it allows you to browse the Internet on your phone through your PC’s connection when you’re at home.

To make GnuBox work, you’ll have to follow the instructions on the GnuBox page, then set up a few things on your Linux box:

• turn off kbtserialchat in the kdebluetooth configuration (or quit kdebluetooth altogether)
• create the following file as /etc/ppp/peers/dun:
  

  460800
  192.168.1.1:192.168.1.2
  ms-dns
  192.168.0.1
  lock
  crtscts
  noauth

  (where 192.168.1.1 and 192.168.1.2 are the IP addresses of your computer and your phone, 192.168.0.1 is the address of your DNS server)

• add the following lines to /etc/default/bluetooth:
  

  DUND_ENABLED=1
  DUND_OPTIONS=”–listen –channel 3 –encrypt call dun”

I’ve been using the free (as in beer) BK client for a while, about since Linus started using it I think. Did you? Where did you (or anyone else, for that matter) get the impression that you couldn’t extract all the metadata information with it? You can get diffs between any two revisions. You can export changesets as diffs, with all the comments and other data: try “bk export -tpatch -r1.2291,1.2292″ on a recent linux-2.5 tree for example.

What is undocumented is the actual format of the BK files and the protocols between client and server, but there’s no reason to get at them since you can export everything you need in other ways. Or, if you don’t want to use BK yourself, you can ask someone who does to export what you need. In this respect, and I’m quoting Linus here, it’s exactly the same as someone not wanting to use CVS: (s)he could ask someone else to export what (s)he needs. And I bet Linus would have been glad to export just about everything if asked politely.

When I first saw news of this matter, I thought “Larry is a bad guy”, but after I read the points of view of those involved I completely agree with Linus. Those who did not want to use BK had absolutely no reason to feel “left out in the cold”: as Linus himself said when he started using BK (and repeated ad nauseam), nothing would change for the worse for them. To the contrary, it was so easy to get snapshots out of BK that the -bk tarballs were made available daily.

BK is head and shoulders above other SCMs. If you dont’want to use it for ethical reasons, fine; if you want someone else to stop using it, either write a better tool (or at least a tool “good enough”, as Linus often said) or shut up. Tridge was not writing a better tool, only another tool to extract data from a repository, and that was useless. When asked to stop, he refused. When asked to stop Or Else, he refused. If what he wanted was really acess to the metadata from BK, I’m sure Linus and Larry would have worked out something, like exporting all changesets in a reasonable format. By doing what he did after knowing that he would disrupt a well-working and provably useful system, he did only a disservice to the community that he has otherwise served so well with his work on Samba.