Great Hackers

Great Hackers: “One place this happens is in startups. At our startup we had Robert Morris working as a system administrator. That’s like having the Rolling Stones play at a bar mitzvah. You can’t hire that kind of talent. But people will do any amount of drudgery for companies of which they’re the founders. [4]

Bigger companies solve the problem by partitioning the company. They get smart people to work for them by establishing a separate R&D department where employees don’t have to work directly on customers’ nasty little problems. [5] In this model, the research department functions like a mine. They produce new ideas; maybe the rest of the company will be able to use them.

You may not have to go to this extreme. Bottom-up programming suggests another way to partition the company: have the smart people work as toolmakers. If your company makes software to do x, have one group that builds tools for writing software of that type, and another that uses these tools to write the applications. This way you might be able to get smart people to write 99% of your code, but still keep them almost as insulated from users as they would be in a traditional research department. The toolmakers would have users, but they’d only be the company’s own developers. [6]

If Microsoft used this approach, their software wouldn’t be so full of security holes, because the less smart people writing the actual applications wouldn’t be doing low-level stuff like allocating memory. Instead of writing Word directly in C, they’d be plugging together big Lego blocks of Word-language. (Duplo, I believe, is the technical term.)

fstab

The structure of /etc/fstab

fstab consists of a number of lines (one for each filesystem) seperated into six fields. Each field is seperated from the next by whitespace (spaces/tabs).

So from the example given previously:

/dev/hdc /mnt/cdrom iso9660 noauto,ro,user 0 0

The first field (/dev/hdc) is the physical device/remote filesystem which is to be described.

The second field (/mnt/cdrom) specifies the mount point where the filesystem will be mounted.

The third field (iso9660) is the type of filesystem on the device from the first field.

The fourth field (noauto,ro,user) is a (default) list of options which mount should use when mounting the filesystem.

The fifth field (0) is used by dump (a backup utility) to decide if a filesystem should be backed up. If zero then dump will ignore that filesystem. The sixth field (0) is used by fsck (the filesystem check utility) to determine the order in which filesystems should be checked.
If zero then fsck won’t check the filesystem.
(as the example line above is a cdrom there is very little point in doing a fsck on it, so the value is zero).

From: http://www.humbug.org.au/talks/fstab/fstab_structure.html

Unistalling qmailtoaster rpm

rpm -e autorespond-toaster-2.0.2-1.0.7 control-panel-toaster
-0.5-1.0.5 courier-imap-toaster-3.0.3-1.0.6 daemontools-toaster-0.76-1.0.6 ezmlm
-toaster-0.53.324-1.0.9 horde-toaster-2.2.3-1.0.9 isoqlog-toaster-2.1-1.1.5 mail
drop-toaster-1.5.3-1.0.3 maildrop-toaster-1.5.3-1.0.3 qmailadmin-toaster-1.0.6-1
.0.8 qmailmrtg-toaster-3.4-1.0.10 qmail-toaster-1.03-1.0.15 ucspi-tcp-toaster-0.
88-1.0.10 vpopmail-toaster-5.3.8-1.0.12 vqadmin-toaster-2.3.4-1.0.8 ezmlm-cgi-to
aster-0.53.324-1.0.9 courier-imap-toaster-doc-3.0.3-1.0.6 daemontools-toaster-do
c-0.76-1.0.6 ezmlm-toaster-doc-0.53.324-1.0.9 isoqlog-toaster-doc-2.1-1.1.5 mail
drop-toaster-devel-1.5.3-1.0.3 qmail-toaster-doc-1.03-1.0.15 qmail-pop3d-toaster
-1.03-1.0.15 ucspi-tcp-toaster-doc-0.88-1.0.10 vpopmail-toaster-doc-5.3.8-1.0.12
qmail-pop3d-toaster-1.03-1.0.15 mutt-1.4.1-3.4 mdadm-1.5.0-9 qmail-scanner-1.22
-1.2.3 redhat-lsb-1.3-3.centos.0 squirrelmail-1.4.3-0.e3.1

remove db entries in mysql:table(user, db, tableprv)

userdel stuff
rm -rf /home/vpop

rpm -e courier-imap-toaster-debuginfo vqadmin-toaster-debuginfo tnef-toaster maildrop-toaster maildrop-toaster-debuginfo SpamAssassin-toaster-tools ucspi-tcp-toaster-debuginfo autorespond-toaster-debuginfo ezmlm-toaster-debuginfo qmailmrtg-toaster qmailmrtg-toaster-debuginfo clamav-toaster daemontools-toaster-debuginfo clamav-toaster-devel vpopmail-toaster-debuginfo qmailadmin-toaster-debuginfo isoqlog-toaster-debuginfo SpamAssassin-toaster qmail-toaster-debuginfo

PHP directives in Apache 2



php_value include_path /usr/share/php:/usr/share/pear:.
php_admin_flag safe_mode On
php_admin_value open_basedir /usr/share/toaster
php_admin_value safe_mode_allowed_env_vars PHP_
php_admin_value safe_mode_protected_env_vars LD_LIBRARY_PATH
php_admin_value disable_functions include
php_admin_value safe_mode_exec_dir /usr/share/toaster/include

AuthType Basic
AuthName “Qmail Toaster v. 1.0 Admin”
AuthUserFile /usr/share/toaster/include/admin.htpasswd
require valid-user