Microsoft and Asus just launched a new site called It’s Better with Windows (link).

The marketing premise sounds reasonable but I think the problems with Microsoft is that they actually believe it. They believe that consumers would rather have something familiar than have something better.

I’m not saying Linux on a netbook is better than Windows. I am saying though that I think this “familiar” argument is what caused Microsoft to be totally blindsided in the mobile space in the past few years.

“It’s familiar” was their primary selling point for why you should buy Windows Mobile and not Palm. Palm fell flat on it’s face a few years later, but not because all the users were finally convinced that the Microsoft UI paradigm was superior. As MS tends to do, once they because the dominant player in the space, they completely stopped trying to improve their product.

Microsoft: People aren’t as loyal to the start menu as you think. The lower cost the device the more true this is.

When Apple and then Google came around with their mobile offerings, they had a UI that was totally unfamiliar to everyone, but substantially better. Now Microsoft is caught playing catch up. They are just now coming to grips with the fact that the Windows Start Menu and tiny icons isn’t how people want to interact with their phone or PDA.

Microsoft should be making a custom version of windows with a netbook centric UI that takes advantage of the small screen and stop trying to cram windows into everything. It is only a matter of time before Apple and Google release netbooks and leave them wondering why people aren’t yearning for a start menu and taskbar.

Another side note, the secondary argument they are making, is that “Windows has better device support than any other platform” is just absurd. Anyone that has plugged in an older or a newer printer or scanner into a Windows computer knows that more often than not the computer doesn’t know what the hell to do with it. At this point, OSX tends to recognize way more devices and know exactly what to do with them way better than Windows.

First off Fedora has an awesome FAQ for how to upgrade your OS with Yum. If you don’t care for all that reading and thinking, here is a quick and dirty set of notes I have been using to upgrade several servers.

This process is more likely to hose your config files, so make sure you have them backed up somewhere. (I use subversion for everything in /etc).

This also assumes you are runlevel 3. duh.

1. if you are connected via ssh, use screen. Screen will save your life during long running processes, and generally you should be using it all the time anyway.

screen

2. run an update first:

yum update

3. check what you have installed:

yum list | grep installed

4. remove anything you don’t need or use, it will just waste time and cause conflicts. For me, I often find things like OpenOffice or Audio Programs on headless servers. Sometimes I even remove stuff that I know is easy to add back later and isn’t required by the upgrade scripts. (firefox, cups, ImageMagick, crap like that)

yum remove openoffice.org

5. change your repository. The FAQ says you can do this with just installing the fedora-release-10-1.noarch.rpm. but that doesn’t seem to work for me. It gets a conflict that you also need the release notes. This seems to work better:

wget ftp://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/releases/10/Everything/i386/os/Packages/fedora-release-10-1.noarch.rpm
 
wget ftp://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/releases/10/Everything/i386/os/Packages/fedora-release-notes-10.0.0-1.noarch.rpm
 
rpm -U *.rpm

6. clear out the old caches and files so it can detect that you need to update:

yum clean all

7. At this point you can just run “yum upgrade” and cross your fingers. I like to do smaller updates of packages with a lot of dependencies. I have had good results with combination of upgrades like this:

yum upgrade kernel
yum upgrade httpd
yum upgrade mysql
yum upgrade perl
yum upgrade

The last one of course upgrading anything not already touched by the others.

8. Depending on your configuration and what you have installed you will probably still have some dependency issues that will need to be resolved. It wouldn’t be life without some issues though right?

I just spent the night updating all of my DNS servers because of the flaw that was released today. I had thought I could put it off for a few more days and have time to prepare, but that can never be the case.

One of my annoyances with patching Linux, and Bind in particular is that every time I do an upgrade it seems to break something, today is no exception. I patched three fedora core 9 systems, and some version of Cent OS without any problems.

Updating a FC6 system is where the fun came in — I immediately started getting this error on startup:

zone wirelust.com/IN: loading master file /var/named/zones/wirelust.com.dns: file not found
_default/wirelust.com/in: file not found

It took a few hours of googling to find a solution, but it turns out that somewhere between the previous version and this new one (31:9.3.4-8.P1.fc6) it defaults to a chroot configuration..

The fix was to simply copy all of my zone files from:
/var/named/zones/

to the folder:
/var/named/chroot/var/named/zones

I had a server die on me last week and I needed to reinstall it as quickly as possible. It was running Fedora Core 4. I only had install media for Fedora core 6. I knew it would be a bit of a pain to update all of the config files for everything running on the server, but I figured now is as good a time as any. I would have updated to 7 or 8, but I didn’t have time to download those on CDs (I have 8 on dvd but the server doesn’t have a dvd drive).

Anyway. I updated everything and it all seemed to run swimmingly. I didn’t even have to configure anything too drastically different. I switched from Courier IMAP to Dovecot, but that is another story.

The issue that got me pulling my hair out last night was that my tomcat log kept showing odd smtp related error messages in the stack trace:

javax.mail.SendFailedException: Sending failed;
  nested exception is:
        class javax.mail.MessagingException: 501 5.5.4 Bad RET parameter syntax
        at javax.mail.Transport.send0(Transport.java:218)
        at javax.mail.Transport.send(Transport.java:80)
        at com.approachingpi.store.order.Notification.sendMail(Notification.java:116)
        at com.approachingpi.store.order.Notification.run(Notification.java:56)
        at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:595)

After a lot of digging, it seems that javamail sends the RET parameter as described in RFC-1891, even if it is not set up in the config file. Since this is an optional parameter, you would think that leaving it out of your properties file would make javamail not send it to the mail server. It seems it sends “RET=” rather than leaving it out.

It also seems that postfix v2.2.2 ignores “RET=”, but v2.3.3 is a little more strict and expects your parameter to have a value.

I don’t know what application is behaving improperly here. My guess is that postfix is doing the right thing, and that javamail should probably not send the RET parameter, but I guess they could argue that I just need to always configure it in my settings to make sure I’m compliant. (I am using javamail 1.3.0 btw, so it may have changed in newer versions)

to fix the problem, all I had to do was add these two lines to my javamail config properties file:
mail.smtp.dsn.ret=HDRS
mail.smtp.dsn.notify=NEVER

I found I also had to set the mail.smtp.dns.notify value too, because if I don’t I get this error:

javax.mail.SendFailedException: Sending failed;
  nested exception is:
        class javax.mail.SendFailedException: Invalid Addresses;
  nested exception is:
        class javax.mail.SendFailedException: 501 5.5.4 Error: Bad NOTIFY parameter syntax;
  nested exception is:
        class javax.mail.SendFailedException: 501 5.5.4 Error: Bad NOTIFY parameter syntax
        at javax.mail.Transport.send0(Transport.java:218)
        at javax.mail.Transport.send(Transport.java:80)
        at com.approachingpi.store.order.Notification.sendMail(Notification.java:116)
        at com.approachingpi.store.order.Notification.run(Notification.java:56)
        at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:595)

It looks like javamail sends that along as blank as well. weird.