Ben Burdick (weez) writes "SlashNET will be conducting a forum with the developers of Stampede Linux on Saturday at 10 p.m EST. The forum will be held in #TheVoid. "

First, since we have spare clock cycles and memory, I implemented a Comment Search Script. Use it if you desire. Next I fixed the poll booth comment glitch that was causing everything to look funky. Third, I changed the banner HTML to a never version using (Ack!) Layers/IFrames. The page renders much faster on my box now. If anyone notices browser incompatibilities, let me know (please don't email just to tell me you hate layers. I already don't have time to reply to all of my mail). Next up is a rewrite to a chunk of the homepage so it displays the last 24 hours of stories in the main space, and the previous 24 hours in the Older Stuff box. Hopefully later today. The mysql bug is still here, but I've got a cron job making sure we don't stay down for long...

The third-to-last piece of hardware just went in the Slashdot box this morning. VA Research (Blatant Plug Alert:Go Buy Stuff From Them!) sent us some parts- RAM being the important one. The box now weighs in as a Dual P2/266 with 256 megs of RAM. This will mean that the box will still function during heavy posting (ala any time either KDE or Gnome is hinted at *grin*). The last piece is a hard drive/uber fast controller which should be here RSN. Then if we can just iron out the mysql glitch, everything will be spiffy to ship the server out to the land of vast bandwidth. We're getting there folks, so keep hanging in there. As a side note, we had 182,000 hits yesterday- all this hardware should give us some room to grow now.

OK, a good number of you have been e-mailing about the server status, where we are going to co-locate. Stop it. Thanks to the wonder of the Pine inbox beep, my laptop sounds like I am trying to start a stacatoo rap group. I think I'm gonna go gold next week.
Anyway, we are going to be moving out West, young man, to the fabled hills of San Fransico. Blacklight, who handles the ads for here, Everything and others will be coloing with us on a (ta-da) T1 and a T3, so that should give us room to grow. We will be living at UPN, for those who care. New hardware is coming for both Everything and Slashdot, so that will be picking up as well. Lastly, if anyone is interested in writing book reviews, please drop me a line.

I've sorted out most of the kinks now. For those who are curious, the system currently is dying because of a glitch in Mysql- occasionally it just goes nuts and uses 100% CPU. When that occurs, Slashdot becomes unusable until the process is killed. I've upgraded almost everything to the latest version, as well as drasticly simplified a few of the more complicated parts of the site, so I'm hoping things are cool. We should have more RAM and a new HD in the next day or 2. After we're sure those are stable, we're shiping the box to a new ISP where we'll have more bandwidth than even Slashdot can consume. Then life shall be peachy. At least, I hope...

Chomsky writes "The linux/technical community was both shocked and dismayed this morning, as reports filtered through the internet of a linux enthusiast successfully loading the Slashdot news website in Netscape. The news was at first met with mostly suspicion and skepticism. "It just seems so unlikely", said longtime linux advocate Pengo the Penguin. "In the past week I've gotten through like, twice at the most. It's that cursed 'Everything' section, I'm telling ya." The interviewee then ate a bucket of raw fish and belched loudly. Not everyone is as skeptical though. An anonymous caller claimed to be using a beowulf cluster comprised of 64 alphas to calculate and predict successful connections to the Slashdot website. "Although it sounds like a hoax, we predicted this connection", said the caller. "According to our calculations, someone will connect again early next week". " In all seriousness, we're getting more RAM and moving to a faster connection in the next week or so- hang in there. And stop emailing me already. It's very disheartening to delete 50 of these things each morning :)

Continuing in what appears to be a long trend of "Whats the Best Hardware for Linux" Ask Slashdot questions, Zak wrote in to ask us what UPSs people are comfortable with under Linux. What brands work, what don't, what features to look for etc.

A number of people have written over the last few days, offering help and also offering advice for the Slashdot migration to bigger bandwidth. Thanks-this really shows the strength of the Slashdot community. That, and you all flooded my mailbox. But I'll get over it. With lots of counseling. Anyway, where we stand right now is that we are talking to a few people/colos closely right now, checking out specific things and narrowing things down. With a little luck the move will be occurring later on this week. I know things have been unreliable here for the past little bit, but the light is at the end of the tunnel, and I don't think think it's an oncoming train.

David Eisner sent in this Ask Slashdot. It's quite different then usual, but I think it's a really interesting one. He asks "To become a good writer, one studies the works of great writers. To become a good programmer, perhaps it would help to study the works of great programmers. It has always surprised me that this isn't part of the formal training of a programmer. My question, then, is this: What do Slashdot readers consider to be the great works of programming literature? Programs that made you think, "Wow! This is beautifully designed!", programs worthy of study."

It's finally somewhat usable folks. You can join irc.slashdot.org, and /msg Salsa CHANNELS to see what the channels are that she is monitoring. If channels are used, they are logged, and a link is added to the story here, to the IRC log. Currently Salsa is monitoring the newest 6 stories. If things work out, she'll monitor more. Don't be surprised if she blows up for a while yet, but we'll get the kinks worked out yet.

Hey, it's my turn to Ask Slashdot *grin*. We're seriously considering running a permanent ISDN line to the geekhouse so we don't have to keep redialing and sharing a single tired little modem over 5 users who all want bandwidth. The question is simply what is a good ISDN modem for us? Needs to work with Linux and preferably not to expensive. Who's got experience?

Ok tons 'o' crazy stuff is happening and I'm gonna answer this all at once so I can stop with the email. We have 3 problems currently. First is RAM. We can only run so many httpd's at a time, and so around 11, they are all being consumed, and connecting gets painful. Especially when stories have lots of comments and people use flat mode (eg, the Gnome/KDE flame war yesterday). We're getting more soon, several folks have offered to swap RAM for advertising, so this'll be solved soon. Second is bandwidth. We're just going to have to move the servers. If you know a good place to host boxes, contact Hemos. Ideally some place that will do it, at least partially in exchange for some advertising. Finally, the machine is acting funky- I'm not sure exactly what it is, but we're trying a few things. We'll work it out asap.

Ok it's gonna happen. We're making minor changes yet today and doing assorted nitpicky changes yet, but T.M.P. is ready to roll. Assuming everything falls into place, we're gonna officially announce it around 4 or 5 (eastern) on these pages, and Nate and I will be on irc.slashdot.org (in a to-be-announced-channel) this evening to answer questions (there will be many). The word from our testers has been really positive. We're really getting excited about this, so just hang in there, and hopefully everyone will see why.

Mark Whitley writes "I was wondering what resources there are for people who are desirous to find jobs that use open-source software. The Free Software Community has shown that they are very capable in the areas of collaboration and communication, and I think we might serve ourselves well to have better listings of jobs using open-source software. This needn't be a central site. I can picture the various home pages having links to jobs associated with their software (i.e. perl.com would show a listing of Perl jobs, linux.org would show a listing of Linux jobs, etc.). Paying attention to locale would be a plus as there are many people who cannot move to a different state/country. I think we could do a lot to further The Cause by more prominantly advertising jobs where you can work with the same software that you love to use at home. "

Florian sent us a simple question:What video card do people recommend these days? "I will choose between the Matrox Productiva and the Diamond Viper. I only need the Card for 2D. I already have a Monster Card. So what card could you prefer me? Thanks... " I'm actually curious what experience people have had with modern cards and Linux. My newest video card is a 3 year old Millenium, so I'm totally out of touch. Note:Send submissions to Ask Slashdot to Clifton Wood.

Ok, Salsa (the IRC bot) is really close to ready. I need to add the ability to send people URLs to the original article, and make it look pretty on the web side, but it's almost done. Unfortunately I won't finish it until at least this weekend because the next chunk of my life is dedicated to finishing The Mystery Project, which should be officially announced Wed. Afternoon. Nate and I will be on IRC in the evening to answer questions on SlashNET (Channel will be announced- maybe we'll beta test the bot :)

It's been a busy weekend. The finishing touches are now going on The Mystery Project. Nate has been coding like a crazy man making sure it works properly and I've been making sure that it looks perty when it gets done. Hopefully it'll be announced in the next day or two. We'll probably have a Q&A on SlashNET 'cuz there will be some questions. But this means I can get back to the Slash Source Code Release, as well as the Slashdot IRC Bot. Hopefully both of them will happen in the next week or so.

endisnigh writes "I am a smalltime sysadmin working in a cyber cafe in Dublin - my problem is that the linux server that we have here (redhat 5.1) attracts system crackers for some reason - people from a few different countries who seem to be portscanning etc.. I wouldn't consider myself totally green as regards to linux, but find it hard to get good up-to-date linux security advice that covers everyting from shadow passwords, to secure finger daemons to immutable file systems to just *exactly* what daemons don't need to be running on a mail/web/name server. I want answers! I want advice! I want cheesy poofs! "

Ben Burdick (weez) wrote in to tell us that SlashNET had its first forum last night. It was an impromptu discussion with several members of the freedows project with a lengthy Q & A session. Check out Weez's SlashNET home page for the complete log

Well folks, as everyone has noticed, we're having some problems. These problems are not being solved because after this weeks move, I don't yet have a phone line, and hence, no Internet Access. I'll hopefully solve this tomorrow and things will get back to normal. So bear with us- rest assured, this is pissing me off more than you guys (sigh).