Finally, the strange thought of RTFM entered my mind (and I even found the manual of the concentrator), and found that the importer has added a color chart leaflet to it; the cable is referred to as a “Telco50” cable. So here we go:
| Pair | First Wire | Second Wire |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | red | red — white |
| 2 | yellow | yellow — black |
| 3 | green | green — white |
| 4 | blue | blue — white |
| 5 | brown | brown — white |
| 6 | black | black — white |
| 7 | purple | purple — white |
| 8 | orange | orange — white |
| 9 | light green | green — black |
| 10 | blue — black | purple — black |
| 11 | light blue — black | light blue — red |
| 12 | light green — green | light green — blue |
| 13 | light green — black | light green — red |
| 14 | light blue — blue | light blue — green |
| 15 | light yellow — red | light yellow — black |
| 16 | light yellow — green | light yellow — blue |
| 17 | gray | gray — black |
| 18 | gray — green | gray — red |
| 19 | red — black | light red |
| 20 | light red — blue | light red — green |
| 21 | light red — black | light red — red |
| 12 | white | orange — black |
| 13 | white — blue | white — green |
| 24 | white — red | white — black |
| 25 | light blue | light yellow |
(Actually, on the DSL concentrator here this order is listed as “pin” numbers while the 12 ports are assigned in reverse order, starting at 25. The concentrator is a Zyxel VES-1012 and is not in production anymore.)
]]>I should probably add that this is not a rant. I'm running software that's explicitly labelled as experimental. So people should probably view this as a response to whoever (can't find it anymore, wasn't it on Planet?) recently stated that he'd switch to the Hurd since Debian has become boring. Or as a Thank You posting for those making Debian from a “you know it's been the stable version for the last year when it's entered Debian” type of distribution into a “get it on the day of release” distribution.
]]>(The fact that zbasel.fortytwo.ch wasindeed a public DNS server was my own configuration mistake, of course, not theirs...)
]]>OTOH spammers are already reacting: the percentage of spam I'm receiving through regular MXen (as per reverse DNS), including Yahoo and Google, (but not gmx so far, interestingly) is increasing markedly these months.
]]>At least I can map the buttons (both Fn+keyboard key and the additional buttons at the front of the laptop) to the pcm mixer. But it took quite some fiddling for something the non-technical user will expect work out of the box.
]]>First, default installations of Debian create ext3 and not reiserfs filesystems (Please correct me if I'm wrong. I've just recently installed a fresh etch, but I didn't specifically look at the fs.) And even if it were reiserfs (v3), I don't see why a reaction would be called for now. The stability of reiserfs has come up every once, before the whole murderer story begun, and that the interaction between the reiserfs developers (including, of course, Hans Reiser) and the kernel team were always difficult has also been known for a long time. This is the kind of reason where I think it's appropriate for Debian to take steps (i.e. switching to a different filesystem), not a single event, where it is not even clear yet how the reiserfs (v3 and v4) efforts will move on.
On to the technical stuff: Perlow tries, but doesn't really arrive at understanding the issues he's writing about. Reiser 4 is discounted without a single remark on its technical merits (I can't comment either as I have not looked at it so far.) Why he discounts ext4 is not clear to me (because it is not ripe for production use yet — but that's even more true of ZFS and this Linux-NTFS thingy he rambles about further down...) He discounts JFS2 because it hasn't got a new release for several years (is that bad in a filesystem?) but then touts ZFS as a great idea with minor licensing problems, without speaking of patents which is where the real problems lie (not to mention the fact that the Linux ZFS port probably is much less tested than ext4 or JFS.) And in a final jump into fantasy-land he mentions that NTFS might just be ideal for Linux, and Microsoft is said to have started cooperating nicely with the Free Software world, so all licensing and patent issues are certainly going away Real Soon Now™. At least for Novell, these issues shouldn't be a problem, I guess.
Not mentioned by Jason are btrfs (which has a quite tightly coupled network filesystem brother, crfs and is in a very early state of development), and hammer, which comes from the BSD world and currently lacks a Linux port. Both efforts are probably more likely to replace ext3 or reiser on Linux than both ZFS and NTFS: no patent issues, no license issues, and the development is actually done by a community and not a single company.
Update: Julien Blanche ha a much more succinct response to Jason Perlow. More intersting to read than mine, too.
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