Stuff that peels your potatoes with paring knives of ANGER.

[Spectere]

Actually, I figured out much of what I know through experimentation, before the class officially learned it.  I learn when I get bored.  I do have the advantage of being able to play around with actual gear, though.  I've used simulators (Boson NetSim, for one) but they aren't always exactly the same.  Speaking of which, if you want to try playing with them, give NetSim a shot.  It's the best one I've used.

I think the main reason that they don't use Linux on their basic routers is because it'd probably be a lot heavier than their own IOS software.  Linux is considerably larger, requiring a larger EEPROM, takes a while to start up (compared to IOS, which starts up in maybe twenty seconds, including performing extensive hardware checks), and has more overhead.  IOS also has a much more intuitive way of storing configuration data, setting up interfaces, etc, because it was built specifically for the task at hand.  Linux would be nice for an all-in-one sort of device, but most places that would need higher-end routers probably wouldn't want a solution like that -- too much rolling on one device and all.

I dunno about the static routing thing.  It would probably take a lot of trial and error if you haven't done it before; it's a little odd.  There is a quick reference of sorts available in the IOS software (just key in a question mark after a command) but it is a little vague on a few things.

"no shut" is vital for the interface to actually start talking.  IOS is like Windows or *nix in that every interface, by default, starts in a down state.  Typing "no shutdown," or, as I abbreviated it, "no shut," brings up the interface.

I don't think I mentioned this in my previous post.  IOS supports shortcut commands.  The commands are pretty verbose by default (i.e. "enable," "configure terminal," "interface ethernet0/0", "ip address," etc.  You can abbreviate the commands as much as you like, so long as the identifier is still unique.  For example, instead of "interface ethernet0/0" you could type "int e0/0," since there is no ambiguity.  You cannot use "in e0/0," however, because it would conflict with a command such as "invert rxclock."

It's quite nice, really.  It's a fairly intuitive input system.

Edit: Ugh, building a toolchain for Linux can be a royal pain in the ass sometimes.

I'm building a i686-pc-linux-gnu toolchain for a project I'm working on (building a distro from scratch) and it's been an interesting ride.  I basically used my Gentoo system to put together everything I'd need for a minimal system.  I used portage to build binary packages of gcc 4.1.2, binutils 2.18-r1, and glibc 2.6.1, then built a busybox binary.  I extracted the toolchain components to my empty directory, threw busybox in place, then chrooted into it.  Awesome.

I then started gathering tools to rebuild the toolchain.  When it finally got to the point where I'd be able to compile binutils, gcc, and glibc, I attempted it.  gcc and glibc, surprisingly, went well, but binutils kept choking on build.  I'd already fixed an issue related to texinfo (namely, binutils 2.18's configure script's inability to deal with versions higher than a certain number) but was completely stumped on this one.  The solution?  Build and install binutils 2.17, then link binutils 2.18 using those tools.  WHAT THE FUCK? O.O  Oh well, at least it works now, and aquamarine can now truly stand on its own two feet.

Insert obligatory "LOOK MA, I DID IT WITHOUT LFS" happiness here.

[Bobbias]

Haha, oh wow, now that must have been one hell of a ride.

My MyBook runs off a busybox system, but I haven't bothered building all that stuff from scratch, it came pre-equipped with most of what I needed. Albeit, building PHP and MySQL from scratch was interesting. Especially since it's running a slow-ass ARM processor at 200 MHz. Took fucking forever to compile all that shit :/

I'll definitely check out Boson NetSim, though. I always like to learn more, and if I can do it without needing the hardware itself, then that's all the better.

[Spectere]

I would have definitely gotten a cross-compiling toolchain built for the MyBook in that case, haha.  Gentoo, for one, makes it very simple (emerge crossdev; crossdev -s4 arm-unknown-linux-uclibc (or gnu, if you're using glibc)).  I ended up setting up a cross-compiler on my laptop once so that I could compile PowerPC binaries faster (since G4s are slow as shit compared to x86 when it comes to compilation) and it didn't take much effort on my part.

[annon]

Software companies, politicians, etc. who use security as an excuse for control.

[MortifiedocAlot]

I really do have a math disorder, and I have about 6 different sections of math I have to do tonight and IO hardly understand it.

[Bobbias]

That sucks. I've been identified as slow with math. What takes someone like, a half a second, because it's instinctive, takes me like, anywhere between a couple seconds, to maybe a minute or more, depending. I get things right a lot, but it takes me a LOT longer. It's why I hate math work in school, I can do ti, but the amount they give me is overwhelming considering how much slower I am.

I also don't learn the same way they teach at school. I learn by understanding the relationships between numbers, not simply memorizing "this is how you do it". There are a million ways to do the same thing, they all boil down to doing the same thing, but some of them do it in a really different way.

[cristian989]

I really do have a math disorder, and I have about 6 different sections of math I have to do tonight and IO hardly understand it.

I need a calculator even for simple math, it's probably a combination of laziness and apathy with a pinch of dumbass 

[MortifiedocAlot]

That sucks. I've been identified as slow with math. What takes someone like, a half a second, because it's instinctive, takes me like, anywhere between a couple seconds, to maybe a minute or more, depending. I get things right a lot, but it takes me a LOT longer. It's why I hate math work in school, I can do ti, but the amount they give me is overwhelming considering how much slower I am.

Same, I hardly know my times tables, and I can hardly do anything without a scrap piece of paper or a calculator.

[Bobbias]

Well, I know some of the times tables, and I'm slowly getting faster with those, but I still have to work some of them out in my head. I've just been gettign faster at working some of them out, as well. I can do complicated stuff, I can do long division in my head (not multiple digits though, but I could do something that results in a really long string of numbers after the decimal), but it's really slow. With paper though, I can work pretty well.

[annon]

I'm the other way around. I'm excellent at math but not much else.

[Bobbias]

Well, I'm good at math but slow. Once I learn something (actually learn it, not simply memorize it for school) I can do it really easily. Unfortunately, it does take a lot longer. I'm good, as long as I understand what's going on, but the teachers don't teach in a way that works well for me most of the time :/

[annon]

People who talk about shit they know nothing about as if they actually do.

Example: Joey's mom's old computer had an integrated video card. The video card got fried, so the motherboard went down with it. Since then, he's been telling people that HP "wires their motherboards in a way that if one component goes down, they all go down." He said that to me, so I responded.

Me: "Joey, that's only true for the video card because it's integrated."
Joey: "But the rest of the components are all on the same..."
Me: "Motherboard? You mean like all computers?"

[Spectere]

Oh, that's okay.  I had someone at my school (when I went to ITT) try to tell me that Dell used proprietary memory just because the system that he worked on had DDR2 and he'd never seen it before.  It went something like this:

Dumbass: Dell is complete shit.  They don't even use standard memory or any components in their system.
Me: ...really.
Dumbass: Yeah, they use some weird memory with a lot more pins than normal memory.
Me: More pins...you mean like DDR2?
Dumbass: That's not standard memory!
Me: *facepalm*

There is nothing worse than people who try to feign knowledge when using computers.

[Bobbias]

Agreed. My mom thinks that just because she's more tech-savvy than the people she works with, she can presume to tell me what's wrong with a computer. She can browse the net, do email, and she knows enough how to install things, and how to design a website with the help of a WYSIWYG editor, and she seems to think that she can tell me what's wrong with a computer. I've been fixing computers for about as long as I've owned one, and yet she thinks she can tell me what's wrong just because something is slow, or isn't acting right.

And then she blindly orders me to fix it when half the time I don't even know what's wrong. She claims one thing is wrong when it quite obviously isn't, because computers don't work that way, and refuses to listen when I try to explain why it can't be that, and then she blindly tells me to fix it.

Recently, my mom got a Blackberry Pearl. I noticed it had a facebook application in the menu, I opened it to see what it would do, and it brought me to some disclaimer and terms of use pages and such, and then I exited. After exiting, one of the icons got a white background and the orange circle that appears behind the icon wouldn't show up behind it. She then begins to rant about how I fucked it up, and shit like the thing is broken. It's a fucking graphical glitch. After some googling, I found that it's a fairly common problem that can only really be solved by reloading the operating system on it. She didn't seem to understand that A) just because a small graphical glitch happened doesn't mean anything will stop working right, B) if it happened that soon after she got it, and after such a small thing as opening one of the applications and exiting, that it was not likely something serious, and C) even if it was serious, tings like that can be reset and wiped clean anyway.

[Spectere]

Man, if you slip up and make a mistake with Linux you could wind up in a hell of a lot of trouble.

Let's just say, I screwed up a single bloody line in a shell script and I managed to bind /dev to /dev.  It doesn't sound as bad as it is, believe me.  Let's just say, I can't spawn a shell because every time I attempt to it goes into an infinite loop and I can't get rid of the bind because /dev is, obviously, in use.  Methinks it's about time for a reboot!

Edit: Ooo, scratch that.  Getting out of X (hence, killing the instances of Konsole that were no doubt waiting for a free TTY) and unmounting the /dev bind fixed everything without a reboot.  I'M AWESOME.