He’s much bigger than you think. King Ink.

[reddragdiva]

• Did you notice that bradfitz carefully did not say anything about ads on LiveJournal, nor answer any of the many questions about the possibility? Which is odd considering Mena actually did. (Modulo debates on what constitutes "plastering.")

• In the meantime, does anyone have a handy tool to archive one's journal and comments? In a more reusable form than screenscraping.

I seek your assistance with Linux bondage. Specifically, the HP Ethernet bonding driver in RHEL 2.1. (What this does is to make two links act like a single link, for increased speed, reliability or both. We're after the reliability.) The bond is set to fail over — to use one link until it fails, then switch to the other and stay there until that fails. But the kernel keeps seeing a link failure when there isn't one and switching to the other link, flapping roughly every few hours. I've kludged around it by setting the downdelay to 2000ms (so it waits two seconds before flapping), but it's still trying to. It's happening on two (identical) boxes in two locations, each with two separate bonded links (one to the NetApps, one to the world), each of whose two links goes to different switches — I'm confident it's not dodgy hardware.

The boxes are DL580 G2, quad 3GHz, 16 gig memory. The kernel is 2.4.9e49-enterprise (that's an old kernel with heavy Red Hat backporting) and it's either that or 2.4.9e57 — nothing later will be a happener. The bonding driver is HP driver 1.0.4q (haven't tried the Red Hat driver). The card driver is Red Hat driver e1000 5.2.52-k1.

Are there any sufferers of Linux bondage who've seen this or heard of it?

Comments

[zotz]

Perhaps Brad realises that this just isn't his call any more. If your word isn't definitive, then best say nothing.

[reddragdiva]

Yeah, but nor is anything else he said about the future.

[zotz]

Maybe he has better agreements covering the matters he would comment on. Or maybe the advertising bit's part of the business end that he's apparently happy to be shot of. Maybe in his new job he just doesn't comment on questions of advertising. "Software architect" or summat, innit?

LJ ads...

[death4breakfast.livejournal.com]

I suspect that advertising is likely within the next six months or so, probably for free accounts at least.

The following is in their new ToS:

XII. # ADVERTISEMENTS AND PROMOTIONS

LiveJournal.com has decided to remove all banner advertisements and promotions on LiveJournal.com journals. However, LiveJournal.com reserves the right to run advertisements and promotions on the LiveJournal.com service in the future. By using LiveJournal.com, you agree that LiveJournal.com has the right to run such advertisements and promotions with or without prior notice, and without recompense to you or any other user. The manner, mode and extent of advertising by LiveJournal.com on your journal are subject to change. You agree that LiveJournal.com shall not be responsible or liable for any loss or damage of any sort incurred as the result of any such dealings or as the result of the presence of such advertisers on the Service.

Re: LJ ads...

[kineticfactory.livejournal.com]

If free-journal ads are limited to Google-style keyword ads, and not a Yahoo-style profusion of pop-ups/pop-unders/interstitials/shoshkeles, I could live with that.

The question is whether other people could. LiveJournal as a community is only as useful as its social network, and anything that causes even, say, 5% of users to kill their journals would reduce the usefulness of it to those who stayed on.

Re: LJ ads...

[reddragdiva]

Indeed. As a blogging engine it's middling. The reason I use LJ and not a weblog on a server I control or pay for (e.g. Rocknerd) is the social network. If some of the 'l33t3r MT features come to the LJ engine (e.g. trackbacks), that'll be marvellous.

DeadJournal uses the LJ engine but is Popup Hell. Although

Re: LJ ads...

[kineticfactory.livejournal.com]

Similarly here, only I've got my own hand-written blogging system. In my view, the difference between my blog (http://dev.null.org/blog/) and my LJ is that the former is about stuff I'm interested in, written for anyone who may share those interests, whereas the latter is about my life, written for people I know. The only reason I use LJ is because of the social-network functions, which, when combined with security levels, go some way towards restoring the private register (http://www.oblomovka.com/entries/2003/10/13#1066058820) which is absent from things published on the wide open web.

Re: LJ ads...

[mendel.livejournal.com]

That's not new; that's been in the TOS since that decision was made sometime before 2001 when I got here. LiveJournal's not going to put "we promise not to advertise" in the terms of service, but Brad's always been vehemently against advertising — what was the Social Contract and is now the Guiding Principles because some lawyer didn't like "Contract" on something that wasn't one explains their stance on advertising (http://www.livejournal.com/legal/principles.bml).

(Note also that that clause about advertising wasn't removed from the Guiding Principles even though it got the once-over for the acquisition. It was put there in the first place because that was Brad's sentiment; it's still there because that's Brad and Six Apart's.)

LiveJournal is profitable on customer revenue alone — 93524 paid accounts at a minimum of $25/year is a healthy revenue stream, and I suspect Six Apart is more interested in bringing in revenues from bloggers than from advertisers.

[rbarclay.livejournal.com]

Well, obviously you're paying for DeadRat support, so go forth and use it, I'd say.

[reddragdiva]

Well, yes. But, God help me, I seek understanding.

[reddragdiva]

It appears my boss asked Red Hat about bonding problems with the bcm5700 driver and they came back saying "we don't support bonding." He said not to bother. Although I really should hit their forums and/or lists as well.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

This is Always The Way.

1) PHB insists you buy something shit because "it's supported".
2) PHB doesn't let you use the support when there's a problem
3) If you are forced to turn to the support, they will tell you to bugger off.

[reddragdiva]

He's a non-PHB. He didn't order me not to, but he seriously doubted it would be productive :-)

The thing is that Service Level Agreements and so forth provide all-important corporate arse covering, even if the actual arse-armour is illusory. I was speaking to someone a few days ago of how they're moving their servers from FreeBSD to Red Hat — not for technical reasons, but precisely because they could not find a single support provider for FreeBSD in the UK with an SLA. Even if every SLA I've ever been involved with has involved bogosity on one side if not both.

[wyrdlinks.livejournal.com]

For Windows, http://fawx.com/ljArchive/ seems to be good, (NB the link in the center is b0rken, but the link to the top right works) - does comments too.

[owdbetts.livejournal.com]

And is pretty damn quick.

A bit buggy (the calendar view crashes on me) and some bugs in the HTML display, but it does the important stuff (ie backing up the data). And it's open source.

[adrasteah.livejournal.com]

ljbook.com

[nisaba.livejournal.com]

Wah-hey, it's back! I thought it had died a death last year.

[zotz]

Somebody else just recommended LJArchive. Allegedly runs under Windows and outputs to XML, HTML or MIDI. No, I don't understand either. Will psychologically profile your journal if asked (which sounds disastrous if it's at all accurate).

[barbedwirekiss.livejournal.com]

Archiving a specific LJ? WGET with the right options to limit it just to a certain root url maybe?

[http://users.livejournal.com/_nicolai_/]

That's (a) hard to republish somewhere else and (b) LiveJournal are really harsh about you not screen-scraping them but using their efficient API instead, and will block your IP and/or application in short order if you do anything noticeable.
(Screenscraping LJ is very inefficient for their end and they really don't want the extra load).

[barbedwirekiss.livejournal.com]

About A>, a quick bit of Perl script should handle any of the HREFs, LINKS, IMG SRC etc. calls and make them relative, I would've thought. About B>, I can see your point. LJ Central would probably get a bit narked at a fast flood of leech requests. However, I was thinking more along the line of scripting WGET (or just a staright Perl::HTTP script) so that it could go and pull one page, back off for x-amount of seconds and then come back and get the next inline. With David's access to Un*x systems/hardwire network access I couldn't imagine this being too much of an issue as he could just start the script off running and come back and pick up the results an hour or two later. Anyway, better options seem to have been sugested so I'll just shut my cakehole for now.

[vatine]

Step one, get mii-tools/mii-config installed.
Step two, set mii-foo in "watch mode" on the interfaces
Step three, if mii-foo disagrees with the bonding-fu you're in deep doodoo

Step N, install routing daemons in strategic places, smack the IP you're interested in having resilience for into the RIB and set sufficiently-low timers that a link falling over leads to a FIB change sufficiently shortly. This has the bonus of being generalisable to multi-site failover. It's a Right Pain, though.

[poggs.livejournal.com]

I suspect switch things. What switches do you have? Are you disabling STP (spanning tree) on the server-facing ports? Are they both in the same L2 VLAN ? Have you correctly given bond0 an IP address and not the individual Ethernet cards?

[kineticfactory.livejournal.com]

You could always try and persuade your friends to move to one of the other (http://www.deadjournal.com) journal (http://www.greatestjournal.com) sites (http://www.diaryland.com), en masse.

[jauncourt.livejournal.com]

Diaryland bites.
Deadjournal is ad-licious.

Greatestjournal, however, might be a possibility. Until it gets eaten by crowds.

[mendel.livejournal.com]

GreatestJournal is heavily ad-supported (http://www.greatestjournal.com/userinfo.bml?user=littleboxes) too, and seem to be of questionable competence (http://www.greatestjournal.com/community/issues/) when it comes to sustainability. For a while they had their MySQL instance accessible from the Internet and their config.inc (with MySQL username and password) readable over the Web — it was sheer luck on their part that no-one had fun with DELETE while I convinced them that they might wish to change that.

Their approach seems to involve adding as many features as they can regardless of functionality — weird things like phpbb forums (http://pictures.greatestjournal.com/userimg/2122359/550224) and a photo gallery with some peculiar content restrictions (http://www.greatestjournal.com/community/gj_gallery/119961.html). It seems to me that their goal involves offering more stuff than LiveJournal, regardless of what their existing users need (but that's to be expected when you're only counting on users for account statistics and not for revenue, I suppose).

They also seem to either delete or lose bits occasionally: my littleboxes (http://www.greatestjournal.com/allpics.bml?user=littleboxes) account there was a little joke taking advantage of their "1000 userpics" or whatever madness it was to maintain a journal in userpics alone. A year later all of the userpics except one are gone.

There's a lot to be said for making sure the boat is sinking before hitting the lifeboats, though.

[kest]

I second (or third or whatever) the LJ Archive recommendation.