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

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.