Sunday, April 15, 2007

Mobile Phones Causing Bees to Disappear?

The Independent, bastion of outstanding and unbiased British reporting, reports in today's paper the assertion that mobile phones might be the root cause of the disappearing bees. See http://news.independent.co.uk/environment/wildlife/article2449968.ece.

"The theory is that radiation from mobile phones interferes with bees' navigation systems, preventing the famously homeloving species from finding their way back to their hives. Improbable as it may seem, there is now evidence to back this up."

There is a serious issue with bees disappearing. We must have bees to survive as a species.

Of course mobile phones wiping out bees will be a world-changing discovery if this is to be proven. At the same time, what is so special about mobile phone radiation? We have had radio transmissions originating from our planet for over a hundred years, and bees have survived over that period. We have been bombarded by radiation originating from space since day one of the universe. Bees have survived that.

What is different about mobile phones to be worthy of this accusation?

Friday, April 06, 2007

Samba Domain Control in Fedora Core 6

I found I needed to upgrade the server from Red Hat 7 (or 8) to run a more contemporary version of Linux. Main reason is that the machine running Red Hat simply refused to restart after replacing the LAN card. I simply wanted to upgrade from 10 mbs to 100 mbs. That led down a long and tortuous path to build a new server, based on Fedora Core 6.

Everything seemed to get installed and started just fine: Sendmail, Apache, Samba file shares, etc. However, getting Samba to act as a domain login controller just would not work. I'm convinced there is a bug. I guess I will try to collect the information in the logs and send it off to the Samba developers.