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I ran CAT 6 cable though my house a couple of years ago (pictures). All of the cables were custom made by me and test at gigabit speed. Testing was done by dragging a box with a gigabit NIC to each jack and making sure the connection was gigabit. I don't remember the network speed test program I used but the test was actual transfer speed. This was my first time making cables and let's just say I didn't spend over $50 on the crimping tool and the punch-down tool was the free one that came with the jacks.

That being said, if your boss says do it his way and he'll give you the budget to do it that way, salute and say "Yes sir." Doing it yourself means that, at best, you proved your boss wrong. Not a good career move. If anything goes wrong (even if it's not your fault like a squirrel chews through a cable) it will be your fault for not doing what your boss said.

Cheers,
Dave

[dave@bend ~/]# cat /proc/cpuinfo
processor : 0
vendor_id : AuthenticAMD
cpu family : 15
model : 67
model name : AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 5600+
stepping : 3
...
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush mmx fxsr sse sse2 ht syscall nx mmxext fxsr_opt rdtscp lm 3dnowext 3dnow pni cx16 lahf_lm cmp_legacy svm extapic cr8_legacy
...
address sizes : 40 bits physical, 48 bits virtual
power management: ts fid vid ttp tm stc

processor : 1
vendor_id : AuthenticAMD
cpu family : 15
model : 67
model name : AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 5600+
...

Lots of RAM:

[dave@bend ~/burpsuite_v1.2]# cat /proc/meminfo
MemTotal: 4048572 kB
MemFree: 44832 kB
...

and plenty of disk space (I'm at the better part of 1TB on the host for a variety of reasons).

So far I've successfully created VMs for Ubuntu 8.10, Fedora Core 10, Windows 2000 Professional, Windows XP Home, Windows Vista Home Premium, Windows Server 2003 and 2008, CentOS 4.7 and CentOS 5.2. I'm running CentOS 5.2 (x86_64) as the host OS and I had to rebuild the kernel, qemu, KVM and SDL to get everything running correctly. All of the OSes except FC10, Ubuntu 8.10, Vista and Server 2008 run fine on the base system. Ubuntu and FC10 needed the newer kernel. Vista and Server 2008 needed the other software updates. The upgrade to the 2.6.28.7 kernel from kernel.org is usually stable but I still run on the latest CentOS kernel unless I need to play with Ubuntu or FC10 just to make sure things are stable.

More details on my blog. Vista and Server 2008 are both dogs but everything else has acceptable performance in a VM.

Cheers,
Dave

You can cut down on the noise by just moving your ssh port to something other than port 22. Such a move won't stop a serious cracker who will do a port scan, etc. However, since it seems to be sufficient to keep the script kiddies and similar types from doing the sort of stuff described in the article, it means you're far more likely to notice when someone with a little higher skill level tries to crack in.

Best bet if you have a small user base is to only allow public key authentication and move the ssh port. I did that a while ago and now no noise and a good level of security. I've got a full write up on "Securing Secure Shell" at my blog:

http://davenjudy.org/davesBlog/node/24

Cheers,
Dave

The trick is to find out exactly what hardware is in the thing and then go to the HP support site and claim you need the driver for XP. If need be, get a Linux live CD and boot the thing to Linux long enough to do a lspci and you'll have all of the information you need. At this point Google is your friend since you can either search for the hardware manufacturers driver or the HP driver. Just be sure you download at least the network drivers so get a network connection once you have installed XP.

From my experience with my wife's DV9015, HP has XP drivers for all of their hardware. They just don't let you get to it if your system identifies itself as having Vista when you connect to support. That's where using Google to find the XP drivers comes in. HP will let you download the files even if your system is running Linux if you ask for a specific file. It's just that they've idiot-proofed their support site so you can't easily get an XP driver for a Vista system by mistake. Download the driver files, stick them on a thumb drive, install XP, load drivers from thumb drive and you've got a fully functional XP system.

Cheers,
Dave

Note: I stopped at the Linux step for my HP zv6015. See my blog if you want the details: http://davenjudy.org/wordpress

I don't think Vista survived for more than a week on my wife's laptop (HP Pavilion dv9015) before I "upgraded" it to XP. She works for a small company and the worst problem was that modt of the custom applications she needed to be able to run wouldn't run under Vista. I got everything working under XP that she needed although I never really tried to get the TV card working. It should work but haven't tried it.

On the other hand, I upgraded my HP zv6015 from XP to Linux almost as soon as I got it back in 2005. It's currently running CentOS 5 x86_64. More on that story at my blog: http://davenjudy.org/wordpress/?p=15.

Cheers,
Dave