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Even if not independently verifiable by laymen, if it at least started with a certain well-established standard for security, it could leverage a verification process that's been in place for a while.

I know that you are trying to be funny but up until the thermal shrinking part it sounded like a great idea.
Heating the SSD to 250 degrees C (482F) restores the NAND cells and can extend the allowed number of writes from 10,000ish to 100,000,000ish
Source

In the hundreds of devices I've tested (many of them several times), I could detect one trend : Cisco is rarely best-in-class, but are rather average everywhere. There's one area where they are very good, and most of the time the best : switching packets from NIC 1 to NIC 2. This is not surprising as this is where they come from: routers and switches. But as soon as you get into the higher functions, especially above layer 4 (where stuff begins to be stateful and you need to keep track of all those nasty TCP states), they are very rarely best in class - when they are, it's for throughput, the easiest part.

As soon as you start testing TCP Establishment Rate, Concurrent Connections or SSL performance, they are not so good. For Load Balancers, F5 usually is best in class. For firewalls, Checkpoint tends to lead. For proxies, BlueCoat is definitively a leader. And so on. But again, they are never bad, simply not best in class (see this news about a NSS testing of a major firewall testing).

I guess for some people is reassuring being able to order all your network devices from the same company - and negotiate a discount once and for all. Personally I'd rather have the best in class all the time, but that's just a geek's dream. That's not how the corporate world works.

There are two different objectives here [...]

I can think of a third objective.

Imagine Microsoft and RSA, the security division of EMC seeing the Cloud as the latest cache of IT gold, and imagine those players identifying security (particularly security compliance) as the only real barrier to that gold. Now its easy to see the third objective - those players doing their utmost to remove that barrier.

EMC SAN arrays already do this. It's probably only a matter of time before you see something similar on performance desktops.

Lots of colleges and universities are switching over to Google. The reasons are pretty straightforward: Google offers more storage space than most higher ed IT departments could reasonably afford and the move relieves them of the need to administer an email server. See this article for an overview. Even Hope, in Taco's home town, switched over a couple years back and I know they've been pretty happy with it.

Look at this quote from the authors' conclusions: "With advantages cost-performance, reliability, power consumption, and modular growth, we expect RAIDS to replace SLEDS in future I/O systems."

SLEDs - Single Large Expensive Drives (for the sizes and price ranges they were talking about) no longer exist - they've been replaced by Single WAY Much Larger Disposable Drives. For the original designers, even a gigabyte on a single 2-1/2" drive was simply way beyond their horizon back in 1988. http://www.networkcomputing.com/tapes-and-disks/raid-vs-sled---now-with-ssds.php

The IBM 3380 used as an example in Patterson's paper had 4 independent head positioners and could deliver 200 IOPs, but that complexity drove the price up to $15/MB and power consumption to over 6KW for a single 7.5GB drive. While the 14" diameter of the platters made room for 4 head combs it also made spinning the disk faster impractical. This technology had reached its zenith.

6 kilowatts, $112,000, for 7.5 gigs. $15,000 a gigabyte. A teraybye drive at those prices would be $15 MILLION and use 6 megawatts. You could run 1,500 homes on that. Now a terabyte will cost you less than 1/000 what a gigabyte cost then (so less than 1 millionth the cost). Their expectations didn't hold up because disks are CHEAP and disposable. Shit happens. Plan for it. Let the disks have different wear patterns instead of sticking them in a raid - it's one less complication, and makes it less likely for multiple disk failures to leave you hanging.

If you have a disk failure with no RAID, the situation is, "oh crap, I have to restore from backup."

No - redundant boxes are the way to go. We're at the point where we should be thinking "redundant array of inexpensive computers".

By the way...

http://www.networkcomputing.com/channels/security/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=199901451&pgno=5

OpenLDAP is #2 to AD in the Fortune 500, all of the other vendors you mention are down in the noise.

HPC is also not trending toward Windows even though Steve Ballmer thought it would.

We can speculate about why, but I do so like that first graph link. I wonder if desktops are going to swing like that, or if laptops are beginning to take that curve.

Actually, it was a Netware server, and it was seven or eight years. Novell even used to hold competitions for the longest-running server.
];)

http://www.networkcomputing.com/1119/1119f1products_2.html

Does the hardware have a console with a network port?

Examples:
- On DELL systems, there are these DRAC cards allowing a https connection to the console.
- On SUN hardware, there is ILOM (x86) and RSC (sparc).
- IBM xSeries has this thing.
- You may be to connect a serial line to ttyA from another server to 'tip' for console, making the security a little easier. See this.
- I'm sure there are others for HP, etc...
- Fancy "KVM swicthes.
- There may even be a 3rd party PCI option

Advantages:
- Console sessions require login/pass (some even accept keys)
- You can set your firewall rule to specific IP endpoints
- Minimal cost
- Minimal techy techy knowledge
- No extra software to install

To solve your 'tail -f' requirement; run nrpe/nagios, or even simpler use *.* @loghost in /etc/syslog.conf and set the correct loghost in /etc/hosts.

I understood that you presently run X11, if that isn't necessary with a hardware option and shipping logs, you may be able to run a straight terminal on the host. Unless, of course, your number cruncher requires it.

That would make a lot more sense.

Given the sheer amount of people who access it, it seems like the perfect use for GSLB

Having worked (past tense) for a few years for a wireless ISP in the 900MHz and 2.4 GHz spectrums I respectfully disagree. They both suck to work in. 900 is maybe a bit worse since it is harder to pinpoint the cause of interference. We had a case where it was a 900MHz phone 2 miles from the base station that was knocking us out. Even with the help of a BumbleBee directional analyzer it took weeks to run down. Swapped them for a fancy new 5.8GHz phone and the problem went away but not before we lost customers over it.

2005 article, a company called Mercury created 7U dual cell servers. 2.8TFLOP, they claim a 6ft rack will pack over 16TFLOP of processing power.

Take a look at IBM/Yahoo's free (as in beer) enterprise search box. I have had good experiences with it and especially like it's open forum (the ibm developers help out as much as they can).

http://omnifind.ibm.yahoo.net/
http://www.networkcomputing.com/channels/enterpriseapps/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=199905064&pgno=9

some of the nicer netwerk cards' network processors have large portions of the stack implemented wholly within the cards' processor firmware. http://www.networkcomputing.com/channels/networkin frastructure/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=15000186

it would be interesting to try one of these cards in a Vista machine whilst playing audio to see to what extent the performance is still impacted. Of course this would require a quick profiling of network performance with the new card without audio active as a baseline.

For 10Gig E:

Cat 6 will work (maybe) for shorter distances. Article linked below says will work up to 55 meters, but remember reading another article that says otherwise.
Cat 6a and Cat 7 will work up to 100 meters.

The adoption curve for 10Gig E isn't as fast as GigE, but in 5-10 years I'd be surprised if it isn't commonplace.

http://www.networkcomputing.com/channels/networkin frastructure/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=188501097

I've never used it, but I believe the NetRanger device (now owned Cisco) did IDS monitoring and had firewall capability as well.

Here is a review dated 1999 talking a 2nd gen version and mentions both firewall and IDS capability and is truly a dedicated device:
http://www.networkcomputing.com/1023/1023f14.html? ls=NCJS_1023bt

Its what happened to Madison River Communications for blocking Vonage traffic.

Federal Communications Chairman Kevin Martin said that his agency has the authority to police any so-called net neutrality violations, both in the voice and video arenas.

In a question-and-answer period in front of the keynote audience, Martin said that "I do think the commission has the authority necessary" to enforce network neutrality violations, noting that the FCC had in fact done so in the case last year involving Madison River's blocking of Vonage's VoIP service.

"We've already demonstrated we'll take action if necessary," Martin said.

Here is the link, for those who don't want to give him any ad revenue.

Also, from a quick search...

This link says it doesn't http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_virtual _machines/

This link says This may be, at least in part, because the Parallels software doesn't support SMP for the virtualized instance of Windows. at http://www.networkcomputing.com/showArticle.jhtml? articleID=187002626/

I'm not saying I'm sure you're wrong (as I'm not in front of my Mac at the moment), but it's not what I recall.

There seems to be lots of SATA-RAID based iSCSI SAN devices available nowadays.. Some links to products I have seen:

http://www.equallogic.com./ They make nice SATA-raid based iSCSI SAN devices with all the features you could expect (volumes, snapshots, array/volume-expansion, hotswap, redundant controllers, redundant fans, etc).

http://www.equallogic.com/pages/products_PS100E.ht m
14 250G sata disks, 3U, 3.5 TB of raw storage.

http://www.equallogic.com/pages/products_PS300E.ht m
14 500G sata disks, 3U, 7 TB of raw storage.

http://www.equallogic.com/pages/products_PS2400E.h tm
56+ TB

Looks good. I have not yet used them myself :)

Another iSCSI SATA SAN possibility:
http://www.mpccorp.com/smallbiz/store/servers/prod uct_detail/dataframe_420.html
16 sata disks, review:
http://www.infoworld.com/MPC_DataFrame_420/product _53700.html?view=1&curNodeId=0

This company also has SATA iSCSI SAN devices:
http://www.dynamicnetworkfactory.com/products.asp/ section/Product~Categories/category/iSCSI/options/ IPBank/drivetype/L~Series/formfactor/Integrated/in face/SATA~-~Serial~ATA

iSCSI SAN comparison:
http://www.networkcomputing.com/story/singlePageFo rmat.jhtml?articleID=170702726

There are also software iSCSI target solutions for use with your own/custom hardware.
http://iscsitarget.sourceforge.net/ for building linux-based iSCSI target/SAN.

If you are familiar with iSCSI targets / iSCSI SAN devices please post your comments!

Allchin has scaled back, or at least clarified, expectations for Cairo, the 1996 version of NT Server. To those awaiting the object-oriented operating system they thought they'd heard Microsoft describe, Allchin has a warning: "Cairo isn't the second coming." It's just the next NT revision.

The key new piece of object technology in Cairo will be its Object File System-an extensible directory of all operating system objects that will function much like a database, permitting searches of object properties, such as the state of all color printers, and extending to documents.

So, I've a muti-part question here, and any input would be appreciated.
1) Would this "rt" linux be up to the task, assuming that drivers are available. (I'd guess that it would, but that's a guess.)
2) How hard would it be, in general, to write a linux driver for this vague hardware?


A stock linux kernel will do everything you want. No need for RT extensions, DOS wasn't/isn't/doesn't. I take it your borland code just calls inb() outb(). This is easily ported to linux. The hard part will be getting the board vendor to give you the firmware commands.

Read this article to get started:
Write a Linux Hardware Device Driver

Enjoy,

Most of these older Toshibas can gotten for pretty cheap from eBay. The only drawback is that a good battery is quite expensive.

Here's some helpful links:

• http://www.linux-laptop.net/toshiba.html
• http://www.buzzard.org.uk/toshiba/
• http://www.networkcomputing.com/unixworld/tutorial /012/012.html

I feel I am being trolled, but here are some articles I dug up.

This one talks about delay, and that most humans can start to detect delay at around 250ms. On the second page, it goes over different G.7xx codecs and tells you the MOS score for each one.

http://www.networkcomputing.com/1202/1202ws3.html

Here is an article about measuring MOS in a network:

http://www.telecommagazine.com/default.asp?journal id=3&func=articles&page=0011t16&year=2000&month=11

Here is an SLA from MCI that has provisions for MOS:

http://global.mci.com/terms/sla/business_connectio n/

Fluke wont have a meter for this, but Agilent does:

http://we.home.agilent.com/USeng/nav/-536885778.53 6882651/pd.html

Cisco more or less agrees with me about the delay (scroll down a bit):

http://www.cisco.com/warp/public/788/voip/delay-de tails.html

So, you probably never heard of this stuff because it doesn't matter in a classic digital or analog network mainly because you are using dedicated circuits and g.711 all day. When you start using data networks and codecs like g.723.1, you need to worry about this shit.

BTW, it took me about 5 minutes to find this info using that Google thing. You should check it out.

ft

It's been done to a VAX =)

But not zero. And the commercial support is two-fold:

• development of the Apache code base,
• installation, customization and maintenance for users.

Sure, customers love high performing, reliable, more secure software such as Apache. And, if they have someone with some expertise with a few hours to spare once in a while, then they can maintain their own web sites cost effectively without ever cutting a check to anyone outside the company. And the effort required to support Apache may be lower than the competition in many situations. But it's still not zero. While the company can download and run Apache without ever contributing any code tot he project, code still had to be written and still needs to be maintained.

The Apache Foundation includes members of several commercial concerns. That commercial support of the open source project has probably helped immeasureably in making Apache better.

Also, for businesses and other users that would like to contract out Apache support there are vendors (eg, Covalent, IBM, HP, Red Hat, Novell/SuSE, ...) that will provide it.

Friendly News Release

ICARUS FAQ (check out question #12)

A news story covering ICARUS

And lastly, The Slashdot story covering it.

But how do I feel about ICARUS? When there's a will there's a way, that's what I say. It's a pain but hey. As an RA I get people continually banging on my door about no internet connection problems. It was HORRIBLE the first two weeks when people were moving in cause NO ONE knows what they have on their computers. Kids would come, plug in their computers and within 30 seconds their port would be killed and they needed to call the Help Desk. Help Desk was overloaded with calls but they'd finally get their ports on again and they know how to clean their machine (or didn't care) and BAM! kicked off again. AND WHO DO YOU THINK THEY COMPLAINED TO!?

ICARUS = devil

What is the kid researching data storage technology doing in the library in the first place? The Net would have much more up to date information than a library would. A quick search on Google reveals almost 6 million results for "data storage technology". While, admittedly, many of the are for online storage services such as XDrive, or manufacturers such as Seagate or APS Tech, there are still quite a few diamonds, such as a webpage about IBM's Millipede storage technology, a Network Computing article on storage disasters, a Bell Labs press release on holographic data storage, etc.

There's just no way a library would buy such obscure and expensive books on data storage technologies when they could be buying children's books, novels, and reference books, which have far wider appeal than stuff on data storage technologies. Anyway, isn't this what the Net's for? To get otherwise obscure, expensive information cheaply and efficiently?

Caldera OpenLinux 2.2 -- see the review

This is a really bad idea. Most students have cellular phones these days

So what happens when cell phones start coming with a flavor of 802.11 and SIP built in? Oh, then you can roam onto your residential VoIP service (like Vonage or packet8.net without *any* per minute fees. Same thing on the campus LAN. Or Starbucks. Or McDonalds (free minutes with the purchase of a happy meal).

'Tis only a matter of time before we won't need PSTN anymore. This is the first step to that.

[From the article]

Caldera has also promised to return any changes made to the OSes kernel to the Internet community--its chief partner. Caldera is also aligning with a wide range of companies to address some of Linux's commercial weaknesses.

Sweet! If only some of what people said could be held against them in the court of law...

Could anybody please make sense of this?

Huh? Netware 6.5 comes with

• 'clustering' (Failover of ANYTHING, including file serving)
• a Zenworks 'starter pack' (I use the starter that comes with NW 5.1, and haven't needed more than that)
• DirXML starter pack (to integrate with that nasty AD schema)
• NAMP (Netware,Apache,MySQL,PHP/Perl)
• Virtual Office
• SSH
• Native File Access (Appears as Netware/Unix/Windows server)

IMHO, firewalling should NOT be done on a Windows box. If you want EXCELLENT fine grain control over VPN's and Internet access rights, get BorderManager. Pegasus Mail and Mercury/32 have long been an excellent, and FREE, alternative NDS-based email solution for Netware. I think you should read this Network Computing article for a good overview.

An erroneous blank got inserted into the URL submitted above. The correct link is: Windows 98 Registry Handbook Sorry.

No, fast switching is alive and well:

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/sw/iosswrel/ps 1831/products_configuration_guide_chapter09186a008 00ca6c8.html">http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/ sw/iosswrel/ps1831/products_configuration_guide_ch apter09186a00800ca6c8.html

http://www.networkcomputing.com/902/902sp2.html

http://www.cisco.com/univercd/cc/td/doc/product/so ftware/ios121/121cgcr/switch_c/xcprt1/xcdipsp.htm

http://www.faqs.org/faqs/cisco-networking-faq/sect ion-20.html

Everyone meet Amer Deeba, the VP of marketing at Qualys. Qualys likes to troll /. and various mailing lists to get some "grass roots" support behind their product. You can usually tell because it's anonymous or comes from a hotmail address that has never posted to the list before. Qualys will usually also use nessus as the comparison in a "We'll it's ok for something free but you know the GPL/support/complextiy/etc may be too much for you." Btw, the foundstone box is 1U (a little short of "half-rack", and it's cheaper than qualys as well). Doh, and it looks like FoundScan just beat Qualys in a Network Computing review too...

Links:
Low-Earth Orbit Satellites: Technologies and Trends

LEOs Dance The Jitterbug

HTTP Traffic over Satellite

In short, because of the youth of LEO it's a bit hard to say. Also don't forget this is for the "last mile"[1] problem. The ones that will be using this, already have their own terrestial networks.

[1] Think of it as an "extended" last mile. Also you could gain other advantages. VoIP,Internet,TV, and the freedom to live were you want.

BTW Watch the dates on some of the stuff you read.

more here: link

Check out a review at Network Computing.

I'm not sure if I have seen any PC-oriented FireWire SAN solutions though as FireWire hasn't really been something you would see in a lot of computers until recently.

I did find a couple when doing a search for "FireWire Network Storage":

http://www.adept.net.au/1394/nas.shtml
http://www.networkcomputing.com/1118/1118sp3.html (this is probably what I was thinking of)
http://www.turnover.com/news/mdm/firenas.html

Since Bluetooth and 802.11b run in the same frequency space (~2.4 Ghz), having the two running together causes interference, resulting in slower connections (discussed here and here). The effect does drop off with distance - having a 10 metre distance between the sources could result in a 10% performance hit for Bluetooth. Obviously, having both on the same card is asking for trouble...
Further information (with lots of pretty mathematical formulae) can be found in this ugly looking PDF.

http://web.archive.org/web/19980119143350/stardivi sion.com/staroffice/java.html

And one about corel's java port from network computing magazine...

http://www.networkcomputing.com/816/816sp3.html

-gleam

turning a VAX into a keg dispenser with webmonitoring
or maybe just a bar or how about a fridge

" This is far and away the best large corporate desktop resources location system ever written bar none"

Well I doubt it's as good as NDS but we'll let that one go.

"For Active Directory to work however virtually every server and every desktop needs to be using Windows 2000 / XP. Samba does not support Active Directory and further Samba is a long way away from supporting this"

By the time the corporations upgrade every single one of their desktops to windows 2K linux will be able to connect to a AD server. In fact it can do that now! Check out this or
this

"But from a company / OEM perspective it doesn't really matter why this issue it exists;"

True for some people but not others. There are some ethical people in business and surely there must a few business people whith a moral compass. I would even venture to guess that there might be a few business executives who could muster more synapses then a couple of dead files and could see through this situation. But then again with all that's happening in the business world today I may be totally off base.

I read Ultimate Guide to the VI and EX Text Editors and UNIX Power Tools, and I took a college course in intro to theoretical computer science that covered regular expressions, and I learned Perl regexes pretty well. This tutorial series at was pretty cool also.

For an article on layer 4 switching, see
Layer 4 Switching

Layer 2 - LAN layer - switch based on MAC address
Layer 3 - Network layer - switch based on IP address
Layer 4 - Transport layer - switch based on contents (like TCP port number)

Although technically they aren't switches, they're called switches because they do layer 4 switching, see?

That's a valid point. As long as you leave the harddrive in place, that's true. But if you have it in a swap mount, things look different. The point is, a DVD is a plastic disc. A harddrive contains a lot of moving parts and sensitive electronics. The data on a DVD is burnt into a layer of dye. On a harddrive, the information is encoded as tiny magnetic fields, which decay over time.

[DVDs] Are also proprietary. Are you sure your DVD-R can read the DVD you burned on another company's DVD-R?

Almost every DVD drive or player you can buy right now can at least read DVD-Rs. Older ones probably too. I don't know about the other standards, but DVD-R seems to be the most agreed upon.

Data on a DVD-R can't be intentionally erased, or even modified. This isn't necessarily a good thing. Depends on how up-to-date you need your data to be, doesn't it?

Of course, depends on the type of data. To quote the original poster: "My company has a large file archive of documents and data that don't necessarily need to be stored on read/write media [...]"

Lastly, as to 20 year old harddrives being incompatible with today's, yes that is true. But you have no crystal ball, and you can't say that today's HDDs will be inaccessible in 20 years, nor can you be sure that CD and DVD will continue to be familiar formats.

There's very good reason to assume that. The DVD is not only a standard for computers, but also for consumer appliances, i.e. DVD players. As long as there are going to be DVD movies, there will be DVD-ROM drives. And probably even after that. Ever wondered why a DVD is the size of a CD? Because it allows the DVD drive to read CD-ROMs. I'd bet that 10 years from now you can still buy a drive that reads CD-ROMs. The same will be true for DVDs: drives will be backward compatible.

Besides, if the data is important enough to be kept around, chances are the hardware to access it will be too (or haven't you seen machine rooms that still use tape backups from X years ago?)

Well, tell that to the guys at the JPL: "For example, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory is facing a crisis due to the huge libraries of data from space probes like Pioneer that are stored on aging seven-track tapes for which readers are no longer made."

(I believe there was a story about this on /., but I couldn't find it. The quote is from this article. )