Appearance: wow, great job! But it looks like you want a static display piece! Nice job laying out all your hard work on the carpet. Next time, uh, lay it out on a work bench, ESD matt, etc. It'll last longer, you'll hopefully have fewer problems, etc.
Your comment about needing a finger-saving solution, but I don't want a web or email-based service, for a number of different reasons, mostly legal and security-related (please save me the flaming - the decision is made). doesn't make sense though and this isn't a flame. Unless you are hosting the opposite ends and encrypting, you still might as well just send a post card since you've thrown security out the window.
My current 3M pixel camera gets approx 160 pictures onto a 256Mb flash card; that's with minimal compression of the JPG files. Doing a bit of maths, that means approx 5000 pictures per 8Gb flash card - a bit much to be carrying around with me!
It not about how much you can get on compressed. It's about how many images you can get on **UNCOMPRESSED**. For professional work, that's how you store images. My sister is a pro photographer and she is always buying the next larger faster CF card. It's a pain in the ass and a distraction to have to swap cards or even go through and delete when you are doing a shoot. You get distracted, you miss shots.
I can't think of any easy ways you could get around a system using this security method - let alone even know that a system is implimenting it.
This really is like safe cracking in a network environment. Only that it's like the bank vault is in a mall with a cubicle partition in front of it.
While I can see that this would add some additional temporary security, it's just a step in the security arms race. Just like better locks or tumblers.
Someone sitting in front of the device being accessed that's doing, say, a tcpdump, of traffic to that server will get the port combination. While they still don't have the public key or password, they've got the "secret handshake" or "secret knock". Unless you are changing your port combination regularly in some some of predetermined way like routing cypher changing on communications, this is way too much of a pain in the ass to be of any real use.
There is little point in implementing this on a closed neighborhood unless you are really paranoid (corporate R&D or strategy, intellegence service, legistative or executive brance of government, etc.). Where this would be used would be on a more public network. And if this is necessary, you are most likely giving the knock sequence away if you are on a network where monitoring takes place (Carnivore or non-governmental data collection).
This sounds only like a service provider tool from a big building to a lot of locations with the downstread demarc connecting to service provider equipment with ethernet out or long haul out to remote locations. I can see this probably will be a tool for telcos or big companies/governments in the 3rd world or other locations in the US. I can see this used to feed bandwidth into more rural areas where high capacity fiber won't be pushed and then the big boys can push DSL while waiting to sell bandwidth do their smaller competitors
If you've got pockets with money and can pay alot to use a big building's roof ala TowerStream. But you still need your bandwidth from somewhere.
Wow, the future is the past. Microwave for broadband like AT&T Long Lines. Now it looks like selling those towers off was like Polaroid selling off anything digital.
Sure certs matter, when it's the HR department that's doing the hiring. Certs are paper. Without realworld experience, you are going to find it incredibly difficult to get hired anywhere. The majority of the better/best IT guys I know across a variety of areas don't have certs but the have loads of experience.
I have I think 9 years implementing NTish technologies in all environments (soho, office, LAN/WAN, Enterprise, insert buzz compliant phrase here). I pack what I think are two blow-off certs that someone had to have because we were a partner (I was CTO at the time and wanted a junket). This is true in Internetworking, desktop support, etc. I been on every rung of the ladder in the corporate world, acedemic world, small business, etc. I can rattle off 30 names in about 2 minutes where this is the same.
A CS degree isn't necessarily that important either. I bachelor's degree in anything can help. I know a lot of people who studied economics that work in IT (I *think* that's an aberation though).
You should find an organization like a non-profit that has no budget or clue about technology but has a real need for help and direction. Volunteer to be their IT guy. Explain to them your situation. You both benefit. Better yet, do it for two. You've now got two real-world examples to put on your resume. And you aren't working for free. You are working for experience that goes on the resume and will help you in your job search. Hell, get them to give you a title at the non-profits.
Then, after you are gainfully employed and you've got money to spend, if you feel like you still need those certs, get them. Just remember: the cert industry is an industry. The overall goal is to blow more of the out the door because they make more money. That's not to say that there aren't good dedicated instructors at some places but it's an ugly business and makes the companies the certs are for a lot of money (MS, Cisco, etc.). Novell certified folks were considered a dime a dozen back 10-12 years ago, the MS ones became that in the late '90s and I've got a feeling that the Cisco ones are become that after interviewing some of them (yes, I know my way around various IOS's). The only one that retained it's cache if I remember correctly was Banyan.
Features like: menu systems, custom greetings based on caller id, remote access, voice recognition ("igor hold" "holding") and such would be ideal.
Check out Asterisk. It's got all the features you ask about, supports POTS, ISDN, T-1, E-1, TDM, SIP, MGCP, etc., etc., ad naseum. You can easily setup a separate call queue based on the caller ID value, call-back, IVR, etc.I haven't been lurking in the list recently but you probably can do voice commands (roll your sleves up).
If you haven't already installed SSH on a machine in both locations, do so.
Follow the "Setting up Samba over SSH Tunnel mini-HOWTO" by Mark Williamson . Then you can use the server on each side to share out the files on the other side and not even change anything about how your users do anything. It's very simple to set up. It's 3 steps on each side plus adding it into a log in script or mapping on the individual machines. So you should be ready in 5 minutes.
If you still want to syncronize, there are tons of tools to do that including Unison.
Don't blame Amtrak. This is a political mess yet Amtrak takes the blame. Congress mandates that Amtrak act like a lean business yet provide the benefits of a government service. They are required to do things like operate unprofitable routes/timetables, etc. They are in the same long-term no win situation that the Post Office has been put in. When it's a political mess, ultimately, the blame lies with the People for either being 1) too apathetic or 2) too selfish (what? the goverment should pay for X but don't you dare tax me to pay for it).
Unfortunately, that's not how it works. There are lots of backend deals and payments. You pay one amount upfront and based on what you sell of a vendors OS (Microsoft) depending on your size, you get a backend payment. It's true with some other vendors and also with some hardware vendors. How do I know? We'll I previously headed up a smallish integrator and previously was the CTO/CIO of a US$40 Million per year PC distributor. At the distributor, I also set up a unit dealing just with corporations for those much larger margins.
I'm the president of an business only ISP and we've been looking at adding voice services for 4 1/2 years. We sell select office buildings where each tenant gets separately firewalled service. I was offered wholesale long distance last year by Worldcom for an insanely low rate of about 1/10th of a US cent per minute. Yes this was to be tied to a voice circuit terminated in a colo we were already it. So for about US$250 per month and US$0.00014 per minute in excess of 500,000 minutes, it's easy to be able to afford long distance bunding even without VOIP for long distance. Even if that's about 1/5 the number of minutes in a 30 day month, it's kind of like bandwidth; a T-1 goes a long long way for a lot of people especially if you minimize bandwidth usage.
Couple that with a soft phone switch like Asterisk with it's pseudo-TDM devices and you've got an incredibly inexpensive solution. Your real costs are advertising and support, not long distance.
You could use Debian, Redhat, Mandrake, whatever. You could even use something like ASP-Linux which is designed for ASPs/ISPs but I haven't used it. We use standard Linux Distros with Webmin which someone else recommended. The are various control panels available off of the Webmin site like Virtualmin and ISP4You.
Then you can use commodity 1U chassis for substantially less than big names. Sticking with reliable components with give you inexpensive machines that will last a long long time. Before someone jumps on me saying you have to use IBM, Dell, insert-your-hardware-flavor, I used to be the CTO of a distributor that specialized in high end OEM desktops and servers so I know what I'm talking about here as well as having previously been the owner of a VAR that specialized in high end OEM gear. Now I own an ISP.
No, I don't particularly like them. Partly, I use them because they're the devil I know. Partly, I use them because of the frequent flyer miles for transfering domains or renewing for 5 years. And in case no one has looked, it's only $35 per year for a single registration, $19 per year for 5 years or a transfer and I've got a link somewhere for $17 per year regardless. Hey, when you handle DNS and registration for a chunk of people, the frequent flyer miles add up. It's 1000 miles per transfer or 5 year renewal.
Really it does. If you are after increased security, server consolidation isn't necessarily the way to go in any environment. For example, placing additonal daemons on a single machine adds rather than reduces the number of potential exploitable holes a single system has. Running Exchange and MS SQL or MySQL and Sendmail or whatever on the same box presents a greater number of potential points of vulnerability that a minimalistic install and just Exchange or Sendmail or whatever simply because more things are running on the machine. This same concept can be used to distribute updates from your distribution vendor (if that is the route you take) from a single source which has the added benefit of reducing your bandwidth consumption.
Also, reducing the number of servers doesn't necessary reduce the the amount of administration. Most admins download and patch servers one at a time regardless of the environment. You could for example (in a *nix environment), have a base environment server that you used to do all of your patching work/distribution on/from; then you create the package of your choice (RPM,.deb whatever) for install on the other machines using an update script. Or you could copy the binaries, conf files, etc., over to the other machines instead of packaging. For a Windows machine, you can script the patching as well using a decent login processor like KiXtart with a login script that checks recursively for patches and applies what you want. Or you could use Perl and command line tools to accomplish this across your servers (workstations too). This is beyond most Windows adminstrators. It shouldn't be but it is. I've been administering Windows and networks since just after NT 3.1 Advanced Server shipped, Netware about the same length of time, and Linux servers and networks about 5 or 6 years and most Windows admins are too indimidated or lazy to learn anything other than the GUI that ships. I've done this done on all environments for years and years and have seen or know others that do this too.
I believe you are confused. SAIC sold Netsol to Verisign. SAIC is the secretive, well connected bunch that knows their way around Langely. Fort Meade too I believe.
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Appearance: wow, great job! But it looks like you want a static display piece! Nice job laying out all your hard work on the carpet. Next time, uh, lay it out on a work bench, ESD matt, etc. It'll last longer, you'll hopefully have fewer problems, etc.
are going to
That should read could.
is probably the easiest.
Your comment about needing a finger-saving solution, but I don't want a web or email-based service, for a number of different reasons, mostly legal and security-related (please save me the flaming - the decision is made). doesn't make sense though and this isn't a flame. Unless you are hosting the opposite ends and encrypting, you still might as well just send a post card since you've thrown security out the window.
Now I'm feeling really old. I thought it was last week that that new Irish band U2 released "Boy".
My current 3M pixel camera gets approx 160 pictures onto a 256Mb flash card; that's with minimal compression of the JPG files. Doing a bit of maths, that means approx 5000 pictures per 8Gb flash card - a bit much to be carrying around with me!
It not about how much you can get on compressed. It's about how many images you can get on **UNCOMPRESSED**. For professional work, that's how you store images. My sister is a pro photographer and she is always buying the next larger faster CF card. It's a pain in the ass and a distraction to have to swap cards or even go through and delete when you are doing a shoot. You get distracted, you miss shots.
I can't think of any easy ways you could get around a system using this security method - let alone even know that a system is implimenting it.
This really is like safe cracking in a network environment. Only that it's like the bank vault is in a mall with a cubicle partition in front of it.
While I can see that this would add some additional temporary security, it's just a step in the security arms race. Just like better locks or tumblers.
Someone sitting in front of the device being accessed that's doing, say, a tcpdump, of traffic to that server will get the port combination. While they still don't have the public key or password, they've got the "secret handshake" or "secret knock". Unless you are changing your port combination regularly in some some of predetermined way like routing cypher changing on communications, this is way too much of a pain in the ass to be of any real use.
There is little point in implementing this on a closed neighborhood unless you are really paranoid (corporate R&D or strategy, intellegence service, legistative or executive brance of government, etc.). Where this would be used would be on a more public network. And if this is necessary, you are most likely giving the knock sequence away if you are on a network where monitoring takes place (Carnivore or non-governmental data collection).
I think that pretty much says it all. Stew on that.
oh my!
This sounds expensive.
This sounds only like a service provider tool from a big building to a lot of locations with the downstread demarc connecting to service provider equipment with ethernet out or long haul out to remote locations. I can see this probably will be a tool for telcos or big companies/governments in the 3rd world or other locations in the US. I can see this used to feed bandwidth into more rural areas where high capacity fiber won't be pushed and then the big boys can push DSL while waiting to sell bandwidth do their smaller competitorsIf you've got pockets with money and can pay alot to use a big building's roof ala TowerStream. But you still need your bandwidth from somewhere.
Wow, the future is the past. Microwave for broadband like AT&T Long Lines. Now it looks like selling those towers off was like Polaroid selling off anything digital.
Sure certs matter, when it's the HR department that's doing the hiring. Certs are paper. Without realworld experience, you are going to find it incredibly difficult to get hired anywhere. The majority of the better/best IT guys I know across a variety of areas don't have certs but the have loads of experience.
I have I think 9 years implementing NTish technologies in all environments (soho, office, LAN/WAN, Enterprise, insert buzz compliant phrase here). I pack what I think are two blow-off certs that someone had to have because we were a partner (I was CTO at the time and wanted a junket). This is true in Internetworking, desktop support, etc. I been on every rung of the ladder in the corporate world, acedemic world, small business, etc. I can rattle off 30 names in about 2 minutes where this is the same.
A CS degree isn't necessarily that important either. I bachelor's degree in anything can help. I know a lot of people who studied economics that work in IT (I *think* that's an aberation though).
You should find an organization like a non-profit that has no budget or clue about technology but has a real need for help and direction. Volunteer to be their IT guy. Explain to them your situation. You both benefit. Better yet, do it for two. You've now got two real-world examples to put on your resume. And you aren't working for free. You are working for experience that goes on the resume and will help you in your job search. Hell, get them to give you a title at the non-profits.
Then, after you are gainfully employed and you've got money to spend, if you feel like you still need those certs, get them. Just remember: the cert industry is an industry. The overall goal is to blow more of the out the door because they make more money. That's not to say that there aren't good dedicated instructors at some places but it's an ugly business and makes the companies the certs are for a lot of money (MS, Cisco, etc.). Novell certified folks were considered a dime a dozen back 10-12 years ago, the MS ones became that in the late '90s and I've got a feeling that the Cisco ones are become that after interviewing some of them (yes, I know my way around various IOS's). The only one that retained it's cache if I remember correctly was Banyan.
And they went the way of the dodo.
Features like: menu systems, custom greetings based on caller id, remote access, voice recognition ("igor hold" "holding") and such would be ideal.
Check out Asterisk. It's got all the features you ask about, supports POTS, ISDN, T-1, E-1, TDM, SIP, MGCP, etc., etc., ad naseum. You can easily setup a separate call queue based on the caller ID value, call-back, IVR, etc.I haven't been lurking in the list recently but you probably can do voice commands (roll your sleves up).Then you don't have to syncronize.
If you haven't already installed SSH on a machine in both locations, do so.
Follow the "Setting up Samba over SSH Tunnel mini-HOWTO" by Mark Williamson . Then you can use the server on each side to share out the files on the other side and not even change anything about how your users do anything. It's very simple to set up. It's 3 steps on each side plus adding it into a log in script or mapping on the individual machines. So you should be ready in 5 minutes.
If you still want to syncronize, there are tons of tools to do that including Unison.
Amtrak problem is Amtrak.
Don't blame Amtrak. This is a political mess yet Amtrak takes the blame. Congress mandates that Amtrak act like a lean business yet provide the benefits of a government service. They are required to do things like operate unprofitable routes/timetables, etc. They are in the same long-term no win situation that the Post Office has been put in. When it's a political mess, ultimately, the blame lies with the People for either being 1) too apathetic or 2) too selfish (what? the goverment should pay for X but don't you dare tax me to pay for it).
Unfortunately, that's not how it works. There are lots of backend deals and payments. You pay one amount upfront and based on what you sell of a vendors OS (Microsoft) depending on your size, you get a backend payment. It's true with some other vendors and also with some hardware vendors. How do I know? We'll I previously headed up a smallish integrator and previously was the CTO/CIO of a US$40 Million per year PC distributor. At the distributor, I also set up a unit dealing just with corporations for those much larger margins.
I'm the president of an business only ISP and we've been looking at adding voice services for 4 1/2 years. We sell select office buildings where each tenant gets separately firewalled service. I was offered wholesale long distance last year by Worldcom for an insanely low rate of about 1/10th of a US cent per minute. Yes this was to be tied to a voice circuit terminated in a colo we were already it. So for about US$250 per month and US$0.00014 per minute in excess of 500,000 minutes, it's easy to be able to afford long distance bunding even without VOIP for long distance. Even if that's about 1/5 the number of minutes in a 30 day month, it's kind of like bandwidth; a T-1 goes a long long way for a lot of people especially if you minimize bandwidth usage.
Couple that with a soft phone switch like Asterisk with it's pseudo-TDM devices and you've got an incredibly inexpensive solution. Your real costs are advertising and support, not long distance.
You could use Debian, Redhat, Mandrake, whatever. You could even use something like ASP-Linux which is designed for ASPs/ISPs but I haven't used it. We use standard Linux Distros with Webmin which someone else recommended. The are various control panels available off of the Webmin site like Virtualmin and ISP4You.
Then you can use commodity 1U chassis for substantially less than big names. Sticking with reliable components with give you inexpensive machines that will last a long long time. Before someone jumps on me saying you have to use IBM, Dell, insert-your-hardware-flavor, I used to be the CTO of a distributor that specialized in high end OEM desktops and servers so I know what I'm talking about here as well as having previously been the owner of a VAR that specialized in high end OEM gear. Now I own an ISP.
Yes, you are right. I "bill through" the amount of the charge. Hey, I host their sites, do the DNS and provide the email.
No, I don't particularly like them. Partly, I use them because they're the devil I know. Partly, I use them because of the frequent flyer miles for transfering domains or renewing for 5 years. And in case no one has looked, it's only $35 per year for a single registration, $19 per year for 5 years or a transfer and I've got a link somewhere for $17 per year regardless. Hey, when you handle DNS and registration for a chunk of people, the frequent flyer miles add up. It's 1000 miles per transfer or 5 year renewal.
They've been producing CPUs and doing development of these processors for maybe 5 years now. What's happening with that?
Perhaps it's the pray-er and not the pray-ee that benefits by feeling better that they are trying to make a difference.
How did such a guy get elected?
Um, they are appointed.
Vanu is the son of Amar Bose, founder of Bose, the maker of all of those great speakers. Another MIT wizkid.
Really it does. If you are after increased security, server consolidation isn't necessarily the way to go in any environment. For example, placing additonal daemons on a single machine adds rather than reduces the number of potential exploitable holes a single system has. Running Exchange and MS SQL or MySQL and Sendmail or whatever on the same box presents a greater number of potential points of vulnerability that a minimalistic install and just Exchange or Sendmail or whatever simply because more things are running on the machine. This same concept can be used to distribute updates from your distribution vendor (if that is the route you take) from a single source which has the added benefit of reducing your bandwidth consumption.
Also, reducing the number of servers doesn't necessary reduce the the amount of administration. Most admins download and patch servers one at a time regardless of the environment. You could for example (in a *nix environment), have a base environment server that you used to do all of your patching work/distribution on/from; then you create the package of your choice (RPM, .deb whatever) for install on the other machines using an update script. Or you could copy the binaries, conf files, etc., over to the other machines instead of packaging. For a Windows machine, you can script the patching as well using a decent login processor like KiXtart with a login script that checks recursively for patches and applies what you want. Or you could use Perl and command line tools to accomplish this across your servers (workstations too). This is beyond most Windows adminstrators. It shouldn't be but it is. I've been administering Windows and networks since just after NT 3.1 Advanced Server shipped, Netware about the same length of time, and Linux servers and networks about 5 or 6 years and most Windows admins are too indimidated or lazy to learn anything other than the GUI that ships. I've done this done on all environments for years and years and have seen or know others that do this too.
I believe you are confused. SAIC sold Netsol to Verisign. SAIC is the secretive, well connected bunch that knows their way around Langely. Fort Meade too I believe.
Sorry, but we already knew it - we have seen how George W. Bush was non-elected.
Not true. He was elected by a majority. Of 9.
Careful, now, or you will piss off Athena! She is the Goddess of Geekdom.