This kind of reminds me of the display screen in the captain's quarters with the head of Professor Martenson on the Martenson Screen. I always knew there was a purpose behind all of that mist.
I'll agree OVH has some beefy server options with 20TB traffic. Depending on your needs, you could get by with an EG class server for £99.99 which is roughly $158.18
I believe OVH is the best option out there. A friend of mine has a server with over 10,000 active users and the system and bandwidth seem to keep up quite nicely according to him, but he is using the HG class server too.
If you do plan on going the camera route, you may want to take a look at www.cowboyfrank.net and look through his camera reviews. Based on his info, I went and got the Logitech Webcam Pro 9000. [Part No. 960-000048] Google the Part number if you are serious about getting one or more of them. The price is pretty good for them right now (under $50 with an average price of $75).
I second this. Portable Apps rock. There are programs on that site that meet all of your criteria for programs to put on a pen drive. Question is; will you be buying a large enough pen drive to hold all of those programs?
Actually this should be a non issue. I can buy Mac OS X for about $30 and run it on my existing PC hardware. Take a look at the following web site:
http://tonymacx86.blogspot.com/
Like MoFoQ (584566) says, put it in the case and secure it near the HDD so that it can't get lost, but use a flash drive that is equivalent to the recovery partition, that way you can account for the HDD failure and losing recovery media. Having a recovery partition isn't moot. It allows you to restore the system without having to hunt down some sort of recovery media. Doing both ways isn't a total waste as it does offer better value to most users and even some of the advanced users too.
And if the hardware is new enough to boot from USB, then yes, forego the boot partition and hook up this "internal" flash drive up as the recovery partition as RLaager (200280) previously stated.
Lately, I've given up on making CDs/DVDs because they are just too bulky. Flash drives are cheap and neatly compact. It isn't hard at all to make a flash drive read-only and bootable these days. Most recovery partitions don't need to be more than 2GB and what does a good quality 2GB flash drive cost these days?
Granted on hardware that won't boot from USB, I do still create a recovery CD in addition to a recovery partition, but storing the media in the case makes sure you can actually "find" the media when needed.
Am I the only one who cringes at reading this? If you are dealing with someone who needs a recovery disk in the first place, do you really want them to deploy hopelessly outdated drivers and software on their machines?
For older machines, most of the time there is no such thing as newer drivers, so (depending on the age of the hardware) having "outdated" drivers is all there will ever be.
For the MBR being broken, why not just take a dd image of that section of the HDD and present that as an option as part of the repair process? Having backups of the MBR, partition table and FAT are good ideas for recovery options IMHO.
I do like Ubuntu as a distro. I haven't tried Linux Mint (but I probably will soon). I've also used Solaris, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, RedHat Linux, and Debian Linux. Generally, the biggest difference between all of them is how the Package Manager (Add/Remove Programs or "Programs and Features" equivalent) works to install or remove programs from the system (the same holds true for building your own packages of existing programs).
As long as you have fairly modern hardware, VirtualBox or VMWare are good ways to go to try Linux before you attempt a dual boot. Dual boot is recommended in the sense that you will either be "forced" to learn it or forget about it all together. Using Linux in a VM allows you to have the Linux computer in one window, and still have a web browser in another to research how to actually "use" Linux and the many different ways it can be used. You could then even see what different "Window Managers" exist and what one you like best.
Window Managers are essentially the software that manage the presentation of XWindows as a GUI (Graphical User Interface). Mac OSX is Unix under-the-hood and uses a Window Manager as well. There are many different window managers out there. The 2 biggest Window Manager environments are KDE and Gnome. I personally like Fluxbox as a window manager because it is clean, light-weight and allows lots of apps to become full screen easily.
VMWare is very popular and a full featured virtual machine platform. Probably very well supported too. Personally I use VirtualBox because I find it to be the least CPU intensive of the virtual machine platforms I've tried. Also, it is FREE.
An alternative to running Linux in a Dual Boot or virtual machine environment is to install Linux as the only OS on a spare Pentium class computer. Many of these can be had for cheap AND depending on where you live, a quick dumpster dive could land you a decent system for this task.
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This kind of reminds me of the display screen in the captain's quarters with the head of Professor Martenson on the Martenson Screen. I always knew there was a purpose behind all of that mist.
I'll agree OVH has some beefy server options with 20TB traffic. Depending on your needs, you could get by with an EG class server for £99.99 which is roughly $158.18
http://www.ovh.co.uk/dedicated_servers/eg_best_of.xml
I believe OVH is the best option out there. A friend of mine has a server with over 10,000 active users and the system and bandwidth seem to keep up quite nicely according to him, but he is using the HG class server too.
If you do plan on going the camera route, you may want to take a look at www.cowboyfrank.net and look through his camera reviews. Based on his info, I went and got the Logitech Webcam Pro 9000. [Part No. 960-000048] Google the Part number if you are serious about getting one or more of them. The price is pretty good for them right now (under $50 with an average price of $75).
I second this. Portable Apps rock. There are programs on that site that meet all of your criteria for programs to put on a pen drive. Question is; will you be buying a large enough pen drive to hold all of those programs?
Actually this should be a non issue. I can buy Mac OS X for about $30 and run it on my existing PC hardware. Take a look at the following web site: http://tonymacx86.blogspot.com/
Its all part of implementation. Look at how eBay has done it. There are Captchas and the like last I checked for this sort of thing.
Reputation systems seem to have worked quite well for eBay and other similar sites, I don't see why it can't work for some sort of SSL.
Like MoFoQ (584566) says, put it in the case and secure it near the HDD so that it can't get lost, but use a flash drive that is equivalent to the recovery partition, that way you can account for the HDD failure and losing recovery media. Having a recovery partition isn't moot. It allows you to restore the system without having to hunt down some sort of recovery media. Doing both ways isn't a total waste as it does offer better value to most users and even some of the advanced users too.
And if the hardware is new enough to boot from USB, then yes, forego the boot partition and hook up this "internal" flash drive up as the recovery partition as RLaager (200280) previously stated.
Lately, I've given up on making CDs/DVDs because they are just too bulky. Flash drives are cheap and neatly compact. It isn't hard at all to make a flash drive read-only and bootable these days. Most recovery partitions don't need to be more than 2GB and what does a good quality 2GB flash drive cost these days?
Granted on hardware that won't boot from USB, I do still create a recovery CD in addition to a recovery partition, but storing the media in the case makes sure you can actually "find" the media when needed.
Am I the only one who cringes at reading this? If you are dealing with someone who needs a recovery disk in the first place, do you really want them to deploy hopelessly outdated drivers and software on their machines?
For older machines, most of the time there is no such thing as newer drivers, so (depending on the age of the hardware) having "outdated" drivers is all there will ever be.
For the MBR being broken, why not just take a dd image of that section of the HDD and present that as an option as part of the repair process? Having backups of the MBR, partition table and FAT are good ideas for recovery options IMHO.
I do like Ubuntu as a distro. I haven't tried Linux Mint (but I probably will soon). I've also used Solaris, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, RedHat Linux, and Debian Linux. Generally, the biggest difference between all of them is how the Package Manager (Add/Remove Programs or "Programs and Features" equivalent) works to install or remove programs from the system (the same holds true for building your own packages of existing programs).
As long as you have fairly modern hardware, VirtualBox or VMWare are good ways to go to try Linux before you attempt a dual boot. Dual boot is recommended in the sense that you will either be "forced" to learn it or forget about it all together. Using Linux in a VM allows you to have the Linux computer in one window, and still have a web browser in another to research how to actually "use" Linux and the many different ways it can be used. You could then even see what different "Window Managers" exist and what one you like best.
Window Managers are essentially the software that manage the presentation of XWindows as a GUI (Graphical User Interface). Mac OSX is Unix under-the-hood and uses a Window Manager as well. There are many different window managers out there. The 2 biggest Window Manager environments are KDE and Gnome. I personally like Fluxbox as a window manager because it is clean, light-weight and allows lots of apps to become full screen easily.
VMWare is very popular and a full featured virtual machine platform. Probably very well supported too. Personally I use VirtualBox because I find it to be the least CPU intensive of the virtual machine platforms I've tried. Also, it is FREE.
An alternative to running Linux in a Dual Boot or virtual machine environment is to install Linux as the only OS on a spare Pentium class computer. Many of these can be had for cheap AND depending on where you live, a quick dumpster dive could land you a decent system for this task.