IBM shops often use notes, since they already depend on IBM as a vendor. I know Kaiser-Permanente, the HMO, just recently swtiched from MS Exchange (A.K.A. Mmm... sex change...) and Outlook over to Lotus Notes after weathering one too many email viruses. KP uses DB2 on RS6000s running AIX.
Washington Mutual probably uses Notes too. I know they're an IBM customer. At the branch in Cheney you could see the S/390 behind the counter. If you get a look at the screen of a loan officer's PC, it's not running Windows but OS/2. From what I understand, the banks buy the AS400s and get OS/2 thrown in for free.
Casinos are another safe bet, if you want a job working with IBM iron and Notes. The new ones being run by native americans seem to prefer NT/2000, but the "old" corporate-run casinos of Las Vegas mostly use AS/400s for their accounting.
The Associated Press (AP) used to be all-IBM too. All the turnkey systems they used to sell newspapers ran nothing but OS/2, but last year they made a big promotion about they're new commitment to Windows 2000, and shortly after that all our AP systems were replaced by IBM PCs with W2K. They may still may be a place to look if you're looking for a Notes sysadmin position.
Re:Is this really healthy?
on
To The Pain
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· Score: 2
Adjust your desk so your elbows, forearms, wrists and hands form a straight line. That will keep any carpal tunnel from getting worse. It does go away with time if not aggravated (I've had it bad and recovered a couple of times now).
If you're worried about getting a bad case, so bad you won't be able to work, do this every morning:
- Hold you hands out straight at the level of your ribs - Clench your hands into fists as tight as you can for 1 second - Flex your hands open and splay your fingers as far as they will go for 5 seconds. - Repeat until you've done 5 to 10 of them.
This is supposed to "scuff" off the accumulations in the carpal tunnel and improve the clearance your tendons have inside your wrists. Ever since I added that stretch to my morning, my CT problems have stopped recurring. I'm not any kind of medical professional, but of the medical advice I've received on this, holding your wrists straight and the clench/flex stretch seem to do the most real good.
As for reforming the entire PC/Consumer Electronics industry in one fell swoop, I think it's going to take more than one post. Best of luck. Just don't hurt yourself with all that impassioned typing.
I think an old PC is a great suggestion. As long as you're using DMA to a good sound card and have enough RAM, most anything should work fine.
However, there's no need to limit yourself to floppies for diskless, dedicated function machines anymore. Sure they cost less than a buck, but there's lots of affordable ways around having to cram everything in a 1.4/2.8 MB compressed image.
1) Use a CompactFlash card (8 MB $10, constantly getting cheaper) and a CF-ATA adapter ($25-$40). They act exactly like a hard-drive in every way, except less heat, power drain, and noise. Mediocre speed, but a seek time of ZERO (i.e. the transfer rate from CF is flat, unlike the bursts of data you get from a hard disk). No software required. They slowly wear out from writes, but as long you don't use them for swap they should last ~10 years. Or just mount read-only, or upgrade every so often to whatever size costs $10 this year (and buy spares). You can master the CF card on a laptop with PCMCIA slots or with a USB CF reader.
2) Use a motherboard with Disk-On-Chip or a DoC ISA/PCI card. Almost like a hard-drive, but you need a utility floppy to set it up the first time. M-Sys has docs on these (www.m-sys.com). Drivers are optional, depending how you want the OS to use the DoC. GNU drivers for linux are available. An "old" PC may not have the DoC socket, but most $100 motherboards have them now.
3) Use a motherboard with PEX or ethernet boot support to boot the machine off the LAN. If your building a network appliance, it needs a network anyway. For secure boxes, use two NICs and boot off the one not connected accessible to the internet. Most Intel motherboard with a NIC on-board support several network boot methods. You can add a boot ROM to a PCI/ISA ethernet card, but it's just easier to use a motherboard with support built in.
4) Use a spare CD-ROM drive to boot from a CD-R or -RW burned on your workstation. 700 MB of space, better access time and transfer rate than floppies for about the same price. One problem would be if the CD-ROM can't read CD-R or CD-RW discs, and some older drives cannot.
5) Solid-state ATA disks are available now, and the price isn't nearly as bad as the solid-state SCSI disks that used to cost a little more than a car for under 100 megs. Still pretty expensive, but it mounts inside like a regular hard disk, only quieter and with no seek time.
Not that floppies aren't that bad, but there's no need to settle for their restrictions and liabilities anymore. You can craft a silent, low-power solution with no (or fewer) moving parts to wear out and over 8 megs of space for under $50. And you can still use a compressed disk image on top of that for even more space. A bootable CD gives you the most space for your buck, while CF is probably is easiest to implement and upgrade, while booting over the network offers the best of both, if you can figure out how to set it up and have a suitable boot server to use. If you've got small kids or dumb/mean friends, ejectable boot floppies and CDs are just asking for trouble.
Sure you can buy something off the shelf. But it's more than likely the company will go out of business or cease all support for the product, leaving you SOL if it has unresolved issues. Why pay when you can't create all your own problems for free?;-)
There's no reason to use thin clients anymore, unless you already have a multiuser host that's going to waste or you can afford to buy 1 to 3 EXPENSIVE, high-power servers every few years to keep the performance of the back-end up.
PCs are cheap. Software can automate all the administration issues of caring for dozens to hundred of seats. A lot of the software is free. Managed PCs are much cheaper, and if you aggressively audit and prune the files installed on them (i.e. delete all the files that aren't absolutely required to use the PC's applications) then the file system becomes very light and you'll be surprise how much faster the PC performs. (O'Reily has a good book on Optimizing Windows 95 for Games -- ignore the title, rip off the cover if you have to bring it to work -- it has the info you need)
Look at revrdist for Macs and PCRDist for Windows. They automatically syncronize all the files and registry entries of the client to a master image (with rule sets for exceptions/iterations). You could hack something similiar together with boot floppies or rebooting the PC off the network (password protect the BIOS) and reimage the hard drive from scripts on a file server. I ran across a page on the net about someone who already did this with a linux file server, but the
Also look at http://www.infrastructures.org for UNIX-only take on the same idea as revrdist.
Once you do this, you get the best of both worlds: the zero-administration of thin clients and the local performance of fat clients. This also places a minimal load on your file servers (except when you reimage the whole lab!) because you can easily cache all the apps, files, and libs students will need on the local disk.
It's common knowledge modern OSes are complete bloatware. It's not common knowledge that you can par down the OS and apps to a bare minimum of files using an imaging file server. On a standalone PC, if you remove too many files, you can paint yourself into a corner that requires a reinstall or rescue disk/floppy to fix. With an imaging server, you can experiment by moving files out of their directories on the server, rebooting the client, and then running a few experiments or scripts to verify it all works. If it doesn't, put the files back and reboot the client again until you figure it out.
Thin Clients are hip because they're easy to sell. You can't really sell the above methodology in a shrink-wrapped box -- you have to hire and pay somebody knowledgable to do it, which makes it a hard-sell of a panacea.
MCS works quite well, especially well on Fibre Channel and Brand Name Hardware such as Dells and Compaqs.
Except your post is factually incorrect. MSCS is a POS -- to say it works "well" is true if you mean "well... it works.... kinda."
It basically just enables multi-initiator support for SCSI chains (so a chain can be connected to 2+ hosts), allows more memory for large applications (if the application is written correctly to use it) and (this is the main feature) allows services to fail-over from one host to the other.
This is where it MSCS should be good, but it just isn't. Basically imagine you have 2 NT servers. A is running Services, and B isn't running any Services except the basics. Do a NET STOP on all the services on A, wait for it to completely finish, and then, and only then, do a NET START on those same services on B. Visualize how long in your mind that would take, and then double it. If anything goes wrong, like a service won't stop (imagine that) or a service can't start due to a dependancy, it throws a monkey into the whole works.
Also, the clusters disks can only be used by one node at a time, and while it would have been trivial for Microsoft to expose each disk to both hosts always (by automatically mounting the disk on the "other" node over the network) they just didn't bother.
It's also got alot of setup caveats. Read the entire manual very carefully and take notes before you even purchase hardware. Then go on-line and read all the addendums and known issues. A good understanding of NT is not enough -- MSCS is a different build (compile) of NT than the Workstation/Server version. She is a woman who has serious issues, some of which can't be fixed by you.
And then there's the blue screens. And the 7 hour installation procedure. And the way you are strongly cautioned from deleting or changing some MSCS settings after being set, with loving MS-style advice that a reinstall is your best bet.
However, for just plain applications, it's OK. Anything you can run from the command line proper can be put in the cluster and will fail over. So if your one of the majority of Acrobat Distiller user who installs in a manner that violates the EULA, i.e. on NT polling the "In" folder of a network share, MSCS can fail over Distiller VERY FAST (it's not a service, so no delays). However, with a little brains and a little ActiveState Perl (or cygwin I suppose) you could hack together a work-a-like using DFS + rsync and save a lot of money.
Kudos to your post for not trying to engender a flame war. But you kinda imply that MSCS is worth the exorbitant price tag, and it just isn't for what little it does and the problems and extra headache it brings with it. I'm not flaming you, just spreading the word:
DON'T BUY MSCS -- IT SUCKS. IF THEY GIVE IT TO YOU FOR FREE, SEND IT BACK OR GIVE IT TO SOMEONE YOU DISLIKE.
Back on topic, what MS may try and sell you is something based on the Microsoft Message Queue and the Microsoft Transaction Server. Those are more BackOffice-variety PHB-entitled products that really don't do much except provide an API for sending guaranteed IPC and doing transactions, even for VB monkeys who don't really understand what that means but think it sounds just plain awesome. Free with the option pack.
This is part of that Microsoft program to divert "wins" from Linux to Microsoft at all cost, especially from IBM. So the sales rep probably doesn't have a clue what your cluster really does, what you want it for, or what MS products it would actually take to build a knockoff. They may have a anti-beowulf team cooking something up right now, and guess what pal?! They're hoping your administration will take the bait of free hardware and licenses, and you'll end up beta-testing a 0.1a version of some bizarro-beowulf for MS. What a deal!!!
Good luck. I'd stick to you guns and inside on using something already proven to work for your goals, like Beowulf or AppleSeed.
As long as they port RuneQuest, Stormbringer, and Villains & Vigilantes to linux, that's all the RPGs I need on my AS/400. That's what this topic is about, right?
Hopefully, we can finally advance levels without calling IBM and giving our support contract number.
Hold on just a sec... Lemme find those ten-sided dice. I feel a Idea roll coming on...
Mine isn't by any means an "ultimate" watch. But it has features I couldn't find in any other watch for a reasonable price.
I have a VibraLite 3 medical alert watch. It has a vibrating alarm mode like you find in pagers or cell phones. It's intended for the deaf or people who need notification that it's time to take their medication without an annoying beep telling the whole room about it. I use it for cooking, laundry, running long batch jobs or downloads on the computer, or anything else that I can leave running unsupervised. It's also good for street parking, if all you can find is a 1 hour spot. And also to be notified of the passage of time without having to interrupt what I'm doing or keep checking the clock.
It has an hourly chime (feeling the watch shake against your wrist every 60 minutes really helps keep track of the passage of time when you're working on something that requires heavy concentration), a 2nd clock (for another time zone -- I set mine to GMT), two daily alarms, a stopwatch, and a countdown timer. All of them run independantly of one another, so you can have the stopwatch and the countdown timer running at the same time.
The controls are also fairly simple and consistent. Most medical aids are designed to be usable by both the very young and old, and possibly infirmed, so the controls mind-numbingly straightforward. You won't have to refer back to the manual to find out the magic key sequence to do something. You can teach someone how to key all they features in under a minute, so it's an easy watch to loan to someone temporarily.
You can find it at any medical supply store for about $50 if you shop around. The vibrating alarm does run down the battery faster than a plain digital watch would. But you can disable the alarm, or the hourly "chime", before you go to bed or won't be needing it to save power. I've had mine 8 months so far without having to change the battery. The vibrations are very, very weak now, but it still keeps fairly accurate time.
Downsides? The vibrating alarm at first feels like a large insect has landed on the back of wrist and is rooting around on your skin looking for a place to lay its eggs. It's pretty disconcerting until you get used to it. If your mind has a tendancy to wander, getting bit on the wrist every hour on the hour will cure you of it really quick. I also would have liked even more alarms than it has, but I couldn't find better even at REI or the big-name watch company web sites.
Oh, and an embedded teleport bracelet would be handy. I'd pay a few bucks extra to be able to escape any situation instantly by shouting into my watch "TELEPORT! VILLA!! NOW!!!" I'd pay even more if the teleport operator wasn't Villa...
PS: I used to run Exchange -- so if you think I am not tracking this message, think again. Don't forward it! And if you have forward rules that have forwarded this message, then perhaps you should think again about forwarding internal email with those rules. I want to give you folks all the information I can in a very open way. If we continue to have bad apples or careless people out there, I will not be able to help you by sending this kind of information!
He forgot to say: Make sure you only use Copy and Paste or File, Save Message As... to leak this memo to this press.
Are you sure this guy doesn't work for Microsoft's network security???;-)
The problem is keeping the CD up-to-date. It's too much trouble for your library. If you're going to pester your librarian with your ideas, its got to be something that's worth their money and time. "It'd be great!" is not a good enough reason.
- Get your LUG together and chip in enough money to buy permanant subscriptions for the library for a few distributions. You could pool enough money to buy them a 10 year CD subscription, subject to renewal if your LUG is around in 10 years.
- Do some serious fundraising and create a foundation. You basically need enough money that the annual interest is enough to pay for the CD subscription renewal, with enough left over to offset inflation. You'll also need a lawyer, a grant/proposal-writer, and some rich, gullible, er... generous friends.
- Simpler yet, communicate to the library what exactly free software means. If you do your job right, they'll see the CDs don't need to be checked out at all -- they can burn copies and charge enough to cover costs just like they do for photocopies of microfiche or other special services.
- Or give them something turnkey. Build and donate a computer system to mirror a few distributions over the internet with a simple menu to burn CDs for patrons on request. They could charge a reasonable price, say $3-$5 which might cover the media and bandwidth overhead.
Whatever you do, you're also going to have to make sure the CDs are freely liscenced materials or you could run into an administative snag with some official terrified that the library is going to be sued into oblivion for software piracy. It doesn't matter if the risk is real or not, but the perception of their being a risk will cause the library to turn down the proposal.
It'd be great to check out linux CDs from the library, but to be honest you already can, and you just didn't notice. Go to the computer books sections and find a book on Linux that says "CD enclosed!" and take it to the front desk. They'll bring you the CDs and check 'em out to you. So really, the only point of doing what you want to do is to do away with the need for the "Dummies" book to accompany the CD. The only reason to do that is if your Linux CDs in the library have some advantage to compensate for not being bundled with a book.
But there ARE advantages to be had. One, with a subscription or a mirror, the library always has a copy that is up-to-date, with no effort on the part of their staff. Two, the resource is digital and under non-restrictive license, so it can be copied perfectly, repeatedly, and inexpensively, all without fear of legal reprisals. The CD then stays in the library and is therefore always "checked in" -- no waiting lists, no missing copies, no interlibrary loan. One well-equipped library can provide the CDs or mirrors over the WAN/MAN to all the other libraries in the county or even the state!
Before you bother your local library with any poorly-research ideas (especially harvested from poorly edited or mispelled slashdot posts... case in point...), you should figure out how to provide the maximum service and utility to library patrons with minimal cost and maintenance for the library. Part of the problem with our library systems failure to move into the digital age is that people keep treating digital media like books. Software is different. There's no rational reason to "check out" CDs of software, especially free software, when unlimited copies can be made for $1 each.
RMS (rms@stallman.org) or anybody at the FSF (http://www.fsf.org) could probably give you better advice than I could.
1st, call the Linux vendors: IBM, RedHat, SUSE, HPaq(?), and whoever else wants to play. Always do that first, and do exactly what you would do in the real world if you weren't buying software: ask the guy on the phone who they would recommend if they don't carry what you need. If they won't help you, find someone else at that company to talk or get their boss on the phone. Just asking a company "Do you have a product that does X, Y, and Z?" indicates to them some product demand, and they just might add such a product to their line-up on the basis of a few inquiries and a junior manager looking to climb the corporate ladder.
Head over to bsdmall.com and look under "Applications". They have commercial software for FreeBSD (mostly), almost all of which also has a Linux version you can order off the site. Heavily slanted towards ISPs, but take a look.
The other tool I would hunt down is VA's software for the Wired-For-Management (WFM, EMP, Wake-On-Lan, PEX, blah blah blah) features of Intel motherboards. It's like HP OpenView but just for controlling the motherboards over the LAN or out-of-band through the EMP.
And there are some do it yourself solutions (for which you could hire a consultant):
- Installing SNMP on your linux boxes. HP OpenView can talk to that -- that's all it basically does, beside the plugins and the availability of HPOV consultants...;-)
- Use a "meta" package. Use the packaging tools of your distribution (rpm, deb) to make your own package. You don't have to put anything in it (but you can). The idea is to then make that meta package dependant on the packages you want installed. Then create answers files for each package to make sure all the yes/no/select questions get answered automatically. Then you can boot the PC off the network, enter the command to install the meta package (or set up the rc scripts to do it) and you can rebuild any of your machines automagically in a few unattended minutes. Customize the pre- and post- install script for more power.
- Dave Roth has a good article describing a very affordable solution for bring an NT WAN under automatic control using Perl. The same concepts could be applied to NT without too much heavy thinking. If you use 2000, you've probably already read this, but check it out: http://www.roth.net/conference/lisant/1999/
Power cost and sheer draw are the big obstacles to putting beowulf-style clusters in your house. I know a guy who was given a surplussed IBM 704 Server (4xPII@200, 512 MB RAM, Mylex RAID SCSI-2 PCI card w/ 64 MB cache, 12 hot-swappable drive-bays, 45 GB of disk space, FT 2 port ethernet, and 3, count 'em, 3 400W power supplies) from work to take home and learn on. It never worked out for him. When he powered it up the lights in his house would dim... If his wife turned on something else, it would trip the circuit breaker. Now of course you have to use your brain and not put all your heavy draw equipment on the same circuit, like the TV, the Microwave, the vacuum cleaner, and the THREE FOUR-HUNDRED WATT POWER SUPPLIES of your "free" server oh so graciously gifted to you by your work. I think he stuck it out, rearranged what appliances were plugged in where, and got the whole thing working OK...
...for one month. Then he got his power bill. It cost him his HMO co-pay to get his jaw off the floor so he could work his mouth well enough to cuss properly. That was the end of that. Last I heard, he pawned the beast off on someone else more willing to make the monthly sacrifices his silicon and metal "Seymour" required of its owner. He was just lucky it didn't need human blood to run properly (so long as the Mylex RAID is already configured).
I lucked out -- a Solaris system got taken out of service and I was given one of the SS20 workstations. It's a much less impressive machine than the 704, but it can do 4 CPUs and 512 MB of RAM on just one 50W power supply. I've had it running awhile and can't see a big difference in this month's bill from last years, as far as just total killowatt hours.
Moral of the story: whatever computers you're thinking about giving a good home (a worthy pasttime, I'd say), consider very carefully how much it's going to cost you to run. Unlike cars, computers don't cost a lot in terms of maintenance, fluids to change, or parts that wear out. But electricity is their fuel, and besides upgrades, software, and proprietary parts, electricity could easily be the #1 cost you incur for accepting a "free" computer, or building your own super-computer array in the garage.
There's a good chart that breaks it down by PS wattage vs. cents per killowatt/hour, the cost of running any device -- server, router, network appliance, etc. -- 24x7x365 for a year at:
It's sort of an anti-diet book that uses basic science to teach you how to eat adequately without a tedious amount of willpower or nutritional accounting. Here's the jist of what I've picked up so far:
3 nutrients in your diet affect most of your dietary health: protien, carbohydrates, and fat. Water, vitamins, and minerals make up the rest.
Your body needs carbohydrates to metabolize food at all.
Your body mostly burns fat to get its energy, with a little required carbohydrates to jumpstart the fire.
If you run out of carbohydrates in your blood, you stop burning fat at all. Your body goes into 'famine-preparation' mode.
To prepare for a famine, your body stores any fat in the blood into fat cells to protect you from starving to death.
To get energy without carbohydrates, your body cannibalizes its own muscle tissue by de-animating the protien into carbohydrates, which leaves nitrates in the blood as a waste product (ashes).
You're basic metabolic rate (BMR) is determined by the percentage of your body that is muscle. More muscle and you burn more calories just sitting still.
The loss of muscle tissue caused by famine-preparation lowers your BMR, causing you to burn fewer calories in general.
Any surplus of unmetabolized carbohydrates or fat in the blood gets stored as fat.
Most people run out of carbohydrates 3 to 5 hours after eating.
Digestion itself burns calories to work, but complex carbohydrates take the most calories to digest.
The big magic secret to losing weight is: eat more often. NEVER go without food or let it get to the point where you feel a nagging hunger -- that's when your body is starting to archive fat and sugar into your fat cells.
Eat some complex carbohydrates (grains, beans, legumes) every 3 to 5 hours, along with a complete protein (amount doesn't matter, almost "any" protein, however little, is "enough"). Check out something on vegetarianism for an explanation of "complete" protiens. (It's easy)
Don't eat so much that you feel "full". Digestion takes a lot of power to run. That sleepiness is your stomach diverting energy away from the rest of you to digest. If you eat more often, you don't need to eat so much each time to feel satiated (try it).
Eating too much at once overloads your digestion and causes excess food to be either stored as fat or just expelled (which dehydrates you).
Moderate eating throughout the day will burn calories just through digestion without making you feel tired.
If you eat enough carbohydrates, your body can add protein to your muscles, which will increase your BMR.
A little aerobic exersize slightly damages your muscles. They will heal back a little larger if you don't work them too hard. A 30 minute walk is "enough" of a workout.
Don't go crazy and hurt yourself. Overworking your muscles will gradually make them smaller. Too much exersize exhausts your blood sugar and causes your muscle protien to be deanimated into fuel. The process that heals back protein into your muscles needs carbohydrates, so overexertion very quickly (a few weeks) will make you weaker.
Once you have enough muscle, your body will burn fat mostly, provided you feed it enough carbohydates. Eventually, you won't be able to eat more carbohydrates by volume than your muscles can burn, if you stick to natural food (not granulated sugar).
Last and most important: you may not lose any weight. It doesn't matter. Your body composition will change from being a lot of fat with some bones, organs and muscles hiding underneath to a bunch of bones, organs and muscles with some fat in between for insulation (you need to be 5 to 20 percent composed of fat). Muscle is much denser than fat, so your "weight" may actually go up. Scales are useless and tell you next to nothing about your health. Don't weight yourself.
At that point the whole thing kind of runs itself. Supposedly. We'll see, eh?
The diet world is full of scams. Your first clue that something isn't legitimate is if it requires you to continuously shell out money (diet pills, "nutitional" shakes, health clubs for people who aren't atheletes...). The only thing that I see different about Body Fueling is that doctors look at it and give it a thumbs up. Real doctors. The kind with bad hair, ill-fitting clothes, and that far-away look in their eyes left over from years without sleep in medical school. Not the actors wearing stethoscopes you see on TV. PBS did a spot on Body Fueling in the mid-90s, which is where I heard of it. My mom is a biologist who teaches pre-med to would-be nurses and doctors, and she said it checked out with her understanding of human body chemistry and metabolism.
So eat a piece of fruit, some complex carbohydrates (like pasta, rice, lentils, peas, corn, beans, or wheat bread), and a complete protein. Drink a cup of water, juice, or tea before you eat. Drink a cup after you finish (not while you eat, if you can help it -- it defeats the digestive effect of saliva and chewing your food). Do this every 3 hours (not 5, especially if you are just starting out). Use your watch to tell you when to eat. You should stop feeling hunger pangs at all after a few days. If you miss a meal, eat a little something as soon as you can, then set your next meal 3 hours from then. Life usually doesn't cooperate with our intended schedules, so just work around interruptions. Take a 30 minute walk once a day, or something on that order. Until you get fit FIRST, any real level of exersize will probably be counterproductive. But I can't even spell exersize, so what do I know? I haven't even finished the book.
If you have a habit of eating a lot of junk food, fast food, or subsist on soda/coffee (my problem), do the body fueling first. Then see if you still feel as hungry for those things. I find if I bring 2 sandwhiches, 4 peices of fruit, and 1 cup of some entree from home (like lentils or spaghetti) that I can make it through work without the temptation to get a Coke or Mountain Dew to supress my appetite. And I don't feel jittery or tired, just alert.
If you live in an apartment or rent a house, you can't (usually) make modifications to the property at will, such as running CAT-5 through the walls. Also, you have to stay reasonably within code. If your landlord pops by, even if for some other reason than to inspect you, and sees that you've got wires strung all over the place, say through the vents or along the cieling or moulding, especially for what might sound like dubious purposes, you may be asked not so nicely to tear your wiring out. If your landlord is a jerk, he may try to say it violates your lease and get you kicked out.
HomePlug, like wireless, avoids these problems. It adapts AC power to tunnel ethernet packets across the circuit. You just need an ethernet card in your PC or a router, hub, or switch to connect to it. You DO NOT need a proprietary PCI card or adapter for your PC.
The real competitor to HPA is 802.11b wireless. Both potentially leak your network traffic wear the outside world can snoop in on it (that's why the HPA uses 56-bit DES encryption), but which will seem "more private" to homeowners and earn their trust? Then there's the performance comparison, but more importantly price. Most PCs these days have ethernet builtin, but only laptops have PCMCIA for the wireless cards. A comparison of the cost of connecting 2 nodes over HPA vs. 802.11b is left an an exercise for the reader.
Re:BIOSes should not be operating system-specific.
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LinuxBIOS Gains Steam
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· Score: 1
The BIOS should be a generic facility that can load any desired operating system.
The instant DRM meets with a Disk-On-Chip that is spacious enough and cheap enough for OEMs, the BIOS will be gone before you can say "Hey! Why won't Linux boot on this new motherboard?!" Not that it won't be hackable (just buy a new DoC, if you can bypass the CPU's DRM support) but I strongly suspect Microsoft would like nothing better than to make it nearly impossible to dual-boot or install a new OS without special OEM tools.
In the newspaper industry, you can hear the nervous talk about e-paper. The only real barrier to entry in publishing a paper is either access to a press or owning one, and for a daily paper you basically need to own your own press. The other pieces involved in making a newspaper cost next to nothing compared to the press, ink, paper, film, plates, typesetters, benders, and employing skilled pressmen. Journalists, pre-press staff, workstations, DTP software, wire feeds, photo development (digital now), etc. are all widely available and don't take millions in capital or the help of a vendor or consultant to put in place. The high cost of owning and running a press is what keeps competition between newspapers limited to the paper(s) owned by the city's local plutocrats, papers from media conglomerates (USA Today, Tribune-owned papers, etc.) and the local weeklies that earn their living criticizing the mistakes of first two. The local weeklies usually rent the use of a commercial press, which is why they're stuck coming out only once a week. The cost of starting your own paper is so high, they say you're better off to just bury your millions in your back yard and wait to see it goes up in value. It can be done, but it's a very expensive business to try to start from scratch.
Once you've got e-paper, all that is gone. Newspaper publication becomes no more expensive than web site publication, and may actually be cheaper as you may not have the "slashdot penalty", depending on how you offer your epaper over the internet: micropayments, free, suscriber only, etc.
- Newspapers can be distributed by a vending machine equipped with USB, irDA, 802.11, maybe bluetooth, maybe a CompactFlash card writer. Pay via your cell-phone, magnetic card swipe, or plain old coins.
- The vending machine will be the barrier to entry, i.e. the equivelent of owning a press. Consequently, the rich will try their best to corner all the vending machines, especially in airports, schools, and restaurants.
- However, someone will figure out they can make more money with less risk if they just charge a commision on each paper sold and then just offer more titles to choose from (out-of-town newspapers, typical newstand magazines, snap-shots of popular web sites, e-text novels, indy and alternative papers, adult material, mail-order catalogs, maybe interactive games or puzzles).
- The idea that each e-paper reader will only hold 1 title is just stupid. The free market will tear that fantasy to shreds. To just read 60-80 dpi grayscale books, the guts of a PDA from 2 or 3 years ago would be enough to hold a week or two of issues and a half-dozen full-length novels and still be cheap. It might also double as a PDA, especially if they power consumption is better and you can fold it up to fit your pockets. The media outlets will give away crappy ones, but the aftermarket and PDA vendors will take it from there, offering models that give you more freedom (more storage, ports) for just a little more money.
- DRM is going to vary. Big media outlets will definately use it, but your indy papers may let it go, and some pubs may deliberately shun including DRM in their issues as a nod to their customers. FE, if Project Gutenberg or Ibiblio can get in the game, it's reasonably certain those docs won't expire on you. You're probably going to see what's already happened with DVD players and region encoding. DMCA or not, word will get out which models can be made to bypass the DRM. The black market will not let this slide by them.
Personally, I'm more interested in when they will develop table-top displays with biometrics. Imagine an epaper screen covering the entire dining table that can distinguish between finger taps, a stylus, and irrelevant pressure to ignore, like a coffee cup or elbows set on the table. A little handwriting recognition, a PC rackmounted underneath, and you've got a nice desk to work on (or play StarCraft...).
Disable access to the campus wide email server and proxy to accounts in the group 'Student' during class time. Each classroom, building or department could have a local proxy that allows students in a given class access to certain URLs on the internet, added in by the teacher, automatically purged after they expire or by you. School schedules are mind-numbingly regular, and variations from the norm (half-days) can be handled by a script to set the stop/start times for periods. When period starts, turn unregulated access off. Period ends, access resumes. You can do the same things for lunch, as long as you have valid data which students are scheduled for which lunch. This also prevents most problems with browsing inappropriate pages during class, unless one of your teachers has a porn archive that can be found on the WLAN.
Other than that, your school has given the students laptops... what did you expect they would do with them. Doodle? Write embarrassing poems? Reverse engineer the entire MacOS with MacsBug? Turn off access using an automated system and you won't have to police so much. Not to mention your server load will drop, letting you go a few more years between server upgrades.
The problem with VNC is that you'd have to lock down the local security settings of the laptops to prevent the students from disabling it. It also wouldn't take long before one of them learns how to setup rfbproxy to send a prerecorded VNC sequence to clients, like an idle desktop with a hot key to pause/resume the fake sequence.
If your laptops run MacOS prior to X or Windows that is non-NT, then good luck securing them. The products vendors sell to secure these like Foolproof and Fortress do everthing they promise, but at the hands of a determined kid with nothing better to do but crack it, their "security" is a joke. Think "scriptkiddy".
Back in school, the instant I learned about the Psion 3 I was sold. I bought one and used it as my main PC for writing papers and taking notes all through school. It was worth every penny. For less than the cost of upgrading/replacing my old Mac to something that could run a modern version of Office, I got a tool that could import and export the latest Word formats, never crashed, booted instantly, made ZERO noise, could be locked in my desk to prevent theft, fit inside my coat pocket, had a fairly fast GUI set of apps, and only needed recharged batteries about once a month. I have no idea where you could get a decent equation editor, but let me give you some generic advice:
Look for portable, interpreted software: Java or Waba, Forth, Postscript, Python, maybe Perl (if you have the room), or even VB or JavaScript. Then you can download programs for those languages and run them on your PDA. The problem with PDAs is that they are ALL proprietary. WindowsCE models use various incompatible CPUs, and some apps work only on a certain OS versions (which usually requires a ROM upgrade to change), and models usually differ in screen depth, resolution, and the presence/absence of color, all of which can make short work of a casually written GUI app -- same story on the Psions. You have to score a version for your CPU and OS and hope that it doesn't have any show-stopper bugs. What's more likely? That someone wrote and maintained a bug free version of the exact software you're looking for that runs on your proprietary PDA? Or that a bored web developer wrote a Java applet along those lines that also runs on your PDA? With portable languages, you will have much more software available (especially freeware), and you can at least make an attempt to fix any bugs that bother you by editing the script or decompiled bytecodes. Newer PDAs are modern enough to host a compiler, but it takes too much space and time to be convenient to fix things, especially when you're "in the field". Recent Psions had Java built-in.
Go cheap. The obsolesense curve you see on PCs is steeper for PDAs because they're relatively new. Also PDAs are easy to misplace, even easier to steal, fragile, and vulnerable to falls and liquid. Even if you're careful, other students will not be and may knock it off the desk, spill drinks on it, or use their mechanical pencil on the touch screen just to see what happens. Buy the best you can get for $99, maybe $199. If the worst happens a few months later, buy a better model for another $99. No one worth knowing will care how much your toys cost, except maybe thieves.
Avoid proprietary components. Most PDAs use parts that should have a number of BMW logos on them to indicate their scarcity and cost. Most of the accessories will be available only from the OEM, mostly cables. See if you can find cables and parts at RadioShack or in JameCo catalogs instead (I was able to) -- the price difference is worth it. Also, get one with AA batteries, not a Lithium "powerpack" -- then you can buy a fresh set of replacements at any gas station or supermarket, if you have to. CompactFlash is the best storage medium right now (no batteries in the CF card, ATA pinout, FAT filesystem, works with anything).
Buy spare parts: batteries, backup batteries (the watch battery on the underside), serial cables, AC adapter, CF cards, etc. If you can afford, get a spare PDA. If you do the previous step, this should be pretty inexpensive. You don't want to have pay overnight shipping to mail a needed replacement because something bad happened. Leave them at home in a safe place. There no point in losing them if your backpack gets stolen.
Rule in favor of battery Life over performance. There's nothing fast or useful about a PDA that shuts itself off right when you need it. You can't rely on having AC power. Don't get anything that has less than 1 full day's charge. If you're using it for school, you're going to use it a lot and you might exeed that in a stretch.
Backup to media, not (only) your PC. The tools that "sync" your PDA to your PC make your PDA dependant on that PC working properly. Get sync working then just use it to add software. If you backup to flash or CF, you can make multiple copies and lock the backup in a desk or someplace safe. If someone or something happens to your computer, your PDA data will still be safe. You can then upgrade the OS on your PC without worrying whether your sync software will still work (here's a hint: it usually won't).
Password your PDA with a good pasword and keep current contact info into the "Owner" control panel. Most people are honest and will call you if they find your PDA. Don't use a password that can be "seen" by people nearby (like all numbers). You'll also want to learn the key combo to reset the password in case you get locked out. Usually, it wipes your data. But just insert your backup on CF and restore.
Other than those points (mostly a healthy mix of common sense and paranoia) a PDA is far superior to a notebook for student tasks. Unless you need essentially a portable workstation with a large screen for graphics, compilation, viewing PDFs or web pages, the CPU and disk space offered by laptops are overkill, especially given their weight, bulk, fragility, cost, short battery life, OS problems, and appeal to thieves. Beyond backups, a PDA doesn't take any system administration, virus or defragmenting tools, or any other maintenance. With good battery life, you can stop watching the clock and apply your full concentration to your work.
I'm surprised (not to say hurt, disappointed and disconsolate) that no one (am I wrong?) has come out with the equivalent of Mandrake to at least one of the BSDs -- and by equivalent I mean in a certain superficial but important way: user-friendly, pretty install, emphasis on user experience, intelligibility.
All of these are BSD-style OSes with easy installers and (almost) automatic hardware detection. The first two boot into painfully easy-to-use GUIs with hypertext help, graphical control panels, and assisted mounting/ejecting removable disks. (The Intel version of Solaris is much more difficult to install, and requires you to know your motherboard/PCI chipsets, like FreeBSD and OpenBSD.) Both MacOS X and Solaris make a comparable workstation desktop to that of Windows NT (meaning: everything except system administration and adding any 3rd-party software is a no-brainer. Especially if you RTFM). The NetBSD install is text-mode, but it's no harder than MacOS X or Solaris. All of them take under a dozen questions to install, especially if you accept the default partitioning and use DHCP or no network at all. NetBSD has some historical docs in/usr/share/doc/. They all make Debian look like filling out a 1040 (though I happen to like the Debian installer).
Really, I'm just talking about the install. Something with some graphical flair, built-in help system for new users, and a game or two, or a little slideshow, or some interesting history text files, *something* built in to play while slow parts of the install proceed.
Try leadership@apple.com and see if you can get them to slip Breakout or some decent reading material (like a bunch of Bill Gates jokes) into the next MacOS X installer. You have an iBook, and today's just might follow through on it. Solaris, incidently, will let you goof off in the shell in a seperate window and has graphical on-line help during the install. No tetris though, unless you provide it yourself on a floppy disk. NetBSD makes you wait to play Tetris until the install finishes, and even then it hides them in/usr/games, which is not in the default path. These NetBSD guys are all business, sheesh.;-)
The supported hardware page at http://www.netbsd.org/Hardware/mca.html lists ESDI MCA controllers as compatible. Your odds are good, I'd say.
Download the install floppies, and try to boot from them. Watch the messages for the edc0 controller (your card) and ed0, ed1, etc (your disks), though they might come up wd0 or sd0.
Choose "Utilities" and then the option for a shell (Bourne, not bash). Then you can try to mount the EDSI disks as FAT, or look at them with fdisk, etc. That way you can test the kernel's ability to reach the disks at all without a full install.
Whatever you do, don't format over your reference partition, or you'll need one on a floppy just to boot up, and the BIOS might try to "take back" that part of the disk, causing a great deal of disagreement with netbsd. Just look for an unallocated area on the disk with fdisk, and setup your partitions to avoid that area. I have a 9595, and it squirrels away the reference disk in the last 3 blocks of the hard drive. Any old DOS utility to examine a raw disk should help you find out what part of the disk to avoid.
I'm not a DOS enthusiast, but FreeDOS is the least consistent, least reliable version of DOS I've ever used. DR-DOS comes in a close 2nd. Be very, very careful relying on them to flash your BIOS, set peripheral firmware, configure PC RAID cards (like those stupid Mylex cards that ship with IBM servers), etc. Maybe it will work. But if what you're going to do isn't reversable, think twice.
PC-DOS 2000 from IBM is pretty cheap. If you got something the least bit wierd, like a laptop, that might be better. Of course Free/DR-DOS are free (my kind of price), but hey, you can get free cyanide by chewing on apple seeds. Purple Kool-Aid for everybody!
Of course there are rotten versions of MS/PC-DOS too, but YMMV.
You only just now noticed a problem with NT-based operating systems (like XP) and the PC: DOS utilities. To NT admins, this is old news. This problem is at least 5 years old, as long as you had to boot NT from an NTFS partition in order to gain most of its benefits (like security, automatic compress, maybe SFM).
Most people here are going to say "use floppy disks" which is cheap, but kind of reckless. You'd better make 2 or 3 copies stored in different places away from CRTs, TVs, fridges, and stereo speakers. If your machine won't boot, you can't go download a fix if your "rescue floppy" is bent up, scrambled, or moonlighting as a lint motel. As the BSD gurus have said: relying a $1 disk to fix your PC is fine if you have only $1 worth of data or your time is only worth $1. Or if you only have $1.;-)
You have lots of options:
- DOS Bootable removable media: Zip, LS-120, and even CD-R. Keep them out of the light and don't feed them after midnight.
- DOS boot floppy with NET.EXE if you have a LAN.
- A bootable FAT hard disk partition where XP can't mess with it and a 3rd party boot loader.
- Some vendors (like Dell) include a "reference partition" for their diagnostic utilities that the BIOS will boot with an F8 before NT gets a crack at even asking you. You may be able to grow the partition's size and stash all your driver installers, MBR tools, BIOS utilies, etc in there.
- Sysinternals (http://www.sysinternals.com/) has a DOS tool to read/write from NTFS partitions (not free).
- The "official" MS way... is um, well, just forget it. ERD in the dictionary should say "noun. (Jargon) A false hope. Potential security risk. Something seemingly crucial, yet useless misplaced, maybe on the bus. See 'Placebo'."
That's a completely incomplete list. Read some NT sites and you'll find some more ways other people have worked around this moronic position NTFS boot disks puts you in. Or read the Cryptonomicon and pay attention to the repeated theme "Use a little ingenuity."
By comparison, Linux or *BSD are trivial to fix if they won't boot or you want to keep a DOS partition of BIOS tools and drivers to boot into without hassle. NT though has issues and an agenda. MS doesn't want you using DOS, and NT almost can't be fixed without 3rd party tools if you can't boot all the way into NT. Its like the filesystem has a built-in self-destruct mechanism that's too easy to accidently set off (like running CHKDSK, defragging, or not facing your desk towards Redmond, WA). Don't get me wrong -- I actually (ahem) like NT. A little accelerated video and lot of RAM and its a great desktop OS. But the boot sequence/fixability and support for DOS utilities is pretty raw. But hey, quirky OSes create jobs, and after all this balony about being profitable, isn't that what really matters? Hrm. That sounds like an "Ask Slashdot" waiting to happen.
Does all this apply wholesale to XP? If you don't know, NT4 is where I'd start and see what will carry over. Or just don't buy it -- it's amazing what kinds of problems a little well-placed frugality can solve. I know guys who'd pay $200 to mess up their PC so their spouse will give up trying to use it. I guess that's those "honeypots" they keep talking about...
TightVNC encoding is very efficient, and the picture consistency is much better than Hextile. HOWEVER, its CPU usage is very high, much higher than other VNC encodings. I run it on about a dozen Xeons from 400 to 700 Mhz, and connecting to the VNC server raises the CPU load by about 20%. Not that those CPU don't have 20% to spare, but the CPU usage is higher. I use the Tight encoding because it alone seems to update the Windows desktop correctly with badly behaved vendor apps. It still screws up the numeric keypad completely (to the point of uselessness) and caps lock can get out of sync between client and server.
There's also a patch to WinVNC to ignore the Windows desktop pattern, and you're going to want that.
TridiaVNC is a good source for a windows VNC client. They provide commercial support and could compile a version of WinVNC to your requirements.
If you've got a manager with money to burn, sure KVMs are nice, but you usually can't use VPN or PPP to connect to them without buying an add-on. Also, KVMs don't scale up without a suit to sign off on the purchase. If you get in new servers, you have to buy more KVM cables and after awhile another KVM switch to tier with your old one. With VNC, you just install it on the new box.
We use both. KVMs keep the "NT diarrea" to a minimum, letting us drive 16 servers with just a pair of keyboards and screens. Our server room is just too small for a monitor for every server. Consolidating server space is really what KVMs are best at.
However, PPP/VPN access is something else. Over dialup, VNC sucks, period. Over the standard 26400 connection most people get, VNC isn't really fast enough to do real work and remain calm. Over VPN via DSL or cable, VNC is perfectly fine. PCAnywhere is much better for dial-up telecommuting to Windows hosts. Turn on the maximum compression, no/minimal encryption, and downsample the color palette to 4 colors. The last bit is what does it -- a four color display updates over dialup very quickly, though it takes a little extra CPU time. Even over 19200 PCAnywhere is still usable even with the worst behaved GUI apps, like MS Access or vendorware.
Slashdot Mirror
IBM shops often use notes, since they already depend on IBM as a vendor. I know Kaiser-Permanente, the HMO, just recently swtiched from MS Exchange (A.K.A. Mmm... sex change...) and Outlook over to Lotus Notes after weathering one too many email viruses. KP uses DB2 on RS6000s running AIX.
Washington Mutual probably uses Notes too. I know they're an IBM customer. At the branch in Cheney you could see the S/390 behind the counter. If you get a look at the screen of a loan officer's PC, it's not running Windows but OS/2. From what I understand, the banks buy the AS400s and get OS/2 thrown in for free.
Casinos are another safe bet, if you want a job working with IBM iron and Notes. The new ones being run by native americans seem to prefer NT/2000, but the "old" corporate-run casinos of Las Vegas mostly use AS/400s for their accounting.
The Associated Press (AP) used to be all-IBM too. All the turnkey systems they used to sell newspapers ran nothing but OS/2, but last year they made a big promotion about they're new commitment to Windows 2000, and shortly after that all our AP systems were replaced by IBM PCs with W2K. They may still may be a place to look if you're looking for a Notes sysadmin position.
Adjust your desk so your elbows, forearms, wrists and hands form a straight line. That will keep any carpal tunnel from getting worse. It does go away with time if not aggravated (I've had it bad and recovered a couple of times now).
If you're worried about getting a bad case, so bad you won't be able to work, do this every morning:
- Hold you hands out straight at the level of your ribs
- Clench your hands into fists as tight as you can for 1 second
- Flex your hands open and splay your fingers as far as they will go for 5 seconds.
- Repeat until you've done 5 to 10 of them.
This is supposed to "scuff" off the accumulations in the carpal tunnel and improve the clearance your tendons have inside your wrists. Ever since I added that stretch to my morning, my CT problems have stopped recurring. I'm not any kind of medical professional, but of the medical advice I've received on this, holding your wrists straight and the clench/flex stretch seem to do the most real good.
As for reforming the entire PC/Consumer Electronics industry in one fell swoop, I think it's going to take more than one post. Best of luck. Just don't hurt yourself with all that impassioned typing.
I think an old PC is a great suggestion. As long as you're using DMA to a good sound card and have enough RAM, most anything should work fine.
;-)
However, there's no need to limit yourself to floppies for diskless, dedicated function machines anymore. Sure they cost less than a buck, but there's lots of affordable ways around having to cram everything in a 1.4/2.8 MB compressed image.
1) Use a CompactFlash card (8 MB $10, constantly getting cheaper) and a CF-ATA adapter ($25-$40). They act exactly like a hard-drive in every way, except less heat, power drain, and noise. Mediocre speed, but a seek time of ZERO (i.e. the transfer rate from CF is flat, unlike the bursts of data you get from a hard disk). No software required. They slowly wear out from writes, but as long you don't use them for swap they should last ~10 years. Or just mount read-only, or upgrade every so often to whatever size costs $10 this year (and buy spares). You can master the CF card on a laptop with PCMCIA slots or with a USB CF reader.
2) Use a motherboard with Disk-On-Chip or a DoC ISA/PCI card. Almost like a hard-drive, but you need a utility floppy to set it up the first time. M-Sys has docs on these (www.m-sys.com). Drivers are optional, depending how you want the OS to use the DoC. GNU drivers for linux are available. An "old" PC may not have the DoC socket, but most $100 motherboards have them now.
3) Use a motherboard with PEX or ethernet boot support to boot the machine off the LAN. If your building a network appliance, it needs a network anyway. For secure boxes, use two NICs and boot off the one not connected accessible to the internet. Most Intel motherboard with a NIC on-board support several network boot methods. You can add a boot ROM to a PCI/ISA ethernet card, but it's just easier to use a motherboard with support built in.
4) Use a spare CD-ROM drive to boot from a CD-R or -RW burned on your workstation. 700 MB of space, better access time and transfer rate than floppies for about the same price. One problem would be if the CD-ROM can't read CD-R or CD-RW discs, and some older drives cannot.
5) Solid-state ATA disks are available now, and the price isn't nearly as bad as the solid-state SCSI disks that used to cost a little more than a car for under 100 megs. Still pretty expensive, but it mounts inside like a regular hard disk, only quieter and with no seek time.
Not that floppies aren't that bad, but there's no need to settle for their restrictions and liabilities anymore. You can craft a silent, low-power solution with no (or fewer) moving parts to wear out and over 8 megs of space for under $50. And you can still use a compressed disk image on top of that for even more space. A bootable CD gives you the most space for your buck, while CF is probably is easiest to implement and upgrade, while booting over the network offers the best of both, if you can figure out how to set it up and have a suitable boot server to use. If you've got small kids or dumb/mean friends, ejectable boot floppies and CDs are just asking for trouble.
Sure you can buy something off the shelf. But it's more than likely the company will go out of business or cease all support for the product, leaving you SOL if it has unresolved issues. Why pay when you can't create all your own problems for free?
There's no reason to use thin clients anymore, unless you already have a multiuser host that's going to waste or you can afford to buy 1 to 3 EXPENSIVE, high-power servers every few years to keep the performance of the back-end up.
PCs are cheap. Software can automate all the administration issues of caring for dozens to hundred of seats. A lot of the software is free. Managed PCs are much cheaper, and if you aggressively audit and prune the files installed on them (i.e. delete all the files that aren't absolutely required to use the PC's applications) then the file system becomes very light and you'll be surprise how much faster the PC performs. (O'Reily has a good book on Optimizing Windows 95 for Games -- ignore the title, rip off the cover if you have to bring it to work -- it has the info you need)
Look at revrdist for Macs and PCRDist for Windows. They automatically syncronize all the files and registry entries of the client to a master image (with rule sets for exceptions/iterations). You could hack something similiar together with boot floppies or rebooting the PC off the network (password protect the BIOS) and reimage the hard drive from scripts on a file server. I ran across a page on the net about someone who already did this with a linux file server, but the
Also look at http://www.infrastructures.org for UNIX-only take on the same idea as revrdist.
Once you do this, you get the best of both worlds: the zero-administration of thin clients and the local performance of fat clients. This also places a minimal load on your file servers (except when you reimage the whole lab!) because you can easily cache all the apps, files, and libs students will need on the local disk.
It's common knowledge modern OSes are complete bloatware. It's not common knowledge that you can par down the OS and apps to a bare minimum of files using an imaging file server. On a standalone PC, if you remove too many files, you can paint yourself into a corner that requires a reinstall or rescue disk/floppy to fix. With an imaging server, you can experiment by moving files out of their directories on the server, rebooting the client, and then running a few experiments or scripts to verify it all works. If it doesn't, put the files back and reboot the client again until you figure it out.
Thin Clients are hip because they're easy to sell. You can't really sell the above methodology in a shrink-wrapped box -- you have to hire and pay somebody knowledgable to do it, which makes it a hard-sell of a panacea.
MCS works quite well, especially well on Fibre Channel and Brand Name Hardware such as Dells and Compaqs.
Except your post is factually incorrect. MSCS is a POS -- to say it works "well" is true if you mean "well... it works.... kinda."
It basically just enables multi-initiator support for SCSI chains (so a chain can be connected to 2+ hosts), allows more memory for large applications (if the application is written correctly to use it) and (this is the main feature) allows services to fail-over from one host to the other.
This is where it MSCS should be good, but it just isn't. Basically imagine you have 2 NT servers. A is running Services, and B isn't running any Services except the basics. Do a NET STOP on all the services on A, wait for it to completely finish, and then, and only then, do a NET START on those same services on B. Visualize how long in your mind that would take, and then double it. If anything goes wrong, like a service won't stop (imagine that) or a service can't start due to a dependancy, it throws a monkey into the whole works.
Also, the clusters disks can only be used by one node at a time, and while it would have been trivial for Microsoft to expose each disk to both hosts always (by automatically mounting the disk on the "other" node over the network) they just didn't bother.
It's also got alot of setup caveats. Read the entire manual very carefully and take notes before you even purchase hardware. Then go on-line and read all the addendums and known issues. A good understanding of NT is not enough -- MSCS is a different build (compile) of NT than the Workstation/Server version. She is a woman who has serious issues, some of which can't be fixed by you.
And then there's the blue screens. And the 7 hour installation procedure. And the way you are strongly cautioned from deleting or changing some MSCS settings after being set, with loving MS-style advice that a reinstall is your best bet.
However, for just plain applications, it's OK. Anything you can run from the command line proper can be put in the cluster and will fail over. So if your one of the majority of Acrobat Distiller user who installs in a manner that violates the EULA, i.e. on NT polling the "In" folder of a network share, MSCS can fail over Distiller VERY FAST (it's not a service, so no delays). However, with a little brains and a little ActiveState Perl (or cygwin I suppose) you could hack together a work-a-like using DFS + rsync and save a lot of money.
Kudos to your post for not trying to engender a flame war. But you kinda imply that MSCS is worth the exorbitant price tag, and it just isn't for what little it does and the problems and extra headache it brings with it. I'm not flaming you, just spreading the word:
DON'T BUY MSCS -- IT SUCKS. IF THEY GIVE IT TO YOU FOR FREE, SEND IT BACK OR GIVE IT TO SOMEONE YOU DISLIKE.
Back on topic, what MS may try and sell you is something based on the Microsoft Message Queue and the Microsoft Transaction Server. Those are more BackOffice-variety PHB-entitled products that really don't do much except provide an API for sending guaranteed IPC and doing transactions, even for VB monkeys who don't really understand what that means but think it sounds just plain awesome. Free with the option pack.
This is part of that Microsoft program to divert "wins" from Linux to Microsoft at all cost, especially from IBM. So the sales rep probably doesn't have a clue what your cluster really does, what you want it for, or what MS products it would actually take to build a knockoff. They may have a anti-beowulf team cooking something up right now, and guess what pal?! They're hoping your administration will take the bait of free hardware and licenses, and you'll end up beta-testing a 0.1a version of some bizarro-beowulf for MS. What a deal!!!
Good luck. I'd stick to you guns and inside on using something already proven to work for your goals, like Beowulf or AppleSeed.
As long as they port RuneQuest, Stormbringer, and Villains & Vigilantes to linux, that's all the RPGs I need on my AS/400. That's what this topic is about, right?
Hopefully, we can finally advance levels without calling IBM and giving our support contract number.
Hold on just a sec... Lemme find those ten-sided dice. I feel a Idea roll coming on...
Mine isn't by any means an "ultimate" watch. But it has features I couldn't find in any other watch for a reasonable price.
I have a VibraLite 3 medical alert watch. It has a vibrating alarm mode like you find in pagers or cell phones. It's intended for the deaf or people who need notification that it's time to take their medication without an annoying beep telling the whole room about it. I use it for cooking, laundry, running long batch jobs or downloads on the computer, or anything else that I can leave running unsupervised. It's also good for street parking, if all you can find is a 1 hour spot. And also to be notified of the passage of time without having to interrupt what I'm doing or keep checking the clock.
It has an hourly chime (feeling the watch shake against your wrist every 60 minutes really helps keep track of the passage of time when you're working on something that requires heavy concentration), a 2nd clock (for another time zone -- I set mine to GMT), two daily alarms, a stopwatch, and a countdown timer. All of them run independantly of one another, so you can have the stopwatch and the countdown timer running at the same time.
The controls are also fairly simple and consistent. Most medical aids are designed to be usable by both the very young and old, and possibly infirmed, so the controls mind-numbingly straightforward. You won't have to refer back to the manual to find out the magic key sequence to do something. You can teach someone how to key all they features in under a minute, so it's an easy watch to loan to someone temporarily.
You can find it at any medical supply store for about $50 if you shop around. The vibrating alarm does run down the battery faster than a plain digital watch would. But you can disable the alarm, or the hourly "chime", before you go to bed or won't be needing it to save power. I've had mine 8 months so far without having to change the battery. The vibrations are very, very weak now, but it still keeps fairly accurate time.
Downsides? The vibrating alarm at first feels like a large insect has landed on the back of wrist and is rooting around on your skin looking for a place to lay its eggs. It's pretty disconcerting until you get used to it. If your mind has a tendancy to wander, getting bit on the wrist every hour on the hour will cure you of it really quick. I also would have liked even more alarms than it has, but I couldn't find better even at REI or the big-name watch company web sites.
Oh, and an embedded teleport bracelet would be handy. I'd pay a few bucks extra to be able to escape any situation instantly by shouting into my watch "TELEPORT! VILLA!! NOW!!!" I'd pay even more if the teleport operator wasn't Villa...
Beware of Sig:
PS: I used to run Exchange -- so if you think I am not tracking this message, think again. Don't forward it! And if you have forward rules that have forwarded this message, then perhaps you should think again about forwarding internal email with those rules. I want to give you folks all the information I can in a very open way. If we continue to have bad apples or careless people out there, I will not be able to help you by sending this kind of information!
;-)
He forgot to say: Make sure you only use Copy and Paste or File, Save Message As... to leak this memo to this press.
Are you sure this guy doesn't work for Microsoft's network security???
Beware of sig:
The problem is keeping the CD up-to-date. It's too much trouble for your library. If you're going to pester your librarian with your ideas, its got to be something that's worth their money and time. "It'd be great!" is not a good enough reason.
- Get your LUG together and chip in enough money to buy permanant subscriptions for the library for a few distributions. You could pool enough money to buy them a 10 year CD subscription, subject to renewal if your LUG is around in 10 years.
- Do some serious fundraising and create a foundation. You basically need enough money that the annual interest is enough to pay for the CD subscription renewal, with enough left over to offset inflation. You'll also need a lawyer, a grant/proposal-writer, and some rich, gullible, er... generous friends.
- Simpler yet, communicate to the library what exactly free software means. If you do your job right, they'll see the CDs don't need to be checked out at all -- they can burn copies and charge enough to cover costs just like they do for photocopies of microfiche or other special services.
- Or give them something turnkey. Build and donate a computer system to mirror a few distributions over the internet with a simple menu to burn CDs for patrons on request. They could charge a reasonable price, say $3-$5 which might cover the media and bandwidth overhead.
Whatever you do, you're also going to have to make sure the CDs are freely liscenced materials or you could run into an administative snag with some official terrified that the library is going to be sued into oblivion for software piracy. It doesn't matter if the risk is real or not, but the perception of their being a risk will cause the library to turn down the proposal.
It'd be great to check out linux CDs from the library, but to be honest you already can, and you just didn't notice. Go to the computer books sections and find a book on Linux that says "CD enclosed!" and take it to the front desk. They'll bring you the CDs and check 'em out to you. So really, the only point of doing what you want to do is to do away with the need for the "Dummies" book to accompany the CD. The only reason to do that is if your Linux CDs in the library have some advantage to compensate for not being bundled with a book.
But there ARE advantages to be had. One, with a subscription or a mirror, the library always has a copy that is up-to-date, with no effort on the part of their staff. Two, the resource is digital and under non-restrictive license, so it can be copied perfectly, repeatedly, and inexpensively, all without fear of legal reprisals. The CD then stays in the library and is therefore always "checked in" -- no waiting lists, no missing copies, no interlibrary loan. One well-equipped library can provide the CDs or mirrors over the WAN/MAN to all the other libraries in the county or even the state!
Before you bother your local library with any poorly-research ideas (especially harvested from poorly edited or mispelled slashdot posts... case in point...), you should figure out how to provide the maximum service and utility to library patrons with minimal cost and maintenance for the library. Part of the problem with our library systems failure to move into the digital age is that people keep treating digital media like books. Software is different. There's no rational reason to "check out" CDs of software, especially free software, when unlimited copies can be made for $1 each.
RMS (rms@stallman.org) or anybody at the FSF (http://www.fsf.org) could probably give you better advice than I could.
Beware of Sig:
1st, call the Linux vendors: IBM, RedHat, SUSE, HPaq(?), and whoever else wants to play. Always do that first, and do exactly what you would do in the real world if you weren't buying software: ask the guy on the phone who they would recommend if they don't carry what you need. If they won't help you, find someone else at that company to talk or get their boss on the phone. Just asking a company "Do you have a product that does X, Y, and Z?" indicates to them some product demand, and they just might add such a product to their line-up on the basis of a few inquiries and a junior manager looking to climb the corporate ladder.
;-)
Head over to bsdmall.com and look under "Applications". They have commercial software for FreeBSD (mostly), almost all of which also has a Linux version you can order off the site. Heavily slanted towards ISPs, but take a look.
The other tool I would hunt down is VA's software for the Wired-For-Management (WFM, EMP, Wake-On-Lan, PEX, blah blah blah) features of Intel motherboards. It's like HP OpenView but just for controlling the motherboards over the LAN or out-of-band through the EMP.
And there are some do it yourself solutions (for which you could hire a consultant):
- Installing SNMP on your linux boxes. HP OpenView can talk to that -- that's all it basically does, beside the plugins and the availability of HPOV consultants...
- http://www.infrastructures.org Self explanatory, strongly recommended reading.
- Use a "meta" package. Use the packaging tools of your distribution (rpm, deb) to make your own package. You don't have to put anything in it (but you can). The idea is to then make that meta package dependant on the packages you want installed. Then create answers files for each package to make sure all the yes/no/select questions get answered automatically. Then you can boot the PC off the network, enter the command to install the meta package (or set up the rc scripts to do it) and you can rebuild any of your machines automagically in a few unattended minutes. Customize the pre- and post- install script for more power.
- Dave Roth has a good article describing a very affordable solution for bring an NT WAN under automatic control using Perl. The same concepts could be applied to NT without too much heavy thinking. If you use 2000, you've probably already read this, but check it out: http://www.roth.net/conference/lisant/1999/
How much power did it use at full bore? (Curious)
0 10 9e.htm
Y :w ww.samag.com/articles/2001/0109/documents/sam0109e /+cost+kilowatt+hour+router+year&hl=en&lr=lang_en
Power cost and sheer draw are the big obstacles to putting beowulf-style clusters in your house. I know a guy who was given a surplussed IBM 704 Server (4xPII@200, 512 MB RAM, Mylex RAID SCSI-2 PCI card w/ 64 MB cache, 12 hot-swappable drive-bays, 45 GB of disk space, FT 2 port ethernet, and 3, count 'em, 3 400W power supplies) from work to take home and learn on. It never worked out for him. When he powered it up the lights in his house would dim... If his wife turned on something else, it would trip the circuit breaker. Now of course you have to use your brain and not put all your heavy draw equipment on the same circuit, like the TV, the Microwave, the vacuum cleaner, and the THREE FOUR-HUNDRED WATT POWER SUPPLIES of your "free" server oh so graciously gifted to you by your work. I think he stuck it out, rearranged what appliances were plugged in where, and got the whole thing working OK...
...for one month. Then he got his power bill. It cost him his HMO co-pay to get his jaw off the floor so he could work his mouth well enough to cuss properly. That was the end of that. Last I heard, he pawned the beast off on someone else more willing to make the monthly sacrifices his silicon and metal "Seymour" required of its owner. He was just lucky it didn't need human blood to run properly (so long as the Mylex RAID is already configured).
I lucked out -- a Solaris system got taken out of service and I was given one of the SS20 workstations. It's a much less impressive machine than the 704, but it can do 4 CPUs and 512 MB of RAM on just one 50W power supply. I've had it running awhile and can't see a big difference in this month's bill from last years, as far as just total killowatt hours.
Moral of the story: whatever computers you're thinking about giving a good home (a worthy pasttime, I'd say), consider very carefully how much it's going to cost you to run. Unlike cars, computers don't cost a lot in terms of maintenance, fluids to change, or parts that wear out. But electricity is their fuel, and besides upgrades, software, and proprietary parts, electricity could easily be the #1 cost you incur for accepting a "free" computer, or building your own super-computer array in the garage.
There's a good chart that breaks it down by PS wattage vs. cents per killowatt/hour, the cost of running any device -- server, router, network appliance, etc. -- 24x7x365 for a year at:
http://www.samag.com/documents/s=1146/sam0109e/
or please use the google cached version:
http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:8pTuTII9Cd
It's sort of an anti-diet book that uses basic science to teach you how to eat adequately without a tedious amount of willpower or nutritional accounting. Here's the jist of what I've picked up so far:
- 3 nutrients in your diet affect most of your dietary health: protien, carbohydrates, and fat. Water, vitamins, and minerals make up the rest.
- Your body needs carbohydrates to metabolize food at all.
- Your body mostly burns fat to get its energy, with a little required carbohydrates to jumpstart the fire.
- If you run out of carbohydrates in your blood, you stop burning fat at all. Your body goes into 'famine-preparation' mode.
- To prepare for a famine, your body stores any fat in the blood into fat cells to protect you from starving to death.
- To get energy without carbohydrates, your body cannibalizes its own muscle tissue by de-animating the protien into carbohydrates, which leaves nitrates in the blood as a waste product (ashes).
- You're basic metabolic rate (BMR) is determined by the percentage of your body that is muscle. More muscle and you burn more calories just sitting still.
- The loss of muscle tissue caused by famine-preparation lowers your BMR, causing you to burn fewer calories in general.
- Any surplus of unmetabolized carbohydrates or fat in the blood gets stored as fat.
- Most people run out of carbohydrates 3 to 5 hours after eating.
- Digestion itself burns calories to work, but complex carbohydrates take the most calories to digest.
- The big magic secret to losing weight is: eat more often. NEVER go without food or let it get to the point where you feel a nagging hunger -- that's when your body is starting to archive fat and sugar into your fat cells.
- Eat some complex carbohydrates (grains, beans, legumes) every 3 to 5 hours, along with a complete protein (amount doesn't matter, almost "any" protein, however little, is "enough"). Check out something on vegetarianism for an explanation of "complete" protiens. (It's easy)
- Don't eat so much that you feel "full". Digestion takes a lot of power to run. That sleepiness is your stomach diverting energy away from the rest of you to digest. If you eat more often, you don't need to eat so much each time to feel satiated (try it).
- Eating too much at once overloads your digestion and causes excess food to be either stored as fat or just expelled (which dehydrates you).
- Moderate eating throughout the day will burn calories just through digestion without making you feel tired.
- If you eat enough carbohydrates, your body can add protein to your muscles, which will increase your BMR.
- A little aerobic exersize slightly damages your muscles. They will heal back a little larger if you don't work them too hard. A 30 minute walk is "enough" of a workout.
- Don't go crazy and hurt yourself. Overworking your muscles will gradually make them smaller. Too much exersize exhausts your blood sugar and causes your muscle protien to be deanimated into fuel. The process that heals back protein into your muscles needs carbohydrates, so overexertion very quickly (a few weeks) will make you weaker.
- Once you have enough muscle, your body will burn fat mostly, provided you feed it enough carbohydates. Eventually, you won't be able to eat more carbohydrates by volume than your muscles can burn, if you stick to natural food (not granulated sugar).
- Last and most important: you may not lose any weight. It doesn't matter. Your body composition will change from being a lot of fat with some bones, organs and muscles hiding underneath to a bunch of bones, organs and muscles with some fat in between for insulation (you need to be 5 to 20 percent composed of fat). Muscle is much denser than fat, so your "weight" may actually go up. Scales are useless and tell you next to nothing about your health. Don't weight yourself.
At that point the whole thing kind of runs itself. Supposedly. We'll see, eh?The diet world is full of scams. Your first clue that something isn't legitimate is if it requires you to continuously shell out money (diet pills, "nutitional" shakes, health clubs for people who aren't atheletes...). The only thing that I see different about Body Fueling is that doctors look at it and give it a thumbs up. Real doctors. The kind with bad hair, ill-fitting clothes, and that far-away look in their eyes left over from years without sleep in medical school. Not the actors wearing stethoscopes you see on TV. PBS did a spot on Body Fueling in the mid-90s, which is where I heard of it. My mom is a biologist who teaches pre-med to would-be nurses and doctors, and she said it checked out with her understanding of human body chemistry and metabolism.
So eat a piece of fruit, some complex carbohydrates (like pasta, rice, lentils, peas, corn, beans, or wheat bread), and a complete protein. Drink a cup of water, juice, or tea before you eat. Drink a cup after you finish (not while you eat, if you can help it -- it defeats the digestive effect of saliva and chewing your food). Do this every 3 hours (not 5, especially if you are just starting out). Use your watch to tell you when to eat. You should stop feeling hunger pangs at all after a few days. If you miss a meal, eat a little something as soon as you can, then set your next meal 3 hours from then. Life usually doesn't cooperate with our intended schedules, so just work around interruptions. Take a 30 minute walk once a day, or something on that order. Until you get fit FIRST, any real level of exersize will probably be counterproductive. But I can't even spell exersize, so what do I know? I haven't even finished the book.
If you have a habit of eating a lot of junk food, fast food, or subsist on soda/coffee (my problem), do the body fueling first. Then see if you still feel as hungry for those things. I find if I bring 2 sandwhiches, 4 peices of fruit, and 1 cup of some entree from home (like lentils or spaghetti) that I can make it through work without the temptation to get a Coke or Mountain Dew to supress my appetite. And I don't feel jittery or tired, just alert.
YMMV. Good luck to you.
It's just you.
If you live in an apartment or rent a house, you can't (usually) make modifications to the property at will, such as running CAT-5 through the walls. Also, you have to stay reasonably within code. If your landlord pops by, even if for some other reason than to inspect you, and sees that you've got wires strung all over the place, say through the vents or along the cieling or moulding, especially for what might sound like dubious purposes, you may be asked not so nicely to tear your wiring out. If your landlord is a jerk, he may try to say it violates your lease and get you kicked out.
HomePlug, like wireless, avoids these problems. It adapts AC power to tunnel ethernet packets across the circuit. You just need an ethernet card in your PC or a router, hub, or switch to connect to it. You DO NOT need a proprietary PCI card or adapter for your PC.
The real competitor to HPA is 802.11b wireless. Both potentially leak your network traffic wear the outside world can snoop in on it (that's why the HPA uses 56-bit DES encryption), but which will seem "more private" to homeowners and earn their trust? Then there's the performance comparison, but more importantly price. Most PCs these days have ethernet builtin, but only laptops have PCMCIA for the wireless cards. A comparison of the cost of connecting 2 nodes over HPA vs. 802.11b is left an an exercise for the reader.
The BIOS should be a generic facility that can load any desired operating system.
The instant DRM meets with a Disk-On-Chip that is spacious enough and cheap enough for OEMs, the BIOS will be gone before you can say "Hey! Why won't Linux boot on this new motherboard?!" Not that it won't be hackable (just buy a new DoC, if you can bypass the CPU's DRM support) but I strongly suspect Microsoft would like nothing better than to make it nearly impossible to dual-boot or install a new OS without special OEM tools.
In the newspaper industry, you can hear the nervous talk about e-paper. The only real barrier to entry in publishing a paper is either access to a press or owning one, and for a daily paper you basically need to own your own press. The other pieces involved in making a newspaper cost next to nothing compared to the press, ink, paper, film, plates, typesetters, benders, and employing skilled pressmen. Journalists, pre-press staff, workstations, DTP software, wire feeds, photo development (digital now), etc. are all widely available and don't take millions in capital or the help of a vendor or consultant to put in place. The high cost of owning and running a press is what keeps competition between newspapers limited to the paper(s) owned by the city's local plutocrats, papers from media conglomerates (USA Today, Tribune-owned papers, etc.) and the local weeklies that earn their living criticizing the mistakes of first two. The local weeklies usually rent the use of a commercial press, which is why they're stuck coming out only once a week. The cost of starting your own paper is so high, they say you're better off to just bury your millions in your back yard and wait to see it goes up in value. It can be done, but it's a very expensive business to try to start from scratch.
Once you've got e-paper, all that is gone. Newspaper publication becomes no more expensive than web site publication, and may actually be cheaper as you may not have the "slashdot penalty", depending on how you offer your epaper over the internet: micropayments, free, suscriber only, etc.
- Newspapers can be distributed by a vending machine equipped with USB, irDA, 802.11, maybe bluetooth, maybe a CompactFlash card writer. Pay via your cell-phone, magnetic card swipe, or plain old coins.
- The vending machine will be the barrier to entry, i.e. the equivelent of owning a press. Consequently, the rich will try their best to corner all the vending machines, especially in airports, schools, and restaurants.
- However, someone will figure out they can make more money with less risk if they just charge a commision on each paper sold and then just offer more titles to choose from (out-of-town newspapers, typical newstand magazines, snap-shots of popular web sites, e-text novels, indy and alternative papers, adult material, mail-order catalogs, maybe interactive games or puzzles).
- The idea that each e-paper reader will only hold 1 title is just stupid. The free market will tear that fantasy to shreds. To just read 60-80 dpi grayscale books, the guts of a PDA from 2 or 3 years ago would be enough to hold a week or two of issues and a half-dozen full-length novels and still be cheap. It might also double as a PDA, especially if they power consumption is better and you can fold it up to fit your pockets. The media outlets will give away crappy ones, but the aftermarket and PDA vendors will take it from there, offering models that give you more freedom (more storage, ports) for just a little more money.
- DRM is going to vary. Big media outlets will definately use it, but your indy papers may let it go, and some pubs may deliberately shun including DRM in their issues as a nod to their customers. FE, if Project Gutenberg or Ibiblio can get in the game, it's reasonably certain those docs won't expire on you. You're probably going to see what's already happened with DVD players and region encoding. DMCA or not, word will get out which models can be made to bypass the DRM. The black market will not let this slide by them.
Personally, I'm more interested in when they will develop table-top displays with biometrics. Imagine an epaper screen covering the entire dining table that can distinguish between finger taps, a stylus, and irrelevant pressure to ignore, like a coffee cup or elbows set on the table. A little handwriting recognition, a PC rackmounted underneath, and you've got a nice desk to work on (or play StarCraft...).
Disable access to the campus wide email server and proxy to accounts in the group 'Student' during class time. Each classroom, building or department could have a local proxy that allows students in a given class access to certain URLs on the internet, added in by the teacher, automatically purged after they expire or by you. School schedules are mind-numbingly regular, and variations from the norm (half-days) can be handled by a script to set the stop/start times for periods. When period starts, turn unregulated access off. Period ends, access resumes. You can do the same things for lunch, as long as you have valid data which students are scheduled for which lunch. This also prevents most problems with browsing inappropriate pages during class, unless one of your teachers has a porn archive that can be found on the WLAN.
... what did you expect they would do with them. Doodle? Write embarrassing poems? Reverse engineer the entire MacOS with MacsBug? Turn off access using an automated system and you won't have to police so much. Not to mention your server load will drop, letting you go a few more years between server upgrades.
Other than that, your school has given the students laptops
The problem with VNC is that you'd have to lock down the local security settings of the laptops to prevent the students from disabling it. It also wouldn't take long before one of them learns how to setup rfbproxy to send a prerecorded VNC sequence to clients, like an idle desktop with a hot key to pause/resume the fake sequence.
If your laptops run MacOS prior to X or Windows that is non-NT, then good luck securing them. The products vendors sell to secure these like Foolproof and Fortress do everthing they promise, but at the hands of a determined kid with nothing better to do but crack it, their "security" is a joke. Think "scriptkiddy".
Best of luck.
Other than those points (mostly a healthy mix of common sense and paranoia) a PDA is far superior to a notebook for student tasks. Unless you need essentially a portable workstation with a large screen for graphics, compilation, viewing PDFs or web pages, the CPU and disk space offered by laptops are overkill, especially given their weight, bulk, fragility, cost, short battery life, OS problems, and appeal to thieves. Beyond backups, a PDA doesn't take any system administration, virus or defragmenting tools, or any other maintenance. With good battery life, you can stop watching the clock and apply your full concentration to your work.
- Fortunately, you
- are wrong. You must feel greatly relieved.
- MacOS X
- Solaris 8 for Sparc
- NetBSD
All of these are BSD-style OSes with easy installers and (almost) automatic hardware detection. The first two boot into painfully easy-to-use GUIs with hypertext help, graphical control panels, and assisted mounting/ejecting removable disks. (The Intel version of Solaris is much more difficult to install, and requires you to know your motherboard/PCI chipsets, like FreeBSD and OpenBSD.) Both MacOS X and Solaris make a comparable workstation desktop to that of Windows NT (meaning: everything except system administration and adding any 3rd-party software is a no-brainer. Especially if you RTFM). The NetBSD install is text-mode, but it's no harder than MacOS X or Solaris. All of them take under a dozen questions to install, especially if you accept the default partitioning and use DHCP or no network at all. NetBSD has some historical docs inReally, I'm just talking about the install. Something with some graphical flair, built-in help system for new users, and a game or two, or a little slideshow, or some interesting history text files, *something* built in to play while slow parts of the install proceed.
Try leadership@apple.com and see if you can get them to slip Breakout or some decent reading material (like a bunch of Bill Gates jokes) into the next MacOS X installer. You have an iBook, and today's just might follow through on it. Solaris, incidently, will let you goof off in the shell in a seperate window and has graphical on-line help during the install. No tetris though, unless you provide it yourself on a floppy disk. NetBSD makes you wait to play Tetris until the install finishes, and even then it hides them in /usr/games, which is not in the default path. These NetBSD guys are all business, sheesh. ;-)
Have fun.
The supported hardware page at http://www.netbsd.org/Hardware/mca.html lists ESDI MCA controllers as compatible. Your odds are good, I'd say.
Download the install floppies, and try to boot from them. Watch the messages for the edc0 controller (your card) and ed0, ed1, etc (your disks), though they might come up wd0 or sd0.
Choose "Utilities" and then the option for a shell (Bourne, not bash). Then you can try to mount the EDSI disks as FAT, or look at them with fdisk, etc. That way you can test the kernel's ability to reach the disks at all without a full install.
Whatever you do, don't format over your reference partition, or you'll need one on a floppy just to boot up, and the BIOS might try to "take back" that part of the disk, causing a great deal of disagreement with netbsd. Just look for an unallocated area on the disk with fdisk, and setup your partitions to avoid that area. I have a 9595, and it squirrels away the reference disk in the last 3 blocks of the hard drive. Any old DOS utility to examine a raw disk should help you find out what part of the disk to avoid.
Beware FreeDOS and DR-DOS!
I'm not a DOS enthusiast, but FreeDOS is the least consistent, least reliable version of DOS I've ever used. DR-DOS comes in a close 2nd. Be very, very careful relying on them to flash your BIOS, set peripheral firmware, configure PC RAID cards (like those stupid Mylex cards that ship with IBM servers), etc. Maybe it will work. But if what you're going to do isn't reversable, think twice.
PC-DOS 2000 from IBM is pretty cheap. If you got something the least bit wierd, like a laptop, that might be better. Of course Free/DR-DOS are free (my kind of price), but hey, you can get free cyanide by chewing on apple seeds. Purple Kool-Aid for everybody!
Of course there are rotten versions of MS/PC-DOS too, but YMMV.
Welcome to NT! Enjoy your stay!!!
;-)
You only just now noticed a problem with NT-based operating systems (like XP) and the PC: DOS utilities. To NT admins, this is old news. This problem is at least 5 years old, as long as you had to boot NT from an NTFS partition in order to gain most of its benefits (like security, automatic compress, maybe SFM).
Most people here are going to say "use floppy disks" which is cheap, but kind of reckless. You'd better make 2 or 3 copies stored in different places away from CRTs, TVs, fridges, and stereo speakers. If your machine won't boot, you can't go download a fix if your "rescue floppy" is bent up, scrambled, or moonlighting as a lint motel. As the BSD gurus have said: relying a $1 disk to fix your PC is fine if you have only $1 worth of data or your time is only worth $1. Or if you only have $1.
You have lots of options:
- DOS Bootable removable media: Zip, LS-120, and even CD-R. Keep them out of the light and don't feed them after midnight.
- DOS boot floppy with NET.EXE if you have a LAN.
- A bootable FAT hard disk partition where XP can't mess with it and a 3rd party boot loader.
- Some vendors (like Dell) include a "reference partition" for their diagnostic utilities that the BIOS will boot with an F8 before NT gets a crack at even asking you. You may be able to grow the partition's size and stash all your driver installers, MBR tools, BIOS utilies, etc in there.
- Sysinternals (http://www.sysinternals.com/) has a DOS tool to read/write from NTFS partitions (not free).
- The "official" MS way... is um, well, just forget it. ERD in the dictionary should say "noun. (Jargon) A false hope. Potential security risk. Something seemingly crucial, yet useless misplaced, maybe on the bus. See 'Placebo'."
That's a completely incomplete list. Read some NT sites and you'll find some more ways other people have worked around this moronic position NTFS boot disks puts you in. Or read the Cryptonomicon and pay attention to the repeated theme "Use a little ingenuity."
By comparison, Linux or *BSD are trivial to fix if they won't boot or you want to keep a DOS partition of BIOS tools and drivers to boot into without hassle. NT though has issues and an agenda. MS doesn't want you using DOS, and NT almost can't be fixed without 3rd party tools if you can't boot all the way into NT. Its like the filesystem has a built-in self-destruct mechanism that's too easy to accidently set off (like running CHKDSK, defragging, or not facing your desk towards Redmond, WA). Don't get me wrong -- I actually (ahem) like NT. A little accelerated video and lot of RAM and its a great desktop OS. But the boot sequence/fixability and support for DOS utilities is pretty raw. But hey, quirky OSes create jobs, and after all this balony about being profitable, isn't that what really matters? Hrm. That sounds like an "Ask Slashdot" waiting to happen.
Does all this apply wholesale to XP? If you don't know, NT4 is where I'd start and see what will carry over. Or just don't buy it -- it's amazing what kinds of problems a little well-placed frugality can solve. I know guys who'd pay $200 to mess up their PC so their spouse will give up trying to use it. I guess that's those "honeypots" they keep talking about...
TightVNC encoding is very efficient, and the picture consistency is much better than Hextile. HOWEVER, its CPU usage is very high, much higher than other VNC encodings. I run it on about a dozen Xeons from 400 to 700 Mhz, and connecting to the VNC server raises the CPU load by about 20%. Not that those CPU don't have 20% to spare, but the CPU usage is higher. I use the Tight encoding because it alone seems to update the Windows desktop correctly with badly behaved vendor apps. It still screws up the numeric keypad completely (to the point of uselessness) and caps lock can get out of sync between client and server.
There's also a patch to WinVNC to ignore the Windows desktop pattern, and you're going to want that.
TridiaVNC is a good source for a windows VNC client. They provide commercial support and could compile a version of WinVNC to your requirements.
If you've got a manager with money to burn, sure KVMs are nice, but you usually can't use VPN or PPP to connect to them without buying an add-on. Also, KVMs don't scale up without a suit to sign off on the purchase. If you get in new servers, you have to buy more KVM cables and after awhile another KVM switch to tier with your old one. With VNC, you just install it on the new box.
We use both. KVMs keep the "NT diarrea" to a minimum, letting us drive 16 servers with just a pair of keyboards and screens. Our server room is just too small for a monitor for every server. Consolidating server space is really what KVMs are best at.
However, PPP/VPN access is something else. Over dialup, VNC sucks, period. Over the standard 26400 connection most people get, VNC isn't really fast enough to do real work and remain calm. Over VPN via DSL or cable, VNC is perfectly fine. PCAnywhere is much better for dial-up telecommuting to Windows hosts. Turn on the maximum compression, no/minimal encryption, and downsample the color palette to 4 colors. The last bit is what does it -- a four color display updates over dialup very quickly, though it takes a little extra CPU time. Even over 19200 PCAnywhere is still usable even with the worst behaved GUI apps, like MS Access or vendorware.
Yes.
You're welcome. Any time. Glad I could help.
I called Microsoft up and asked them about the very same problem...
They said if I bought their special expansion pack for Palm called "Windows-C-E" that I could sync made PDA to XP with no problems. Cool!
Where's the disintegration ray? I want 200 shots off a pair of NiMH AAs!
Villa, teleport now! Villa!!