This begs another question: Why is 60% of your mail spam? Even CRAPPY anti-spam systems work better than that, so you must not have anything at all.
Do yourself a favor: put a *nix box (or 12) in front of your exchange box running an MTA with clamav / spamassassin on it. If *nix isn't your gig, buy an appliance (there are many) or outsource your MX to a service. Frankly, IMHO, Exchange should NEVER EVER be directly connected to the internet (for many reasons. Search google.)
I setup a simple (near zero administration) OpenBSD / Exim / SA / ClamAV box for one of my clients and put it in front of exchange which took their spam level from 70% to less than 1%. It also (for legal reasons) keeps copies of all incoming and outgoing mail in a way that can be "replayed" if needed (and it was needed last month when the Exchange DB took a dump and they had to restore from backup.) Furthermore, you can do REALLY cool things with this setup like run a mailman list on the same domain, intelligent auto-processors, custom routing, etc. and NO LICENSE FEES.
To be fair, they were probably NOT using Windows (which is much easier to recover deleted files from than Unix is.) Also, recovering a few gig on a drive is very different than recovering millions of files totalling HUNDREDS of gigs spanning dozens of drives. Most likely, the drive were not brand-new high density models. Many ISP's still have massive arrays of old 36G drives or smaller (which isn't really a bad thing considering the drive latency issues when supporting a million users. You want to spread your load over as many arms as possible.) RAID systems can make things even more difficult.
Anyway, the big question of the day is: where are the backups????
Frankly, I NEVER EVER rely on my ISP for anything other than simple connectivity. I don't need nor want some boneheaded ISP screwing with my mail with lamed-assed anti-spam systems that block legit mail yet do nothing to stop spam. I have also found that the reliability of ISP mail systems is really crappy too. Verizon in the US is a prime example of an ISP that has a HORRIBLE reputation when it comes to email reliability. If you want it done right, you gotta do it yourself.
You are looking at a VERY specific small product line. Look at the Proliant Linux support matrix and Debian is nowhere to be seen. You CAN NOT download HP drivers and support software for Debian on the number one HP server platform.
Don't get me wrong, I run Debian at home for my desktop and home server and prefer it personally, but my home use and the realities of the enterprise are two VERY VERY different things.
Being able to get support (from an end user perspective) is NOT the issue. A company like HP wants to deal with another COMPANY that has TOTAL control over the distribution, and has a large enough support / engineering staff to work with effectivly. The only two Linux distribution companies that fit that bill at this point are Novell and Red Hat. Red Hat (being a large company with hundreds of employees) has the resources to support MANY ISV's and hardware companies at a very high level at the same time. Debian and Ubuntu, while being awesome distributions, simply do not have these resources.
You need to start looking at this issue from an enterprise point of view and not a small-business / personal point of view in order to understand it.
It's got automatic LAMP installation, which is nice and saves the trouble of manually integrating a LAMP stack.
Huh. Not sure I quite understand this. LAMP is simply Linux / Apache / MySQL / Perl(PHP). All of these can be installed with a single apt command along with all their dependencies. In fact, just installing a simple LAMP based appplication that is included with debian gets all of that for you. I've never had to "manually integrate" anything - it works out of the box.
Frankly, unless your applications are fairly simplistic (or stock packages,) you end up needing to compile custom versions of PHP or apache anyway since the distro versions frequently are not compiled with the options needed.
There is another major reason too. Third party support. Companies like IBM, HP, EMC (both the SAN part and VMWare), Veritas (Symantec), etc. feel MUCH more comfortable releasing driver / application packages for a distro that has a real company behind it that is "enterprise" oriented. This basically means that they support RedHat and Suse. Lucky for me, CentOs works as a RedHat replacement in all cases.
It also has to do with enterprise deployment. When Debian / Ubunto gets to similar levels as RedHat in the enterprise, we will start to see support for it.
Or you call support. People are unwilling to read manuals, but perfectly happy to sit on support hold for 30 minutes. An "expert" is not needed for home setups (which is what TFA is about.)
And support for MS is how much??? It's not free, and does not come bundled with the license. You can't compare apples to apples because the software / support is offered under different terms.
But to respond to your other comment, yes, your right. At some point, personal knowledge is vast enough that commercial support for open source software is not needed. Hire good people and they ARE the support. The larger the company, the more likely this is. A well known example is Google. They have top notch admins and even roll their own distro. You don't have to be a google to have that level of competance however, but if you insist on hiring MCSE's, then most likely you are NOT going to get that level of competance (hence the FA.)
And CentOS, which is nearly an exact clone of RHEL is free. Debian is free. So are most linux distros. So you pick ONE distro out of HUNDREDS and claim that linux is not free????? Do you somehow believe that the ONLY way you can run Linux in a commercial environment is if you run RHEL or other commercial pay distro?
Re-read my original post. In this case, Walmart was the lesser of two evils. Both companies actually operate very much the same. Low-quality products and business practices that screw America. BB actually is a little worse than Walmart due to the fact that "screw the customer at every opportunity" has been added to the formula.
Um, I don't normally hang out with young kids - when you get older, that kind of thing is considered "bizzare behavior." But anyway, your solution to best-buy's pricing is to still patronize best buy rather than another company? Sounds a little silly to me. I'd much rather find a good local company to support.
As a bit of history, I went to one of the original Best Buy store in Burnsville MN back in the early 80's. They sucked then and they continue to suck today.
I caution people on buying from retail stores since the retail stores only carry consumer models. I always try to direct people towards the business models which are a little more expensive, but come with Much better support. I always buy through the "small business" portals for personal stuff and never through "consumer" portals.
I had an old Titanium G4 Powerbook that wouldn't power on. I suspected the battery, and told a "genius bar" guy that. He played with a couple different power supplies, the PRAM reset, etc., and finally broke down and opened a new battery box. Powered right up. Of course I had tried all those things before, but he was following the Apple troubleshooting steps I had read on the net. I'm actually impressed that he didn't go for the easy answer first (since batteries are expensive) and tried all the options. This was at the Tysons Corner store in Virgina.
Now, I'll absolutely agree that there is a 99.999% chance that the BBGS guy is clueless, but considering that most of their customers are ALSO clueless (or they wouldn't be buying stuff from BB in the first place) it's quite likely that the customer has 87534 viruses and other malware on the machine, and has screwed it up badly by fucking with settings all over the place.
Imaging the drive is probably the right move. Really. Then you can start looking at hardware issues for lockups and such (such as bad ram.) Memtest does take a long time to do a good test, as does compiling the linux kernel (as another good test) so imaging the drive is most likely much faster.
It's interesting.. I was on a business trip and realized I needed a simple USB cable. Best Buy was right by the hotel, so against my better judgement I went in. The ONLY USB cables they had were of the "monster" style with massive braided sheilds, etc. and the LEAST expensive cable was $39 for a standard 6' cable!!! WTF? The 12 year old sales boy (he looked 12 anyway) claimed that that was all they carried. I made a comment that only an idiot would pay that much for a simple USB cable and walked out.
Lucky for me, there was a Walmart (which I also detest) next to the BB which had an APC brand cable for $7.
Frankly, there is no reason to ever patronize Best(Bad)Buy. Ever.
I once joined a smallish (500 employees) company as the IT director and found that they had exactly 7 copies of office, but it was installed on every machine. It was a similar issue with Windows and Adobe products. It cost us hundreds of thousands to "catch up". This kind of thing actually happens all the time.
I have no problem buying licenses of software that is used.
>And no, while Bush IS an a-hole, he is not a warlord dictator.
I think the jury is still out there I'm afraid.
No, it's not. He's the president in a democracy. He can be removed from office at any time and does not have absolute authority. In fact, due to term limits, he doesn't have much time left in office. Maybe you need to look up the term "dictator" in a dictionary.
Both the US and UK have supplied most of the "bad guys" with weapons for long periods of time. (and in many cases put them in power in the first place)
I see you left out Germany, Russia, and France who had HUGE vested interests in Iraq and were the primary supporters of Iraq in the modern incarnation (after Sadam went off the deep end.) In fact, these countries (with financial vested interest in supporting an evil dictator) abused their power in the UN in an attempt to keep an evil dictator in office. We are seeing thise exact same scenario played out with Iran. Follow the money.
The UK *government* supported the US in Iraq despite massive public outcry
And this is different than the US exactly HOW??? Oh that's right, different abbreviations.
Ahh, the anti-US propoganda is SOOO easy to believe.
The sad part is that they will just raise the price of licenses by $10 / copy in the EU and just pay the fine. The EU would have to ban the sale of MS products until MS complies in order to make a dent.
Nice troll. While the US has it's share of corrupt a-holes in government, the US is NOTHING like China, Iran, Iraq, North Korea, Afghanistan, or any of the other "bad" countries it's been involved in militarily. No country is perfect historically, but the US is a whole lot better than most. History has also proven that you can't sit around doing nothing while insane warlord dictators do bad things or the situation gets MUCH MUCH worse. (And no, while Bush IS an a-hole, he is not a warlord dictator.) The US really doesn't want to (and can't) be the world's police force, but nobody else is truely stepping up to the plate.
Some people point to Guantanimo, but I'd MUCH rather spend 10 years in Guantanimo than 5 years in a prison in China or North Korea, or Iran.
If you really want to point fingers, perhaps you should start looking at who is providing these "bad" countries with nuclear technology or other support. Lets look at the UN and see who is failing to support sanctions against Iran and North Korea and allowing things to get out of control (which we are all going to pay for eventually.)
There are other countries (governments) that I do believe have better morals than the US government, like Australia and the UK (both of which supported the US in Iraq BTW) but not an order of magnitude better.
I have a gel wrist rest mousepad that I've used for years. I recently noticed that the mouse no longer glided nicely.. Reason? cleaning lady got too close with a can of Pledge. Pledge and mousepads don't mix folks... A little washing and it was good as new.
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This begs another question: Why is 60% of your mail spam? Even CRAPPY anti-spam systems work better than that, so you must not have anything at all.
Do yourself a favor: put a *nix box (or 12) in front of your exchange box running an MTA with clamav / spamassassin on it. If *nix isn't your gig, buy an appliance (there are many) or outsource your MX to a service. Frankly, IMHO, Exchange should NEVER EVER be directly connected to the internet (for many reasons. Search google.)
I setup a simple (near zero administration) OpenBSD / Exim / SA / ClamAV box for one of my clients and put it in front of exchange which took their spam level from 70% to less than 1%. It also (for legal reasons) keeps copies of all incoming and outgoing mail in a way that can be "replayed" if needed (and it was needed last month when the Exchange DB took a dump and they had to restore from backup.) Furthermore, you can do REALLY cool things with this setup like run a mailman list on the same domain, intelligent auto-processors, custom routing, etc. and NO LICENSE FEES.
To be fair, they were probably NOT using Windows (which is much easier to recover deleted files from than Unix is.) Also, recovering a few gig on a drive is very different than recovering millions of files totalling HUNDREDS of gigs spanning dozens of drives. Most likely, the drive were not brand-new high density models. Many ISP's still have massive arrays of old 36G drives or smaller (which isn't really a bad thing considering the drive latency issues when supporting a million users. You want to spread your load over as many arms as possible.) RAID systems can make things even more difficult.
Anyway, the big question of the day is: where are the backups????
Frankly, I NEVER EVER rely on my ISP for anything other than simple connectivity. I don't need nor want some boneheaded ISP screwing with my mail with lamed-assed anti-spam systems that block legit mail yet do nothing to stop spam. I have also found that the reliability of ISP mail systems is really crappy too. Verizon in the US is a prime example of an ISP that has a HORRIBLE reputation when it comes to email reliability. If you want it done right, you gotta do it yourself.
You are looking at a VERY specific small product line. Look at the Proliant Linux support matrix and Debian is nowhere to be seen. You CAN NOT download HP drivers and support software for Debian on the number one HP server platform.
Don't get me wrong, I run Debian at home for my desktop and home server and prefer it personally, but my home use and the realities of the enterprise are two VERY VERY different things.
Being able to get support (from an end user perspective) is NOT the issue. A company like HP wants to deal with another COMPANY that has TOTAL control over the distribution, and has a large enough support / engineering staff to work with effectivly. The only two Linux distribution companies that fit that bill at this point are Novell and Red Hat. Red Hat (being a large company with hundreds of employees) has the resources to support MANY ISV's and hardware companies at a very high level at the same time. Debian and Ubuntu, while being awesome distributions, simply do not have these resources.
You need to start looking at this issue from an enterprise point of view and not a small-business / personal point of view in order to understand it.
It's got automatic LAMP installation, which is nice and saves the trouble of manually integrating a LAMP stack.
Huh. Not sure I quite understand this. LAMP is simply Linux / Apache / MySQL / Perl(PHP). All of these can be installed with a single apt command along with all their dependencies. In fact, just installing a simple LAMP based appplication that is included with debian gets all of that for you. I've never had to "manually integrate" anything - it works out of the box.
Frankly, unless your applications are fairly simplistic (or stock packages,) you end up needing to compile custom versions of PHP or apache anyway since the distro versions frequently are not compiled with the options needed.
There is another major reason too. Third party support. Companies like IBM, HP, EMC (both the SAN part and VMWare), Veritas (Symantec), etc. feel MUCH more comfortable releasing driver / application packages for a distro that has a real company behind it that is "enterprise" oriented. This basically means that they support RedHat and Suse. Lucky for me, CentOs works as a RedHat replacement in all cases.
It also has to do with enterprise deployment. When Debian / Ubunto gets to similar levels as RedHat in the enterprise, we will start to see support for it.
I think the real practical solution to the problem will come only when cameras become so small that it's not obvious to anyone that you are using one.
Don't know where you have been the past several years, but covert cameras are widely available.
Or you call support. People are unwilling to read manuals, but perfectly happy to sit on support hold for 30 minutes. An "expert" is not needed for home setups (which is what TFA is about.)
And support for MS is how much??? It's not free, and does not come bundled with the license. You can't compare apples to apples because the software / support is offered under different terms.
But to respond to your other comment, yes, your right. At some point, personal knowledge is vast enough that commercial support for open source software is not needed. Hire good people and they ARE the support. The larger the company, the more likely this is. A well known example is Google. They have top notch admins and even roll their own distro. You don't have to be a google to have that level of competance however, but if you insist on hiring MCSE's, then most likely you are NOT going to get that level of competance (hence the FA.)
And CentOS, which is nearly an exact clone of RHEL is free. Debian is free. So are most linux distros. So you pick ONE distro out of HUNDREDS and claim that linux is not free????? Do you somehow believe that the ONLY way you can run Linux in a commercial environment is if you run RHEL or other commercial pay distro?
I'll take a wait and see attitude before totally slamming it, but if history is a judge, ...
Nope. Seize their main asset: ownership of the Windows copyright. Game over - Microsoft dead.
No, but they can seize assets when a company to comply with a court order. It would be interesting to see the EU "own" windows.
Re-read my original post. In this case, Walmart was the lesser of two evils. Both companies actually operate very much the same. Low-quality products and business practices that screw America. BB actually is a little worse than Walmart due to the fact that "screw the customer at every opportunity" has been added to the formula.
Um, I don't normally hang out with young kids - when you get older, that kind of thing is considered "bizzare behavior." But anyway, your solution to best-buy's pricing is to still patronize best buy rather than another company? Sounds a little silly to me. I'd much rather find a good local company to support.
As a bit of history, I went to one of the original Best Buy store in Burnsville MN back in the early 80's. They sucked then and they continue to suck today.
I caution people on buying from retail stores since the retail stores only carry consumer models. I always try to direct people towards the business models which are a little more expensive, but come with Much better support. I always buy through the "small business" portals for personal stuff and never through "consumer" portals.
I had an old Titanium G4 Powerbook that wouldn't power on. I suspected the battery, and told a "genius bar" guy that. He played with a couple different power supplies, the PRAM reset, etc., and finally broke down and opened a new battery box. Powered right up. Of course I had tried all those things before, but he was following the Apple troubleshooting steps I had read on the net. I'm actually impressed that he didn't go for the easy answer first (since batteries are expensive) and tried all the options. This was at the Tysons Corner store in Virgina.
Now, I'll absolutely agree that there is a 99.999% chance that the BBGS guy is clueless, but considering that most of their customers are ALSO clueless (or they wouldn't be buying stuff from BB in the first place) it's quite likely that the customer has 87534 viruses and other malware on the machine, and has screwed it up badly by fucking with settings all over the place.
Imaging the drive is probably the right move. Really. Then you can start looking at hardware issues for lockups and such (such as bad ram.) Memtest does take a long time to do a good test, as does compiling the linux kernel (as another good test) so imaging the drive is most likely much faster.
It's interesting.. I was on a business trip and realized I needed a simple USB cable. Best Buy was right by the hotel, so against my better judgement I went in. The ONLY USB cables they had were of the "monster" style with massive braided sheilds, etc. and the LEAST expensive cable was $39 for a standard 6' cable!!! WTF? The 12 year old sales boy (he looked 12 anyway) claimed that that was all they carried. I made a comment that only an idiot would pay that much for a simple USB cable and walked out.
Lucky for me, there was a Walmart (which I also detest) next to the BB which had an APC brand cable for $7.
Frankly, there is no reason to ever patronize Best(Bad)Buy. Ever.
I'm not so sure it was a small number.
I once joined a smallish (500 employees) company as the IT director and found that they had exactly 7 copies of office, but it was installed on every machine. It was a similar issue with Windows and Adobe products. It cost us hundreds of thousands to "catch up". This kind of thing actually happens all the time.
I have no problem buying licenses of software that is used.
>And no, while Bush IS an a-hole, he is not a warlord dictator.
I think the jury is still out there I'm afraid.
No, it's not. He's the president in a democracy. He can be removed from office at any time and does not have absolute authority. In fact, due to term limits, he doesn't have much time left in office. Maybe you need to look up the term "dictator" in a dictionary.
Both the US and UK have supplied most of the "bad guys" with weapons for long periods of time. (and in many cases put them in power in the first place)
I see you left out Germany, Russia, and France who had HUGE vested interests in Iraq and were the primary supporters of Iraq in the modern incarnation (after Sadam went off the deep end.) In fact, these countries (with financial vested interest in supporting an evil dictator) abused their power in the UN in an attempt to keep an evil dictator in office. We are seeing thise exact same scenario played out with Iran. Follow the money.
The UK *government* supported the US in Iraq despite massive public outcry
And this is different than the US exactly HOW??? Oh that's right, different abbreviations.
Ahh, the anti-US propoganda is SOOO easy to believe.
The sad part is that they will just raise the price of licenses by $10 / copy in the EU and just pay the fine. The EU would have to ban the sale of MS products until MS complies in order to make a dent.
Not sure whether that should be modded funny or informative... Sigh.
Nice troll. While the US has it's share of corrupt a-holes in government, the US is NOTHING like China, Iran, Iraq, North Korea, Afghanistan, or any of the other "bad" countries it's been involved in militarily. No country is perfect historically, but the US is a whole lot better than most. History has also proven that you can't sit around doing nothing while insane warlord dictators do bad things or the situation gets MUCH MUCH worse. (And no, while Bush IS an a-hole, he is not a warlord dictator.) The US really doesn't want to (and can't) be the world's police force, but nobody else is truely stepping up to the plate.
Some people point to Guantanimo, but I'd MUCH rather spend 10 years in Guantanimo than 5 years in a prison in China or North Korea, or Iran.
If you really want to point fingers, perhaps you should start looking at who is providing these "bad" countries with nuclear technology or other support. Lets look at the UN and see who is failing to support sanctions against Iran and North Korea and allowing things to get out of control (which we are all going to pay for eventually.)
There are other countries (governments) that I do believe have better morals than the US government, like Australia and the UK (both of which supported the US in Iraq BTW) but not an order of magnitude better.
I have a gel wrist rest mousepad that I've used for years. I recently noticed that the mouse no longer glided nicely.. Reason? cleaning lady got too close with a can of Pledge. Pledge and mousepads don't mix folks... A little washing and it was good as new.