I love me some pfSense. We use it at the office and it handles everything we can throw at it (including VPN/IPSec between offices to backfeed high bandwidth security video). It is also light weight enough to work in a home environment on minimal hardware.
Their hardware is both overpriced and well-made. For our small branch offices their embedded devices (such as https://store.pfsense.org/VK-T...) are better than what we could create on our own in low volume and a lot less work. For larger branch offices we will stick pfSense in virtual machine with whatever else they have running. It does well as a VM, too.
Instead of spending a rumored $100 MILLION giving everyone a U2 album few want, maybe Apple should have just shipped everyone an iPhone6 instead? Or at least used that money to beef-up capacity on launch day?
You gotta wonder how many watts his jammer was putting out if it was able to affect a cell phone tower than was several hundred feet away if not further. There are 100-watt mobile models available.
I'm not one of those people who think the minuscule power a cell phone puts out is going to rot your brain from occasional use but I've got to imagine that lots of watts in close proximity at that frequency can't be good. Especially daily for two years.
Oddly enough, using this RF calculator, seems to show no safety problems except, possibly, for the cars directly adjacent.
Theft isn't anymore an issue with this bike than a regular bike. My non-motorized bicycle costs about the same as the Faraday Poser. Heck, at more than 40 pounds - twice what my bike weights - the Faraday is probably safer than a regular bike.
As a regular cyclist, I'm of two minds on electric-assist vehicles. On one hand, anything with two wheels, quite, minimally polluting and fun has my seal of approval.
On the other hand, my experience has been that people who tend to ride electric bicycles (and gas-powered pit bikes and powered scooters of the Razor style) tend to be jerks who ride on sidewalks and terrorize pedestrians.
Just about every morning on my way to work, I see two of the Tesla Model S on the road. I commute between Palm Beach Gardens and Jupiter, Florida. That's less than a 20-minute commute.
If you're looking for a conversation starter at the country club or marina, a BMW, Mercedes or even a Bentley isn't going to work nearly as well as a Tesla.
While $65,000 to $75,000 seems like a lot for a car (I cringe at paying half that), there are just as many cars in that price range rolling in Palm Beach County that aren't nearly as exotic or as head-turning as the Tesla. I pass dozens of $65k+ cars on the way to work and it isn't unusual to see $100k+ cars either. Those are mostly background noise because they are so common.
When you say 'Any suggestions (beyond develop hobbies, spend time with family) on how to deal with all the new free time?', you're missing the point. Free time is all about hobbies and spending time with the family. It isn't about finding more work.
When I was, more or less, unemployed for ten months, I rode my bicycle. A lot: sometimes more than 200 miles a week. Lost 30 pounds. Felt great. By the time I had to go back to real work, I was in the best shape of my life, was relaxed and had spent wonderful amounts of time with my wife and kid. (Now I'm a fat slob again. But I'm making money. So, I've got that.)
Whatever you do, don't feel guilty about having free time. Don't try to fill your free time with more day-job-type work. You've done day-job-type work for 25 years and are, apparently, valuable enough that you don't have to do that 40 hours a week anymore.
AC: There were recent, reliable backups and the RS/6000 system was under an (expensive) IBM maintenance contract. While we had one or two spare drives on the shelf, we didn't have the six that locked-up.
We were paying IBM for its knowledge through the service contract and we got our money's worth there. Where we were in line to get screwed was in the hardware replacement cost.
At a time when the going rate for hard drives was about two cents per megabyte, IBM wanted more than 13 cents per megabyte. We would have gladly paid double but six times more was off the table for a system that was already in the budget for replacement.
In preparation for Y2K, we had to turn off our text archive server (at a newspaper) for the first time in, literally, years. The machine itself has been in production for six years, the last two or so of which without a reboot.
It was an IBM AIX machine with an array of 4.5GB SCSI drives. After sitting with its power off for a couple hours, we turned it back on and Nothing Happened. No drives were spinning. Crap.
Called IBM tech support. Got the run-around. Finally got to a guy who said something along the lines of "you're going to think this is crazy but do what I say in this order" followed by...
* turn machine off * remove drives * turn the machine on * bang the drives on their edge a few times on the floor - don't go crazy but harder than you think is a good idea * spin the drives flat on the ground as though they were tops * immediately, put the drives in the enclosure * reboot the machine but do not power it off
Damn if the guy wasn't right.
His guess was that the drives had been powered for eight or so years and the lubricant had either broken down or the heads were simply stuck to the platters. The thumping dislodged the heads and the spin gave the grease a fighting chance. {shrug}
In any case, we dared not turn it off for another year and a half until at such time it was replaced. We thought about buying replacement drives but IBM wanted something along the lines of $600 for a 4.5GB drive. Even on eBay, they were three times what we felt was reasonable.
1. Throw away everything that isn't a standard-sized SATA drive. 2. Buy a Drobo (http://www.drobo.com/products/professionals/drobo-fs/index.php). 3. Put the five (or eight) largest drives in the Drobo. 4. Throw away the rest of the drives. 5. When you get a drive that is larger than the smallest drive in your Drobo, pull the smaller drive out and insert the larger drive. 6. Find peace in the universe.
When I was young and foolish, I tried to keep every drive spinning, even long after its time had passed. I had *nix boxes stuffed with drives and SCSI-attached arrays. I learned a lot about drive management and system administration but, mostly, I learned that there is a value to my time and my time isn't best utilized playing disk administrator.
Drobo doesn't pay me a dime and I am still more excited about Drobo than any technology product since TiVo.
A year or more ago, I commented that I didn't think the Tea Party would have a long-term affect because they weren't motivated enough to burn down an ROTC building nor were the police scared enough of them to hit them with tear gas.
Agree with them or not. Understand them or not. The Occupy movement is going to leave a mark upon this country because they are willing to have skin in the game.
I'm entirely, completely in love with Drobo as a NAS device.
The ability to pop out a smaller drive and replace it with a larger drive is amazing - that is simply how technology is supposed to work. I have the Drobo FS at home and the DroboPro FS at work. Having used them for about a year and having tried to make them fail before I moved them into production, I'm very happy with their reliability and performance. (More on performance in a second.)
At the high end, I have used EMC and IBM solutions. At the low end, I've used every home-built and crappy RAID NAS solution you can name. Having used three of the five products reviewed by InfoWorld, I can say the Drobo is easily better than most of the units reviewed.
Performance on both the Drobo units I own isn't mind-blowing compared to some of the solutions that cost four or five times more. Ease of management, reliability, price point, expandability and overall functionality far offset the less than awesome performance. Still, as Lifix noted, there is more than enough performance to meet the needs of a home or small office. The only time I really notice the DroboPro FS slowing down is when we're running multiple rsync backups to it.
I have not been this excited and evangelical about a piece of technology since I got my TiVo.
Cheers, Matt
(I'm not in any way compensated by Drobo but would be willing to entertain offers. Drobo? Are you listening? Send me free stuff.)
I don't see anything wrong with Verizon offering content that is so irrestable that they end up making more money. In fact, I'm pretty sure that is their sworn duty.
Grandmother's chocholate chip cookies make be deliciously irresistable but it is still my fault if I fall off my diet.
Points are awarded based on the wrong algorithm.
For example, NSA.gov is only worth 2,497 points but HomeDepot.com is worth 219,941? The Department of Homeland Security (dhs.gov) is worth 17,068 while facebook.com is 75,000,000? Really?
Until the rankings better reflect the underlying difficulty and associated risk, I refuse to participate in this sham.
Cheers,
Matt
when vehicles without this technology are banned from motorways; similar to horse-drawn vehicles, pedestrians and cyclists.
Point of order, at least in the United States, horse-drawn vehicles and cyclists are allowed to use public roads the same way they did before the invention of the automobile. Roads are very good about being backward compatible.
So you say a mid-sized company paid a $100,000 extortion? That money with 'poof', right? Untraceable, right? Call me the suspicious sort but are we sure this is extortion and not embezzlement?
Most data traveling in the clear has little value. What value it has may be momentary. A week from now, it is worthless.
Heck, most encrypted data has little value. The fact of the matter is most data is worthless junk.
I was the backup administrator for a Fortune 500 company's branch office of 1,500 users. I have a pretty good idea of what data existed because I was responsible for keeping it safe. Of the terabytes upon terabytes of data sitting in the archive, I could have put the worth-encrypting sensitive company information on a USB thumb-drive. There was really that little of it floating around.
So, the reason most data isn't encrypted is that there really is no reason for its encryption.
In 2001, the newspaper I worked for got rid of Atex (a PDP-11 based publishing system -- amazing in its own right) and replaced it with a more modern pagination system that involved an RS/6000 system on the backend and new-fangled Windows NT machines at the front.
A few of the reporters were still using Tandy 100/102 laptops to file stories. The Tandy 100 ran about 18 hours on four double-A batteries. It had a 300 baud modem to send stories. In short, it was awesome. One reporter specifically refused to accept a brand new IBM ThinkPad instead favoring the Tandy 102 for another year. (Once he discovered that the ThinkPad could download porn, he gave up the Tandy 102 willingly.)
The fully-funcational Tandy 102 laptop cost just $500 in 1986 and our reporters used it and the 100 for more than 15 years. Today a laptop will cost you about twice that, have a battery that last less than half as long and won't last you more than five years. Ah, progress.
I still have my collection of TRS gear... TRS-80 Model I, Model IV, Tandy 100, Tandy 102, Tandy 200. All boot except the Model I. The Model IV is becoming less useful because the 5 1/4 floppies aren't aging well. The Laptops, however, work great because everything is solid-state. No moving parts!
I own 17 and manage 40 or so more. Combined, they see about 40,000 unique visitors a month. So, admittedly, I'm in the minor leagues. All have my direct phone number in whois. It isn't a big deal.
A little over ten years and fewer than half a dozen phone calls. A few pieces of good old fashioned postal mail trying to sell me stuff but, again, not a big deal.
> What if you and your wife were running an amateur > porn site from your home ?
What makes you think we don't?
For my safety, I'd probably have a PO Box for an address but the email address and phone number would come directly to me.
> What if you and your wife also had kids ?
Well, she says he is my kid but we haven't done any DNA tests. Why? Do you know something I don't? Are you implying that you are the father? That slut!
> What if your web site was politically charged and > you had a lot of enemies that only hate you because > of your political or religious beliefs ?
Real name. Real address. Real phone number.
> See where I'm coming from ?
I see you are fearful of the world around you and lack the spine to be able to stand up for the views and opinions you express.
For more than a dozen years, I worked in the editorial department at major American newspapers. My real name, office phone number and email address was in print every time I was published. A Sunday newspaper during the season was dropped on the doorsteps of nearly 340,000 people, on our website and archived to Lexis/Nexis. Needless to say, not all the people who saw my content liked me. My home phone number and address is in the local phone book.
My point is simply that I prefer accountability and do not wish to hide behind the false sense of security that perceived anonymity brings. I do not cower in the shadows because I'm unwilling to stand behind my opinions and beliefs.
Back to topic: whois rocks. Let's make sure it is accurate.
> What about guys who set up a small web site out of their homes
Ummmmm... You mean people such as myself? I have owned my domain since 1997, have always hosted it myself (though never in my house) and have always used real contact information that actually comes right to me. In, geez, ten years, I have only received two phone calls and both were calls I was glad to receive.
Yes, I'm sure spammers target me based on the whois information but with an email address of firstname@domain.tld, I doubt most of my spam comes from whois.
Spam is bad but bad whois information, at least to me, is worse.
I know that interpersonal voice communications conducted over an old fashion telephone line between peers is the antithesis of all that is the tech world and Slashdot. Still, it can be rather effective at times.
True story...
I was the IT Director for a mergers and acquisitions company. We were a couple days away from closing on a mid-sized ($72 million) transaction. Money had already been wired into escrow. We are in the United States but the company's owner was vacationing in South Africa. The company we were buying was based in the Dominican Republic so there was local counsel there. The company from which we were buying the Dominican company was based in the Cook Islands. The law firm -- a fairly large international firm -- coordinating everything was out of the Netherlands. Documents were zipping back and forth by email pretty much around the clock given the time zones involved.
Then, for some reason, the email stopped. Test messages when through from all the parties but all the documents failed. We thought it might be file-size related but large test documents went through fine. The lawyers we were working with out of the Netherlands didn't know who did their network/email support -- it was handled out of another office. They couldn't come up with anyone who knew anything about the problem in hours of trying to track someone down. Without a complete set of documents (several hundred pages) executed by all parties, the transaction would be delayed.
(Delaying the closing even by hours is a massive and costly pain given the number of people and amount of money involved. Homework: calculate the amount of interest $72m throws off ever hour.)
Faxing large quantities of documents for review was out of the question. FedEx or another overnight carrier would delay the closing. Not to mention, it would slow the final revision processing.
Using whois, I called the technical contact for the domain. He immediately handed me off to their mail guru. After I explained the problem, he checked his change log and found a half dozen new regular expressions were added to their spam filter about the time we started having problem. Seven characters of the eight-character transaction code we were using in the filenames on all the documents happened to be the same as a banned regex that had been added. Once the regex had been removed, everything worked and we closed on time.
Total time from 'whois domain' to problem resolution: less than half an hour.
Had I not been able to get the mail guru on the phone or by email, we would have delayed the closing. We would have had to come up with an alternate document transport. We would have had to notify and train all parties in the alternate document transport. It would have been ugly.
So, in short, if I have a problem with your domain, I'd like a number I can dial to speak with a competent human being.
> I don't have the time or resources to take calls from Joe in Seattle who wants to sell me
I'd spend 20 minutes a month telling sales holes 'no' than spend five hours trying to track down an admin at another site to fix a problem that, when I get the right person, takes five minutes to fix.
Slashdot Mirror
I love me some pfSense. We use it at the office and it handles everything we can throw at it (including VPN/IPSec between offices to backfeed high bandwidth security video). It is also light weight enough to work in a home environment on minimal hardware.
Their hardware is both overpriced and well-made. For our small branch offices their embedded devices (such as https://store.pfsense.org/VK-T...) are better than what we could create on our own in low volume and a lot less work. For larger branch offices we will stick pfSense in virtual machine with whatever else they have running. It does well as a VM, too.
Cheers,
Matt
Instead of spending a rumored $100 MILLION giving everyone a U2 album few want, maybe Apple should have just shipped everyone an iPhone6 instead? Or at least used that money to beef-up capacity on launch day?
Cheers,
Matt
You gotta wonder how many watts his jammer was putting out if it was able to affect a cell phone tower than was several hundred feet away if not further. There are 100-watt mobile models available.
I'm not one of those people who think the minuscule power a cell phone puts out is going to rot your brain from occasional use but I've got to imagine that lots of watts in close proximity at that frequency can't be good. Especially daily for two years.
Oddly enough, using this RF calculator, seems to show no safety problems except, possibly, for the cars directly adjacent.
Cheers,
Matt
Theft isn't anymore an issue with this bike than a regular bike. My non-motorized bicycle costs about the same as the Faraday Poser. Heck, at more than 40 pounds - twice what my bike weights - the Faraday is probably safer than a regular bike.
As a regular cyclist, I'm of two minds on electric-assist vehicles. On one hand, anything with two wheels, quite, minimally polluting and fun has my seal of approval.
On the other hand, my experience has been that people who tend to ride electric bicycles (and gas-powered pit bikes and powered scooters of the Razor style) tend to be jerks who ride on sidewalks and terrorize pedestrians.
Cheers,
Matt
Are you done yet in there, Grandpa?
Cheers,
Matt
There is a reason we fly over you, TWiTfan.
Cheers,
Mat
Just about every morning on my way to work, I see two of the Tesla Model S on the road. I commute between Palm Beach Gardens and Jupiter, Florida. That's less than a 20-minute commute.
If you're looking for a conversation starter at the country club or marina, a BMW, Mercedes or even a Bentley isn't going to work nearly as well as a Tesla.
While $65,000 to $75,000 seems like a lot for a car (I cringe at paying half that), there are just as many cars in that price range rolling in Palm Beach County that aren't nearly as exotic or as head-turning as the Tesla. I pass dozens of $65k+ cars on the way to work and it isn't unusual to see $100k+ cars either. Those are mostly background noise because they are so common.
Cheers,
Matt
His current wife may not be getting any younger but his next wife is already half her age.
Cheers,
Matt
When you say 'Any suggestions (beyond develop hobbies, spend time with family) on how to deal with all the new free time?', you're missing the point. Free time is all about hobbies and spending time with the family. It isn't about finding more work.
When I was, more or less, unemployed for ten months, I rode my bicycle. A lot: sometimes more than 200 miles a week. Lost 30 pounds. Felt great. By the time I had to go back to real work, I was in the best shape of my life, was relaxed and had spent wonderful amounts of time with my wife and kid. (Now I'm a fat slob again. But I'm making money. So, I've got that.)
Whatever you do, don't feel guilty about having free time. Don't try to fill your free time with more day-job-type work. You've done day-job-type work for 25 years and are, apparently, valuable enough that you don't have to do that 40 hours a week anymore.
Cheers,
Matt
AC: There were recent, reliable backups and the RS/6000 system was under an (expensive) IBM maintenance contract. While we had one or two spare drives on the shelf, we didn't have the six that locked-up.
We were paying IBM for its knowledge through the service contract and we got our money's worth there. Where we were in line to get screwed was in the hardware replacement cost.
At a time when the going rate for hard drives was about two cents per megabyte, IBM wanted more than 13 cents per megabyte. We would have gladly paid double but six times more was off the table for a system that was already in the budget for replacement.
Cheers,
Matt
In preparation for Y2K, we had to turn off our text archive server (at a newspaper) for the first time in, literally, years. The machine itself has been in production for six years, the last two or so of which without a reboot.
It was an IBM AIX machine with an array of 4.5GB SCSI drives. After sitting with its power off for a couple hours, we turned it back on and Nothing Happened. No drives were spinning. Crap.
Called IBM tech support. Got the run-around. Finally got to a guy who said something along the lines of "you're going to think this is crazy but do what I say in this order" followed by...
* turn machine off
* remove drives
* turn the machine on
* bang the drives on their edge a few times on the floor - don't go crazy but harder than you think is a good idea
* spin the drives flat on the ground as though they were tops
* immediately, put the drives in the enclosure
* reboot the machine but do not power it off
Damn if the guy wasn't right.
His guess was that the drives had been powered for eight or so years and the lubricant had either broken down or the heads were simply stuck to the platters. The thumping dislodged the heads and the spin gave the grease a fighting chance. {shrug}
In any case, we dared not turn it off for another year and a half until at such time it was replaced. We thought about buying replacement drives but IBM wanted something along the lines of $600 for a 4.5GB drive. Even on eBay, they were three times what we felt was reasonable.
Cheers,
Matt
1. Throw away everything that isn't a standard-sized SATA drive.
2. Buy a Drobo (http://www.drobo.com/products/professionals/drobo-fs/index.php).
3. Put the five (or eight) largest drives in the Drobo.
4. Throw away the rest of the drives.
5. When you get a drive that is larger than the smallest drive in your Drobo, pull the smaller drive out and insert the larger drive.
6. Find peace in the universe.
When I was young and foolish, I tried to keep every drive spinning, even long after its time had passed. I had *nix boxes stuffed with drives and SCSI-attached arrays. I learned a lot about drive management and system administration but, mostly, I learned that there is a value to my time and my time isn't best utilized playing disk administrator.
Drobo doesn't pay me a dime and I am still more excited about Drobo than any technology product since TiVo.
Cheers,
Matt
Instagram was nifty the first time I saw it... Oh, the halcyon days of photography. Now it is just played-out. Let it go, folks.
Cheers,
Matt
My father was a college student and newspaper photographer in Ohio circa May 1970. His photos of student protest and civil disobedience remind me of what I'm seeing with the Occupy movement.
A year or more ago, I commented that I didn't think the Tea Party would have a long-term affect because they weren't motivated enough to burn down an ROTC building nor were the police scared enough of them to hit them with tear gas.
Agree with them or not. Understand them or not. The Occupy movement is going to leave a mark upon this country because they are willing to have skin in the game.
Cheers, Matt
I'm entirely, completely in love with Drobo as a NAS device.
The ability to pop out a smaller drive and replace it with a larger drive is amazing - that is simply how technology is supposed to work. I have the Drobo FS at home and the DroboPro FS at work. Having used them for about a year and having tried to make them fail before I moved them into production, I'm very happy with their reliability and performance. (More on performance in a second.)
At the high end, I have used EMC and IBM solutions. At the low end, I've used every home-built and crappy RAID NAS solution you can name. Having used three of the five products reviewed by InfoWorld, I can say the Drobo is easily better than most of the units reviewed.
Performance on both the Drobo units I own isn't mind-blowing compared to some of the solutions that cost four or five times more. Ease of management, reliability, price point, expandability and overall functionality far offset the less than awesome performance. Still, as Lifix noted, there is more than enough performance to meet the needs of a home or small office. The only time I really notice the DroboPro FS slowing down is when we're running multiple rsync backups to it.
I have not been this excited and evangelical about a piece of technology since I got my TiVo.
Cheers,
Matt
(I'm not in any way compensated by Drobo but would be willing to entertain offers. Drobo? Are you listening? Send me free stuff.)
I don't see anything wrong with Verizon offering content that is so irrestable that they end up making more money. In fact, I'm pretty sure that is their sworn duty.
Grandmother's chocholate chip cookies make be deliciously irresistable but it is still my fault if I fall off my diet.
Cheers,
Matt
Points are awarded based on the wrong algorithm. For example, NSA.gov is only worth 2,497 points but HomeDepot.com is worth 219,941? The Department of Homeland Security (dhs.gov) is worth 17,068 while facebook.com is 75,000,000? Really? Until the rankings better reflect the underlying difficulty and associated risk, I refuse to participate in this sham. Cheers, Matt
when vehicles without this technology are banned from motorways; similar to horse-drawn vehicles, pedestrians and cyclists.
Point of order, at least in the United States, horse-drawn vehicles and cyclists are allowed to use public roads the same way they did before the invention of the automobile. Roads are very good about being backward compatible.
Cheers,
Matt
So you say a mid-sized company paid a $100,000 extortion? That money with 'poof', right? Untraceable, right? Call me the suspicious sort but are we sure this is extortion and not embezzlement?
Cheers,
Matt
Most data traveling in the clear has little value. What value it has may be momentary. A week from now, it is worthless.
Heck, most encrypted data has little value. The fact of the matter is most data is worthless junk.
I was the backup administrator for a Fortune 500 company's branch office of 1,500 users. I have a pretty good idea of what data existed because I was responsible for keeping it safe. Of the terabytes upon terabytes of data sitting in the archive, I could have put the worth-encrypting sensitive company information on a USB thumb-drive. There was really that little of it floating around.
So, the reason most data isn't encrypted is that there really is no reason for its encryption.
Cheers,
Matt
In 2001, the newspaper I worked for got rid of Atex (a PDP-11 based publishing system -- amazing in its own right) and replaced it with a more modern pagination system that involved an RS/6000 system on the backend and new-fangled Windows NT machines at the front.
A few of the reporters were still using Tandy 100/102 laptops to file stories. The Tandy 100 ran about 18 hours on four double-A batteries. It had a 300 baud modem to send stories. In short, it was awesome. One reporter specifically refused to accept a brand new IBM ThinkPad instead favoring the Tandy 102 for another year. (Once he discovered that the ThinkPad could download porn, he gave up the Tandy 102 willingly.)
The fully-funcational Tandy 102 laptop cost just $500 in 1986 and our reporters used it and the 100 for more than 15 years. Today a laptop will cost you about twice that, have a battery that last less than half as long and won't last you more than five years. Ah, progress.
I still have my collection of TRS gear... TRS-80 Model I, Model IV, Tandy 100, Tandy 102, Tandy 200. All boot except the Model I. The Model IV is becoming less useful because the 5 1/4 floppies aren't aging well. The Laptops, however, work great because everything is solid-state. No moving parts!
—Matt
> Do you have kids ?
Yes. A three-year-old. Thanks for asking!
> What if you owned 100 domains ?
I own 17 and manage 40 or so more. Combined,
they see about 40,000 unique visitors a month. So,
admittedly, I'm in the minor leagues. All have my
direct phone number in whois. It isn't a big deal.
A little over ten years and fewer than half a
dozen phone calls. A few pieces of good old
fashioned postal mail trying to sell me stuff but,
again, not a big deal.
> What if you and your wife were running an amateur
> porn site from your home ?
What makes you think we don't?
For my safety, I'd probably have a PO Box for
an address but the email address and phone number
would come directly to me.
> What if you and your wife also had kids ?
Well, she says he is my kid but we haven't done
any DNA tests. Why? Do you know something I don't?
Are you implying that you are the father? That slut!
> What if your web site was politically charged and
> you had a lot of enemies that only hate you because
> of your political or religious beliefs ?
Real name. Real address. Real phone number.
> See where I'm coming from ?
I see you are fearful of the world around you and
lack the spine to be able to stand up for the views
and opinions you express.
For more than a dozen years, I worked in the
editorial department at major American newspapers. My
real name, office phone number and email address was
in print every time I was published. A Sunday newspaper
during the season was dropped on the doorsteps of
nearly 340,000 people, on our website and archived to
Lexis/Nexis. Needless to say, not all the people who
saw my content liked me. My home phone number and
address is in the local phone book.
My point is simply that I prefer accountability
and do not wish to hide behind the false sense of
security that perceived anonymity brings. I do not
cower in the shadows because I'm unwilling to stand
behind my opinions and beliefs.
Back to topic: whois rocks. Let's make sure it
is accurate.
Matt
> What about guys who set up a small web site out of their homes
Ummmmm... You mean people such as myself? I have owned my domain since 1997, have always hosted it myself (though never in my house) and have always used real contact information that actually comes right to me. In, geez, ten years, I have only received two phone calls and both were calls I was glad to receive.
Yes, I'm sure spammers target me based on the whois information but with an email address of firstname@domain.tld, I doubt most of my spam comes from whois.
Spam is bad but bad whois information, at least to me, is worse.
I know that interpersonal voice communications conducted over an old fashion telephone line between peers is the antithesis of all that is the tech world and Slashdot. Still, it can be rather effective at times.
True story...
I was the IT Director for a mergers and acquisitions company. We were a couple days away from closing on a mid-sized ($72 million) transaction. Money had already been wired into escrow. We are in the United States but the company's owner was vacationing in South Africa. The company we were buying was based in the Dominican Republic so there was local counsel there. The company from which we were buying the Dominican company was based in the Cook Islands. The law firm -- a fairly large international firm -- coordinating everything was out of the Netherlands. Documents were zipping back and forth by email pretty much around the clock given the time zones involved.
Then, for some reason, the email stopped. Test messages when through from all the parties but all the documents failed. We thought it might be file-size related but large test documents went through fine. The lawyers we were working with out of the Netherlands didn't know who did their network/email support -- it was handled out of another office. They couldn't come up with anyone who knew anything about the problem in hours of trying to track someone down. Without a complete set of documents (several hundred pages) executed by all parties, the transaction would be delayed.
(Delaying the closing even by hours is a massive and costly pain given the number of people and amount of money involved. Homework: calculate the amount of interest $72m throws off ever hour.)
Faxing large quantities of documents for review was out of the question. FedEx or another overnight carrier would delay the closing. Not to mention, it would slow the final revision processing.
Using whois, I called the technical contact for the domain. He immediately handed me off to their mail guru. After I explained the problem, he checked his change log and found a half dozen new regular expressions were added to their spam filter about the time we started having problem. Seven characters of the eight-character transaction code we were using in the filenames on all the documents happened to be the same as a banned regex that had been added. Once the regex had been removed, everything worked and we closed on time.
Total time from 'whois domain' to problem resolution: less than half an hour.
Had I not been able to get the mail guru on the phone or by email, we would have delayed the closing. We would have had to come up with an alternate document transport. We would have had to notify and train all parties in the alternate document transport. It would have been ugly.
So, in short, if I have a problem with your domain, I'd like a number I can dial to speak with a competent human being.
> I don't have the time or resources to take calls from Joe in Seattle who wants to sell me
I'd spend 20 minutes a month telling sales holes 'no' than spend five hours trying to track down an admin at another site to fix a problem that, when I get the right person, takes five minutes to fix.
Matt