I read about these a while ago and have bought one.
Just like every single other review I've read, great things are claimed about this thing that "Its just like a hard drive" "Linux! Wee!" yadda yadda yadda.
I question whether most these reviewers actually touched one.
I have version 1.2 of the board. I had four 512meg pc2700 dimms laying around (kingston) which I figured I'd try it out with. It seemed to work at first, detected in the bios, has the right size on autodetect.
I was able to format it once in Windows XP after initializing it. I have never successfully formatted it since. The data corrupted itself shortly thereafter. (I copied an iso back and forth from a standard sata disk and md5'd it.)
The speed was impressive. Copying to itself from itself did about 500mb in 5-7 seconds.
Now, the use in windows has some appeal (sql temp db? IIS cache / IIS compression dir?) but I really wanted this for some of my mail servers (spam scanners that need a fairly big glob of temp space) and possibly for some replicated mysql dbs.
I could not get any of the following linux installs to recognize that there was a disk on the system at sda or hda: fedora (core4), centos (4.2), ubuntu (um, whatever the iso is they have up). However, this was *only* during the installation process . . . I do not know what driver these installs might have needed that would allow it to see this device (they see a maxtor sata drive I have on hand just fine). If I installed onto a regular old sata hard drive, and turned off all PATA ports, I was able to see the I-Ram. I was able to fdisk the I-ram. I was able to mkfs.ext3 the i-ram, sort of... The smaller partitions seemed to go ok, but whenever I made a partition bigger than 200meg, sometimes mkfs would crap out throwing errors about the partition being possibly corrupt.
I was able to successfully install a 100meg fat partition, with dos on it and it worked quite well...
Now, because I was getting corruption and not using one of the suggested ram types, I purchased 4 1gig sticks of the exact model and chipset they listed as being tested (kingston kvf400x64c3a/1g). This did not change any of the weirdness.
Now, I firmly believe this product works. I can't see them selling it if it didn't (yeah, I'm an optimist). I called their tech support to make sure there wasn't a firmware update I might need to make. All of my hardware should be supported (ICH6R chipset, right ram, right pci slot, etc) they said. They have not tested it at all in Linux he said (This didn't matter since I could show issues in Win32XP). He was not able to immediately RMA a new card however . ..all they have on hand in support is apparently one of hte prototype cards ...so I'm having to wait until he gets one of the new ones, one of my chipset boards, and the suggested ram before he can make the call that a replacement would fix the issue.
I knew ahead of time I'd be dealing with early adopter pain, but there is use even though "SATA is so slow!". Yeah. Well, being able to push all 150mbytes/sec per SATA channel is good enough for me. That'd saturate a gigabit line and is good enough for me and I can put a 4gig ram disk on boards that wont support 4gig of ram total...
Don't consider this a review. I'm not speaking for or against the thing. This is purely my experience so far with *one* card...
The 4801 soekris can have 256meg of ram and a 266 is plenty for nfs and samba . . .
I didn't see anything in your post that negated the use of a soekris for what you are wanting? 266mhz is just fine for a file server for home use, 256mb ram is probably overkill, on the 4801 there is 44 pin udma33 interface (you can buy a converter if you want 40 pin or you can use the PCI slot and put your own card in if you want).
I question whether you are looking in the wrong direction for what you are wanting to accomplish. You are looking for something to run drives for a streaming server which means you'll need a power supply for those too (which you won't pull off one of the low power sbc systems generally). Unless you just want to dump a single 2.5" drive in there, and in that case, again, the soekris 4801 would work just fine.
But, if that's still not your bag, stop looking at SBC's, get one of the low end nano VIA boards (the cheapest one has no fan on it already and relies on passive cooling), underclock it as far down as it'll go. You'll reduce your power draw and you'll also have a much cooler (lower in temperature) system and won't need additional case fans. All you'll need to do is hunt for your case that has the quiet psu and you can do what you please with it.
(I have a 4801 as a router/firewall device, and before using it there I tried it out as a file server using an old 10gb 2.5 I reclaimed from a laptop and it was quite peppy. The only thing you have listed in your descrip that I didn't try was the slimserver software . ..and unless it's a beast You'll probably be happy with the soekris boxes ..and if not, put it up on ebay, I'll probably bid on it (or consider using it for other projects. A nerd that cant find a use for a soekris box needs to get rid of that girlfriend). ..)
I have the setup you have described at home, and for similar reasons. I work at home quite a bit and have a home office specifically for my work. However, I keep my play machines and work machines absolutely segmented to protect my customers from me doing something stupid on one of my personal machines. (I have as yet gotten anything, but how do I know the next CD I buy wont have something worse than what sony was spewing . . . but I prefer to be paranoid when it comes to my customers' security). In any case for ~300 dollars you can purchase: Soekris 4801 SBC computer with case and power supply. You will need to purchase a Compact flash card for the OS. Monowall will only cost you time. You can attempt to get a wireless card working on the 4801, however, I didnt want to futz with antennae and soldering, so I use a separate wap for each network. The 4801 has 3 interfaces by default (you can add more with the pci slot), but 3 is enough for what you want. An uplink to your cable modem, and two separate network segments.
Monowall will let you completely firewall the two interfaces from each other and still use the same uplink or you can allow limited traffic between them (I allow ssh between my segments).
Now, you can do the same thing with any computer and monowall, the soekris is just a one stop shop that's tiny, doesn't eat much power and will get the job done...I personally like it.
Check ebay for soekris 4801's, there's usually one that shows up every week or two from some nerd that wanted to play with it but decided they wanted something else for their project (or a new toy) for $300.
Chief Information Security Officer, you troll ...
on
The CISO Handbook
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· Score: 1
This is the single thing stopping me from being able to roll out pure Linux desktops to many of my clients. A replacement for everything that exchange offers on the client and server side is what throws the wrench into the gears. Yes, there are servers that can replicate parts of what exchange does. Yes there are clients that offer many of the things that Outlook does when connected to exchange. But there just isn't yet a unified client-server solution for Outlook-Exchange that can be deployed to the common-desktop-plebe that allows them to start working and communicate on the day after orientation that Exchange offers. Any secretary can start using exchange to schedule meetings, send out emails on behalf of people, and do the generic office communication thing with Outlook-exchange. There just isn't a total-opensource solution that does this yet.
I rah-rah Linux and open source like the rest of you, but 'best tool for the job' trumps my ideologies every time. Give me Open Outlook and Open Exchange and I'll be your Champion...
(excuse my typos and ramblings, there's an empty bottle of goldschlager next to me and I think I might have my Exchange priv IS down to a manageable level again)
"result was nothing less than the level of ..."
on
Blizzcon Writeup
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· Score: 1
No, he means there were long lines, and whenever they got near the vendors they ended up walking really slow, people would appear out of nowhere, and there were lots of pink haired mostly naked short people dancing.
I played B&W2. I am *not* a super-gamer. I finished it from start to finish in maybe 9 hours of game play, a large quantity of it being repetitive and somewhat boring.
The game is *very* pretty. If you have the graphics card and a nice sound system, you'll have some wow factor. But game play? Come on. The AI is downright stupid. The enemy creatures get 'stuck' looking at trees because they lose their pathing when you close off your gates to your city. Their armys will stand there waiting for you to open the gates, but if the gates close, they stop. I got past peekaboo early on in life and just playing it with an army until it gets close enough for archers to take out doesn't do much for me.
What's worse is I completed every single quest (barring a couple that would have switched my alignment) and I finished this game in less than a half day's worth of playing.
I'm sorry, but 50 bucks for something like this? Just for pretty graphics? I want my money back. (on the other hand, I didn't get any save crashes).
See, I think I'd argue that they should be pushing for the exact opposite. I mean, honestly, if I had to spend 30 months with someone, I'd rather they'd be so into free love that chewbacca would get 'em going (and I mean, how can he not?).
I'd rather have the sluttle shuttle rather than a no-fun-nun-run.
Besides, just about *every* job disallows having sex at the office, it isn't like people who to do it don't ignore it anyways . . . Making rules that are just going to be ignored is stupid.
Posted: Private Lan. No hunting. No Phishing.
on
PCs Posted No Trespass
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· Score: 4, Funny
No SNMP Trapping.
Violators will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.
Drives die. Fans die. Power supplies die. Motherboards die. Having a RAID array is not enough. There are plenty of other things in a single system that can go wrong that can take the system down for a period of time. The biggest issue I have with the limited description here is the fact you are talking about one system. If you want availability, you need to be looking at scaling by the machine.
Now you can just have other machines waiting to take the load with a quick reconfig, or you can start doing things automatically (people have mentioned using things like Nagios for monitoring, but monitoring doesn't give you uptime ..it gives you response to minimize downtime . ..)
If you want to look at solutions that don't cost, check out LVS. It'll allow you to balance your ports across multiple systems (you can even balance win32 and linux systems if you for some reason wanted to) with a couple different methods (I prefer the DR method myself). The setup isn't that bad with several of the recent kernels in the major distro's including all the ipvs turned on by default, so you may not even have to recompile a kernel on your balancer systems.
Now, of course you can't depend on a single balancer any more than you can depend on a single web server; there is support using the HA linux stuff to allow you to have backup LVS systems to take over as a balancer if your primary balancer bites it (heartbeat and ldirectord is your friend here).
With a pair of fairly low end systems and some monkey work at the keys, you can have a system that will balance your tcp traffic (or setup an automagic failover from a system) that can be as good as some of the commercial balancing products out there.
I currently use LVS with heartbeat/ldirector to balance the following:
Win32 Apache Servers
Linux Apache Servers
Win2k3 IIS Servers (the LVS system balanced better than the built in WLBS from MS . ..and there was a lot less broadcasts
Postfix
Amavisd-new
And as others have mentioned about setting up some good monitoring (ala Nagios if you want), we monitor the virtual services on the LVS systems in addition to the real servers' services so that we can know if we are still delivery service externally even though real server B is down...
When you get bigger, then you should even start looking at having datacenter redundancy . . . deploying the meteor net never seems to be the right answer to the 'Force Majeur' question . . .
I like the idea of the space elevator . . . but won't it be a prime target for terrorist attacks? I mean, if I was a terrorist, it'd be the first place I'd direct my hijacked pla . . . moment, there's a knock at my door.
One CRT isn't going to cut it. Get a second LCD mounted up on the wall. That much space, you likely want to watch more than one thing at a time and a switch box is frustrating.
An old laptop with floppy drive (and a burner if you want to get fancy). Nothing is more irritating than having to walk back and forth for bios, drivers, and whatnot to put on floppies at your desk . . . There's always something you want to lookup online or download to use on your hardware.
Easily accessible tools. Not bins. Not a toolbox under the bench. A nice set of phillips and flatheads, maybe a couple needle nose just there on the wall. (Paint them fluorescent orange or something so they dont walk away if you want). Those all-in-one tool cases with their plastic snapin holders are not conducive to putting things away right.
An assortment of 'known good' parts in easy to get to bins doesn't hurt. And a nice sorted variety of screws is always good (I don't know what they do with them, but people seem to like hording backplanes and their screws . ..).
Easy to reach canned air. Easy to reach paper towels.
Didn't Creative already do a 'Nano' mp3 player?
on
A Review of the iPod nano
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Creative Zen Nano Plus
Is Apple losing creativity or did I miss some division getting bought by someone else?
I just won't buy one . ..I'm pretty sure that's how this whole consumer market thing works? I think?
I just find it interesting that they feel the can change something I have already purchased because they don't like what I do with it. I think I should be able to reciprocate, that is fair, right? If I don't like their business practices, maybe it should be ok for me to disable their email.
What next? Hand held massagers being disabled because they aren't exactly being used to massage?
That's definitely interesting. Didn't notice the netblock was there. Did some other quick searching to see if there was any other 'official' sites and a few pop up . . none of them from sources I would trust as being in the know of which one is 'official' if there is one . . .
The other one I'm seeing linked to a lot and sometimes referred to as the 'other official' site is This one. But again, it's a plus if it really is 'official' since it's an Apache 2.0 box on SuSE...
This Trip thing they are talking about here has a bit at the bottom of the page that "This webpage and its images is released to the internet community under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License" (with link). Not a Linux endorsement, but definitely in the right ball park.
I doubt they'd ever come out and advocate something that isn't homegrown . . . you don't hear much about DPRK linux users, but somehow I bet they are out there since there's lotsa open source type stuff sitting on their primary web presense.
Or I could be wrong . . . but I'd bet there are some communist linux boxes out there . . .
I think it sure would be nifty to see this type of AP installed in cars and have uplink points along major highways . . . It'd be a fluid network that would improve with traffic . . . Then again, maybe encouraging heavier traffic is a bad thing . . . it'd still be cool.
It seems every reponse that has been modded up are people who are pointing out things you likely have already thought of. Today's slashdot: Ask for suggestions, get flamed. Nice.
Let us assume that you have considered the possibility of flooding, you understand you *could* put in a ceiling, and you really are looking at making it look nice. You said the constraint is the ceiling, but the fact of your asking makes me think the constraint is the pocket book. I'm assuming this isn't a server room since you did say 'pc room'.
I had a similar issue with space. I wanted to house 8-14 machines at any one point running off up to 3-4 monitors with an 'L' shaped desk that covered about 7x5 feet. No amount of ceiling is going to help me find room for my legs when some of them are consumer towers, some are 4U rackmounts on their sides, and some are cute little systems. I knew I'd be moving systems in and out on occasion. I wanted a raised floor to put them all under so the machines were close enough to be hooked to my monitors and switch boxes without extensions, yet still be out of the way, accessible enough, and more importantly quiet (without spending gobs of money every time I brought a new system in to add to the bunch every couple weeks just to make it quiet). My solution was a raised floor for my desk (and only my desk).
To do something like this economically (though not necessarily prettily) can be accomplished for under 200 bucks. Picture of mine
Building a free standing platform that will hold a good half ton (put down the fritos if this isn't enough) for you, your desk, rolly chair, and 2 or three others isn't too difficult and all you need is a workbench to do some sawing and drilling.
You can build a platform that has 18" of clearance (enough space that a mid tower can slide under) that stands 24" tall (you can get a full tower in tilted and lean it upwards between crossbeams) with a single 4x4x8', two 2x6x12', eight or so 2x4x8', a couple sheets of 1/2" plywood (preferably higher quality so you dont have to sand) and a plethora of bolts, braces, joist hangers. If you check out the first link there, you can see the mid towers that just fit under the floor, and a full tower showing it being the same height as the floor.. Build the base of the frame by attaching 2x6 pieces to the 4x4 legs with a pair of bolts at each juncture (so each 4x4 would have 4 bolts running through, 2 per side in that corner). When drilling the holes (a drill press helps here), make sure to offset one side by 1/2" up or down (you dont want the bolts meeting each other in the middle of the 4x4).
Picture of a corner (with braces leading up to an extra post I was using to let a cockatoo visit, dont ask. You can use similar big corner braces like those if you want, but they arent necessary ..I just used them to bolt that extra 4x4 post come up off the floor.).
Once you have the base frame (think 'cornerlines in a cube' to visualize) you will want to place support beams through the middle parallel to the short side to support the plywood top you'll be putting on. Use 2x4 hangers screwed into the 2x6 sides and place them approximately every 14-18 inches giving you 2x4 cross beams. This will help support the plywood top and give you a firm surface.
Once you have your crossbeams in place and everything bolted in, this platform should be rock solid before you put your plywood top on. The plywood you can cut however is most convenient for you. I didn't need a traditional raised floor where you could pull up a 'tile' at any 2 foot interval. I was happy enough to crawl under for the few times I'd need to get under there for initial setups. You may want to work in some access panels or make the top modular. It is really up to you (though you'll need to figure out the way to make it stable and size your crossbeams appropriately). You may also need to deal
Absolutely, Pothos can grow in just fluorescents
on
Plants for Cubicles?
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· Score: 1
We had little potted ones in the bathroom of the first startup I was in back in 96 . . . no windows. Just fluorescents when someone would go in there and turn the lights on . . . They got watered (with water) maybe once every couple weeks and sometimes would go months. The did not die.
Since they were so hardy, we moved them from bathroom to bathroom as the startup grew . . . eventually after I decided to leave the company after it got absorbed by a big telco, I took the plant with me and gave it a spot at home.
I havent watered it in a month now, but it seems to be ok. Definitely a bit bigger than the little bathroom pot it started from . . and in a cube, you can make yourself a veritable jungle winding that stuff around . ..it explodes in good sunlight and lotsa water, but it does just fine in very little too.
I know the original question was 'how do I dump MS for Linux', but I highly suggest you choose the right tool for the job. Yes, Linux is great. Samba is great. Administering it, well, it depends on *you* really. As most are guessing, it doesn't sound like you've heard of samba, so it is likely you are fairly new to the Linux scene. Great. Welcome.
Now, you really need to decide if it is the right tool and if you can make it the right tool. Before doing that, consider your current setup and your current upgrade path. Is MS wrong for you? Maybe not. Do you qualify for Non-profit MS licensing? Yes, it is evil and I should be lashed for suggesting it. However, it is important to know that the option exists. If you do qualify, you are not going to get a better licensing option from MS at your size in all liklihood. Small Business Server 2k3 is definitely targetted at your size organization; find out what pricing you can get for it from the MS marketroids. Let them even give their TCO arguments to you. Remember them, write them down, you'll need them.
Once you have that info, you have the ammunition to help justify your linux proposal. Or you won't and you'll have at least chosen the Evil Empire with thought...
Don't make the switch just because the zealots are pushing you to. Make the switch when it is the right economical, business & technical supportable option. Learn Samba. Prove it works to yourself. Bring in a workstation with it and prove it works to the non-profit. Prove the TCO argument. You *will* win if they really listen.
Slashdot Mirror
I read about these a while ago and have bought one.
.all they have on hand in support is apparently one of hte prototype cards . ..so I'm having to wait until he gets one of the new ones, one of my chipset boards, and the suggested ram before he can make the call that a replacement would fix the issue.
Just like every single other review I've read, great things are claimed about this thing that "Its just like a hard drive" "Linux! Wee!" yadda yadda yadda.
I question whether most these reviewers actually touched one.
I have version 1.2 of the board.
I had four 512meg pc2700 dimms laying around (kingston) which I figured I'd try it out with. It seemed to work at first, detected in the bios, has the right size on autodetect.
I was able to format it once in Windows XP after initializing it. I have never successfully formatted it since. The data corrupted itself shortly thereafter. (I copied an iso back and forth from a standard sata disk and md5'd it.)
The speed was impressive. Copying to itself from itself did about 500mb in 5-7 seconds.
Now, the use in windows has some appeal (sql temp db? IIS cache / IIS compression dir?) but I really wanted this for some of my mail servers (spam scanners that need a fairly big glob of temp space) and possibly for some replicated mysql dbs.
I could not get any of the following linux installs to recognize that there was a disk on the system at sda or hda: fedora (core4), centos (4.2), ubuntu (um, whatever the iso is they have up). However, this was *only* during the installation process . . . I do not know what driver these installs might have needed that would allow it to see this device (they see a maxtor sata drive I have on hand just fine). If I installed onto a regular old sata hard drive, and turned off all PATA ports, I was able to see the I-Ram. I was able to fdisk the I-ram. I was able to mkfs.ext3 the i-ram, sort of... The smaller partitions seemed to go ok, but whenever I made a partition bigger than 200meg, sometimes mkfs would crap out throwing errors about the partition being possibly corrupt.
I was able to successfully install a 100meg fat partition, with dos on it and it worked quite well...
Now, because I was getting corruption and not using one of the suggested ram types, I purchased 4 1gig sticks of the exact model and chipset they listed as being tested (kingston kvf400x64c3a/1g).
This did not change any of the weirdness.
Now, I firmly believe this product works. I can't see them selling it if it didn't (yeah, I'm an optimist). I called their tech support to make sure there wasn't a firmware update I might need to make. All of my hardware should be supported (ICH6R chipset, right ram, right pci slot, etc) they said. They have not tested it at all in Linux he said (This didn't matter since I could show issues in Win32XP). He was not able to immediately RMA a new card however . .
I knew ahead of time I'd be dealing with early adopter pain, but there is use even though "SATA is so slow!". Yeah. Well, being able to push all 150mbytes/sec per SATA channel is good enough for me. That'd saturate a gigabit line and is good enough for me and I can put a 4gig ram disk on boards that wont support 4gig of ram total...
Don't consider this a review. I'm not speaking for or against the thing. This is purely my experience so far with *one* card...
Who woulda thought!
.uh . . . you know, those other evil video card vendors.
Free video driver updates!
Will wonders never cease.
Much better than those pay for drivers you get from . .
The 4801 soekris can have 256meg of ram and a 266 is plenty for nfs and samba . . . I didn't see anything in your post that negated the use of a soekris for what you are wanting? 266mhz is just fine for a file server for home use, 256mb ram is probably overkill, on the 4801 there is 44 pin udma33 interface (you can buy a converter if you want 40 pin or you can use the PCI slot and put your own card in if you want).
.and unless it's a beast You'll probably be happy with the soekris boxes . .and if not, put it up on ebay, I'll probably bid on it (or consider using it for other projects. A nerd that cant find a use for a soekris box needs to get rid of that girlfriend). . .)
I question whether you are looking in the wrong direction for what you are wanting to accomplish. You are looking for something to run drives for a streaming server which means you'll need a power supply for those too (which you won't pull off one of the low power sbc systems generally). Unless you just want to dump a single 2.5" drive in there, and in that case, again, the soekris 4801 would work just fine.
But, if that's still not your bag, stop looking at SBC's, get one of the low end nano VIA boards (the cheapest one has no fan on it already and relies on passive cooling), underclock it as far down as it'll go. You'll reduce your power draw and you'll also have a much cooler (lower in temperature) system and won't need additional case fans. All you'll need to do is hunt for your case that has the quiet psu and you can do what you please with it.
(I have a 4801 as a router/firewall device, and before using it there I tried it out as a file server using an old 10gb 2.5 I reclaimed from a laptop and it was quite peppy. The only thing you have listed in your descrip that I didn't try was the slimserver software . .
I have the setup you have described at home, and for similar reasons. I work at home quite a bit and have a home office specifically for my work. However, I keep my play machines and work machines absolutely segmented to protect my customers from me doing something stupid on one of my personal machines. (I have as yet gotten anything, but how do I know the next CD I buy wont have something worse than what sony was spewing . . . but I prefer to be paranoid when it comes to my customers' security). In any case for ~300 dollars you can purchase:
Soekris 4801 SBC computer with case and power supply.
You will need to purchase a Compact flash card for the OS.
Monowall will only cost you time.
You can attempt to get a wireless card working on the 4801, however, I didnt want to futz with antennae and soldering, so I use a separate wap for each network. The 4801 has 3 interfaces by default (you can add more with the pci slot), but 3 is enough for what you want. An uplink to your cable modem, and two separate network segments.
Monowall will let you completely firewall the two interfaces from each other and still use the same uplink or you can allow limited traffic between them (I allow ssh between my segments).
Now, you can do the same thing with any computer and monowall, the soekris is just a one stop shop that's tiny, doesn't eat much power and will get the job done...I personally like it.
Check ebay for soekris 4801's, there's usually one that shows up every week or two from some nerd that wanted to play with it but decided they wanted something else for their project (or a new toy) for $300.
You are welcome!
This is the single thing stopping me from being able to roll out pure Linux desktops to many of my clients. A replacement for everything that exchange offers on the client and server side is what throws the wrench into the gears. Yes, there are servers that can replicate parts of what exchange does. Yes there are clients that offer many of the things that Outlook does when connected to exchange. But there just isn't yet a unified client-server solution for Outlook-Exchange that can be deployed to the common-desktop-plebe that allows them to start working and communicate on the day after orientation that Exchange offers. Any secretary can start using exchange to schedule meetings, send out emails on behalf of people, and do the generic office communication thing with Outlook-exchange. There just isn't a total-opensource solution that does this yet.
I rah-rah Linux and open source like the rest of you, but 'best tool for the job' trumps my ideologies every time. Give me Open Outlook and Open Exchange and I'll be your Champion...
(excuse my typos and ramblings, there's an empty bottle of goldschlager next to me and I think I might have my Exchange priv IS down to a manageable level again)
No, he means there were long lines, and whenever they got near the vendors they ended up walking really slow, people would appear out of nowhere, and there were lots of pink haired mostly naked short people dancing.
I played B&W2. I am *not* a super-gamer. I finished it from start to finish in maybe 9 hours of game play, a large quantity of it being repetitive and somewhat boring.
The game is *very* pretty. If you have the graphics card and a nice sound system, you'll have some wow factor. But game play? Come on. The AI is downright stupid. The enemy creatures get 'stuck' looking at trees because they lose their pathing when you close off your gates to your city. Their armys will stand there waiting for you to open the gates, but if the gates close, they stop. I got past peekaboo early on in life and just playing it with an army until it gets close enough for archers to take out doesn't do much for me.
What's worse is I completed every single quest (barring a couple that would have switched my alignment) and I finished this game in less than a half day's worth of playing.
I'm sorry, but 50 bucks for something like this? Just for pretty graphics? I want my money back. (on the other hand, I didn't get any save crashes).
See, I think I'd argue that they should be pushing for the exact opposite. I mean, honestly, if I had to spend 30 months with someone, I'd rather they'd be so into free love that chewbacca would get 'em going (and I mean, how can he not?).
I'd rather have the sluttle shuttle rather than a no-fun-nun-run.
Besides, just about *every* job disallows having sex at the office, it isn't like people who to do it don't ignore it anyways . . . Making rules that are just going to be ignored is stupid.
No SNMP Trapping.
Violators will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.
Had thet dang sahn posted out yahnuh fer years now. I do b'lieve it states clearly ah am hav'n theh ra'ht t' shoot 'em.
Drives die. Fans die. Power supplies die. Motherboards die. Having a RAID array is not enough. There are plenty of other things in a single system that can go wrong that can take the system down for a period of time. The biggest issue I have with the limited description here is the fact you are talking about one system. If you want availability, you need to be looking at scaling by the machine.
.it gives you response to minimize downtime . . .)
.and there was a lot less broadcasts
Now you can just have other machines waiting to take the load with a quick reconfig, or you can start doing things automatically (people have mentioned using things like Nagios for monitoring, but monitoring doesn't give you uptime .
If you want to look at solutions that don't cost, check out LVS. It'll allow you to balance your ports across multiple systems (you can even balance win32 and linux systems if you for some reason wanted to) with a couple different methods (I prefer the DR method myself). The setup isn't that bad with several of the recent kernels in the major distro's including all the ipvs turned on by default, so you may not even have to recompile a kernel on your balancer systems.
Now, of course you can't depend on a single balancer any more than you can depend on a single web server; there is support using the HA linux stuff to allow you to have backup LVS systems to take over as a balancer if your primary balancer bites it (heartbeat and ldirectord is your friend here).
With a pair of fairly low end systems and some monkey work at the keys, you can have a system that will balance your tcp traffic (or setup an automagic failover from a system) that can be as good as some of the commercial balancing products out there.
I currently use LVS with heartbeat/ldirector to balance the following:
Win32 Apache Servers
Linux Apache Servers
Win2k3 IIS Servers (the LVS system balanced better than the built in WLBS from MS . .
Postfix
Amavisd-new
And as others have mentioned about setting up some good monitoring (ala Nagios if you want), we monitor the virtual services on the LVS systems in addition to the real servers' services so that we can know if we are still delivery service externally even though real server B is down...
When you get bigger, then you should even start looking at having datacenter redundancy . . . deploying the meteor net never seems to be the right answer to the 'Force Majeur' question . . .
Well, except for the part about Newt Time . . . I like newts.
Guns A and B. Tracking and firing on multiple targets.
They must be wall to wall in there. Look at those ammo counters go. It's a shooting gallery down there.
B gun's dry. Twenty on A. Ten. Five. That's it.
They're at the fire door.
Man, listen to that.
Twenty meters and closing. Fifteen. C and D guns down about fifty percent.
How many?
Can't tell. Lots. D gun's down to twenty. Ten. It's out.
They retreated. The guns stopped them.
Yeah. But look...
Newt time then can walk right up and knock.
But they don't know that. They're probably looking for other ways to get in. That'll take them awhile.
I like the idea of the space elevator . . . but won't it be a prime target for terrorist attacks? I mean, if I was a terrorist, it'd be the first place I'd direct my hijacked pla . . . moment, there's a knock at my door.
One CRT isn't going to cut it. Get a second LCD mounted up on the wall. That much space, you likely want to watch more than one thing at a time and a switch box is frustrating.
.).
An old laptop with floppy drive (and a burner if you want to get fancy). Nothing is more irritating than having to walk back and forth for bios, drivers, and whatnot to put on floppies at your desk . . . There's always something you want to lookup online or download to use on your hardware.
Easily accessible tools. Not bins. Not a toolbox under the bench. A nice set of phillips and flatheads, maybe a couple needle nose just there on the wall. (Paint them fluorescent orange or something so they dont walk away if you want). Those all-in-one tool cases with their plastic snapin holders are not conducive to putting things away right.
An assortment of 'known good' parts in easy to get to bins doesn't hurt. And a nice sorted variety of screws is always good (I don't know what they do with them, but people seem to like hording backplanes and their screws . .
Easy to reach canned air. Easy to reach paper towels.
Creative Zen Nano Plus Is Apple losing creativity or did I miss some division getting bought by someone else?
I just won't buy one . . .I'm pretty sure that's how this whole consumer market thing works? I think?
I just find it interesting that they feel the can change something I have already purchased because they don't like what I do with it. I think I should be able to reciprocate, that is fair, right? If I don't like their business practices, maybe it should be ok for me to disable their email.
What next? Hand held massagers being disabled because they aren't exactly being used to massage?
The original article had a link right to it . . .
The 5220 card runs 200 bucks with a 100 buck discount and the service is 80 a month.
I haven't found a dead spot in Austin yet and I know it is good as far down as San Marcos.
That's definitely interesting. Didn't notice the netblock was there. Did some other quick searching to see if there was any other 'official' sites and a few pop up . . none of them from sources I would trust as being in the know of which one is 'official' if there is one . . .
The other one I'm seeing linked to a lot and sometimes referred to as the 'other official' site is This one. But again, it's a plus if it really is 'official' since it's an Apache 2.0 box on SuSE...
Just browsed around their site a little bit and I see lotsa positive open source-ish things.
.which is open source and sits on Apache (though it *could* be run on Win32 or Linux).
The Korean Friendship Association USA branch on the DPRK official site uses CMSimple .
This Trip thing they are talking about here has a bit at the bottom of the page that "This webpage and its images is released to the internet community under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License" (with link). Not a Linux endorsement, but definitely in the right ball park.
I doubt they'd ever come out and advocate something that isn't homegrown . . . you don't hear much about DPRK linux users, but somehow I bet they are out there since there's lotsa open source type stuff sitting on their primary web presense.
Or I could be wrong . . . but I'd bet there are some communist linux boxes out there . . .
I think it sure would be nifty to see this type of AP installed in cars and have uplink points along major highways . . . It'd be a fluid network that would improve with traffic . . . Then again, maybe encouraging heavier traffic is a bad thing . . . it'd still be cool.
It seems every reponse that has been modded up are people who are pointing out things you likely have already thought of. Today's slashdot: Ask for suggestions, get flamed. Nice.
.I just used them to bolt that extra 4x4 post come up off the floor.).
Once you have the base frame (think 'cornerlines in a cube' to visualize) you will want to place support beams through the middle parallel to the short side to support the plywood top you'll be putting on. Use 2x4 hangers screwed into the 2x6 sides and place them approximately every 14-18 inches giving you 2x4 cross beams. This will help support the plywood top and give you a firm surface.
Let us assume that you have considered the possibility of flooding, you understand you *could* put in a ceiling, and you really are looking at making it look nice. You said the constraint is the ceiling, but the fact of your asking makes me think the constraint is the pocket book. I'm assuming this isn't a server room since you did say 'pc room'.
I had a similar issue with space. I wanted to house 8-14 machines at any one point running off up to 3-4 monitors with an 'L' shaped desk that covered about 7x5 feet. No amount of ceiling is going to help me find room for my legs when some of them are consumer towers, some are 4U rackmounts on their sides, and some are cute little systems. I knew I'd be moving systems in and out on occasion. I wanted a raised floor to put them all under so the machines were close enough to be hooked to my monitors and switch boxes without extensions, yet still be out of the way, accessible enough, and more importantly quiet (without spending gobs of money every time I brought a new system in to add to the bunch every couple weeks just to make it quiet). My solution was a raised floor for my desk (and only my desk). To do something like this economically (though not necessarily prettily) can be accomplished for under 200 bucks.
Picture of mine
Building a free standing platform that will hold a good half ton (put down the fritos if this isn't enough) for you, your desk, rolly chair, and 2 or three others isn't too difficult and all you need is a workbench to do some sawing and drilling.
You can build a platform that has 18" of clearance (enough space that a mid tower can slide under) that stands 24" tall (you can get a full tower in tilted and lean it upwards between crossbeams) with a single 4x4x8', two 2x6x12', eight or so 2x4x8', a couple sheets of 1/2" plywood (preferably higher quality so you dont have to sand) and a plethora of bolts, braces, joist hangers. If you check out the first link there, you can see the mid towers that just fit under the floor, and a full tower showing it being the same height as the floor.. Build the base of the frame by attaching 2x6 pieces to the 4x4 legs with a pair of bolts at each juncture (so each 4x4 would have 4 bolts running through, 2 per side in that corner). When drilling the holes (a drill press helps here), make sure to offset one side by 1/2" up or down (you dont want the bolts meeting each other in the middle of the 4x4). Picture of a corner (with braces leading up to an extra post I was using to let a cockatoo visit, dont ask. You can use similar big corner braces like those if you want, but they arent necessary .
Once you have your crossbeams in place and everything bolted in, this platform should be rock solid before you put your plywood top on. The plywood you can cut however is most convenient for you. I didn't need a traditional raised floor where you could pull up a 'tile' at any 2 foot interval. I was happy enough to crawl under for the few times I'd need to get under there for initial setups. You may want to work in some access panels or make the top modular. It is really up to you (though you'll need to figure out the way to make it stable and size your crossbeams appropriately). You may also need to deal
We had little potted ones in the bathroom of the first startup I was in back in 96 . . . no windows. Just fluorescents when someone would go in there and turn the lights on . . . They got watered (with water) maybe once every couple weeks and sometimes would go months. The did not die. Since they were so hardy, we moved them from bathroom to bathroom as the startup grew . . . eventually after I decided to leave the company after it got absorbed by a big telco, I took the plant with me and gave it a spot at home. I havent watered it in a month now, but it seems to be ok. Definitely a bit bigger than the little bathroom pot it started from . . and in a cube, you can make yourself a veritable jungle winding that stuff around . . .it explodes in good sunlight and lotsa water, but it does just fine in very little too.
I know the original question was 'how do I dump MS for Linux', but I highly suggest you choose the right tool for the job. Yes, Linux is great. Samba is great. Administering it, well, it depends on *you* really. As most are guessing, it doesn't sound like you've heard of samba, so it is likely you are fairly new to the Linux scene. Great. Welcome.
Now, you really need to decide if it is the right tool and if you can make it the right tool. Before doing that, consider your current setup and your current upgrade path. Is MS wrong for you? Maybe not. Do you qualify for Non-profit MS licensing? Yes, it is evil and I should be lashed for suggesting it. However, it is important to know that the option exists. If you do qualify, you are not going to get a better licensing option from MS at your size in all liklihood. Small Business Server 2k3 is definitely targetted at your size organization; find out what pricing you can get for it from the MS marketroids. Let them even give their TCO arguments to you. Remember them, write them down, you'll need them.
Once you have that info, you have the ammunition to help justify your linux proposal. Or you won't and you'll have at least chosen the Evil Empire with thought...
Don't make the switch just because the zealots are pushing you to. Make the switch when it is the right economical, business & technical supportable option. Learn Samba. Prove it works to yourself. Bring in a workstation with it and prove it works to the non-profit. Prove the TCO argument. You *will* win if they really listen.