The Soekris platforms are getting a bit dated. You may have some of the same problems with the Soekris that you'd have with a WRT54G: slow CPU, only 10/100 ethernet, etc. On the other hand, the Soekris are i386-compatible, generally have more memory, and you can add gobs of flash and other options. The latest stuff (net55xx) is somewhat faster, but even that's a bit dated and limited performance-wise, sadly.
Keep in mind that the WRT54G's have a relatively slow CPU and couldn't even max out G. Bridging between the wifi and the built in switch is, AFAIR, a software affair, so even using it as a pure AP is less-than-full-throughput.
Spoofing implies gaining access to something that isn't actually yours. If you use your cell number as the CID on a VoIP call, that's merely setting your Caller-ID. If you use the local police department's number as the CID, and you call your neighbor and tell him to turn down the annoying noise he blares day and night, that's spoofing.
This is nothing new, we've been talking about issues like this since the introduction of SSL. Either you have onerous and thorough verification, which makes SSL a real pain to deploy and discourages adoption, or you have an easy-to-game system that makes SSL less secure. Security always involves lots of effort, and that's simply at odds with the way things are "supposed to work" on the Internet.
I'll argue that last point: a demo that shows off a crummy game will result in less sales.
It's worth remembering, however, that companies often hire very clever agencies whose primary role in life is to say shifty sorts of things that sound good but actually say nothing, or, worse, spin the topic in some crazy direction. It's like all that MPAA/RIAA propaganda that DRM is the greatest thing since sliced bread. Many companies won't talk candidly to the public, because what they would say if they were honest wouldn't be flattering to their image.
The best way to post comments in any heated debate is semi-anonymously, using a disposable e-mail address and a public Internet connection (or better yet, TOR). This is fairly effective at discouraging this sort of ridiculousness.
The devil is in the details; open source is nice, but unencumbered is also extremely important. I'm cautiously optimistic that Google will take this and do something really positive, but we'll have to wait and see. If they are willing to provide royalty-free patent licensing for the technology, then that really would be fantastic.
The problem with most of these devices is that they compete head-to-head with each other at this level. You're still talking what is effectively an entry-level commodity UPS line, which has to compete directly against all the other cheap products out there, especially on price. APC also has a very comprehensive array of offerings, and most other manufacturers are more limited.
That's not really what I mean, though. I'd want it to be paperLESS, where the sender sends and there's no third party intercept+scan, which raises a whole bunch of questions.
A simple standard for e-mailbox (note I'm not necessarily talking about e-mail) delivery of documents could mean that you could do all sorts of neat things:
1) You could automatically import your bills directly into your personal finance software; this would need to be a little more complex than PDF, but it'd be clever to have the phone company "mail" your bill and have it appear magically in your personal finance software,
2) You could arrange automatic filing and archiving of the data, which is the real current problem with current "paperless" systems; looking at your bill online is nice but typically the data is only available for a little while, and even if you save a local copy on disk, that's messy and may not work correctly later - I'd like to be able to look back sometimes ten or twenty years.
3) For the luddites who prefer paper, your e-mailbox could be forwarded to your printer so you still save on postage/envelopes/snail mail delay and get instant delivery of your e-documents, etc.
You know what I'd like? A real e-mailbox. Not the sort of thing that can be repurposed by senders for ads and crap. Something that reliably and consistently had mail sent in a fixed form. If I could get bank statements, bills, and all of that sent as a PDF to a given address, that'd be impressive. Something vaguely like a fax system, something that was standard, something that the law forbade abuse of, etc.
I've had flatbed scanners for a long time, auto-feeding, etc. Way back, scanning was very manual and OCR took a Really Long Time. That was a turnoff for many years.
These days, there are really good scanners out there (we just picked up a Fujitsu ScanSnap S1400) and the OCR isn't too painful on a modern box. The ScanSnap is color and double-sided with a large ADF - and blazing fast. I cannot picture too many improvements, except maybe a scanner that would unfold paper and remove staples... but the sticking point is still document management and access.
We're part of the way there. The largest remaining problems are software and people.
The upside? A banker's box of papers can be consolidated onto a quarter of a DVD - all searchable. I want that.:-)
Yes, he said server room, but the problems are similar.
Regardless of the size of the room, any "computer room" with anything more than a modest amount of power consumption will generate a certain amount of heat. A modern server can easily consume hundreds of watts of power, and sticking two or maybe three on something like a SmartUPS 1400 is likely to put it near the ragged edge anyways. That alone is more than a quarter ton of cooling, and "opening the window" can rapidly become a problem to managing how you dissipate that heat.
Even for a server room, the AHJ in many areas may look at your setup and decide that fire suppression isn't optional. Regardless, the heat blasting out of the back of your servers should rapidly convince *you* that making arrangements for cooling isn't optional either. These problems encompass both "server rooms" and "datacenters." The normal solution in both, at a certain point, is a private A/C system that handles just the equipment. The problem with this is that once you do it, you are definitely going to be separating the building HVAC system from your server room A/C zone, and in doing so, you do actually bring about a lack of ventilation because you're just continuously running the same air through the coils over and over and over. You'll actually make it almost airtight if you are required to install something like FM100.
We do record data, but there's just no data that suggested there was a problem. We have SNMP, email alerts, and it had even weathered a short power outage recently, which is probably what did it in.
Short of yanking the battery pack and looking periodically, which simply isn't practical (and isn't the idea that this is a SmartUPS?), I've still got no idea what we could really do differently. We have units that'll perform well after years and years, and ones that'll fry a battery set in 12 months. We've slowly weeded out the latter, thankfully, but here was a unit that did have some fairly old batteries but which did pass inspection with flying colors when it was racked last year.
Well, on the standalone 1400's, you also get the joy of the pop-off front that's permanently wired to the unit, so you have to spin it around and hope there's nothing sitting on top of the UPS, or you've got no place for it to go... and of course the door doesn't quite open fully, so unless you happened to stick a book or something under the UPS when you installed it, yeah, changing that battery with the door design they have is a lot of fun, you're right.
A triggered fire suppression system should trip the A/C interlock, shutting down ventilation and outside air (blowing air is stupid when FM-100 or whatever is used).
Normally, however, air may well be circulated in a fairly tight closed loop. You do not want to inject outside air without a lot of treatment; filtering and humidity are very large concerns. Drawing in extremely moist, hot air from outside and bringing it into your air supply may well be a lot more challenging than simply recycling the existing clean warm air that already has a roughly correct humidity, for example, and then what happens when it's winter and suddenly the outside air is cold and super-dry? You suddenly have a different HVAC challenge.
Having worked with various standalone and both older and newer rackmount models, I would have to say that one of the most frustrating bits about APC's designs are that their battery compartments seem to be engineered to assume that batteries never bulge.
On something like a standalone 1400, any bulging of the batteries tends to increase their width, jamming the batteries against the sides like Comic Book Guy trying to get through a turnstile.
On the older 3U 1400's, the front of the chassis is cut-to-battery-size, and being constrained spacewise front-to-back, bulging usually happens widthwise across the batteries, forcing them bigger than the opening. This means that even if you remove the chassis top, you can't just get in there with a crowbar and forcibly eject them out the front chassis opening, you still need to unscrew the inner battery compartment partition (and maybe even remove it).
This newer 2U 1400, though, wow, what a pain... the chassis is an artfully bent sheet of steel. If you cannot get the drawer to slide out of the battery compartment, the inner battery compartment partition is actually riveted to the chassis, so you have to drill out the rivets, and even after you get the partition removed, you only have one option for which battery to remove first, and they're taped down, so you have to use something like a crowbar to get them out, which is just vaguely scary because all the wiring for the battery tray surrounds the batteries in all the points where you need to exert force to break the tape adhesive.
It's almost like they want it to be frustrating as all hell (maybe so you just replace the whole UPS?) while looking like they've tried to make it new and easy with their wonderful battery tray.
03/14/2010 14:46:00 UPS: No batteries installed. 03/14/2010 14:45:42 UPS: No batteries installed cleared. 03/14/2010 14:45:38 UPS: Failed internal diagnostic self-test. 03/14/2010 14:45:26 UPS: No batteries installed. 03/14/2010 14:44:52 UPS: No batteries installed cleared. 03/14/2010 14:37:08 UPS: Failed internal diagnostic self-test.
at which point obviously we replaced the batteries. In this particular case, the UPS wasn't even really alarming, it would "squeak" for about a tenth of a second, wait a while, and repeat... sounded rather like a nearly dead battery-operated smoke alarm. Normally the APC UPS's have a really easy-to-recognize beee-beee-bee-bee-beee-beeeeeeep! when there's a battery dying, but this went from UPS-thinks-it-is-OK to totally-flipped-and-dead.
Network management cards are great and all, but aren't a guarantee of catching problems. We've seen this sort of thing happen to dozens of Smart-UPS. The older 3U 1400's tend to be the worst cookers, but this was a more recent 2U model. We've been replacing batteries and have got enough historical statistics that we've been able to identify that some units will "cook" batteries in as little as 18 months; our conclusion is that a UPS that cooks one set of batteries in anything less than 3 years has a bad charge circuit and will cook new batteries rapidly as well, so when we discover newly cooked batteries, we're always checking the replacement log to determine if we also need to discard the UPS as well.
The overall quality of the APC units leaves something to be desired; we generally like the ones that don't cook batteries quite a bit, but at sixty dollars a set to replace batteries, the ones that cook batteries or require disassembly in our electronics shop to remove old batteries are a bit of a pain in the rear.
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We needed this advice back when we started high power radio transmissions... we've got plenty of advertising of our presence out there now.
The Soekris platforms are getting a bit dated. You may have some of the same problems with the Soekris that you'd have with a WRT54G: slow CPU, only 10/100 ethernet, etc. On the other hand, the Soekris are i386-compatible, generally have more memory, and you can add gobs of flash and other options. The latest stuff (net55xx) is somewhat faster, but even that's a bit dated and limited performance-wise, sadly.
Keep in mind that the WRT54G's have a relatively slow CPU and couldn't even max out G. Bridging between the wifi and the built in switch is, AFAIR, a software affair, so even using it as a pure AP is less-than-full-throughput.
Spoofing implies gaining access to something that isn't actually yours. If you use your cell number as the CID on a VoIP call, that's merely setting your Caller-ID. If you use the local police department's number as the CID, and you call your neighbor and tell him to turn down the annoying noise he blares day and night, that's spoofing.
This is nothing new, we've been talking about issues like this since the introduction of SSL. Either you have onerous and thorough verification, which makes SSL a real pain to deploy and discourages adoption, or you have an easy-to-game system that makes SSL less secure. Security always involves lots of effort, and that's simply at odds with the way things are "supposed to work" on the Internet.
He has to *resubmit* it? What, do they delete them after they reject them? That seems odd.
I'll argue that last point: a demo that shows off a crummy game will result in less sales.
It's worth remembering, however, that companies often hire very clever agencies whose primary role in life is to say shifty sorts of things that sound good but actually say nothing, or, worse, spin the topic in some crazy direction. It's like all that MPAA/RIAA propaganda that DRM is the greatest thing since sliced bread. Many companies won't talk candidly to the public, because what they would say if they were honest wouldn't be flattering to their image.
Do they think we pay to watch trailers? Are they joking?
The best way to post comments in any heated debate is semi-anonymously, using a disposable e-mail address and a public Internet connection (or better yet, TOR). This is fairly effective at discouraging this sort of ridiculousness.
The return of pirates... as if boating on the Great Lakes wasn't already a bit hazardous at times.
Wow. Clever. Nobody ever thought of that before.
The devil is in the details; open source is nice, but unencumbered is also extremely important. I'm cautiously optimistic that Google will take this and do something really positive, but we'll have to wait and see. If they are willing to provide royalty-free patent licensing for the technology, then that really would be fantastic.
If you aspire to be Tony Stark, yes... but AluminumMan kind of lacks that spark...
Please don't pull my wings off, Dave!
The diesel model suffered from wet stacking.
The problem with most of these devices is that they compete head-to-head with each other at this level. You're still talking what is effectively an entry-level commodity UPS line, which has to compete directly against all the other cheap products out there, especially on price. APC also has a very comprehensive array of offerings, and most other manufacturers are more limited.
It's frustrating.
That's not really what I mean, though. I'd want it to be paperLESS, where the sender sends and there's no third party intercept+scan, which raises a whole bunch of questions.
A simple standard for e-mailbox (note I'm not necessarily talking about e-mail) delivery of documents could mean that you could do all sorts of neat things:
1) You could automatically import your bills directly into your personal finance software; this would need to be a little more complex than PDF, but it'd be clever to have the phone company "mail" your bill and have it appear magically in your personal finance software,
2) You could arrange automatic filing and archiving of the data, which is the real current problem with current "paperless" systems; looking at your bill online is nice but typically the data is only available for a little while, and even if you save a local copy on disk, that's messy and may not work correctly later - I'd like to be able to look back sometimes ten or twenty years.
3) For the luddites who prefer paper, your e-mailbox could be forwarded to your printer so you still save on postage/envelopes/snail mail delay and get instant delivery of your e-documents, etc.
You know what I'd like? A real e-mailbox. Not the sort of thing that can be repurposed by senders for ads and crap. Something that reliably and consistently had mail sent in a fixed form. If I could get bank statements, bills, and all of that sent as a PDF to a given address, that'd be impressive. Something vaguely like a fax system, something that was standard, something that the law forbade abuse of, etc.
I've had flatbed scanners for a long time, auto-feeding, etc. Way back, scanning was very manual and OCR took a Really Long Time. That was a turnoff for many years.
These days, there are really good scanners out there (we just picked up a Fujitsu ScanSnap S1400) and the OCR isn't too painful on a modern box. The ScanSnap is color and double-sided with a large ADF - and blazing fast. I cannot picture too many improvements, except maybe a scanner that would unfold paper and remove staples... but the sticking point is still document management and access.
We're part of the way there. The largest remaining problems are software and people.
The upside? A banker's box of papers can be consolidated onto a quarter of a DVD - all searchable. I want that. :-)
Yes, he said server room, but the problems are similar.
Regardless of the size of the room, any "computer room" with anything more than a modest amount of power consumption will generate a certain amount of heat. A modern server can easily consume hundreds of watts of power, and sticking two or maybe three on something like a SmartUPS 1400 is likely to put it near the ragged edge anyways. That alone is more than a quarter ton of cooling, and "opening the window" can rapidly become a problem to managing how you dissipate that heat.
Even for a server room, the AHJ in many areas may look at your setup and decide that fire suppression isn't optional. Regardless, the heat blasting out of the back of your servers should rapidly convince *you* that making arrangements for cooling isn't optional either. These problems encompass both "server rooms" and "datacenters." The normal solution in both, at a certain point, is a private A/C system that handles just the equipment. The problem with this is that once you do it, you are definitely going to be separating the building HVAC system from your server room A/C zone, and in doing so, you do actually bring about a lack of ventilation because you're just continuously running the same air through the coils over and over and over. You'll actually make it almost airtight if you are required to install something like FM100.
So I'm failing to see how the poster didn't RTFA.
We do record data, but there's just no data that suggested there was a problem. We have SNMP, email alerts, and it had even weathered a short power outage recently, which is probably what did it in.
Short of yanking the battery pack and looking periodically, which simply isn't practical (and isn't the idea that this is a SmartUPS?), I've still got no idea what we could really do differently. We have units that'll perform well after years and years, and ones that'll fry a battery set in 12 months. We've slowly weeded out the latter, thankfully, but here was a unit that did have some fairly old batteries but which did pass inspection with flying colors when it was racked last year.
Well, on the standalone 1400's, you also get the joy of the pop-off front that's permanently wired to the unit, so you have to spin it around and hope there's nothing sitting on top of the UPS, or you've got no place for it to go... and of course the door doesn't quite open fully, so unless you happened to stick a book or something under the UPS when you installed it, yeah, changing that battery with the door design they have is a lot of fun, you're right.
A triggered fire suppression system should trip the A/C interlock, shutting down ventilation and outside air (blowing air is stupid when FM-100 or whatever is used).
Normally, however, air may well be circulated in a fairly tight closed loop. You do not want to inject outside air without a lot of treatment; filtering and humidity are very large concerns. Drawing in extremely moist, hot air from outside and bringing it into your air supply may well be a lot more challenging than simply recycling the existing clean warm air that already has a roughly correct humidity, for example, and then what happens when it's winter and suddenly the outside air is cold and super-dry? You suddenly have a different HVAC challenge.
Having worked with various standalone and both older and newer rackmount models, I would have to say that one of the most frustrating bits about APC's designs are that their battery compartments seem to be engineered to assume that batteries never bulge.
On something like a standalone 1400, any bulging of the batteries tends to increase their width, jamming the batteries against the sides like Comic Book Guy trying to get through a turnstile.
On the older 3U 1400's, the front of the chassis is cut-to-battery-size, and being constrained spacewise front-to-back, bulging usually happens widthwise across the batteries, forcing them bigger than the opening. This means that even if you remove the chassis top, you can't just get in there with a crowbar and forcibly eject them out the front chassis opening, you still need to unscrew the inner battery compartment partition (and maybe even remove it).
This newer 2U 1400, though, wow, what a pain... the chassis is an artfully bent sheet of steel. If you cannot get the drawer to slide out of the battery compartment, the inner battery compartment partition is actually riveted to the chassis, so you have to drill out the rivets, and even after you get the partition removed, you only have one option for which battery to remove first, and they're taped down, so you have to use something like a crowbar to get them out, which is just vaguely scary because all the wiring for the battery tray surrounds the batteries in all the points where you need to exert force to break the tape adhesive.
It's almost like they want it to be frustrating as all hell (maybe so you just replace the whole UPS?) while looking like they've tried to make it new and easy with their wonderful battery tray.
That's good in theory, but in practice APC's diagnostics aren't always stellar. This unit went from
03/10/2010 11:09:32 UPS: Passed internal self-test.
to
03/14/2010 14:46:00 UPS: No batteries installed.
03/14/2010 14:45:42 UPS: No batteries installed cleared.
03/14/2010 14:45:38 UPS: Failed internal diagnostic self-test.
03/14/2010 14:45:26 UPS: No batteries installed.
03/14/2010 14:44:52 UPS: No batteries installed cleared.
03/14/2010 14:37:08 UPS: Failed internal diagnostic self-test.
at which point obviously we replaced the batteries. In this particular case, the UPS wasn't even really alarming, it would "squeak" for about a tenth of a second, wait a while, and repeat... sounded rather like a nearly dead battery-operated smoke alarm. Normally the APC UPS's have a really easy-to-recognize beee-beee-bee-bee-beee-beeeeeeep! when there's a battery dying, but this went from UPS-thinks-it-is-OK to totally-flipped-and-dead.
Network management cards are great and all, but aren't a guarantee of catching problems. We've seen this sort of thing happen to dozens of Smart-UPS. The older 3U 1400's tend to be the worst cookers, but this was a more recent 2U model. We've been replacing batteries and have got enough historical statistics that we've been able to identify that some units will "cook" batteries in as little as 18 months; our conclusion is that a UPS that cooks one set of batteries in anything less than 3 years has a bad charge circuit and will cook new batteries rapidly as well, so when we discover newly cooked batteries, we're always checking the replacement log to determine if we also need to discard the UPS as well.
The overall quality of the APC units leaves something to be desired; we generally like the ones that don't cook batteries quite a bit, but at sixty dollars a set to replace batteries, the ones that cook batteries or require disassembly in our electronics shop to remove old batteries are a bit of a pain in the rear.