i teach economics at the university level, and i have a lenovo x200. it is way outside the $1000 range. it has a wacom screen and the stylus is very precise (we do lots of crazy math too ya know). my normal computer is a mac, but i LOVE this thing. lightweight, LONG battery life (5hrs easily), and very sturdy construction. its currently running vista and i've had no problems (core 2 duo 2.0, 4gb ram)
i'd either save up (or convince them to give you more money - if your university is in the US and receives perkins funding, you might go that route. as long as you teach perkins eligible students, your grant administrator can probably find the cash (it might take bribing them with chocolate though..lol)) or, if there is a PC in the room invest in a wireless/bluetooth tablet that you can just carry to the classroom with you. you are going to have a hella-hard time finding all that you need for less than $1500 (unless you go used - our university wont buy used), and one of those cheap ones will just fall apart. one of my colleagues got one of the $1000 HP offerings and HATES it. a year later, the screen flickers, the battery sucks, and the tablet is not very sensitive.
this statement would be absolutely correct. the precursors to the anabaptists (which were the precursors of today's modern baptists -- i am an ABA member) were the Waldensians. they were victims of the inquisition -- the pic on the link even shows a text with them made out to be witches (they were considered heretics because they rejected papal authority and believed that the Bible was all one needed for salvation).
note up front -- i did this about a year and a half ago, but put it in one of those blog-things that were so popular so i would remember what i did. anyway, the process might have changed a little. btw -- i am in the US.
i bought an inspiron 1200 laptop a year and a half ago and it came with windows xp home and word perfect office. i dont run MS stuff (linux and openbsd are my preferred choices) and could really care less what it came with. but, since "no os" wasnt an option, i thought that i would try my hands at getting the much talked-about "windows refund."
i first called the number on their website, and then promptly got transferred to the technical support line, which transferred me to preferred customer care or something like that. anyway, instead of jumping through hoops the number that you want to call is:
800.624.9897
this will get you to the right people to take care of this. you will need your service tag and express service code.
check windowsrefund.info for the FAQ, which has a good statement to make (they say via fax, but i just called them and asked). what i said was something along the lines of:
"When I turned on my computer for the first time, I was presented with a License Agreement. The agreement says to contact Dell immediately if you disagree with any portion of the agreement. I have refused all parts of the license, have used a free operating system to remove all software and format the hard drive. The CD's included with the system are still in their original, unopened state. I would, per the terms of the license agreement with Windows, like to request a refund for the unused software."
they put me on hold, and then came back to say that the software was free and no refund can be expected. i politely stated that the software cost Dell something, and that those costs were passed on to me when I purchased the laptop. I went on with a story about not wanting to pay for things that i did not ask for and were not going to use.
anyway, i suggested that the software cost Dell around $30, and that the laptop's price was probably $30 higher because of this. I persisted to state that, per the license, I was entitled to a refund of this amount.
I was placed on hold for about 5 minutes, and the dude came back and told me that they would credit my Dell Preferred Credit Account (note -- this may be what made the whole thing work -- it didnt involve any "real" money changing hands) with the amount and gave me a reference number for the credit.
if you follow this advice, you might try asking for more money. just keep it reasonable. that is one thing that I said -- Dell buys windows by the gross, so it couldnt cost more than $30-$50 per seat. if you ask for too much, you will get nothing. be reasonable, and your chances were will be better.
the only time in history that there has been a paperless office is when we still wrote everything on clay tablets.
seriously -- we tried this at my previous employer with some fancy stuff from Ricoh (scanner, fax, print, copy and more tied to an ID card system. slick stuff, but i dont remember the name of the software package that went with it) and although we did cut on paper usage, there was still paper everwhere. the auditors for some reason _like_ paper.....
i have a friend from that part of the world and according to him they eat a lot of horse meat. if you were in almaty in a restaurant, chances are it was mutton or beef, but he said its not uncommon to find horse on the menu as well.
from the reactions of my colleagues (i teach full-time these days at a community college, and echo the feeling) we HATE to have to switch books in most instances. dont blame us -- the textbook industry is pushing for the adoption of new books every year or 2. why? think about it. about the only time that a new text is profitable for the publisher is in its first year -- after that, its resold over and over and over again. the bookstores are just as bad -- being in education, i see the costs on these books (to the college) and then see what they sell for. the markup, on average (at our college anyway) is about 35%. i _always_ tell my students to check out the web for copies before plunking down their cash with our bookstore (which like most keep raising prices).
it really sucks for everyone involved (except the publisher). we, as faculty, have to constantly look for new material (when in most cases there is nothing wrong with the current text) and adjust our courses for these changes. the bookstores are stuck with copies of books that the publisher wont take back because there is a new version out, and the students -- they get the worst end -- most new textbooks _FLAT_OUT_SUCK_. they are written so quickly that they are full of errors and light on insightful explnations. they read more like poorly-written dictionaries with _no_resale value. the books, are in my opinion, supposted to aid in the course, not be the course. these days, a lot of them make better doorstops than course aids.
do what i did for the UNIX class i teach -- write your own materials. we charged the students $5 for the packets (which i will GDL as soon as i clean them up)
we have a sun system at our institution that runs a webserver for a very specific application. an unnamed vendor (we'll keep it that way) installed this machine and pretty much told us to keep hands-off of it except to change the backup tape. if we made any modifications to the machine or its software, then our service agreement was void and they would not support this particular app. so, we firewall the crap out of this thing, only allowing access to httpd (apache), making sure to explictly block any high port in use. well, this machine gets compromised about a week ago because this vendor has an ancient version of apache (1.3.3 or something) running suid/sgid root. idiots.......this is a problem we could have prevented if our vendor wasnt as dumb as they were. being a small.edu, we cant just pack up and change without spending 6 figures, so we are pretty much stuck with it until their contract comes up in a couple of years (this is an inherited problem). want their take on the problem - apache only will work suid/sgid. wont run unless permissions are that way. so i ask them to change it, and after about 10 minutes of arguing with their lead UNIX guy he does so. he was amazed that it would run......
we have a sony dru-500ax here that burns either format (dvd+ and dvd-). it is our experience that the "dvd-r/rw" works much better than the dvd+ in off-the-shelf dvd players. i have an apex 1100 at home and it will not play the dvd+ discs (verbatim brand 2.4 speed) that i have burnt with this unit, while the dvd- (also verbatim brand 2.4 speed) discs play just fine. we also have another brand of dvd player in our break room (dont remember the brand) and it wont play them either, and its fairly new. we've also had trouble getting the dvd+ data discs to read in some of the computers we have on campus (brand new dell optiplex) while the dvd- work. maybe its just the brand of discs that we are using. hope this helps....YMMV
to build on what you stated, Dan Bernstein (of qmail fame) pondered on this a few years back. his website http://cr.yp.to/im2000.html makes a few of these observations. he also has a mailing list about this very subject. interesting concept -- i'd love to see something like it implimented. it would really make life for a spammer difficult, which is a "good thing(tm)"
i wouldnt remove the stickers from the top of the HD if i were you. IDE failure rates are higher than that of scsi and if you take the sticker off (or badly discolor it/mark it up) you can almost assure yourself the manuf will not take it back.
i think that you are looking for something like this. $13.95, you can probably check pricewatch.com and find it cheaper or others like it.
Both Citrix ICA and Tarantella do this. Citrix is proven on the Windows platform and is all in all a nice program. we have had great success with it here. there are plugins and clients for Linux, Solaris, Apple, and others. Tarantella i know less about, but its server runs on multiple OS, and has clients for several as well. Both applications give you a full remote desktop over the network on local clients or web plugins. they run on a server, so you can have several users on the same server doing different things at the same time. they also scale well and have load-balancing built in (citrix does anyway). they also provice straight up remote application support. These programs are much better than VNC for a remote-desktop purpose -- VNC is bad over slow connections and handles images and screen-redraws horribly. It would be really nasty to develop anything over it. and then there is the whole problem of multiple users, and what if my connection dies and i forget to lock my desktop? its just not worth the risk.
The system ships with a 73gb fibrechannel harddisc, 900 or 1.05 UltraSparcIII (dual capable), and a gig of ram. nice box. It sets a world record in workstation performance (halfway down the press-release).
Renaming them to K##xxxx is not necessarily a good idea. Instead of just not telling them to start, you're telling them to Kill off the service if it's running. This will slow down your boot as you try to kill of things that never started.
true, but if you do this you have to make sure that they dont get started in any other runlevel. (runlevel 2, etc...). this is why i stuck to using the recommended K##xxxx. and if the/etc/init.d scripts are written properly, killing them off isnt much of an issue as there should be pid files in/var/run (or whatever is applicable per your OS).
Re:disable system services on startup
on
Linux Tuning Tricks?
·
· Score: 3, Informative
with redhat (maybe others) you can also run the command "setup" and have a curses-based way to do it. or, you can go into/etc/rc3.d (or whatever runlevel your distro/os normally runs at) and move the S##xxxx scripts to K##xxxx to prevent them from starting. this is the standard way of starting/stopping services on SYSV UNIX, so this holds true for Solaris and others.
-- aside -- you CAN move them to anything other than S##xxxx, but i normally stick with the standard and use K##xxxx
i name all of mine after bodies of water. names like erie, rhine, rhone, nile, danube, eufaula (where the nick comes from - it was the first machine), etc...
what you could do if you had multpile locations is name them after geographical features of the area, like contients. (datacenter 1 = europe, datacenter 2 = north america, etc...), so, in one building you could have danube, elbe, volga, rhine, mtblanc, alps and so on. in another you could have erie, champlain, saltlake, pikespeak....this would probably get confusing after awhile. it works for us but we dont have anywhere near 4000 machines.
on my network we have a http and ftp mirror of the Linux Kernel Archives (ftp3.us.kernel.org/www1.us.kernel.org), OpenBSD, Project Gutenberg, and ProFTPD. we have several distro's in both ISO's and loose files, and all told, over 100gb of data. these damn webbots crawl our site and index it, which takes DAYS, and seriously interferes with our ability to provide a useful http mirror. at one point recently, an altavista webbot was using about 10% of our T-1 and filled up/var with access_logs in a few hours. its only gotten worse. i started blocking the bots based on their browser match type and it has helped a ton. but the only problem with this method is that i have to go through it every day or 2 to keep current. this module looks to do exactly what i need. it wont be foolproof, but will save me and countless others a ton of grunt work.
if you do happen to visit the site, the stupidspider and dumbbot dir/file are part of my currrent spider trap. just thought that i'd warn you.
also, to make it harder to find try running ssh on a nonstandard port. look through/etc/services and find a nice one that you arent using and run it there. or make up one. it wont solve these problems, but when there is an exploit and you are not in the position to fix it immediately, it will at least buy you a some time and a drop of protection from the scanners looking at port 22 only.
At the local college here, we have 8 Citrix ICA servers (nice, dual proc 1ghz xeon, tons ram) running NT4.0 terminal server. Its a nice fit for the students/fac, and the NT shop that is ran here (we're working on changing it). We were buying a few of these WYSE winterms to deploy across campus to allow access, but at over $800 a pop those things get expensive in a hurry.
So, in order to save money and provide loads more functionality, we bought a thinknic and i went about the process of hacking the hell out if it. there are tons of websites (hack-a-nic.com, and yahoo's groups are just 2) that describe the in's and out's of this $199 piece of hardware.
all in all, they are pretty easy to hack. the standard OS is based of debian i believe, and runs 2.2.x (i forget). anyway, the window manager is blackbox and you can change the menus a bit to add right-click desktop functionality and turn off the always-on netscape session. I have ours with a custom background, and updated version of citrix, mozilla instead of netscape, and links to a telnet client and ssh. i also have one that i am testing that uses a PAM module to authenticate off of the NT domain so the user can open and run a couple of native apps like abiword and gnumeric and save their work to their NT network drive.
We now have about 25 of these things scattered across campus, and they work great. you could also use them to connect to a linux terminal server instead of windows. Next up for us is providing full X-terminal functionality to a couple of linux servers to provide remote application support. these are really nifty boxes.
i have a good friend who is from bulgaria, and there they mass-produced an apple IIe knockoff called the Pravetz. they reverse engineered the apple and started making their own version. He said that they ended up being more powerful than any of the apple II line. People like the Dark Avenger (ever had a real computer virus? he probably wrote it) grew up hacking these things. anyway, they are mentioned in a really good wired article about the Dark Avenger and the Soviet Bloc's more recent computing history, and Woz even has a picture of one on his website.
i sure hope that this is better than it used to be. when i was getting my masters degree about 3 years ago the Univ. bought into this program, and quickly gave it up. it was a complete piece of crap. it broke all the time, added levels of complexitiy, and besides, cost a fortune. our campus had about 15,000 students. that might have been the problem, but they said that it would handle our needs. it didnt, and i think that we ended up suing the company over it to get our money back. anyway, i suspect it would work better on a smaller, less complex scale. but this is our experience with it, and by no means the final word.
while you are at it, check the posting on this subject from last week. some guy mentioned a pretty neat package that intergrated with NT and he was working to open up a UNIX version or something.
isnt it a tad ironic that after years of fighting and lawsuits to strip all of the AT&T stuff out of BSD, a good portion of the code from that era ends up under the BSD lisc?
Slashdot Mirror
i teach economics at the university level, and i have a lenovo x200. it is way outside the $1000 range. it has a wacom screen and the stylus is very precise (we do lots of crazy math too ya know). my normal computer is a mac, but i LOVE this thing. lightweight, LONG battery life (5hrs easily), and very sturdy construction. its currently running vista and i've had no problems (core 2 duo 2.0, 4gb ram)
i'd either save up (or convince them to give you more money - if your university is in the US and receives perkins funding, you might go that route. as long as you teach perkins eligible students, your grant administrator can probably find the cash (it might take bribing them with chocolate though..lol)) or, if there is a PC in the room invest in a wireless/bluetooth tablet that you can just carry to the classroom with you. you are going to have a hella-hard time finding all that you need for less than $1500 (unless you go used - our university wont buy used), and one of those cheap ones will just fall apart. one of my colleagues got one of the $1000 HP offerings and HATES it. a year later, the screen flickers, the battery sucks, and the tablet is not very sensitive.
good luck!!!!
this statement would be absolutely correct. the precursors to the anabaptists (which were the precursors of today's modern baptists -- i am an ABA member) were the Waldensians. they were victims of the inquisition -- the pic on the link even shows a text with them made out to be witches (they were considered heretics because they rejected papal authority and believed that the Bible was all one needed for salvation).
note up front -- i did this about a year and a half ago, but put it in one of those blog-things that were so popular so i would remember what i did. anyway, the process might have changed a little. btw -- i am in the US.
i bought an inspiron 1200 laptop a year and a half ago and it came with windows xp home and word perfect office. i dont run MS stuff (linux and openbsd are my preferred choices) and could really care less what it came with. but, since "no os" wasnt an option, i thought that i would try my hands at getting the much talked-about "windows refund."
i first called the number on their website, and then promptly got transferred to the technical support line, which transferred me to preferred customer care or something like that. anyway, instead of jumping through hoops the number that you want to call is:
800.624.9897
this will get you to the right people to take care of this. you will need your service tag and express service code.
check windowsrefund.info for the FAQ, which has a good statement to make (they say via fax, but i just called them and asked). what i said was something along the lines of:
"When I turned on my computer for the first time, I was presented with a License Agreement. The agreement says to contact Dell immediately if you disagree with any portion of the agreement. I have refused all parts of the license, have used a free operating system to remove all software and format the hard drive. The CD's included with the system are still in their original, unopened state. I would, per the terms of the license agreement with Windows, like to request a refund for the unused software."
they put me on hold, and then came back to say that the software was free and no refund can be expected. i politely stated that the software cost Dell something, and that those costs were passed on to me when I purchased the laptop. I went on with a story about not wanting to pay for things that i did not ask for and were not going to use.
anyway, i suggested that the software cost Dell around $30, and that the laptop's price was probably $30 higher because of this. I persisted to state that, per the license, I was entitled to a refund of this amount.
I was placed on hold for about 5 minutes, and the dude came back and told me that they would credit my Dell Preferred Credit Account (note -- this may be what made the whole thing work -- it didnt involve any "real" money changing hands) with the amount and gave me a reference number for the credit.
if you follow this advice, you might try asking for more money. just keep it reasonable. that is one thing that I said -- Dell buys windows by the gross, so it couldnt cost more than $30-$50 per seat. if you ask for too much, you will get nothing. be reasonable, and your chances were will be better.
the only time in history that there has been a paperless office is when we still wrote everything on clay tablets.
seriously -- we tried this at my previous employer with some fancy stuff from Ricoh (scanner, fax, print, copy and more tied to an ID card system. slick stuff, but i dont remember the name of the software package that went with it) and although we did cut on paper usage, there was still paper everwhere. the auditors for some reason _like_ paper.....
i have a friend from that part of the world and according to him they eat a lot of horse meat. if you were in almaty in a restaurant, chances are it was mutton or beef, but he said its not uncommon to find horse on the menu as well.
it really sucks for everyone involved (except the publisher). we, as faculty, have to constantly look for new material (when in most cases there is nothing wrong with the current text) and adjust our courses for these changes. the bookstores are stuck with copies of books that the publisher wont take back because there is a new version out, and the students -- they get the worst end -- most new textbooks _FLAT_OUT_SUCK_. they are written so quickly that they are full of errors and light on insightful explnations. they read more like poorly-written dictionaries with _no_resale value. the books, are in my opinion, supposted to aid in the course, not be the course. these days, a lot of them make better doorstops than course aids.
do what i did for the UNIX class i teach -- write your own materials. we charged the students $5 for the packets (which i will GDL as soon as i clean them up)
we have a sun system at our institution that runs a webserver for a very specific application. an unnamed vendor (we'll keep it that way) installed this machine and pretty much told us to keep hands-off of it except to change the backup tape. if we made any modifications to the machine or its software, then our service agreement was void and they would not support this particular app. so, we firewall the crap out of this thing, only allowing access to httpd (apache), making sure to explictly block any high port in use. well, this machine gets compromised about a week ago because this vendor has an ancient version of apache (1.3.3 or something) running suid/sgid root. idiots.......this is a problem we could have prevented if our vendor wasnt as dumb as they were. being a small .edu, we cant just pack up and change without spending 6 figures, so we are pretty much stuck with it until their contract comes up in a couple of years (this is an inherited problem). want their take on the problem - apache only will work suid/sgid. wont run unless permissions are that way. so i ask them to change it, and after about 10 minutes of arguing with their lead UNIX guy he does so. he was amazed that it would run......
we have a sony dru-500ax here that burns either format (dvd+ and dvd-). it is our experience that the "dvd-r/rw" works much better than the dvd+ in off-the-shelf dvd players. i have an apex 1100 at home and it will not play the dvd+ discs (verbatim brand 2.4 speed) that i have burnt with this unit, while the dvd- (also verbatim brand 2.4 speed) discs play just fine. we also have another brand of dvd player in our break room (dont remember the brand) and it wont play them either, and its fairly new. we've also had trouble getting the dvd+ data discs to read in some of the computers we have on campus (brand new dell optiplex) while the dvd- work. maybe its just the brand of discs that we are using. hope this helps....YMMV
to build on what you stated, Dan Bernstein (of qmail fame) pondered on this a few years back. his website http://cr.yp.to/im2000.html makes a few of these observations. he also has a mailing list about this very subject. interesting concept -- i'd love to see something like it implimented. it would really make life for a spammer difficult, which is a "good thing(tm)"
yeah, this usually works
http://destroypc.com/pchunt/page13.html
i wouldnt remove the stickers from the top of the HD if i were you. IDE failure rates are higher than that of scsi and if you take the sticker off (or badly discolor it/mark it up) you can almost assure yourself the manuf will not take it back.
i think that you are looking for something like this. $13.95, you can probably check pricewatch.com and find it cheaper or others like it.
hope this helps.
the only time in history when there was a completely paperless office was when we wrote everthing down on clay tablets.
Both Citrix ICA and Tarantella do this. Citrix is proven on the Windows platform and is all in all a nice program. we have had great success with it here. there are plugins and clients for Linux, Solaris, Apple, and others. Tarantella i know less about, but its server runs on multiple OS, and has clients for several as well. Both applications give you a full remote desktop over the network on local clients or web plugins. they run on a server, so you can have several users on the same server doing different things at the same time. they also scale well and have load-balancing built in (citrix does anyway). they also provice straight up remote application support. These programs are much better than VNC for a remote-desktop purpose -- VNC is bad over slow connections and handles images and screen-redraws horribly. It would be really nasty to develop anything over it. and then there is the whole problem of multiple users, and what if my connection dies and i forget to lock my desktop? its just not worth the risk.
just my $0.02. hope this helps....
http://www.sun.com/2002-0314/feature/
The system ships with a 73gb fibrechannel harddisc, 900 or 1.05 UltraSparcIII (dual capable), and a gig of ram. nice box. It sets a world record in workstation performance (halfway down the press-release).
true, but if you do this you have to make sure that they dont get started in any other runlevel. (runlevel 2, etc...). this is why i stuck to using the recommended K##xxxx. and if the /etc/init.d scripts are written properly, killing them off isnt much of an issue as there should be pid files in /var/run (or whatever is applicable per your OS).
-- aside -- you CAN move them to anything other than S##xxxx, but i normally stick with the standard and use K##xxxx
you forgot one --
teletran 1
-- transformers, more than meets the eye....
i name all of mine after bodies of water. names like erie, rhine, rhone, nile, danube, eufaula (where the nick comes from - it was the first machine), etc...
what you could do if you had multpile locations is name them after geographical features of the area, like contients. (datacenter 1 = europe, datacenter 2 = north america, etc...), so, in one building you could have danube, elbe, volga, rhine, mtblanc, alps and so on. in another you could have erie, champlain, saltlake, pikespeak....this would probably get confusing after awhile. it works for us but we dont have anywhere near 4000 machines.
just my $0.02.....
on my network we have a http and ftp mirror of the Linux Kernel Archives (ftp3.us.kernel.org/www1.us.kernel.org), OpenBSD, Project Gutenberg, and ProFTPD. we have several distro's in both ISO's and loose files, and all told, over 100gb of data. these damn webbots crawl our site and index it, which takes DAYS, and seriously interferes with our ability to provide a useful http mirror. at one point recently, an altavista webbot was using about 10% of our T-1 and filled up /var with access_logs in a few hours. its only gotten worse. i started blocking the bots based on their browser match type and it has helped a ton. but the only problem with this method is that i have to go through it every day or 2 to keep current. this module looks to do exactly what i need. it wont be foolproof, but will save me and countless others a ton of grunt work.
if you do happen to visit the site, the stupidspider and dumbbot dir/file are part of my currrent spider trap. just thought that i'd warn you.
also, to make it harder to find try running ssh on a nonstandard port. look through /etc/services and find a nice one that you arent using and run it there. or make up one. it wont solve these problems, but when there is an exploit and you are not in the position to fix it immediately, it will at least buy you a some time and a drop of protection from the scanners looking at port 22 only.
At the local college here, we have 8 Citrix ICA servers (nice, dual proc 1ghz xeon, tons ram) running NT4.0 terminal server. Its a nice fit for the students/fac, and the NT shop that is ran here (we're working on changing it). We were buying a few of these WYSE winterms to deploy across campus to allow access, but at over $800 a pop those things get expensive in a hurry.
So, in order to save money and provide loads more functionality, we bought a thinknic and i went about the process of hacking the hell out if it. there are tons of websites (hack-a-nic.com, and yahoo's groups are just 2) that describe the in's and out's of this $199 piece of hardware.
all in all, they are pretty easy to hack. the standard OS is based of debian i believe, and runs 2.2.x (i forget). anyway, the window manager is blackbox and you can change the menus a bit to add right-click desktop functionality and turn off the always-on netscape session. I have ours with a custom background, and updated version of citrix, mozilla instead of netscape, and links to a telnet client and ssh. i also have one that i am testing that uses a PAM module to authenticate off of the NT domain so the user can open and run a couple of native apps like abiword and gnumeric and save their work to their NT network drive.
We now have about 25 of these things scattered across campus, and they work great. you could also use them to connect to a linux terminal server instead of windows. Next up for us is providing full X-terminal functionality to a couple of linux servers to provide remote application support. these are really nifty boxes.
yep, they get used here at my place of employment. kinda makes you sick just thinking about it huh?
i have a good friend who is from bulgaria, and there they mass-produced an apple IIe knockoff called the Pravetz. they reverse engineered the apple and started making their own version. He said that they ended up being more powerful than any of the apple II line. People like the Dark Avenger (ever had a real computer virus? he probably wrote it) grew up hacking these things. anyway, they are mentioned in a really good wired article about the Dark Avenger and the Soviet Bloc's more recent computing history, and Woz even has a picture of one on his website.
i sure hope that this is better than it used to be. when i was getting my masters degree about 3 years ago the Univ. bought into this program, and quickly gave it up. it was a complete piece of crap. it broke all the time, added levels of complexitiy, and besides, cost a fortune. our campus had about 15,000 students. that might have been the problem, but they said that it would handle our needs. it didnt, and i think that we ended up suing the company over it to get our money back. anyway, i suspect it would work better on a smaller, less complex scale. but this is our experience with it, and by no means the final word.
while you are at it, check the posting on this subject from last week. some guy mentioned a pretty neat package that intergrated with NT and he was working to open up a UNIX version or something.
isnt it a tad ironic that after years of fighting and lawsuits to strip all of the AT&T stuff out of BSD, a good portion of the code from that era ends up under the BSD lisc?