I'd like to voice my agreement with your concerns. It saddens me that entire Cisco Catalyst based infrastructures will not be supported by SSH and Cisco's willingness to dump the 2900XL switch product line in favor for the 2950/3950. They no longer release major feature updates, on their 4M and 8M switches.
I went to Networkers in San Diego and sat in the IOS session with all the major companies in attendance and there was an overwhelming response to users that wanted SSH (login + file xfer) functionality in IOS. So far they've only been including it in their Firewall/encryption feature set images, which are expensive. This makes it harder for small businesses or SOHO users to get the needed functionality for their lower end routers. As far as switches go, they are only offering SSH in CatOS 6.5 on newer Sup3 5000's and 6500's. No SSH support in their access layer switches, which would be the most vulnerable. What's the deal?
What a bummer, why is it that HP offers SSH in all their 1 meg OS images for all their switches? Low end and high end. I sometimes wonder if its worth it to go the Cisco route these days, but I digress.
I just recently sold my iBook 500 on eBay, due to it's wonderful performance with Mac OS X 10.1. Even OS 10.2 dev preview ran like shit on it. This is what made me sell it, all that Apple brainwashing and fud that said 10.2 was remarkably faster.
The fact that Apple won't ship hardware accelerated graphics for the ATI chipsets just made it worse. Do you know what it feels like to spend $1400 and then find out two months later that your purchase won't support simple drawing features, like translucent menus which OS 10 is rampant with.
Cocoa is extremely cool, but developing with it did not warrant me to upgrade my Mac again 8 months later just to experience more dismal performance and a sore wallet. I'm not going to buy into their pump and dump solution to hardware.
Good bye Apple. My iBook was pretty cool, and I felt like part of the Apple community for the 8 months I had it - reading all the News sites daily in hope for some magic patch to make my hardware faster and OS X run better.
It was nice reading about the Japanese kids that removed 200 screws and painted their iBook blue and overclocked it to 600Mhz. Ah well.
Thanks for the informative response. Is there a place where I can read whitepapers on the viability of CAM overflows and MAC and ARP spoofing? Does Cisco have anything available that relates to this security? I'm aware of port security (only allowing certain MAC address to join a port) and VMPS (a centralized MAC database for VLANs, network wide).
Would either of these be helpful in prevent these types of attacks?
Thanks for the flame, but I don't think you understood my question. I understand the benefits and strengths of using SSH and encrypted VPN products and I use them regularly. My question was - how important is this with packet switching blocking frames that are able to be sniffed?
Everyone says SSH is great, because your passwords and session information cannot be sniffed and I know that - but how important is it now? You cannot sniff packets on a switched network without SPAN access or port mirroring access on the switch itself. And over multiple switches, it is not trivial to gain access to do that since multiple access ports do not receive unicast frames. Unless you were the switch administrator of all the core and access switches I don't see this happening easily.
Is there a tool that allows you to force the switch to forward ethernet frames so they can be sniffed without switch administrator access? Please offer some information on how this is done as I'd like to have a better understanding on how this works. What platforms does the tool run on, and on what switch platforms would it work against?
I've read a lot of testimonials from Mozilla users (and haters as well) but I'd like to share my thoughts on using Mozilla. I've ran it off and on on the Windows and Linux platforms since early betas. I am currently now running 1.0rc3 on Windows XP and it is a purely awesome browser. It is extremely fast, rivalling the built-in Internet Explorer.
It's startup time has been greatly improved using Mozilla Quick Launch - making it part of the Windows startup process makes a huge difference in browser and mail start time.
I really like a lot of Mozilla browser features, like the "Block Images from this site" option which is a great banner killer. You can also disable JavaScript new window open calls with one click, this means no more popups. The Form Manager stores all your personal information and lets you fill out any pesky download or purchase forms on a web site with one click. The Password Manager is great as well, storing all your web site passwords and locking them with a single key. You can then go in and easily manage which sites you want to remember.
Mozilla also has a full featured download manager, like Internet Explorer on MacOS which makes it convenient to track all your downloads. You can also pause your downloads to reserve some bandwidth if necessary. Good stuff.
Mozilla Mail also handles IMAP much better then Outlook. It handles message deletion more elegantly, and will store a copy of your Sent Mail and Drafts on your IMAP store. It also correctly caches your IMAP mailbox indexes and messages for fast access. Outlook has long delays when accessing even cached mails. What's up with that?
So that's my two cents - when you download Mozilla, immediately go into View->Theme->Get new Themes and download the Pinball theme. It is a brushed bevelled white theme that is great on the eyes and highly usable. It should be part of the Mozilla default themes. Let me know if this post influences you to download Mozilla and tell me what your thoughts are. Was I right?
The GameCube will have an Ethernet card and modem soon. It also features progressive scanning at 480p, and has the new Dolby Pro-Logic II (which is 4 channels without the subwoofer or LRE). If you happen to have a decent enough surround receiver, it rocks!
What more do you want? You still have to pay to use the DVD player on the XBox by buying a cartridge. (from what I've heard) Even then, the quality and playability of games on the GameCube slay the XBox. Hands down.
Save the extra money you'd pay for an XBox, and buy a nice new Philips DVD player. They are down to like $100 now anyways - plus you can play VCDs and get a decent remote. The XBox would make a nice DVD player, if you wanted one the size of a microwave on your entertainment center.
I am in full agreement with you. My trips to Target, Wal-Mart and Toys R' Us were the same. Just around Christmas time last year, every X-Box I saw had a black screen with green lettering "This X-box has encountered a hardware failure, contact Microsoft for service" or something along those lines.
I did buy a GameCube for my wife, and we've been very happy with the quality and replayability of the games I got. Super Monkey Ball is fun with a bunch of drunk friends, and I really dig the graphics in All Star Baseball.
I just picked up Aaron Hillegass's new book (how is his last name pronounced? he-yay-gass or hill-e-gas) and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I dig his writing and teaching style.
After about 4 chapters into the book, after the random calculator and the associated framework I was ready to tear stuff up. I came back a few times as a reference, using the Preferences frameworks in my own application.
Really good stuff, good concepts and understanding and solid examples. His writing style makes learning Cocoa exciting. When I wanted to learn OS X programming, I started with Carbon thinking more resources are available and it would be easier. After seeing the power of Cocoa, and how little GUI code you have to write - it's incredible. You can spend 5 minutes doing GUI work and layout and spend most of your time just working on what you want it to do.
Anyhow, enough of that. Aaron's book rocks. Buy it.
Cisco's VoIP solution does NOT rely on CallManager, in fact - Vonage's solution relies on SIP. CallManager does not support SIP. SIP phone sets (the new Cisco ones) and terminal adapters can be used with any SIP "proxy" server, including open source Linux ones like Vovida Vocal and even the new SIP proxy that comes built-in with Windows.NET.
CallManager does however support Skinny (which their old VoIP phone sets use) and MGCP on SOME IOS routers.
Unlike CallManager, IOS routers can support MGCP, SGCP, SIP AND H.323 v1&2 . And the newest development versions of IOS have CallManager -builtin-! This is called SRST (survivable remote site telephony) or Cisco IOS Telephony.
Microsoft Messenger also features SIP and can make voice calls out SIP gateways. It is nice that a standard is converging that can be used as a physical device on your desktop, or as software on your PC. The fact that Cisco makes the ATA available so that you can build your own VoIP is even more appealing.
I am currently running my own Cisco-based VoIP solution which is highly stable. Keep power to your network (switches and gateways), keep your voice lines up and you'll be fine.
Any UNIX that supports PAM (Solaris, Linux, etc) can authenticate against Kerberos or LDAP. Both are also supported by Windows-based OS's and servers. LDAP is very scalable with an extensible schema, and can provide support for more then usernames and passwords. For dial access services, LDAP can also be integrated with RADIUS or TACACS.
This is incorrect. XM is currently broadcasting multiple ClearChannel-owned FM stations, including the popular Top 40 station KISS in Los Angeles and another pop station in Houston, Texas. They are on channels 21 and 22.
XM even provides station identification which explicitly says its a re-broadcast. I can also listen to the traffic information and local news for LA - which is good when I take a trip from my home in Fresno. XM also provides standalone radio units that are provided with new cars and trucks this year from multiple manufacturers. They also just recently released a new Alpine deck (I think), check their press releases for more information.
I've been an XM customer since Day 1 here on the West Coast. I have a Sony XM deck and I love XM. I don't miss local talk radio and news, I've got BPM, CNN and XM Comedy. Smooth. Let me know if you have any questions.
Orville Redenbacher died in his home today. He was 23. He made many contributions to popcorn "kernel development" and will missed. Truly an american icon.
I just want to say something here about Valve's new content delivery system. This comes from the guys that can't even get a Half-Life or CounterStrike update to you, without using 20 non-working mirrors in Japan at 4k/s. Who here has downloaded the latest 38 files to upgrade CounterStrike to be playable? How many sites did you have to click on, and how many banners did you have to click through after you tried all 20 non-working mirrors?
I'm a cable user, and trying to get updates are a joke. The updater software that ships with their products doesn't even work, out of the box even.
Jesus, these guys can't even get patches out for their own games. I wouldn't trust them to do game distribution.
There is a much better, easier way to deploy a MOSIX cluster. This article is poorly written, and missing several important sections. It is not for the kernel-phobic or beginner users. The preferred way to bring up a diskless cluster with easy tear down, no maintenance, and no network booting required is to use ClumpOS.
ClumpOS is a bootable CD with network drivers that is pre-setup with a custom kernel that contains MOSIX and MFS out of the box with no work required. You can download and burn ClumpOS and then boot it on your slave machines.
As far as building your MOSIX master goes, I prefer Debian with the prebuilt easy to deploy MOSIX packages and kernel patches. The links to find both are below:
MOSIX is a fun, extremely useful tool. Just remember when building your Debian kernel to make sure to turn ALL options on for MOSIX, this includes MFS. Otherwise, you will have weird problems with not being able to migrate processes to your cluster.
NTFS has a built-in transaction tracking system, where pending disk operations are queued and tracked so that data loss doesn't occur in situations like power failures or hard shutdowns. If you were running XP and didn't have to dual boot any other classic Windows OS's, you should have upgraded to NTFS from the get-go. Shame on you for running FAT32. FAT32 is a toy for Windows game loader OS's (ME, 98, 95) and I would never keep any useful data on a FAT FS.
To change the Standard HAL to ACPI HAL, use Winnt32.exe to install Windows 2000
over the current installation. If you try to change the type of HAL without
running Setup, you may not be able to start Windows successfully again or you
may experience hardware and other stability problems.
You cannot change between Standard and ACPI HALs because of the different way an
ACPI and a non-ACPI BIOS enumerate hardware. The copy of the hardware tree,
which is kept in the registry, is stored differently for each type of HAL. If
you change the HAL without running Setup again, Windows may not be able to find
hardware components needed to start the computer.
For more information, see the following documents in TechNet or at support.microsoft.com:
Q237556 Troubleshooting Windows 2000 Hardware Abstraction Layer Issues
Q216573 How Windows 2000 Determines ACPI Compatibility
Q197055 Disabling ACPI Support in BIOS Results in Error Message
I'm in the same boat. I figured some cool shit out with my Xerox WorkCentre XK50CX. If you take a good look at the Windows drivers, it is really a new Lexmark printer [most of them are]. Lexmark has Mac OS X 10.1 print drivers for most of their printers, unfortunately their USB device drivers are keyed to the Xerox name - but they will usually work if you connect to a network printer using the PPDs (via LPR or whatever)
I really hate Xerox printers, my printer has not even 200 prints on it and 2 $50 cartridge swaps and regularly prints white lines on my shit, even after I swapped out cartridges. The only way I can get it to print anything decent is to set it to maximum quality. Then it takes 4 minutes to print a single picture.
I'm beginning to hate vendors that don't have multiplatform driver support. I would have been better off paying the money for a flimsier HP, at least I could find parts and cheap cartridges, AND it would work under OS X. See if I make that same mistake again.
I thought about getting Adobe Acrobat for OS X and just doing Print to PDF and having that Acrobat distiller deal just auto-print PDFs when I drop them into a network directory. It'd be a little slow. Anyone doing this? Would it work?
First off, I really like the new apple.slashdot.org site, and the GUI is quite lickable. Talk about serious hickory! I'm going to have to wipe off my monitor! Kudos to the graphics designers at/. for this supreme Apple lovin'.
Now, because I'm at work I haven't had a chance to install the 10.1.3 update. Someone please tell me they did some Aqua or ATI 3D optimization on the Rage chipset in the new iBooks. That is -all- I want! Also, I haven't really seen much comments or reports on the update, since Apple doesn't publish a really big CHANGELOG. But Macintouch has a fairly huge reader reports section. If not, I guess I'll have to wait for the next 10.2 beta.
Anyone know how to make non-supported DVD drives play with OS X DVD player.app? I have an LG 12x burner 8x DVD that is supposed to work according to xlr8yourmac.com - it'll work fine in OS 9 but no love from 10.1.2. Cool. Have fun!
I have a brand new iBook 500 Dual USB I bought in August. I immediately upgraded it to 320Mb of RAM. It runs 10.1 like a piece of shit. I think this mostly has to do with their graphics support though.. and other unoptimized crap.
If you want to get work done, or run more then one app at a time - run OS 9.1. Not 9.2.1. OS 9.1 gives you features that they take away - like being able to close your iBook lid and still use an external display. Now they force your iBook to sleep in 9.2.1 and 10.1 - so forget about docked configurations.
I expected a little bit more for the money I invested in this laptop, and I'm still very bitter about it. But that's my.2 cents.
Alright. 5 points for you. Filzip is the bomb. I just happily removed WinRar, WinAce and WinZip and their dialog box and web spamming goodness. Carry on then.
I hit a highway divider while on my daily commute to Tulare, CA (from Fresno) at over 70mph after an 18-wheeler ran me off the road. I careened off the highway after the collision and flew over an overpass on the opposite side of the highway.
I was driving a '93 Honda Del Sol S automatic equipped with a driver side air bag. My brand new one week old 500mhz iBook was sitting in a Terapin laptop case that I bought off onsale.com a year back.
I shattered my sternum, ribs and collarbone and suffered internal bruising. My whole chest turned yellow 4 days after the accident. It took about 6 and a half weeks to recover. It was the scariest experience I've ever lived through in my life. I'd say recovering was worse then the accident.
Needless to say, my iBook hit the dash at a force of over 500mph (according to the firefighters that pulled me from the wreckage of my car) Once the ambulance transported me to the emergency room, the CHP officers brought my belongings and my wife met me there. To comfort me, my wife fired up my iBook and to my relief it still worked and booted into OS X without any problems.
It's about 3 months later now, and all the damage my iBook has to show is some leather smear from the case on the corners of the nice polished white plastic. No other problems whatsoever. And yet iBook users complain about their hinges.... *shrug* I love my iBook, glad it made it through it OK.
Slashdot Mirror
What a bummer, why is it that HP offers SSH in all their 1 meg OS images for all their switches? Low end and high end. I sometimes wonder if its worth it to go the Cisco route these days, but I digress.
Good points.
Pat
Pat
The fact that Apple won't ship hardware accelerated graphics for the ATI chipsets just made it worse. Do you know what it feels like to spend $1400 and then find out two months later that your purchase won't support simple drawing features, like translucent menus which OS 10 is rampant with.
Cocoa is extremely cool, but developing with it did not warrant me to upgrade my Mac again 8 months later just to experience more dismal performance and a sore wallet. I'm not going to buy into their pump and dump solution to hardware.
Good bye Apple. My iBook was pretty cool, and I felt like part of the Apple community for the 8 months I had it - reading all the News sites daily in hope for some magic patch to make my hardware faster and OS X run better. It was nice reading about the Japanese kids that removed 200 screws and painted their iBook blue and overclocked it to 600Mhz. Ah well.
Flame on.. RIP iBook.
Pat
Would either of these be helpful in prevent these types of attacks?
Thanks again.
-Pat
-Pat
Is there a tool that allows you to force the switch to forward ethernet frames so they can be sniffed without switch administrator access? Please offer some information on how this is done as I'd like to have a better understanding on how this works. What platforms does the tool run on, and on what switch platforms would it work against?
-Pat (a CCNP and MCSE)
I really like a lot of Mozilla browser features, like the "Block Images from this site" option which is a great banner killer. You can also disable JavaScript new window open calls with one click, this means no more popups. The Form Manager stores all your personal information and lets you fill out any pesky download or purchase forms on a web site with one click. The Password Manager is great as well, storing all your web site passwords and locking them with a single key. You can then go in and easily manage which sites you want to remember. Mozilla also has a full featured download manager, like Internet Explorer on MacOS which makes it convenient to track all your downloads. You can also pause your downloads to reserve some bandwidth if necessary. Good stuff.
Mozilla Mail also handles IMAP much better then Outlook. It handles message deletion more elegantly, and will store a copy of your Sent Mail and Drafts on your IMAP store. It also correctly caches your IMAP mailbox indexes and messages for fast access. Outlook has long delays when accessing even cached mails. What's up with that?
So that's my two cents - when you download Mozilla, immediately go into View->Theme->Get new Themes and download the Pinball theme. It is a brushed bevelled white theme that is great on the eyes and highly usable. It should be part of the Mozilla default themes. Let me know if this post influences you to download Mozilla and tell me what your thoughts are. Was I right?
-Pat
What more do you want? You still have to pay to use the DVD player on the XBox by buying a cartridge. (from what I've heard) Even then, the quality and playability of games on the GameCube slay the XBox. Hands down.
Save the extra money you'd pay for an XBox, and buy a nice new Philips DVD player. They are down to like $100 now anyways - plus you can play VCDs and get a decent remote. The XBox would make a nice DVD player, if you wanted one the size of a microwave on your entertainment center.
Pat
I did buy a GameCube for my wife, and we've been very happy with the quality and replayability of the games I got. Super Monkey Ball is fun with a bunch of drunk friends, and I really dig the graphics in All Star Baseball.
Pat
After about 4 chapters into the book, after the random calculator and the associated framework I was ready to tear stuff up. I came back a few times as a reference, using the Preferences frameworks in my own application.
Really good stuff, good concepts and understanding and solid examples. His writing style makes learning Cocoa exciting. When I wanted to learn OS X programming, I started with Carbon thinking more resources are available and it would be easier. After seeing the power of Cocoa, and how little GUI code you have to write - it's incredible. You can spend 5 minutes doing GUI work and layout and spend most of your time just working on what you want it to do.
Anyhow, enough of that. Aaron's book rocks. Buy it.
-Pat
nfs_mount -i -s server:/tunes /Volumes/Tunes
-i makes it interruptable so you can kill the process if it hang and -s uses a soft mount that will fail and timeout. smooth.
-Pat
Unlike CallManager, IOS routers can support MGCP, SGCP, SIP AND H.323 v1&2 . And the newest development versions of IOS have CallManager -builtin-! This is called SRST (survivable remote site telephony) or Cisco IOS Telephony.
Microsoft Messenger also features SIP and can make voice calls out SIP gateways. It is nice that a standard is converging that can be used as a physical device on your desktop, or as software on your PC. The fact that Cisco makes the ATA available so that you can build your own VoIP is even more appealing.
I am currently running my own Cisco-based VoIP solution which is highly stable. Keep power to your network (switches and gateways), keep your voice lines up and you'll be fine.
Pat
Have fun.
Pat
XM even provides station identification which explicitly says its a re-broadcast. I can also listen to the traffic information and local news for LA - which is good when I take a trip from my home in Fresno. XM also provides standalone radio units that are provided with new cars and trucks this year from multiple manufacturers. They also just recently released a new Alpine deck (I think), check their press releases for more information.
I've been an XM customer since Day 1 here on the West Coast. I have a Sony XM deck and I love XM. I don't miss local talk radio and news, I've got BPM, CNN and XM Comedy. Smooth. Let me know if you have any questions.
-Pat
[what better day to learn how to troll]
I'm a cable user, and trying to get updates are a joke. The updater software that ships with their products doesn't even work, out of the box even. Jesus, these guys can't even get patches out for their own games. I wouldn't trust them to do game distribution.
-Pat
ClumpOS is a bootable CD with network drivers that is pre-setup with a custom kernel that contains MOSIX and MFS out of the box with no work required. You can download and burn ClumpOS and then boot it on your slave machines.
As far as building your MOSIX master goes, I prefer Debian with the prebuilt easy to deploy MOSIX packages and kernel patches. The links to find both are below:
Clump/OS: A CD-based mini distribution
MOSIX on Debian
MOSIX is a fun, extremely useful tool. Just remember when building your Debian kernel to make sure to turn ALL options on for MOSIX, this includes MFS. Otherwise, you will have weird problems with not being able to migrate processes to your cluster.
-Pat
-Pat
-Pat
You cannot change between Standard and ACPI HALs because of the different way an ACPI and a non-ACPI BIOS enumerate hardware. The copy of the hardware tree, which is kept in the registry, is stored differently for each type of HAL. If you change the HAL without running Setup again, Windows may not be able to find hardware components needed to start the computer.
For more information, see the following documents in TechNet or at support.microsoft.com:
-Pat
I really hate Xerox printers, my printer has not even 200 prints on it and 2 $50 cartridge swaps and regularly prints white lines on my shit, even after I swapped out cartridges. The only way I can get it to print anything decent is to set it to maximum quality. Then it takes 4 minutes to print a single picture.
I'm beginning to hate vendors that don't have multiplatform driver support. I would have been better off paying the money for a flimsier HP, at least I could find parts and cheap cartridges, AND it would work under OS X. See if I make that same mistake again. I thought about getting Adobe Acrobat for OS X and just doing Print to PDF and having that Acrobat distiller deal just auto-print PDFs when I drop them into a network directory. It'd be a little slow. Anyone doing this? Would it work?
-Pat
Now, because I'm at work I haven't had a chance to install the 10.1.3 update. Someone please tell me they did some Aqua or ATI 3D optimization on the Rage chipset in the new iBooks. That is -all- I want! Also, I haven't really seen much comments or reports on the update, since Apple doesn't publish a really big CHANGELOG. But Macintouch has a fairly huge reader reports section. If not, I guess I'll have to wait for the next 10.2 beta.
Anyone know how to make non-supported DVD drives play with OS X DVD player.app? I have an LG 12x burner 8x DVD that is supposed to work according to xlr8yourmac.com - it'll work fine in OS 9 but no love from 10.1.2. Cool. Have fun!
-Pat
If you want to get work done, or run more then one app at a time - run OS 9.1. Not 9.2.1. OS 9.1 gives you features that they take away - like being able to close your iBook lid and still use an external display. Now they force your iBook to sleep in 9.2.1 and 10.1 - so forget about docked configurations.
I expected a little bit more for the money I invested in this laptop, and I'm still very bitter about it. But that's my .2 cents.
-Pat
-Pat
I shattered my sternum, ribs and collarbone and suffered internal bruising. My whole chest turned yellow 4 days after the accident. It took about 6 and a half weeks to recover. It was the scariest experience I've ever lived through in my life. I'd say recovering was worse then the accident.
Needless to say, my iBook hit the dash at a force of over 500mph (according to the firefighters that pulled me from the wreckage of my car) Once the ambulance transported me to the emergency room, the CHP officers brought my belongings and my wife met me there. To comfort me, my wife fired up my iBook and to my relief it still worked and booted into OS X without any problems.
It's about 3 months later now, and all the damage my iBook has to show is some leather smear from the case on the corners of the nice polished white plastic. No other problems whatsoever. And yet iBook users complain about their hinges.... *shrug* I love my iBook, glad it made it through it OK.
-Pat