>Does anyone know if IP masquerading (or a >workalike) is offered in FreeBSD? I'm going to >need a IP masquerading box for next semester, and >if FreeBSD does this I might try it just for fun. >Linux is just getting too easy these days..:^)
Yes, it's called ipnat.
This post was brought to with the assistance of OpenBSD and ipnat(1)...
SMAC is very good, I've wasted a lot of time on it.
The computer players are pretty darn good, in my opinion. Diplomacy is pretty important.
The game has a lot of depth, there are several ways to win, and you have to play each faction differently, according to their strengths. Makes for good replay value.
The endgame isn't bad, there is a queue for which buildings to build next, etc. You can also set individual cities to manage themselves, i.e. the AI picks your builds. I'm too much of a control freak to use that option, but I've heard that it works reasonably well.
Have fun, make sure you have lots of spare time before you try this one out...
If you don't like 1st person shooters, that's fine. It does strike me as ironic that you complain about lack of innovation in Q3 and then say that you just bought Civ CTP...
I happen to love FPSs, and I also love Civ/CivII/FreeCiv/MOO/MOM/etc. My current addiction happens to be SMAC, I absolutely adore that game. But I'd hardly pretend that it's original, it's not hard to see the Civ roots.
There is nothing new under the sun, and all that jazz.
I just set up a new SCO box for a client to replace their old (non Y2K ready) server.
They've got a bunch of Wyse terminals using WordPerfect v8 for Unix, Character Terminal Edition or some such. The character edition is included with the X version, I don't believe that you can purchase it seperately.
WP character edition looks a helluva lot like good old WP 5.1, btw.
I don't believe this is included in WP for Linux, anyone know for sure?
Your suggestion will work, but unfortunately it's just too much work to be practical in most situations.
The whole reason folks buy PC-RDIST/Ghost/ZEN/whatever is to save the incredible nuisance of doing these tasks by hand.
I've spent well over 100 hours since the release of Win95 tuning my "automatic Win95 install" collection of batch files, INF files, etc. (Most of the pain is due to the incredibly poor documentation.)
My kludges have saved literally weeks of time in the long run, but they are still not as functional as Ghost for building new machines, and not nearly as good as PC-RDIST or ZEN for rolling out updates or changes.
Take a hard look at one of these packages, and you'll never want to go back to rolling your own. In terms of manageability, Win95 was a serious step back from Win3.11. I've come to the conclusion that it really takes a dedicated team of programmers to cook up a tool that's good enough to be practical for managing the festering abombination that is Win95.
If you're too poor, (like a lot of my previous employers) then you make do, all the while cursing and swearing because there are tools to eliminate most of the drudgery, and make the whole thing more reliable.
Let's not get personal... Oh, I guess I can't get personal with you, coz you're an AC.
>The internet inconveniences you daily? All this >because its tools and ideas and users are >evolving?
Once upon a time, the 'net was a technical place where technical people communicated about things of interest to them. I was there, and I liked it. Those days are gone forever, and of course I can't do anything about that.
Why did I like the old days better?
Every time I find another website that I can't navigate because I've disabled flash/shockwave/jscript/java, that's inconvenient.
Everytime someone sends an HTML email to a mailing list that I'm a member of, that's inconvenient.
Everytime someone posts HTML to a newsgroup that I read, that's inconvenient.
Everytime I wait 5 minutes for a page to load because some fsckwit put all the navigation buttons as GIFs and didn't bother with old fashioned ALT tags, that's inconvenient.
I don't have Win98 on any PC that I control, but I do have to use it on occasion, and I find the "IE everywhere" design to be amazingly annoying, exasperating, and inconvenient.
Yeah, that's evolution, ain't it. You can't fight progress, can you? It's not "healthy".
*SNIP a bunch of irrelevant crap*
>What folks *ought* to focus on (and yes, I said >"ought" not "might" or "might want to consider") >is how to utilize (or, at least, theorize about) >the evolving internet instead of pointing >fingers at the "influx of AOL/webTV" users.
s/users/lusers/
I've been utilizing the Internet for a long time, sonny. Some of the changes are positive, but I can't think of a single positive thing about either AOL or webTV.
I remember when spam was a meat by-product sold in cans. I remember Usenet before cancelbots. I remember the first time I ran into a website "optimized for NutScrape 2.01.03 at 400x500 with 42 colors", and I remember how angry I was. The whole point of the Internet is that anyone might want to read your page, no matter how they access it. I suppose you might say that the Internet has the ability to "democratize". What you like to call "evolution" is interfering with that, and offers nothing of value (to me anyway) in return.
But it's a big 'net, and you and I can co-exist just fine. Me and my kind will thrive on the scaps of bandwidth left over from the real-audio streams, shockwave movies, Outlook Express emails with GIF stationary attached, pr0n downloads, and all that other really really valuable and socially important stuff that I'm too old-fashioned to appreciate.
>No, by innovation I mean converting the Internet >from a grey hell, to a place bursting with >colour, packed with free tools, free advice and >free information.
Pfft. There were lots of free tools, info and advice on the 'net before the massive influx of AOL/webtv lusers, Shockwave, Javascript, animated GIFs, Adobe Acrobat, HTML newsreaders/email clients, and assorted other festering abombinations.
You might enjoy color, I much prefer ASCII. It's hard to grep an animated GIF.
>Bearing in mind of course that if you *want* to >revert to a text-based Gopher / HTML 1.0 info >space you are more than welcome to. Ther's >nothing stopping you at all, it's all a part of >the whole.
Actually, no I can't, because a lot of sites who have useful information are illegible with old browsers.
>Also true, but the Internet is ephemeral. I've >been following web-design information on the Web >for years. At first the newsgroups were the >place for discussion, nowadays, it's best to >find a solid mailing list. Be prepared to change >every now and again. Not ideal perhaps, but it >works - I currently am on a list with fantastic >signal to noise.
Untill the lusing hordes overwhelm it again, and you have to find another forum.
You seem like a very tolerant and good natured fellow, congrats. I'm a grumpy bastard who doesn't see that the increased popularity of the internet has really benefited me in any substantial way, but does inconvenience me almost daily.
I keep hearing about Usenet 2, I'll have to check that out sometime.
You can have 2 or more machines (with different IP addrs, naturally) using round robin DNS to answer to the same name.
You can have seperate boxen for HTML, graphics, and the database. Depending on what you're trying to accomplish, you may be able to split the db among 2 or more boxes.
If you've got (for example) one machine as HTML and a different one for the db, it really doesn't matter what OS their running.
What do you mean by layer 4 switching? The last time I saw that buzzword was in brochures for networking h/w, i.e. glorified ethernet switches. Save yourself a few bucks and just stick everything on 100BaseT. If you can afford a network connection that makes 100BaseT a bottleneck, then you can afford to hire someone to do all this for you.
Oh, and as to bottlenecks... Take a look at some of the tutorials about reducing the storage requirements of your GIFs. It's amazingly easy to shrink your GIFs, and that's probably the cheapest way to optimize a web site.
Yeah, this is vague, but your question is a bit vague too. Don't take my word for it, set it up and test the hell out of it.
Most of the headache in looking after a modern LAN come from stupid s/w that the users install, or viruses that users bring in, or misconfigurations that the users do to their own machines.
Ever supported a few hundred users? I've supported (relatively) standardized environments, and I've supported ridiculously unstandardized environments. Guess which one is easier to look after?
I did support for a university for a while. Each prof had their own research budget, so they bought whatever the hell they wanted, no standards at all. One prof had 3 machines on his desk... A PC, a Mac, and an SGI. We supported MSDOS, PCDOS, Windows 3.x, and OS/2 2.x PCs. We had NetWare, OS/2 and WinNT servers. Unix? Sure, would you like Sun, SGI, or IBM? Documents might be composed in MSWord 2 or 6, or perhaps WordPerfect 5.1 (DOS) or 5.2 (Windows), or maybe good old fashioned TeX.
Pretty good variety, eh? This was a faculty with 20 profs and 5 or 6 labs! There were 2 sysadmins and a gopher (me) looking after this unholy mess, it was a fscking nightmare. Fortunately the sysadmins were really cool and sharp guys... They had to be.
As a result of this experience, I've become a big fan of standards. In my shop, if you want to bring in unsupported s/w... Fine, go ahead, but you're on your own. If it breaks, you get to keep both pieces.
>Remote managment was added to PC systems because >of the threat that NCs posed. I suspect that any >improved NC will have it's features copied into >the PCs, and the NC itself will disappear.
If they only copy features, we won't be much better off. Windows needs a serious redesign, and from what I've seen of W2K, it's not what I need.
>Replacing 1/3 of an organisation's PCs would (in >most cases) make things harder, as there would >now be TWO different systems to maintain. Maybe >if you were large and single site, or you had to >support the back-end platform the NCs relyed on >anyway....
Yeah, but if one of those systems could be maintained without all of the agony of looking after Windows, that's gotta be progress. But everything has to be 100% interoperable, i.e. my NC must always be able to read a spreadsheet composed on your PC.
>user re-training
You change stuff on your users all the time anyway. In the last 5 years they've gone from Win3.x to 95 to maybe 98. They've gone from Word6 to Word95 to maybe Word97, or maybe even migrated from WordPerfect.
I don't know your business or your users. But in most offices I've seen, the vast majority of the users have a box on their desk that has Email, Netscape, a word processor, and maybe a spreadsheet. As far as they are concerned, the box is a magical device, they have no idea how it works. If you give them a different "magic box" and tell them that they don't have a "C drive" any more, they should save everything to "H drive", they'll be just as happy.
Good discussion, BTW. Nice to chat with someone on/. who actually does this stuff for a living and knows what the hell they're talking about:)
I love ZEN, a couple of jobs ago we started using it to roll out changes to an app- it saved us several days of travel to remote offices.
I honestly don't know how people manage PCs without ZEN or SMS or some similar tools. But why is it that we need add-on tools to provide basic management to client PCs?
Win95/98/NT is a fscking nightmare by design, because of the relentlessly "single user desktop" mentality of the OS designers, and also the application designers. From a maintenance perspective, the only thing worse then the Windows OS are the typical applications, in all their registry diddling, DLL overwriting, splendour.
If I want to deploy an app over ZENworks or SMS, I have to carefully test the install on several of my "typical" machines to make sure that I don't bugger a crucial DLL or registry key. Have you ever looked at the amount of registry changes made by an install of MS Office? Mind boggling. It's amazing that any of this fragile garbage works at all, ever.
Have you ever done something inadvertant during an unattended install to a few dozen workstations? I have, it's easy to do, and not fun at all.
Presumably, NCs will be designed to be manageable, instead of tacking increasingly convoluted hacks onto an already incoherent mess of kludges. Policies and profiles and ZEN and SMS are far too complicated for the functionality they deliver. The fact that we are glad to get these tools is an indication of how completely unmanageable Windows has become.
Windows 3.11 sucked in almost every detail, but at least I could have a standard "image" for the typical user. If someone was having strange s/w problems, I could boot from my magic boot diskette(TM), which did a FORMAT C: and logged on to the network and did an XCOPY of the generic install. Edit one.ini file to enable the proper graphics card, and you're done, took maybe 20 min. I miss those days, I really really do.
NCs won't be for every user, but even if you replaced a third of your PCs, think of how much easier life would be.
I know exactly where he's coming from, that's why this Slashdot account doesn't use my name.
Why do I maintain a second "identity"?
Well, y'see, I have opinions. Lots of them. Some of those opinions could get me in trouble. For example, it's not completely impossible for vendors to unleash their legal beagles on folks who publicly criticize their products. I happen to think that a lot of vendors ship products that are... suboptimal. (Oh, what the hell, just a short rant.)
If I ever get my hands on the design team for DLink print server boxes, I'm going to infect the whole lot of 'em with leprosy, and force them to play hockey every day in the winter (hey, there's a face off in the corner!) and Aussie rules football every day in the summer.
If I was posting under my own name, I probably wouldn't describe a previous boss as a "spineless beancounter who knows the cost of everything and the value of nothing. In fact, I can't decide which is greater - my personal dislike for him as a human being, or my utter contempt for him professionally".
Or perhaps I'd hesitate to describe the last company I worked for as "a dismal hellhole where they've been so disorganized for so long that they wouldn't be able to do anything right to save their souls".
Ah, I feel better now. But I don't know if my boss would approve of those statements, and some of my customers are oversensitive fsckwits who might get offended or something.
Sure, this isn't bullet proof privacy, I'm sure the cops could find out who I am... But it's anonymous enough for my purposes.
Conflicts like this happen all the time. A sensible law practice has procedures to ensure that they find out about them up front, though.
Say I want to buy a house, I need a lawyer to represent me, and the seller needs one to represent him/her/it. When I go down to the Dewey, Screwem, and Howe law office, they get the particulars and then do a check to make sure they aren't representing the seller as well.
Small firms pretty much know who is doing what, big firms with offices in several cities have some sort of process they follow to sniff out conflicts.
Now if it's something easy and non-confrontational, like selling a house, both parties can agree to use 2 lawyers from the same firm. (In Canada, at least) A buddy of mine just bought some land. Both he and the vendor had known their respective lawyers for years, but the lawyers worked for the same firm. No problem, sign a form and everything goes ahead, they trusted their lawyers not to shaft them.
Obviously in some situations (lawsuits!) that wouldn't work, so the second party has to go find a new lawyer.
>On the eve of the twent-first century men do >still dominate most walks of life. But given the >massive advances in attaining equality for women >in this century, I don't think it will be long >before the issue of women in computing becomes a >non-issue.
That's pretty damned optimistic. Where the hell do you work/go to school?
In any job I've had, there have been many many fewer techie women then men. Is that because I've worked for places that hired on a sexist basis? No, it has to do with the supply of women entering the field.
When I did my BCS (graduated ~ 5 yrs ago), the babe ratio was about 6:1
Last year I taught MCSE and CNA classes. The female ratio was better... about 4:1 or 5:1. (Shouldn't really be referring to students as babes, eh?:) )
We've got a hell of a long way to go before we have anything close to equality.
As a previous poster said, we've got to change the attitudes of the preschoolers and elementary kids, that's our only hope of getting more women in the field.
Speaking of attitudes, the guys who are interested in getting more women in the field because it'll give them more women to look at/hit on/whatever.... You aren't helping.
> Stevens was a noted anti-Linux, anti-Perl bigot > who happened to be a high profile author of some > very good Unix books. This event signifies the > passing of the torch to the GNU generation.
I'm speachless, and that doesn't happen very often. I was going to let this slide, but I just fscking can't.
<RANT mode=REALLYFUCKINGPISSED>
It's not a fscking crime not to like Linux, or Perl. It's a matter of opinion, and the last time I checked, the GNU movement is all about giving people a little empowerment, and more choice.
The contribution of Stevens' books to the computing community has been enormous. There are so few good technical books available, and his are among the best technical books I have ever read.
How much code in the world is better because the author(s) of that code read and applied some of these books?
Now a lot of that code is in commercial software, but vast, incalculable KLOCs of Free Software/Open Source have benefitted from Stevens' insights. This man has advanced the Free Software community by leaps and bounds, without maintaining a single program (that I know of.)
One of the biggest weaknesses in the computer industry (and the Free Software movement is no exception) is the shitty documentation and books. Any author that reliably comes out with well written, concise, insightful, and experienced books deserves to be sainted IMNSHFO.
I'm a sysadmin by trade. I don't fscking care if you run GNU/Linux or *BSD or SCO or Ultrix or NT or VMS or NetWare, if you're crazy enough to maintain computers for a living, you need all the decent documentation that you can get, and TCP/IP Illustrated has helped fsckloads of people understand the subtle interactions of the various protocols that make the 'net work.
In conclusion, if I thought you were reprentative of the GNU generation, then I would probably toast my fscking Linux and FreeBSD partitions and put NT back on, you selfish, short sighted, ungrateful punk.
>Hell, even Apple ended up having to stop testing >new software on every instance of machine they >ever made- it got too expensive as there were >hundreds of Macs and the logistics were >impossible with so many software projects lining >up to use the labs.
I worked in one of the Nortel testing centers for a few months, where they tested telephone switch h/w and s/w.
They had one of everything that was still in use by any customer, anywhere in the world. The lab ran tests 24/7, it was Very Impressive.
There was this one old piece of kit that was still being used by only one customer. They were apparently seriously considering giving them something more modern just so that they didn't have to worry about keeping compatibility with the old thing.
Oh, and forget your piddly little UPS, those guys have a battery room bigger then my apartment, the leads coming off the batteries are as thick as your wrist.
disclaimer - I've never used Ghost (never been anywhere where they could afford it!)
I hear that one of the nice things about Ghost is that it will do multicast, so if you're a school or whatever you can re-install a lab full of machines _really_ fast.
(Maybe you can do that with free s/w too, if so please enlighten me...)
Tapes are a great way to get a snapshot of your file system as of right now. With a sensible tape rotation, it's easy to go back and get a file as of a few months ago, i.e. before someone accidentally deleted the first 20 pages of the document or whatever, and nobody noticed until now.
Keeping stuff online with big hard drives is a great way to backup data that is static, i.e. scanned documents, but is somewhat less useful for stuff that is constantly changing.
> It seems like the people who got into the tech > industry because they liked computers already do > fine, it's just the people who got into to make > the big $$$ who get burntout. Or something.
I disagree.
I eat, sleep and breathe computers, and I hate my job with such an all-consuming passion that I can't even begin to express it.
Ever work in a clueless hellhole where your own management doesn't even pretend to make rational choices based on sound technical judgement, but rather plays politics every second of every day?
Ever worked with a bunch of clueless fsckwits (mostly people in the biz for the money) who were so bad that they actually produced negative work (i.e. screwed up more things then they contributed)? It's even better when they're consultants making $10K more then you.
Ever had your technical skills/ideals work against you, in that you continue to piss more hours into the job in an effort to carry everything? You know you can't keep it indefinitely, but just a little hack here and a little scotch tape there, and it's only midnight, so...
Ever been so close to the line that you've carried a signed letter of resignation in you pocket for weeks, waiting for that final straw that would finally provoke you to sign the thing and hand it in?
Ever been stuck (for personal reasons) in an area where there aren't a lot of IT jobs? If I was in Silicon Valley, sure, I'd have bailed by now. But suppose I was working in Bangor, ME, USA or Drumheller, AB, Canada? You think that's not hard on a relationship, me knowing that there are zillions of better jobs in the world but that I can't have them because I'd have to leave my SO?
Anyways. I'm not angry at you, this is just an undirected rant.
Slashdot Mirror
>Does anyone know if IP masquerading (or a :^)
>workalike) is offered in FreeBSD? I'm going to
>need a IP masquerading box for next semester, and
>if FreeBSD does this I might try it just for fun.
>Linux is just getting too easy these days..
Yes, it's called ipnat.
This post was brought to with the assistance of OpenBSD and ipnat(1)...
SMAC is very good, I've wasted a lot of time on it.
The computer players are pretty darn good, in my opinion. Diplomacy is pretty important.
The game has a lot of depth, there are several ways to win, and you have to play each faction differently, according to their strengths. Makes for good replay value.
The endgame isn't bad, there is a queue for which buildings to build next, etc. You can also set individual cities to manage themselves, i.e. the AI picks your builds. I'm too much of a control freak to use that option, but I've heard that it works reasonably well.
Have fun, make sure you have lots of spare time before you try this one out...
If you don't like 1st person shooters, that's fine. It does strike me as ironic that you complain about lack of innovation in Q3 and then say that you just bought Civ CTP...
I happen to love FPSs, and I also love Civ/CivII/FreeCiv/MOO/MOM/etc. My current addiction happens to be SMAC, I absolutely adore that game. But I'd hardly pretend that it's original, it's not hard to see the Civ roots.
There is nothing new under the sun, and all that jazz.
Corel is still selling character based WP.
I just set up a new SCO box for a client to replace their old (non Y2K ready) server.
They've got a bunch of Wyse terminals using WordPerfect v8 for Unix, Character Terminal Edition or some such. The character edition is included with the X version, I don't believe that you can purchase it seperately.
WP character edition looks a helluva lot like good old WP 5.1, btw.
I don't believe this is included in WP for Linux, anyone know for sure?
Here's my opinion...
Your suggestion will work, but unfortunately it's just too much work to be practical in most situations.
The whole reason folks buy PC-RDIST/Ghost/ZEN/whatever is to save the incredible nuisance of doing these tasks by hand.
I've spent well over 100 hours since the release of Win95 tuning my "automatic Win95 install" collection of batch files, INF files, etc. (Most of the pain is due to the incredibly poor documentation.)
My kludges have saved literally weeks of time in the long run, but they are still not as functional as Ghost for building new machines, and not nearly as good as PC-RDIST or ZEN for rolling out updates or changes.
Take a hard look at one of these packages, and you'll never want to go back to rolling your own. In terms of manageability, Win95 was a serious step back from Win3.11. I've come to the conclusion that it really takes a dedicated team of programmers to cook up a tool that's good enough to be practical for managing the festering abombination that is Win95.
If you're too poor, (like a lot of my previous employers) then you make do, all the while cursing and swearing because there are tools to eliminate most of the drudgery, and make the whole thing more reliable.
If/when this puppy becomes widely available, I'll probably buy one and crank it right into my car.
Presumably they'll sell a lighter adapter, so no battery worries, and I'll never have to dub my CDs to cassette again.
If anyone is interested, NetBSD is already booting on WinCE hardware, check it out.
This is getting personal, feel free to take it to email, kiddo.
>God, what a fscking tiresome attitude.
Let's not get personal... Oh, I guess I can't get personal with you, coz you're an AC.
>The internet inconveniences you daily? All this
>because its tools and ideas and users are
>evolving?
Once upon a time, the 'net was a technical place where technical people communicated about things of interest to them. I was there, and I liked it. Those days are gone forever, and of course I can't do anything about that.
Why did I like the old days better?
Every time I find another website that I can't navigate because I've disabled flash/shockwave/jscript/java, that's inconvenient.
Everytime someone sends an HTML email to a mailing list that I'm a member of, that's inconvenient.
Everytime someone posts HTML to a newsgroup that I read, that's inconvenient.
Everytime I wait 5 minutes for a page to load because some fsckwit put all the navigation buttons as GIFs and didn't bother with old fashioned ALT tags, that's inconvenient.
I don't have Win98 on any PC that I control, but I do have to use it on occasion, and I find the "IE everywhere" design to be amazingly annoying, exasperating, and inconvenient.
Yeah, that's evolution, ain't it. You can't fight progress, can you? It's not "healthy".
*SNIP a bunch of irrelevant crap*
>What folks *ought* to focus on (and yes, I said
>"ought" not "might" or "might want to consider")
>is how to utilize (or, at least, theorize about)
>the evolving internet instead of pointing
>fingers at the "influx of AOL/webTV" users.
s/users/lusers/
I've been utilizing the Internet for a long time, sonny. Some of the changes are positive, but I can't think of a single positive thing about either AOL or webTV.
I remember when spam was a meat by-product sold in cans. I remember Usenet before cancelbots. I remember the first time I ran into a website "optimized for NutScrape 2.01.03 at 400x500 with 42 colors", and I remember how angry I was. The whole point of the Internet is that anyone might want to read your page, no matter how they access it. I suppose you might say that the Internet has the ability to "democratize". What you like to call "evolution" is interfering with that, and offers nothing of value (to me anyway) in return.
But it's a big 'net, and you and I can co-exist just fine. Me and my kind will thrive on the scaps of bandwidth left over from the real-audio streams, shockwave movies, Outlook Express emails with GIF stationary attached, pr0n downloads, and all that other really really valuable and socially important stuff that I'm too old-fashioned to appreciate.
(wildly off topic)
>No, by innovation I mean converting the Internet
>from a grey hell, to a place bursting with
>colour, packed with free tools, free advice and
>free information.
Pfft. There were lots of free tools, info and advice on the 'net before the massive influx of AOL/webtv lusers, Shockwave, Javascript, animated GIFs, Adobe Acrobat, HTML newsreaders/email clients, and assorted other festering abombinations.
You might enjoy color, I much prefer ASCII. It's hard to grep an animated GIF.
>Bearing in mind of course that if you *want* to
>revert to a text-based Gopher / HTML 1.0 info
>space you are more than welcome to. Ther's
>nothing stopping you at all, it's all a part of
>the whole.
Actually, no I can't, because a lot of sites who have useful information are illegible with old browsers.
>Also true, but the Internet is ephemeral. I've
>been following web-design information on the Web
>for years. At first the newsgroups were the
>place for discussion, nowadays, it's best to
>find a solid mailing list. Be prepared to change
>every now and again. Not ideal perhaps, but it
>works - I currently am on a list with fantastic
>signal to noise.
Untill the lusing hordes overwhelm it again, and you have to find another forum.
You seem like a very tolerant and good natured fellow, congrats. I'm a grumpy bastard who doesn't see that the increased popularity of the internet has really benefited me in any substantial way, but does inconvenience me almost daily.
I keep hearing about Usenet 2, I'll have to check that out sometime.
There's all sorts of load balancing.
You can have 2 or more machines (with different IP addrs, naturally) using round robin DNS to answer to the same name.
You can have seperate boxen for HTML, graphics, and the database. Depending on what you're trying to accomplish, you may be able to split the db among 2 or more boxes.
If you've got (for example) one machine as HTML and a different one for the db, it really doesn't matter what OS their running.
What do you mean by layer 4 switching? The last time I saw that buzzword was in brochures for networking h/w, i.e. glorified ethernet switches. Save yourself a few bucks and just stick everything on 100BaseT. If you can afford a network connection that makes 100BaseT a bottleneck, then you can afford to hire someone to do all this for you.
Oh, and as to bottlenecks... Take a look at some of the tutorials about reducing the storage requirements of your GIFs. It's amazingly easy to shrink your GIFs, and that's probably the cheapest way to optimize a web site.
Yeah, this is vague, but your question is a bit vague too. Don't take my word for it, set it up and test the hell out of it.
Speaking as a sysadmin...
Most of the headache in looking after a modern LAN come from stupid s/w that the users install, or viruses that users bring in, or misconfigurations that the users do to their own machines.
Ever supported a few hundred users? I've supported (relatively) standardized environments, and I've supported ridiculously unstandardized environments. Guess which one is easier to look after?
I did support for a university for a while. Each prof had their own research budget, so they bought whatever the hell they wanted, no standards at all. One prof had 3 machines on his desk... A PC, a Mac, and an SGI. We supported MSDOS, PCDOS, Windows 3.x, and OS/2 2.x PCs. We had NetWare, OS/2 and WinNT servers. Unix? Sure, would you like Sun, SGI, or IBM? Documents might be composed in MSWord 2 or 6, or perhaps WordPerfect 5.1 (DOS) or 5.2 (Windows), or maybe good old fashioned TeX.
Pretty good variety, eh? This was a faculty with 20 profs and 5 or 6 labs! There were 2 sysadmins and a gopher (me) looking after this unholy mess, it was a fscking nightmare. Fortunately the sysadmins were really cool and sharp guys... They had to be.
As a result of this experience, I've become a big fan of standards. In my shop, if you want to bring in unsupported s/w... Fine, go ahead, but you're on your own. If it breaks, you get to keep both pieces.
>Remote managment was added to PC systems because
/. who actually does this stuff for a living and knows what the hell they're talking about :)
>of the threat that NCs posed. I suspect that any
>improved NC will have it's features copied into
>the PCs, and the NC itself will disappear.
If they only copy features, we won't be much better off. Windows needs a serious redesign, and from what I've seen of W2K, it's not what I need.
>Replacing 1/3 of an organisation's PCs would (in >most cases) make things harder, as there would
>now be TWO different systems to maintain. Maybe
>if you were large and single site, or you had to
>support the back-end platform the NCs relyed on
>anyway....
Yeah, but if one of those systems could be maintained without all of the agony of looking after Windows, that's gotta be progress. But everything has to be 100% interoperable, i.e. my NC must always be able to read a spreadsheet composed on your PC.
>user re-training
You change stuff on your users all the time anyway. In the last 5 years they've gone from Win3.x to 95 to maybe 98. They've gone from Word6 to Word95 to maybe Word97, or maybe even migrated from WordPerfect.
I don't know your business or your users. But in most offices I've seen, the vast majority of the users have a box on their desk that has Email, Netscape, a word processor, and maybe a spreadsheet. As far as they are concerned, the box is a magical device, they have no idea how it works. If you give them a different "magic box" and tell them that they don't have a "C drive" any more, they should save everything to "H drive", they'll be just as happy.
Good discussion, BTW. Nice to chat with someone on
I love ZEN, a couple of jobs ago we started using it to roll out changes to an app- it saved us several days of travel to remote offices.
.ini file to enable the proper graphics card, and you're done, took maybe 20 min. I miss those days, I really really do.
I honestly don't know how people manage PCs without ZEN or SMS or some similar tools. But why is it that we need add-on tools to provide basic management to client PCs?
Win95/98/NT is a fscking nightmare by design, because of the relentlessly "single user desktop" mentality of the OS designers, and also the application designers. From a maintenance perspective, the only thing worse then the Windows OS are the typical applications, in all their registry diddling, DLL overwriting, splendour.
If I want to deploy an app over ZENworks or SMS, I have to carefully test the install on several of my "typical" machines to make sure that I don't bugger a crucial DLL or registry key. Have you ever looked at the amount of registry changes made by an install of MS Office? Mind boggling. It's amazing that any of this fragile garbage works at all, ever.
Have you ever done something inadvertant during an unattended install to a few dozen workstations? I have, it's easy to do, and not fun at all.
Presumably, NCs will be designed to be manageable, instead of tacking increasingly convoluted hacks onto an already incoherent mess of kludges. Policies and profiles and ZEN and SMS are far too complicated for the functionality they deliver. The fact that we are glad to get these tools is an indication of how completely unmanageable Windows has become.
Windows 3.11 sucked in almost every detail, but at least I could have a standard "image" for the typical user. If someone was having strange s/w problems, I could boot from my magic boot diskette(TM), which did a FORMAT C: and logged on to the network and did an XCOPY of the generic install. Edit one
NCs won't be for every user, but even if you replaced a third of your PCs, think of how much easier life would be.
I know exactly where he's coming from, that's why this Slashdot account doesn't use my name.
Why do I maintain a second "identity"?
Well, y'see, I have opinions. Lots of them. Some of those opinions could get me in trouble. For example, it's not completely impossible for vendors to unleash their legal beagles on folks who publicly criticize their products. I happen to think that a lot of vendors ship products that are... suboptimal. (Oh, what the hell, just a short rant.)
If I ever get my hands on the design team for DLink print server boxes, I'm going to infect the whole lot of 'em with leprosy, and force them to play hockey every day in the winter (hey, there's a face off in the corner!) and Aussie rules football every day in the summer.
If I was posting under my own name, I probably wouldn't describe a previous boss as a "spineless beancounter who knows the cost of everything and the value of nothing. In fact, I can't decide which is greater - my personal dislike for him as a human being, or my utter contempt for him professionally".
Or perhaps I'd hesitate to describe the last company I worked for as "a dismal hellhole where they've been so disorganized for so long that they wouldn't be able to do anything right to save their souls".
Ah, I feel better now. But I don't know if my boss would approve of those statements, and some of my customers are oversensitive fsckwits who might get offended or something.
Sure, this isn't bullet proof privacy, I'm sure the cops could find out who I am... But it's anonymous enough for my purposes.
Conflicts like this happen all the time. A sensible law practice has procedures to ensure that they find out about them up front, though.
Say I want to buy a house, I need a lawyer to represent me, and the seller needs one to represent him/her/it. When I go down to the Dewey, Screwem, and Howe law office, they get the particulars and then do a check to make sure they aren't representing the seller as well.
Small firms pretty much know who is doing what, big firms with offices in several cities have some sort of process they follow to sniff out conflicts.
Now if it's something easy and non-confrontational, like selling a house, both parties can agree to use 2 lawyers from the same firm. (In Canada, at least) A buddy of mine just bought some land. Both he and the vendor had known their respective lawyers for years, but
the lawyers worked for the same firm. No problem, sign a form and everything goes ahead, they trusted their lawyers not to shaft them.
Obviously in some situations (lawsuits!) that wouldn't work, so the second party has to go find a new lawyer.
>On the eve of the twent-first century men do
:) )
>still dominate most walks of life. But given the
>massive advances in attaining equality for women
>in this century, I don't think it will be long
>before the issue of women in computing becomes a
>non-issue.
That's pretty damned optimistic. Where the hell do you work/go to school?
In any job I've had, there have been many many fewer techie women then men. Is that because I've worked for places that hired on a sexist basis? No, it has to do with the supply of women entering the field.
When I did my BCS (graduated ~ 5 yrs ago), the babe ratio was about 6:1
Last year I taught MCSE and CNA classes. The female ratio was better... about 4:1 or 5:1. (Shouldn't really be referring to students as babes, eh?
We've got a hell of a long way to go before we have anything close to equality.
As a previous poster said, we've got to change the attitudes of the preschoolers and elementary kids, that's our only hope of getting more women in the field.
Speaking of attitudes, the guys who are interested in getting more women in the field because it'll give them more women to look at/hit on/whatever.... You aren't helping.
I used that eval copy a lot during my undergrad, i.e. flow charts, net diagrams, etc.
> No, this is not flamebait. I'm serious.
> Stevens was a noted anti-Linux, anti-Perl bigot
> who happened to be a high profile author of some
> very good Unix books. This event signifies the
> passing of the torch to the GNU generation.
I'm speachless, and that doesn't happen very often. I was going to let this slide, but I just fscking can't.
<RANT mode=REALLYFUCKINGPISSED>
It's not a fscking crime not to like Linux, or Perl. It's a matter of opinion, and the last time I checked, the GNU movement is all about giving people a little empowerment, and more choice.
The contribution of Stevens' books to the computing community has been enormous. There are so few good technical books available, and his are among the best technical books I have ever read.
How much code in the world is better because the author(s) of that code read and applied some of these books?
Now a lot of that code is in commercial software, but vast, incalculable KLOCs of Free Software/Open Source have benefitted from Stevens' insights. This man has advanced the Free Software community by leaps and bounds, without maintaining a single program (that I know of.)
One of the biggest weaknesses in the computer industry (and the Free Software movement is no exception) is the shitty documentation and books. Any author that reliably comes out with well written, concise, insightful, and experienced books deserves to be sainted IMNSHFO.
I'm a sysadmin by trade. I don't fscking care if you run GNU/Linux or *BSD or SCO or Ultrix or NT or VMS or NetWare, if you're crazy enough to maintain computers for a living, you need all the decent documentation that you can get, and TCP/IP Illustrated has helped fsckloads of people understand the subtle interactions of the various protocols that make the 'net work.
In conclusion, if I thought you were reprentative of the GNU generation, then I would probably toast my fscking Linux and FreeBSD partitions and put NT back on, you selfish, short sighted, ungrateful punk.
</RANT>
>Hell, even Apple ended up having to stop testing
>new software on every instance of machine they
>ever made- it got too expensive as there were
>hundreds of Macs and the logistics were
>impossible with so many software projects lining
>up to use the labs.
I worked in one of the Nortel testing centers for a few months, where they tested telephone switch h/w and s/w.
They had one of everything that was still in use by any customer, anywhere in the world. The lab ran tests 24/7, it was Very Impressive.
There was this one old piece of kit that was still being used by only one customer. They were apparently seriously considering giving them something more modern just so that they didn't have to worry about keeping compatibility with the old thing.
Oh, and forget your piddly little UPS, those guys have a battery room bigger then my apartment, the leads coming off the batteries are as thick as your wrist.
--
disclaimer - I've never used Ghost (never been anywhere where they could afford it!)
I hear that one of the nice things about Ghost is that it will do multicast, so if you're a school or whatever you can re-install a lab full of machines _really_ fast.
(Maybe you can do that with free s/w too, if so please enlighten me...)
My favorite bit...
If Microsoft can change and compete on quality, I've won.
Tapes are a great way to get a snapshot of your file system as of right now. With a sensible tape rotation, it's easy to go back and get a file as of a few months ago, i.e. before someone accidentally deleted the first 20 pages of the document or whatever, and nobody noticed until now.
Keeping stuff online with big hard drives is a great way to backup data that is static, i.e. scanned documents, but is somewhat less useful for stuff that is constantly changing.
My 0.02 $CAN
> It seems like the people who got into the tech
> industry because they liked computers already do
> fine, it's just the people who got into to make
> the big $$$ who get burntout. Or something.
I disagree.
I eat, sleep and breathe computers, and I hate my job with such an all-consuming passion that I can't even begin to express it.
Ever work in a clueless hellhole where your own management doesn't even pretend to make rational choices based on sound technical judgement, but rather plays politics every second of every day?
Ever worked with a bunch of clueless fsckwits (mostly people in the biz for the money) who were so bad that they actually produced negative work (i.e. screwed up more things then they contributed)? It's even better when they're consultants making $10K more then you.
Ever had your technical skills/ideals work against you, in that you continue to piss more hours into the job in an effort to carry everything? You know you can't keep it indefinitely, but just a little hack here and a little scotch tape there, and it's only midnight, so...
Ever been so close to the line that you've carried a signed letter of resignation in you pocket for weeks, waiting for that final straw that would finally provoke you to sign the thing and hand it in?
Ever been stuck (for personal reasons) in an area where there aren't a lot of IT jobs? If I was in Silicon Valley, sure, I'd have bailed by now. But suppose I was working in Bangor, ME, USA or Drumheller, AB, Canada? You think that's not hard on a relationship, me knowing that there are zillions of better jobs in the world but that I can't have them because I'd have to leave my SO?
Anyways. I'm not angry at you, this is just an undirected rant.
The systems were PII-333s with 64MB RAM running NT4SP4, and DLINK 8029 (or maybe 8019) PCI NICs.
I believe that the NT TCP/IP stack has been improved greatly since the 3.5x days, which was what I suppose you would have been running on a P90.
(Sorry for delay getting back to you, has been busy at work)