Sounds like someone doesn't know how to setup and administer an Exchange server.
I've had to admin Exchange servers both here at the main office, and on a box I've never seen, half a world away, connected via IPSec tunnel. Apart from hardware failures, neither Exchange server has died, rebooted, corrupted, or anything else adverse in three years.
We're currently running Exchange 5.5 on a dual proc Dell 2550, with about a gig of RAM. Plenty of horsepower to spare, and i've got 4 times the number of users you do. A Quad Xenon with that much RAM, I'd kill for, but is overkill for such a small Exchange site.
Do yourself and your company a favor and get an Exchange expert in to figure out what what your problems are. Exchange is a damnfine messaging system, and a lot of effort is being put in on the OSS side of things to clone its functionality. Microsoft must have done something right....
I still fail to see why this causes so much titter among the people here.
Which pill would I take? One that led to a more worthwhile result. Now excuse me, I'm going to pop Ghost Recon into my unmodded Xbox and shoot some bad guys.
Buying an Xbox without buying any games is like buying a box of condoms without any intention of getting laid.
Microsoft has several billion in cash (40 billion+ from what I heard) in its war chest. Do you think the number of Slashdotters who buy Xboxes without games are making the slightest difference in the overall picture? How many actually bought an Xbox and never bought a game for one? I'm sure there's a couple who have HALO or Ghost Recon stashed away in the bottom of their closets whenever their fellow Linux geeks come over to visit.
Every time one of these "Linux on Xbox" stories pop up, I ask: Why?
I've gotten a few vague answers, ranging from "it has a good graphics card, I can now do all that rendering I've been waiting to do!" to "Don't tell me how to use my hardware, you sancimonious pro-Microsoft clone!"
I still ask: Why? Oh, yeah, there's that giddy little thrill of 'subverting' a Microsoft platform to run Linux, but you have to have actually purchased an Xbox to begin with, so you've already put money in Microsoft's coffers. With all the effort needed to get an Xbox to run Linux, there's tons of easier platforms so you fire up EMACS and check your email. Once you done it, what are you going to do with it? Compartively speaking, apart from the graphics controller, it's not that good of a computing platform.
Maybe if China, Korea and Taiwan all got rid of their spamhosts, that would free up a significant amount of addresses. 99% of the stuff I get from Asia both at work and at home is spam.
This isn't news. This is every company. There hasn't been one place that I've worked at that didn't have a group of people that the others picked on. If there aren't any contractors, then it would be the mailroom dorks or something similar. A group of people will always find another group of people to piss on. It's just a microcosm.
This isn't just every company, this is every highschool. Get over it and find some real news to report.
You'll have to excuse me, as I take anything that Larry Ellison says with a metric ton of salt. His success rate for his predictions have been on the far left end of the bell curve. Even a normal everyday person would have more success by now.
Actually, part of the original letter we recieved from the BSA stated that we could not change what software was running on our computers already. They said that could be construed as "destroying evidence". Yes, they had an idea of what software was installed and in what quantity since we were reported by a disgruntled ex-employee.
I'm not a lawyer, and I'm pretty sure that 99%+ of Slashdot isn't either, so any discussion as to the legality and accuracy of that claim is moot.
You wrote that you had all licenses except one for Visio, the bills for them are irrelevant. So, wtf should any sane man pay more than that?
If it was me making the decision, I'd would have told the BSA to go pound sand after showing them our licenses. But it wasn't me making that decision. Obviously, the BSA's strongarm tactics worked on our upper management since I had to dig through years of purchase orders and receipts and we still wound up paying them some princely sum.
We had the BSA sicced on us by a disgruntled ex-employee. We didn't receive one of those mass mailed letters, we received a bona-fide messenger delivered packet from the BSA, naming specific software titles. Also in the letter was their "gracious" offer to do a self-audit and orders to report the results of the audit to them. Failure to comply with their demands would result in the BSA taking us to court, getting a court order to come in and conduct an audit themselves, with their software and people,and under the eyes of either the State Troopers or US Marshals to make sure that we didn't interfere.
So we did an audit and found out that we were only one copy of a certain software title out of compliance. We sent back the results of our audit, along with copies of our licenses to the BSA, along with an offer to buy the extra license at full retail price. They replied that our licenses and audit results were not good enough, that they also wanted us to produce the receipts for the software.
The receipts. Apparently, having the licenses are not good enough. Or maybe the BSA figured they could strongarm some money out of us, so they leaned a little harder. I had heard that before the BSA sends out these demands, they research the company to see if they have enough cash to make their efforts worthwhile. Having recently completed a series of capital funding, I suppose we looked mighty tempting.
This meant many days of going through three years of financial records. Eventually, we found most of our reciepts and purchase orders, except for a few things from the very beginnings of the company when the records weren't really kept. But we did have the licenses. Of course, the BSA, now really smelling blood, came down with an arbitrary amount to fine us along with a statement that if we did not pay this (ridiculous) sum for basically being one copy out of compliance, they would take us to court and demand far more.
I was never told how much exactly we had to pay the BSA, but I heard it was "not insignificant". It was somewhere in the 5-figure range. All for one copy of Visio, and some tossed receipts from three years ago.
I always argued that the BSA had no right to demand our receipts and financial records since we were able to produce the software licenses. It's a bunch of crap. I can't see how the BSA can legally operate in this country. There is another organization that operates in a similar fashion- it's called the Mafia. Bastards.
Are they saying that two different files can't have the same hash value? That's a load of crap! It's not hard at all to modify data to create any hash value that you want, especially when you're including "deleted space" in the CRC calculations... It's good at telling you if there were any random modifications caused by errors during copying, but not that the files are identical.
It's extremely unlikely to produce two different files that produce the same SHA-1/MD-5 hash, not impossoble. CRC, on the other had is a lot easier. If two files produce the same SHA-1 or MD-5 hash, it is very, very likely that the files are identical.
Some people insist on making isssues out of everything. It's real simple: Google is a privately held company, they can do whatever the hell they want. If Google wants to link only to websites about left-handed redheaded stepchildren who like square dancing, it's Google's perogative and there isn't a whole lot that everyone else can do except bitch and bawl (which it sounds like we have that in spades) or use a different search engine. The sense of entitlement of some people really astounds me.
I'm wondering how these people plan on enforcing their license? Say Country X uses their software, and callously makes policial dissidents make wallets and watch reruns of MASH all day long (after it got mauldin).
Exactly how do they plan on making Country X stop using their software? Show up on the doorsteps of the palace/king's mansion/capitol building and ask really forcefully to stop? Irony defined, would be those kids thrown into the clink also, to make wallets and watch MASH reruns.
Countries that regularly commit human rights violations usually don't sweat the little stuff like some 16 year old kid not wanting that country to use his software.
I find it interesting that little or no attention to the Common Critera have been paid by Slashdot or its readers until Win2k was EAL4 certified. All of a sudden there is a flurry of activity concerning whether the Common Critera is relevant or any good, or whether Microsoft bought their certificate. How come Linux can't get EAL4 certified, hmmm? With all the effort put into bellyaching about Win2k and the CC, I'm certain that at least one flavor of Linux could have been whipped into shape.
First of all, CC certification was achieved with Service Pack 3 plus Hotfix Q326886, not just SP3. The author's statement is incorrect.
Second, Common Criteria isn't a panacea or a magical certificate saying that Win2k is uber-secure. It is an assurance that it meets a specific level of security and reliability on failure (ie, will STOP instead of going into an insecure mode on a kernel exception).
Its predecessor was called Orange Book, which WinNT scored a C2 rating. That's about as good as you are going to get with an "off the shelf" operating system. A Level 3 really doesn't mean it's better than other OSs, just certified that it will operate in a predictable and reliable fashion, has DACLs and user-based security, etc... Big whoop.
Why Service Pack 3? Gee, it takes a bit of time for certification. IIRC, NT took 2 years to get C2 certified. Remember, this is the government.
By the way, I don't see Linux listed anywhere on the CC list. Check your pots, I think they're talking to your kettles.
Finally, I take exception to the author's use of "propaganda". Is it becoming the thing to call anything propaganda that paints Microsoft as something other than the Evil Empire?
Despite all the "experts" that Slashdot has on computing, security, software, robotics and just about every other subject under the sun, why for "Bob's" sake would you ask./ for legal advice?
Now, a Linux user can "see the source to [his] programming tools," and so is not obliged to rely on included documentation.
Not obliged, but how useful is it? Personally, I don't know C, so being able to view the source code for something really doesn't mean anything to me. Documentation is a standard development process, and it needs to be done and done well. Being able to peer at the source code is no excuse for not documenting properly. I really haven't seen this in many OSS packages yet. OpenSSH, yes. A few others. Most of the other time, it's "Well it works on MY system!" or the obligatory "RTFM|STFW, n00b!" bullshit response.
Neither of those make up for the ability to see the source code.
Moreover, as you point out, there are many sources of documentation for those tools, from HOWTOs to manpages to info pages (of course, with lots of redundant information and not every bit of software is well-documented).
As a Unix friend of mine once said, "manpages suck. they're always wrong". HOWTOs are wildly inaccurate, or written for Redhat 2.45.7x with the mudflaps and cup holder.
The Windows programmer has to rely on whatever documentation MS provides -- because no one else can see the bloody source.
All binaries and programming APIs come from Microsoft?! Egad!
Hey! Let's pretend we're in Bizarro World and we're talking about Linux!
It isn't. Well, not for most people (even Slashdot people). I can't speak for others, but I find it mildly offensive that many people are convinced that Linux is the only way, that with software you get what you pay for,
See how well this works?! This is fun!
Still other people, such as aspiring programmers, often have a tough time doing any real programming in Linux because it's so damn complex and crufty, and some eventually lose interest and leave for a different interest. Some of these people would also benefit greatly from being able to see the source to their programming tools--how they actually work--rather than reading unnavigable gigabytes of manpages, RTFMs, STFWs and HOWTOs documentation to find info on how to work around some obscure bug or "feature" in their tools.
Strange how the same arguments against Windows can be used against Linux too.
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds like someone doesn't know how to setup and administer an Exchange server.
I've had to admin Exchange servers both here at the main office, and on a box I've never seen, half a world away, connected via IPSec tunnel. Apart from hardware failures, neither Exchange server has died, rebooted, corrupted, or anything else adverse in three years.
We're currently running Exchange 5.5 on a dual proc Dell 2550, with about a gig of RAM. Plenty of horsepower to spare, and i've got 4 times the number of users you do. A Quad Xenon with that much RAM, I'd kill for, but is overkill for such a small Exchange site.
Do yourself and your company a favor and get an Exchange expert in to figure out what what your problems are. Exchange is a damnfine messaging system, and a lot of effort is being put in on the OSS side of things to clone its functionality. Microsoft must have done something right....
As we say over at fark.com....
"Still no cure for cancer"
I still fail to see why this causes so much titter among the people here.
Which pill would I take? One that led to a more worthwhile result. Now excuse me, I'm going to pop Ghost Recon into my unmodded Xbox and shoot some bad guys.
Buying an Xbox without buying any games is like buying a box of condoms without any intention of getting laid.
Microsoft has several billion in cash (40 billion+ from what I heard) in its war chest. Do you think the number of Slashdotters who buy Xboxes without games are making the slightest difference in the overall picture? How many actually bought an Xbox and never bought a game for one? I'm sure there's a couple who have HALO or Ghost Recon stashed away in the bottom of their closets whenever their fellow Linux geeks come over to visit.
Every time one of these "Linux on Xbox" stories pop up, I ask: Why?
I've gotten a few vague answers, ranging from "it has a good graphics card, I can now do all that rendering I've been waiting to do!" to "Don't tell me how to use my hardware, you sancimonious pro-Microsoft clone!"
I still ask: Why? Oh, yeah, there's that giddy little thrill of 'subverting' a Microsoft platform to run Linux, but you have to have actually purchased an Xbox to begin with, so you've already put money in Microsoft's coffers. With all the effort needed to get an Xbox to run Linux, there's tons of easier platforms so you fire up EMACS and check your email.
Once you done it, what are you going to do with it? Compartively speaking, apart from the graphics controller, it's not that good of a computing platform.
Maybe if China, Korea and Taiwan all got rid of their spamhosts, that would free up a significant amount of addresses. 99% of the stuff I get from Asia both at work and at home is spam.
This isn't news. This is every company. There hasn't been one place that I've worked at that didn't have a group of people that the others picked on. If there aren't any contractors, then it would be the mailroom dorks or something similar. A group of people will always find another group of people to piss on. It's just a microcosm.
This isn't just every company, this is every highschool. Get over it and find some real news to report.
You'll have to excuse me, as I take anything that Larry Ellison says with a metric ton of salt. His success rate for his predictions have been on the far left end of the bell curve. Even a normal everyday person would have more success by now.
Actually, part of the original letter we recieved from the BSA stated that we could not change what software was running on our computers already. They said that could be construed as "destroying evidence". Yes, they had an idea of what software was installed and in what quantity since we were reported by a disgruntled ex-employee.
I'm not a lawyer, and I'm pretty sure that 99%+ of Slashdot isn't either, so any discussion as to the legality and accuracy of that claim is moot.
You wrote that you had all licenses except one for Visio, the bills for them are irrelevant. So, wtf should any sane man pay more than that?
If it was me making the decision, I'd would have told the BSA to go pound sand after showing them our licenses. But it wasn't me making that decision. Obviously, the BSA's strongarm tactics worked on our upper management since I had to dig through years of purchase orders and receipts and we still wound up paying them some princely sum.
It's unbelievable! Next time your company wants to give away money for nothing, send me a mail.
Hindsight is always 20/20, especially when you're not involved, isn't it?
We had the BSA sicced on us by a disgruntled ex-employee. We didn't receive one of those mass mailed letters, we received a bona-fide messenger delivered packet from the BSA, naming specific software titles. Also in the letter was their "gracious" offer to do a self-audit and orders to report the results of the audit to them. Failure to comply with their demands would result in the BSA taking us to court, getting a court order to come in and conduct an audit themselves, with their software and people,and under the eyes of either the State Troopers or US Marshals to make sure that we didn't interfere.
So we did an audit and found out that we were only one copy of a certain software title out of compliance. We sent back the results of our audit, along with copies of our licenses to the BSA, along with an offer to buy the extra license at full retail price. They replied that our licenses and audit results were not good enough, that they also wanted us to produce the receipts for the software.
The receipts. Apparently, having the licenses are not good enough. Or maybe the BSA figured they could strongarm some money out of us, so they leaned a little harder. I had heard that before the BSA sends out these demands, they research the company to see if they have enough cash to make their efforts worthwhile. Having recently completed a series of capital funding, I suppose we looked mighty tempting.
This meant many days of going through three years of financial records. Eventually, we found most of our reciepts and purchase orders, except for a few things from the very beginnings of the company when the records weren't really kept. But we did have the licenses. Of course, the BSA, now really smelling blood, came down with an arbitrary amount to fine us along with a statement that if we did not pay this (ridiculous) sum for basically being one copy out of compliance, they would take us to court and demand far more.
I was never told how much exactly we had to pay the BSA, but I heard it was "not insignificant". It was somewhere in the 5-figure range. All for one copy of Visio, and some tossed receipts from three years ago.
I always argued that the BSA had no right to demand our receipts and financial records since we were able to produce the software licenses. It's a bunch of crap. I can't see how the BSA can legally operate in this country. There is another organization that operates in a similar fashion- it's called the Mafia. Bastards.
Are they saying that two different files can't have the same hash value? That's a load of crap! It's not hard at all to modify data to create any hash value that you want, especially when you're including "deleted space" in the CRC calculations... It's good at telling you if there were any random modifications caused by errors during copying, but not that the files are identical.
It's extremely unlikely to produce two different files that produce the same SHA-1/MD-5 hash, not impossoble. CRC, on the other had is a lot easier. If two files produce the same SHA-1 or MD-5 hash, it is very, very likely that the files are identical.
Some people insist on making isssues out of everything. It's real simple: Google is a privately held company, they can do whatever the hell they want. If Google wants to link only to websites about left-handed redheaded stepchildren who like square dancing, it's Google's perogative and there isn't a whole lot that everyone else can do except bitch and bawl (which it sounds like we have that in spades) or use a different search engine. The sense of entitlement of some people really astounds me.
Case closed.
This isn't going to go very far in court... It's going to go something like this:
Judge: "So Mr. Linux user, you bought a laptop that you knew comes with WindowsXP even through you didn't want it?"
Linux guy: "Yes"
Judge: "Can you buy a laptop that doesn't come with Windows? In fact, can't you buy a laptop that has Linux preinstalled?"
Linux guy: "Yes"
Judge: "So despite having a choice, and not being forced to pick the Windows laptop, you bought it anyway and think you're entitled to a refund?"
Linux guy "YESS!!!"
Judge: "Bailiff, please escort these Birkenstock-wearing geeks out of my courtroom"
I'm wondering how these people plan on enforcing their license? Say Country X uses their software, and callously makes policial dissidents make wallets and watch reruns of MASH all day long (after it got mauldin).
Exactly how do they plan on making Country X stop using their software? Show up on the doorsteps of the palace/king's mansion/capitol building and ask really forcefully to stop? Irony defined, would be those kids thrown into the clink also, to make wallets and watch MASH reruns.
Countries that regularly commit human rights violations usually don't sweat the little stuff like some 16 year old kid not wanting that country to use his software.
I find it interesting that little or no attention to the Common Critera have been paid by Slashdot or its readers until Win2k was EAL4 certified. All of a sudden there is a flurry of activity concerning whether the Common Critera is relevant or any good, or whether Microsoft bought their certificate. How come Linux can't get EAL4 certified, hmmm? With all the effort put into bellyaching about Win2k and the CC, I'm certain that at least one flavor of Linux could have been whipped into shape.
First of all, CC certification was achieved with Service Pack 3 plus Hotfix Q326886, not just SP3. The author's statement is incorrect.
Second, Common Criteria isn't a panacea or a magical certificate saying that Win2k is uber-secure. It is an assurance that it meets a specific level of security and reliability on failure (ie, will STOP instead of going into an insecure mode on a kernel exception).
Its predecessor was called Orange Book, which WinNT scored a C2 rating. That's about as good as you are going to get with an "off the shelf" operating system. A Level 3 really doesn't mean it's better than other OSs, just certified that it will operate in a predictable and reliable fashion, has DACLs and user-based security, etc... Big whoop.
Why Service Pack 3? Gee, it takes a bit of time for certification. IIRC, NT took 2 years to get C2 certified. Remember, this is the government.
By the way, I don't see Linux listed anywhere on the CC list. Check your pots, I think they're talking to your kettles.
Finally, I take exception to the author's use of "propaganda". Is it becoming the thing to call anything propaganda that paints Microsoft as something other than the Evil Empire?
"You're running me on a live system! That's incredibly stupid."
This popped up in a RedHat 7.1 system while trying to get some QLogic HBA adapters to work.
First Psot!!!1!!!!
Despite all the "experts" that Slashdot has on computing, security, software, robotics and just about every other subject under the sun, why for "Bob's" sake would you ask ./ for legal advice?
NT never shipped with one, but it was a feature added in by Service Pack. But since NT4.0 has lived past its lifecycle at MS, they won't support it.
PPTP was available in NT.40 post SP3. No RRAS needed.
Now, a Linux user can "see the source to [his] programming tools," and so is not obliged to rely on included documentation.
Not obliged, but how useful is it? Personally, I don't know C, so being able to view the source code for something really doesn't mean anything to me. Documentation is a standard development process, and it needs to be done and done well. Being able to peer at the source code is no excuse for not documenting properly. I really haven't seen this in many OSS packages yet. OpenSSH, yes. A few others. Most of the other time, it's "Well it works on MY system!" or the obligatory "RTFM|STFW, n00b!" bullshit response.
Neither of those make up for the ability to see the source code.
Moreover, as you point out, there are many sources of documentation for those tools, from HOWTOs to manpages to info pages (of course, with lots of redundant information and not every bit of software is well-documented).
As a Unix friend of mine once said, "manpages suck. they're always wrong". HOWTOs are wildly inaccurate, or written for Redhat 2.45.7x with the mudflaps and cup holder.
The Windows programmer has to rely on whatever documentation MS provides -- because no one else can see the bloody source.
All binaries and programming APIs come from Microsoft?! Egad!
Hey! Let's pretend we're in Bizarro World and we're talking about Linux!
It isn't. Well, not for most people (even Slashdot people). I can't speak for others, but I find it mildly offensive that many people are convinced that Linux is the only way, that with software you get what you pay for,
See how well this works?! This is fun!
Still other people, such as aspiring programmers, often have a tough time doing any real programming in Linux because it's so damn complex and crufty, and some eventually lose interest and leave for a different interest. Some of these people would also benefit greatly from being able to see the source to their programming tools--how they actually work--rather than reading unnavigable gigabytes of manpages, RTFMs, STFWs and HOWTOs documentation to find info on how to work around some obscure bug or "feature" in their tools.
Strange how the same arguments against Windows can be used against Linux too.
PuTTy
OpenSSH
Snort
nmapnt
OpenOffice