I run into a similar problem, it was caused by a catch all address. Trouble is spammers use dictionary attacks and this can generate an insane amount of spam if you use a catch all address. Makes a nice spam honeypot though.
There are a couple of routes in the UK. You finish school at 16. You can either stay on in school and specialise in 3 or 4 academic subjects or take a "vocational" course where you'll learn a single subject such as hairdressing, childcare, secretarial skills, IT, electronics etc. the vocational courses are hands on and tend to teach real life working skills. This second stage via either route lasts two years.
After following either of these routes you can get entry to university, although the academic route is essential for certain courses (ie. law, english, medicine etc.)
Two years studying IT via the vocational route are about as good as two years in university, however you don't get bogged down in as much theory. I took the vocational route and it was a mix of programming, electronics, micro-electronics, maths and general computing. The course was excellent although as you may have only two or three lecturers involved for the whole two years the quality can vary wildly from year to year and college to college.
The vocational route was fine for me. I had a part-time programming job whilst at college after only a year of training and my career is progressing well, helped by the fact that I've four years experience before everyone else taking the university route had even graduated. I have taken the odd open university module at undergraduate and postgrad level in order to build up my CV. The lack of a degree so far has not impeeded my career progression. Others who took the same course seem to be appearing in high places.
Dell images hard drives. If they image everyone's hard drive with this encryption enabled, then every dell machine shipped will use the same encryption keys.
The default is surely going to be OFF and recommended only for laptop users.
Quarantine management is the biggest problem with most anti-spam solutions. My feeling is that mail should be rejected at the MTA or have such a high confidence level that you can leave quarantine management to IT.
My mail path looks something like this:
Greylisting (Postgrey) -> xbl.spamhaus.net (Only rbl I trust enough for a hard block) -> Custom Perl Filter to Spot UK Phishing Attempts -> SpamAssassin (Tags at 13) with ocrtext.pm/RBL+/Mailpolice -> ClamAV -> NOD32 -> Mailbox
SpamAssassin is set at a very high level and any matching messages are redirected to a single central mailbox for review. I also capture copies of any messages scoring between 10 and 13 to check if any are just slipping below the threshold. There have been no false positives in the central mailbox since this system has been running and very rarely does a SPAM make it through on a 10-13.
Every so often to verify performance I'll capture a days e-mail and manually check for SPAM, usually it's only one or two pieces of SPAM making it through in about 8,000 non-spam mails and these are almost always nigerian fraud rather than your typical SPAMs. That puts accepted SPAM at 0.025%. The key to this success is Greylisting at the first stage.
As posted in a previous message in this thread, greylisting gets rids of all the viruses too. ClamAV and NOD-32 have virtually no work at all. They catch only 1 or 2 virus infected messages a month.
From my users perspective they have no quarantine to mess around with and need not know anything about the anti-spam/anti-virus system. Theres no attachment blocking / quarantine either, thanks to the strengths of greylisting/clamav/nod32.
A good greylisting engine will have an auto-whitelist feature. So only the first few messages per domain will experience the delay and this typically is only a few minutes depending on your greylisting settings. If things do seem to be getting stuck and it is an important message, having the sender re-send the message usually does the trick.
Even if you discount spam, greylisting as an anti-virus method should not be underestimated. In the past 7 days, I've had NO viruses picked up by ClamAV or NOD32 on my mail-relays. Prior to enabling greylisting, it would have been in the 100K messages range. That's all zero-day protection too.
Greylisting for anti-spam is not as effective as it was. However it's still a worthwhile measure and goes largely unnoticed by the majority of my e-mail users.
Corporate market is waiting for Vista. I would expect to start seeing big upgrade programs once it's released. At the moment hardware from a few years back is doing the job.
Dell do seem to struggle with Retail support, it's understandable though. With business support particularly with the larger companies they are talking to in-house IT who usually know what they are doing. The faffing around with first-line support can usually be skipped.
Of course the other factor that might be going against Dell is the move in some organisations towards thin-client computing. About a third of our users are now using WySE / ChipPC / Thinstation thin-clients and there is no longer the need to keep the desktops up to date, if we do replace it'll be with a thin-client terminal and not a Dell box. So Dell have lost a third of their PC sales to us. Of course we still buy servers to support these clients and may well buy the thin-clients through dell.
This must be a tough time though, the likes of Viruozzo / VMWARE could easily start eating in to their server sales too, particularly with their really big customers in the web dedicated hosting business.
Most of Dells business is corporate. We are not a particularly large organisation but we spend close to $400K a year with Dell. Our main concerns are that the kit is reliable, cheap, hardware platform is relatively stable and support is good. Dell gives us all these things, the chip and technologies used are way down the list of our concerns.
The likely reason for slowed growth is that PCs are lasting longer. We have 5 year old PCs that are still very usable, step back a few years and the upgrade cycles were faster as the tech moved along. Things have been static for a while now, anything over 800Mhz is good enough for most modern applications and a fair amount of games.
Perhaps the real reason for the slow down is the Vista delay. There is no external push from Microsoft to force people through a refresh to get the latest toys.
While in any other circumstances I would completely agree with you, but it's a bit short sited if you are studying computer science. You really should be making an effort to understand more about different operating systems and computer systems and learn how to install, configure and use these systems.
Learning to read and understand technical documentation and debug technical problems are the most important things can learn during your computer science degree. Experimenting with a Linux box will give you those skills in droves.
Most malware adds microsoft update and most common anti-virus and security sites into the hosts file to prevent updates from succeeding. This prevents the malware from being spotted by update virus signatures as they will be eternally frozen at the point the hosts file was messed up.
It's not a bad thing, but I do wonder why they don't just disable hosts file completely unless it's specifically required, particularly for the home editions.
No spell checker / thesaurus, no styles, no page breaks, no context menus, no word count, indexes, contents. Even find / replace seems disabled. Whilst MS Word does have some exotic features, this doesn't seem to even compare to Wordpad.
Why couldn't they build on something like FCKEditor, which leaves this in the dust.
Your front end combined with the Agent from http://ocsinventory.sourceforge.net/ would be a very nice combination. OCSInventory have a wonderful lightweight agent suitable for inclusion in logon scripts and versions Linux, makes a reasonable job of helping track down non-windows, non-redhat machines.
The only trouble with it is the web interface is a bit french.
I think we've seen more downtime due to complications and problems with the high availability stuff than we did running without it.
Very little of our downtime is due to hardware or network failures, most of it is operator error, when you combine operator error with a load balancing arrangement or a SAN then you can wave bye bye to half your services. A least a single screw up on a single server only harms one system.
A misplaced shutdown command can generate a lot of work.
This whole thread is pointless anyway, the 10% figure was pulled out of someone's arse. I suspect the performance gain is 1% or less, most applications are disk or network bound rather than CPU these days so code optimisations are pointless.
A 10% CPU speed gain would give you 2.7Ghz performance on a 2.4Ghz CPU. Unless you are running a big number crunching cluster then this isn't going to mean a great deal. If you are running a big maths app then the chances are you are compiling your own code from source with all the optimisations you could get anyway.
XAMPP and other similar projects make it really easy to install all that stuff under windows. It's easier in some respects to install XAMPP under windows than it is for Linux, particulary for someone with out any Linux experience.
"The distribution for Windows 98, NT, 2000 and XP. This version contains: Apache, MySQL, PHP + PEAR, Perl, mod_php, mod_perl, mod_ssl, OpenSSL, phpMyAdmin, Webalizer, Mercury Mail Transport System for Win32 and NetWare Systems v3.32, JpGraph, FileZilla FTP Server, mcrypt, eAccelerator, SQLite, and WEB-DAV + mod_auth_mysql. "
If all the programming talent for a complex project is bought then a project could be in big trouble.
Look how long it took Mozilla to find it's feet after being opened. Same sort of problems exist for a fork, particularly if all the key developers are employed and restricted by employment contracts from making any more public contributions.
Most of the candidates for an open-source buy out are those that have kept close tabs on the source code for the project, keeping it untainted by community contributions to maintain a commercial release. In doing so they tend to keep the community contributors away and thus there won't be any outsiders with intimate knowledge of the codebase.
The same sort of problems happen with closed source too, look at what happened to Borland after Anders got poached by Microsoft.
Nokia PC Suite is pretty good and comparable to activesync. You can sync and backup your contacts / calendar / whole phone and it's all synced with outlook.
I have a few portable devices Nokia Phone, Orange M2000 (PDA with GPRS) and a Dell Axim.
I _always_ have the phone with me, whereas the other bulky items might be left at home or the office. The major problem as I see it with Smart Phones is that the battery life isn't good enough, particularly if you start using data services.
My phone is always charged through use of a car kit. The GPRS PDA battery will go flat in a few hours of data use, leaving me with no phone.
There are disadvantages / advantages to each of these products, but I won't be giving up the Cell Phone any time soon. All devices are synced so it doesn't really matter which I take with me.
Tomcat, Postgresql, Apache, Gimp etc. all run very nicely under windows, add Cygwin for anything else missing.
It seems obvious that Linux can never beat windows for applications if the "linux" apps can also run on the windows platform. Which of course they can as the source is open and can be ported easily enough.
Postgresql on windows seems very polished and is comparable in interface and usage to SQL Server.
Well actually it's more likely to be congestion at the ISP or poorly performing web servers than the local fiber. Many web servers are on 10Mbit or lower throttled connections or are incapable of sustaining good file transfer speeds.
I'm on a good quality 100Mbit internet connection and I rarely see download speeds over 2 Megabytes a second. A typical download is usually 200-400Kbytes/sec
MySQL development is the result of a _handful_ of clued up people, if you lose those key developers they are not easily replaced. The same is true for most technically challenging OSS projects. It's worth remembering that MySQL doesn't really accept too much community GPL input in order to protect their commercial dual licensing arrangements, so there is not already the committed developer base ready to take over the project. It's quite probable that the project would stall terminally if MySQL were somehow sabotaged by Oracle.
Personally I don't quite see Oracle being too interested in destroying MySQL. MySQL has a knack for giving users without a great deal of database experience an easy introduction into SQL. Every person who learns their way around MySQL is a potential Oracle customer, they won't want to interfere with that. If a customer goes with MySQL for free, it's better for them than the customer going the other way and putting money in Microsofts pocket for SQL Server.
The real benefit that MySQL has that Oracle would somehow want to leverage is that MySQL is a standard feature with any web host. Windows based web hosting is gaining in popularity but can't match MySQL for this marketshare.
Even the least technically aware people are starting to realise what phishing is and the forms the scams take and are developing a healthy sceptisim of anything that arrives through e-mail. You only have to see a few scams for it to begin to register with people that e-mails may not be genuine no matter how convicing they look, thankfully the time taken to reach the current sophistication level has resulted in users having time to become aware of the frauds.
The nigerian scams have been well covered, receiving e-bay e-mail notifications when you don't even have an ebay account and banking security notices from a bank you don't even bank with have all raised awareness of the problem. The scams may now be of much higher quality but users are very skeptical. Most non-technical users have always been very wary of online banking and shopping.
This is forward thinking, in a few years time the PC is likely to be at the centre of the living room with TV downloaded over broadband.. I'm not suggesting that everyone will have this setup, just that a population segment will receive "TV" in this way and will not own a traditional television set and that they should still contribute.
If the BBC open up their programming for watch again internet downloads and live streaming, the last thing that they want for providing this service is a reduction in license fees. If internet based TV is going to take off it really needs the support of the BBC as they are the only organisation within the UK to make internet TV a possibility (and hopefully in the process give Sky something to worry about)
We have 100 servers, each of them has very low load. The reason we have seperate servers is to reduce management overhead (ie. one app one server), it's easier to rebuild and manage if there are not a load of different services all running on a single box, it's also harder to upgrade, restore and test if servers run too many services. In many cases outside contractors are involved with the maintenance and upgrades of individual applications, on a shared server they are likely to blame the other services leaving us in an awkward situation.
Of course having 100 servers to manage and upgrade brings it's own problems and this is where virutalisation has a niche.
VMWare claim for each CORE they can handle approx 8 virtual servers, in a production environment for reasonably loaded servers lets take this down to 4. With a dual-proc quad core machine we could comfortably host 32 virtual machines assuming that we can afford the RAM to host all this and that we have fast SAN storage. We could potentially reduce our server footprint from 100 down to 5 or 6 servers (including a few for resiliance) with this sort of technology available.
Also don't underestimate the benefits of a consistant hardware platform, snapshots, KVM, Power Cycling and imaging. That is something that VMWare can give everyone even if they host a single virtual machine per host.
Slashdot Mirror
I run into a similar problem, it was caused by a catch all address. Trouble is spammers use dictionary attacks and this can generate an insane amount of spam if you use a catch all address. Makes a nice spam honeypot though.
Jason
There are a couple of routes in the UK. You finish school at 16. You can either stay on in school and specialise in 3 or 4 academic subjects or take a "vocational" course where you'll learn a single subject such as hairdressing, childcare, secretarial skills, IT, electronics etc. the vocational courses are hands on and tend to teach real life working skills. This second stage via either route lasts two years.
After following either of these routes you can get entry to university, although the academic route is essential for certain courses (ie. law, english, medicine etc.)
Two years studying IT via the vocational route are about as good as two years in university, however you don't get bogged down in as much theory. I took the vocational route and it was a mix of programming, electronics, micro-electronics, maths and general computing. The course was excellent although as you may have only two or three lecturers involved for the whole two years the quality can vary wildly from year to year and college to college.
The vocational route was fine for me. I had a part-time programming job whilst at college after only a year of training and my career is progressing well, helped by the fact that I've four years experience before everyone else taking the university route had even graduated. I have taken the odd open university module at undergraduate and postgrad level in order to build up my CV. The lack of a degree so far has not impeeded my career progression. Others who took the same course seem to be appearing in high places.
Jason
Of course it won't be default.
Dell images hard drives. If they image everyone's hard drive with this encryption enabled, then every dell machine shipped will use the same encryption keys.
The default is surely going to be OFF and recommended only for laptop users.
Jason.
Quarantine management is the biggest problem with most anti-spam solutions. My feeling is that mail should be rejected at the MTA or have such a high confidence level that you can leave quarantine management to IT.
My mail path looks something like this:
Greylisting (Postgrey) -> xbl.spamhaus.net (Only rbl I trust enough for a hard block) -> Custom Perl Filter to Spot UK Phishing Attempts -> SpamAssassin (Tags at 13) with ocrtext.pm/RBL+/Mailpolice -> ClamAV -> NOD32 -> Mailbox
SpamAssassin is set at a very high level and any matching messages are redirected to a single central mailbox for review. I also capture copies of any messages scoring between 10 and 13 to check if any are just slipping below the threshold. There have been no false positives in the central mailbox since this system has been running and very rarely does a SPAM make it through on a 10-13.
Every so often to verify performance I'll capture a days e-mail and manually check for SPAM, usually it's only one or two pieces of SPAM making it through in about 8,000 non-spam mails and these are almost always nigerian fraud rather than your typical SPAMs. That puts accepted SPAM at 0.025%. The key to this success is Greylisting at the first stage.
As posted in a previous message in this thread, greylisting gets rids of all the viruses too. ClamAV and NOD-32 have virtually no work at all. They catch only 1 or 2 virus infected messages a month.
From my users perspective they have no quarantine to mess around with and need not know anything about the anti-spam/anti-virus system. Theres no attachment blocking / quarantine either, thanks to the strengths of greylisting/clamav/nod32.
Jason.
A good greylisting engine will have an auto-whitelist feature. So only the first few messages per domain will experience the delay and this typically is only a few minutes depending on your greylisting settings. If things do seem to be getting stuck and it is an important message, having the sender re-send the message usually does the trick.
Even if you discount spam, greylisting as an anti-virus method should not be underestimated. In the past 7 days, I've had NO viruses picked up by ClamAV or NOD32 on my mail-relays. Prior to enabling greylisting, it would have been in the 100K messages range. That's all zero-day protection too.
Greylisting for anti-spam is not as effective as it was. However it's still a worthwhile measure and goes largely unnoticed by the majority of my e-mail users.
Corporate market is waiting for Vista. I would expect to start seeing big upgrade programs once it's released. At the moment hardware from a few years back is doing the job.
Dell do seem to struggle with Retail support, it's understandable though. With business support particularly with the larger companies they are talking to in-house IT who usually know what they are doing. The faffing around with first-line support can usually be skipped.
Of course the other factor that might be going against Dell is the move in some organisations towards thin-client computing. About a third of our users are now using WySE / ChipPC / Thinstation thin-clients and there is no longer the need to keep the desktops up to date, if we do replace it'll be with a thin-client terminal and not a Dell box. So Dell have lost a third of their PC sales to us. Of course we still buy servers to support these clients and may well buy the thin-clients through dell.
This must be a tough time though, the likes of Viruozzo / VMWARE could easily start eating in to their server sales too, particularly with their really big customers in the web dedicated hosting business.
Jason.
Most of Dells business is corporate. We are not a particularly large organisation but we spend close to $400K a year with Dell. Our main concerns are that the kit is reliable, cheap, hardware platform is relatively stable and support is good. Dell gives us all these things, the chip and technologies used are way down the list of our concerns.
The likely reason for slowed growth is that PCs are lasting longer. We have 5 year old PCs that are still very usable, step back a few years and the upgrade cycles were faster as the tech moved along. Things have been static for a while now, anything over 800Mhz is good enough for most modern applications and a fair amount of games.
Perhaps the real reason for the slow down is the Vista delay. There is no external push from Microsoft to force people through a refresh to get the latest toys.
Jason.
While in any other circumstances I would completely agree with you, but it's a bit short sited if you are studying computer science. You really should be making an effort to understand more about different operating systems and computer systems and learn how to install, configure and use these systems.
Learning to read and understand technical documentation and debug technical problems are the most important things can learn during your computer science degree. Experimenting with a Linux box will give you those skills in droves.
Jason
Most malware adds microsoft update and most common anti-virus and security sites into the hosts file to prevent updates from succeeding. This prevents the malware from being spotted by update virus signatures as they will be eternally frozen at the point the hosts file was messed up.
It's not a bad thing, but I do wonder why they don't just disable hosts file completely unless it's specifically required, particularly for the home editions.
Jason
No spell checker / thesaurus, no styles, no page breaks, no context menus, no word count, indexes, contents. Even find / replace seems disabled. Whilst MS Word does have some exotic features, this doesn't seem to even compare to Wordpad.
Why couldn't they build on something like FCKEditor, which leaves this in the dust.
Jason.
Your front end combined with the Agent from http://ocsinventory.sourceforge.net/ would be a very nice combination. OCSInventory have a wonderful lightweight agent suitable for inclusion in logon scripts and versions Linux, makes a reasonable job of helping track down non-windows, non-redhat machines.
The only trouble with it is the web interface is a bit french.
Nice job though, I'll take a good look.
Jason
I think we've seen more downtime due to complications and problems with the high availability stuff than we did running without it.
Very little of our downtime is due to hardware or network failures, most of it is operator error, when you combine operator error with a load balancing arrangement or a SAN then you can wave bye bye to half your services. A least a single screw up on a single server only harms one system.
A misplaced shutdown command can generate a lot of work.
Jason.
This whole thread is pointless anyway, the 10% figure was pulled out of someone's arse. I suspect the performance gain is 1% or less, most applications are disk or network bound rather than CPU these days so code optimisations are pointless.
A 10% CPU speed gain would give you 2.7Ghz performance on a 2.4Ghz CPU. Unless you are running a big number crunching cluster then this isn't going to mean a great deal. If you are running a big maths app then the chances are you are compiling your own code from source with all the optimisations you could get anyway.
Jason
XAMPP and other similar projects make it really easy to install all that stuff under windows. It's easier in some respects to install XAMPP under windows than it is for Linux, particulary for someone with out any Linux experience.
"The distribution for Windows 98, NT, 2000 and XP. This version contains: Apache, MySQL, PHP + PEAR, Perl, mod_php, mod_perl, mod_ssl, OpenSSL, phpMyAdmin, Webalizer, Mercury Mail Transport System for Win32 and NetWare Systems v3.32, JpGraph, FileZilla FTP Server, mcrypt, eAccelerator, SQLite, and WEB-DAV + mod_auth_mysql. "
Jason
If all the programming talent for a complex project is bought then a project could be in big trouble.
Look how long it took Mozilla to find it's feet after being opened. Same sort of problems exist for a fork, particularly if all the key developers are employed and restricted by employment contracts from making any more public contributions.
Most of the candidates for an open-source buy out are those that have kept close tabs on the source code for the project, keeping it untainted by community contributions to maintain a commercial release. In doing so they tend to keep the community contributors away and thus there won't be any outsiders with intimate knowledge of the codebase.
The same sort of problems happen with closed source too, look at what happened to Borland after Anders got poached by Microsoft.
Jason.
If it wants updating to include americans we could try:
Heaven:
French Chefs
German Engineers
British Bobbies
American Lawyers
Hell:
British Chefs
French Engineers
German Police
American Lawyers
I think it works.
Thats supposed to be:
Heaven:
French Chefs
German Engineers
British Bobbies
Hell:
British Chefs
French Engineers
German Police
Nokia PC Suite is pretty good and comparable to activesync. You can sync and backup your contacts / calendar / whole phone and it's all synced with outlook.
I have a few portable devices Nokia Phone, Orange M2000 (PDA with GPRS) and a Dell Axim.
I _always_ have the phone with me, whereas the other bulky items might be left at home or the office. The major problem as I see it with Smart Phones is that the battery life isn't good enough, particularly if you start using data services.
My phone is always charged through use of a car kit. The GPRS PDA battery will go flat in a few hours of data use, leaving me with no phone.
There are disadvantages / advantages to each of these products, but I won't be giving up the Cell Phone any time soon. All devices are synced so it doesn't really matter which I take with me.
Jason
Tomcat, Postgresql, Apache, Gimp etc. all run very nicely under windows, add Cygwin for anything else missing.
It seems obvious that Linux can never beat windows for applications if the "linux" apps can also run on the windows platform. Which of course they can as the source is open and can be ported easily enough.
Postgresql on windows seems very polished and is comparable in interface and usage to SQL Server.
Jason.
Well if you get a virus that Symantec can't detect (because updates are so slow), it'll remove Symantec for you.
It's really not that hard.
Jason
Well actually it's more likely to be congestion at the ISP or poorly performing web servers than the local fiber. Many web servers are on 10Mbit or lower throttled connections or are incapable of sustaining good file transfer speeds.
I'm on a good quality 100Mbit internet connection and I rarely see download speeds over 2 Megabytes a second. A typical download is usually 200-400Kbytes/sec
Jason.
MySQL development is the result of a _handful_ of clued up people, if you lose those key developers they are not easily replaced. The same is true for most technically challenging OSS projects. It's worth remembering that MySQL doesn't really accept too much community GPL input in order to protect their commercial dual licensing arrangements, so there is not already the committed developer base ready to take over the project. It's quite probable that the project would stall terminally if MySQL were somehow sabotaged by Oracle.
Personally I don't quite see Oracle being too interested in destroying MySQL. MySQL has a knack for giving users without a great deal of database experience an easy introduction into SQL. Every person who learns their way around MySQL is a potential Oracle customer, they won't want to interfere with that. If a customer goes with MySQL for free, it's better for them than the customer going the other way and putting money in Microsofts pocket for SQL Server.
The real benefit that MySQL has that Oracle would somehow want to leverage is that MySQL is a standard feature with any web host. Windows based web hosting is gaining in popularity but can't match MySQL for this marketshare.
Jason.
Even the least technically aware people are starting to realise what phishing is and the forms the scams take and are developing a healthy sceptisim of anything that arrives through e-mail. You only have to see a few scams for it to begin to register with people that e-mails may not be genuine no matter how convicing they look, thankfully the time taken to reach the current sophistication level has resulted in users having time to become aware of the frauds.
The nigerian scams have been well covered, receiving e-bay e-mail notifications when you don't even have an ebay account and banking security notices from a bank you don't even bank with have all raised awareness of the problem. The scams may now be of much higher quality but users are very skeptical. Most non-technical users have always been very wary of online banking and shopping.
I think sometimes we underestimate our users.
Jason
This is forward thinking, in a few years time the PC is likely to be at the centre of the living room with TV downloaded over broadband.. I'm not suggesting that everyone will have this setup, just that a population segment will receive "TV" in this way and will not own a traditional television set and that they should still contribute.
If the BBC open up their programming for watch again internet downloads and live streaming, the last thing that they want for providing this service is a reduction in license fees. If internet based TV is going to take off it really needs the support of the BBC as they are the only organisation within the UK to make internet TV a possibility (and hopefully in the process give Sky something to worry about)
Jason
We have 100 servers, each of them has very low load. The reason we have seperate servers is to reduce management overhead (ie. one app one server), it's easier to rebuild and manage if there are not a load of different services all running on a single box, it's also harder to upgrade, restore and test if servers run too many services. In many cases outside contractors are involved with the maintenance and upgrades of individual applications, on a shared server they are likely to blame the other services leaving us in an awkward situation.
Of course having 100 servers to manage and upgrade brings it's own problems and this is where virutalisation has a niche.
VMWare claim for each CORE they can handle approx 8 virtual servers, in a production environment for reasonably loaded servers lets take this down to 4. With a dual-proc quad core machine we could comfortably host 32 virtual machines assuming that we can afford the RAM to host all this and that we have fast SAN storage. We could potentially reduce our server footprint from 100 down to 5 or 6 servers (including a few for resiliance) with this sort of technology available.
Also don't underestimate the benefits of a consistant hardware platform, snapshots, KVM, Power Cycling and imaging. That is something that VMWare can give everyone even if they host a single virtual machine per host.
Jason.