USENIX has put together an extremely effective guide for hiring sys-admins. Check out http://www.usenix.org and look under the SAGE section. Yes you're gonna have to buy a book but you'll get over it.
Is it just me or does the new SGI and the new HP i2000 look eerily similar? The only difference in appearance is that the HP has a little colored patch near the lights. Is SGI building HPs machines? Hmmmmmmm
This is a method that is public knowledge and has been for some time. Mudge discussed this as a "web security" technique at blackhat back in '98. Heck, CNN was there and broadcasted pieces of that particular panel. Since he released it into the public domain by open discussion at a national conference, I do believe that voids the patent on the basis of a widely known public method. Of course, I'm not a lawyer even though I don't play one on TV.
Once upon a time I was a consultant and had to discuss this issue all the time. Before we give you a counter argument, let's deal with what they are usually _really_ asking for:
-A single address list (OpenLDAP anyone?)
-Consistent look and feel to messages (Make everyone use the same format.)
-Ability to directly use rich content in messages (See above. Pine users will probably take a beating on this one though. Sorry.)
-Group scheduling (There's freeware that can do this. If the company is anti-open source, use the iPlanet calendar. If you use an HTML based scheduler, you can tell them how you're aligning the company for e-biz through the Extranet/Internet/insert buzzword of day here.)
I'm going to venture out on a limb and say that they are probably pro M$ techies or on the business side. If they are on the biz side, they only know what they've experienced and/or heard. M$ eXchange is commonly credited with providing all of that functionality. Now on to the points that you can use to counter this force:
- Cost. I wouldn't make the typical free software
argument at all. Avoid it with PHBs, it's a black hole. Rather I'd talk about the increased administrative costs, the poor ROI on software that gobbles up resources and the cost of outages.
- Reliability. I've been forced to live in several environments where exchange was implemented. Even in the best of them, the mail servers went down on average twice a week. Sendmail in a HA config is great since you can migrate the storage and keep on trucking. Let's not forget the ease of adding upstream MX spoolers in the event of a link problem. Ever use exchange
as a spooler? Ick.
-Complexity. Depending on how much mail your typical user gets/sends/processes, the amount of storage and processing requirements vary wildly for exchange. Odd are you'll have more than two servers (I'm guessing five.) Shared storage and data volumes? Good luck implementing this under NT 4/Exchange 5.5; remember that exchange sticks every message in a database which makes it a major PITA to even consider shared volumes.
-Productivity. It costs time to use outlook. Outlook is slow and difficult to use in comparison to netscape mail or even outlook express. They'll go for the directory argument so be prepared to bring up LDAP.
The folks over at secure computing http://www.securecomputing.com are under contract to develop a "secure" version of Linux for government use. The boys in Ft. Meade are funding this effort, so it's pretty safe to assume that it will have to meet the common criteria. The big question is whether or not the results will be GPL'ed.
I was at best buy yesterday and they had an iPaq to demo. The bugger just isn't that heavy with the expansion pack on it. I don't think you'd need the microdrive since you could just mount what you need via nfs and big apps remotely.
Handhelds.org shows that there is support for 802.11 under Linux. If Best Buy had one available to sell me, I'd probably be trying this right now.
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USENIX has put together an extremely effective guide for hiring sys-admins. Check out http://www.usenix.org and look under the SAGE section. Yes you're gonna have to buy a book but you'll get over it.
Is it just me or does the new SGI and the new HP i2000 look eerily similar? The only difference in appearance is that the HP has a little colored patch near the lights. Is SGI building HPs machines? Hmmmmmmm
This is a method that is public knowledge and has been for some time. Mudge discussed this as a "web security" technique at blackhat back in '98. Heck, CNN was there and broadcasted pieces of that particular panel. Since he released it into the public domain by open discussion at a national conference, I do believe that voids the patent on the basis of a widely known public method. Of course, I'm not a lawyer even though I don't play one on TV.
Once upon a time I was a consultant and had to discuss this issue all the time. Before we give you a counter argument, let's deal with what they are usually _really_ asking for:
-A single address list (OpenLDAP anyone?)
-Consistent look and feel to messages (Make everyone use the same format.)
-Ability to directly use rich content in messages (See above. Pine users will probably take a beating on this one though. Sorry.)
-Group scheduling (There's freeware that can do this. If the company is anti-open source, use the iPlanet calendar. If you use an HTML based scheduler, you can tell them how you're aligning the company for e-biz through the Extranet/Internet/insert buzzword of day here.)
I'm going to venture out on a limb and say that they are probably pro M$ techies or on the business side. If they are on the biz side, they only know what they've experienced and/or heard. M$ eXchange is commonly credited with providing all of that functionality. Now on to the points that you can use to counter this force:
- Cost. I wouldn't make the typical free software
argument at all. Avoid it with PHBs, it's a black hole. Rather I'd talk about the increased administrative costs, the poor ROI on software that gobbles up resources and the cost of outages.
- Reliability. I've been forced to live in several environments where exchange was implemented. Even in the best of them, the mail servers went down on average twice a week. Sendmail in a HA config is great since you can migrate the storage and keep on trucking. Let's not forget the ease of adding upstream MX spoolers in the event of a link problem. Ever use exchange
as a spooler? Ick.
-Complexity. Depending on how much mail your typical user gets/sends/processes, the amount of storage and processing requirements vary wildly for exchange. Odd are you'll have more than two servers (I'm guessing five.) Shared storage and data volumes? Good luck implementing this under NT 4/Exchange 5.5; remember that exchange sticks every message in a database which makes it a major PITA to even consider shared volumes.
-Productivity. It costs time to use outlook. Outlook is slow and difficult to use in comparison to netscape mail or even outlook express. They'll go for the directory argument so be prepared to bring up LDAP.
I hope this helps you out.
The folks over at secure computing http://www.securecomputing.com are under contract to develop a "secure" version of Linux for government use. The boys in Ft. Meade are funding this effort, so it's pretty safe to assume that it will have to meet the common criteria. The big question is whether or not the results will be GPL'ed.
I was at best buy yesterday and they had an iPaq to demo. The bugger just isn't that heavy with the expansion pack on it. I don't think you'd need the microdrive since you could just mount what you need via nfs and big apps remotely.
Handhelds.org shows that there is support for 802.11 under Linux. If Best Buy had one available to sell me, I'd probably be trying this right now.
Come on Compaq, start cranking these out.
Lighthouse designs released a toolkit for Solaris a few years ago that lets you NeXT-ize your Sun box. It's out in the open now at:
o ns
ftp://ftp.peanuts.org/pub/OpenStep/implementati
or something like that.
Cheers,
m