Over the past few years, I've had the opportunity to interview quite a few folks for the position of network and system administrators.
Let me tell you, there really are not that many good ones out there.
In my own personal experience, I'd say that 1 in 20 are worth the space that they occupy. One in 100 would fall into what I would classify as a true senior level admin. The rest of them are just an accident waiting to happen. All of them go around trying to sell themselves as 'senior unix | network system administrators'
The problem is that many of these places setup the firewall and block everything. all ICMP packets included. they dont take the time to learn what they should block and what the consequences are. they just block everything. Then when something does not work, they open things up till it does. For a good time, check out the firewall config of an admin who setup an exchange server that sits behind a firewall. Chances are they had no clue what the 'established' keyword was and just allowed ports 1024 through 64k. (in the cases where their firewall did not automatically recognize that exchange works in a fashion similar to rpc)
The really sad thing is that most of these admins pull 60-80K/yr (in the us) and think that they know everything. Ah, the ignorance of youth (even the 40+ year old ones who still dont have a clue). You see, the more you know, the more you know that you dont know everything.
The hard part for me is that with all of the gui's now dominating the server market, the level of knowledge required to get a system up and running is getting lower and lower. A trained monkey can install NT and most of the linux based distros out there nowadays. And as soon as they can do that, they add 'system admin' to their resume and try and go for the big bucks. And they can play that game till something serious comes up and they discover what vi is and then they discover that they have no idea of what single user mode is or how fsck works. At that point the game is over and the company that they work for discovers that they didnt hire a senior level admin, they hired a trained monkey.
So yes, you are screwed. If your ISP is nice, you can send them an email telling them to discard any emails that they get of 'attacks' from your ftp servers. If it goes to the right network admin (one of the 100) then you can probably sit back, smile and respond with an automatic 'hey stupid, please read rfc bla, bla and bla and then write back when you get a clue as to how ftp works and what your firewall is doing.'
In the mean time, all we can do is hope that companies start to find some way to tell when an admin really knows their shit and when they just know how to walk through the mandrake gui install.
Anybody can get a print of a Picasso and put it on their wall. Ok, now how many folks have the original on their wall? ok, thought so.
Fine art is hard to physically get ones hands on. This rarity makes it valuable. Now, if folks can store your art work on a floppy and make a million copies, what is an individual copy worth? Its not like the original has any value since one can never prove that it is the original. Is there even an original?
Photographs are the same way. One can make as many copies as they wish with the original negatives. However, through access to the original negatives one can increase the value of any of the copies.
So, I suggest that you do the following (similar to a suggestion by another poster who said to go and get a printer):
Get a good slide printer and then go make enlargements of the resulting film. These prints (numbered and signed) have value. Only by controlling the number of original prints made can you control the value and thus the determination in the future of your works 'value' as art vs 'fine art'.
In keeping with the usual slashdot tradition of going with an unrealistic system price, yeah, the Sunblade for $995 does not get you much.
A more realistic setup would be as follows:
Sunblade 100 w/ 256MB: $1,450
21" monitor with adapter: $1295
Keyboard: $45 (I remember when these were free)
Forte C++ Personal Edition 6 (1 RTU): $1,995
Total: $4,785 (One can expect at least a 10% discount)
The main benifit is that this system is binary compatable with a SunFire 6800 (24 cpu's and 192gigs of ram at a cost of a million+ bucks)
It also helps with the previous argument that it cost too much to get started with sun equipment. I recently priced out a small dev system (web, app and db systems) and the Sun solution came out to $9,400. An identically configured dell system came out to $9,400. The kicker is that I can expect a 10% discount on the sun systems and no discount on the dell systems. Ok, so much for price being an argument against sun. (I still like the fact that I can put a console server on the serial port and do anything to the server, including os installs, from anywhere in the world.)
Sorry, but I would not count the UltraSPARC out just yet. Of all of the 64 bit chips out on the market today, it is the only one that a) has a large installed base and b) has not had an EOL statement. (yeah, we got ibm and the ppc and sgi with the mips, but sgi is just about dead and ibm keeps hinting that they are going to intel)
Intel's chip may be nice, but what runs on it? What compilers actually produce code that is as optimized as intel hopes? (and without a good compiler, the chip is toast)
Its just as expensive as the UltraSPARC (and in many cases more expensive) and it has nowhere near that app support. Ok, so you have a linux distro. That is great. Now tell me, will you put a bet the business database on linux? Didnt think so. Would you do the same with a Sun box running oracle? you bet. Lets face it folks, when a 10 minutes of downtime cost more than the hardware, one does not cut corners. Sun can get away with charging half a mil for a 6800 because their clients know that in the grand scheme of things, that is pocket change. Intel knows this and thus they want to get into the large server market where the markups are so high.
The majority of apps out there do not need the memory that a 64 bit address space can get them. I dont know of many web servers that have more than a gig of ram in them, do you? In fact, in the past year, I've been deploying banks of small systems (like the Sun T1's) instead of large systems. The only time I throw more than 4 gigs of ram into a system is if it is running oracle or some other memory hungry app. ok, new slashdot poll: what is the most ram that you have put into a server recently? 512? 1024?. ok, enough said. The largest box that i've ever setup was a sun 5500 with 12 cpu's and 12 gigs, and that was 3 years ago. I just have not had much of a need for systems with more than 1Gig recently with a few exceptions.
The main reason for going with a 64 bit chip is to simplify your line of supported systems. You can give a developer a SunBlade 100 ($995) and have them write apps for your E10K ($2+Mil).
Also, it is not just the chip folks. When I look to get a sun box, I dont care about how fast the cpu is. I care about the I/O to the disks, memory and other cpu's. It does me no good to have a 1GHz cpu that sits there waiting for a cache miss. CPU speed is nice if you have an app that is very parallel and can fit into L2 cache (SETI, des cracking, etc). It is useless if you are trying to run a database and you just need lots of ram and I/O. I still purchase 9 gig disks for my disk arrays even though I can get 73 gig drives. Why? simple: I need speed as much as I need space and cost is not a big issue for many large systems. (remember: cost, performance, reliability. Pick one, balance 2, you will never get all 3)
Anyway, I see the market starting to consolidate. Sun has the mid to high end systems. (they have it, but if they slack off, they will loose it). Linux, and the *BSD's will have the low end where cost is important. (Not that sun charges for their OS anymore, but they make better use of the low end intel hardware). The linux and *BSD's dont have a chance at the high end till intel can produce a cpu, supporting chipset and backplane that can compete with sun and be cost competative(something that they have never done. IBM and SGI have, but not intel).
when i was a kid, we didn't have cd's to load our os's from. we had to toggle the instructions in by hand on the front of the system t give the thing enough smarts to talk to the paper tape drive which then loaded the code to talk to the tape system.....
we didn't have no fancy gui's. We had punch cards, and we liked it. Back in the good days, you actually had to know what you were doing in order to program the machine. We didn't have no "high level" languages like C. And we liked it that way, it kept the wimps off of our systems.
You should be happy that you only have to drive 2 hours to get to a store. When i was a kid, I had to walk.
I got zip's, I got jaz, I got compact flash, I got CD-R and CD-RW... the last thing that I need is yet another way of storing all of my "research papers" on yet another format that may or may not be around for more than a year or two...
then again, one can store a lot of "research" on a 20 gig disk:)
All for the low, low price of $75 month, but only $50/month during the introductory period!
Ok, so for less than the cost of a cheap dsl line, a company that wants access can get it...
Somehow these prices do not look like they are intended to only service large companies and corporate offices (otherwise the cost would be in the thousands of dollars per month like many other electronic legal resources)
If this ever goes to court, it will be a good test of the DMCA.
Unlike previous cases (DeCSS, etc, etc) that were electronic publications, this one is a paper based publication. The court has no problems with understanding things that are on paper (compared to anything electronic) and thus their academic publication will most likely enjoy the full protection of the law. That and I'm sure that there is a long history of corporations trying to stop the publication of formal academic papers (from what I've seen, the academic's usually win)
When coupled with the fact that the SDMI folks presented a formal and public challenge to break their system, I'm sure that whatever protection that they though the dcma would have provided them will be thrown out the window.
Want to crack des? use the pentium. Want to move large amounts of data around? use the sun. Want to serve up static web pages at your co-lo where you only have a 10Mb pipe? Use a cheap P166's running whatever free software you can find.
The advantage to the sun box is not that it can compete with a dual or quad PIII in raw cpu performance, it is that you can use a cheap X1 ($995) or SunBlade 100 to write and debug your app and then run it on a SunFire 6800 (24 cpu, 196GB of ram). I havent seen any intel based system even come close to what sun offers in their midrange let alone their high end systems. (and again, no, you do not use one of these systems to crack crypto codes, just like you do not use the pentium for large fluid dynamics simulation apps. different problem, different solution)
It only holds up to 2... a 420R can hold up to 4 cpu's
sorry, hate to nitpick, but i have a few racks of them... and no, I do not use them as webservers (the netra T1 line is a lot cheaper, a quarter the size, and will fill a 100Mb pipe just fine.)
That said, if the single 700mhz system is running faster than a quad sun, you had better find a real sysadmin who knows what they are doing...
I dont know who your local telco is, but around here, a T1 cost about $150-$300 per month for the local loop (depending on distance to the co).
That said, the internet service for that T1 costs around $700/mo for a tier 2 and $950/mo for a tier 1 isp.
So, the major cost is not in the T1 line but in the service for that T1 line. Now, you may wonder why 1.5Mbps via a T1 cost more than 2Mbps through dsl. Simple, when you get a T1 service, you are also getting SLA's that guarantee latency and throughput on your providers network. With DSL, you dont get much of an SLA other than maybe an uptime guarantee. If you've ever seen the way a dslam is connected, you'll realize that it is typically 128 ports all going into a single DS-3 or OC-3 (and the dslams from cisco let you subtend or daisy chain them so that you really have 12 dslams with 128 ports each all going into a single oc-3. talk about over subscription)
when you login, a session cookie gets sent to your browser and all other sessions are destroyed.
If you give your password out to a friend, then the two of you cannt browse the site at the same time without constantly logging in again. (For extra fun, the browser with the old cookie gets locked out for X minutes )
so yes, there are ways of making password sharing a real pain in the ass
Ok, rule number 1 of system security: If you don't control it, don't trust it until after you have verified it.
This vulnerability has been known for a long time and has been corrected in all but the lamest of shopping cart applications. It just makes sense that if you trust the client to report the cost of something to you that you are going to get burned.
Ouch. I take issue here. Doesn't it make sense that affluent parents not scrambling to work two jobs each to pay the bills would be able to invest more time in their children? I take issue with your implication that rich white folks make better parents. My parents were/are working-class white folks, just like two thirds of the people where I grew up. So why are only forty of us from an original class of two hundred doing the same? Parents make a difference -- no matter how little they make, parents can always invest their concern in a child's schoolwork. The wealthy just have the option of hiring someone else to do so...
The original poster used the rich white folks in an affluent neighborhood as an example so I twisted their example to make the point. It was not intended to indicate that one must have rich, white parents in order to have a chance to get ahead in life. I grew up in an environment that at times bordered poverty (food stamps were a major source of income for food and clothing often came from the local church group). But my parents knew the value of a good education and would not let me slack off.
You also seem to think that once rich, one does not need to work their ass off to stay that way. Most folks become rich because they worked their ass off to get there. That work ethic does not suddenly halt once they have a personal net worth of $1M. In some parts of the world, folks are born into money. In the US, most rich folks were not born with it, they earned it by working 18 hour days, making the most of what resources they had and not giving up.
Good Lord, man! Have you been to college recently? You *do* need textbooks, and they're damned freakin' expensive.
Actually, yes, I have been to college recently. Apparently, you have not; otherwise you would have noted that i used a new computer as an example and not a $90 textbook. There is only an order of magnitude cost difference between the two. In all but the poorest of schools, textbooks are not a funding issue unless somebody has the crazy idea that computers are more important that textbooks. They are not. They may enhance the learning experience but will not replace it. I did not have a real computer till I got to college (in 92). Even then, I was only one of 7 on my wing of 40 who had their own computers. Did the other students suffer due to it? Not really. There were labs down the hall and my door was always open to whoever wanted to use it to write a paper or do some work on the stats apps that I had.
Predominately white schools in affluent neighborhoods don't always get better funding but they do get parents who know the value of an education and hold their children to higher standards.
The most important factor in the outcome is the parent. The next factor is the teacher. Funding is lower on the list (you don't need a new computer to teach physics or chemistry)
Once in a while a student can rise above their surroundings and achieve great things without the help of their (often absent) parents, but this is like 1 in 1000.
Actually, they turned off the encryption during the gulf war due to the lack of military grade gps receivers. Many troops were using standard commercial off the shelf receivers that could not decrypt anything no matter what they key was.
As for the ability to rekey, if the NSA is involved, there is always a way to rekey in the event of the disclosure of the key (they also have rather strict policies for the lenght of time that a key can be in use. The best thing is that the keys are typically distributed on paper tape because it is so easy to destroy).
What I really want to know is who attached a 'top secret' system to the internet (or any other non classified system). Having worked in that industry before, doing so was a very quick way to getting not only fired but thrown in jail.
Using DiskSuite, you can mirror drives (including boot/root/swap). The GUI will complain that you have all of your state database replicas on only two disks and that everything is on the same controller, but you can simply ignore the warning.
I currently do this with a bunch of T1's where you have both of the internal disks on the same controller (and only 2 disks).
I also just used the command line to do the work. Check out Sun's Guide to high availability where they provide the step by step instructions for both DiskSuite (free) and Veritas (overpriced unless you have an array)
having worked for 3 years in the defense industry (right out of college, into the secret world of software development), I will never go back.
The main reason is that the environment is very restrictive. I ran about 70 sun systems (E5500's, 4500's, etc. ) and was in a constant battle with the security folks. Want to put ssh on the system to ditch *rsh apps? Fill out this paperwork, file it, wait 6 months, resubmit for further disapproval.
Want to upgrade the version of perl on the system to fix a bug or two? Dont even think about downloading the source code and recompiling. It must be purchased from a vendor, otherwise it might have back doors in it. Lets not even talk about using any other 'free' software.
The folks in charge of the system security generally do not understand how the various parts of a computer interact and what is a security risk and what is totally benign.
But what has to be the largest source of frustration is working with former military officers who were taught that an officer is trained to take on any task whatsoever and thus they are qualified to do anything just because they were an officer. I'd rather work with a bunch of PhD's (did that in college).
The old boy network is in effect at most defense jobs. Folks gain their position based on their rank in the military. Look at most defense companies org chart and you'll almost never find a major in a position above a general.
But anyway, my current job pays better and I get to work from home:)
I'm sure that this will be said a million times in this thread: If you only purchase one book, this is by far the best one out there. Period.
I have the second and third editions of this book on the shelf next to me. My copy red bible has been read by dozens of co-workers and has become the first book that I recommend when somebody asks me what they should read in order to get started down the unix admin path. (I send them to the O'Reilly sys admin book only _after_ they have first read this one)
This is not a book for programmers, nor is it a cookbook for those who just want to get something done real quick. This is the book you read to understand what is going on and why things work the way they do.
I give it a 10/10. Despite the price, it is well worth it.
The general consensus was that non comp sci majors made the best programmers. The best ones that we knew seemed to come from the music and language areas. The biggest problem that we see is that most programmers do not learn to see the problem beyond the code that they write and they never learn how the rest of the system operates.
I'm a chem major myself, with a number of grad level comp sci courses to boot. Fortunately for the programmers, I like designing system and network topologies for co-lo sites and use my spare cycles to help them deal with a problem interfacing with things outside of the jvm that they are using.
When are they going to realize the fact that the crime rate is not a result of any gun control, internet or violent games....
Its a result of the overall standard of living and economy. When people have job, they generally have less time to go around causing problems (and less of a need to do so, why steal the tv when you have the cash to simply purchase it).
Take a look, the last time we (in the us, that is) saw a drop like this was at the end of the great depression... a time when we went from a very high unemployment rate to a very low one...
In the mean time, people will claim that their anti crime programs are working and claim credit for it, and then wonder what happened when the recession hits...
Didn't sun just release the Sun Grid Engine just the other week?
It does the same thing, run distributed compute intensive jobs on idle systems.
Of course, you can download the stuff now... no need to wait, and they promise that they will release it under an open source license in the near future.
Slashdot Mirror
Over the past few years, I've had the opportunity to interview quite a few folks for the position of network and system administrators.
Let me tell you, there really are not that many good ones out there.
In my own personal experience, I'd say that 1 in 20 are worth the space that they occupy. One in 100 would fall into what I would classify as a true senior level admin. The rest of them are just an accident waiting to happen. All of them go around trying to sell themselves as 'senior unix | network system administrators'
The problem is that many of these places setup the firewall and block everything. all ICMP packets included. they dont take the time to learn what they should block and what the consequences are. they just block everything. Then when something does not work, they open things up till it does. For a good time, check out the firewall config of an admin who setup an exchange server that sits behind a firewall. Chances are they had no clue what the 'established' keyword was and just allowed ports 1024 through 64k. (in the cases where their firewall did not automatically recognize that exchange works in a fashion similar to rpc)
The really sad thing is that most of these admins pull 60-80K/yr (in the us) and think that they know everything. Ah, the ignorance of youth (even the 40+ year old ones who still dont have a clue). You see, the more you know, the more you know that you dont know everything.
The hard part for me is that with all of the gui's now dominating the server market, the level of knowledge required to get a system up and running is getting lower and lower. A trained monkey can install NT and most of the linux based distros out there nowadays. And as soon as they can do that, they add 'system admin' to their resume and try and go for the big bucks. And they can play that game till something serious comes up and they discover what vi is and then they discover that they have no idea of what single user mode is or how fsck works. At that point the game is over and the company that they work for discovers that they didnt hire a senior level admin, they hired a trained monkey.
So yes, you are screwed. If your ISP is nice, you can send them an email telling them to discard any emails that they get of 'attacks' from your ftp servers. If it goes to the right network admin (one of the 100) then you can probably sit back, smile and respond with an automatic 'hey stupid, please read rfc bla, bla and bla and then write back when you get a clue as to how ftp works and what your firewall is doing.'
In the mean time, all we can do is hope that companies start to find some way to tell when an admin really knows their shit and when they just know how to walk through the mandrake gui install.
One minor problem is the issue of scarcity.
Anybody can get a print of a Picasso and put it on their wall. Ok, now how many folks have the original on their wall? ok, thought so.
Fine art is hard to physically get ones hands on. This rarity makes it valuable. Now, if folks can store your art work on a floppy and make a million copies, what is an individual copy worth? Its not like the original has any value since one can never prove that it is the original. Is there even an original?
Photographs are the same way. One can make as many copies as they wish with the original negatives. However, through access to the original negatives one can increase the value of any of the copies.
So, I suggest that you do the following (similar to a suggestion by another poster who said to go and get a printer):
Get a good slide printer and then go make enlargements of the resulting film. These prints (numbered and signed) have value. Only by controlling the number of original prints made can you control the value and thus the determination in the future of your works 'value' as art vs 'fine art'.
but anyway, my 0.02 worth
In keeping with the usual slashdot tradition of going with an unrealistic system price, yeah, the Sunblade for $995 does not get you much.
A more realistic setup would be as follows:
Sunblade 100 w/ 256MB: $1,450
21" monitor with adapter: $1295
Keyboard: $45 (I remember when these were free)
Forte C++ Personal Edition 6 (1 RTU): $1,995
Total: $4,785 (One can expect at least a 10% discount)
The main benifit is that this system is binary compatable with a SunFire 6800 (24 cpu's and 192gigs of ram at a cost of a million+ bucks)
It also helps with the previous argument that it cost too much to get started with sun equipment. I recently priced out a small dev system (web, app and db systems) and the Sun solution came out to $9,400. An identically configured dell system came out to $9,400. The kicker is that I can expect a 10% discount on the sun systems and no discount on the dell systems. Ok, so much for price being an argument against sun. (I still like the fact that I can put a console server on the serial port and do anything to the server, including os installs, from anywhere in the world.)
Sorry, but I would not count the UltraSPARC out just yet. Of all of the 64 bit chips out on the market today, it is the only one that a) has a large installed base and b) has not had an EOL statement. (yeah, we got ibm and the ppc and sgi with the mips, but sgi is just about dead and ibm keeps hinting that they are going to intel)
Intel's chip may be nice, but what runs on it? What compilers actually produce code that is as optimized as intel hopes? (and without a good compiler, the chip is toast)
Its just as expensive as the UltraSPARC (and in many cases more expensive) and it has nowhere near that app support. Ok, so you have a linux distro. That is great. Now tell me, will you put a bet the business database on linux? Didnt think so. Would you do the same with a Sun box running oracle? you bet. Lets face it folks, when a 10 minutes of downtime cost more than the hardware, one does not cut corners. Sun can get away with charging half a mil for a 6800 because their clients know that in the grand scheme of things, that is pocket change. Intel knows this and thus they want to get into the large server market where the markups are so high.
The majority of apps out there do not need the memory that a 64 bit address space can get them. I dont know of many web servers that have more than a gig of ram in them, do you? In fact, in the past year, I've been deploying banks of small systems (like the Sun T1's) instead of large systems. The only time I throw more than 4 gigs of ram into a system is if it is running oracle or some other memory hungry app. ok, new slashdot poll: what is the most ram that you have put into a server recently? 512? 1024?. ok, enough said. The largest box that i've ever setup was a sun 5500 with 12 cpu's and 12 gigs, and that was 3 years ago. I just have not had much of a need for systems with more than 1Gig recently with a few exceptions.
The main reason for going with a 64 bit chip is to simplify your line of supported systems. You can give a developer a SunBlade 100 ($995) and have them write apps for your E10K ($2+Mil).
Also, it is not just the chip folks. When I look to get a sun box, I dont care about how fast the cpu is. I care about the I/O to the disks, memory and other cpu's. It does me no good to have a 1GHz cpu that sits there waiting for a cache miss. CPU speed is nice if you have an app that is very parallel and can fit into L2 cache (SETI, des cracking, etc). It is useless if you are trying to run a database and you just need lots of ram and I/O. I still purchase 9 gig disks for my disk arrays even though I can get 73 gig drives. Why? simple: I need speed as much as I need space and cost is not a big issue for many large systems. (remember: cost, performance, reliability. Pick one, balance 2, you will never get all 3)
Anyway, I see the market starting to consolidate. Sun has the mid to high end systems. (they have it, but if they slack off, they will loose it). Linux, and the *BSD's will have the low end where cost is important. (Not that sun charges for their OS anymore, but they make better use of the low end intel hardware). The linux and *BSD's dont have a chance at the high end till intel can produce a cpu, supporting chipset and backplane that can compete with sun and be cost competative(something that they have never done. IBM and SGI have, but not intel).
you kids have it soooo easy now a days....
when i was a kid, we didn't have cd's to load our os's from. we had to toggle the instructions in by hand on the front of the system t give the thing enough smarts to talk to the paper tape drive which then loaded the code to talk to the tape system.....
we didn't have no fancy gui's. We had punch cards, and we liked it. Back in the good days, you actually had to know what you were doing in order to program the machine. We didn't have no "high level" languages like C. And we liked it that way, it kept the wimps off of our systems.
You should be happy that you only have to drive 2 hours to get to a store. When i was a kid, I had to walk.
kids... you think that you have it soooo hard....
I got zip's, I got jaz, I got compact flash, I got CD-R and CD-RW... the last thing that I need is yet another way of storing all of my "research papers" on yet another format that may or may not be around for more than a year or two...
:)
then again, one can store a lot of "research" on a 20 gig disk
Ok, so for less than the cost of a cheap dsl line, a company that wants access can get it...
Somehow these prices do not look like they are intended to only service large companies and corporate offices (otherwise the cost would be in the thousands of dollars per month like many other electronic legal resources)
Fortunately, most college computer labs are filled with virgins that can be used for just this purpose :)
If this ever goes to court, it will be a good test of the DMCA.
Unlike previous cases (DeCSS, etc, etc) that were electronic publications, this one is a paper based publication. The court has no problems with understanding things that are on paper (compared to anything electronic) and thus their academic publication will most likely enjoy the full protection of the law. That and I'm sure that there is a long history of corporations trying to stop the publication of formal academic papers (from what I've seen, the academic's usually win)
When coupled with the fact that the SDMI folks presented a formal and public challenge to break their system, I'm sure that whatever protection that they though the dcma would have provided them will be thrown out the window.
It depends on the task that you have...
Want to crack des? use the pentium. Want to move large amounts of data around? use the sun. Want to serve up static web pages at your co-lo where you only have a 10Mb pipe? Use a cheap P166's running whatever free software you can find.
The advantage to the sun box is not that it can compete with a dual or quad PIII in raw cpu performance, it is that you can use a cheap X1 ($995) or SunBlade 100 to write and debug your app and then run it on a SunFire 6800 (24 cpu, 196GB of ram). I havent seen any intel based system even come close to what sun offers in their midrange let alone their high end systems. (and again, no, you do not use one of these systems to crack crypto codes, just like you do not use the pentium for large fluid dynamics simulation apps. different problem, different solution)
It only holds up to 2... a 420R can hold up to 4 cpu's
sorry, hate to nitpick, but i have a few racks of them... and no, I do not use them as webservers (the netra T1 line is a lot cheaper, a quarter the size, and will fill a 100Mb pipe just fine.)
That said, if the single 700mhz system is running faster than a quad sun, you had better find a real sysadmin who knows what they are doing...
I dont know who your local telco is, but around here, a T1 cost about $150-$300 per month for the local loop (depending on distance to the co).
That said, the internet service for that T1 costs around $700/mo for a tier 2 and $950/mo for a tier 1 isp.
So, the major cost is not in the T1 line but in the service for that T1 line. Now, you may wonder why 1.5Mbps via a T1 cost more than 2Mbps through dsl. Simple, when you get a T1 service, you are also getting SLA's that guarantee latency and throughput on your providers network. With DSL, you dont get much of an SLA other than maybe an uptime guarantee. If you've ever seen the way a dslam is connected, you'll realize that it is typically 128 ports all going into a single DS-3 or OC-3 (and the dslams from cisco let you subtend or daisy chain them so that you really have 12 dslams with 128 ports each all going into a single oc-3. talk about over subscription)
Simple, use both.
when you login, a session cookie gets sent to your browser and all other sessions are destroyed.
If you give your password out to a friend, then the two of you cannt browse the site at the same time without constantly logging in again. (For extra fun, the browser with the old cookie gets locked out for X minutes )
so yes, there are ways of making password sharing a real pain in the ass
Ok, rule number 1 of system security: If you don't control it, don't trust it until after you have verified it.
This vulnerability has been known for a long time and has been corrected in all but the lamest of shopping cart applications. It just makes sense that if you trust the client to report the cost of something to you that you are going to get burned.
The original poster used the rich white folks in an affluent neighborhood as an example so I twisted their example to make the point. It was not intended to indicate that one must have rich, white parents in order to have a chance to get ahead in life. I grew up in an environment that at times bordered poverty (food stamps were a major source of income for food and clothing often came from the local church group). But my parents knew the value of a good education and would not let me slack off.
You also seem to think that once rich, one does not need to work their ass off to stay that way. Most folks become rich because they worked their ass off to get there. That work ethic does not suddenly halt once they have a personal net worth of $1M. In some parts of the world, folks are born into money. In the US, most rich folks were not born with it, they earned it by working 18 hour days, making the most of what resources they had and not giving up.
Good Lord, man! Have you been to college recently? You *do* need textbooks, and they're damned freakin' expensive.
Actually, yes, I have been to college recently. Apparently, you have not; otherwise you would have noted that i used a new computer as an example and not a $90 textbook. There is only an order of magnitude cost difference between the two. In all but the poorest of schools, textbooks are not a funding issue unless somebody has the crazy idea that computers are more important that textbooks. They are not. They may enhance the learning experience but will not replace it. I did not have a real computer till I got to college (in 92). Even then, I was only one of 7 on my wing of 40 who had their own computers. Did the other students suffer due to it? Not really. There were labs down the hall and my door was always open to whoever wanted to use it to write a paper or do some work on the stats apps that I had.
Predominately white schools in affluent neighborhoods don't always get better funding but they do get parents who know the value of an education and hold their children to higher standards.
The most important factor in the outcome is the parent. The next factor is the teacher. Funding is lower on the list (you don't need a new computer to teach physics or chemistry)
Once in a while a student can rise above their surroundings and achieve great things without the help of their (often absent) parents, but this is like 1 in 1000.
Actually, they turned off the encryption during the gulf war due to the lack of military grade gps receivers. Many troops were using standard commercial off the shelf receivers that could not decrypt anything no matter what they key was.
As for the ability to rekey, if the NSA is involved, there is always a way to rekey in the event of the disclosure of the key (they also have rather strict policies for the lenght of time that a key can be in use. The best thing is that the keys are typically distributed on paper tape because it is so easy to destroy).
What I really want to know is who attached a 'top secret' system to the internet (or any other non classified system). Having worked in that industry before, doing so was a very quick way to getting not only fired but thrown in jail.
Using DiskSuite, you can mirror drives (including boot/root/swap). The GUI will complain that you have all of your state database replicas on only two disks and that everything is on the same controller, but you can simply ignore the warning.
I currently do this with a bunch of T1's where you have both of the internal disks on the same controller (and only 2 disks).
I also just used the command line to do the work. Check out Sun's Guide to high availability where they provide the step by step instructions for both DiskSuite (free) and Veritas (overpriced unless you have an array)
having worked for 3 years in the defense industry (right out of college, into the secret world of software development), I will never go back.
:)
The main reason is that the environment is very restrictive. I ran about 70 sun systems (E5500's, 4500's, etc. ) and was in a constant battle with the security folks. Want to put ssh on the system to ditch *rsh apps? Fill out this paperwork, file it, wait 6 months, resubmit for further disapproval.
Want to upgrade the version of perl on the system to fix a bug or two? Dont even think about downloading the source code and recompiling. It must be purchased from a vendor, otherwise it might have back doors in it. Lets not even talk about using any other 'free' software.
The folks in charge of the system security generally do not understand how the various parts of a computer interact and what is a security risk and what is totally benign.
But what has to be the largest source of frustration is working with former military officers who were taught that an officer is trained to take on any task whatsoever and thus they are qualified to do anything just because they were an officer. I'd rather work with a bunch of PhD's (did that in college).
The old boy network is in effect at most defense jobs. Folks gain their position based on their rank in the military. Look at most defense companies org chart and you'll almost never find a major in a position above a general.
But anyway, my current job pays better and I get to work from home
I'm sure that this will be said a million times in this thread: If you only purchase one book, this is by far the best one out there. Period.
I have the second and third editions of this book on the shelf next to me. My copy red bible has been read by dozens of co-workers and has become the first book that I recommend when somebody asks me what they should read in order to get started down the unix admin path. (I send them to the O'Reilly sys admin book only _after_ they have first read this one)
This is not a book for programmers, nor is it a cookbook for those who just want to get something done real quick. This is the book you read to understand what is going on and why things work the way they do.
I give it a 10/10. Despite the price, it is well worth it.
Funny, this came up the other day at work...
The general consensus was that non comp sci majors made the best programmers. The best ones that we knew seemed to come from the music and language areas. The biggest problem that we see is that most programmers do not learn to see the problem beyond the code that they write and they never learn how the rest of the system operates.
I'm a chem major myself, with a number of grad level comp sci courses to boot. Fortunately for the programmers, I like designing system and network topologies for co-lo sites and use my spare cycles to help them deal with a problem interfacing with things outside of the jvm that they are using.
When are they going to realize the fact that the crime rate is not a result of any gun control, internet or violent games....
Its a result of the overall standard of living and economy. When people have job, they generally have less time to go around causing problems (and less of a need to do so, why steal the tv when you have the cash to simply purchase it).
Take a look, the last time we (in the us, that is) saw a drop like this was at the end of the great depression... a time when we went from a very high unemployment rate to a very low one...
In the mean time, people will claim that their anti crime programs are working and claim credit for it, and then wonder what happened when the recession hits...
but anyway, my 0.02 worth
Didn't sun just release the Sun Grid Engine just the other week? It does the same thing, run distributed compute intensive jobs on idle systems. Of course, you can download the stuff now... no need to wait, and they promise that they will release it under an open source license in the near future.
disable support for RC4-56 encryption... it will work after that (may also need to disable 56 bit des, ymmv)
If you have the money, Kodak released the 660 (hope I got the model number correct) that is basically an f5 with a 6 megapixle back.
It can be your's for only $15,000