I cover nearby township meetings for the local newspaper, so I'm obviously only qualified to talk out of my ass about this. But in the particular township which I have the most experience, running a software company from home is actually a *right*, as long as you file for the correct permits and abide by the specified restrictions. The permit you need is called a "Conditional Use Permit" here in Minnesota. It'll cost about 250 dollars or so to file for one, and then the city/township/county has to chew on it for a while.
You'll probably have some sort of hearing before a zoning board or township board or committee or whatever. Be prepared to answer questions like, how will your business affect residential traffic patterns? Will you have any employees? Working on-site or off site? Will you have any employees in the future? How many cars will you have parked outside during the day time?
Another thing you might want to check is to see if your software company violates any housing covenants that you signed when you moved into your neighborhood. As I understand it, disputes over housing covenants are not settled by any governmental agency -- you start out with courts and lawyers.
32579738956 other people have said this before me, but go talk to your city, township, or county zoning administrator. They're usually very helpful (unless you live in a larger city, then, good luck). Chambers of Commerce are also good places to find out info.
But the best way of approaching things like this is to *start* at the local level; ask the smallest level of local government (your wife?;) and work your way up. When it comes to zoning issues, generally, any smaller level of government can be more restrictive than any larger level of government, but not less restrictive. (The township can't say "Sure, you can build a 35 story office building," if the county has imposed height limits on buildings county wide, etc.)
But get as much local info as you can, since everywhere is different (that's why you start smallest first and work your way up. Kinda like booting.;)
Your milage may vary, I'm not a lawyer, etc. Good luck!
First, to Knology, our cable provider. Due to shoddy service and a general run-around over the past few days, we're on the verge of 1) switching cable modem providers 2) demanding a refund for all the service we didn't get this month. Our service has been out for part of every day for the past week. My apologies to those of you who attempted to access domesticat on Friday afternoon. I was halfway through major changes on the site, and had uploaded files but not rebuilt them with greymatter - and then our connection conked out for about five hours.
They (and all their friends) eventually switched because the service was so bad. Now, that was a year ago, and maybe they've changed, but then, maybe not. It took BresnanLink (later bought out by Charter) 5 years to get cable modem access right up here, and it *still* occationally screws up.
Hmmm. Maintain a seperate kernel tree on your dual Celeron box which you also make available to the P166. Compile on the celeron, copy the kernel over to the P166, enjoy. Don't forget to check the little box which says "Pentium" when you do make menuconfig.
I don't know to what extent this has anything to do with "clustering" but it works if you really can't wait to compile the new kernel on the P166 (or if you were using a 486 with 8 megs of ram and a 100 meg drive as your gateway -- now that would be a case of wanting to compile on a different box. Unless your old distro you had on the 486 only had glib5. That's never happened to me nope nope nope.)
I looked into doing something like this with a web server cluster a while back. The goal was to eliminate as many single points of failure as possible. The design goes something like this: Buy 4 machines with a CDROM drive, and a gig or so of RAM. Have a stripped down and hardened version of your favorite distro on it, and set it to create a ramdisk on bootup with the distro entirely in RAM. Put them all behind a firewall. Set up an internal gigabit ethernet network connecting all of these machines together, and put your backend database with all of your web pages on the internal network. Now, put in sysconnect gigabit ethernet cards in them (with the two ports on each card and drivers for linux/freeBSD/solaris/almostanyothernix which do automatic failover if you yank a network cable). Make the firewalls, routers, and database backend failover properly, and assuming you have two completely independently routed incoming network connections, the only single point of failure is incoming power and the fact that all your machines are in one place, so if you have a fire, you're kinda screwed.
Get F5 BigIP firewall thingies. They do 900Mb/s of real world traffic (USA Today's web page, Supreme Court website (remember Florida?)), etc. They don't pay me, and I've never worked for them; I'm just really impressed with their product. I don't even know if they make these anymore, but if they do, they're way better than anything Cisco makes (or, to be more precise, they were way better than any Cisco firewall product at the time I looked into this.)
Anyway, the main point, as it related to the poster's question, is that if anyone managed to get past your firewall and invade your box, he's only modifying what's going on in RAM. If you detect him there, and plug the security hole, you don't have to worry about what things he changed on what disks, and so on. All you have to do is burn 4 more CDs, take the machines down one by one (the F5s do load balancing as well as firewalling, so you aren't going to have any downtime upgrading your machines -- did I mention they're the shiznit?) and reboot off the new CD. Yes, I know that the database server still has disks and an attacker could get in and mess that up (again, this is assuming he got past the firewall, which is a pretty big assumption if you're blocking everything but port 22 and port 80) but by and large, it's a pretty interesting way of dealing with possible breakins. If you're really hardcore, you can run openbsd on the boxen (if openbsd allowed that whole foofy "boot into ramdisk" thing -- I have no idea whatsoever if it does. You could run it on the database backends tho.)
For various social and political reasons, we had to make this design work for either linux servers or solaris servers; hence the use of sysconnect gigabit ethernet cards, which work in both solaris and linux. However, I've heard that Solaris now has netcard failover built in; I'm not sure if the linux kernel has the infrastructure to do that or not (I don't think it would be too terribly hard to write it tho, if you had to.)
Yeah, put the posts on Usenet, where they can't get at them. Then no one else will get them because NOBODY READS USENET (with the exception of the entire alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.* hierarchy).
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I think it entirely depends on where you live.
;) and work your way up. When it comes to zoning issues, generally, any smaller level of government can be more restrictive than any larger level of government, but not less restrictive. (The township can't say "Sure, you can build a 35 story office building," if the county has imposed height limits on buildings county wide, etc.)
;)
I cover nearby township meetings for the local newspaper, so I'm obviously only qualified to talk out of my ass about this. But in the particular township which I have the most experience, running a software company from home is actually a *right*, as long as you file for the correct permits and abide by the specified restrictions. The permit you need is called a "Conditional Use Permit" here in Minnesota. It'll cost about 250 dollars or so to file for one, and then the city/township/county has to chew on it for a while.
You'll probably have some sort of hearing before a zoning board or township board or committee or whatever. Be prepared to answer questions like, how will your business affect residential traffic patterns? Will you have any employees? Working on-site or off site? Will you have any employees in the future? How many cars will you have parked outside during the day time?
Another thing you might want to check is to see if your software company violates any housing covenants that you signed when you moved into your neighborhood. As I understand it, disputes over housing covenants are not settled by any governmental agency -- you start out with courts and lawyers.
32579738956 other people have said this before me, but go talk to your city, township, or county zoning administrator. They're usually very helpful (unless you live in a larger city, then, good luck). Chambers of Commerce are also good places to find out info.
But the best way of approaching things like this is to *start* at the local level; ask the smallest level of local government (your wife?
But get as much local info as you can, since everywhere is different (that's why you start smallest first and work your way up. Kinda like booting.
Your milage may vary, I'm not a lawyer, etc. Good luck!
I think you're pre-supposing that humanity will be ready to receive what you have to tell them after you've warned them about it.
Even if you don't warn them about it, the assumption that humanity will always become more "responsible" (or whatever) over time is sketchy at best.
They (and all their friends) eventually switched because the service was so bad. Now, that was a year ago, and maybe they've changed, but then, maybe not. It took BresnanLink (later bought out by Charter) 5 years to get cable modem access right up here, and it *still* occationally screws up.
Hmmm. Maintain a seperate kernel tree on your dual Celeron box which you also make available to the P166. Compile on the celeron, copy the kernel over to the P166, enjoy. Don't forget to check the little box which says "Pentium" when you do make menuconfig.
I don't know to what extent this has anything to do with "clustering" but it works if you really can't wait to compile the new kernel on the P166 (or if you were using a 486 with 8 megs of ram and a 100 meg drive as your gateway -- now that would be a case of wanting to compile on a different box. Unless your old distro you had on the 486 only had glib5. That's never happened to me nope nope nope.)
I looked into doing something like this with a web server cluster a while back. The goal was to eliminate as many single points of failure as possible. The design goes something like this: Buy 4 machines with a CDROM drive, and a gig or so of RAM. Have a stripped down and hardened version of your favorite distro on it, and set it to create a ramdisk on bootup with the distro entirely in RAM. Put them all behind a firewall. Set up an internal gigabit ethernet network connecting all of these machines together, and put your backend database with all of your web pages on the internal network. Now, put in sysconnect gigabit ethernet cards in them (with the two ports on each card and drivers for linux/freeBSD/solaris/almostanyothernix which do automatic failover if you yank a network cable). Make the firewalls, routers, and database backend failover properly, and assuming you have two completely independently routed incoming network connections, the only single point of failure is incoming power and the fact that all your machines are in one place, so if you have a fire, you're kinda screwed.
Get F5 BigIP firewall thingies. They do 900Mb/s of real world traffic (USA Today's web page, Supreme Court website (remember Florida?)), etc. They don't pay me, and I've never worked for them; I'm just really impressed with their product. I don't even know if they make these anymore, but if they do, they're way better than anything Cisco makes (or, to be more precise, they were way better than any Cisco firewall product at the time I looked into this.)
Anyway, the main point, as it related to the poster's question, is that if anyone managed to get past your firewall and invade your box, he's only modifying what's going on in RAM. If you detect him there, and plug the security hole, you don't have to worry about what things he changed on what disks, and so on. All you have to do is burn 4 more CDs, take the machines down one by one (the F5s do load balancing as well as firewalling, so you aren't going to have any downtime upgrading your machines -- did I mention they're the shiznit?) and reboot off the new CD. Yes, I know that the database server still has disks and an attacker could get in and mess that up (again, this is assuming he got past the firewall, which is a pretty big assumption if you're blocking everything but port 22 and port 80) but by and large, it's a pretty interesting way of dealing with possible breakins. If you're really hardcore, you can run openbsd on the boxen (if openbsd allowed that whole foofy "boot into ramdisk" thing -- I have no idea whatsoever if it does. You could run it on the database backends tho.)
For various social and political reasons, we had to make this design work for either linux servers or solaris servers; hence the use of sysconnect gigabit ethernet cards, which work in both solaris and linux. However, I've heard that Solaris now has netcard failover built in; I'm not sure if the linux kernel has the infrastructure to do that or not (I don't think it would be too terribly hard to write it tho, if you had to.)
Yeah, put the posts on Usenet, where they can't get at them. Then no one else will get them because NOBODY READS USENET (with the exception of the entire alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.* hierarchy).