Consider the relative difficulty involved in sending an occasional tape to your offsite facility that's clearly labeled "backup decryption keys".
You're using the same facilities that you trust for your other backups. Recovery is relatively straightforward. Only now, if a tape goes missing on its way to the facility, you don't have to worry as much.
(Yeah, I know that some of you send a dozen tapes to different facilities guarded by warring factions of ninja assassins and you encrypt your encryption keys such that 9 different people have to authenticate 9 different sub-keys in order to reconstruct the master key. I'm not talking to you. I'm just saying that some encryption to protect against random idiots is better than none.)
First, what do you mean by excessive disk load? I'm not being facetious here. Do you mean that the SAN unit is pegged. How do you know that? Are the servers spending a lot of time waiting for I/O? Is the unit making loud noises? Or are the machines that are connected to the server just slow without the processor being pegged?
Also, while "have you tried defragging?" is a common home troubleshooting tip, it's not clear how you came up with the idea that the SAN has to be defragged. If you have reasons and you're just simplifying to keep the post short, great. Defrag away according to the SAN manufacturer's recommendations. However, don't become obsessed with it unless you know that fragmentation's an issue.
You need to spend some time benchmarking the whole system. Figure out how much disk, processor, network IO, and SAN IO are being used. Know what percentage of the total that is. Figure out exactly which servers are causing performance problems at which times.
"Find the problem" is always the first step in "fix the problem." Once you know what's going on, you can deal with the problem intelligently. Are all the servers booting at the same time? Give them different spindles to work from or stagger the boot times. Are all of the users logging in at once? Figure out why that's slow (network speed, SAN, data size, etc.) and split the data across multiple servers and SANS or improve the hardware.
If you can make the case with hard data that the SAN is swamped, you can probably pry money from management to fix the problem. However, guessing that it -might- be something won't get you very far. They don't want to spend $20k on a fix to be told, "Nope. It was something else."
I doubt this'll be read by many folks (after all, the article was posted -hours- ago), but I haven't seen anyone else mention it.
I think that there are two things that should affect your decision.
The first is application support. Open Source stuff isn't a problem. You can just assume that it's available for any distro that you like. If you're going to use any commercial software, you should check with the makers of that software to see what distros they support. A lot of academic software expects Redhat Enterprise (or a clone like CentOS) or Suse.
The second thing you should consider is distro lifetime. Many linux distributions stop offering support and upgrades for old versions after a year or two. A lot of us -like- to wipe everything and reinstall, but if you're trying to get work done, it can be really annoying. There are a few distros that offer a longer support window, though. Ubuntu offers a "LTS" ("Long-Term Support") version, and Redhat (again, and clones like CentOS) offers support for their products for several years.
First, do everything that you can to ensure that they can use as many websites as possible. Install Flash, RealPlayer, Java, and Shockwave plug-ins. If they can't watch videos and play games, "linux is broken." That includes the ability to play mp3, wmv, quicktime AND DVDs.
Second, really think about installing Wine (you may end up doing this just to get Shockwave working). It'll cause grief either way, but if they can run whatever cheap recipe CD they picked up at Wal-Mart, they'll be happier.
Finally, set up automatic backups. They -will- delete an important file or trash the OS at some point. Have a way to bail them out. Ideally, install a proper backup system, but something as simple as a second hard drive and a script that runs "cp -r" on their home directory would work.
You'll also want to ensure that they have a live CD. That's easy with ubuntu, but in general, leave them with a "goof-proof" boot disk.
A lot of people have correctly claimed that using wireless networking permanently for all employees is a bad idea, and they're right.
Wireless does have its place, though. You can set up a wireless network very quickly. That can be important if you need to start moving people to the new location before the contractors have finished wiring. It's also good for meeting areas where people will be bringing laptops. That is, it's good for -temporary- network connectivity. So, even if you (correctly) walk away thinking that a completely wireless office is a bad idea, don't leave wireless out of the plans completely.
ANY company that makes a significant portion of its money from internet sales should have multiple providers for EVERY public-facing server. I'm not saying that every machine should have multiple NICs, but they should have their servers connected to beefy network equipment that can switch all traffic to working providers the moment one provider has problems.
In this case, they can even control the protocol and contents of the packets, so they can't even blame protocol limits for the problem.
Anda's Game (have to either subscribe or go through an ad to see it) is a cute story about gaming from a girl's perspective. Fiction, but maybe not so much as it seems. It seems like the sort of thing that might help some guys relate a little bit better.
Strangely enough, I've seen plenty of problem with nVidia cards (particularly with World of Warcraft), but I've had no problems with ATI cards. I tend to play very mainstream games, though (the sort that probably get thorough testing from both nVidia and ATI).
Plus, ATI is pretty free about basic card specs so that anybody can make a driver (though they're not so open about the latest 3d features), while nVidia just releases closed-source binary drivers. So, anyone running a non-mainstream OS (or even obscure Linux variant) will have a harder time with an nVidia card. Admittedly, if nVidia makes a package for your OS, it probably will work better than the equivalent ATI driver.
I guess it all depends on what games you play and what you want to do with your machine.
Maybe the interview is available for download in a few years when the new video oriented operating systems he mentions have taken hold.
Operating systems like... BeOS?
On the OS front, we have a situation where "good" is the enemy of "great". Windows has succeeded because it's good enough and it's a stable, constant platform. For people who care (i.e. many slashdot readers), it's not quite good enough, so they turn to a unix variant. More stable, but less of a consistent platform (Do you write for Linux or Solaris or AIX or NetBSD or...?). Fortunately, the variants are close enough that, so long as you have the source, you can probably port your app (or find somebody else who has already ported the app) to your OS.
There have been (and still are) some really great alternative operating systems out there (AtheOS, Archy, Plan 9, Inferno, 2K... the list goes on and on), but nobody uses 'em because they don't have all of the essential apps. We use applications, not operating systems. The "right" OS is the one that runs the programs that you want to run. Until a killer app comes out that ONLY runs on a Video-based OS, nobody'll switch.
As others have pointed out, the question's too vague to answer. There are a ton of hardware and software options.
One that I haven't seen mentioned yet is H.323. Clients are implemented in Linux with GnomeMeeting (and a few others), in Windows with NetMeeting (and some other commercial options), and in Mac OS with XMeeting.
If you substitute "Handspring" for "RIM" and "RIM" for "NTP", your post is equally accurate. RIM sued Handspring because they had a patent on tiny keyboards. Really.
There's some poetic justice in RIM losing a ton of money because somebody else had an obvious patent that RIM was infringing.
The problem is the set-up and tear-down time for each new file. I wonder if you'd be able to do something like put all of the files into a.zip file and then copy the.zip file to the device. That'd probably be a few orders of magnitude faster.
You could even use something like WinZip Jobs to automate the process for the less technical users.
I love the DIY eraser approach, but if you simply -must- buy something, there are a few different companies out there that make laptop riser stands with fans in them. Some are even powered via USB so that you don't need to worry about carrying another power brick.
I'm waiting to be deployed by the Red Cross. They'll be providing any specialized equipment. We just need personal supplies. Here's my packing list:
Wrap EVERYTHING in waterproof containers!
copy of this list photocopies of everything in wallet left at home
7x clothing sweatpants/sleep clothing 2 pairs of waterproof shoes hat cheap sunglasses waterproof jacket
sleeping bag ground pad sheet mosquito net pillow
any prescription medicine first-aid kit rubber gloves face mask pain killers anti-diarreah medicine toilet paper towel soap shampoo toothbrush, toothpaste, floss deodorant bug spray sunscreen hand wipes hand sanitizer laundry detergent tissues
2 days food + utensils 2 days water (gallon/day) water purification tablets
rope swiss army knife duct tape pens permanent markers pad of paper plastic garbage bags ziplock bags flashlight extra batteries
All of the paren't suggestions are decent, but there are a few alternatives that may make sense:
-Cyrus IMAP, while a monster to build and configure, can handle a pretty heavy load, and the latest versions can handle a lot of load-balancing internally.
-Exim's nice. I'm a Postfix man, myself. Sendmail is king, though. I'm not going to claim to like it, but it's up to the task, and there's something to be said with using a standard tool.
-While things like MD4 are okay for hashing, they're kind of CPU-intensive. Consider something like "second and third letter of username" that takes less CPU time. The right answer here depends a lot on the relative speed of CPU versus disk. If you can get dedicated hardware to do this (rare, but it exists), use whatever hashing the hardware supports.
-Consider some sort of cache (maybe even separate machines) between incoming SMTP and SpamAssassin/ClamAV. When the 2am spam run hits, your incoming SMTP machines can become overloaded. The downside: deciding what to do with mail that's not rejected the moment it's received.
-Set up a "mail machine" configuration with whatever OS and tools you use, and make it possible to create a disk image quickly. You're going to need a lot of hardware, which means that you'll have enough random failures to make building machines by hand impractical. This also means "have at least one extra built machine/disk array/etc. powered-on and waiting at all times" for those 4am hardware failures.
-You may find that things like NFS just aren't fast enough. Be ready to look at SAN or shared "direct-looking" storage. The tough part: this is hard to discover during testing. It may be overkill, but don't lock it out as a possibility.
-I/O is king. CPU speed won't matter as much as bus speed, disk speed, and memory speed. This is why a lot of companies use banks of big proprietary unix machines for their mail, even if they use commodity PCs elsewhere.
-I don't trust hardware load balancers. Sometimes they're necessary (and they do make life better when they work), but they're a big single point of failure. Consider other ways to split the load, or at least ways to work around the load balancer if it should fail. The Cyrus aggregator can handle some of this.
What spammers call "double opt-in" is what normal people call "opt-in".
Spammers claim that single opt-in is when your address is on a list that they bought (you "opted in" by appearing on the list), and double opt-in is when you actually asked for the mail.
"Where can I buy one" was what I thought when I first heard about Transmeta's processors.
I don't need a laptop. I want to put one into a PC. VIA makes a similar sort of low-power product, and you can actually play with those.
Transmeta made some inroads into the laptop and supercomputer markets, but there was just no way for normal people to play with one, except by buying a laptop.
Slashdot Mirror
Consider the relative difficulty involved in sending an occasional tape to your offsite facility that's clearly labeled "backup decryption keys".
You're using the same facilities that you trust for your other backups. Recovery is relatively straightforward. Only now, if a tape goes missing on its way to the facility, you don't have to worry as much.
(Yeah, I know that some of you send a dozen tapes to different facilities guarded by warring factions of ninja assassins and you encrypt your encryption keys such that 9 different people have to authenticate 9 different sub-keys in order to reconstruct the master key. I'm not talking to you. I'm just saying that some encryption to protect against random idiots is better than none.)
First, what do you mean by excessive disk load? I'm not being facetious here. Do you mean that the SAN unit is pegged. How do you know that? Are the servers spending a lot of time waiting for I/O? Is the unit making loud noises? Or are the machines that are connected to the server just slow without the processor being pegged?
Also, while "have you tried defragging?" is a common home troubleshooting tip, it's not clear how you came up with the idea that the SAN has to be defragged. If you have reasons and you're just simplifying to keep the post short, great. Defrag away according to the SAN manufacturer's recommendations. However, don't become obsessed with it unless you know that fragmentation's an issue.
You need to spend some time benchmarking the whole system. Figure out how much disk, processor, network IO, and SAN IO are being used. Know what percentage of the total that is. Figure out exactly which servers are causing performance problems at which times.
"Find the problem" is always the first step in "fix the problem."
Once you know what's going on, you can deal with the problem intelligently. Are all the servers booting at the same time? Give them different spindles to work from or stagger the boot times. Are all of the users logging in at once? Figure out why that's slow (network speed, SAN, data size, etc.) and split the data across multiple servers and SANS or improve the hardware.
If you can make the case with hard data that the SAN is swamped, you can probably pry money from management to fix the problem. However, guessing that it -might- be something won't get you very far. They don't want to spend $20k on a fix to be told, "Nope. It was something else."
PvP already went there
I doubt this'll be read by many folks (after all, the article was posted -hours- ago), but I haven't seen anyone else mention it.
I think that there are two things that should affect your decision.
The first is application support. Open Source stuff isn't a problem. You can just assume that it's available for any distro that you like. If you're going to use any commercial software, you should check with the makers of that software to see what distros they support. A lot of academic software expects Redhat Enterprise (or a clone like CentOS) or Suse.
The second thing you should consider is distro lifetime. Many linux distributions stop offering support and upgrades for old versions after a year or two. A lot of us -like- to wipe everything and reinstall, but if you're trying to get work done, it can be really annoying. There are a few distros that offer a longer support window, though. Ubuntu offers a "LTS" ("Long-Term Support") version, and Redhat (again, and clones like CentOS) offers support for their products for several years.
First, do everything that you can to ensure that they can use as many websites as possible. Install Flash, RealPlayer, Java, and Shockwave plug-ins. If they can't watch videos and play games, "linux is broken." That includes the ability to play mp3, wmv, quicktime AND DVDs.
Second, really think about installing Wine (you may end up doing this just to get Shockwave working). It'll cause grief either way, but if they can run whatever cheap recipe CD they picked up at Wal-Mart, they'll be happier.
Finally, set up automatic backups. They -will- delete an important file or trash the OS at some point. Have a way to bail them out. Ideally, install a proper backup system, but something as simple as a second hard drive and a script that runs "cp -r" on their home directory would work.
You'll also want to ensure that they have a live CD. That's easy with ubuntu, but in general, leave them with a "goof-proof" boot disk.
This leads to an amusing possibility: the MPAA/RIAA suing ISPs for blocking BitTorrent.
A lot of people have correctly claimed that using wireless networking permanently for all employees is a bad idea, and they're right.
Wireless does have its place, though. You can set up a wireless network very quickly. That can be important if you need to start moving people to the new location before the contractors have finished wiring. It's also good for meeting areas where people will be bringing laptops. That is, it's good for -temporary- network connectivity. So, even if you (correctly) walk away thinking that a completely wireless office is a bad idea, don't leave wireless out of the plans completely.
That's still not a good excuse.
ANY company that makes a significant portion of its money from internet sales should have multiple providers for EVERY public-facing server. I'm not saying that every machine should have multiple NICs, but they should have their servers connected to beefy network equipment that can switch all traffic to working providers the moment one provider has problems.
In this case, they can even control the protocol and contents of the packets, so they can't even blame protocol limits for the problem.
I'm thinking that the "reliable business principles" in question are those of P.T. Barnum. Specifically: "There's a sucker born every minute."
(For a story about where that quote came from and who really said it, check out this site)
Hula's actually an Open Source Netmail, but they're going to be porting major new features from Groupwise to Hula.
Anda's Game (have to either subscribe or go through an ad to see it) is a cute story about gaming from a girl's perspective. Fiction, but maybe not so much as it seems. It seems like the sort of thing that might help some guys relate a little bit better.
Gee, BitComet sounds great! Where can I download a Mac or Linux version?
Strangely enough, I've seen plenty of problem with nVidia cards (particularly with World of Warcraft), but I've had no problems with ATI cards. I tend to play very mainstream games, though (the sort that probably get thorough testing from both nVidia and ATI).
Plus, ATI is pretty free about basic card specs so that anybody can make a driver (though they're not so open about the latest 3d features), while nVidia just releases closed-source binary drivers. So, anyone running a non-mainstream OS (or even obscure Linux variant) will have a harder time with an nVidia card. Admittedly, if nVidia makes a package for your OS, it probably will work better than the equivalent ATI driver.
I guess it all depends on what games you play and what you want to do with your machine.
Maybe the interview is available for download in a few years when the new video oriented operating systems he mentions have taken hold.
Operating systems like... BeOS?
On the OS front, we have a situation where "good" is the enemy of "great". Windows has succeeded because it's good enough and it's a stable, constant platform. For people who care (i.e. many slashdot readers), it's not quite good enough, so they turn to a unix variant. More stable, but less of a consistent platform (Do you write for Linux or Solaris or AIX or NetBSD or...?). Fortunately, the variants are close enough that, so long as you have the source, you can probably port your app (or find somebody else who has already ported the app) to your OS.
There have been (and still are) some really great alternative operating systems out there (AtheOS, Archy, Plan 9, Inferno, 2K... the list goes on and on), but nobody uses 'em because they don't have all of the essential apps. We use applications, not operating systems. The "right" OS is the one that runs the programs that you want to run. Until a killer app comes out that ONLY runs on a Video-based OS, nobody'll switch.
As others have pointed out, the question's too vague to answer. There are a ton of hardware and software options.
One that I haven't seen mentioned yet is H.323. Clients are implemented in Linux with GnomeMeeting (and a few others), in Windows with NetMeeting (and some other commercial options), and in Mac OS with XMeeting.
Here's the Coral Cache of the AllPeers web site since the original seems to be a smoking hole in the ground.
If you substitute "Handspring" for "RIM" and "RIM" for "NTP", your post is equally accurate. RIM sued Handspring because they had a patent on tiny keyboards. Really.
There's some poetic justice in RIM losing a ton of money because somebody else had an obvious patent that RIM was infringing.
You could even use something like WinZip Jobs to automate the process for the less technical users.
I love the DIY eraser approach, but if you simply -must- buy something, there are a few different companies out there that make laptop riser stands with fans in them. Some are even powered via USB so that you don't need to worry about carrying another power brick.
I'm waiting to be deployed by the Red Cross. They'll be providing any specialized equipment. We just need personal supplies. Here's my packing list:
Wrap EVERYTHING in waterproof containers!
copy of this list
photocopies of everything in wallet left at home
7x clothing
sweatpants/sleep clothing
2 pairs of waterproof shoes
hat
cheap sunglasses
waterproof jacket
sleeping bag
ground pad
sheet
mosquito net
pillow
any prescription medicine
first-aid kit
rubber gloves
face mask
pain killers
anti-diarreah medicine
toilet paper
towel
soap
shampoo
toothbrush, toothpaste, floss
deodorant
bug spray
sunscreen
hand wipes
hand sanitizer
laundry detergent
tissues
2 days food + utensils
2 days water (gallon/day)
water purification tablets
rope
swiss army knife
duct tape
pens
permanent markers
pad of paper
plastic garbage bags
ziplock bags
flashlight
extra batteries
All of the paren't suggestions are decent, but there are a few alternatives that may make sense:
-Cyrus IMAP, while a monster to build and configure, can handle a pretty heavy load, and the latest versions can handle a lot of load-balancing internally.
-Exim's nice. I'm a Postfix man, myself. Sendmail is king, though. I'm not going to claim to like it, but it's up to the task, and there's something to be said with using a standard tool.
-While things like MD4 are okay for hashing, they're kind of CPU-intensive. Consider something like "second and third letter of username" that takes less CPU time. The right answer here depends a lot on the relative speed of CPU versus disk. If you can get dedicated hardware to do this (rare, but it exists), use whatever hashing the hardware supports.
-Consider some sort of cache (maybe even separate machines) between incoming SMTP and SpamAssassin/ClamAV. When the 2am spam run hits, your incoming SMTP machines can become overloaded. The downside: deciding what to do with mail that's not rejected the moment it's received.
-Set up a "mail machine" configuration with whatever OS and tools you use, and make it possible to create a disk image quickly. You're going to need a lot of hardware, which means that you'll have enough random failures to make building machines by hand impractical. This also means "have at least one extra built machine/disk array/etc. powered-on and waiting at all times" for those 4am hardware failures.
-You may find that things like NFS just aren't fast enough. Be ready to look at SAN or shared "direct-looking" storage. The tough part: this is hard to discover during testing. It may be overkill, but don't lock it out as a possibility.
-I/O is king. CPU speed won't matter as much as bus speed, disk speed, and memory speed. This is why a lot of companies use banks of big proprietary unix machines for their mail, even if they use commodity PCs elsewhere.
-I don't trust hardware load balancers. Sometimes they're necessary (and they do make life better when they work), but they're a big single point of failure. Consider other ways to split the load, or at least ways to work around the load balancer if it should fail. The Cyrus aggregator can handle some of this.
You're right. I hit the submit button too quickly and then regretted it.
"Double opt-in" is what you describe. "Single opt-in", though, is often used to describe "indirect opt-in", aka "we bought this list of names".
What spammers call "double opt-in" is what normal people call "opt-in".
Spammers claim that single opt-in is when your address is on a list that they bought (you "opted in" by appearing on the list), and double opt-in is when you actually asked for the mail.
Quantapoint uses a similar (but much more developed) system to generate blueprint for buildings.
"Where can I buy one" was what I thought when I first heard about Transmeta's processors.
I don't need a laptop. I want to put one into a PC. VIA makes a similar sort of low-power product, and you can actually play with those.
Transmeta made some inroads into the laptop and supercomputer markets, but there was just no way for normal people to play with one, except by buying a laptop.