That's an interesting argument to make. I'm going to have to write that one down. 'When someone asks a question from a viewpoint I disagree with respond with a radical change in topic, yet imply that the two are related.' That's pretty slick. I should probably watch more political debates.
So the market percentage is so small that big busiess isn't giving a rip. Well, I guess that would be a good reason for regulation then. I'm still not sure about online businesses but then again I guess that is where business is heading.
Not to sound insensitive to those with disabilities, but why not simply let the market push the matter? If companies want to attract a certain type of customer then they do what's necessary to attract those customers including marketing their products to those customers and making the purchase process as easy as possible for that customer. Wouldn't the market sort this out if it were left alone?
What can be done with MS Windows boxes, on a DMZ, that need Internet access to get updates?
Use SUS or WSUS or one of the many 3rd-party patch management applications.
As an example I know of one network in particular where the Windows domain servers (print servers, file servers, DCs, ISA boxes, etc) have no access to the outside world at all. No access at all. The internal Exchange servers don't have access to the outside either. They relay all mail through a SMTP relay w/ anti-spam and anti-virus functionality in a DMZ. None of the internal critical servers have any access to the outside at all. IIRC they use SMS for patch management. That is a wonderful layout. Even if an attacker manages to gain access to your internal servers they can't readily get sensitive data out to the outside world. Likewise forcing all desktop PCs through proxies is also a slick way to protect your internal data.
There's no single silver bullet for the problem(s) but there are steps you can take to make things better. Yeah, this is more work. There's no doubt about that. It's less convienent to apply patches but then again I wouldn't want a server automatically patching itself either. I would want to wait a week or more at the least to allow everyone else to test the new patch. I'd want to review the changelog and release history before applying the patch. In an enterprise network the patch should be tested in a lab before limited deployment to the company servers. Controlling external access would simply be one of the steps in this process.
There is absolutely no reason for those machines to have had (or have currently) unfettered access to the outside world. If they're required to support a funky app then their outbound access should be bound to a specific port or set of ports and a specific destination or source IP. There is no excuse for this kind of setup. I too have seen many situations just like this which were made to have much less of an impact by limiting the outbound access of the machines. For example does your mail server really need to do send anything other than use tcp/25 and certain types of ICMP packets (for PMTU) to the outside world? No? Then why would you let it? If these machines are so critical to their business function that they can't upgrade them or do without them then why do they have unfettered access to/from the inside network?!
On the matter of disclosure it all depends. IMHO there should be a disclosure. On the otherhand it may not be legally required. If the company is publicly traded then it's required. If not then it may still be required depending on the type of company or the type of data that may have been lost. This will vary from state to state as well. Either way it's not your responsibility to do the disclosing. It's not your data. You're an indirect employee of the company. You can not speak on the company's behalf. I would however recommend documenting the incident with a professional post-mortem on the systems. In that post-mortem report I would indicate the types of data that could have been compromised and recommend that the company have its legal staff review the incident to decide if the company required to take further action. Then leave it at that. You can't force them to do anything. You're a consultant; all you do is consult. If the company does this kind of crap often and is required make a disclosure but doesn't then I would sever ties with them. Eventually this will come back to haunt them. As the local IT contractor you'll feel the heat from it if this ever gets into court. Document everything, make good recommendations and keep your nose clean. If it ever gets to the point where you think the problem is going to become public or end up in court, document the problem and get out. The company can probably withstand the financial blow from a civil court but can you? You are bonded, right?
Find a part-time helpdesk position at your local ISP or IT shop. I started working both for my school (officially) and for my ISP when I was 15 and never looked back. Here I am 12 years later and I'm a network engineer for the sister company of the telco that owns the ISP and I now run the ISP. A word of advice though. If you get an IT-related job take it seriously. It's a job like any other. Anything worth doing is worth doing right. Don't fuck around with the opportunity if you find a shop that's willing to hire you. You would be amazed at how small the IT world really is. The odds are damned good that if you screw off as an intern that the people who employed you and those that you worked with will remember that for a very long time. We had a HS intern at our office for a couple months. He dicked around more than anyone I ever met. He even fell asleep on the job. We ended up having to fire him (or the equivalent by telling his internship sponsor not to send him back to our office). Take the job seriously.
Don't write off college. I don't have a college degree but I'm damned lucky. I came into college with a wealth of IT experience behind me, not to mention what I got while I was there. The right opportunities opened up for me at the right times after I got booted from my university. The odds of lightning striking twice are pretty slim my friend. Get your ass in college and stick with it. Yes the first 2 years will most likely be filled with boring theory and other bullshit. That's the price you'll have to pay to reach the latter college years where you actually get to apply what you learned. IMHO this method of education is jacked up. Few people learn from textbooks and classroom instruction. The vast majority of human beings learn from actual hands-on, practial experience. Teach people how to apply what they're learning as they learn it. Don't expect them to do anything other than memorize the answers if you want to teach theory. That's just my opinion. Back on topic though, get your damned degree. I would recommend against a CS major unless you really want to code the rest of your life. I would highly recommend an actual engineering degree of some sort. This will give you the widest possible array of good jobs in the long-run. As an engineer you'll be able to apply for damn near any job that requires highly skilled people simply because the employers want people with an engineering background. The sky is the limit with an engineering degree. Pounding out code is usually the limit with a CS degree. I know a lot of people with CS degrees that aren't even in the IT industry anymore. Also, in this day and age it doesn't hurt to get a minor in business. This will also set you apart from the rest of the field. No, you probably don't want to be an MBA but to be able to understand business models and what your employer and their customers need will quickly run you up the employement food chain. I would also highly recommend any sort of project management and Engineering Process or Ethics courses you can get your hands on. Force yourself to work with others. It's worth it in the long run, especially in our field. Best of luck.
Yeah, that's pretty much it. They are most costly but IMHO you'll walk away with a solid system. I'm glad you guys located a good VAR. I've seen both good and bad work from VARs over the years but once you find a good one stick with them as long as they can provide what you need. The Cisco VoIP solution is relatively closed. It is getting better though. For example Cisco Call Manager 5.0 will only run on Linux. I was told to expect Unity to make the switch soon as well. A big downside is the Mac support. Cisco's Mac support is lacking at best. As you can tell from my nickname I am also an Apple-head (related to the fabled Cheese-Heads of Wisconsin, only less cold and more fruity). I don't have a good solution for you there. Many of the schools we've worked in are either partially Macs or mostly Macs. Usually the administrative areas are PC-based and the educational areas are Mac-based. The upside of this is that the call-flow applications are Windows-centric. These usually aren't apps that teachers or students should have any direct interaction with. The downside is if you're 100% Mac, even in the admin offices, then you're not going to have IPCC or CPA. You'll still have a excellent phone system but you won't have these apps available to you if that's something you're wanting. IPCC would be unusual in a school, even a large district. CPA is useful for the operator lines. You could always use a thin PC for these workstations that's dedicated to call routing. As far as SIP goes they didn't go that route in the beginning. They are of course following the industry which went that way. Their LinkSys One offering is 100% SIP-based, though that doesn't really scale over 50-100 phones. It's meant for SOHOs primarily. The SIP integration isn't something that I'm terribly familiar with. I'm sucking hind tit on the Cisco VoIP offerings unfortunately. My assignment pretty much keeps me out of the voice loop, at least the cisco voice loop. Cisco's VoIP services don't care who your TDM provider is. We're out own TDM provider in some areas and we have a plethora of customers who went every route imaginable.
Best of luck with your deployment. There are a lot of options out there. My best advice is to do your homework (which you've already started it seems). It never hurts to demo solutions for a couple months either.
I'm a bit biased because my employer sells Cisco systems (many of which are to large school systems) but I would recommend going that route. This isn't just your phone system that you're investing in. This is the heart of your technological backbone. You're investing in the network. We're not talking about daisy-chaining more $100 LinkSys switches or your eBay special of the week switches. We're talking full QoS, PoE, and a fully redundant network design. We're talking SRST. We're talking a properly designed and deployed wireless infrastructure for your cordless VoIP phones, not a bunch of hacked WRT54G units liberally scattered around the building(s). You're investing in the guts of the IT system. This isn't something to mess around with IMHO.
You're district administrators, board members, and tax payers will want something that 1) the current staff can manage, 2) someone else can manage if they ever have staff leave, and 3) get support in case of an emergency. This is one of the scenarios where I recommend a school thinks like a business by purchasing something that makes good strategic economic sense. I am a Linux and OSS bigot but I wouldn't recommend an OSS phone system for your environment. I would recommend something that anyone with a little networking experience can manage. I would recommend something that I can get top-notch support for at 3am when a maintenance window goes south. This is the return on investment for your money people.
There is likely an Asterisk-based solution that will suit your needs but IMHO it's not the best solution for the environment. If you were to ask if I thought you should run Linux servers and Linux lab PCs then I would say oh hell yeah. A phone system is a different beast entirely. It's not simply a new app to learn. You have to develop a completely different mentality towards your management practices. A system like that demands 5 9s at the least and absolutely no downtime if students are on the premise. The potential (but unlikely) cost difference between a commercial solution and an OSS isn't worth the liability if something were to happen while your homegrown phone system was down. Like I said, were this question about servers or some other service then I would say go the OSS route if you have the ability. This is a phone system though. You just can't take the risk.
In closing I would also recommend the Cisco solution because you will get an excellent discount from Cisco through your local VAR. You can also write off the vast majority of it in E-Rate. Best of luck.
I call BULLSHIT. If they had defended themselves in a US court that would have legitamized the US jurismydicktion of the matter, thus opening Steve and Spamhaus to challenges from ANY court in the WORLD. This is a very simple concept that apparently you do not get. Alan? Alan Ralsky, is that you? Eddy? Could it be you?
I'm short on time so read the reply I wrote to the other reply to my comment for more detail. I deployed a CanIt Pro system for a small ISP (about 3500 users at the time). We dedicated 2 servers to filtering and 1 to the backend mail store. This ISP outsourced all of its services about 6 months later but had they left that mail system in place another month we'd have been filtering 500k pieces of spam per week with only 25k legit messages in the same time frame. No, that's not a typo. Those 3500 users were averaging 142 pieces of spam per user per week. Only 5% of the received mail was legit. I admin a Barracuda right now. I've added numerous DNSBLs to it as well as tweak what little filtering rules I have available to me. I still average around 7 pieces of spam in my inbox alone per day. Bayes it absolutely worthless on that box because users don't train it. The Cuda will not auto-train itself either (WTF Barracuda?!!). The Cuda is good for a quick and dirty turnkey spam filtering but for the same money you can buy something much better.
Greylisting, Auto-Bayes Analysis and scoring, Offloading of AV scanning to a dedicated server that integrates with your enterprise AV solution (an absolute must for an enterprise mail system), choice of AV products for AV scanning, SURBL support, TMDA support, source availability for customization (I did this heavily), more than blacklist/whitelist spam scoring options for users (that's all the Cuda will let users do), and many more options than I can remember after the day I've had. The Barracuda is not a bad product if the admin wants a so-so set it and forget it solution, if they have absolutely no desire to tweak anything, or if they aren't running a very high-volume mail system (even though Barracuda's stats say that they can support thousands of users). The CanIt Pro product is an mail admin's spam/AV/etc filter (similar to the phrase "a pilot's plane" referring to a plane that pilots love to use because of the enhanced capabilities offered).
You got screwed on the Barracuda. It's a piece of shit. I've had 3 different ones under my thumb and I am less than impressed, even in the most recent beta code. The spam filtering is marginal at best. Their Bayes methodology is a joke at the least. Their support pricing is not good at all. You would have been much better buying a Can-It Pro appliance from Roaring Penguin. You've probably heard of their famous OSS cousin, MIMEDefang, the tool that glues Sendmail to AV and spam filtering tools via the Milter library. Can-It Pro kicks ass. It actually gives you, the admin, complete control over every single aspect of your spam filtering solution. It also gives the admin to empower the end-users (power users) to give them a significant amount of flexibility in their own spam scanning. What does Barracuda give the admin in way of spam scoring flexibility? Jack shit. What does Barracuda give users of their systems? Less than jack shit. You can whitelist though. Woo. For less than you can buy an overpriced Barracuda you could have bought a Can-It Pro appliance w/ full support. You also get control over the appliance too. You can't even log into the Barracuda appliance to do something trivial like hardcode the speed and duplex of the nic or set the NTP server to your internal corporate time server. Nice.
To me I read between the lines on what you wrote to mean that you had a nasty high-school experience. Fortunately not everyone has similar experiences. Then again these are all part of the experience. Hopefully people have enough "good" stuff to offset the bad. Sheltering your children from every negative experience does them more harm than good. Life is about both good and bad things happening. You can't have one without the other.
There is nothing like calling Cisco TAC at 04:00. You get an Aussie TAC engineer that knows 1) you're network is seriously fscked up or you wouldn't be calling him at 04:00, 2) you've already removed what little hair you have from your head and your scalp is bleeding. The nightshift engineer is highly experienced in working under said conditions and is more than capable or resolving the problem. I've been in that position twice in the last month. All I can say is I want to move to Austrailia, mate.
I wish the SmartNet prices were a little more reasonable. They should cut the prices dramatically for the lower-end 8x5x4-day replacement support so that more people can afford it. This would be a solid recurring business for Cisco whereas only a small percentage of Cisco customers bother buying support nowadays.
All kids should be educated at home. I don't mean that they should be "home schooled". I literally mean that they should learn something at home. A good education begins at home. Unfortunately fewer and fewer parents every year give a shit about their children's future so long as it doesn't interfere with the parents' lives. Schools have become low-cost baby sitters. As much as we rag on the public school system we have to give credit where credit is due. They do a lot with very little. Imagine what they could do if they were properly supported (with involvment from the parents and community as well as financially).
Finally, on the topic of your intent to home school your children, I sincerely hope that you find a way to fill in the social voids your decision will create. Education in a public or private facility isn't just about classroom learning. It's also about the experience. It's about learning to socialize with others. It's about learning to work as a member of a team or community. Yes, some amazing people have come away from home schooling and done a lot for the world. Just as many amazing people have come out of the public school system and done even more good. Not-so-amazing people that are still good citizens and neighbors come out of the public school system. These people are the backbone of our society. Unfortunately home schooling deprives children of most of the social learning experiences that are readily available to other children. My personal choice would be to pick a good public school for my children and make the experience even better by being a part of my childrens' education. Children don't have to stop learning when the 3:00 bell rings. Help them with their homework. Visit a museum or a zoo. Emphasize the educational points in family trips. Help the system help your children.
That's my $.02 from a teacher's son, a teacher's nephew, a teacher's cousin, and a teacher's grand son.
I recall something from a year or so ago about a foreign family that moved to the US. They had pictures of their infant with the mother in the tub, on the bed, etc. I think a few of the pics were more of a cultural thing. I think the infant ran around naked in the home or something. Basic mother/infant stuff. The film developing place flipped out and called the police. SRS took the child and the mother was arrested. It took her weeks to get it all sorted out and IIRC even then the SRS imposed limitations on her.
I'm against SRS in its current implementation. 1) They're usually under-funded so many times they can't do all that they need to be doing. 2) There is rarely any good oversight over SRS so abuse like the case above is rampant. 3) Not every set of parents raises their children in the same manner. That doesn't mean what they are doing is illegal by any means (even if sometimes it turns your stomach). SRS workers need to be both smart and compassionate. Unfortunately I believe that all too often they are neither. It's just a job to too many of them. Take this case for example. SRS logged 7 reports about those little girls who's parents were starving them in their basement. WTF is up with that?! SRS was in the freaking house and didn't do a damned thing. That's fucked up.
Ha! What a crock of shit. Cables have always and will always move frequently if for no other reason than people can not afford (or will not buy) enough switchports for every drop. We had a new building wired not too long ago. In total there were over 1500 drops in the building. We had about 450 switchports total to support 400 users. Businesses however are extremely dynamic. One day they're using a conference room for a temporary training lab and need 12 working drops (wireless is not an option). The remodel X offices per week (I think it's a requirement from their charter), requiring additional drops on different walls. They move one department from one area to another. Of course one of the departments is the dev team which has numerous drops per cube. The point is wiring closets are never, EVER stagnant. Wiring closets are more comparable to a living breathing being. Hell it can develop an attitude. Wire neatly. Punch everything down and use cross connects. Don't try to be a wiring zealot. It won't work.
Hand-made patch cables are EVIL. I can't begin to tell you how many times I've found the problem to be a custom, hand-made patch cable that has failed (yes, cables do fail). Of the hundreds of server rooms I've been in I always replace the patch cords if I have the slightest inkling that they're bad. Too many times to accurately count the cables were the problem. 99.9999% of the numbuts out there couldn't properly terminate a cable to save their life! I know many network engineers, carrying certs from the lowly CCNA to CCIE, that I wouldn't trust to make a single straight through cable, let alone put it into production.
Stop making your own cables for production use! Stop being part of the problem that we have to come fix! Buy factory-made and certified cables that come with a warranty. You people are keeping people like me employed because of your save a buck attitudes. Then again I suppose that's a good thing, for me.
I would recommend looking at what other people in your situation are doing. Roaring Pengiun uses Debian for their appliances and push updates out to all systems. You could either open a dialog with their dev team (great people) or buy a low-end unit and look at the guts yourself. They give users complete control over the appliance which is nice.
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That's an interesting argument to make. I'm going to have to write that one down. 'When someone asks a question from a viewpoint I disagree with respond with a radical change in topic, yet imply that the two are related.' That's pretty slick. I should probably watch more political debates.
So the market percentage is so small that big busiess isn't giving a rip. Well, I guess that would be a good reason for regulation then. I'm still not sure about online businesses but then again I guess that is where business is heading.
Not to sound insensitive to those with disabilities, but why not simply let the market push the matter? If companies want to attract a certain type of customer then they do what's necessary to attract those customers including marketing their products to those customers and making the purchase process as easy as possible for that customer. Wouldn't the market sort this out if it were left alone?
Use SUS or WSUS or one of the many 3rd-party patch management applications.
As an example I know of one network in particular where the Windows domain servers (print servers, file servers, DCs, ISA boxes, etc) have no access to the outside world at all. No access at all. The internal Exchange servers don't have access to the outside either. They relay all mail through a SMTP relay w/ anti-spam and anti-virus functionality in a DMZ. None of the internal critical servers have any access to the outside at all. IIRC they use SMS for patch management. That is a wonderful layout. Even if an attacker manages to gain access to your internal servers they can't readily get sensitive data out to the outside world. Likewise forcing all desktop PCs through proxies is also a slick way to protect your internal data.
There's no single silver bullet for the problem(s) but there are steps you can take to make things better. Yeah, this is more work. There's no doubt about that. It's less convienent to apply patches but then again I wouldn't want a server automatically patching itself either. I would want to wait a week or more at the least to allow everyone else to test the new patch. I'd want to review the changelog and release history before applying the patch. In an enterprise network the patch should be tested in a lab before limited deployment to the company servers. Controlling external access would simply be one of the steps in this process.
On the matter of disclosure it all depends. IMHO there should be a disclosure. On the otherhand it may not be legally required. If the company is publicly traded then it's required. If not then it may still be required depending on the type of company or the type of data that may have been lost. This will vary from state to state as well. Either way it's not your responsibility to do the disclosing. It's not your data. You're an indirect employee of the company. You can not speak on the company's behalf. I would however recommend documenting the incident with a professional post-mortem on the systems. In that post-mortem report I would indicate the types of data that could have been compromised and recommend that the company have its legal staff review the incident to decide if the company required to take further action. Then leave it at that. You can't force them to do anything. You're a consultant; all you do is consult. If the company does this kind of crap often and is required make a disclosure but doesn't then I would sever ties with them. Eventually this will come back to haunt them. As the local IT contractor you'll feel the heat from it if this ever gets into court. Document everything, make good recommendations and keep your nose clean. If it ever gets to the point where you think the problem is going to become public or end up in court, document the problem and get out. The company can probably withstand the financial blow from a civil court but can you? You are bonded, right?
Don't write off college. I don't have a college degree but I'm damned lucky. I came into college with a wealth of IT experience behind me, not to mention what I got while I was there. The right opportunities opened up for me at the right times after I got booted from my university. The odds of lightning striking twice are pretty slim my friend. Get your ass in college and stick with it. Yes the first 2 years will most likely be filled with boring theory and other bullshit. That's the price you'll have to pay to reach the latter college years where you actually get to apply what you learned. IMHO this method of education is jacked up. Few people learn from textbooks and classroom instruction. The vast majority of human beings learn from actual hands-on, practial experience. Teach people how to apply what they're learning as they learn it. Don't expect them to do anything other than memorize the answers if you want to teach theory. That's just my opinion. Back on topic though, get your damned degree. I would recommend against a CS major unless you really want to code the rest of your life. I would highly recommend an actual engineering degree of some sort. This will give you the widest possible array of good jobs in the long-run. As an engineer you'll be able to apply for damn near any job that requires highly skilled people simply because the employers want people with an engineering background. The sky is the limit with an engineering degree. Pounding out code is usually the limit with a CS degree. I know a lot of people with CS degrees that aren't even in the IT industry anymore. Also, in this day and age it doesn't hurt to get a minor in business. This will also set you apart from the rest of the field. No, you probably don't want to be an MBA but to be able to understand business models and what your employer and their customers need will quickly run you up the employement food chain. I would also highly recommend any sort of project management and Engineering Process or Ethics courses you can get your hands on. Force yourself to work with others. It's worth it in the long run, especially in our field. Best of luck.
Best of luck with your deployment. There are a lot of options out there. My best advice is to do your homework (which you've already started it seems). It never hurts to demo solutions for a couple months either.
You're district administrators, board members, and tax payers will want something that 1) the current staff can manage, 2) someone else can manage if they ever have staff leave, and 3) get support in case of an emergency. This is one of the scenarios where I recommend a school thinks like a business by purchasing something that makes good strategic economic sense. I am a Linux and OSS bigot but I wouldn't recommend an OSS phone system for your environment. I would recommend something that anyone with a little networking experience can manage. I would recommend something that I can get top-notch support for at 3am when a maintenance window goes south. This is the return on investment for your money people.
There is likely an Asterisk-based solution that will suit your needs but IMHO it's not the best solution for the environment. If you were to ask if I thought you should run Linux servers and Linux lab PCs then I would say oh hell yeah. A phone system is a different beast entirely. It's not simply a new app to learn. You have to develop a completely different mentality towards your management practices. A system like that demands 5 9s at the least and absolutely no downtime if students are on the premise. The potential (but unlikely) cost difference between a commercial solution and an OSS isn't worth the liability if something were to happen while your homegrown phone system was down. Like I said, were this question about servers or some other service then I would say go the OSS route if you have the ability. This is a phone system though. You just can't take the risk.
In closing I would also recommend the Cisco solution because you will get an excellent discount from Cisco through your local VAR. You can also write off the vast majority of it in E-Rate. Best of luck.
I call BULLSHIT. If they had defended themselves in a US court that would have legitamized the US jurismydicktion of the matter, thus opening Steve and Spamhaus to challenges from ANY court in the WORLD. This is a very simple concept that apparently you do not get. Alan? Alan Ralsky, is that you? Eddy? Could it be you?
This needs a few more positive mod points and the parent needs many less. Schmuck.
I'm short on time so read the reply I wrote to the other reply to my comment for more detail. I deployed a CanIt Pro system for a small ISP (about 3500 users at the time). We dedicated 2 servers to filtering and 1 to the backend mail store. This ISP outsourced all of its services about 6 months later but had they left that mail system in place another month we'd have been filtering 500k pieces of spam per week with only 25k legit messages in the same time frame. No, that's not a typo. Those 3500 users were averaging 142 pieces of spam per user per week. Only 5% of the received mail was legit. I admin a Barracuda right now. I've added numerous DNSBLs to it as well as tweak what little filtering rules I have available to me. I still average around 7 pieces of spam in my inbox alone per day. Bayes it absolutely worthless on that box because users don't train it. The Cuda will not auto-train itself either (WTF Barracuda?!!). The Cuda is good for a quick and dirty turnkey spam filtering but for the same money you can buy something much better.
Greylisting, Auto-Bayes Analysis and scoring, Offloading of AV scanning to a dedicated server that integrates with your enterprise AV solution (an absolute must for an enterprise mail system), choice of AV products for AV scanning, SURBL support, TMDA support, source availability for customization (I did this heavily), more than blacklist/whitelist spam scoring options for users (that's all the Cuda will let users do), and many more options than I can remember after the day I've had. The Barracuda is not a bad product if the admin wants a so-so set it and forget it solution, if they have absolutely no desire to tweak anything, or if they aren't running a very high-volume mail system (even though Barracuda's stats say that they can support thousands of users). The CanIt Pro product is an mail admin's spam/AV/etc filter (similar to the phrase "a pilot's plane" referring to a plane that pilots love to use because of the enhanced capabilities offered).
You got screwed on the Barracuda. It's a piece of shit. I've had 3 different ones under my thumb and I am less than impressed, even in the most recent beta code. The spam filtering is marginal at best. Their Bayes methodology is a joke at the least. Their support pricing is not good at all. You would have been much better buying a Can-It Pro appliance from Roaring Penguin. You've probably heard of their famous OSS cousin, MIMEDefang, the tool that glues Sendmail to AV and spam filtering tools via the Milter library. Can-It Pro kicks ass. It actually gives you, the admin, complete control over every single aspect of your spam filtering solution. It also gives the admin to empower the end-users (power users) to give them a significant amount of flexibility in their own spam scanning. What does Barracuda give the admin in way of spam scoring flexibility? Jack shit. What does Barracuda give users of their systems? Less than jack shit. You can whitelist though. Woo. For less than you can buy an overpriced Barracuda you could have bought a Can-It Pro appliance w/ full support. You also get control over the appliance too. You can't even log into the Barracuda appliance to do something trivial like hardcode the speed and duplex of the nic or set the NTP server to your internal corporate time server. Nice.
You forgot that ignorant blonde bimbo from I'll-suck-anything-labeled-GOP hell.
Sea bass.
This deserves to be seen by everyone.
To me I read between the lines on what you wrote to mean that you had a nasty high-school experience. Fortunately not everyone has similar experiences. Then again these are all part of the experience. Hopefully people have enough "good" stuff to offset the bad. Sheltering your children from every negative experience does them more harm than good. Life is about both good and bad things happening. You can't have one without the other.
Well said. This easily says 80% of what needs to be said. Without support you have an OSS space heater at 02:00, assuming it will power up at all.
I wish the SmartNet prices were a little more reasonable. They should cut the prices dramatically for the lower-end 8x5x4-day replacement support so that more people can afford it. This would be a solid recurring business for Cisco whereas only a small percentage of Cisco customers bother buying support nowadays.
I'll say go figure. Do you have any photos?
All kids should be educated at home. I don't mean that they should be "home schooled". I literally mean that they should learn something at home. A good education begins at home. Unfortunately fewer and fewer parents every year give a shit about their children's future so long as it doesn't interfere with the parents' lives. Schools have become low-cost baby sitters. As much as we rag on the public school system we have to give credit where credit is due. They do a lot with very little. Imagine what they could do if they were properly supported (with involvment from the parents and community as well as financially).
Finally, on the topic of your intent to home school your children, I sincerely hope that you find a way to fill in the social voids your decision will create. Education in a public or private facility isn't just about classroom learning. It's also about the experience. It's about learning to socialize with others. It's about learning to work as a member of a team or community. Yes, some amazing people have come away from home schooling and done a lot for the world. Just as many amazing people have come out of the public school system and done even more good. Not-so-amazing people that are still good citizens and neighbors come out of the public school system. These people are the backbone of our society. Unfortunately home schooling deprives children of most of the social learning experiences that are readily available to other children. My personal choice would be to pick a good public school for my children and make the experience even better by being a part of my childrens' education. Children don't have to stop learning when the 3:00 bell rings. Help them with their homework. Visit a museum or a zoo. Emphasize the educational points in family trips. Help the system help your children.
That's my $.02 from a teacher's son, a teacher's nephew, a teacher's cousin, and a teacher's grand son.
I'm against SRS in its current implementation. 1) They're usually under-funded so many times they can't do all that they need to be doing. 2) There is rarely any good oversight over SRS so abuse like the case above is rampant. 3) Not every set of parents raises their children in the same manner. That doesn't mean what they are doing is illegal by any means (even if sometimes it turns your stomach). SRS workers need to be both smart and compassionate. Unfortunately I believe that all too often they are neither. It's just a job to too many of them. Take this case for example. SRS logged 7 reports about those little girls who's parents were starving them in their basement. WTF is up with that?! SRS was in the freaking house and didn't do a damned thing. That's fucked up.
Ha! What a crock of shit. Cables have always and will always move frequently if for no other reason than people can not afford (or will not buy) enough switchports for every drop. We had a new building wired not too long ago. In total there were over 1500 drops in the building. We had about 450 switchports total to support 400 users. Businesses however are extremely dynamic. One day they're using a conference room for a temporary training lab and need 12 working drops (wireless is not an option). The remodel X offices per week (I think it's a requirement from their charter), requiring additional drops on different walls. They move one department from one area to another. Of course one of the departments is the dev team which has numerous drops per cube. The point is wiring closets are never, EVER stagnant. Wiring closets are more comparable to a living breathing being. Hell it can develop an attitude. Wire neatly. Punch everything down and use cross connects. Don't try to be a wiring zealot. It won't work.
Stop making your own cables for production use! Stop being part of the problem that we have to come fix! Buy factory-made and certified cables that come with a warranty. You people are keeping people like me employed because of your save a buck attitudes. Then again I suppose that's a good thing, for me.
I would recommend looking at what other people in your situation are doing. Roaring Pengiun uses Debian for their appliances and push updates out to all systems. You could either open a dialog with their dev team (great people) or buy a low-end unit and look at the guts yourself. They give users complete control over the appliance which is nice.