I'm interested to see that myself. What about in the immediate airspace above land (-500 feet)? Can that be sold separately? It seems like CMU or some other university declared the airspace above their campus to be their property to keep wireless conflicts from happening. I guess they don't realize that all HAM radio operators (which must be licensed) take precedence over those same ranges and can do whatever they want in those ranges legally. Someday we will have to go down in the ground or up in the air. I'm really curious how that will be handled. We may not be alive when that comes to be though.:-)
Sorry for the confusion. I geared my post more towards line being laid in general. Around here the railroad companies own the land they have tracks on (except when they pass through cities). If the line is being leased for railroad tracks already and they then lay line along side of it for another purpose entirely, I could easily see some conflict arising. The land was leased for one purpose and was then use to server an additional purpose. That could easily be the cause of some trouble for somebody. Anyhow, I probably should have spelled out what my scenario was written around. Whoops!:-)
I'm curious what your reasons are for disliking LinuxPPC. Would you mind sharing them?
Personally I really like LinuxPPC. I have numerous installations in a number of locations and I don't tend to have many or really any problems that I can't fix myself. I used to admin a mirror server that mirrored a large number of Linux distros and other open-source items (apache, proftpd, mrtg, LDP, etc...) and it was hosted on a box running LinuxPPC 99. It ran quite well for a machine that had as little RAM as it had and suffered as much pounding as it did. I'm still impressed by it. I use it here at work as a personal server and a place to host our network statistics and other information. It's been rock solid since I put up that machine when I started work here 10 months ago. I use it at home as well and haven't had any trouble there. Isn't Tivo also based on LinuxPPC?
Sure you occasionally run into problems with something not compiling. That's not really a LinuxPPC problem but more of a coder problem not writing source to be as portable as possible across common hardware platforms. That happens. Ask an Alpha user.:)
There have been some problems with LPPC in the past like sound support, support for new machines, etc... but the tend to get fixed quickly. Support for new hardware doesn't happen over night after all. Maybe if Apple divulged a little info to the LPPC group a few days or weeks before dropping a new machine on the market, support would come sooner.
I can't honestly say that Linux on PPC-based architectures would be as far as they are today without the support of LinuxPPC Inc. MkLinux never would have gotten it here. YellowDog wasn't even on the scene yet. I don't believe Debian had been ported to PPC yet either. In the Fall of '97, you had either MkLinux DR2.1 or LinuxPPC to choose from. Someone has to buy the newly released pieces of hardware and donate them to developers for progress to be made on supporting those new machines. LinuxPPC usually does this act. All PPC Linux distros greatly benefit from this, not just LinuxPPC. YellowDog does too. So will Mandrake. So will the rest.
Personally I've had really good luck with LinuxPPC and will continue to use and support their efforts. I'd be interested to hear about the problems you encountered though. I'll probably purchase a copy of YellowDog 2.0 just for the hell of it and give it a whirl. Good luck with whichever distro you use.
so let's see here... these people are willing to have a large, noise, huge moving metal mass move through their property at any time of night, but they think they should be compensated just to run a cable that does not move, does not look any worse than the tracks, does not make noise, does not stop traffic, and does not pollute? I can't believe how selfish these people are. What's the problem with laying a cable?
It's a simple matter of ownership. When a railroad company wants to run tracks across your property, they must purchase or rent it from you. When a cell or radio provider wants to put a fenced in tower and small shack on your property, they must purchase or rent it from you. When you lay an oil, water, or gas pipeline across my property, you must pay rent to me each month. This is the case just south of my home town. In the late '20s a gas line was laid across south-central/south-eastern Kansas. It crossed the family land of a friend of mine. The gas company gave the owners of the land two options. One was $100 in cash. The other was that the price of gas for whomever owns that piece of land will never go up higher than the cost of natural gas the year the line was laid. That's right. They still pay gas prices from the late '20s. Nice.:) Do you think that just because you want to lay a few strands of fiber in the ground that you are exempt from paying me some sort of restitution? I don't think so. What happens if I'm a farmer and you laid the fiber in the ground across one of my fields. I go out one weekend and rebuild a few terraces in that field and end up digging up that piece of fiber. Was it my fault? Unless I gave permission to put that line there (and believe you me I wouldn't do it unless I could have some compensation for baby-sitting it), it is trespassing on my property. You trespassed when you put it there. You dug a trench in my field. That's destruction of private property. Like I said at the beginning, it's a simple matter of ownership.
Honestly, where's the problem here? Here's how I purchase a book. I browse through Amazon and B&N to find a book I want and read the reviews; then I head over to FatBrain and buy it. It's that simple. I suck up a little bandwidth from Amazon and B&N, read their reviews, and then give the business to FatBrain. I used to love B&N. I still like them but not as much as FatBrain. Anyhow, that's how I handle my Amazon dislike--hit'em in the pocket books with my ~$500/year of books I buy.
I know similar suggestions have been made but I haven't seen anyone suggest this one just yet. I propose the RIAA and MPAA join forces to sue Bob Metcalf for his immense part in creating what eventually became the Ethernet standards we use today. It's used in every dorm room and is the major factor of the media that carries copyrighted works. How dare he not rewrite the standards to incorporate facist copy-protections schemes at the beckoning of the RIAA and MPAA. Shame on dear Bob. BTW, Ethernet had its 29th birthday on teh 22nd of May. Oh, and did I forget the smartjack makers? What about the cable producing companies? Surely could implement copy-protection schemes directly into their wiring and jacks. They are just too lazy to do it. I am really getting sick of the RIAA and MPAA. Honestly if I was a foreign country training terrorist and having a hard time finding buildings to practice on, might I suggest whatever buildings encompass the RIAA and MPAA? I don't think there is any down to earth American that would miss those bastards one bit. Oh wait, now I can be like that poor guy that posted to a newsgroup about picketing in front of some building and his comments were taken so far out of context that they are barely legible. Kudos to that judge for allowing that fsckup. FYI, this post is meant to be taken with a large block of salt, 4 whiskey shots, and a big chunk of sarcasm.
I use netatalk on my LinuxPPC boxes. I don't have much time to spend on configuring it (it's pretty simplistic as it is) but it seems like you can configure netatalk to encrypt the auth. There is a "uams" directory. I can't say for sure or not but I'm pretty sure you can do it. You might want to check in on a newer version over at their new website. Development picked up again a while back. Good luck buddy.
I have to agree with that. I'm not a BSD person myself (yet, but I've been thinking about playing broadening my horizons a bit) but I think that would be cool.
Thanks for taking a step or two towards security responsiblity. It's nice to see a company step up to the plate and swing once in a while. If you can maintain or even better improve security with your OS's, you can take a much needed step in front of a number of other companies that don't worry about security concerns until their blunders go public and threaten to hurt their bottomline or public image. Security never has ben a major problem for Apple because very little can be done to a Mac remotely. Now with OS X upon us, those old beliefs are out the window. I'd personally like to see Apple take the initiative to install the operating system in a very secure state. Pre-configure TCP wrappers in a DENY ALL state. Turn off everything that doesn't absolutely have to be on. Wrap everything wether it's on or not. Even packet filter certain things would be nice. Take the initiative to make things a litle more secure, unlike Irix and Redhat that tend to turn on way more services than are really needed. That could greatly limit the number of security concerns now and down the road. Sure you may find a new sploit for ftpd down the road but if it's already disable and/or secured to allow access only to a few hosts.... Of course this is just my opinion, I could be wrong.
This may have already been said but in case it hasn't... What ever happened to good ole trust? If you can't ever find a way to trust your kids, how can you ever expect them to become trustworthy adults? Kids make mistakes. Kids learn from mistakes. It's part of the process of life. Kids learn from other kids horrific mistakes as well (like becoming a teenage mother or father, doing drugs, driving drunk, and even killing someone). They can be tough lessons to learn but no one ever said learning was easy. The easier you make the learning process, the more George Carlin views on the 'pussification of America' seems true. If you treat your kid like a baby, they will act like a baby--maybe that's why linguists say to stop the baby talk early. Of course that's my opinion; I could be wrong.
Hey thanks for the input. It's greatly appreciated. I'm going to have to do a lot of research and trial & error to make this a really viable and efficient solution for them. I may do some of it myself when I get a house (instead of an over priced apartment).
The reason that guy used motor oil was because of its thermal capabilities. It holds heat really well and he had plenty of it to spare. Freezing isn't a worry either, although you can't let it get too cold or your circulation pump will hate you.:) Water and anti-freeze would work too but I would think that your pipes would eventually gum up.
I think a wire screen could protect a solar panel. Let's say 3/4" by 3/4" screen primed and painted black, stretched over the surface of the panel about 4" away from the glass and supported with a square tubing framework. I think that would protect it from most hail. Baseball or softball sized hail might still break through. Any hail smaller than that probably won't hurt the panel. It's an interesting thought. I think it's doable. I'm going to have to dig around for details on how to convert and store the electricty those cells pump out. I should have finished that dual computer/electrical engineering major. That would have helped.:)
The winds depend on the season and the year. I remember one winter way back in HS when we had a bit of a dust bowl. The ground was super dry. We had just had about 16" of snow and everything but the snow was a dry as dirt. The snow/dirt off of the fields started blowing. Visibility was null. It sucked. In late May, towards the last day of school with 90 degree weather there was still snow in the deepest ditches. The dirt insulated the snow so well that it didn't melt. If you cut a core out of it with a knife, you'd find dirty snow under the top layer of dirt. How much wind do we have to have a productive windmill?
That article also talked about WWW disclaimers. I personally like the one used on the Oklahoma State University's Tuba section website. Warning, this may only be funny to fellow tuba players.:)
Ok, I know this has probably already been brought up but after skimming the top comments I didn't see it mentioned in the way I'm going to mention this.
Tell me something. What kind of idiotic netadmin would use something like the RBL to block routes on a router? That is the most assinine thing I've ever heard of. What happens if your provider's mail server gets listed? Whoops. What happens if the mail server of your DNS registrar gets blacklisted for whatever reason? Whoops. Gee I sure hope we don't need to update any of our records or renew a payment on our primary domain. Good thing I have that Yahoo address for when things like this happen. Oh darn, did the RBL just list keiko.ebay.com and the CEO missed an outbid notice on a gift for his wife. Well he should know better than to rely on such tempermental things as email from a very well known company like ebay to be on time and accurate.
I don't mean to sounds sarcastic but... Wait, I take that back. Yes I do mean to sound sarcastic. I mean to sound very sarcastic. Using the RBL to drop routes on a router is one of the dumbest things I think I've ever heard of. It's even more dumb than the time my super asked why we couldn't just turn off spanning tree in our flat-as-Calista-Flockhart's-chest network. And to think that people actually get paid to be this dumb. I use the DUL and RSS and greatly enjoy the assistance they give me in filtering out eroneous and illegitimate mail. I've even considered the use of RBL or ORBS from time to time. I have to have a certain degree of trust with a group that puts something like RBL or ORBS together. I trust them to filter out mail servers of spammers, spam friendly hosts, or misconfigured/compromised machines acting as an open relay. That doesn't mean that I want to drop all traffic to and from those hosts. I just don't want their damned spam. Does anyone else feel that RBL and routing just don't mix? My views may be skewed coming from an ISP and a university standpoint (separate thoughts and jobs) but this just doesn't make sense to me.
Ok, I just thought of an analogy that describes my thoughts on this. Using the RBL to drop routes at your border routers, hence dropping traffic that someone else deemed to be bad, is like the DMV or DOT using road spikes at on ramps to prevent all vehicles using Firestone tires from getting onto the highway. Someone else said they were bad tires and you automagically believe them and prevent all of them from entering onto your section of the highway, no matter what you tax-paying county/state residents want. That's a good business plan. Make them pay their dues but don't give them any say in what they get in the end.
In all honesty, using the RBL or any other such list to decide my filtering rules goes against every belief I've ever had as a network and/or security professional. Security. I haven't touched on that. It's late and I need my beauty sleep so I'll leave you with this one last thought. Consipiring with others to submit bogus RBL nominations or lightly compromise a machine enough to spam from it to get it on the RBL is one helluva DoS attack, don't you think? It's like probing ports of a machine that's running portsentry (set to drop routes) with their gateway of last resort, mail server, DNS servers, etc... addresses. That makes for a nice DoS attack too. Not only would this make them fall off of the face of the 'Net, but it would quite easily cast the shadow of guilt onto MAPS for accepting the bad nominations, or at least off of your trail for some time. It's an interesting thought...
My appolgoies for my grammatical errors. I was writing quickly. When I'm on a roll I move to fast to double-check my work. I should put something in my sig about reading for meaning and not what I really wrote.:-)
I'd like to do this to the house my parents are wanting to build soon. It will be a clean start out in the country. Ok, when I say country I really mean country--not that you live in the subarbs with a gas station up the road a mile and 10 trees on your property. I mean hedge trees, cattle, deer, creek, lake, ponds, dirt roads, shotguns and coon huntin'. That's real country. They will have 2 or 3 large out buildings. Heating those could be accomplished with with solar water heating panels on the roof and piping laid in the concrete floor. That would work well. A friend of the family did it with a large wood stove heating pipes that get run to a storage tank (a small oil tank, 200-400 gal) incased in concrete block walls with sand packed in around it. The fluid was pumped through piping in the floors that heated the building. The fluid used is old motor oil. It heats easily and retains that heat well too. Fire up the stove once a week or so, heat the oil in the tank, and heat your building for a week. That would work well for heating a building or heating water for hot water usage. What I'm more interested in is electrical usage. I don't want it to be their primary source or power or really even a secondary or backup source. Supplemental power is what I'm after. There will be a large number of landscaping items that will consume power. Acent and border lighting, pump-driven water fall/creek, etc... If we could use the power for that, it would be a big step. They already make small independent acent lighting units that are solar powered. They charge up during the day and kick on at night. I would rather use cheaper low voltage units and power/control them as a group instead.
One of my questions is about solar panel maintenance. Here in Kansas we get hail storms. They happen every year. Sometimes it misses an area or two and sometimes it totals vehicles and crops. Will that kill solar panels. Is there a way to protect them? Maybe a hard screen or wire screen 3-4 inches above the panels would work. Another question is about winter. Will hard freezes affect the panels at all? Would motor oil be better used in a case like that or water with anti-freeze (since it will be thinner than cold oil). What about battery life and maintenance? Will that be a big hassle? I'd love to find a good resource that can set some of these concerns to rest. It would be a really viable source energy-savings I think. A windmill isn't out of the question either. Any thought or past experience anyone care share is greatly appreciated.
I did some research into this a few years back when we in the helpdesk at Kansas State University decided we should put up some sort of knowledge base or searchable FAQ. Or generic html-based FAQ was greatly showing it's age and relied heavily on the time of senior consultants to update it. We were understaffed and overworked. Anything to help was needed. I found this one site purely on accident and was greatly impressed by it. Indiana University built their own knowledge base with in-house knowledge and resources. The outcome is very impressive.
Another method of doing this is to use the FAQ-O-MATIC, written primarily by Jon Howell I believe. Jon's approach differs because the FOM is meant to be user driven. It can easily be closed up for in-house maintenance only but it's original intent was to be a user-driven and user-support tool to aide other users. I've used it and have been impressed with it as well. It gets better and better with each new release.
Any knowledge base type of tool will have one very important thing in common. They require time, and possibly lots of it. They require time to build, time to administer, time to update, and time to maintain. It's not always an easy task. If you can delegate some of the responsibility for bits and pieces of it down to others better suited to those bits and pieces, all the better. Making sure they keep up on their end of the deal though will need some superior oversight. Indiana Unv says they spend 300 hours a week on their KB. While it may not be exactly that much time and of that time they may not be working hard on the KB, they do spend a lot of time on it (I imagine they took their total number of student consultant * a percentage of their weekly working hours to get 300 hours--it's still a lot of hours). I never built K-State a knowledge base. I started more than once but I always ended up running out of time. If this is something they want you to do, make sure they know that it can use up a lot of your time, especially in the beginning. Make sure they acknowledge this and don't expect you to do this job and another fulltime job on top of it. Good luck!
I have a question. This may have already been asked; if so, bear with me. What is the definition of pornography? Is our Supreme Court qualified to define the word? Are they also highly experienced art specialists that can say 'this is art and this is not'? Is pornography just something that is offensive to other people? If so, than I can of lots of things that offend me that might not offend someone else. Is the definition something that is sexually offensive to someone else? If that's the case than a woman dressed in a bathing suit may be offensive to Mormon or Amish (sp?) people. What about a picture of a pregnant woman walking down the street with her husband, say they are documenting their first pregnancy. I don't find that offensive and I can't think of anyone that would but someone might and obviously it has a sexual connotation to it. JC Penny's catalogs are available in all their stores and you don't have to be a certain age to buy them. $5 is all it takes. Let's say I'm 12 and I just bought the catalog, saying it's for my Mom who's in a hurry and went to another part of the store. I take it home and flip to the lingerie section. ooh ahh look at all the beautiful women in lacy, frilly clothing. Is JC Penny's responsible for selling me the catalog? Should they have run me through an adult verification service first? What if I slipped the catalog order postcard out of a friend's Mom's Victoria's Secret catalog and sent it in in my sister's name. I check the mail religiously and eventually it comes in. I snag it before anyone else sees it. I'm 10. Who's responsible? Has anything wrong actually been done besides committing postal fraud? No. What about magazines in grocery store checkout lines. Some of those are pretty open. Is some woman on the cover of Vogue concealing her bare breasts with her hands considered pornography? How can anyone honestly say that their judgment of pornography is shared by everyone in every race, gender, or religion? It's simple. You can't. Quite frankly I don't think 9 or however many justices there are in the Supreme Court are even remotely qualified to pass judgement on such a thing. I don't think there is any person or any panel or people that can even hint of such qualifications. There's nothing that needs to be controlled here folks except for the rash few that think there is. Sit down with your kids and have that little talk. They aren't stupid. You have HBO. THEY PROBABLY KNOW MORE ABOUT SEX THAN YOU DID WHEN YOU WERE 20. It's not going to freak them out or scare them for life. Approach them and be honest. That's my opinion; of course I may be wrong, in your eyes.
While physical security is an absoulte must, I find that most compromises are remotely done. Few people have the balls to walk into an office and take over a network drop. Few would be gutsy enough to jimmy the lock on a wiring closet door or cabinet. Any teenager can run a script on you from the outside and feel relatively safe because he's using a dialup account he registered in his English teacher's name. Now if we're talking about a site that has something to really protect, sensitive data not the boss's pron, than yes physical security is a must. When you really have something to hide, the worst attacks come from within. Social engineering comes at you from all sides. Joe Blow in the mail room is really short $$ one month and someone offers him big $$ if he can just slip into person XYZ's office after work and nab a copy of their inbox. Things like that are more common than you think. Basically what all this means is that both types of security are a must. Physical security is of much less importance to the average Joe though. Do I really worry about who can walk up to my Linux firewall in my house and boot it into single? Not really. Do I care who can query Bind on my box? Of course. Do I care who can query apache on my box? Oh hell yes. I don't want my provider turning me off for violating their anti-server policy.
The thought of such a thing makes me feel warm and fuzzy all over, like under my arms. In fact it smells a lot like my armpits. That's odd. Wait a second; it's like my ass crack too! Warm and fuzzy with a unique smell. I'd better watch out cause didn't Time Warner patent that smell a while back? I guess circumventing the protection of the elastic band on my BVDs puts me in violation of the DMCA. It was pretty easy too. Just hook and pull. Oh wait, now I've told the method to the whole world. Now I'm really up shits creek without a double roll of Cottonelle and a Black Box catalog.
At the very least, you and all the other webmasters involved should file formal complaints with the Better Business Bureau. I've done that before. Once it went far enough for me to get my $$. The other times I convinced enough other victims to also file and the business went under some sort of audit. Worked well. Check with your local office for details.
...because I don't use X. I might export my display to another machine once a month or so but other than that, I don't use X. Ever. The command line is what I prefer. Oh, and did I mention that I'm also a Mac guru. Yes even I like the command line.
Whoops... They told me it was two weeks ago. They hired me to be an outside attacker. Apologize to the boss for me for the DDoS of his desktop machine. Oh, and compliment "The Captain" on his pron collection would ya?:-)
Although now that I read the troll's next reply, my anger boils even more. An imbecile is he. The way he writes his replies, it sounds like he's been on the other side of the fence. He's been the accuser, unjustly delivering punishment to someone that can't defend themselves for something he himself probably jacked up. I can't think of any other reason why he'd respond with such unwarranted ridicule. Perhaps he's the son of some person high up in IT (the higher you go, the more IT illiterate they get) that comes home to cry on his families shoulder because all his users are idiots and all they do is ask questions and break things all day long. Wah Wah Waaaaa....
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Personally I really like LinuxPPC. I have numerous installations in a number of locations and I don't tend to have many or really any problems that I can't fix myself. I used to admin a mirror server that mirrored a large number of Linux distros and other open-source items (apache, proftpd, mrtg, LDP, etc...) and it was hosted on a box running LinuxPPC 99. It ran quite well for a machine that had as little RAM as it had and suffered as much pounding as it did. I'm still impressed by it. I use it here at work as a personal server and a place to host our network statistics and other information. It's been rock solid since I put up that machine when I started work here 10 months ago. I use it at home as well and haven't had any trouble there. Isn't Tivo also based on LinuxPPC?
Sure you occasionally run into problems with something not compiling. That's not really a LinuxPPC problem but more of a coder problem not writing source to be as portable as possible across common hardware platforms. That happens. Ask an Alpha user. :)
There have been some problems with LPPC in the past like sound support, support for new machines, etc... but the tend to get fixed quickly. Support for new hardware doesn't happen over night after all. Maybe if Apple divulged a little info to the LPPC group a few days or weeks before dropping a new machine on the market, support would come sooner.
I can't honestly say that Linux on PPC-based architectures would be as far as they are today without the support of LinuxPPC Inc. MkLinux never would have gotten it here. YellowDog wasn't even on the scene yet. I don't believe Debian had been ported to PPC yet either. In the Fall of '97, you had either MkLinux DR2.1 or LinuxPPC to choose from. Someone has to buy the newly released pieces of hardware and donate them to developers for progress to be made on supporting those new machines. LinuxPPC usually does this act. All PPC Linux distros greatly benefit from this, not just LinuxPPC. YellowDog does too. So will Mandrake. So will the rest.
Personally I've had really good luck with LinuxPPC and will continue to use and support their efforts. I'd be interested to hear about the problems you encountered though. I'll probably purchase a copy of YellowDog 2.0 just for the hell of it and give it a whirl. Good luck with whichever distro you use.
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The reason that guy used motor oil was because of its thermal capabilities. It holds heat really well and he had plenty of it to spare. Freezing isn't a worry either, although you can't let it get too cold or your circulation pump will hate you. :) Water and anti-freeze would work too but I would think that your pipes would eventually gum up.
I think a wire screen could protect a solar panel. Let's say 3/4" by 3/4" screen primed and painted black, stretched over the surface of the panel about 4" away from the glass and supported with a square tubing framework. I think that would protect it from most hail. Baseball or softball sized hail might still break through. Any hail smaller than that probably won't hurt the panel. It's an interesting thought. I think it's doable. I'm going to have to dig around for details on how to convert and store the electricty those cells pump out. I should have finished that dual computer/electrical engineering major. That would have helped. :)
The winds depend on the season and the year. I remember one winter way back in HS when we had a bit of a dust bowl. The ground was super dry. We had just had about 16" of snow and everything but the snow was a dry as dirt. The snow/dirt off of the fields started blowing. Visibility was null. It sucked. In late May, towards the last day of school with 90 degree weather there was still snow in the deepest ditches. The dirt insulated the snow so well that it didn't melt. If you cut a core out of it with a knife, you'd find dirty snow under the top layer of dirt. How much wind do we have to have a productive windmill?
Thanks again for the reply.
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Tell me something. What kind of idiotic netadmin would use something like the RBL to block routes on a router? That is the most assinine thing I've ever heard of. What happens if your provider's mail server gets listed? Whoops. What happens if the mail server of your DNS registrar gets blacklisted for whatever reason? Whoops. Gee I sure hope we don't need to update any of our records or renew a payment on our primary domain. Good thing I have that Yahoo address for when things like this happen. Oh darn, did the RBL just list keiko.ebay.com and the CEO missed an outbid notice on a gift for his wife. Well he should know better than to rely on such tempermental things as email from a very well known company like ebay to be on time and accurate.
I don't mean to sounds sarcastic but... Wait, I take that back. Yes I do mean to sound sarcastic. I mean to sound very sarcastic. Using the RBL to drop routes on a router is one of the dumbest things I think I've ever heard of. It's even more dumb than the time my super asked why we couldn't just turn off spanning tree in our flat-as-Calista-Flockhart's-chest network. And to think that people actually get paid to be this dumb. I use the DUL and RSS and greatly enjoy the assistance they give me in filtering out eroneous and illegitimate mail. I've even considered the use of RBL or ORBS from time to time. I have to have a certain degree of trust with a group that puts something like RBL or ORBS together. I trust them to filter out mail servers of spammers, spam friendly hosts, or misconfigured/compromised machines acting as an open relay. That doesn't mean that I want to drop all traffic to and from those hosts. I just don't want their damned spam. Does anyone else feel that RBL and routing just don't mix? My views may be skewed coming from an ISP and a university standpoint (separate thoughts and jobs) but this just doesn't make sense to me.
Ok, I just thought of an analogy that describes my thoughts on this. Using the RBL to drop routes at your border routers, hence dropping traffic that someone else deemed to be bad, is like the DMV or DOT using road spikes at on ramps to prevent all vehicles using Firestone tires from getting onto the highway. Someone else said they were bad tires and you automagically believe them and prevent all of them from entering onto your section of the highway, no matter what you tax-paying county/state residents want. That's a good business plan. Make them pay their dues but don't give them any say in what they get in the end.
In all honesty, using the RBL or any other such list to decide my filtering rules goes against every belief I've ever had as a network and/or security professional. Security. I haven't touched on that. It's late and I need my beauty sleep so I'll leave you with this one last thought. Consipiring with others to submit bogus RBL nominations or lightly compromise a machine enough to spam from it to get it on the RBL is one helluva DoS attack, don't you think? It's like probing ports of a machine that's running portsentry (set to drop routes) with their gateway of last resort, mail server, DNS servers, etc... addresses. That makes for a nice DoS attack too. Not only would this make them fall off of the face of the 'Net, but it would quite easily cast the shadow of guilt onto MAPS for accepting the bad nominations, or at least off of your trail for some time. It's an interesting thought...
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One of my questions is about solar panel maintenance. Here in Kansas we get hail storms. They happen every year. Sometimes it misses an area or two and sometimes it totals vehicles and crops. Will that kill solar panels. Is there a way to protect them? Maybe a hard screen or wire screen 3-4 inches above the panels would work. Another question is about winter. Will hard freezes affect the panels at all? Would motor oil be better used in a case like that or water with anti-freeze (since it will be thinner than cold oil). What about battery life and maintenance? Will that be a big hassle? I'd love to find a good resource that can set some of these concerns to rest. It would be a really viable source energy-savings I think. A windmill isn't out of the question either. Any thought or past experience anyone care share is greatly appreciated.
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Another method of doing this is to use the FAQ-O-MATIC, written primarily by Jon Howell I believe. Jon's approach differs because the FOM is meant to be user driven. It can easily be closed up for in-house maintenance only but it's original intent was to be a user-driven and user-support tool to aide other users. I've used it and have been impressed with it as well. It gets better and better with each new release.
Any knowledge base type of tool will have one very important thing in common. They require time, and possibly lots of it. They require time to build, time to administer, time to update, and time to maintain. It's not always an easy task. If you can delegate some of the responsibility for bits and pieces of it down to others better suited to those bits and pieces, all the better. Making sure they keep up on their end of the deal though will need some superior oversight. Indiana Unv says they spend 300 hours a week on their KB. While it may not be exactly that much time and of that time they may not be working hard on the KB, they do spend a lot of time on it (I imagine they took their total number of student consultant * a percentage of their weekly working hours to get 300 hours--it's still a lot of hours). I never built K-State a knowledge base. I started more than once but I always ended up running out of time. If this is something they want you to do, make sure they know that it can use up a lot of your time, especially in the beginning. Make sure they acknowledge this and don't expect you to do this job and another fulltime job on top of it. Good luck!
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