Actually, I've used it quite successfully under Linux for web, MySQL, and mail servers. The mail server is the most abused server, and it has no speed problems. We have 3 IDE drives as a RAID5 under Linux (md device). That server has been known to pass over 100k Emails per day. Sure, it's mostly spam and viruses coming in, but they're still received, scanned, and everything but the high scoring spam and viruses are delivered.
So, several hundred users using IMAP and POP3 to collect mail, SMTP to send mail, and the 100k or so incoming messages do add up to a lot of work, and it handles it flawlessly.
My goals are to build a file server that can live through a drive failure with no loss of data, and will be easy to rebuild. Ideally, in the event of a failure, I'd just like to remove the bad hard drive and install a new one and be done with it. Is this possible?
You want a Promise UltraTrak SX8000 It's the easy idiotproof array. We're using several of these.
If a drive fails, it beeps at you til you replace it. You just yank it out, and put in a new drive, the same size or larger. It then rebuilds automatically. No shutdown or reboot required.
The Linux crowd will be happy to know the RM series runs linux. I don't know about the SX series, but I suppose it does too. Either one appears to the server to be a single SCSI drive. No drivers required, other than making the SCSI card of your choice work.
There's the Linux method of doing it too, which I like a lot. It saves you a *LOT* of money in extra hardware. You can go with 3 drives without adding any extra cards to your system, or you can put in IDE controllers to add as many drives as your system can support (PCI slots, power, and physical mounting points are the limitation). Read the "Software-RAID-HOWTO", which should come with your system. I've done many of these also, and they work quite nicely. You have to shut down the system to swap a drive, and then run `raidaddhot` with a couple parameters (the md device, if I remember right), and you can be running while it rebuilds.
How many drives to I need to get this done, 2,4 or 5? What size should they be? I know when you implement RAID, your usable drive space is N% of the total drive space depending on the RAID level."
You should have looked it up before you posted.
RAID 5 is the most common for a large redundant array. The array size is (N-1)*size . The more drives you use in a single array, the better off you are for size loss.
RAID 0 is striping. No redundancy, which you won't be happy with. (One failure means losing the array.
RAID 1 is mirroring. With two drives, you still only have the size of one.
RAID 50 is nice where it does striping across redundant arrays. You lose size, but gain speed.
Most other RAID types aren't very popular for various reasons.
Watch out for going over 2Tb in size on a single block device. I'm having problems with that right now. I have two Promise VTrak 15100's with 15 250Gb SATA drives in each, and anything with a block size over 2Tb is giving me grief. There are legitimate reasons for this, most of which newer documentation claims to be fixing, but I'm still having problems with a current Linux release. Making logical drives under 2Tb works, but doesn't accomplish what I need.
After all these years of filling out fake information in online forms, I'm not really very sure what my own name, address, or social security information is any more.
Maybe that's why the IRS is less than entertained by my tax returns.
So, what exactly would the conversion from normal bandwidth speeds (gracefully not saying it), to Mps? I'd like to switch all my bandwidth graphing over to that, just to piss off the bosses.:)
Hehe. Reminds me of a long argument that I had with someone on FidoNet back in the day. I was on a 486/33, and he was on a state of the art 486/50. He insisted that CPU speeds would never reach 100Mhz, because the machines would cause too much radio interference, and more importantly, the radiation (huh?) from a chip going that fast would kill you in minutes.
I fear for my life every time I go in the colo, with all those 1Ghz+ machines around me. Good thing I have my lead apron, foil hat, and shielded jock strap.:)
Just kidding. I'm the most laid back person that walks into the colo. I show up in T-shirt, shorts, and sandals. They frown upon me bringing in beer, so I usually finish off the one I'm drinking before I go in. I enjoy walking into professional buildings looking like I just came from the beach. hehe
My girlfriend did make me a foil hat though, so I can wear it when I don't want the aliens listening to my thoughts. You never know, they may intercept the password to a porn server.
I recommend you break out the Armatron to hit those keys. We all know robots are intended to serve in dangerous industrial environments that aren't safe for humans.:)
Remember the days when the "high" bandwidth users had USR HST modems, and regular folks were perfectly happy downloading their porn from BBS's at 2400 baud?:)
Who would ever need 1.5Mb/s? That's the speed of the Internet backbone. Well, everyone knows that Internet thing won't make it. BBS are the future! (hehe) Now houses are getting several Mb/s and wanting more..
Too bad the 200Mb/s DSL is just a proposition. TI hopes to have a chip out sometime next year, and the first practical tests in 2006. We'd be lucky to see something in any sort of serious use by 2010. Consider how many users are still on 56k modems. The telco in the area I lived in 2 years ago still didn't have the infrastructure in place to provide DSL, and that was a fairly modern area.
Frequently, it isn't the technology that holds us back, it's the implementation. There's nothing as far as technology goes, that says you can't have OC192 run between every city. Price and demand prohibit it. If it costs several million dollars to run fiber to Bumstick Nebraska, and only 1000 customers who want to pay for it, it won't be run there.
Consider the "lit" buildings idea. Bandwidth providers were running serious bandwidth to office buildings, to provide bandwidth for everyone inside. Sweet idea. I'm a customer in the building, I just call up and say I want service, and I'm on. Too bad I've never managed to actually find a job in a lit building. I'd love to send network problems to someone else. "Hey buddy, your network is down."
The implementation isn't even necessarly based on cost. I've been trying to get someone to talk about roof rights in the office building we're in. We have a clear line of sight less than 10 miles to the colo where our equipment is, where we have 1Gb/s fiber. I wanted to put up a high gain antenna on each end, and run an 802.11g link (ahhhh, 54Mb/s). On the colo end, they've been more than happy to discuss it with me. They've talked prices, taken me to the roof to look, and we've discussed everything that needs to be done.
On the office end, no one will talk to me about it. I've been trying for close to two years, and keep getting run around. I could provide service to everyone in the building (22 floors of mostly law offices). Instead there are lots of offices with no connectivity, and the ones that have it, have DSL, cablemodem, or a T1.
For my own home connectivity (802.11b over 1/2 mile with Linksys WAP11's, no amplifiers), I have a relatively low gain panel, and a high gain parabolic dish, pointed at each other. On the office side, I have the antenna propped up against a window inside. Every day I do work online from home, I'm proving the technology works.
Unfortunately, due buildings and a hill, I don't have line of sight to the colo, or I'd set up my house to relay a 802.11g connection. I need at least another 50 feet up., and the existance of power lines (and being in a residential neighborhood) keep me from putting a tower up.
I can't. She uses the enemies software (XP Home, for her games), and it won't allow that.:( At least without begging some Redmond support minion for permission to do something so daring.
I'll be so happy when more authors are writing games for Linux, or Wine is much farther advanced.
I'd rather pay the Wine people money, than pay Microsoft, and have to ask for permission to change my own hardware around. Hell, this is *MY* equipment, and I did pay for the software, if I want to swap parts between my machine all day, isn't that *MY* business?
I've always bought close to bleeding edge. Like machines that won't break the bank, but are fast.
My first x86 was a 486/33, which I got just after the 50's came out. Whoohoo.
My next machine was a AMD K5/133+. If I remember right, retail on the CPU alone was $200. That machine is now running a friends personal website.:)
Right now, my machine is a 1.1Ghz Athlon. It was screaming fast for the day, but now I'm looking at my girlfriend's 2800+ saying "damn, more than twice as fast as mine."
Even our mail server, a bleeding edge Opteron 242, is slow now. We're getting parts in now for a pair of Opteron 848's.
After setting up Fedora in the mail server, I'm looking forward to an Opteron workstation. The first time I set up the mail server, I installed X and all, just to see it work, then I reinstalled with as CLI only.
In a year, there'll be something bigger and faster (and probably incompatable) out anyways. It's always like that, if you haven't been paying attention.:)
Even if you bought a motherboard today, in a year the top of the line processor probably won't work on it anyways.
I got to drive one of the nice newer Mercedes coupes,with a big V8 in it. They were bragging up the horsepower, so I was wanted proof. "Let me drive." I ran it hard. The owner, in the passenger seat, was impressed with the power I was pulling from it. Then asked the owner how much the car cost. Something around $100k. I handed him the keys to my car (2000 TransAm WS/6) and said "now drive this."
I paid about $25k for my car. New it was something like $30k. My car has better handling, better acceleration, better braking, and is faster. This was before I did any mods to it. The interior trim may not be as nice, but my car does have all the options including leather seats, and it turns more heads when I drive past, than a Mercedes does. It's comfortable enough for two people to ride in it all day (done that many times), and the back seats are just about as big.
Apple's are very pretty. I've used a few. I was happy that my girlfriend was on one using OS/X, but when that machine started acting flaky, we didn't buy a new Apple, we spent $1500 on really good parts. AMD 2800+, 1Gb RAM, 200Gb hdd, DVD reader, DVD writer, asus motherboard, high end video card, etc, etc.. What Apple does $1500 buy you? When we want faster, all we have to do is buy some faster components. When the G6, G7, or whatever comes out, well, you're buying a new Apple.
You can buy a new Mercedes at the really fancy store, or you can (could) buy a TransAm at any dealership. If I want more power, I grab Jegs or Summit, and start shopping.
You can buy an Apple at the fancy Apple store, or buy parts from a wholesaler whos "Will Call" area is the back door of the warehouse.
I still say "Pretty" every time I look at a Apple. I give them that. Then I hop back on my x86 based Linux machine and drive faster.:)
We've had an internal joke in the office for years, that our in-house distribution should be named "Pornix". We think if it sold at $40, and included a one month membership to a couple of our adult sites, we'd make a fortune.:)
The Internet comes from an English background. Therefore, a lot of software comes with English comments and docs only. Most tech people have an understanding of it because of that, not because they like the language so much.
I agree with that. The Internet was "born" in the US, but it's grown dramatically. I think it's grown well beyond saying it's an English-only club. It's well beyond the point of trying to believe that every speaker on the Internet fluent in English.
I did some work with a company in Amsterdam, and their workstations were all configured in Dutch. I was at a bit of a loss sometimes, being that I don't speak a word of Dutch. I stumbled through a lot of it, and had to ask for a lot of help.
Did you have foreign customers, or why did people send in support requests in other languages? There should be some sort of form / contact page which states what languages are being understood.
The company was a hosting company with hints of being a MLM company. It wasn't a scam, it was perfectly legit. Although based in Florida, it ended up with people marketing it all over the world. We had some pretty active people marketing in Italy, Germany, and Spain. In theory the people marketing were suppose to handle their customers support, and the marketing partners were suppose to communicate with us if there was a problem. It never worked like that though.
I'm playing with a script now, to see the most obnoxious way to do it.:) Hmmm, converting it to binary may end up really obnoxious.. Right now, it's just convering characters to their ASCII numbers, binary numbers would make it huge.
Again, that's not inside what's actually parsed in the language.
But hey, people lie about what they do all the time.:) I've known people do write out HTML pages, stick an extension as if it's a parsed page, and call it programming.
You've proven PHP, ASP, CF, shtml, and I'm sure plenty of others, with effectively the same statement.
I like PHP for doing stuff embedded into web pages. It works nicely there. I use PERL for "real" work. I don't think there's anything that's impossible for PERL.
Really, if you know PHP very well, you should have no problem picking up PERL. I was a PERL programmer first, and then started playing with PHP and it all fell into place, with a few exceptions.
I used to run BBS's that absolutely depended on batch files to do various things. Now working with better languages, I laugh remembering some of the old stuff..
Does anyone still use FrontDoor, or BBS's in general for that matter?
I write my stuff so I should be able to go back to it in a year (or several years), and understand what I was thinking without comments.
I've read lots of people's code who is simply.. well, for a lack of a better term, fucked.
I was so happy the other day, I needed to fix a perl script on someone elses machine (as a favor), and opened it up in `vi`, and it was all plain and obvious. He had lots of comments, but his style and indention were beautiful. Then I looked at some of his HTML, and it was the same way. That's one guy's code I'll never mind working on again.
I've had a few occasions to rewrite scripts into PHP and Perl, and some of them just give me a huge headache. I hate it when their variables look like they ran it through an obfuscater (even if they didn't).
There are a few "webmasters" I've worked with that their HTML is that much worse. They use WYSIWYG editors, and I usually have to spend time formatting it to even start making sense of what they've done. Without even changing a single tag, putting in decent line breaks and spacing make a world of difference.
But then there are the "what were you thinking" chunks of code. I'll admit, some of my really old stuff (like, when I was first learning Perl) is rough, and I'll laugh at some of what I wrote, but there are "professionals" now that write worse.
But they probably would want it at least in the language, so it would be:
<? print "Hello World" ?>
or
<? echo "Hello World" ?>
They probably should have included it, but that would add quite a few other "web" scripting languages, as long as they have a way to run them locally. Off the top of my head, I'm thinking ColdFusion, I'm sure there are more.
I think a fun game would be to find the longest way to print "Hello World", without unnecessary filler functions or comments. My first attempt would be to have the Base64 encoded string as a variable, then decode it, then print it, and have all that in an encoded eval.
I found a script someone had that did their "protection" that way. Without the registration key, you couldn't run it, and they had this beautiful set of encoded strings in evals that did the checking. Took me a good 20 minutes to figure the whole thing out. Then I rewrote that part, so I could try the software without a working key.:)
The software was otherwise crap, except for all the work they had put into requiring the key. I tried it, and proceeded to delete it. It would have been nice if they had a shareware version to try first. I'm really glad I didn't spend the $200 they wanted for it.
Junk email is self-limiting because it actually costs money to send. In addition, it arrives once a day in a known place -- you don't get it 24x7 masquerading as something else.
So, check your Email once a day.:) Just kidding.
Spam is self limiting for the same reason junk mail is. It costs money to have a server (or servers) and pay for bandwidth. Most of the spammers I've seen recently pay for colo space also. They're not hard to spot, Look through the cabinet doors (if they're plexi or wire mesh), and when you see a few dozen machines marked "mail", that's a clue.
Spam is sent because it makes money. The solution to ending spam is for no one to buy from it. Spammers I've talked to tell me their sent to sales ratio. It's not good, but it's there. They know if they send xx,xxx messages, they'll get xxx sales. When the cost of sending spam exceeds the number of sales they get, then it will stop.
The same is true for the 419 scams. If people didn't fall for them, then the 419 scammers wouldn't do them.
I really enjoy working for a company that doesn't need to market in any way. Our biggest site survives due to word of mouth, which brings in over 1 million daily unique viewers. I've had offers from spamming companies to work for them, but refused them simply because I don't like the business.
Don't look at the mail in your spam box as people intentionally trying to attack your server. Look at it as people marketing. They're trying to make a buck. Sure, their methods aren't good, but neither are the people who bulk mail burial plot advertisments to retirement communities. Anyone with an Email address *could* be a customer.
I'm still enjoying seeing postal mail come in from the Scientologists, because I stopped to talk to them once (I wanted to play with their resistance meter toy).
Junk mail is a trivial annoyance compared to spam and telemarketing calls. It doesn't interrupt you while you are doing something else.
Oh, I could go on about telemarketers. Sometimes I'll get their calls on my cell, which is my "urgent" line. Anyone calling it gets priority over anything else, because I use it for work. If I get a 4am call, it means someone is having an urgent problem on the network somewhere, or someone died.
I never changed my phone number when I moved, because lots of people have it, including our providers. If there's a serious issue, the bandwidth providers and/or the colo's will call me. Ok, it's rare, but they do.
So with an East coast phone number, now being on the West coast, I occasionally get calls at 4am. No, I don't need aluminum siding, nor my septic tank cleaned, but thanks for offering at 4am. As soon as they start talking I usually say "It's 4am, I'm in California, this is a business line. Never call me again." Sometimes that actually works.:)
I knew someone who worked in one of those boiler room operations. They sit there and get transfered calls by their wardialer. They have no real control over who they get. They come and go so fast that it rarely matters if they did exclude me from their list. Some other winner will start wardialing (???)???-????.
I almost enjoy the ones telling me I should change my long distance service. Ummm, like, you called a cell phone with free long distance.
I got really annoyed by the Capital One junk mail after a while. I'd get two or three offers every day, so I started filling out every application and sending it back. Sure, it hit my credit score a bit, but for whatever reason, they slowed down with the offers. I got two extra Capital One credit cards out of it. ($200 limit each).
What's worse, someone willing to sell me Viagra, or someone sending an offer for $4000 off a new car, when the small print clearly (under a microscope) says it doesn't apply. How about those "checks" that if you deposit automatically enroll you in a program? At least most of the spams are really selling something.
I get plenty of junk postal mail that looks like official notices. More than once, I've cross-references my real accounts to make sure it was junk mail.
Slashdot is wonderfully American-centric. Imagine if this discussion was happening on say a Chinese tech site. "There's 1.3 billion of us, and only 290 million of them. The Internet should be all in English.":)
Americans (myself being guilty of it too) predominantly only speak English. Our concept of learning second languages is very poor compared to other countries.
If I'm writing to a small ISP in say Russia, why should I expect that the guy answering Emails reads and writes English.
I work with a guy in Russia who reads and writes English almost flawlessly. I'll ask him to send his next trouble report in English, and see if he even gets a response.
The hosting provider I worked at years ago got *LOTS* of support emails in various languages. I'm really good at recognizing languages by various clues, which was very helpful to feed it to online translation services, but not everyone is good at that.
Can you tell the difference between Dutch, Finish, or German? How about Bulgarian and Russian? I was lost the first time someone gave me an Armenian document to read. I didn't even recognize the language. At least now I can spot it, but I can't read it, and I have no idea where I could translate it online. I've been trying to learn it, but it's difficult. It has a 38 character alphabet that doesn't even resemble anything in our character set. I was doing better learning Russian.
Hell, I protect my users from 99% of the incoming spam with free packages (MailScanner and SpamAssassin), and 100% of viruses (so far).. I'm one guy.. I have to think AOL has more than one admin running their mail servers.
Sure, we aren't the scale of AOL. On high traffic days, we receive 100,000 pieces of email (including spam and viruses). My users never ask "Why don't I receive the mail I'm expecting?". Well, they do occasionally. They usually don't receive mail because of something else, like their network cable got unplugged.:)
We still deliver the spam, with the subject modified so they can filter it automatically. The server quietly blocks "high score" messages. That was after a good period of testing.
In my own box, I filter all the spam tagged messages off to a box marked "Spam". That lets me read through it, if I so choose. I never see it in my inbox, and I only keep it so I can make statistical data for my own box.
The management of it would be the same. AOL put a policy into place that is obnoxious, and expect people to jump through hoops to do perfectly legitimate things. Their solution is slow and backwards.
If Comcast is responible about it, cool. I'd be happy to see more people taking his kind of aggressive stance, if they're responsible about it.
After dealing with several different cablemodem companies, I'd be willing to bet it to get the access turned back on would take an hour on hold just to get a support person who's clueless to the issue and another week before it gets sent up to someone who knows what to do.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, I've used it quite successfully under Linux for web, MySQL, and mail servers. The mail server is the most abused server, and it has no speed problems. We have 3 IDE drives as a RAID5 under Linux (md device). That server has been known to pass over 100k Emails per day. Sure, it's mostly spam and viruses coming in, but they're still received, scanned, and everything but the high scoring spam and viruses are delivered.
/proc/mdstat
/ /boot /dev/shm
So, several hundred users using IMAP and POP3 to collect mail, SMTP to send mail, and the 100k or so incoming messages do add up to a lot of work, and it handles it flawlessly.
$ cat
Personalities : [linear] [raid0] [raid1] [raid5] [multipath]
read_ahead 1024 sectors
md0 : active raid5 hdc2[2] hdb2[1] hda2[0]
351100416 blocks level 5, 64k chunk, algorithm 2 [3/3] [UUU]
unused devices:
$ df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/md0 330G 11G 302G 4%
/dev/hda1 122M 8.0M 108M 7%
none 499M 0 499M 0%
You want a Promise UltraTrak SX8000 It's the easy idiotproof array. We're using several of these.
If a drive fails, it beeps at you til you replace it. You just yank it out, and put in a new drive, the same size or larger. It then rebuilds automatically. No shutdown or reboot required.
The Linux crowd will be happy to know the RM series runs linux. I don't know about the SX series, but I suppose it does too. Either one appears to the server to be a single SCSI drive. No drivers required, other than making the SCSI card of your choice work.
There's the Linux method of doing it too, which I like a lot. It saves you a *LOT* of money in extra hardware. You can go with 3 drives without adding any extra cards to your system, or you can put in IDE controllers to add as many drives as your system can support (PCI slots, power, and physical mounting points are the limitation). Read the "Software-RAID-HOWTO", which should come with your system. I've done many of these also, and they work quite nicely. You have to shut down the system to swap a drive, and then run `raidaddhot` with a couple parameters (the md device, if I remember right), and you can be running while it rebuilds.
You should have looked it up before you posted.
RAID 5 is the most common for a large redundant array. The array size is (N-1)*size . The more drives you use in a single array, the better off you are for size loss.
3 100Gb drives = 200Gb
5 100Gb drives = 400Gb
10 100Gb drives = 900Gb
10 200Gb drives = 1.8Tb
RAID 0 is striping. No redundancy, which you won't be happy with. (One failure means losing the array.
RAID 1 is mirroring. With two drives, you still only have the size of one.
RAID 50 is nice where it does striping across redundant arrays. You lose size, but gain speed.
Most other RAID types aren't very popular for various reasons.
Watch out for going over 2Tb in size on a single block device. I'm having problems with that right now. I have two Promise VTrak 15100's with 15 250Gb SATA drives in each, and anything with a block size over 2Tb is giving me grief. There are legitimate reasons for this, most of which newer documentation claims to be fixing, but I'm still having problems with a current Linux release. Making logical drives under 2Tb works, but doesn't accomplish what I need.
I hope this helps.
After all these years of filling out fake information in online forms, I'm not really very sure what my own name, address, or social security information is any more.
:)
Maybe that's why the IRS is less than entertained by my tax returns.
Name: John Smith (note the resemblance)
SS#: 078-05-1120
Addr: 1 Main Street
Anytown, USA
Just kidding, I've been sending notes to the IRS for years reminding them I am from a galaxy far far away, and we don't believe in taxes.
So, what exactly would the conversion from normal bandwidth speeds (gracefully not saying it), to Mps? I'd like to switch all my bandwidth graphing over to that, just to piss off the bosses.
Hehe. Reminds me of a long argument that I had with someone on FidoNet back in the day. I was on a 486/33, and he was on a state of the art 486/50. He insisted that CPU speeds would never reach 100Mhz, because the machines would cause too much radio interference, and more importantly, the radiation (huh?) from a chip going that fast would kill you in minutes.
:)
I fear for my life every time I go in the colo, with all those 1Ghz+ machines around me. Good thing I have my lead apron, foil hat, and shielded jock strap.
Just kidding. I'm the most laid back person that walks into the colo. I show up in T-shirt, shorts, and sandals. They frown upon me bringing in beer, so I usually finish off the one I'm drinking before I go in. I enjoy walking into professional buildings looking like I just came from the beach. hehe
My girlfriend did make me a foil hat though, so I can wear it when I don't want the aliens listening to my thoughts. You never know, they may intercept the password to a porn server.
MMm.. All the way From 3Mhz to what? 6Mhz? :)
:)
I recommend you break out the Armatron to hit those keys. We all know robots are intended to serve in dangerous industrial environments that aren't safe for humans.
Remember the days when the "high" bandwidth users had USR HST modems, and regular folks were perfectly happy downloading their porn from BBS's at 2400 baud? :)
Who would ever need 1.5Mb/s? That's the speed of the Internet backbone. Well, everyone knows that Internet thing won't make it. BBS are the future! (hehe) Now houses are getting several Mb/s and wanting more..
Too bad the 200Mb/s DSL is just a proposition. TI hopes to have a chip out sometime next year, and the first practical tests in 2006. We'd be lucky to see something in any sort of serious use by 2010. Consider how many users are still on 56k modems. The telco in the area I lived in 2 years ago still didn't have the infrastructure in place to provide DSL, and that was a fairly modern area.
Frequently, it isn't the technology that holds us back, it's the implementation. There's nothing as far as technology goes, that says you can't have OC192 run between every city. Price and demand prohibit it. If it costs several million dollars to run fiber to Bumstick Nebraska, and only 1000 customers who want to pay for it, it won't be run there.
Consider the "lit" buildings idea. Bandwidth providers were running serious bandwidth to office buildings, to provide bandwidth for everyone inside. Sweet idea. I'm a customer in the building, I just call up and say I want service, and I'm on. Too bad I've never managed to actually find a job in a lit building. I'd love to send network problems to someone else. "Hey buddy, your network is down."
The implementation isn't even necessarly based on cost. I've been trying to get someone to talk about roof rights in the office building we're in. We have a clear line of sight less than 10 miles to the colo where our equipment is, where we have 1Gb/s fiber. I wanted to put up a high gain antenna on each end, and run an 802.11g link (ahhhh, 54Mb/s). On the colo end, they've been more than happy to discuss it with me. They've talked prices, taken me to the roof to look, and we've discussed everything that needs to be done.
On the office end, no one will talk to me about it. I've been trying for close to two years, and keep getting run around. I could provide service to everyone in the building (22 floors of mostly law offices). Instead there are lots of offices with no connectivity, and the ones that have it, have DSL, cablemodem, or a T1.
For my own home connectivity (802.11b over 1/2 mile with Linksys WAP11's, no amplifiers), I have a relatively low gain panel, and a high gain parabolic dish, pointed at each other. On the office side, I have the antenna propped up against a window inside. Every day I do work online from home, I'm proving the technology works.
Unfortunately, due buildings and a hill, I don't have line of sight to the colo, or I'd set up my house to relay a 802.11g connection. I need at least another 50 feet up., and the existance of power lines (and being in a residential neighborhood) keep me from putting a tower up.
I can't. She uses the enemies software (XP Home, for her games), and it won't allow that. :( At least without begging some Redmond support minion for permission to do something so daring.
I'll be so happy when more authors are writing games for Linux, or Wine is much farther advanced.
I'd rather pay the Wine people money, than pay Microsoft, and have to ask for permission to change my own hardware around. Hell, this is *MY* equipment, and I did pay for the software, if I want to swap parts between my machine all day, isn't that *MY* business?
I've always bought close to bleeding edge. Like machines that won't break the bank, but are fast.
:)
My first x86 was a 486/33, which I got just after the 50's came out. Whoohoo.
My next machine was a AMD K5/133+. If I remember right, retail on the CPU alone was $200. That machine is now running a friends personal website.
Right now, my machine is a 1.1Ghz Athlon. It was screaming fast for the day, but now I'm looking at my girlfriend's 2800+ saying "damn, more than twice as fast as mine."
Even our mail server, a bleeding edge Opteron 242, is slow now. We're getting parts in now for a pair of Opteron 848's.
After setting up Fedora in the mail server, I'm looking forward to an Opteron workstation. The first time I set up the mail server, I installed X and all, just to see it work, then I reinstalled with as CLI only.
In a year, there'll be something bigger and faster (and probably incompatable) out anyways. It's always like that, if you haven't been paying attention.
Even if you bought a motherboard today, in a year the top of the line processor probably won't work on it anyways.
I agree.
:)
I got to drive one of the nice newer Mercedes coupes,with a big V8 in it. They were bragging up the horsepower, so I was wanted proof. "Let me drive." I ran it hard. The owner, in the passenger seat, was impressed with the power I was pulling from it. Then asked the owner how much the car cost. Something around $100k. I handed him the keys to my car (2000 TransAm WS/6) and said "now drive this."
I paid about $25k for my car. New it was something like $30k. My car has better handling, better acceleration, better braking, and is faster. This was before I did any mods to it. The interior trim may not be as nice, but my car does have all the options including leather seats, and it turns more heads when I drive past, than a Mercedes does. It's comfortable enough for two people to ride in it all day (done that many times), and the back seats are just about as big.
Apple's are very pretty. I've used a few. I was happy that my girlfriend was on one using OS/X, but when that machine started acting flaky, we didn't buy a new Apple, we spent $1500 on really good parts. AMD 2800+, 1Gb RAM, 200Gb hdd, DVD reader, DVD writer, asus motherboard, high end video card, etc, etc.. What Apple does $1500 buy you? When we want faster, all we have to do is buy some faster components. When the G6, G7, or whatever comes out, well, you're buying a new Apple.
You can buy a new Mercedes at the really fancy store, or you can (could) buy a TransAm at any dealership. If I want more power, I grab Jegs or Summit, and start shopping.
You can buy an Apple at the fancy Apple store, or buy parts from a wholesaler whos "Will Call" area is the back door of the warehouse.
I still say "Pretty" every time I look at a Apple. I give them that. Then I hop back on my x86 based Linux machine and drive faster.
We've had an internal joke in the office for years, that our in-house distribution should be named "Pornix". We think if it sold at $40, and included a one month membership to a couple of our adult sites, we'd make a fortune.
I agree with that. The Internet was "born" in the US, but it's grown dramatically. I think it's grown well beyond saying it's an English-only club. It's well beyond the point of trying to believe that every speaker on the Internet fluent in English.
I did some work with a company in Amsterdam, and their workstations were all configured in Dutch. I was at a bit of a loss sometimes, being that I don't speak a word of Dutch. I stumbled through a lot of it, and had to ask for a lot of help.
The company was a hosting company with hints of being a MLM company. It wasn't a scam, it was perfectly legit. Although based in Florida, it ended up with people marketing it all over the world. We had some pretty active people marketing in Italy, Germany, and Spain. In theory the people marketing were suppose to handle their customers support, and the marketing partners were suppose to communicate with us if there was a problem. It never worked like that though.
I'm playing with a script now, to see the most obnoxious way to do it.
Thanks for the idea!
Again, that's not inside what's actually parsed in the language.
:) I've known people do write out HTML pages, stick an extension as if it's a parsed page, and call it programming.
But hey, people lie about what they do all the time.
You've proven PHP, ASP, CF, shtml, and I'm sure plenty of others, with effectively the same statement.
I use both PERL and PHP.
I like PHP for doing stuff embedded into web pages. It works nicely there. I use PERL for "real" work. I don't think there's anything that's impossible for PERL.
Really, if you know PHP very well, you should have no problem picking up PERL. I was a PERL programmer first, and then started playing with PHP and it all fell into place, with a few exceptions.
Oh, I miss batch files. (not)
I used to run BBS's that absolutely depended on batch files to do various things. Now working with better languages, I laugh remembering some of the old stuff..
Does anyone still use FrontDoor, or BBS's in general for that matter?
In a shell would be a lot easier to read.
$ cat filename | tr " " "\n" | sort | uniq
or, to get it into PERL (for us lazy people)
#!/usr/bin/perl
@array = `cat filename | tr " " "\\n" | sort | uniq`;
(That should get some purists freaking out)
Exactly.
.. well, for a lack of a better term, fucked.
I write my stuff so I should be able to go back to it in a year (or several years), and understand what I was thinking without comments.
I've read lots of people's code who is simply
I was so happy the other day, I needed to fix a perl script on someone elses machine (as a favor), and opened it up in `vi`, and it was all plain and obvious. He had lots of comments, but his style and indention were beautiful. Then I looked at some of his HTML, and it was the same way. That's one guy's code I'll never mind working on again.
I've had a few occasions to rewrite scripts into PHP and Perl, and some of them just give me a huge headache. I hate it when their variables look like they ran it through an obfuscater (even if they didn't).
There are a few "webmasters" I've worked with that their HTML is that much worse. They use WYSIWYG editors, and I usually have to spend time formatting it to even start making sense of what they've done. Without even changing a single tag, putting in decent line breaks and spacing make a world of difference.
But then there are the "what were you thinking" chunks of code. I'll admit, some of my really old stuff (like, when I was first learning Perl) is rough, and I'll laugh at some of what I wrote, but there are "professionals" now that write worse.
But they probably would want it at least in the language, so it would be:
:)
<? print "Hello World" ?>
or
<? echo "Hello World" ?>
They probably should have included it, but that would add quite a few other "web" scripting languages, as long as they have a way to run them locally. Off the top of my head, I'm thinking ColdFusion, I'm sure there are more.
I think a fun game would be to find the longest way to print "Hello World", without unnecessary filler functions or comments. My first attempt would be to have the Base64 encoded string as a variable, then decode it, then print it, and have all that in an encoded eval.
I found a script someone had that did their "protection" that way. Without the registration key, you couldn't run it, and they had this beautiful set of encoded strings in evals that did the checking. Took me a good 20 minutes to figure the whole thing out. Then I rewrote that part, so I could try the software without a working key.
The software was otherwise crap, except for all the work they had put into requiring the key. I tried it, and proceeded to delete it. It would have been nice if they had a shareware version to try first. I'm really glad I didn't spend the $200 they wanted for it.
So, check your Email once a day.
Spam is self limiting for the same reason junk mail is. It costs money to have a server (or servers) and pay for bandwidth. Most of the spammers I've seen recently pay for colo space also. They're not hard to spot, Look through the cabinet doors (if they're plexi or wire mesh), and when you see a few dozen machines marked "mail", that's a clue.
Spam is sent because it makes money. The solution to ending spam is for no one to buy from it. Spammers I've talked to tell me their sent to sales ratio. It's not good, but it's there. They know if they send xx,xxx messages, they'll get xxx sales. When the cost of sending spam exceeds the number of sales they get, then it will stop.
The same is true for the 419 scams. If people didn't fall for them, then the 419 scammers wouldn't do them.
I really enjoy working for a company that doesn't need to market in any way. Our biggest site survives due to word of mouth, which brings in over 1 million daily unique viewers. I've had offers from spamming companies to work for them, but refused them simply because I don't like the business.
Don't look at the mail in your spam box as people intentionally trying to attack your server. Look at it as people marketing. They're trying to make a buck. Sure, their methods aren't good, but neither are the people who bulk mail burial plot advertisments to retirement communities. Anyone with an Email address *could* be a customer.
I'm still enjoying seeing postal mail come in from the Scientologists, because I stopped to talk to them once (I wanted to play with their resistance meter toy).
Oh, I could go on about telemarketers. Sometimes I'll get their calls on my cell, which is my "urgent" line. Anyone calling it gets priority over anything else, because I use it for work. If I get a 4am call, it means someone is having an urgent problem on the network somewhere, or someone died.
I never changed my phone number when I moved, because lots of people have it, including our providers. If there's a serious issue, the bandwidth providers and/or the colo's will call me. Ok, it's rare, but they do.
So with an East coast phone number, now being on the West coast, I occasionally get calls at 4am. No, I don't need aluminum siding, nor my septic tank cleaned, but thanks for offering at 4am. As soon as they start talking I usually say "It's 4am, I'm in California, this is a business line. Never call me again." Sometimes that actually works.
I knew someone who worked in one of those boiler room operations. They sit there and get transfered calls by their wardialer. They have no real control over who they get. They come and go so fast that it rarely matters if they did exclude me from their list. Some other winner will start wardialing (???)???-????.
I almost enjoy the ones telling me I should change my long distance service. Ummm, like, you called a cell phone with free long distance.
I got really annoyed by the Capital One junk mail after a while. I'd get two or three offers every day, so I started filling out every application and sending it back. Sure, it hit my credit score a bit, but for whatever reason, they slowed down with the offers. I got two extra Capital One credit cards out of it. ($200 limit each).
What's worse, someone willing to sell me Viagra, or someone sending an offer for $4000 off a new car, when the small print clearly (under a microscope) says it doesn't apply. How about those "checks" that if you deposit automatically enroll you in a program? At least most of the spams are really selling something.
I get plenty of junk postal mail that looks like official notices. More than once, I've cross-references my real accounts to make sure it was junk mail.
Slashdot is wonderfully American-centric. Imagine if this discussion was happening on say a Chinese tech site. "There's 1.3 billion of us, and only 290 million of them. The Internet should be all in English." :)
Americans (myself being guilty of it too) predominantly only speak English. Our concept of learning second languages is very poor compared to other countries.
If I'm writing to a small ISP in say Russia, why should I expect that the guy answering Emails reads and writes English.
I work with a guy in Russia who reads and writes English almost flawlessly. I'll ask him to send his next trouble report in English, and see if he even gets a response.
The hosting provider I worked at years ago got *LOTS* of support emails in various languages. I'm really good at recognizing languages by various clues, which was very helpful to feed it to online translation services, but not everyone is good at that.
Can you tell the difference between Dutch, Finish, or German? How about Bulgarian and Russian? I was lost the first time someone gave me an Armenian document to read. I didn't even recognize the language. At least now I can spot it, but I can't read it, and I have no idea where I could translate it online. I've been trying to learn it, but it's difficult. It has a 38 character alphabet that doesn't even resemble anything in our character set. I was doing better learning Russian.
There are much better solutions.
Hell, I protect my users from 99% of the incoming spam with free packages (MailScanner and SpamAssassin), and 100% of viruses (so far).. I'm one guy.. I have to think AOL has more than one admin running their mail servers.
Sure, we aren't the scale of AOL. On high traffic days, we receive 100,000 pieces of email (including spam and viruses). My users never ask "Why don't I receive the mail I'm expecting?". Well, they do occasionally. They usually don't receive mail because of something else, like their network cable got unplugged.
We still deliver the spam, with the subject modified so they can filter it automatically. The server quietly blocks "high score" messages. That was after a good period of testing.
In my own box, I filter all the spam tagged messages off to a box marked "Spam". That lets me read through it, if I so choose. I never see it in my inbox, and I only keep it so I can make statistical data for my own box.
The management of it would be the same. AOL put a policy into place that is obnoxious, and expect people to jump through hoops to do perfectly legitimate things. Their solution is slow and backwards.
If Comcast is responible about it, cool. I'd be happy to see more people taking his kind of aggressive stance, if they're responsible about it.
After dealing with several different cablemodem companies, I'd be willing to bet it to get the access turned back on would take an hour on hold just to get a support person who's clueless to the issue and another week before it gets sent up to someone who knows what to do.