Ask most women why they buy a car. Because it's pretty. The color matches her shoes, or whatever.
I've been fighting with my girlfriend over what car to buy next. She wants "pretty", and I want it to be mechanically sound, and affordable
She points at a Hyundai Tiburon, and I say "no".
She points at a Porsche Boxter S, and I say "affordable? no."
She points at a Mazda Miata, I remind her of the last one that died at like 60,000 miles. "no".
Actually, the Hyundai dealership thought she was nuts. She drove her '98 TransAm there, and said she'd be trading it for the Hyundai. That set the whole "she's gotta be kidding" attitude.
We're coming to some agreement on the issue, but it's going to be something both can agree on, since I'll be making the payments.
She has an iMac, because it's cute. I can agree to it because it's OS/X .:)
She has flowery, girlie things throughout the house, but I don't have much of a choice but to agree to those.
She'd want that printer, because it had some frilly feature that she wants. Paint it pink, that'll sell even more of 'em.
Actually, your posting submitted them into the Slashdot database, so they're property of Slashdot. You should be paying them for permission to reproduce.
It sounded like the same type questions non-technical bosses always ask about technical matters.
"We're ordering this brand new hardware that you've never tested before. Can you guarantee it will never crash?"
"Will this database server handle the load of our brand new project?" (without an accurate growth estimate)
"A server 2000 miles away just went down. What happened?" (no ping, no nothing) Hmmm.. Power/NIC/CPU/CPU fan/hard disks?
It really sounds like they did some decent advanced planning on those probes, but from other stories I read, the were shooting for 90 days of reliability, which in itself was a hard one to do. What if it turns the antenna the wrong way and looses connectivity? What if it gets hit by lightning? What if it falls in a hole? (go Beagle!)
Sure, relate this to your web server colocated somewhere you're not. Cross your fingers, hold your breath, and hope there aren't a few fatal systems failures, or a bit of human error. I've been responsible for a bit of that in the past, but at least my equipment wasn't a few million miles away.
A friend of mine came out to LA, and started job hunting, including through the job sites.
Her skills are in network and windows administration, with plenty of training and experience in high end phone systems (like enterprise sized Nortel stuff).
The first call she got was from Belkin, being an independant sales rep, only making commissions.
The second was from a major national insurance company, who asked her to come out for an interview. She verified that it was a computer job before she went. The interview itself was an hour outside of LA. We drove out, and they asked if I was interested in sitting in on the meeting too. Why? I'm not looking for a job. So, I go to the car, and start playing with my laptop. 10 minutes later, she comes out bitching. It's a multi-level marketing thing, where they had a room full of unemployed non-english speaking people to sell insurance (or ideally recruit new sales people) to people that can't afford it, and take the commissions.
WTF? computer job? Nowhere in that job required a computer. It required being able to con people into spending money they couldn't afford on life insurance they'd never see. You didn't even use a computer to file the applications, they were by paper.
{sigh}
Aparently they went throught Monster.com, took down all the names and titles, and contacted everyone they could, offering jobs in their field, only to find that it was this sales crap.
In Other News, Nissan Of North America executives are mysteriously taken away in black vans for possession of "WMD's", after an US Air Force AWACS plane was almost downed after flying over the Nissan plant.
There were no comments from Nissan, but the U.S. Government cannot confirm nor deny any Nissan executives may or may not be held at what may or may not be a base in the country that may or may not be known as "Cuba"
Ya, I guess it really should have the local IP in there too. Like I said, there could be problems with it. No one should copy&paste just anything they find.:)
It's not like your solution is very hard either. A decently set up ipchains/iptables script at boot time can easily handle that. If no ports are accessable other than by authorized networks, it makes things fairly tight.
I do that on a lot of servers, where only port 80 is accessable to the Internet, and my SSH port (reassigned for a little security through obscurity myself).
Here's my script. By default, this machine would be invisible to the rest of the Internet. I just uncomment whatever needs to be accessable. It should be tuned to your own tastes. I'm sure some people will argue parts of the ICMP, but others will agree that it can be blocked completely. Honestly, it causes no problems like this. Parts may not be correct, I put some entries in here that I've never actually used. I have an iptables version also, but it's not as well tested as this one is.
The first few times news.google.com linked http://freeinternetpress.com , the traffic was so overwhelming that the server didn't take it. We had to tweak a few things out, so now we can.
The send lots of traffic to lots of people. We just post news very well, we weren't expecting the number of hits we got when they pick up stories.
No complaints though, we enjoy the fact that lots of people read our stuff.
Maybe you could, maybe you couldn't. There are a lot of variables you don't go into, mostly topology.
In the last apartment I lived in, if you went into the main hallway of the building, you couldn't pick up any sort of signal from the AP on the other side of the wall. Probably due to the wire mesh in the stucco. In the 2 story building I'm in now, you can clearly pick up a strong signal on either floor, anywhere in the building. Much different construction.
Here's some pictures of my current wireless setup. 802.11b with high gain antennas going from my house to office, 1/2 mile away. Then just a generic AP inside the house servicing computers in virtually every room of the house. My laptop works everywhere in the house, so the cheap NetGear AP handles it.
You may be able to do it with a basic AP and no special antennas on the floor in the middle of the 3rd floor. Maybe not. You may need one AP per floor with high gain antennas plus copper wiring between them. You may have to put multiple AP's per floor, depending on how much the signal is blocked by walls. If your AP is at one end of the building, and there are 3 2 room apartments in line, you'd have an awful lot of walls between the AP and the last user.
We did copper wiring for a law office once that was a 3 story building. They went nuts with the construction of the building. Floors were 3 feet of cement. Cell phones didn't work anywhere but by the windows in an area with great cell service. It was not a good candidate for wireless service.
Maybe you can find someone locally who's played with this a bit more, so they can look at it, and give you an educated opinion. No one here can give you the right answer, including me.
I used to use Charter Communications with their cablemodem in California. The service was identical to Time Warner/BrightHouse/RoadRunner in Florida, down to using the same boxes, and the same sorry support.
I bought a Hughes DVR2 (sometimes called DVR3), which is a DirecTV receiver with two connections to the dish (I'll explain more in a minute). I also got the oval dish, with two seperate LNB's, but it has expansion space for the third LNB, should I want to hook it to a HDTV (I don't have one yet).
The bills are very reasonable. I get all the local channels and cable channels for about $100/mo.
I upgraded the receiver with a 140Gb hard drive. From what I gathered on the Internet, that's as big as the BIOS on the box supports, but you can put in a second hard drive as well. As it is right now, I have over 100 hours of recording time, and it would almost be trivial to add a second 140Gb drive. As it is right now, we have weeks worth of stuff recorded.
I strongly recommend the O'Reilly book, "TiVO Hacks". There's lots of fun things you can do with it. I'm working on getting network connectivity to mine, so I can copy movies off to DVD to watch later.:) You can watch recorded shows and movies on your Linux or Windows PC using a modified version of mplayer. If you do both, you may not ever get any more work done again. You can watch soaps at work.
I have absolutely no complaints about reception. It's been perfectly stable even in rain and wind. That's much better than my "digital cable" service was. Movies would always get blocky or go blank, and they just said that was normal.
If you live in the Northern US, you may wish to buy a larger dish. My friend who owns dssaccessories.com sells bigger dishes, and de-icers if you're in a frozen wasteland or something.
I really enjoy watching tv shows that are on when I'm not home, or forget to sit down and watch. I can sit down at 2am and watch my favorite shows, rather than bitching that I missed an episode. The downside to this is that now I've seen every Simpsons and Futurerama, so now I see the description, know I've seen it, and just delete it.
TiVO absolutely rocks for watching TV though. If you pause for a few minutes at the beginning of the show (get a beer or whatever), you can then skip through the commercials through the whole show. It's definately better than watching 8 minutes of commercials every 10 minutes. I didn't realize how short shows really are. Now I watch a 1 hour show in about 1/2 hour. If someone calls, I just pause the show, and I can rewind a few minute (up to 30 minutes) to catch back up with what they were saying. The day I hooked it up, my friend watched the "Fanta" commercial over and over frame by frame, and insisted that the girls were saying "want to f***". I could see it but only after hours of seeing her do it. We're easily entertained.
I apologize for the ugly site. I'm redesigning it for him right now. The new site is pretty, but not quite ready.
He ships very quickly, and you'll get exactly what you wanted. I got my 5 input, 8 output multiswitch w/ power supply from him overnight. It was very useful since I had just moved into a new house, and was kinda missing that one piece. I don't trust anyone to hook up my equipment but me, so I didn't have DirecTV do it.:)
I was looking at it myself. My personal wireless T1 may be going away in August (the source is moving, probably away from my line of sight). I'm working with some financial backers to light up the city I'm in wireless, but who knows if it'll be done by August. If it does work out well, we'll be covering the entire Los Angeles area in a couple years. The Charter Communications folks were really upset when I moved. I ditched the cable TV for DirecTV, and went to the wireless (above). They were begging for me to stay with them, but I was like, "If your service didn't completely suck, I would have." It was bad. More than half the time, I would find my download speeds at or below 128K, and if I started an upload, I was below 128K. When it's barely faster than a 56k dialup, why pay the extra cost?
I was watching TV, and saw the DirecWay ad, and thought it looked interesting, so I switched over to the DirecWay channel. I don't know the channel off hand, but it has a 15 to 30 minute looping advertisment on it with the bubbly airhead repeating the same brainwashing over and over.
DirecWay has a speed comparison chart at:
http://directv.direcway.com/connection_test.html
Basically, DirecWay a box, that attaches to your computer via ethernet and to a DirecTV-like dish with a transceiver on it (bigger LNB). They say it'll give UP TO 500Kb/s for downloads, and no information on uploads, so this could be comparable to cablemodem or DSL, depending on your neighborhood. They say it's "really fast" compared to 28.8 modem, so who knows.
You should expect long latency though, so browsing Slashdot may be ok, but SSHing to the server to make changes will be painful. Since I spend half my life in a shell using SSH, I'm not sure I could handle it.
I see quite a few comments about weather problems. You shouldn't really expect bad weather related problems, at least with DirecTV. I messed around with my dish until I had beween 92% and 100% signal strength on all channels with the A and B LNB's. If you're up north or find you have a weaker signal, you can buy a bigger dish that'll fix you right up. My friend owns dssaccessories.com, and he recommends using the upgraded 24" dish. If you have iceing problems, use a heated dish. I'm in LA, with a 2 LNB oval dish, and have no problems, even in the occasional rain storm. My dish is secured well with the standard equipment, so it doesn't get blown around with wind. It'll take the same kind of work to get a really good signal DirecWay signal. Don't necessarly trust the installers when they put it in. My in-laws had their DirecTV dish put behind a tree, so when the wind blows, they loose their signal.
They're looking for a $599.98 deposit and a monthly cost of $59.99 or a $99.99 activation fee, and a 15 month contract at $99.99 to cover the equipment cost, converting to $59.99 after 15 months. Either way, it's pricy.
I know that some guy with a masters in whatever running some tech department in a Fortune 500 company doesn't want some 18 year old kid who's been messing with a Linux box for the last 6 years showing him up, but honestly, I'd rather get someone in that could show me up.
My girlfriend is job hunting right now. She's more than qualified to work most office jobs, but isn't getting picked up because of a lack of a degree in anything. {sigh}
At least she's using a Mac now, so she can put OS/X experience on the list.:) I don't know if it'll help, but it shouldn't hurt.
Well, in our company one of the managers (non-technical) gets the resumes, but I usually wander in, read the pile, and toss 'em into "maybe" and "noway" piles.:)
I particularly liked one resume, that looked like the guy not only invented the Internet, but he invented programming too. It read almost like the guys with experience with Linux since 1980, or with Cisco since 1965.
Actually, our hiring policy (when we do it) is completely backwards, intentionally.
We've hired people with lots of certifications, who could do absolutely nothing when they walked in the door. We gave them some time, but it didn't help, and we'd have to let them go.
We've hired people who had no certifications or formal training. They had learned some programming on their own, and played with *nix machines at home. They've been our best people.
Our interviews are fairly laid back.
What jobs relative to this work environment have you done?
What do you know? Languages, hardware platforms, etc.
Are you willing to learn?
What OS's have you used personally (home)?.. at work?
If I were to hand you a broken server, could you fix it?.. demonstrate.
If I'm not sure, I may open up a console, do a little something, and then ask them to explain what I just did.
I've given people a stack of parts, and told them to build me a server, and install the OS with my CD (with instructions). I'm a bit rough. I tell them they have 10 minutes to complete it, or whatever. I just want to see how well they work. I don't really care that it takes 15 minutes, or if they encounter a problem and can't finish. I wanted to see that they made a good attempt.
I felt so sorry for one interview. This was back when I worked in a computer store. I gave him a random machine from the "repair" rack, and told him to fix it. I hadn't actually checked it out myself. I swear, just about everything was broken on that thing. I had no idea before he started, I hadn't checked it first. The customer report was "won't boot". No shit. Dead power supply, fried motherboard, etc, etc... Must have been a lightning strike (this was Florida). He looked so terrified. I watched what he was doing, and he did everything right, so he did pass, even though he didn't get it working.
All in all, I'd rather hire some Linux geek with no certs at all.
My last two best people I've hired were:
an ex-Y2k AIX programmer, with Linux and *BSD experience at home.
a "consultant" with no formal job experience, but in his words, "an OS whore". He'd used every OS out there enough to be familiar with them. He introduced *ME* to BeOS. I used it for a day.:)
It seems every time we take in someone with a degree of some sort, they're very proud of their education, but can't look beyond what they've learned.
I agree, in Fortune500-land, or for the government, you'll need or want a degree. But there are still companies who's senior tech geek (me) wants other geeks around him who actually understand and enjoy what they're doing.
(sorry to all my coworkers I just labled as "geek" if you didn't like it. hehe)
It sounds like you want to do something almost identical to what we've done at my work. We build out servers on a regular basis, and need to be able to get a full OS installed as quickly as possible. We have the total install time, from the time we turn the machine on with blank hard drives, to when it's finished rebooting with a working operating system, down to 5 minutes. I'm happy with our time, so we aren't pushing to get it any faster.
Here's what we do.
I use Slackware, but this will apply to any OS that you'd like, with some changes. Normally, we have two hard drives in the server, one for the OS, and a second for the server's data (web data, mail, databases, or whatever this machine does). As far as this first step goes, this second drive is empty.
Our partitions usually consist of:
/dev/hda1 All available space /dev/hda2 128Mb swap /dev/hdb1 server files (empty to start)
Below is a sample of/dev/hda . We don't have a/dev/hdb in this machine, it's just a workstation, but it shows the partition table.
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/hda1 * 1 2415 19398456 83 Linux /dev/hda2 2416 2431 128520 82 Linux swap ---
1) We take a machine, and do a full install as normal, and do our customizations (adding programs, modifying the/etc/rc.d/rc.* files, etc).
2) We build a bunch of kernels, one for every one of our "standard" installations. There are only 3 or 4 hardware platforms that we end up using, so I build out kernels for each, plus have some generic ones waiting, in case someone asks for a server to be built on some different hardware (can you make my 486/33 a server? Sure.)
3) Make "generic" customizations. That is, make this config generic, so it won't conflict with something else. I change/etc/HOSTNAME to "server", and put in impossible values in/etc/rc.d/rc.inet1. This would be easy enough to replace the value with a script. (cat rc.inet1 ; sed -e s/xNETWORKx/192.168.1/g | sed -e s/xDx/99/g > rc.inet1.temp ; mv rc.inet1.temp rc.inet1). If you use DHCP, you don't even have to mess with this. We don't use DHCP for servers.
3) When we're sure we are happy with the installation, we just tar it up.
mkdir/orig/ mkdir/new/
mount/dev/hda1/orig mount/dev/hda2/new
cd/orig tar cvpzf/new/os.tar.gz./
That'll run for a while. You'll get to watch the filenames roll by.
4) send it over to a workstation that you make CD's on. I have copies of all my ISO's, and the tgz's for future reference, and to download from internally. This lets me figure out mistakes from the past, or make subtle corrections as necessary.
5) prepare to make a CD.
I took <A HREF="http://syslinux.zytor.com/index.php">isolinu x</A> from the Slackware installation CD (1st disk of the pack, if you bought it), but I s
Isn't this what they tried with the GIF format? Make it free for years, then decide they want to make money off their nice little patent? We'll be manufacturers go to other formats soon, just like people started using different formats for graphics and the like. Isn't that part of what made jpeg popular? Well, besides the fact that it's smaller, it doesn't have the tax on it.
I just can't imagine how long it will be before we start seeing digital cameras and other assorted devices using with UFS, EXT2, or whatever. I just hope they're smart about it, and figure out to use a common system, rather than all using their own home-grown systems. Isn't that where we started with digital cameras, where they all had their own special image format, on built-in storage, where we *HAD* to download through serial or USB cables through their own program..
Prepare for the new wave of new types of media. Microsoft just made CF, MMC, SD, etc, etc, obsolete.
Maybe this time they're just getting a bit too greedy. It's not costing them anything to let people continue to use this ancient format, but now they want to make the quick buck. Ok, a few million bucks, but still...
Exactly. Something what he's looking for isn't rocket science. Writing it himself, it'll give exactly the features that he wants to offer them.. More than likely, everything he finds out there will be missing a little something.
One of the sites that I write for required a seriously huge content management system, with all kinds of wierd stuff special to that site. For giggles, I wrote the front end in PHP, which allows users to upload files, and do a whole bunch of functions. The back end is written in Perl. The admin users can do a variety of photoprocessing passed on to ImageMagick. If that isn't enough for them, they have the option to push one button in the browser, and have the image open up on their local machine in PhotoShop. (that was a bit harder to pull off). Then there are a huge variety of sorting functions, publishing management options, etc, etc.. Finally, once it's done, it reaches the web page on the scheduled date.
Of course, most of that is *WAY* beyond what he requires..
The way I'd write his application would be something like this...
Store all the images in one directory. Write a simple upload page to let them upload individual images or zip files. Assign the images a unique name (we know users can't do that themselves) before sticking them in the common directory.
He'd need a database to hold a little information. Something along the lines of image_id, image_name, image_description, image_comment, section, sort_order. The image_id is a unique number (incrementing, duh). The next four are obvious. The last one would be the order that it's sorted on the result page. People always want to rearrange their stuff, for some reason.
The last page would be to display the images. List all the sections, let the viewing user pick which section to view (Christmas 1999), and when they've selected a section, show the images, sorted by sort_order.
That would consist of just a few pages. Not very hard.
Then the question is, what's he looking for in regards to blogging? Slashcode is great if you have lots of users, lots of stuff, or require lots of configurability.. But probably he just wants a simple chat system. One page to insert messages, one to display the last x messages (last 20, or whatever). Again, simple stuff.
I've written a few of these, each one specific to it's application. Our intranet has the most basic type (described above), which was exactly what was required. It's written in ColdFusion, with a MSSQL database, and currently only has about 16,000 records in it.. I have one that's quite a bit more complex on another site written in Perl with a MySQL database, holding 4,000,000 records.. It has serious administrative and anti-abuse capabilities, and has thousands of "topics"..
The ColdFusion one took about an hour to write, because I'm not terribly proficent in ColdFusion (I don't use it much). The second took me about a day to write, and little code changes over the years to stop various kinds of abuses and add features that the site owner wanted..
Really, he should/could write his parents site in just a couple days.. They'd probably be very proud of him, and thank him a whole lot more than if he just put a pre-written package up for them.
But hey, I'm a programmer, I'd write it if my mom wanted one. It's really up to his abilities.
I'm completely paranoid about trying to update. We've made so many modifications to the templates, and some of the scripts themselves, that I'm afraid that an update would have tragic results.. Well, that's why we have daily, weekly, and monthly off-site backups. We can roll back to 2 months if we need to. Of course, I don't want any downtime, so rolling back to something older would be bad for us.. Google checks Free Internet Press every 3 hours for news updates. I'd hate to think that maybe they'd drop us as a news source if we weren't available for an update or two...
Slashdot Mirror
-------------
From: baduser@aol.com
To: gooduser@aol.com
Subject: Look At My Porn
Come look at my naked (sister|mother|wife|daughter) on her web cam doing all kinds of nasty things.
http://www.sco.com
--------------
AOL , making DoS even easier.
Ask most women why they buy a car. Because it's pretty. The color matches her shoes, or whatever.
I've been fighting with my girlfriend over what car to buy next. She wants "pretty", and I want it to be mechanically sound, and affordable
She points at a Hyundai Tiburon, and I say "no".
She points at a Porsche Boxter S, and I say "affordable? no."
She points at a Mazda Miata, I remind her of the last one that died at like 60,000 miles. "no".
Actually, the Hyundai dealership thought she was nuts. She drove her '98 TransAm there, and said she'd be trading it for the Hyundai. That set the whole "she's gotta be kidding" attitude.
We're coming to some agreement on the issue, but it's going to be something both can agree on, since I'll be making the payments.
She has an iMac, because it's cute. I can agree to it because it's OS/X .
She has flowery, girlie things throughout the house, but I don't have much of a choice but to agree to those.
She'd want that printer, because it had some frilly feature that she wants. Paint it pink, that'll sell even more of 'em.
But, is a list a comment?
:)
It would appear to belong to OSDN. Well, if they had a staff of SCO trained lawyers working for them, it would.
I already bought my license.
I wonder how many Microsoft salesmen were pushing for putting WinXP on it..
It sounded like the same type questions non-technical bosses always ask about technical matters.
"We're ordering this brand new hardware that you've never tested before. Can you guarantee it will never crash?"
"Will this database server handle the load of our brand new project?" (without an accurate growth estimate)
"A server 2000 miles away just went down. What happened?" (no ping, no nothing) Hmmm.. Power/NIC/CPU/CPU fan/hard disks?
It really sounds like they did some decent advanced planning on those probes, but from other stories I read, the were shooting for 90 days of reliability, which in itself was a hard one to do. What if it turns the antenna the wrong way and looses connectivity? What if it gets hit by lightning? What if it falls in a hole? (go Beagle!)
Sure, relate this to your web server colocated somewhere you're not. Cross your fingers, hold your breath, and hope there aren't a few fatal systems failures, or a bit of human error. I've been responsible for a bit of that in the past, but at least my equipment wasn't a few million miles away.
A friend of mine came out to LA, and started job hunting, including through the job sites.
Her skills are in network and windows administration, with plenty of training and experience in high end phone systems (like enterprise sized Nortel stuff).
The first call she got was from Belkin, being an independant sales rep, only making commissions.
The second was from a major national insurance company, who asked her to come out for an interview. She verified that it was a computer job before she went. The interview itself was an hour outside of LA. We drove out, and they asked if I was interested in sitting in on the meeting too. Why? I'm not looking for a job. So, I go to the car, and start playing with my laptop. 10 minutes later, she comes out bitching. It's a multi-level marketing thing, where they had a room full of unemployed non-english speaking people to sell insurance (or ideally recruit new sales people) to people that can't afford it, and take the commissions.
WTF? computer job? Nowhere in that job required a computer. It required being able to con people into spending money they couldn't afford on life insurance they'd never see. You didn't even use a computer to file the applications, they were by paper.
{sigh}
Aparently they went throught Monster.com, took down all the names and titles, and contacted everyone they could, offering jobs in their field, only to find that it was this sales crap.
Computer Job != Insurance Salesman
It's easier to set a macro to current Windows version.
( $t[4]/4)+1);$v = int("$t[7]$t[2]$t[1]$t[0]"*((rand(rand(10)+1)+1))) ;print "Win$yr\SR$sr.$v\n";'
perl -e '@t=localtime(time());$yr=($t[5]+1900)-1;$sr=int(
(take out the line break, and it will work better)
In Other News, Nissan Of North America executives are mysteriously taken away in black vans for possession of "WMD's", after an US Air Force AWACS plane was almost downed after flying over the Nissan plant.
There were no comments from Nissan, but the U.S. Government cannot confirm nor deny any Nissan executives may or may not be held at what may or may not be a base in the country that may or may not be known as "Cuba"
Ya, I guess it really should have the local IP in there too. Like I said, there could be problems with it. No one should copy&paste just anything they find.
It's not like your solution is very hard either. A decently set up ipchains/iptables script at boot time can easily handle that. If no ports are accessable other than by authorized networks, it makes things fairly tight.
I do that on a lot of servers, where only port 80 is accessable to the Internet, and my SSH port (reassigned for a little security through obscurity myself).
Here's my script. By default, this machine would be invisible to the rest of the Internet. I just uncomment whatever needs to be accessable. It should be tuned to your own tastes. I'm sure some people will argue parts of the ICMP, but others will agree that it can be blocked completely. Honestly, it causes no problems like this. Parts may not be correct, I put some entries in here that I've never actually used. I have an iptables version also, but it's not as well tested as this one is.
#!/bin/tcsh
# rc.firewall
# secure yer webserver
# 04.24.2003(d) Edition -pv
echo "Firewall, Flushing"
/sbin/ipchains -F input
/sbin/ipchains -F output
/sbin/ipchains -F forward
/sbin/ipchains -A input -i lo -d 0/0 -j ACCEPT
echo "Firewall, Starting"
# Put Enemy Networks Here
#/sbin/ipchains -A input -b -p tcp -s aa.bb.cc.0/24 -d 0/0 -l -j DENY
# Remote services
# Accept web viewers
#/sbin/ipchains -A input -p tcp -s 0/0 -d 0/0 80 -j ACCEPT # Port 80 - Web Server
#/sbin/ipchains -A input -p tcp -s 0/0 -d 0/0 443 -j ACCEPT # Port 443 - Secure Server
#/sbin/ipchains -A input -p tcp -s 0/0 -d 0/0 8000 -j ACCEPT # Port 8000 - Alternate Web Port
#/sbin/ipchains -A input -p tcp -s 0/0 -d 0/0 8080 -j ACCEPT # Port 8080 - Alternate Web Port
#/sbin/ipchains -A input -p tcp -s 0/0 -d 0/0 21 -j ACCEPT # Port 21 - FTP Server
#/sbin/ipchains -A input -b -p tcp -s 0/0 -d 0/0 20 -j ACCEPT # Port 20 - FTP Server (FTP-Data)
#/sbin/ipchains -A input -b -p tcp -s 0/0 50000:50050 -d 0/0 -j ACCEPT # -FTP Data Ports
#/sbin/ipchains -A input -b -p udp -s 0/0 50000:50050 -d 0/0 -j ACCEPT # -FTP Data Ports
#/sbin/ipchains -A input -b -p tcp -s 0/0 -d 0/0 25 -j ACCEPT # Port 25 - SMTP Mail Server
#/sbin/ipchains -A input -p tcp -s 0/0 25 -d 0/0 -j ACCEPT # Outbound Email
#/sbin/ipchains -A input -p tcp -s 0/0 -d 0/0 110 -j ACCEPT # Port 110 - POP3 Mail Server
#/sbin/ipchains -A input -b -p tcp -s 0/0 -d 0/0 113 -j ACCEPT # Port 113 - ident
#/sbin/ipchains -A input -b -p udp -s 0/0 -d 0/0 113 -j ACCEPT # Port 113 - ident
#/sbin/ipchains -A input -p tcp -s 0/0 -d 0/0 143 -j ACCEPT # Port 143 - imap
#/sbin/ipchains -A input -p tcp -s 0/0 -d 0/0 13 -j ACCEPT # Port 13 - daytime
#/sbin/ipchains -A input -b -p tcp -s 0/0 -d 0/0 53 -j ACCEPT # Port TCP/53 - DNS
#/sbin/ipchains -A input -b -p udp -s 0/0 -d 0/0 53 -j ACCEPT # Port UDP/53 - DNS
#/sbin/ipchains -A input -p udp -s 0/0 -d 0/0 1024:32767 -j ACCEPT # Port UDP/1024->32767 - DNS
# Accept Internetwork communication (Our networks, unlimited)
/sbin/ipchains -A input -s 1.2.3.0/24 -d 0/0 -j ACCEPT # Office
/sbin/ipchains -A input -s 5.6.7.0/24 -d 0/0 -j ACCEPT # Server Farm
# Deny and log everyone else
/sbin/ipchains -A input -p tcp -s 0/0 -d 0/0 -l -j DENY
/sbin/ipchains -A input -p udp -s 0/0 -d 0/0 -l -j DENY
/sbin/ipchains -A input -p icmp -s 0/0 -d 0/0 -l -j DENY
/sbin/ipchains -A output -j ACCEPT
/sbin/ipchains -A forward -j DENY
This isn't news.
The first few times news.google.com linked http://freeinternetpress.com , the traffic was so overwhelming that the server didn't take it. We had to tweak a few things out, so now we can.
The send lots of traffic to lots of people. We just post news very well, we weren't expecting the number of hits we got when they pick up stories.
No complaints though, we enjoy the fact that lots of people read our stuff.
Maybe you could, maybe you couldn't. There are a lot of variables you don't go into, mostly topology.
0 03 /
In the last apartment I lived in, if you went into the main hallway of the building, you couldn't pick up any sort of signal from the AP on the other side of the wall. Probably due to the wire mesh in the stucco. In the 2 story building I'm in now, you can clearly pick up a strong signal on either floor, anywhere in the building. Much different construction.
Here's some pictures of my current wireless setup. 802.11b with high gain antennas going from my house to office, 1/2 mile away. Then just a generic AP inside the house servicing computers in virtually every room of the house. My laptop works everywhere in the house, so the cheap NetGear AP handles it.
http://diary.illusions.gen.fl.us/Wireless.Dec-2
You may be able to do it with a basic AP and no special antennas on the floor in the middle of the 3rd floor. Maybe not. You may need one AP per floor with high gain antennas plus copper wiring between them. You may have to put multiple AP's per floor, depending on how much the signal is blocked by walls. If your AP is at one end of the building, and there are 3 2 room apartments in line, you'd have an awful lot of walls between the AP and the last user.
We did copper wiring for a law office once that was a 3 story building. They went nuts with the construction of the building. Floors were 3 feet of cement. Cell phones didn't work anywhere but by the windows in an area with great cell service. It was not a good candidate for wireless service.
Maybe you can find someone locally who's played with this a bit more, so they can look at it, and give you an educated opinion. No one here can give you the right answer, including me.
I used to use Charter Communications with their cablemodem in California. The service was identical to Time Warner/BrightHouse/RoadRunner in Florida, down to using the same boxes, and the same sorry support.
:) You can watch recorded shows and movies on your Linux or Windows PC using a modified version of mplayer. If you do both, you may not ever get any more work done again. You can watch soaps at work.
I bought a Hughes DVR2 (sometimes called DVR3), which is a DirecTV receiver with two connections to the dish (I'll explain more in a minute). I also got the oval dish, with two seperate LNB's, but it has expansion space for the third LNB, should I want to hook it to a HDTV (I don't have one yet).
The bills are very reasonable. I get all the local channels and cable channels for about $100/mo.
I upgraded the receiver with a 140Gb hard drive. From what I gathered on the Internet, that's as big as the BIOS on the box supports, but you can put in a second hard drive as well. As it is right now, I have over 100 hours of recording time, and it would almost be trivial to add a second 140Gb drive. As it is right now, we have weeks worth of stuff recorded.
I strongly recommend the O'Reilly book, "TiVO Hacks". There's lots of fun things you can do with it. I'm working on getting network connectivity to mine, so I can copy movies off to DVD to watch later.
I have absolutely no complaints about reception. It's been perfectly stable even in rain and wind. That's much better than my "digital cable" service was. Movies would always get blocky or go blank, and they just said that was normal.
If you live in the Northern US, you may wish to buy a larger dish. My friend who owns dssaccessories.com sells bigger dishes, and de-icers if you're in a frozen wasteland or something.
I really enjoy watching tv shows that are on when I'm not home, or forget to sit down and watch. I can sit down at 2am and watch my favorite shows, rather than bitching that I missed an episode. The downside to this is that now I've seen every Simpsons and Futurerama, so now I see the description, know I've seen it, and just delete it.
TiVO absolutely rocks for watching TV though. If you pause for a few minutes at the beginning of the show (get a beer or whatever), you can then skip through the commercials through the whole show. It's definately better than watching 8 minutes of commercials every 10 minutes. I didn't realize how short shows really are. Now I watch a 1 hour show in about 1/2 hour. If someone calls, I just pause the show, and I can rewind a few minute (up to 30 minutes) to catch back up with what they were saying. The day I hooked it up, my friend watched the "Fanta" commercial over and over frame by frame, and insisted that the girls were saying "want to f***". I could see it but only after hours of seeing her do it. We're easily entertained.
I have a friend who sells direcTV equipment. He has a heated dish, that'll get rid of the ice and snow for you.
:)
dssaccessories.com
I apologize for the ugly site. I'm redesigning it for him right now. The new site is pretty, but not quite ready.
He ships very quickly, and you'll get exactly what you wanted. I got my 5 input, 8 output multiswitch w/ power supply from him overnight. It was very useful since I had just moved into a new house, and was kinda missing that one piece. I don't trust anyone to hook up my equipment but me, so I didn't have DirecTV do it.
I was looking at it myself. My personal wireless T1 may be going away in August (the source is moving, probably away from my line of sight). I'm working with some financial backers to light up the city I'm in wireless, but who knows if it'll be done by August. If it does work out well, we'll be covering the entire Los Angeles area in a couple years. The Charter Communications folks were really upset when I moved. I ditched the cable TV for DirecTV, and went to the wireless (above). They were begging for me to stay with them, but I was like, "If your service didn't completely suck, I would have." It was bad. More than half the time, I would find my download speeds at or below 128K, and if I started an upload, I was below 128K. When it's barely faster than a 56k dialup, why pay the extra cost?
l
I was watching TV, and saw the DirecWay ad, and thought it looked interesting, so I switched over to the DirecWay channel. I don't know the channel off hand, but it has a 15 to 30 minute looping advertisment on it with the bubbly airhead repeating the same brainwashing over and over.
DirecWay has a speed comparison chart at:
http://directv.direcway.com/connection_test.htm
Basically, DirecWay a box, that attaches to your computer via ethernet and to a DirecTV-like dish with a transceiver on it (bigger LNB). They say it'll give UP TO 500Kb/s for downloads, and no information on uploads, so this could be comparable to cablemodem or DSL, depending on your neighborhood. They say it's "really fast" compared to 28.8 modem, so who knows.
You should expect long latency though, so browsing Slashdot may be ok, but SSHing to the server to make changes will be painful. Since I spend half my life in a shell using SSH, I'm not sure I could handle it.
I see quite a few comments about weather problems. You shouldn't really expect bad weather related problems, at least with DirecTV. I messed around with my dish until I had beween 92% and 100% signal strength on all channels with the A and B LNB's. If you're up north or find you have a weaker signal, you can buy a bigger dish that'll fix you right up. My friend owns dssaccessories.com, and he recommends using the upgraded 24" dish. If you have iceing problems, use a heated dish. I'm in LA, with a 2 LNB oval dish, and have no problems, even in the occasional rain storm. My dish is secured well with the standard equipment, so it doesn't get blown around with wind. It'll take the same kind of work to get a really good signal DirecWay signal. Don't necessarly trust the installers when they put it in. My in-laws had their DirecTV dish put behind a tree, so when the wind blows, they loose their signal.
They're looking for a $599.98 deposit and a monthly cost of $59.99 or a $99.99 activation fee, and a 15 month contract at $99.99 to cover the equipment cost, converting to $59.99 after 15 months. Either way, it's pricy.
Hope this helps.
I know that some guy with a masters in whatever running some tech department in a Fortune 500 company doesn't want some 18 year old kid who's been messing with a Linux box for the last 6 years showing him up, but honestly, I'd rather get someone in that could show me up.
My girlfriend is job hunting right now. She's more than qualified to work most office jobs, but isn't getting picked up because of a lack of a degree in anything. {sigh}
At least she's using a Mac now, so she can put OS/X experience on the list.
Well, in our company one of the managers (non-technical) gets the resumes, but I usually wander in, read the pile, and toss 'em into "maybe" and "noway" piles.
I particularly liked one resume, that looked like the guy not only invented the Internet, but he invented programming too. It read almost like the guys with experience with Linux since 1980, or with Cisco since 1965.
huh? Oh. ya {crumple}
When we have an opening, I'm going to put it in my
Actually, our hiring policy (when we do it) is completely backwards, intentionally.
.. at work?
.. demonstrate.
:)
We've hired people with lots of certifications, who could do absolutely nothing when they walked in the door. We gave them some time, but it didn't help, and we'd have to let them go.
We've hired people who had no certifications or formal training. They had learned some programming on their own, and played with *nix machines at home. They've been our best people.
Our interviews are fairly laid back.
What jobs relative to this work environment have you done?
What do you know? Languages, hardware platforms, etc.
Are you willing to learn?
What OS's have you used personally (home)?
If I were to hand you a broken server, could you fix it?
If I'm not sure, I may open up a console, do a little something, and then ask them to explain what I just did.
I've given people a stack of parts, and told them to build me a server, and install the OS with my CD (with instructions). I'm a bit rough. I tell them they have 10 minutes to complete it, or whatever. I just want to see how well they work. I don't really care that it takes 15 minutes, or if they encounter a problem and can't finish. I wanted to see that they made a good attempt.
I felt so sorry for one interview. This was back when I worked in a computer store. I gave him a random machine from the "repair" rack, and told him to fix it. I hadn't actually checked it out myself. I swear, just about everything was broken on that thing. I had no idea before he started, I hadn't checked it first. The customer report was "won't boot". No shit. Dead power supply, fried motherboard, etc, etc... Must have been a lightning strike (this was Florida). He looked so terrified. I watched what he was doing, and he did everything right, so he did pass, even though he didn't get it working.
All in all, I'd rather hire some Linux geek with no certs at all.
My last two best people I've hired were:
an ex-Y2k AIX programmer, with Linux and *BSD experience at home.
a "consultant" with no formal job experience, but in his words, "an OS whore". He'd used every OS out there enough to be familiar with them. He introduced *ME* to BeOS. I used it for a day.
It seems every time we take in someone with a degree of some sort, they're very proud of their education, but can't look beyond what they've learned.
I agree, in Fortune500-land, or for the government, you'll need or want a degree. But there are still companies who's senior tech geek (me) wants other geeks around him who actually understand and enjoy what they're doing.
(sorry to all my coworkers I just labled as "geek" if you didn't like it. hehe)
Oops, forgot an obvious step before #7. Burn the ISO to a CD.
It sounds like you want to do something almost identical to what we've done at my work. We build out servers on a regular basis, and need to be able to get a full OS installed as quickly as possible. We have the total install time, from the time we turn the machine on with blank hard drives, to when it's finished rebooting with a working operating system, down to 5 minutes. I'm happy with our time, so we aren't pushing to get it any faster.
/dev/hda1 All available space
/dev/hda2 128Mb swap
/dev/hdb1 server files (empty to start)
/dev/hda . We don't have a /dev/hdb in this machine, it's just a workstation, but it shows the partition table.
/dev/hda
/dev/hda: 20.0 GB, 20000000000 bytes
/etc/rc.d/rc.* files, etc).
/etc/HOSTNAME to "server", and put in impossible values in /etc/rc.d/rc.inet1. This would be easy enough to replace the value with a script. (cat rc.inet1 ; sed -e s/xNETWORKx/192.168.1/g | sed -e s/xDx/99/g > rc.inet1.temp ; mv rc.inet1.temp rc.inet1). If you use DHCP, you don't even have to mess with this. We don't use DHCP for servers.
/etc/rc.d/rc.inet1 /bin/sh /etc/rc.d/rc.inet1
/etc/HOSTNAME`
/orig/ /new/
/dev/hda1 /orig /dev/hda2 /new
/orig /new/os.tar.gz ./
Here's what we do.
I use Slackware, but this will apply to any OS that you'd like, with some changes. Normally, we have two hard drives in the server, one for the OS, and a second for the server's data (web data, mail, databases, or whatever this machine does). As far as this first step goes, this second drive is empty.
Our partitions usually consist of:
Below is a sample of
---
root@master (/) fdisk -l
Disk
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 2431 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hda1 * 1 2415 19398456 83 Linux
/dev/hda2 2416 2431 128520 82 Linux swap
---
1) We take a machine, and do a full install as normal, and do our customizations (adding programs, modifying the
2) We build a bunch of kernels, one for every one of our "standard" installations. There are only 3 or 4 hardware platforms that we end up using, so I build out kernels for each, plus have some generic ones waiting, in case someone asks for a server to be built on some different hardware (can you make my 486/33 a server? Sure.)
3) Make "generic" customizations. That is, make this config generic, so it won't conflict with something else. I change
---
#!
#
#
HOSTNAME=`cat
# Attach the loopback device.
/sbin/ifconfig lo 127.0.0.1
/sbin/route add -net 127.0.0.0 netmask 255.0.0.0 lo
/sbin/ifconfig eth0 xNETWORKx.xDx broadcast xNETWORKx.255 netmask 255.255.255.0
/sbin/route add -net xNETWORKx.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 eth0
/sbin/route add default gw xNETWORKx.1 netmask 0.0.0.0 metric 1
# End of rc.inet1
---
3) When we're sure we are happy with the installation, we just tar it up.
mkdir
mkdir
mount
mount
cd
tar cvpzf
That'll run for a while. You'll get to watch the filenames roll by.
4) send it over to a workstation that you make CD's on. I have copies of all my ISO's, and the tgz's for future reference, and to download from internally. This lets me figure out mistakes from the past, or make subtle corrections as necessary.
5) prepare to make a CD.
I took <A HREF="http://syslinux.zytor.com/index.php">isolinu x</A> from the Slackware installation CD (1st disk of the pack, if you bought it), but I s
Isn't this what they tried with the GIF format? Make it free for years, then decide they want to make money off their nice little patent? We'll be manufacturers go to other formats soon, just like people started using different formats for graphics and the like. Isn't that part of what made jpeg popular? Well, besides the fact that it's smaller, it doesn't have the tax on it.
I just can't imagine how long it will be before we start seeing digital cameras and other assorted devices using with UFS, EXT2, or whatever. I just hope they're smart about it, and figure out to use a common system, rather than all using their own home-grown systems. Isn't that where we started with digital cameras, where they all had their own special image format, on built-in storage, where we *HAD* to download through serial or USB cables through their own program..
Prepare for the new wave of new types of media. Microsoft just made CF, MMC, SD, etc, etc, obsolete.
Maybe this time they're just getting a bit too greedy. It's not costing them anything to let people continue to use this ancient format, but now they want to make the quick buck. Ok, a few million bucks, but still...
Exactly. Something what he's looking for isn't rocket science. Writing it himself, it'll give exactly the features that he wants to offer them.. More than likely, everything he finds out there will be missing a little something.
One of the sites that I write for required a seriously huge content management system, with all kinds of wierd stuff special to that site. For giggles, I wrote the front end in PHP, which allows users to upload files, and do a whole bunch of functions. The back end is written in Perl. The admin users can do a variety of photoprocessing passed on to ImageMagick. If that isn't enough for them, they have the option to push one button in the browser, and have the image open up on their local machine in PhotoShop. (that was a bit harder to pull off). Then there are a huge variety of sorting functions, publishing management options, etc, etc.. Finally, once it's done, it reaches the web page on the scheduled date.
Of course, most of that is *WAY* beyond what he requires..
The way I'd write his application would be something like this...
Store all the images in one directory. Write a simple upload page to let them upload individual images or zip files. Assign the images a unique name (we know users can't do that themselves) before sticking them in the common directory.
He'd need a database to hold a little information. Something along the lines of image_id, image_name, image_description, image_comment, section, sort_order. The image_id is a unique number (incrementing, duh). The next four are obvious. The last one would be the order that it's sorted on the result page. People always want to rearrange their stuff, for some reason.
The last page would be to display the images. List all the sections, let the viewing user pick which section to view (Christmas 1999), and when they've selected a section, show the images, sorted by sort_order.
That would consist of just a few pages. Not very hard.
Then the question is, what's he looking for in regards to blogging? Slashcode is great if you have lots of users, lots of stuff, or require lots of configurability.. But probably he just wants a simple chat system. One page to insert messages, one to display the last x messages (last 20, or whatever). Again, simple stuff.
I've written a few of these, each one specific to it's application. Our intranet has the most basic type (described above), which was exactly what was required. It's written in ColdFusion, with a MSSQL database, and currently only has about 16,000 records in it.. I have one that's quite a bit more complex on another site written in Perl with a MySQL database, holding 4,000,000 records.. It has serious administrative and anti-abuse capabilities, and has thousands of "topics"..
The ColdFusion one took about an hour to write, because I'm not terribly proficent in ColdFusion (I don't use it much). The second took me about a day to write, and little code changes over the years to stop various kinds of abuses and add features that the site owner wanted..
Really, he should/could write his parents site in just a couple days.. They'd probably be very proud of him, and thank him a whole lot more than if he just put a pre-written package up for them.
But hey, I'm a programmer, I'd write it if my mom wanted one. It's really up to his abilities.
I'm completely paranoid about trying to update. We've made so many modifications to the templates, and some of the scripts themselves, that I'm afraid that an update would have tragic results.. Well, that's why we have daily, weekly, and monthly off-site backups. We can roll back to 2 months if we need to. Of course, I don't want any downtime, so rolling back to something older would be bad for us.. Google checks Free Internet Press every 3 hours for news updates. I'd hate to think that maybe they'd drop us as a news source if we weren't available for an update or two...