There is no reason at all that you can't do similar things. Your arguement is much like that of someone who says "oh you've comitted fraud because you didn't pay for that FREE operating system." FreeBSD and Linux happened because thousands of people gave their time (in huge amounts) to these projects. What would you have us do on the budget to account for the free O/S that we were given?
Unless you've lived under a rock, *lots* of things get given to places (non-profit and for-profit alike). Educational places get zillions of dollars worth of things every year (especially a person from MIT should know this!). Just this past week a group I consult for gave another group (us)$10k worth of equipment in a different division of the same company. It wasn't _fraud_ that they can now clain they didn't have to spend the money to buy that stuff. Their budget wasn't decrimented a dime.
The ACME budget stands as it is as that is what it cost in dollars to build it. If you're going to pick at us, then pick at the time that we've got invested in getting it working. But since this is/., I'll guess that everyone presumes that their time is free.
Re:What disappoints me...
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Mattel Spyware
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· Score: 2
First PE is the law pretty much everywhere in the US and Canada. The professional society lobbiests made sure of it. There is a growing industry around the license process and passing these marginal exams. The exams are fundamentally flawed as the 'pass' rate swings wildly from 30% to 70% with no appreciable change in the pool of people taking the exams.
I am a Civil Engineer. The PE means approximately nothing to the ethical behavior of the engineering world. Trust me, been there, done that. In fact, I can make a coherent arguement that it has in fact made things worse. There are bunches of laws & regulations about this and that, but in reality unless a project kills or significantly hurts people, the laws are totally ignored. This non-enforcement is a very dangerous thing, as it lends the illusion that the public's ethics are being watched out for.
The PE is really a barrier to entry to keep the underskilled and poor test takers out. It serves as a means of reducing the population of engineers that can practice and thus keeping wages higher than otherwise. There is a movement afoot to make things 'harder' so that the net wages will continue to rise "up to those of programmers".
To get a PE you do swear to a code of ethics. I've heard of a few dozen cases a year nationally (USA) where those are even vaguely enforced. It's just like bad Doctors who can practice (and kill) for years and not be de-licensed until they kill someone important or a large group.
If you note some cynical tone here, you get an A. The professional registration of Engineers, Doctors and Lawyers is fundamentally a good idea. I believe that as the system is currently operated it does more harm than good.
Finally, I taught Software Engineering at a major midwestern university for 5.5 years. We talked about ethics and one of the things that was discussed is the freedom computer people currently have. If they don't like what is happening, there are so many empty jobs, they can go someplace else and work. Civil Engineering currently has more engineers than jobs and that doesn't allow a CE to depart a job over something as trivial as an ethical objection. Something to ponder as you drive along the interstate crossing hundreds of lowest bid bridges, eh?
Summary: Don't hold up PE as a model of how things ought to be. It is very broken from the ethical perspective.
I'd suggest that you and the repliers go read a few issues of Home Power Magazine before you speak out of turn.
People are doing this even as you whine it isn't possible/feasible. Home Power writes about it in every issue.
BTW, Home Power Magazine is produced with a bunch of Macs by a bunch of pretty interesting people who are by no means 'typical magazine' folks. These guys are more like a big family.
The orignal post was a Troll, but in case people are interested...
It's safe to say we can bring up a new node in well under 30 minutes. That includes flashing it to a new BIOS, setting up the NV RAM in the network cards and then loading FreeBSD (via the network of course).
Sometimes it takes longer, but that is usually because we've got some piece of bad hardware (memory or disk usually) or we've screwed up along the way from raw tiredness. Most of the hardware work we do on this thing is done on Friday nights.
K6-2 because at the time we selected it K6-3 was still in the first revision and the motherboards that we had couldn't do the power requirements (3.x volt current in particular) that K6-3 needed. Also there was (and I'll guess still is) a pretty steep price premium on K6-3. This was one of those topics we discussed for a while before we decided. Original K6-2s were just on the current limits of what the P55T2P4 Rev 3 boards could do.
Our rule of thumb is each node is roughly a Pentium II/330. Most of the code we're running (at least at the moment) is in Fortran (80% - a 4800 line legacy) & C and is mostly integer.
I'm reminded of the expression, "when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail." We have a hammer and some of the problems will certainly be screws, but at less than $3k we'll live with it. It isn't a perfect world.
You can solve lots of problems. It comes down to how the problem is described and then coded.
ACME's first problem is CPU bound and not memory bound. If the nodes had 16mb it would be fine, since the code is small and the runtimes are long.
On the other hand, we have friends at Purdue who are adding their second gb of ram to each compute node. It all depends on the problem and the resources available.
Please don't mis-understand that we *like* having nodes with only 32mb, but we don't have huge money to buy huge (and very very cool) grown up machines. If you've got a free (or near free) source of 42 duals 600s with 1gb of ram per CPU in rack mounted cases, we've got racks that would be delighted to hold them instead of what they are holding. FreeBSD runs *real* well on duals.
$3000 doesn't go very far in 'new' computing. In another project we've got going, $3k didn't even buy the disk drives for one machine.
Finally, to your swipe about 'recognition'. I had no intent on ever making any kind of BIG deal about ACME. I figured we'd get 10,000 hits over the entire life of the project. We got that in less than the first hour after/. posted about us. ACME is doing real work, that's why it was built. If you don't like that, well that's your problem.
And what did you do with your $250 cluster? You could have joined SETI or gone after a few prime numbers or any of a zillion other cool things.
The point of ACME is to solve a few very hard (yes, NP-hard) problems. We don't particularly care the form of ACME in the end as long as we can solve the problems at hand.
One of my gripes about the typical/.er is that they are in love with the technology and not with *doing* things with the technology. ACME is about doing, not screwing around. Our intention is to produce papers that used the results from ACME, and not to do papers about ACME. Being/.ed was a pleasant surprise.
So far, with over 70,000 hits since it started 9 hours ago, ACME.ecn.purdue.edu has done very very well. Our guess is FreeBSD 3.3 as it currently is tuned with plenty of Apaches and enough memory to prevent swapping and we could have dealt with at least 10 times the load we've seen so far with no changes.
On the other hand, we'll also bet that the campus connection to the Internet probably couldn't have taken 10 times the load.
So far so good. I figured we'd get maybe 10,000 hits over the entire life of ACME and we crossed that in the first hour of/.
We've seen some security trouble, but nothing that reasonably well configured systems couldn't handle, though I'd be running a bit more security stuff if I'd known this was coming.
Being/.ed is an intersting thing. We'll write more about it after the hits are below 4 a second.
Disk drives less than 1gb often go into the dumpster even out here in the midwest. Most of ours came from junk at junk yards or from piles of stuff that was headed for the junkyard.
We have yet to have to pay for any disk space.
Watch ACME's news page... in a couple of days we should have eclipsed our 'free' disk space with even cooler stuff.
We found cases last summer that all matched, so that's why we have all the cases. Since that picture was taken, the pile of computers on the far end has gone away and another rack replaced it.
The end you see closest to you is Column 'E' so all the nodes in C, D and E are up plus the top two in column B. The bottom machines in D and E are the two connected to the outside world. The bottom one in D now really is in the new rack, but we've not got new pictures since that was just done last week.
We add roughly a motherboard a month. Hard disks are not a problem (I see four within reach right now that are all 880mb). CPUs we purchase. Memory we find here and there mostly for free. The motherboards are the sticker. PU Salvage gets probably 100 machines a month and we try to get every one of them looked at before someone else gets them purchased.
We cheat. If you look closely at the picture, ACME is sitting on a raised floor. It lives in a little-used computer room left over from holding two dual Vax and a couple of Goulds.
As a result the room has a raised floor with forced air from below, Liebert cooling, power conditioning, better security, etc etc etc.
I've several times gone to those tapes made with a quad splitter/switcher. Between the grain of the source, the noise of a ho-hummmm installation (can you say ground loop), dirty/old VCRs (you can say high frequency loss too) and old tapes identing the person doing the 'deed' was very hard or impossible.
Most of these systems are installed and then rarely if ever well cared for (we're not talking casino level security here) and so the all-digital, all-hard disk solution sure seems like a *much* better scheme for this intermediate level where maintenance is certainly going to be an issue.
Obviously if someone is really going to care about it and get the stuff serviced then tape is a good solution. This 'Ask/.' guy isn't in one of those places, nearly certainly.
One final benefit of the digital solution is that one can build a www interface to the mpeg movie. In very short order, you can see the perp, stop the movie, and hit 'print' and that image is faxible or good for documentation anywhere. Getting stills off security tapes is just one more hassle.
My particular alley is never in sun (part of the problem I'll guess). If you need a netcam that deals with sun, Axis makes the 200+ which is more expensive, has a few more pixels, is a bit older, but seems not to have the sun restriction.
The 2100 is excellent thus far. No crashes, not a single unexpected problem. I've also tried alternate lenses on it and the only problem was the supplied base isn't stable enough for a telephoto. The camera has the standard 1/4-20 camera thread on the bottom, so a more serious base cleaned up that problem easily.
I will note that those who depend on compressing the image from the 2100 should avoid viewing powerlines (which move a couple of pixels in seemingly no wind) and turn off some of the automatic features so the camera doesn't change settings as adaptively. In full size full push mode, the camera can eat a significant portion of a 10baseT network. It is autodetecting 10/100 and I moved it to 100 where it's % consumed was way less. It is very neat.
One of my consulting sites is trying the Quickcam solution. Take an image off the Quickcam 1 or 2 (cqam for example), pump it off site to a system in a secure location and then every hour convert those images to an MPEG movie (for compression). This is possible because of the cool, inexpensive new disks that are 40-60gb and those disks can be grouped together relatively inexpensively. Maxi cool to have an old Pentium with 210gb of disks and still be lurking around $1400.
Remember to 'protect' the location for as long as it will take to notice the theft. Often the time is pretty long (4-5 days) because of things like Xmas eve, Xmas, Sat, Sun sequences.
I'm about to try the Axis Communications Axis 2100 Network Camera ($500ish each) dumped (via server push) to a set of large disks to cover where my car is parked in an alley.
Either of these alternatives massively beats the camera to tape solution, as that requires much to much recurring maintenance. A timelaps VCR is only good for 2-3 years because the heads and transport wear out pretty quickly. The camera to disk solution should be maintenance free.
One more thing. The current owners of Quickcam (Logitech) don't give a damn about Open Software. Please avoid them if at all possible. You should write them and ask why they've not released a programming spec for any of their cameras. Kensington has a Linux USB camera driver in the works.
My general plan is to ignore that there are humans anywhere around. They usually do the wrong thing and so they've been taught to keep there hands off the entire thing.
I never use more than 50% of the UPSes rated capacity. It gets better run times out of them and stresses them less. Often the UPSes are the only remaining power at a place and the temperatures in these places are often into the 90s while the UPSes are still doing their thing. Less load means they can effectively withstand more heat before they reach the end of the batteries. Further, things that matter more are more apt to be on their own UPSes, so they last the longest (given similar sized UPSes).
I avoid APC UPSes, since several I've had them fail in odd and unexpected ways (in particular boiling batteries so they reach end-of-life way too early.) APC is hitting a price point, not a quality point and has been unfriendly to the OSS movement. I've had very good luck with Best and SOLA
If you run Unix (or FreeBSD or Linux or...) I suggest UPSD to baby sit your systems. Most of the sites I take care of are effectively 'lights out' (i.e. nobody that is a systems person is there regularly) and UPSD has served me well. Power fails at site X and UPSD emails me. I can then call (being up to a continent away) and manage the problem as need be. Don't forget to UPS the phone system.
I've found that most of the time the outages come in two possible groups. 0-30 minutes and 2.5hrs and more. I make sure that all of the 0-30 kind of events are fully protected. Without generators the 2.5 hr kinds are not practically covered by normal UPSes. If you're prone to lots of power failures, then go look at Home Power Magazine and in particular Trace Engineering systems. The theme is generate your own power 24/7 and be much more reliable as long as one does some minimal maintenance.
Finally, all the UPSes are tested annually for run times and the batteries are replaced at slightly longer intervals than the manuals suggest. Also be sure the that users have flashlights or other emergency lights that work. I test those lights too, since no one else gives a damn about emergency lighting.
The generator at the transmitter was a 1600HP diesel with enough fuel for 4 days (!) of uninterrupted operation with two tubes online [...]
In Indiana (and I presume the majority of northern states) ice storms and snow cause 4-days to be a sort of minimum amount of fuel. I've a friend who 'borrowed' a Payloader to clear the way for a fuel oil truck when it became clear that 4-days was not enough. At that point he said, "never, ever again". I'll guess he's got fuel for 10 days or so now and has to treat the fuel to prevent it from growing mold and other gook that would foul the Cat's filters.
Well.. if the company makes money then it helps your bottom line..
I think (and obviously your opinion may vary) that BSDi till now was a software company and had no apparent bias towards any hardware. Now there is a bias.
Further, does BSDi have infinitely deep pockets? I doubt it. There is such a thing as management focus, and now there is one more thing to focus on. I'd much rather they were an excellent software company than a ho-hum hardware, software, systems integration, window washing, tire changing, house building, eCommerce, medical records, BtoB etc etc etc company.
"Hey Kirk, what's left on the IPO checklist? You gonna be ready to go around September 1?"
I don't see how buying a hardware company helps the bottom line. Yes it diversifies and adds to the impression that BSDi is more vertically integrated, but does it do anything other than annoy all the other hardware companies that ship boxes with FRbEsEdBiSD already installed?
"The investment bankers said, "Hey, you need a hardware company." So hey, we purchased a hardware company. Next we'll figure out what to do with it."
Linux is a decentralized development model. It is very difficult for one point of failure (other than Linus T) to cause a total breakdown in development. With most of the major players in BSD now under one umbrella, if the ship sinks, will there be enough left to continue?
Is it just me, or does this have the same melody at Bill Clinton every time there is any kind of gun violence? BC: Something bad happens, "We need more laws to protect the children." BG: Something bad happens, "This will happen more if we're broken up. Don't break us up for the sake of the users."
Of course, as we all know, if MS had done something better than a half-assed job with separating the O/S from the application and the user's customizations (err Profile), most of the ILY virus mess couldn't have ever happened.
The difference between customers and users is customers have a choice, users don't. At the moment there are alot of MS users.
According to the BSD BOF that was in Chicago this week (4/19), WC/BSDI will put up a way to order FreeBSD 3.5 on CD, IF THERE IS SUFFICIENT INTEREST IN IT. (Interest here is defined as someplace between 500-1000 copies ordered.) So you'll have to go to WC/BSDI _after_ sometime early next week (the people that change the WC/BSDI web site were at Chicago) and opt-in to get on the list to receive this.
Obviously you want a circuit that limits xmit times, but as we prove on/. everyday. "S**T happens". Things get hit by lightning, bad batches of parts happen, etc etc etc. Sooner or later one of these uplinks (perhaps in a DoS attack) will be on and there will be nothing to do but track down the source. How does one go about doing that?
It took the FBI months to figure out who captured the HBO transponder in the late 1980s. I seriously doubt that the FBI will use that many resources for just a sat based ISP. What is going to prevent their service from totally dieing while that transmitter still transmits?
Ok, I'll do the math on how many transmitters are down here and even at 3 or 4 sigma there is bound to be one stuck on relatively frequently. Won't that be a problem? -- effectly being a DoS.
What are they going to do about the 'stuck on' transmitter problem (be it simple hardware failure or something more unpleasant)? How does one go about finding that transmitter? ("Hey, NSA, could you over-fly the entire US with your radio receiver listening to this freq....")
The existing gas-station style uplinks are relatively tightly controlled... This opens up a whole new class of problems.
I was looking forward to a FreeBSD 3.5 CD. I still have systems that are running 2.2.7 (patched for security). I also have a rule that says I have CDs for anything I run (with floppies for the patches).
I think this really brings out several issues about open source development that are fundamental... 1) The press for newer better faster (i.e. 4.0) is driven by hacking not stability or consumer (in amateur radio it's called 'appliance' users) users. 2) BSDI/WC didn't ask us with zillions of systems in production what we would like. We're increasingly irrelevant to the massive hacking hordes. This is less true with Linux; only because IPO fever has struck over there and with BSDI/WC it isn't quite there yet. 3) 3.x is nearing stagnation, because there is no glory to maintaining it. Just as there is no fix for SMP NetATalk which regularly will panic and cause reboots -- bug killing and back porting are both hard work and very inglorious. You get no fame for "oh I finally killed this bug that impacted 10% of the production systems" but do get fame and commit privs for a new (maybe un-needed, perhaps "cleaner") scheme to do disk I/O or devices or network or...
I'm not mad about this, just realistic that this is a social community with it's own value system. It just happens to be a value system that doesn't help those who are trying to *do* things with this O/S.
Will this get better? I have no idea. There has been some discussion on the FBSD IRC about improved regression testing which will make back porting a little easier and siginicantly improve stability.
The BSDI purchase means there is an IPO on the horizon which will, at least for a moment, make for improved bug response. I wonder if the BSDI/WC folks know what it means to operations be a 'public company'? Perhaps they really don't care -- IPO, count 181 days and retire.
One thing's for sure... we're about to find out the brave new ways of BSDI/WC... be they good or be they bad. I wonder if not pressing 3.5 is just the beginning.
Slashdot Mirror
I think not.
There is no reason at all that you can't do similar things. Your arguement is much like that of someone who says "oh you've comitted fraud because you didn't pay for that FREE operating system." FreeBSD and Linux happened because thousands of people gave their time (in huge amounts) to these projects. What would you have us do on the budget to account for the free O/S that we were given?
Unless you've lived under a rock, *lots* of things get given to places (non-profit and for-profit alike). Educational places get zillions of dollars worth of things every year (especially a person from MIT should know this!). Just this past week a group I consult for gave another group (us)$10k worth of equipment in a different division of the same company. It wasn't _fraud_ that they can now clain they didn't have to spend the money to buy that stuff. Their budget wasn't decrimented a dime.
The ACME budget stands as it is as that is what it cost in dollars to build it. If you're going to pick at us, then pick at the time that we've got invested in getting it working. But since this is /., I'll guess that everyone presumes that their time is free.
First PE is the law pretty much everywhere in the US and Canada. The professional society lobbiests made sure of it. There is a growing industry around the license process and passing these marginal exams. The exams are fundamentally flawed as the 'pass' rate swings wildly from 30% to 70% with no appreciable change in the pool of people taking the exams.
I am a Civil Engineer. The PE means approximately nothing to the ethical behavior of the engineering world. Trust me, been there, done that. In fact, I can make a coherent arguement that it has in fact made things worse. There are bunches of laws & regulations about this and that, but in reality unless a project kills or significantly hurts people, the laws are totally ignored. This non-enforcement is a very dangerous thing, as it lends the illusion that the public's ethics are being watched out for.
The PE is really a barrier to entry to keep the underskilled and poor test takers out. It serves as a means of reducing the population of engineers that can practice and thus keeping wages higher than otherwise. There is a movement afoot to make things 'harder' so that the net wages will continue to rise "up to those of programmers".
To get a PE you do swear to a code of ethics. I've heard of a few dozen cases a year nationally (USA) where those are even vaguely enforced. It's just like bad Doctors who can practice (and kill) for years and not be de-licensed until they kill someone important or a large group.
If you note some cynical tone here, you get an A. The professional registration of Engineers, Doctors and Lawyers is fundamentally a good idea. I believe that as the system is currently operated it does more harm than good.
Finally, I taught Software Engineering at a major midwestern university for 5.5 years. We talked about ethics and one of the things that was discussed is the freedom computer people currently have. If they don't like what is happening, there are so many empty jobs, they can go someplace else and work. Civil Engineering currently has more engineers than jobs and that doesn't allow a CE to depart a job over something as trivial as an ethical objection. Something to ponder as you drive along the interstate crossing hundreds of lowest bid bridges, eh?
Summary: Don't hold up PE as a model of how things ought to be. It is very broken from the ethical perspective.
People are doing this even as you whine it isn't possible/feasible. Home Power writes about it in every issue.
BTW, Home Power Magazine is produced with a bunch of Macs by a bunch of pretty interesting people who are by no means 'typical magazine' folks. These guys are more like a big family.
It's safe to say we can bring up a new node in well under 30 minutes. That includes flashing it to a new BIOS, setting up the NV RAM in the network cards and then loading FreeBSD (via the network of course).
Sometimes it takes longer, but that is usually because we've got some piece of bad hardware (memory or disk usually) or we've screwed up along the way from raw tiredness. Most of the hardware work we do on this thing is done on Friday nights.
K6-2 because at the time we selected it K6-3 was still in the first revision and the motherboards that we had couldn't do the power requirements (3.x volt current in particular) that K6-3 needed. Also there was (and I'll guess still is) a pretty steep price premium on K6-3. This was one of those topics we discussed for a while before we decided. Original K6-2s were just on the current limits of what the P55T2P4 Rev 3 boards could do.
Our rule of thumb is each node is roughly a Pentium II/330. Most of the code we're running (at least at the moment) is in Fortran (80% - a 4800 line legacy) & C and is mostly integer.
I'm reminded of the expression, "when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail." We have a hammer and some of the problems will certainly be screws, but at less than $3k we'll live with it. It isn't a perfect world.
You can solve lots of problems. It comes down to how the problem is described and then coded.
ACME's first problem is CPU bound and not memory bound. If the nodes had 16mb it would be fine, since the code is small and the runtimes are long.
On the other hand, we have friends at Purdue who are adding their second gb of ram to each compute node. It all depends on the problem and the resources available.
Please don't mis-understand that we *like* having nodes with only 32mb, but we don't have huge money to buy huge (and very very cool) grown up machines. If you've got a free (or near free) source of 42 duals 600s with 1gb of ram per CPU in rack mounted cases, we've got racks that would be delighted to hold them instead of what they are holding. FreeBSD runs *real* well on duals.
$3000 doesn't go very far in 'new' computing. In another project we've got going, $3k didn't even buy the disk drives for one machine.
Finally, to your swipe about 'recognition'. I had no intent on ever making any kind of BIG deal about ACME. I figured we'd get 10,000 hits over the entire life of the project. We got that in less than the first hour after /. posted about us. ACME is doing real work, that's why it was built. If you don't like that, well that's your problem.
And what did you do with your $250 cluster? You could have joined SETI or gone after a few prime numbers or any of a zillion other cool things.
/.er is that they are in love with the technology and not with *doing* things with the technology. ACME is about doing, not screwing around. Our intention is to produce papers that used the results from ACME, and not to do papers about ACME. Being /.ed was a pleasant surprise.
The point of ACME is to solve a few very hard (yes, NP-hard) problems. We don't particularly care the form of ACME in the end as long as we can solve the problems at hand.
One of my gripes about the typical
The nifty Paragon was just decommissioned a couple of weeks ago. I'll guess they needed the space for the SP/2.
:-)
Perhaps it will show up someplace where we can, ummm, 'acquire' it.
So far, with over 70,000 hits since it started 9 hours ago, ACME.ecn.purdue.edu has done very very well. Our guess is FreeBSD 3.3 as it currently is tuned with plenty of Apaches and enough memory to prevent swapping and we could have dealt with at least 10 times the load we've seen so far with no changes.
/.
/.ed is an intersting thing. We'll write more about it after the hits are below 4 a second.
On the other hand, we'll also bet that the campus connection to the Internet probably couldn't have taken 10 times the load.
So far so good. I figured we'd get maybe 10,000 hits over the entire life of ACME and we crossed that in the first hour of
We've seen some security trouble, but nothing that reasonably well configured systems couldn't handle, though I'd be running a bit more security stuff if I'd known this was coming.
Being
David Moffett
Disk drives less than 1gb often go into the dumpster even out here in the midwest. Most of ours came from junk at junk yards or from piles of stuff that was headed for the junkyard.
We have yet to have to pay for any disk space.
Watch ACME's news page... in a couple of days we should have eclipsed our 'free' disk space with even cooler stuff.
17 at the moment.
We found cases last summer that all matched, so that's why we have all the cases. Since that picture was taken, the pile of computers on the far end has gone away and another rack replaced it.
The end you see closest to you is Column 'E' so all the nodes in C, D and E are up plus the top two in column B. The bottom machines in D and E are the two connected to the outside world. The bottom one in D now really is in the new rack, but we've not got new pictures since that was just done last week.
We add roughly a motherboard a month. Hard disks are not a problem (I see four within reach right now that are all 880mb). CPUs we purchase. Memory we find here and there mostly for free. The motherboards are the sticker. PU Salvage gets probably 100 machines a month and we try to get every one of them looked at before someone else gets them purchased.
We cheat. If you look closely at the picture, ACME is sitting on a raised floor. It lives in a little-used computer room left over from holding two dual Vax and a couple of Goulds.
As a result the room has a raised floor with forced air from below, Liebert cooling, power conditioning, better security, etc etc etc.
I've several times gone to those tapes made with a quad splitter/switcher. Between the grain of the source, the noise of a ho-hummmm installation (can you say ground loop), dirty/old VCRs (you can say high frequency loss too) and old tapes identing the person doing the 'deed' was very hard or impossible.
/.' guy isn't in one of those places, nearly certainly.
Most of these systems are installed and then rarely if ever well cared for (we're not talking casino level security here) and so the all-digital, all-hard disk solution sure seems like a *much* better scheme for this intermediate level where maintenance is certainly going to be an issue.
Obviously if someone is really going to care about it and get the stuff serviced then tape is a good solution. This 'Ask
One final benefit of the digital solution is that one can build a www interface to the mpeg movie. In very short order, you can see the perp, stop the movie, and hit 'print' and that image is faxible or good for documentation anywhere. Getting stills off security tapes is just one more hassle.
My particular alley is never in sun (part of the problem I'll guess). If you need a netcam that deals with sun, Axis makes the 200+ which is more expensive, has a few more pixels, is a bit older, but seems not to have the sun restriction.
The 2100 is excellent thus far. No crashes, not a single unexpected problem. I've also tried alternate lenses on it and the only problem was the supplied base isn't stable enough for a telephoto. The camera has the standard 1/4-20 camera thread on the bottom, so a more serious base cleaned up that problem easily.
I will note that those who depend on compressing the image from the 2100 should avoid viewing powerlines (which move a couple of pixels in seemingly no wind) and turn off some of the automatic features so the camera doesn't change settings as adaptively. In full size full push mode, the camera can eat a significant portion of a 10baseT network. It is autodetecting 10/100 and I moved it to 100 where it's % consumed was way less. It is very neat.
One of my consulting sites is trying the Quickcam solution. Take an image off the Quickcam 1 or 2 (cqam for example), pump it off site to a system in a secure location and then every hour convert those images to an MPEG movie (for compression). This is possible because of the cool, inexpensive new disks that are 40-60gb and those disks can be grouped together relatively inexpensively. Maxi cool to have an old Pentium with 210gb of disks and still be lurking around $1400.
Remember to 'protect' the location for as long as it will take to notice the theft. Often the time is pretty long (4-5 days) because of things like Xmas eve, Xmas, Sat, Sun sequences.
I'm about to try the Axis Communications Axis 2100 Network Camera ($500ish each) dumped (via server push) to a set of large disks to cover where my car is parked in an alley.
Either of these alternatives massively beats the camera to tape solution, as that requires much to much recurring maintenance. A timelaps VCR is only good for 2-3 years because the heads and transport wear out pretty quickly. The camera to disk solution should be maintenance free.
One more thing. The current owners of Quickcam (Logitech) don't give a damn about Open Software. Please avoid them if at all possible. You should write them and ask why they've not released a programming spec for any of their cameras. Kensington has a Linux USB camera driver in the works.
My general plan is to ignore that there are humans anywhere around. They usually do the wrong thing and so they've been taught to keep there hands off the entire thing.
I never use more than 50% of the UPSes rated capacity. It gets better run times out of them and stresses them less. Often the UPSes are the only remaining power at a place and the temperatures in these places are often into the 90s while the UPSes are still doing their thing. Less load means they can effectively withstand more heat before they reach the end of the batteries. Further, things that matter more are more apt to be on their own UPSes, so they last the longest (given similar sized UPSes).
I avoid APC UPSes, since several I've had them fail in odd and unexpected ways (in particular boiling batteries so they reach end-of-life way too early.) APC is hitting a price point, not a quality point and has been unfriendly to the OSS movement. I've had very good luck with Best and SOLA
If you run Unix (or FreeBSD or Linux or...) I suggest UPSD to baby sit your systems. Most of the sites I take care of are effectively 'lights out' (i.e. nobody that is a systems person is there regularly) and UPSD has served me well. Power fails at site X and UPSD emails me. I can then call (being up to a continent away) and manage the problem as need be. Don't forget to UPS the phone system.
I've found that most of the time the outages come in two possible groups. 0-30 minutes and 2.5hrs and more. I make sure that all of the 0-30 kind of events are fully protected. Without generators the 2.5 hr kinds are not practically covered by normal UPSes. If you're prone to lots of power failures, then go look at Home Power Magazine and in particular Trace Engineering systems. The theme is generate your own power 24/7 and be much more reliable as long as one does some minimal maintenance.
Finally, all the UPSes are tested annually for run times and the batteries are replaced at slightly longer intervals than the manuals suggest. Also be sure the that users have flashlights or other emergency lights that work. I test those lights too, since no one else gives a damn about emergency lighting.
The generator at the transmitter was a 1600HP diesel with enough fuel for 4 days (!) of uninterrupted operation with two tubes online [...]
In Indiana (and I presume the majority of northern states) ice storms and snow cause 4-days to be a sort of minimum amount of fuel. I've a friend who 'borrowed' a Payloader to clear the way for a fuel oil truck when it became clear that 4-days was not enough. At that point he said, "never, ever again". I'll guess he's got fuel for 10 days or so now and has to treat the fuel to prevent it from growing mold and other gook that would foul the Cat's filters.
Well.. if the company makes money then it helps your bottom line..
I think (and obviously your opinion may vary) that BSDi till now was a software company and had no apparent bias towards any hardware. Now there is a bias.
Further, does BSDi have infinitely deep pockets? I doubt it. There is such a thing as management focus, and now there is one more thing to focus on. I'd much rather they were an excellent software company than a ho-hum hardware, software, systems integration, window washing, tire changing, house building, eCommerce, medical records, BtoB etc etc etc company.
"Hey Kirk, what's left on the IPO checklist? You gonna be ready to go around September 1?"
I don't see how buying a hardware company helps the bottom line. Yes it diversifies and adds to the impression that BSDi is more vertically integrated, but does it do anything other than annoy all the other hardware companies that ship boxes with FRbEsEdBiSD already installed?
"The investment bankers said, "Hey, you need a hardware company." So hey, we purchased a hardware company. Next we'll figure out what to do with it."
Linux is a decentralized development model. It is very difficult for one point of failure (other than Linus T) to cause a total breakdown in development. With most of the major players in BSD now under one umbrella, if the ship sinks, will there be enough left to continue?
Is it just me, or does this have the same melody at Bill Clinton every time there is any kind of gun violence?
BC: Something bad happens, "We need more laws to protect the children."
BG: Something bad happens, "This will happen more if we're broken up. Don't break us up for the sake of the users."
Of course, as we all know, if MS had done something better than a half-assed job with separating the O/S from the application and the user's customizations (err Profile), most of the ILY virus mess couldn't have ever happened.
The difference between customers and users is customers have a choice, users don't. At the moment there are alot of MS users.
yup... the IPO checklist.
"Follow the money", All The President's Men `deep throat'
According to the BSD BOF that was in Chicago this week (4/19), WC/BSDI will put up a way to order FreeBSD 3.5 on CD, IF THERE IS SUFFICIENT INTEREST IN IT. (Interest here is defined as someplace between 500-1000 copies ordered.) So you'll have to go to WC/BSDI _after_ sometime early next week (the people that change the WC/BSDI web site were at Chicago) and opt-in to get on the list to receive this.
:-)
Please DO THIS!
Obviously you want a circuit that limits xmit times, but as we prove on /. everyday. "S**T happens". Things get hit by lightning, bad batches of parts happen, etc etc etc. Sooner or later one of these uplinks (perhaps in a DoS attack) will be on and there will be nothing to do but track down the source. How does one go about doing that?
It took the FBI months to figure out who captured the HBO transponder in the late 1980s. I seriously doubt that the FBI will use that many resources for just a sat based ISP. What is going to prevent their service from totally dieing while that transmitter still transmits?
Ok, I'll do the math on how many transmitters are down here and even at 3 or 4 sigma there is bound to be one stuck on relatively frequently. Won't that be a problem? -- effectly being a DoS.
What are they going to do about the 'stuck on' transmitter problem (be it simple hardware failure or something more unpleasant)? How does one go about finding that transmitter? ("Hey, NSA, could you over-fly the entire US with your radio receiver listening to this freq....")
The existing gas-station style uplinks are relatively tightly controlled... This opens up a whole new class of problems.
I was looking forward to a FreeBSD 3.5 CD. I still have systems that are running 2.2.7 (patched for security). I also have a rule that says I have CDs for anything I run (with floppies for the patches).
I think this really brings out several issues about open source development that are fundamental...1) The press for newer better faster (i.e. 4.0) is driven by hacking not stability or consumer (in amateur radio it's called 'appliance' users) users.
2) BSDI/WC didn't ask us with zillions of systems in production what we would like. We're increasingly irrelevant to the massive hacking hordes. This is less true with Linux; only because IPO fever has struck over there and with BSDI/WC it isn't quite there yet.
3) 3.x is nearing stagnation, because there is no glory to maintaining it. Just as there is no fix for SMP NetATalk which regularly will panic and cause reboots -- bug killing and back porting are both hard work and very inglorious. You get no fame for "oh I finally killed this bug that impacted 10% of the production systems" but do get fame and commit privs for a new (maybe un-needed, perhaps "cleaner") scheme to do disk I/O or devices or network or
I'm not mad about this, just realistic that this is a social community with it's own value system. It just happens to be a value system that doesn't help those who are trying to *do* things with this O/S.
Will this get better? I have no idea. There has been some discussion on the FBSD IRC about improved regression testing which will make back porting a little easier and siginicantly improve stability.
The BSDI purchase means there is an IPO on the horizon which will, at least for a moment, make for improved bug response. I wonder if the BSDI/WC folks know what it means to operations be a 'public company'? Perhaps they really don't care -- IPO, count 181 days and retire.
One thing's for sure... we're about to find out the brave new ways of BSDI/WC... be they good or be they bad. I wonder if not pressing 3.5 is just the beginning.