...and before you mod it down, please read it and give it some thought... it'll make sense.
If the truth be known, Windows will never be a completely bug-free and stable OS. Sure, it may come close, but it's never going to be perfect. And this isn't because of the natural human nature of programmers, either. I'm not talking about minor/very small bugs - but rather bugs that are at least rather annoying.
Why? It makes perfect sense as a corporation to release a product that is perpetually "almost there" as far as QA is concerned (especially if they charge for upgrades.) Simply put, if Microsoft can create an image of, "Dangit, we ALMOST had all the bugs out... maybe next time!" to its customers, then those customers are probably going to purchase the next release of Windows in hopes that those bugs are fixed. Of course, fix those bugs, but make sure to add some sort of new stuff (features, eye candy, etc.) that have a few bugs, so that the same cycle repeats itself.
Why woulod they do this? Think about it this way... If WinXP turned out to be a completely stable, bug-free version, and taking into consideration their track record of being rather buggy at times, would you upgrade past WinXP? If you're like a lot of people, probably not. I know several people who have told me already that they are 95% happy with their Win98, and will NOT ugprade past Win98 for fear that the new versions may be buggier. I am sure a lot of people have that same general feeling, and if they ever got their hands on a "good" version, they'd stick with it.
I will give them this much - creating the "Bother, we THOUGHT we had all the bugs out!!! But, we'll get it next time around!" look to all its customers has seemed to keep them on the upgrade track rather well.:) Question is, how long before the customers catch on?
Being a sysadmin, I've run servers on pretty much 3 platforms: Linux, FreeBSD, and BSDI. (Although, even as we speak, our BSDI machines are on their way to being FreeBSD.)
Some of the advantages of BSDI were you could call them for support, they released security patches and fixes (although some required you to have an upgrade contract, and as soon as ours expired they quit even sending us notifications of such updates.) What I didn't like about BSDI is it's closed-source nature, which to me would make it more difficult for developers. Plus, they didn't seem to have very much RAID controller support (at lesat, along the lines of Dell.)
FreeBSD, on the other hand, may not have the "call this number for tech support" (although I am sure someone sells commercial support), but it IS open-sourced and it supports our RAID controller properly.:) I haven't found too many differences between BSDI and it, and actually like FreeBSD better.
We have two servers running our major services (mail, web, ftp, dns, etc.) and both were running BSDI. We recently commissioned a Dell, onto which I installed FreeBSD, and are phasing out one of our BSDI machines. After that, said BSDI machine will be blown away, loaded w/FreeBSD, and will replace the P166 box that is our secondary RADIUS, secondary DNS, and backup MX. (Don't ask - the dual 166 kicked the bucket in June, and the single 166 is what was in the spare parts bucket. We knew it would handle the load, and didn't want to invest in a new box when we'd be getting one in a couple months anyway.) The 166 is running BSDI, and will put back into retirement soon.
But, back to the point. With FreeBSD being open-source, it's open nature is going to allow development to continue. As far as the trademark is concerned, IANAL but they probably only own the trademark to the *name* "FreeBSD" - thus, in a worst case scenario they could probably write a shell script to run sed on all of the files with s/FreeBSD/WhateverBSD/g:)
I will say that I'm much happier now, as on FreeBSD I don't have to have a goofy cron job that checks to see if MySQL is running, and if not, restart it.:) (And, instead of using 80% CPU at peak times, MySQL now only uses about 20%)
I'm afraid this might end up modded as Windows-bashing, but it is not meant as that. It's meant to make a point / bring a question.
I have seen many a virus/worm/trojan for Windows come and go... and I ask myself: Why does the consumer put up with and tolerate this junk? And, how long will the consumer continue to do so?
My general experience is that if a consumer is not happy with a product or service, said consumer will go elsewhere for that product or service in the future. I know personally of a few examples of such, and I am sure most of you know the same. When you signed up for some cheap ISP and always got disconnected because their server crashed, didn't you go somewhere else?
I am sure a lot of people in the/. community know very well the effect of these worms - even for those of us who are running *NIX and Apache servers. We only have ONE NT server, which does not even run IIS. But, at one point today I had to deny ALL INCOMING PORT 80 TRAFFIC to our network - not because of machines becoming infected, but because the amount of bandwidth it was consuming was causing other services to suffer. No more than 10 minutes after setting up the port 80 ACLs, the phones started lighting up (although no one was available to answer them at the time.) I have an odd feeling those were web hosting people wondering why their site would not load off of AOL. In this sense, the worm not only affected us (by wasting LOTS and LOTS of bandwidth) but also affected those customers, because we were forced to shut off web sites in order to keep the network running.
As far as today's attacks, I am not sure how many people ended up with bandwidth problems, I'm sure we were not the only ones hard hit. We're not a huge shop, but we're not tiny either - we're multi-homed and running BGP. The sheer volume of requests was insane - I was running Snort on my Linux workstation (having it intercept and reset exploit connections.) The traffic volume was enough that my 100Mbit Ethernet interface lagged, and the machine itself did also. I put out several hundred megs in logs within a few hours.
What's rough is, when these NT machines decide to attack you, there's not much you can do about it except ride it out. Basically, I've stuck some PHP code on our home page that pops up a large warning to all IE users with a link to an article and links to download Netscape and Mozilla. I've implemented Apache::Nimba on our web server, blocked port 80 to our dialups so their modems don't get hammered, and ripped out all unused netblocks from BGP advertisement. There's no way to really STOP these machines (without some sort of hackback, which doesn't work under 2K from what I've been told.)
But, back to the original topic at hand. When is enough enough? I think consumers are finally starting to catch on... I've already had one poor guy call in several times threatening to cancel his service and go to AOL because he can't get the GSM codecs for Yahoo Messenger to download under WinME - he claims that it says he has to call us for permission to download them. He's already started asking me about Linux, wanting to know how to "get this Windows out of my computer and get something better." All he wants is his machine to work and he's getting frustrated that it won't. A friend of mine is having yet more ME woes with her machine. Lots of people have told me they will NOT be going to Windows XP. (And that once the current version they use is end-of-lifed, they'll find another OS.) I personally will not have anything newer than Windows 98SE - which seems to be halfway stable.
I think consumers are starting to catch on, which is not good for Microsoft (but is good for their competitors, I guess.) I promote Linux and Open Source software every chance I get, and I use them every chance possible. Open Source has saved my butt more times than I can count. Snort was a lifesaver for us and several co-lo customers' servers today. We were getting hit hard enough that getting a TCP connection into any of the servers was almost impossible until I started Snort. Apache has been a great platform for our web hosting, PHP has saved me many many times and has made life a LOT easier. Mozilla has become my browser of choice (they don't even make IE for my OS.) I'm even developing some Open Source software of my own (and plan to release it on SourceForge.)
Question is, how much longer will people put up with this sort of crap before they realize that it's Windows doing it, that ONLY Windows machines are infected by most of these worms. (Yes, I know, there are Linux worms out there, I'm aware of that.. but my experience has shown there are more Win worms than Lin worms.)
ADSL in general is meant for consumers, not producers. Get yourself SDSL, HDSL (1.5 Meg bidirectional on two pair), HDSL2 (1.5 Meg biderectional on one pair) or something larger. But be prepared to pay through the nose.
Is it just our local telco, or is HDSL2 (one pair) garbage? We've always had HDSL circuits and they work fine, but then they started putting in HDSL2 circuits between us (ISP) and T1 customers a while back. One of them had the circuit for about a month or two, was offline more than online, until the telco converted it to HDSL (and since then haven't had problems.) Another customer has an HDSL2 circuit, and to be honest, is down as we speak (has been all weekend - had to call telco the other day and have them test it just to get the thing to work!)
Unless something's up with our telco then stay away from HDSL2 if possible.:)
Looks like the site is/.'ed pretty good, but I did manage to pull all the files off the other mirror (before it got/.'ed too) and got them onto a server with some more/redundant bandwidth.
Hopefully this will give more people the opportunity to see it, and will relieve the other guy's bandwidth a bit... (and probably kill ours in the process... LOL)
I run a Creative Labs SBLive! Value OEM, picked it up for about $50 a while back (they're probably cheaper now.) Love it, works great, don't have to use esd or anything like that. (Only use for esd I've found is to send sound across the LAN.)
I absolutely hate my Ensoniq AudioPCI (I think it's a Creative card too) that I have at work as it only supports one sound at a time - I'm stuck using esd there. But here at home, using the SBLive works great.
(First, I want to start off by saying this isn't meant as a troll or flamebait - so hopefully it will not be modded as such. It's just a "ponderable" or "what if" idea..)
What Microsoft is doing may or may not be legal (IANAL) but it doesn't sound very ethical to me at all. I would not do business with a company that pulls stunts like that. Personally, I would either sell computers running Linux / BSD or I would not sell computers at all.
But, think about this. You can only give a customer so much crap before they get fed up and move on - even if they depend on your product! I can tell you this from experience. I work for an ISP where some remote areas are a local call to our terminal server, but they have the more horrible phone lines I've seen. I have seen countless numbers of people in those remote areas who depend on the Internet for their living, come sign up with us (since we're the only decent ISP here) then find they can't stay connected to the Internet, and even though they really need that access and we're about the only place that does it, they insist WE are disconnecting them and then cancel their service. Although we aren't really giving them the "crap" there, they think we are, and even though we're about the only one here, they cancel anyway.
Point being, people will only take so much crap before they get tired of it and go elsewhere for their Internet service / haircuts / software / automobiles / long distance service / whatever they're buying.
I know that people tend to have a higher "crap" tolerance for Microsoft - probably due to the fact that they seem to be ever-present in the computing industry these days. But, I am sure there is a point that people will no longer tolerate this. I for one have reached that point, and a close friend of mine is about to that point already (bought a WinME box from Dell - they wouldn't preload Linux for her - and it's already crapped out after 2 weeks.)
Ok, back to my main point. What would happen if Microsoft keeps yanking the hardware vendors around like this, and the hardware vendors get tired of it? What if Bill comes busting in saying, "You get that (insert name of alt. OS here) OFF those machines or I'll revoke your OEM license" and the vendors say, "Here, Bill, here's your license! Security will escort you off premises." Then they distribute an OS other than Windows.
I know this probably wouldn't work too well if only one vendor did it (although someone as big as Dell or Compaq MIGHT be able to pull it off.) But what if we all awoke one day, to find out that Dell/Compaq/HP/IBM/etc. no longer sold Windows machines - and that all they sold was Linux or BSD? What would happen then? Linux (and some other alt. OSes) are ready for the desktop, I use Linux as a desktop OS every day. I don't see Joe Average buying a Dell machine with Linux on it, then spending $100 for a new copy of Windows (I know, some are cheaper, some more) and installing it himself. Joe Average would probably learn how to use Linux and stick with it.
Microsoft tries to hold a "everyone uses our OS, so you must load it on your new PCs" threat over vendors' heads. But, does Microsoft realize that no matter what kind of software product they make, if vendors refuse to buy more licenses and install them on new PCs, then their software isn't really worth anything? I'd say OEMs are a big chunk of Microsoft's income, and without those OEMs they might be hurting.
It would be interesting to see what would happen if MS made all the OEMs mad and they all tore up their MS contracts and started distributing some alternative OS on new machines. (Walk into Best Buy, or Wal Mart, or any other place and find that they only sell Linux boxen.)
If I were Microsoft, I'd treat my OEMs with a bit more respect than that. They seem to forget that the OEM's are their CUSTOMERS, and if you upset the OEMs too much, they CAN go elsewhere. We all know about companies in the past who got big, got a monopoly, then thought that they could ram whatever they wanted down customers throats, people finally got tired if it and said "I don't care if 'everybody else' uses it, I'm not." (I've already done that - I don't care if everyone else uses Windows, I'm not - I run Linux.) and then said companies fell by the wayside.
While I didn't invest in a Palm (Visor) until a few months after graduating from high school (back in 2000, when I hit the full-time work force as a UNIX admin) I do feel they can be very useful in education. I would rather carry around a Palm device (be it Palm, Visor, etc.) to keep my notes and information in than to carry around a bunch of notebooks. I bought my first Palm back in July of 2000 to replace my Day-Timer before going on a trip. (I did not want to carry around a Day-Timer in the middle of a Texas summer when I could store it all in a Palm and put it in my pocket.)
Ever since then, I've stuck with the Palm platform, and really like it. You know, take a Visor and combine it with a keyboard (pictures here and here)and you have one heck of a note-taking machine.
The experience I had at our high school is that they wanted to have control of all communications in and out of the building. Here's some examples...
All Internet (well, actually web) connections were run through a filter/proxy server. They even kept a log of denied attempts, which was given to the principal. (I think those were E-Mailed hourly.) Those who had denied attempts would be called to his office. When he called me down there and accused me of surfing porno and chat sites, I denied it. His response was, "You did it and you know it. Everyone has been denying it, but I know better." I asked him to show me logs of it, and he did, and of all things they were BANNER CGIs from IMG tags that are automatically loaded - duh! I sent him an E-Mail with a link to DALnet's logo, which was blocked by the school, then told him to check the logs and see if there was an entry for him. After that, I don't think anyone was called to his office. (Luckily, telnet wasn't logged or anything, so that always worked in a pinch. Also firewalls didn't block ports there, so we could always put in proxy settings to point to a Linux box a few of us ran - which bypassed the filter totally.)
As far as phones - all phone communications is done through the school's phone system, again it can be monitored/controlled by the school.
Sadly enough, the State makes carrying a pager in school a felony. However, they have NO policy on cell phones. Cell phones are banned, but that is local school board policy and not State. They claim that pagers are used for drug dealers (I guess they've never heard of an admin who needs to know about outages.) It's funny how the State bans pagers but not cell phones. If I were a drug dealer, I'd much rather have a cell phone, as it offers two-way communications (whereas most pagers do not.)
I don't think we were ever able to successfully make a modem connection over the school's phone system either. (I had also tried this at another local school with the same type of phone system and had no luck - I did this when the State decided to block our ISPs netblocks, which is where one of the schools sites is hosted and we were supposed to show it to the parents that day.) I don't know if the inability to make modem connections is on purpose or a side effect of wiring problems, etc.
But, I've generally noticed that schools want to control all communications in and out. For that one reason, I mostly used SSH when going out of the school network. (In my senior year one of the labs I worked in got a T1 to a local ISP, which had no filtering or stupid policies as the school LAN did.)
But, how does this all relate to PDAs? I think schools must be afraid that PDAs will offer a channel of communications they cannot control (such as wireless) and they don't like that. My suggestion is that schools deploy some sort of wireless network (802.11b?) and let the students connect their PDAs to that - then they can still sniff/monitor/block what they want.
I think schools need to address the problems that PDAs may cause (if any) and take care of them individually - instead of just banning PDAs altogether.
This is not the 'big business' that some folks are talking about when they are looking towards freedom of speech, this is hogwash made by a monopoly looking to embed itself so far up everyone's butt that they can put out the trash they have been putting out and make people pay for the priviledge of owning a piece of the trash.
Wait - don't you mean renting a piece of the trash?:)
I swear, I almost freaked when I loaded their site. Just take a look at the file size for their animation. A simple Animation Optimize in The GIMP cut the size almost in half, but still too large. (I've had several people who use their service ask why the page takes so long to load.)
Oh well, it's funny.)
(What's really sad is I don't think they realize that it's a problem. I've been told their entire service runs off a single WinNT box, which makes me sick just thinking about it (not as a troll/anti-MS thing, but as a single point of failure thing.))
Micro$oft (NASDAQ: M$FT) today realized that their new TCP/MS protocol will not function over the Internet's (mostly-non-M$) infrastructure. The TCP/MS protocol is designed to address some of the security issues involved with the industry-standard TCP/IP protocol. It allows for authentication and tracing, to allow large corporations to know who does what, when, where, and how.
Micro$oft is not held back by this issue, however. They are currently working on developing a solution called "MS-over-IP" which will allow TCP/MS packets to travel over non-M$-compliant IP networks. This will be available as a patch to the upcoming Windows XP, for approximately $300. Micro$oft also notes that if your ISP refuses to conform to the new TCP/MS standard, and you do not wish to spend $300, you may switch to their M$N Internet $ervice, which will support native TCP/MS connections.
Micro$oft did not return any calls to our reporters on this issue, and simply sent us an E-Mail saying: "All your packets are belong to us."
I'll let someome else think of the ups (or downs) of this, but here's something to consider:
In a worst-case scenario, your firewall (or one of your upstream ISP) can filter out a lot of the attacks. (Talking about ICMP, etc.)
As far as attacks related to downloading content, this is going to (most likely) require an actual fully-established TCP connection. A fully established TCP connection won't work (easily) when spoofing. So, the machines will have to use their true IP to DDoS if it requires a TCP connection to work. At that point you can filter out those IPs.
Still, enough of these babies at least *attempting* to screw with things and the Internet WILL get slow.
How can they be E-Mail viruses? I use E-Mail, with a client called mutt, both at home and at work. I've never been infected by one of these "E-Mail viruses" everyone's talking about. The person down the hall using a Windows mail client has been infected once or twice, but I haven't at all.
I've been using Linux for almost 4 years now, off and on. My very first version was Slackware 3.4, which I downloaded from sunsite.unc.edu over one weekend on a 486, 33.6K modem, and Win3.1. (I still have a working copy of that version too.) I'd alternate between it and Win3.1, and when I upgraded to a PIII I did dual-boot between Win98 and Mandrake. I bought my first few versions of Mandrake at the store for ~$50 or so. Once I got used to using Linux, I started downloading ISOs at work and burning them to CD.:) When I built this machine now, I didn't even bother to load an M$ OS on it.
I tell newbies to buy their first version (or two) at the store, because they'll get a lot of helpful (to them) manuals. Once they read through those manuals a few times and become familiar with Linux, then they can move on to just downloading the ISO images. (Although I'm not opposed to buying the occasional version or so just to help support the effort.)
Start with the store-bought Mandrake versions, learn it, and then download their ISOs. The store-bought versions have a LOT more newbie-helpful stuff than the ISOs will probably ever have.:-) Once you know it though, no need to pay for manuals and a pretty box.
Couldn't this be a problem? Sure, I'd love to have one in my Linux boxen (I pretty much use Linux all the time.) But, think about all those 'doze users still left out there... without all the seek racket, how will they know if their box is still alive or not???
That's one thing I appreciate about the noise, I can tell if the 98 box is still alive or not....:P
(I can see it now... people constantly resetting their XP boxen because they think it's hung, due to the fact that no racket is taking place... now's a good time to get OUT of tech support.)
Actually, we found a cheap solution to this problem at the office! (Also saves on wear and tear on the hard drives, etc. and it lowered our energy bills.):-)
We had someone come in with a pair of wire clippers, and clip all telephone, power, and network cables. This proved to be a life saver, since the other day a storm came through and took out the systems of several surrounding businesses. Our systems were untouched, however.
We HAVE had a problem getting dial tone, or even getting our desktop machines to boot, but we've resorted to bird watching on the back balcony now. Management wasn't too thrilled, but us techs knew we had to cut equipment loss costs in today's dot-bust industry... so......
Yikes! Well, at that point, about all you can do with those old machines is load them up with copies of Win3.1 (you know, I still have a machine with that, and I think it actually might be more stable than Win9x...) Stick up a 2K server somewhere running terminal services, and put a bunch of terminal services clients on all them 486's.. that'll work, although probably not as well as X..
This could be a really nice and cheap solution for office workstations, especially in the days of the dot-bust industry.:)
Think about it - take a decent box and load Linux onto it, make it the app server, and then have all the users run their stuff on their little 486 X terminal. Best of all, they can't get into the 'doze control panel and mess things up.:P
On the subject of the kiosks - I have actually seen these at the Circuit City store in Chattanooga. They have several of the flat panel display deals where you can search their site for products, etc. Any *NIX and X user with half a brain (and sufficient caffeine content) will immediately notice the style of drop-down menus and the mouse pointer heavily resembles X. Not sure if these are full-blown boxen, or just X terminals.. but in any case, neat.
...that we can no longer obtain Akamai servers with LEDs on the front that are bright enough to light the server room? Heaven forbid that people have to resort back to flourescent lighting!
(Seriously, Akamai uses VA for their distributed content servers - at least they did when we got ours a year or so ago. Those things have lights on the front that WILL light up the room if you don't have the Akamai faceplate on them, or at least a piece of tape...)
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If the truth be known, Windows will never be a completely bug-free and stable OS. Sure, it may come close, but it's never going to be perfect. And this isn't because of the natural human nature of programmers, either. I'm not talking about minor/very small bugs - but rather bugs that are at least rather annoying.
Why? It makes perfect sense as a corporation to release a product that is perpetually "almost there" as far as QA is concerned (especially if they charge for upgrades.) Simply put, if Microsoft can create an image of, "Dangit, we ALMOST had all the bugs out... maybe next time!" to its customers, then those customers are probably going to purchase the next release of Windows in hopes that those bugs are fixed. Of course, fix those bugs, but make sure to add some sort of new stuff (features, eye candy, etc.) that have a few bugs, so that the same cycle repeats itself.
Why woulod they do this? Think about it this way... If WinXP turned out to be a completely stable, bug-free version, and taking into consideration their track record of being rather buggy at times, would you upgrade past WinXP? If you're like a lot of people, probably not. I know several people who have told me already that they are 95% happy with their Win98, and will NOT ugprade past Win98 for fear that the new versions may be buggier. I am sure a lot of people have that same general feeling, and if they ever got their hands on a "good" version, they'd stick with it.
I will give them this much - creating the "Bother, we THOUGHT we had all the bugs out!!! But, we'll get it next time around!" look to all its customers has seemed to keep them on the upgrade track rather well. :) Question is, how long before the customers catch on?
Being a sysadmin, I've run servers on pretty much 3 platforms: Linux, FreeBSD, and BSDI. (Although, even as we speak, our BSDI machines are on their way to being FreeBSD.)
:) I haven't found too many differences between BSDI and it, and actually like FreeBSD better.
:)
:) (And, instead of using 80% CPU at peak times, MySQL now only uses about 20%)
Some of the advantages of BSDI were you could call them for support, they released security patches and fixes (although some required you to have an upgrade contract, and as soon as ours expired they quit even sending us notifications of such updates.) What I didn't like about BSDI is it's closed-source nature, which to me would make it more difficult for developers. Plus, they didn't seem to have very much RAID controller support (at lesat, along the lines of Dell.)
FreeBSD, on the other hand, may not have the "call this number for tech support" (although I am sure someone sells commercial support), but it IS open-sourced and it supports our RAID controller properly.
We have two servers running our major services (mail, web, ftp, dns, etc.) and both were running BSDI. We recently commissioned a Dell, onto which I installed FreeBSD, and are phasing out one of our BSDI machines. After that, said BSDI machine will be blown away, loaded w/FreeBSD, and will replace the P166 box that is our secondary RADIUS, secondary DNS, and backup MX. (Don't ask - the dual 166 kicked the bucket in June, and the single 166 is what was in the spare parts bucket. We knew it would handle the load, and didn't want to invest in a new box when we'd be getting one in a couple months anyway.) The 166 is running BSDI, and will put back into retirement soon.
But, back to the point. With FreeBSD being open-source, it's open nature is going to allow development to continue. As far as the trademark is concerned, IANAL but they probably only own the trademark to the *name* "FreeBSD" - thus, in a worst case scenario they could probably write a shell script to run sed on all of the files with s/FreeBSD/WhateverBSD/g
I will say that I'm much happier now, as on FreeBSD I don't have to have a goofy cron job that checks to see if MySQL is running, and if not, restart it.
Just my $0.04 (still adjusted for inflation)
I'm afraid this might end up modded as Windows-bashing, but it is not meant as that. It's meant to make a point / bring a question.
/. community know very well the effect of these worms - even for those of us who are running *NIX and Apache servers. We only have ONE NT server, which does not even run IIS. But, at one point today I had to deny ALL INCOMING PORT 80 TRAFFIC to our network - not because of machines becoming infected, but because the amount of bandwidth it was consuming was causing other services to suffer. No more than 10 minutes after setting up the port 80 ACLs, the phones started lighting up (although no one was available to answer them at the time.) I have an odd feeling those were web hosting people wondering why their site would not load off of AOL. In this sense, the worm not only affected us (by wasting LOTS and LOTS of bandwidth) but also affected those customers, because we were forced to shut off web sites in order to keep the network running.
I have seen many a virus/worm/trojan for Windows come and go... and I ask myself: Why does the consumer put up with and tolerate this junk? And, how long will the consumer continue to do so?
My general experience is that if a consumer is not happy with a product or service, said consumer will go elsewhere for that product or service in the future. I know personally of a few examples of such, and I am sure most of you know the same. When you signed up for some cheap ISP and always got disconnected because their server crashed, didn't you go somewhere else?
I am sure a lot of people in the
As far as today's attacks, I am not sure how many people ended up with bandwidth problems, I'm sure we were not the only ones hard hit. We're not a huge shop, but we're not tiny either - we're multi-homed and running BGP. The sheer volume of requests was insane - I was running Snort on my Linux workstation (having it intercept and reset exploit connections.) The traffic volume was enough that my 100Mbit Ethernet interface lagged, and the machine itself did also. I put out several hundred megs in logs within a few hours.
What's rough is, when these NT machines decide to attack you, there's not much you can do about it except ride it out. Basically, I've stuck some PHP code on our home page that pops up a large warning to all IE users with a link to an article and links to download Netscape and Mozilla. I've implemented Apache::Nimba on our web server, blocked port 80 to our dialups so their modems don't get hammered, and ripped out all unused netblocks from BGP advertisement. There's no way to really STOP these machines (without some sort of hackback, which doesn't work under 2K from what I've been told.)
But, back to the original topic at hand. When is enough enough? I think consumers are finally starting to catch on... I've already had one poor guy call in several times threatening to cancel his service and go to AOL because he can't get the GSM codecs for Yahoo Messenger to download under WinME - he claims that it says he has to call us for permission to download them. He's already started asking me about Linux, wanting to know how to "get this Windows out of my computer and get something better." All he wants is his machine to work and he's getting frustrated that it won't. A friend of mine is having yet more ME woes with her machine. Lots of people have told me they will NOT be going to Windows XP. (And that once the current version they use is end-of-lifed, they'll find another OS.) I personally will not have anything newer than Windows 98SE - which seems to be halfway stable.
I think consumers are starting to catch on, which is not good for Microsoft (but is good for their competitors, I guess.) I promote Linux and Open Source software every chance I get, and I use them every chance possible. Open Source has saved my butt more times than I can count. Snort was a lifesaver for us and several co-lo customers' servers today. We were getting hit hard enough that getting a TCP connection into any of the servers was almost impossible until I started Snort. Apache has been a great platform for our web hosting, PHP has saved me many many times and has made life a LOT easier. Mozilla has become my browser of choice (they don't even make IE for my OS.) I'm even developing some Open Source software of my own (and plan to release it on SourceForge.)
Question is, how much longer will people put up with this sort of crap before they realize that it's Windows doing it, that ONLY Windows machines are infected by most of these worms. (Yes, I know, there are Linux worms out there, I'm aware of that.. but my experience has shown there are more Win worms than Lin worms.)
Only time will tell.
When will this ever stop? I see the US govt. merging with AOL/TW in 5 years.
Is it just our local telco, or is HDSL2 (one pair) garbage? We've always had HDSL circuits and they work fine, but then they started putting in HDSL2 circuits between us (ISP) and T1 customers a while back. One of them had the circuit for about a month or two, was offline more than online, until the telco converted it to HDSL (and since then haven't had problems.) Another customer has an HDSL2 circuit, and to be honest, is down as we speak (has been all weekend - had to call telco the other day and have them test it just to get the thing to work!)
Unless something's up with our telco then stay away from HDSL2 if possible. :)
http://hsphotos.wingnet.net/
Hopefully this will give more people the opportunity to see it, and will relieve the other guy's bandwidth a bit... (and probably kill ours in the process... LOL)
I run a Creative Labs SBLive! Value OEM, picked it up for about $50 a while back (they're probably cheaper now.) Love it, works great, don't have to use esd or anything like that. (Only use for esd I've found is to send sound across the LAN.)
I absolutely hate my Ensoniq AudioPCI (I think it's a Creative card too) that I have at work as it only supports one sound at a time - I'm stuck using esd there. But here at home, using the SBLive works great.
(First, I want to start off by saying this isn't meant as a troll or flamebait - so hopefully it will not be modded as such. It's just a "ponderable" or "what if" idea..)
:)
What Microsoft is doing may or may not be legal (IANAL) but it doesn't sound very ethical to me at all. I would not do business with a company that pulls stunts like that. Personally, I would either sell computers running Linux / BSD or I would not sell computers at all.
But, think about this. You can only give a customer so much crap before they get fed up and move on - even if they depend on your product! I can tell you this from experience. I work for an ISP where some remote areas are a local call to our terminal server, but they have the more horrible phone lines I've seen. I have seen countless numbers of people in those remote areas who depend on the Internet for their living, come sign up with us (since we're the only decent ISP here) then find they can't stay connected to the Internet, and even though they really need that access and we're about the only place that does it, they insist WE are disconnecting them and then cancel their service. Although we aren't really giving them the "crap" there, they think we are, and even though we're about the only one here, they cancel anyway.
Point being, people will only take so much crap before they get tired of it and go elsewhere for their Internet service / haircuts / software / automobiles / long distance service / whatever they're buying.
I know that people tend to have a higher "crap" tolerance for Microsoft - probably due to the fact that they seem to be ever-present in the computing industry these days. But, I am sure there is a point that people will no longer tolerate this. I for one have reached that point, and a close friend of mine is about to that point already (bought a WinME box from Dell - they wouldn't preload Linux for her - and it's already crapped out after 2 weeks.)
Ok, back to my main point. What would happen if Microsoft keeps yanking the hardware vendors around like this, and the hardware vendors get tired of it? What if Bill comes busting in saying, "You get that (insert name of alt. OS here) OFF those machines or I'll revoke your OEM license" and the vendors say, "Here, Bill, here's your license! Security will escort you off premises." Then they distribute an OS other than Windows.
I know this probably wouldn't work too well if only one vendor did it (although someone as big as Dell or Compaq MIGHT be able to pull it off.) But what if we all awoke one day, to find out that Dell/Compaq/HP/IBM/etc. no longer sold Windows machines - and that all they sold was Linux or BSD? What would happen then? Linux (and some other alt. OSes) are ready for the desktop, I use Linux as a desktop OS every day. I don't see Joe Average buying a Dell machine with Linux on it, then spending $100 for a new copy of Windows (I know, some are cheaper, some more) and installing it himself. Joe Average would probably learn how to use Linux and stick with it.
Microsoft tries to hold a "everyone uses our OS, so you must load it on your new PCs" threat over vendors' heads. But, does Microsoft realize that no matter what kind of software product they make, if vendors refuse to buy more licenses and install them on new PCs, then their software isn't really worth anything? I'd say OEMs are a big chunk of Microsoft's income, and without those OEMs they might be hurting.
It would be interesting to see what would happen if MS made all the OEMs mad and they all tore up their MS contracts and started distributing some alternative OS on new machines. (Walk into Best Buy, or Wal Mart, or any other place and find that they only sell Linux boxen.)
If I were Microsoft, I'd treat my OEMs with a bit more respect than that. They seem to forget that the OEM's are their CUSTOMERS, and if you upset the OEMs too much, they CAN go elsewhere. We all know about companies in the past who got big, got a monopoly, then thought that they could ram whatever they wanted down customers throats, people finally got tired if it and said "I don't care if 'everybody else' uses it, I'm not." (I've already done that - I don't care if everyone else uses Windows, I'm not - I run Linux.) and then said companies fell by the wayside.
Just my thoughts on the subject.
Ever since then, I've stuck with the Palm platform, and really like it. You know, take a Visor and combine it with a keyboard (pictures here and here)and you have one heck of a note-taking machine.
The experience I had at our high school is that they wanted to have control of all communications in and out of the building. Here's some examples...
All Internet (well, actually web) connections were run through a filter/proxy server. They even kept a log of denied attempts, which was given to the principal. (I think those were E-Mailed hourly.) Those who had denied attempts would be called to his office. When he called me down there and accused me of surfing porno and chat sites, I denied it. His response was, "You did it and you know it. Everyone has been denying it, but I know better." I asked him to show me logs of it, and he did, and of all things they were BANNER CGIs from IMG tags that are automatically loaded - duh! I sent him an E-Mail with a link to DALnet's logo, which was blocked by the school, then told him to check the logs and see if there was an entry for him. After that, I don't think anyone was called to his office. (Luckily, telnet wasn't logged or anything, so that always worked in a pinch. Also firewalls didn't block ports there, so we could always put in proxy settings to point to a Linux box a few of us ran - which bypassed the filter totally.)
As far as phones - all phone communications is done through the school's phone system, again it can be monitored/controlled by the school.
Sadly enough, the State makes carrying a pager in school a felony. However, they have NO policy on cell phones. Cell phones are banned, but that is local school board policy and not State. They claim that pagers are used for drug dealers (I guess they've never heard of an admin who needs to know about outages.) It's funny how the State bans pagers but not cell phones. If I were a drug dealer, I'd much rather have a cell phone, as it offers two-way communications (whereas most pagers do not.)
I don't think we were ever able to successfully make a modem connection over the school's phone system either. (I had also tried this at another local school with the same type of phone system and had no luck - I did this when the State decided to block our ISPs netblocks, which is where one of the schools sites is hosted and we were supposed to show it to the parents that day.) I don't know if the inability to make modem connections is on purpose or a side effect of wiring problems, etc.
But, I've generally noticed that schools want to control all communications in and out. For that one reason, I mostly used SSH when going out of the school network. (In my senior year one of the labs I worked in got a T1 to a local ISP, which had no filtering or stupid policies as the school LAN did.)
But, how does this all relate to PDAs? I think schools must be afraid that PDAs will offer a channel of communications they cannot control (such as wireless) and they don't like that. My suggestion is that schools deploy some sort of wireless network (802.11b?) and let the students connect their PDAs to that - then they can still sniff/monitor/block what they want.
I think schools need to address the problems that PDAs may cause (if any) and take care of them individually - instead of just banning PDAs altogether.
Wait - don't you mean renting a piece of the trash? :)
(or GetRight under Windows)
Just save the playlist as a .M3U file, open it in vi (or Notepad if on Win) and get that URL. Feed it to wget (or GetRight) ... :)
http://www.gozipstar.com/
I swear, I almost freaked when I loaded their site. Just take a look at the file size for their animation. A simple Animation Optimize in The GIMP cut the size almost in half, but still too large. (I've had several people who use their service ask why the page takes so long to load.)
Oh well, it's funny.)
(What's really sad is I don't think they realize that it's a problem. I've been told their entire service runs off a single WinNT box, which makes me sick just thinking about it (not as a troll/anti-MS thing, but as a single point of failure thing.))
that this will begin the demise of the DMCA. :)
(or at lesat they see how wrong it is and fix it.)
I managed to grab all the 2.4.9 files earlier, and they're now mirrored at:
ftp://ftp.wingnet.net/pub/linux/kernel/2.4.9/
All the standard files for 2.4.9 from kernel.org (bz2, gz, signatures, etc.) are there. Just the 2.4.9 though - no older stuff. Have at it!
Micro$oft (NASDAQ: M$FT) today realized that their new TCP/MS protocol will not function over the Internet's (mostly-non-M$) infrastructure. The TCP/MS protocol is designed to address some of the security issues involved with the industry-standard TCP/IP protocol. It allows for authentication and tracing, to allow large corporations to know who does what, when, where, and how.
Micro$oft is not held back by this issue, however. They are currently working on developing a solution called "MS-over-IP" which will allow TCP/MS packets to travel over non-M$-compliant IP networks. This will be available as a patch to the upcoming Windows XP, for approximately $300. Micro$oft also notes that if your ISP refuses to conform to the new TCP/MS standard, and you do not wish to spend $300, you may switch to their M$N Internet $ervice, which will support native TCP/MS connections.
Micro$oft did not return any calls to our reporters on this issue, and simply sent us an E-Mail saying: "All your packets are belong to us."
I'll let someome else think of the ups (or downs) of this, but here's something to consider:
In a worst-case scenario, your firewall (or one of your upstream ISP) can filter out a lot of the attacks. (Talking about ICMP, etc.)
As far as attacks related to downloading content, this is going to (most likely) require an actual fully-established TCP connection. A fully established TCP connection won't work (easily) when spoofing. So, the machines will have to use their true IP to DDoS if it requires a TCP connection to work. At that point you can filter out those IPs.
Still, enough of these babies at least *attempting* to screw with things and the Internet WILL get slow.
Maybe I'm just confused?
I've been using Linux for almost 4 years now, off and on. My very first version was Slackware 3.4, which I downloaded from sunsite.unc.edu over one weekend on a 486, 33.6K modem, and Win3.1. (I still have a working copy of that version too.) I'd alternate between it and Win3.1, and when I upgraded to a PIII I did dual-boot between Win98 and Mandrake. I bought my first few versions of Mandrake at the store for ~$50 or so. Once I got used to using Linux, I started downloading ISOs at work and burning them to CD. :) When I built this machine now, I didn't even bother to load an M$ OS on it.
:-) Once you know it though, no need to pay for manuals and a pretty box.
I tell newbies to buy their first version (or two) at the store, because they'll get a lot of helpful (to them) manuals. Once they read through those manuals a few times and become familiar with Linux, then they can move on to just downloading the ISO images. (Although I'm not opposed to buying the occasional version or so just to help support the effort.)
Start with the store-bought Mandrake versions, learn it, and then download their ISOs. The store-bought versions have a LOT more newbie-helpful stuff than the ISOs will probably ever have.
Couldn't this be a problem? Sure, I'd love to have one in my Linux boxen (I pretty much use Linux all the time.) But, think about all those 'doze users still left out there... without all the seek racket, how will they know if their box is still alive or not???
:P
That's one thing I appreciate about the noise, I can tell if the 98 box is still alive or not....
(I can see it now... people constantly resetting their XP boxen because they think it's hung, due to the fact that no racket is taking place... now's a good time to get OUT of tech support.)
Actually, we found a cheap solution to this problem at the office! (Also saves on wear and tear on the hard drives, etc. and it lowered our energy bills.) :-)
We had someone come in with a pair of wire clippers, and clip all telephone, power, and network cables. This proved to be a life saver, since the other day a storm came through and took out the systems of several surrounding businesses. Our systems were untouched, however.
We HAVE had a problem getting dial tone, or even getting our desktop machines to boot, but we've resorted to bird watching on the back balcony now. Management wasn't too thrilled, but us techs knew we had to cut equipment loss costs in today's dot-bust industry... so......
Yikes! Well, at that point, about all you can do with those old machines is load them up with copies of Win3.1 (you know, I still have a machine with that, and I think it actually might be more stable than Win9x...) Stick up a 2K server somewhere running terminal services, and put a bunch of terminal services clients on all them 486's.. that'll work, although probably not as well as X..
This could be a really nice and cheap solution for office workstations, especially in the days of the dot-bust industry. :)
:P
Think about it - take a decent box and load Linux onto it, make it the app server, and then have all the users run their stuff on their little 486 X terminal. Best of all, they can't get into the 'doze control panel and mess things up.
On the subject of the kiosks - I have actually seen these at the Circuit City store in Chattanooga. They have several of the flat panel display deals where you can search their site for products, etc. Any *NIX and X user with half a brain (and sufficient caffeine content) will immediately notice the style of drop-down menus and the mouse pointer heavily resembles X. Not sure if these are full-blown boxen, or just X terminals.. but in any case, neat.
...that we can no longer obtain Akamai servers with LEDs on the front that are bright enough to light the server room? Heaven forbid that people have to resort back to flourescent lighting!
(Seriously, Akamai uses VA for their distributed content servers - at least they did when we got ours a year or so ago. Those things have lights on the front that WILL light up the room if you don't have the Akamai faceplate on them, or at least a piece of tape...)
Wonder who Akamai will use now?