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User: penfold69

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  1. Re:There isn't one on IT Crowd (UK) Coming Back For Season 4 · · Score: 1

    I wonder which title they're gonna choose for the episode!

    I was there too - in fact, I went to 3 of the filming sessions and we've got a treat in store for this season :)

    P.

  2. Expandable UPS on UPS Setup For a Small/Mid-Size Company? · · Score: 1

    Condition your incoming power with one of these babies:

    http://www.gamatronic.com/PowerPlusUps.aspx?prod=52

    Nicely expandable, redundant and just perfect for small to medium sized server rooms.

    P.

  3. Re:Bittorrent over 3G on BT Blocks Access To Pirate Bay · · Score: 1

    Huh? What about if I wanted to use TPB's Personal RSS

    I'm not talking about actually torrenting over 3G - that would be fairly retarded. Sometimes I'm on the bus and remember something I'd like. Log onto TPB, add it to my rss, and by the time I get home, it's there.

    It's a slippery slope... skiing..

    P.

  4. Re:Complaining when you got what you asked for on Time Warner Transfer Caps May Inspire Fair-Price Legislation · · Score: 2, Informative

    One of the tech gurus at my local ISP posted an excellent thread which details how UK ISP's are charged for their bandwidth.

    It is certainly UK specific, but it does go into some depth as to how and why there are bandwidth limitations on ISP services in the UK. By far and away the most expensive part of the connection is between the Customer and the ISP, and not between the ISP and the Internet.

    The blog post is available here. Makes for some interesting reading.

  5. UK ISP transfer limits on Typical Home Bandwidth Usage? · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I get a fully unshaped 8Mbit connection with 15GB transfer per month for £20.

    Anything downloaded between midnight and 8am is not counted towards the cap

    One of the tech gurus at my ISP wrote a fine blog article about how UK ISPs are charged for their transfer. It's a completely different market economic to the US, which is why we've had transfer limits for some time.

  6. Re:The more I read the less I know... on SF Admin Gives Up Keys To Hijacked City Network · · Score: 1

    But there are odd, contrary, little pieces of this tale that intrigue me.

    Me too. It's obvious the entire story hasn't come out yet.

    There are fairly easy rebuttals to a lot of the media hype surrounding this story. Remote DSL/modem access to the network is an obvious DR tool that seems to have been twisted to be 'an evil back door'.

    Sure, the guy may have a God complex. Hell, he's completed the CCIE exam which places him in a *very* small pool of people. He's also apparently designed and configured the entire FibreWAN network. He's proud of it and probably rightly so. How many sysadmins here would honestly let some incompetent come and screw up their network? Sure, his judgement of incompetent may be off the mark but c'mon.

    I hope we get more details of this. There has to be a helluva lot that we're not being told.

    P.

  7. Re:More independent verification needed on Massive, Coordinated Patch To the DNS Released · · Score: 1

    Zone alarm, perchance?

  8. Re:I like the thought of this on Irrigation Controller Stolen, Wirelessly Rescues Itself · · Score: 1

    Apologies for the apparent swerve in topic - I assure you it is kinda relevant.

    In the UK we have the 'National Lottery'. Terminals have been installed all over the UK in practically every corner shop and supermarket.

    When they were first deployed, instead of all using telephone lines to 'phone home' certain areas were supplied via satellite. There would be one major relay station in the area, and terminals in the immediate locality of the relay station would be connected via microwave.

    In my locality, the contractors had installed a relay station on the roof of a local supermarket, but were apparently having major problems getting the satellite link working. By all accounts the datastream was working, but they couldn't get any authenticated communications going across the link.

    The cause was eventually traced down to the fact that the contractors had installed the relay station approximately 10 metres away from it's planned location. It had an in-built GPS which basically detected the location of the relay, and the receiving end basically refused the connection on security grounds.

    I hasten to add that the relay station was installed not long after the inception of the National Lottery in the UK - which was in 1994.

    P.

  9. Re:stupid stupid stupid on Debian Bug Leaves Private SSL/SSH Keys Guessable · · Score: 1

    well done ;)

  10. Re:stupid stupid stupid on Debian Bug Leaves Private SSL/SSH Keys Guessable · · Score: 5, Funny

    That's funny, I use the exact same seed on my luggage.

  11. Re:Copyright or Tech? on BBC iPlayer Bandwidth Explosion Bodes Ill For ISPs · · Score: 5, Informative

    Ian's reply is bang on.

    Those of you in the US will not be familiar with the UK internet backbone arrangement.

    The overriding majority of cost for a UK ISP is the 'backhaul' from the consumer in their house, to the ISP network.

    Peering with other ISPs, Backbones and content provider is *very very* cheap, as they practically all peer into Telehouse via LINX.

    As Cable rollout is severely limited in scope in the UK, the majority of internet traffic is routed via BT from the consumer to the ISP network. BT have a fixed base price plus a per-GB charge for this facility.

    Thus, it costs the ISP to transfer data to the consumer. Caching only helps to reduce the traffic at the ISP peering points (which have negligible cost). It doesn't help reduce the cost to transfer that information to the consumer.

    The other alternative to BT is to use LLU (Local Loop Unbundling) providers. These ISP's have installed their own DSLAMs in the various BT exchanges, and rent 'backhaul' off of BT at more favourable rates than paying BT for the entire ATM circuit back to the ISP.

    However, the LLU providers are still charged a per-GB fee for the rental of the backhaul.

    This means that every bit of traffic passing from an ISP network to the consumer costs a set amount. This is where contention is used heavily (and by BT not by the ISP, actually).

    Multicasting won't help, as each multicast stream still needs to be transferred over this backhaul to the consumer, with BT charging for each GB.

    Yes, it's retarded, but yes this is how the UK internet industry works.

    B.

  12. Re:What took them so long? on Legalize File Sharing, Say Swedish MPs · · Score: 1

    You mean SonyEricsson. Nokia are Finnish. Urg, you are right. Brain fart.

  13. Re:What took them so long? on Legalize File Sharing, Say Swedish MPs · · Score: 2

    Sweden produces very little IP of its own, and probably never will Put down the Nokia, step away from the Volvo and stop taking those AstraZeneca drugs.

    I think you'll find that Sweden has a HUGE number of companies that generate considerably more patents (and therefore IP) per capita than the US

    source: http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/eco_pat_gra_percap-economy-patents-granted-per-capita

    Keep scrolling down, past Latvia... and Mongolia... and Kazakhstan... and you find the US in 40th position.

    Now admittedly, you're actually talking about copyright IP, pertaining (mainly) to music and video which can be easily packaged up electronically and transmitted without authorisation. Might be a good idea to have stated that.

  14. Re:For the gamers on Tech Gifts for the Holidays · · Score: 1

    I would recommend Rock Band to anyone with more than two friends. You must be new here?

  15. Im constantly monitoring not necessarily available on Does Constant Access Shatter the Home/Work Boundary? · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I have a blackberry 8800, which revolutionised how I work.

    I have several email addresses routed to it, which each have different notification tones. If I receive a Nagios alert to my "Oh Crap" email address, the notification is loud and insistent. If I receive personal mail, it's subtle. Business mail is also fairly quiet and subtle but different to personal mail.

    Outside of "working hours", I can choose to ignore it easily enough. Only if our monitoring system picks up something alert-worthy do I have to actually bother actioning something immediately.

    When I was first offered the blackberry, I made it clear to the MD that this would not intrude upon my personal life unnecessarily. If I *choose* to read my business emails outside of working hours, then all fine. I balance that with *choosing* to read my personal mail during work hours :)

    P.

  16. Re:it's going to come up on Dot-Com Work Culture Making a Comeback? · · Score: 1
    From the depths of my memory:

    Disgruntled adj. A pig who has lost his voice Poor little piggy.
  17. Re:The word is "oriented", you drooling mongoloid. on Dell Refuses to Sell Ubuntu to Business · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    No it's not. It's orientated to those of us who don't remove letters from words because we can't be arsed to say it.

    It's aluminIum, orientATed, coloUr etc.

    B.

  18. Re:We just did a similar thing on Samba Success in the Enterprise? · · Score: 1

    Exactly that - the system went live 20 days ago, and once we had filtered out some problems with OpenLDAP, it has been completely stable since then.

    The 18 days uptime is for the Samba daemons, which needed to be restarted to fix the OpenLDAP issue. Server has been awake for 26 days now.

    Ok, it's not a huge uptime yet - however I'd like to see a newly deployed 2003 server stay up that long.

  19. We just did a similar thing on Samba Success in the Enterprise? · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Funny you should ask.

    I've just finished deploying a brand new CentOS/Samba solution to replace some ageing NT4 servers.

    We got a shiny new Dell Poweredge 2900 with 16GB Memory, twin quad-core Xeons and 8x300GB hot-swap SAS drives.

    I configured up CentOS 4.4, using Samba/OpenLDAP/Postfix/Dovecot and MySQL to provide domain, database, roaming profile and file sharing services to a workgroup of around 100 workstations running XP.

    Now we have ironed out the smaller issues with the deployment, it's absolutely rock-solid. Current uptime is 18 days, without a glitch at all. Utilisation hasn't peaked over about 20%, giving us plenty of spare capacity for expansion.

    We did consider deploying Windows Server 2003, but were put off by the price tag of the cluster of machines that was recommended to provide us with the capacity to service 100 workstations. Suffice to say that the £6k we paid was a mere fraction of the Windows alternative.

  20. Makes a news item in Slashdot on World of Warcraft Server Problems · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Try living on the EU servers - its been like this for a year.

    P.

  21. Re:So what happens after the move to Intel? on Roundtable on Apple's Future · · Score: 1
    Apple's future is bright,


    Or, in the UK - The Future's Bright... The Future is Orange^H^H^H^H^H^HApple.

    B.
  22. Janus on Napster Has Been Cracked · · Score: 1

    But Napster uses a new digital rights management software from Microsoft called Janus to enable the portable transfers.


    Janus, the god of Beginnings....

    http://www.meridiangraphics.net/janus.htm

    Or otherwise known as the god of two faces. How appropriate for Microsoft.
  23. Re:Its been around for ages already on Track People Using Their Mobile Phones · · Score: 1

    err, make that www.teydo.com.

    I hate it when they change URLS without telling me!

  24. Its been around for ages already on Track People Using Their Mobile Phones · · Score: 1

    www.fleetonline.com

    Bah, get with the program.

  25. Re:In a related announcement... on University of Twente NOC Destroyed · · Score: 1

    Debian users retaliate after flame war on Slashdot.org