I'd be inclined to hire a hacker, but only if I could get good buy-in from everyone he/she'd be working with (and, if applicable, my manangement). Someone with a hacker background is likely better than the average person off the street and this can certain help. The downside is if the people he/she works for don't trust him/her. A hacker (especially this one) comes with a stigma attached that can be used against him/her and you. Anything goes wrong and unscrupulous people with something to gain will promptly point the finger. It would be easy to wind up in a guilty until proved innocent situation. Thus, getting strong backing in the company/group would be the key for me.
You probably didn't see any sane riders because you didn't notice them, they don't stand out. I notice more motorcycles now than before I started riding. This isn't due to many more riders on the road, only that I'm better at interpreting what I view. Or, as Sherlock Holmes put it: "You see, but you do not observe."
I've done several servlets all with vi and Makefiles, which (as you've probably found) doesn't lend itself to easy debugging in some cases. For simple servlets I've found that either printing to the server log or to HTML comments in the output work pretty well. This assumes that you know roughly where the problem(s) might be. Normally I enable debug output with a query parameter, and if you put all this into comments the page looks the same, just view the source for the debug information.
For more complex debugging IBM's VisualAge for Java can run a servlet engine (Tomcat) inside itself and allows stepping though servlets with all the windowed debugger features that you'd expect. I'm sorry, but I can't find the directions for setting this up.
I'd imagine that other Java IDEs have some kind of support for running servlets so they can be debugged, however IBM's VA is the only one I've seen do this.
I still tend to use debug output in HTML comments, I find it works best for me. Although I often build a simple test harness for each class so I can test it by itself. Means I do less debugging once everything is put together and running as a servlet.
Wow! I didn't know this about myself, I am ashamed. I was under this silly assumption that I only wanted to view my hundred or so DVDs on my linux box. But NO! I realize now that my only desire is to copy them! No need to actually watch the movies, just copy copy copy!!
PS: Thanks for giving me a chance to humour myself at the expense of someone who isn't listening. I feel better, how about you?
Microsoft's initial actions of putting a machine out there and letting people try to break it does fit with more open concepts like many minds make short work of finding bugs (to paraphrase ESR). But I don't think this is the main reason for the reaction you're seeing. I believe that most people here (especially here:-) just don't trust Microsoft's actions after this test. Are they likely to admit there was a problem? Maybe, maybe not. Certainly not if it was a major problem.
Why do I think this? Because Microsoft has a history of leaving out anything but the most rosy details about themselves or their products. While they may have changed attitudes suddenly, I won't believe it until I see it. To view this differently, Linus, from the start, worked honestly with other people, he has a history that I (and many others) consider to be forthright, Microsoft doesn't.
What might help change my mind? Well, if Microsoft published details about any (and all) successful attacks (or unsuccessful attacks that reveal problems), and in addition explained what part of w2k didn't work or didn't hold up, or was just broken. They would have to continue and detail how they planned on correcting the problem(s) or finding a better solution(s) so when w2k is finally released end-users really have benefited.
If you are going to setup 25,000 users, do not, repeat NOT, use Exchange.
Listen to this advice, it's obviously born on the hard back of experience, just as much as me reiterating this same line: do not use exchange. For example:
Exchange uses a single database (in general) to hold all the mail for a server, the database integrity tools check (and repair) at 1 gig per hour. Now you put 2000 people on a box at say 10megs each, that's 20 hours of downtime to repair (or even check) the mail store. If you do use exchange, have really good backups, it's faster to restore and lose mail than to check the current database.
Database corruption seems inevitable, I haven't seen an active high use exhange server that didn't eventually corrupt its database.
Exchange is a hardware pig, my experience comes from using exchange on quad PII-400 machines with 0.5gig of ram and we were nearly cpu bound with 3000 users on a box
This is only a start, but I'm sure other people have many of their own reasons as well...
I remember our migration of a mere 750 (users) with extreme horror. We had to manually create each user.
You can create mailboxes in exchange via a config file with the mailbox import tool, although I figured it out by looking at files it created and not via any documentation. With exchange 5.5 I'm pretty sure you can create mailboxes with ldap (although this is far from documented last I looked).
As to solutions, I haven't used any open source email solutions with more than ~5000 users, for which sendmail and the UW pop3d and imapd worked well for the users that I had (many were very light on email). I'd be really neat to integrate an MTA and an IMAP server with ldap to support IMAP referrals and smart mail redirection. I know some of this is done as sendmail has LDAP patches and example rules for this, but I'm not so sure about IMAP side.
On the historical side, the reset button on the Commodore 128 was a redirectable interrupt. This made for some interesting pieces of code when someone would try to reset the machine. Of course, on this box the power switch was less than an inch from the reset button, so the joke might not last very long:-)
It's also a neat way to see how other people do things. Although I didn't crack games (much:-), I preferred ripping graphics out of things (like Strike Fleet and other C64 games). For me it was always the "How does this thing work?" that kept me poking behind the scenes.
I do believe in in purchasing games when possible, even if it takes a while (took me a long time to find a copy of Darklands). However, if someone can only buy a copy of a game from Japan, I don't see any problem in modifying a US machine to play it (the DVD region encoding bothers me as well). Another issue that's similar is discontinued products. This is very annoying. A firm will refuse to sell a product because it's discontinued, but at the same time they won't give you a copy because they might sell it in the future, it's frustrating. It seems to me that many companies care less and less about the people who buy their products (or who want to buy their products) and more about keeping the bean counters and lawyers happy... sigh. (sorry for wandering)
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I'd be inclined to hire a hacker, but only if I could get good buy-in from everyone he/she'd be working with (and, if applicable, my manangement). Someone with a hacker background is likely better than the average person off the street and this can certain help. The downside is if the people he/she works for don't trust him/her. A hacker (especially this one) comes with a stigma attached that can be used against him/her and you. Anything goes wrong and unscrupulous people with something to gain will promptly point the finger. It would be easy to wind up in a guilty until proved innocent situation. Thus, getting strong backing in the company/group would be the key for me.
You probably didn't see any sane riders because you didn't notice them, they don't stand out. I notice more motorcycles now than before I started riding. This isn't due to many more riders on the road, only that I'm better at interpreting what I view. Or, as Sherlock Holmes put it: "You see, but you do not observe."
For more complex debugging IBM's VisualAge for Java can run a servlet engine (Tomcat) inside itself and allows stepping though servlets with all the windowed debugger features that you'd expect. I'm sorry, but I can't find the directions for setting this up.
I'd imagine that other Java IDEs have some kind of support for running servlets so they can be debugged, however IBM's VA is the only one I've seen do this.
I still tend to use debug output in HTML comments, I find it works best for me. Although I often build a simple test harness for each class so I can test it by itself. Means I do less debugging once everything is put together and running as a servlet.
Wow! I didn't know this about myself, I am ashamed. I was under this silly assumption that I only wanted to view my hundred or so DVDs on my linux box. But NO! I realize now that my only desire is to copy them! No need to actually watch the movies, just copy copy copy!!
PS: Thanks for giving me a chance to humour myself at the expense of someone who isn't listening. I feel better, how about you?
Why do I think this? Because Microsoft has a history of leaving out anything but the most rosy details about themselves or their products. While they may have changed attitudes suddenly, I won't believe it until I see it. To view this differently, Linus, from the start, worked honestly with other people, he has a history that I (and many others) consider to be forthright, Microsoft doesn't.
What might help change my mind? Well, if Microsoft published details about any (and all) successful attacks (or unsuccessful attacks that reveal problems), and in addition explained what part of w2k didn't work or didn't hold up, or was just broken. They would have to continue and detail how they planned on correcting the problem(s) or finding a better solution(s) so when w2k is finally released end-users really have benefited.
Listen to this advice, it's obviously born on the hard back of experience, just as much as me reiterating this same line: do not use exchange.
For example:
This is only a start, but I'm sure other people have many of their own reasons as well...
I remember our migration of a mere 750 (users) with extreme horror. We had to manually create each user.
You can create mailboxes in exchange via a config file with the mailbox import tool, although I figured it out by looking at files it created and not via any documentation. With exchange 5.5 I'm pretty sure you can create mailboxes with ldap (although this is far from documented last I looked).
As to solutions, I haven't used any open source email solutions with more than ~5000 users, for which sendmail and the UW pop3d and imapd worked well for the users that I had (many were very light on email). I'd be really neat to integrate an MTA and an IMAP server with ldap to support IMAP referrals and smart mail redirection. I know some of this is done as sendmail has LDAP patches and example rules for this, but I'm not so sure about IMAP side.
On the historical side, the reset button on the Commodore 128 was a redirectable interrupt. This made for some interesting pieces of code when someone would try to reset the machine. Of course, on this box the power switch was less than an inch from the reset button, so the joke might not last very long :-)
Cracking was fun just because it was a challenge.
It's also a neat way to see how other people do things. Although I didn't crack games (muchI do believe in in purchasing games when possible, even if it takes a while (took me a long time to find a copy of Darklands). However, if someone can only buy a copy of a game from Japan, I don't see any problem in modifying a US machine to play it (the DVD region encoding bothers me as well). Another issue that's similar is discontinued products. This is very annoying. A firm will refuse to sell a product because it's discontinued, but at the same time they won't give you a copy because they might sell it in the future, it's frustrating. It seems to me that many companies care less and less about the people who buy their products (or who want to buy their products) and more about keeping the bean counters and lawyers happy... sigh. (sorry for wandering)
BTW, I've still got several ANSI sigs around :-)