Meeting Maker is a semi-reasonable cross-platform alternative to exchange for calendaring. They support the mac well, and they have a java/web client. They have a (motif) solaris client for the older versions which they never ported to linux, i think that this has been discontinued with the current version. However I think they have something more coming with the upcoming product.
You can make the windows client work in Wine, and the web/java client works standalone with a 1.3.1 JVM.
The server runs on windows, mac, solaris, and linux.
It originally was a mac product.
There is also something called Corporate Time, I'm not really familiar with it.
Realistically, if a company is already traded publicly and is burning cash at this rate, they are probably headed for the junk heap - although the trendline is what matters.
The days of being able to raise huge amounts of capital to "take time to get things up and running" are gone.
it did seem kinda "dirty" to me to be using smb to access a linux server from a linux client, but i really liked the ability to tunnel a single port (if i recall correctly) over ssh.
One thing I remember about this that I forgot to mention is that smbfs didn't properly display unix file modes across the connection. Wasn't surprising when i thought about it, presumably no way in this windows-centric protocol to pass that info. I didn't investigate whether NT acls were somehow emulated, etc.
I am not familiar with shfs other than a brief read of the website and this thread.
w/r/t NFS security, NFSv4 should solve most if not all of the problems. Fundamentally two things always bothered me about NFS security.
RPC - NFS makes heavy use of sun-style RPC, requiring you to use the RPC libraries and the portmapper. This stuff has a bad reputation for security problems, eg, buffer overflows, and there is a lot of it, and it runs on random ports so it's difficult to filter/firewall/tunnel it.
no user credentials - NFS through V3 doesn't provide any user credentials - root on the client has access to all users' files on the mounted filesystem. There's no server-enforced security.
NFSv4 fixes the RPC/multiple ports problem. I don't know about the user credential problem but i bet it fixes that too.
On to the quick-and-dirty: In the past, I've set up a samba server and used the linux smbfs client to access it, and tunneled the whole business over SSH. It worked reliably, to the limited extent that i tested it (YMMV). I don't really remember how well it performed - it was more of a proof-of-concept for me.
There are patches for the AFS client to support disconnected operation. They haven't made it into the core distribution yet (lack of developer resources) but if this is a must-have for you you might want to check it out.
This mailing list post is a good place to start.
it's not clear whether the problem is that they won't pay for your cell phone, or that they also won't let you use your cell phone while at work.
If the former, easy enough, don't page to your personal phone and let your boss know you are not pageable and wash your hands of the matter. I suppose at worst you might get a pager to carry.
If the latter, well, also easy enough although i agree their policy is somewhat draconian. It sucks to have to work instead of reading/. and talking on the phone but they are paying you to do a job.
if you feel strongly enough to quit, and can do better elsewhere, then great, do so. if not, then deal with it.
This assumes that you want to do both ethernet and telephone.
This wiring distribution block uses 110 connectors and has 4 punchdowns for cat5 to rj45s (for ethernet) and has 10 punchdowns that are all wired together (for telephone). I would probably have more like 6 and 6 but whatever.
Milestek also has good pricing on rj11, rj45, and coax wall plates & connectors, as well as whatever tools you'll need. Their cable prices are a bit high, as are most of their computer equipment prices.
the partition table and/or the file system is messed up. I can read bits off the drive just fine with dd or whatever (and have done so so i can do any recovery attempts on a copy), but the filesystem is essentially hosed.
Thanks for the tip for recovermyfiles.com. I will check it out.
Clearly the subject story is an infomercial for this vendor.
Due to a partition-magic mishap I whacked my wife's hard drive...which she had fallen out of the habit of backing up. I need to do some recovery. It's a win98 system with a fat32 filesystem.
I had a copy of norton utilities, which did not help much.
I downloaded a demo of ontrack's tool, which seems to get reasonable results but crashed a lot when previewing (presumably bad) jpeg files. It took forever to run ant the $100 version could only recover 25 files at a time. If it weren't for the crashing i'd probably just buy it - she doesn't need more than maybe 100 files, but trying to recover all 4000 jpeg files on the drive, 25 at a time, to then be able to review which ones she wants...
I tried a unix/linux based tool set called "forensics tool kit" which wasn't able to read an image of the drive.
We have a great Jazz & Blues radio station out of Ypsilanti, Mich - WEMU. streaming at www.wemu.org
I'm a bit of a dilletante in jazz myself, but my favorites include:
Dave Brubeck - Time Out in particular
Miles Davis, of course - in addition to the usual suspects I have a soft spot for Sketches of Spain
Billie Holiday - I'm surprised more people haven't mentioned her. Maybe people think of her as blues, not jazz. There is a great 10-cd set of all her stuff on columbia from the 30s and 40s, and a smaller set of the highlights from the big set. I'd recommend her earlier, 30s and 40s recordings, not the 50s stuff.
Rahsaan Roland Kirk - I don't know much about him but I like the song "bright moments" that WEMU plays a lot
I am surprised people above think of Tom Waits as jazz - i think of him as more blues/rock. You can't go wrong with any of his stuff. For a very bluesy interpretation of his stuff check out Wicked Grin
Medeski Martin Wood - don't know well, but like what i have heard
By design, over an uncrowded LAN, UDP is used because TCP has significantly higher overhead. When you are working in a situation different than an uncrowded LAN (eg, over a WAN or a campus network), you will likely see significant benefit with TCP.
Also, note that I am not talking about a performance "scaling" issue - i am talking about a single client and a single server on a 100Mbit ethernet.
That said, I do not know enough about the linux NFS implementation to know if there is some linux-specific reason you should use TCP instead of UDP.
yeah, i've used NFS on many, many systems over the last 12 years.
You're all right, NFS is never fast.
however, my perception based on significant experience is that on linux, out of the box with red hat 7.3, performance is significantly worse than on solaris, out of the box on solaris 2.6.
I haven't used it enough to really comment on the stability, but I can guarantee you that the performance of linux NFS blows chunks. I can more than double my throughput between the same two machines on an otherwise empty network with ftp vs. cp over NFS. These are red hat 7.x systems.
I agree with your basic point, but remember that The fact that a power supply is rated at 250W does NOT mean that it draws 250W constantly. It means that it can supply that much to its devices without puking.
Probably your basic p1 system with 4 drives, not taxing the CPU and using apm to do cpu-idle calls would draw 125-150 watts. More for a monitor, of course.
That's still a non-trivial amount of electricity, of course. You could save some by spinning down the drives when not in use but you're probably at a minimum of 75 watts for a running pentium.
same principle applies to using such a linux box as a NAT router instead of buying a dedicated linksys or whatever - the linksys probably would draw 20 watts or less, and pay for itself in electricity in a year or two.
my brother worked for ADP (the folks who send out your paychecks) back in the 70s and 80s. They were big in the timesharing business and at some point started selling some sort of minicomputer to their big customers that they called OnSite.
somewhere along the line, the cabinet (which they'd had made up custom with the nice ADP logo on it and everything) fell off the back of a truck and was apparently hit/run over/something by another truck (my memory is somewhat hazy).
They managed to get this thing deployed to the customer, cleaned upa nd all, and the marketing dept made lemons out of lemonade and used the durability of the OnSite in their advertising. Fell off a truck! Still works!
On a more modern note, i worked at (huge ISP owned by a phone company) and we had a middle-of-the-night flood in the machine room due to construction weasels messing up the roof during an addition.
Where did the water fall in? On top of the EMC symmetrix. how did we find out that there was water in the machine room? EMC called *us* to ask what was going on since our symmetrix had called into their operations center to complain that eight drives were offline. Had a Sun E450 fill with water, it was seemingly ok afterward. EMC had five or six field engineers out the next morning by noon to fix our symmetrix, since nobody had more than a couple spare drives. Amazingly, even though we ended up losing about 8 or 10 drives out of the unit, we suffered zero data loss and that raid is, to the best of my knowledge, still running today.
One final story - university of michigan decided to not renew the service contract on the big ups in their former computing center building since the IT dept was moving out. Unfortunately, before they moved out, there was some sort of short in the UPS, and a fire started.
interesting trivia: the most flammable thing in a lead-acid battery is in fact the acid.
Luckily, it was over Xmas break and the building was almost entirely empty and the one occupant got out without breathing too much acidic smoke. The cleanup took months.
While I agree with many of the points raised here about server reliability and such, i'm amazed that nobody is mentioning the real cost of the extra power usage. What about the environment? Almost all of that electricity comes from fossil fuel burning, emitting greenhouse gases and possibly other pollutants. Strip Mining. Radioactive Waste from fission power. Birds killed by windmills. Valley habitats destroyed by damming rivers.
Figuring out how to make computers (and everything else) use less power is really important.
For an interesting related read, see Leaking Electricity for a discussion of power usage by household appliances.
Go look through some back issues of rolling stone
magazine (and/or their web site, i get the rag so
i don't bother with the web site). They have done
lots of drug war coverage, with a long article about DARE in particular in the last year.
Slashdot Mirror
I can't vouch for their reliability but Promise now makes some true hardware RAID cards in addition to their "SHRAID" stuff.
http://meetingmaker.com/
Meeting Maker is a semi-reasonable cross-platform alternative to exchange for calendaring. They support the mac well, and they have a java/web client. They have a (motif) solaris client for the older versions which they never ported to linux, i think that this has been discontinued with the current version. However I think they have something more coming with the upcoming product.
You can make the windows client work in Wine, and the web/java client works standalone with a 1.3.1 JVM.
The server runs on windows, mac, solaris, and linux.
It originally was a mac product.
There is also something called Corporate Time, I'm not really familiar with it.
"me too".
except that i'm more turned off by the new editorial directions than you are. I just let my subscription lapse.
Realistically, if a company is already traded publicly and is burning cash at this rate, they are probably headed for the junk heap - although the trendline is what matters.
The days of being able to raise huge amounts of capital to "take time to get things up and running" are gone.
it did seem kinda "dirty" to me to be using smb to access a linux server from a linux client, but i really liked the ability to tunnel a single port (if i recall correctly) over ssh.
One thing I remember about this that I forgot to mention is that smbfs didn't properly display unix file modes across the connection. Wasn't surprising when i thought about it, presumably no way in this windows-centric protocol to pass that info. I didn't investigate whether NT acls were somehow emulated, etc.
does this mean that you wouldn't even to run the portmapper?
I am not familiar with shfs other than a brief read of the website and this thread.
w/r/t NFS security, NFSv4 should solve most if not
all of the problems. Fundamentally two things always bothered me about NFS security.
RPC - NFS makes heavy use of sun-style RPC, requiring you to use the RPC libraries and the portmapper. This stuff has a bad reputation for security problems, eg, buffer overflows, and there is a lot of it, and it runs on random ports so it's difficult to filter/firewall/tunnel it.
no user credentials - NFS through V3 doesn't provide any user credentials - root on the client has access to all users' files on the mounted filesystem. There's no server-enforced security.
NFSv4 fixes the RPC/multiple ports problem.
I don't know about the user credential problem but i bet it fixes that too.
On to the quick-and-dirty:
In the past, I've set up a samba server and used the linux smbfs client to access it, and tunneled the whole business over SSH. It worked reliably, to the limited extent that i tested it (YMMV).
I don't really remember how well it performed - it was more of a proof-of-concept for me.
There are patches for the AFS client to support disconnected operation. They haven't made it into the core distribution yet (lack of developer resources) but if this is a must-have for you you might want to check it out. This mailing list post is a good place to start.
http://www.sfc.wide.ad.jp/DVTS/
it not only displays the video, it will stream it unicast *or* multicast. IPv6 capable.
Note that the windows client may have issues with multicast - it has a ttl of 1 which means it won't leave your lan.
also note that this is a 30 megabit stream before trying it over your DSL.
it's not clear whether the problem is that they won't pay for your cell phone, or that they also won't let you use your cell phone while at work.
/. and talking on the phone but they are paying you to do a job.
If the former, easy enough, don't page to your personal phone and let your boss know you are not pageable and wash your hands of the matter. I suppose at worst you might get a pager to carry.
If the latter, well, also easy enough although i agree their policy is somewhat draconian. It sucks to have to work instead of reading
if you feel strongly enough to quit, and can do better elsewhere, then great, do so. if not, then deal with it.
This assumes that you want to do both ethernet and telephone.
4 40 23
This wiring distribution block uses 110 connectors and has 4 punchdowns for cat5 to rj45s (for ethernet) and has 10 punchdowns that are all wired together (for telephone). I would probably have more like 6 and 6 but whatever.
Milestek also has good pricing on rj11, rj45, and coax wall plates & connectors, as well as whatever tools you'll need. Their cable prices are a bit high, as are most of their computer equipment prices.
http://www.milestek.com/shop/product.asp?id=50-
the partition table and/or the file system is messed up. I can read bits off the drive just fine with dd or whatever (and have done so so i can do any recovery attempts on a copy), but the filesystem is essentially hosed.
Thanks for the tip for recovermyfiles.com. I will check it out.
Clearly the subject story is an infomercial for this vendor.
Due to a partition-magic mishap I whacked my wife's hard drive...which she had fallen out of the habit of backing up. I need to do some recovery. It's a win98 system with a fat32 filesystem.
I had a copy of norton utilities, which did not help much.
I downloaded a demo of ontrack's tool, which seems to get reasonable results but crashed a lot when previewing (presumably bad) jpeg files. It took forever to run ant the $100 version could only recover 25 files at a time. If it weren't for the crashing i'd probably just buy it - she doesn't need more than maybe 100 files, but trying to recover all 4000 jpeg files on the drive, 25 at a time, to then be able to review which ones she wants...
I tried a unix/linux based tool set called "forensics tool kit" which wasn't able to read an image of the drive.
any other suggestions?
I'm a bit of a dilletante in jazz myself, but my favorites include:
By design, over an uncrowded LAN, UDP is used because TCP has significantly higher overhead. When you are working in a situation different than an uncrowded LAN (eg, over a WAN or a campus network), you will likely see significant benefit with TCP.
Also, note that I am not talking about a performance "scaling" issue - i am talking about a single client and a single server on a 100Mbit ethernet.
That said, I do not know enough about the linux NFS implementation to know if there is some linux-specific reason you should use TCP instead of UDP.
yeah, i've used NFS on many, many systems over the last 12 years.
You're all right, NFS is never fast.
however, my perception based on significant experience is that on linux, out of the box with red hat 7.3, performance is significantly worse than on solaris, out of the box on solaris 2.6.
I haven't used it enough to really comment on the stability, but I can guarantee you that the performance of linux NFS blows chunks. I can more than double my throughput between the same two machines on an otherwise empty network with ftp vs. cp over NFS. These are red hat 7.x systems.
See This old thread
somewhat relevant - anyone familiar with an inexpensive thermostatic fan control? Would be useful for this application, as well as for computers.
I agree with your basic point, but remember that
The fact that a power supply is rated at 250W does NOT mean that it draws 250W constantly. It means that it can supply that much to its devices without puking.
Probably your basic p1 system with 4 drives, not taxing the CPU and using apm to do cpu-idle calls would draw 125-150 watts. More for a monitor, of course.
That's still a non-trivial amount of electricity, of course. You could save some by spinning down the drives when not in use but you're probably at a minimum of 75 watts for a running pentium.
same principle applies to using such a linux box
as a NAT router instead of buying a dedicated linksys or whatever - the linksys probably would draw 20 watts or less, and pay for itself in electricity in a year or two.
my brother worked for ADP (the folks who send out your paychecks) back in the 70s and 80s. They were big in the timesharing business and at some point started selling some sort of minicomputer to their big customers that they called OnSite.
somewhere along the line, the cabinet (which they'd had made up custom with the nice ADP logo on it and everything) fell off the back of a truck and was apparently hit/run over/something by another truck (my memory is somewhat hazy).
They managed to get this thing deployed to the customer, cleaned upa nd all, and the marketing dept made lemons out of lemonade and used the durability of the OnSite in their advertising. Fell off a truck! Still works!
On a more modern note, i worked at (huge ISP owned by a phone company) and we had a middle-of-the-night flood in the machine room due to construction weasels messing up the roof during an addition.
Where did the water fall in? On top of the EMC symmetrix. how did we find out that there was water in the machine room? EMC called *us* to ask what was going on since our symmetrix had called into their operations center to complain that eight drives were offline. Had a Sun E450 fill with water, it was seemingly ok afterward. EMC had five or six field engineers out the next morning by noon to fix our symmetrix, since nobody had more than a couple spare drives. Amazingly, even though we ended up losing about 8 or 10 drives out of the unit, we suffered zero data loss and that raid is, to the best of my knowledge, still running today.
One final story - university of michigan decided to not renew the service contract on the big ups in their former computing center building since the IT dept was moving out. Unfortunately, before they moved out, there was some sort of short in the UPS, and a fire started.
interesting trivia: the most flammable thing in a lead-acid battery is in fact the acid.
Luckily, it was over Xmas break and the building was almost entirely empty and the one occupant got out without breathing too much acidic smoke. The cleanup took months.
While I agree with many of the points raised here about server reliability and such, i'm amazed that nobody is mentioning the real cost of the extra power usage. What about the environment? Almost all of that electricity comes from fossil fuel burning, emitting greenhouse gases and possibly other pollutants. Strip Mining. Radioactive Waste from fission power. Birds killed by windmills. Valley habitats destroyed by damming rivers. Figuring out how to make computers (and everything else) use less power is really important. For an interesting related read, see Leaking Electricity for a discussion of power usage by household appliances.
Go look through some back issues of rolling stone
magazine (and/or their web site, i get the rag so
i don't bother with the web site). They have done
lots of drug war coverage, with a long article about DARE in particular in the last year.