It's US$0.19 at my local Costco. So looks like you Canadians get them cheaper than us.
I LOVE this service, even if I can only get my prints the next day...
On topic, I've used both Yahoo and *cough* MSN Groups to share photos, and prefer MSN in terms of the overall ease and flexibility of the site. Yahoo is a PITA for uploading many pictures since they still don't have a decent upload tool, and selecting files one-by-one is a pain.
There are various programs to collect used cell phones for various causes, one that makes a lot of sense is the
Call to Protect which will benefit the victims of domestic violence.
LDAP also won't get you to the contacts in your Contacts folder or any other folders in your Mailbox or Public Folders either, which are often more relevant than the GAL.
Note that OWA 5.5 is also deficient in this area since it only allows you access to your primary Contacts folder, and not to any Public Folders that contain Contacts. OWA 2000 is supposed to improve on that but still has some restrictions I can't remember.
I still don't see why MS doesn't just make Contacts and Calendar items accessible over IMAP as vCard and iCalendar entries respectively. They give you the "Forward as..." option in Outlook so they know how to do the translation...
I agree with you, and use IMAP (over SSL or VPN) myself when remote. However, e-mail's just the tip of the iceberg for most Outlook users. What do you do for Outlook's non-mail features i.e. the GAL (global address list), contacts, calendars, tasks, etc...? There's no way to access these over IMAP.
In my case I fall back to OWA or Outlook over VPN for those, but what if they weren't available?
These guys Cybernet Manufacturing have advertised their zero-footprint PCs in the back of PC Magazine for years. They build the PC into the keyboard and thus are pretty much what you describe, w/o the built in UPS (battery).
Their Deskbook is also a strange beast. And end-user upgradeable portable P4 desktop. Again the only thing you lose over a real notebook is the built-in "UPS", but it does have the built in LCD. And they're not hideously expensive compared to many "desktop replacement" notebooks.
I work for a small (<250 FTEs) high tech telecommunications equipment manufacturer. We provide IPSec VPN access through a Cisco 5001 VPN concentrator (formerly Compatible Systems) using the employee's own 'net connection. If the employee is predominantly out in the field (such as a remote sales person) the company picks up their 'net access, otherwide the employee does.
My wife's Fortune 500 company however provides two tiers of access. Terminal services (Citrix) to access your Outlook remotely from any machine or a company issues laptop with full VPN access apparently usingthe built in Win2K IPSec. She has the terminal services option, which requires a SecurID fob. Terminal services is strange 'cause it doesn't let you do anything useful, such as print documents or access your network drives. So, you have to forward any documents you need to actually work on to an external address and back again.
Where I am we are also providing basic connectivity over HTTPS using Outlook Web Access (OWA/SSL) and have been experimenting with various CIFS to HTTP products to provide access to network shares. This takes care of 90% of users in a relatively easy and secure way.
My wife's Fortune 500 company however provides two tiers of access. Terminal services (Citrix) to access your Outlook remotely from any machine or a company issues laptop with full VPN access apparently usingthe built in Win2K IPSec. She has the terminal services option, which requires a SecurID fob. Terminal services is strange 'cause it doesn't let you do anything useful, such as print documents or access your network drives. So, you have to forward any documents you need to actually work on to an external address and back again.
Where I am we are also providing basic connectivity over HTTPS using Outlook Web Access (OWA/SSL) and have been experimenting with various CIFS to HTTP products to provide access to network shares. This takes care of 90% of users in a relatively easy and secure way.
You could always sign up for Habeas SWE and put their little haiku "warrant" in your headers. This will stop most spam tools from filtering you out, unless of course you violate the terms and send UCE including the warrant.
I currently deliver all my e-mail from various sources including Yahoo to a Mercury/32 IMAP server running on my Win2000 box. This allows me to access my mail from my laptop over 802.11 while taking it off my ISPs servers...
I currently use Izymail
http://izymail.com since it handles both yahoo and hotmail in one small package. It also presents an IMAP interface to access subfolders on those accounts.
You still have to move your mail from POP to IMAP, but that can be handled by most e-mail clients.
Last I checked most 1-800 numbers are only directly accessible from within the US. From outside you have to dial up some other local access number that takes you to the US e.g. AT&T and then dial the "free" 1-800 number, which is now no longer free.
Balam
Ditto! I bought a license to use at work and recommended it highly to anyone that asked. I also was in touch with the guys there about some bug in early releases and they were quite responsive
At home though I use(d) Outlook Express and thus had to look elsewhere. So, I came up with a way to use the GPL version "client-side" on Windows. One of these years I'll whip up a description of it.
Actually, I would presume that this thing has LNA on the receive side, and maybe one for transmit. Many applications like this where the mobile transmitter is small, has low power consumption requirements and inefficient antenna design are reverse link limited, and adding amplification (gain) on the receive side alone can increase range of the overall system. Since the transmitter is stationary and plugged in power is usually not much of a consideration for the transmit side of an access point.
Or even the older Clie T-series models like the T415 to T615... These will do MP3/ATRAC with an add-on (PEGA-SA10) that basically just provides a headphone jack, but they have a real speaker and all the hardware inside the palmtop already...
Thanks! I was looking for something like the Quantum DX30 a few weeks back when two of our DDS drives got jammed and caused us hissy-fits.
Unfortunately given its size and cost, the DX30 only fills a high-end niche. I'd be perfectly happy with a solution that has 5 40G drives in a RAID5 (i.e 160G) and would cost no more than ~ $3/G (i.e. $500). This would take care of most of our daily backups, but we'd still do weeklies to tape.
Anyone know of a cheap/small DX30 equivalent?
Staying on topic, I do use DVD+R at home for archival storage, but they're still not big enough to really be used for regular backup. A full 100 G backup still needs over 20 shiny disks, and swapping them out is a royal pain.
As others have pointed out it's better than CD-ROM, but we really need larger capacity removable storage for home backup...
IMHO knowing the business is key. I'm a scientist working in a small high-tech manufacturing company and don't do IT for a living, but I dabble. We have one in-house IT person to handle everything from help-desk to maintaining our ERP system for ~250 people. I take care of the linux boxen and generaly act as a sounding board for the IT guy when stuff ain't working...
When stuff really hits the fan, everyone thinks that their particular issue is priority #1. One of the roles of a well-trained IT staff is to sort out those priorities and get the comapny back to business efficiently. You really need to know how the pieces are interconnected in order to do that effectively.
Another example: my wife works for a large company that recently outsourced most, but not all, of their IT staff. Now, when she has issues with the PCs in her office/lab she no longer has a single point of contact to deal with recurring problems and ends up having to explain the issue from the beginning again with the tech-of-the-day (Can you close all your apps and reboot? Is it plugged in?)... So what happens? One of the people in her group who knows something about PCs ends up being the local "mr. fix it" and ends up doing that instead of his real job.
Yet another example: She ordered a PC to drive a lab instrument since the old one died a horrible death. It took over two months for it to show up. Why? The only authorized PC for that purpose came with a "free" RAM upgrade and a 19" monitor, and even though the PC showed up within days the RAM was delayed. So the PC and, the >$100,000 piece of equipment was idled because it only had 128M of RAM and could not be delivered without the RAM upgrade. Never mind that the old PC that ran the machine had only 32M to begin with. Oh yeah, and that 19" monitor? It wouldn't fit in the equipment rack, so they ended up repurposing it as someone's desktop monitor. Of course the people in the lab knew it wan't going to fit, and mentioned this up front but the package deal could not be unbundled.
The irony of the whole thing was that it later turned out that the PC was incompatible with the data aquistion board required to drive the instrument even though it met all the manufacturer's specifications.
How did they find out? The in-house IT person from a neighboring department dropped by for something else and mentioned that they had found the same problem with their instruments. She found them an old clunker that was up to the job, and had them up and running the next day....
So, if you add up all the time wasted in dealing with these consultants that don't know what the group does or how it fits into the big picture of the company's business, do they still save money over a dedicated in-house IT staff?
I've looked, but never found a way to have NT4's NTBACKUP dump to anything but a tape drive. How do you set that up? (Windows 2000 ntbackup is different, since it's a stripped down version of Backup Exec.)
Personally, I don't like Exchange backup period. Exmerge is really useful, but still doesn't give you the ability to restore to where you were, since you lose single instance file storage when you re-import the PST to Exchange.
And I've heard far more horror stories restoring Exchange stores from "offline" (i.e. file level) backups than "online" (i.e. ntbackup) backups.
Thanks, been well aware of samba since the early days. In fact that's what got me into linux in the first place around 1994 when I finally gave up on a WfWG 3.1x "server" and replaced it with Slackware... I've also recently deployed two samba 2.2.x servers for quick & dirty jobs in my current job.
So, why not samba for this application?
We still do full back ups every night (~50-100G) and don't want that clogging up our network
We have fairly complex ACLs in some cases that don't map over to unix security all that well
We have two MS Exchange 5.5 servers on NT4 with over 30G of data between them that can only be backed up using NTBACKUP or Backup Exec, and these like to talk to SCSI drives*...
I saw some interesting stuff regarding SCSI target mode on Google when I was researching this a while ago, but it doesn't seem ready for prime time and may require real SCSI devices... Particulary this seems neat, but runs only on Windows, so there goes cheap...
*(BE, might be able to write to a network share, I haven't tried).
OK this is slightly OT: Given the low cost of IDE drives today I was wondering if it would make sense to make an adapter that would make a large IDE drive (or array of drives) look like a SCSI DDS DAT drive.
This way, it would be transparent to the server and could use any backup solution that would write to DDS, but it would be faster, cheaper and more reliable* for routine backups. Archival would still go to tape.
(* we seem to have run into a bad spell where even new tapes seem to be getting jammed in our DDS drives/autoloaders)
Anyone have any other suggestions for using IDE drives to back up NT/Exchange servers?
One minor correction. You can actually find out the status of any application for which you have the correct reference numbers at http://pair.uspto.gov.
This will let you know if a Notice of Allowance has been sent and a patent is about to issue.
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It's US$0.19 at my local Costco. So looks like you Canadians get them cheaper than us.
I LOVE this service, even if I can only get my prints the next day ...
On topic, I've used both Yahoo and *cough* MSN Groups to share photos, and prefer MSN in terms of the overall ease and flexibility of the site. Yahoo is a PITA for uploading many pictures since they still don't have a decent upload tool, and selecting files one-by-one is a pain.
BalamThere are various programs to collect used cell phones for various causes, one that makes a lot of sense is the Call to Protect which will benefit the victims of domestic violence.
BalamLDAP also won't get you to the contacts in your Contacts folder or any other folders in your Mailbox or Public Folders either, which are often more relevant than the GAL.
Note that OWA 5.5 is also deficient in this area since it only allows you access to your primary Contacts folder, and not to any Public Folders that contain Contacts. OWA 2000 is supposed to improve on that but still has some restrictions I can't remember.
I still don't see why MS doesn't just make Contacts and Calendar items accessible over IMAP as vCard and iCalendar entries respectively. They give you the "Forward as ..." option in Outlook so they know how to do the translation...
BalamI agree with you, and use IMAP (over SSL or VPN) myself when remote. However, e-mail's just the tip of the iceberg for most Outlook users. What do you do for Outlook's non-mail features i.e. the GAL (global address list), contacts, calendars, tasks, etc...? There's no way to access these over IMAP.
In my case I fall back to OWA or Outlook over VPN for those, but what if they weren't available?
BalamAnd the Ximian connector uses OWA to gain access to the calendar/contact information from Exchange Server that is not available by IMAP...
Until we get standard protocols for calendars & contacts and Exchange supports them, we're stuck with OWA...
BalamBring back the Commodore 64! ;-).
These guys Cybernet Manufacturing have advertised their zero-footprint PCs in the back of PC Magazine for years. They build the PC into the keyboard and thus are pretty much what you describe, w/o the built in UPS (battery).
Their Deskbook is also a strange beast. And end-user upgradeable portable P4 desktop. Again the only thing you lose over a real notebook is the built-in "UPS", but it does have the built in LCD. And they're not hideously expensive compared to many "desktop replacement" notebooks.
BalamI work for a small (<250 FTEs) high tech telecommunications equipment manufacturer. We provide IPSec VPN access through a Cisco 5001 VPN concentrator (formerly Compatible Systems) using the employee's own 'net connection. If the employee is predominantly out in the field (such as a remote sales person) the company picks up their 'net access, otherwide the employee does.
My wife's Fortune 500 company however provides two tiers of access. Terminal services (Citrix) to access your Outlook remotely from any machine or a company issues laptop with full VPN access apparently usingthe built in Win2K IPSec. She has the terminal services option, which requires a SecurID fob. Terminal services is strange 'cause it doesn't let you do anything useful, such as print documents or access your network drives. So, you have to forward any documents you need to actually work on to an external address and back again.
Where I am we are also providing basic connectivity over HTTPS using Outlook Web Access (OWA/SSL) and have been experimenting with various CIFS to HTTP products to provide access to network shares. This takes care of 90% of users in a relatively easy and secure way.
BalamI work for a small (
My wife's Fortune 500 company however provides two tiers of access. Terminal services (Citrix) to access your Outlook remotely from any machine or a company issues laptop with full VPN access apparently usingthe built in Win2K IPSec. She has the terminal services option, which requires a SecurID fob. Terminal services is strange 'cause it doesn't let you do anything useful, such as print documents or access your network drives. So, you have to forward any documents you need to actually work on to an external address and back again.
Where I am we are also providing basic connectivity over HTTPS using Outlook Web Access (OWA/SSL) and have been experimenting with various CIFS to HTTP products to provide access to network shares. This takes care of 90% of users in a relatively easy and secure way.
BalamYou could always sign up for Habeas SWE and put their little haiku "warrant" in your headers. This will stop most spam tools from filtering you out, unless of course you violate the terms and send UCE including the warrant.
BalamSpamassassin has various tests for this type of behavior. e.g.
Message text disguised using base-64 encoding BASE64_ENC_TEXT
However with the current default scores that alone would not flag a message as spam.
BalamI have used fetchyahoo (http://fetchyahoo.twizzler.org), and yahoopops (http://yahoopops.sourceforge.net/) to get my mail from Yahoo, and freshmeat also lists another alternative http://mrbook.org/mrpostman/
I currently use Izymail http://izymail.com since it handles both yahoo and hotmail in one small package. It also presents an IMAP interface to access subfolders on those accounts.You still have to move your mail from POP to IMAP, but that can be handled by most e-mail clients.
Hope this helps.Balam
Last I checked most 1-800 numbers are only directly accessible from within the US. From outside you have to dial up some other local access number that takes you to the US e.g. AT&T and then dial the "free" 1-800 number, which is now no longer free. Balam
So they're integrating it with their kindler-gentler SpamKiller software? ;-)
http://www.mcafeeb2b.com/other/jump/deersoft-homeu ser.asp.
Balam
Ditto! I bought a license to use at work and recommended it highly to anyone that asked. I also was in touch with the guys there about some bug in early releases and they were quite responsive
At home though I use(d) Outlook Express and thus had to look elsewhere. So, I came up with a way to use the GPL version "client-side" on Windows. One of these years I'll whip up a description of it.
BalamBalam
AFAIK the NR series uses the same "Motorola Dragonball VZ - 66MHz" that is in the T-series.
See http://www.mobileplanet.com/askexperts/PDA_Palm.as p and e.g http://www.djajic.com/handhelds/Sony_ClieNR.html.
BalamOr even the older Clie T-series models like the T415 to T615... These will do MP3/ATRAC with an add-on (PEGA-SA10) that basically just provides a headphone jack, but they have a real speaker and all the hardware inside the palmtop already...
BalamThis is also my read on the grant.
CDMA (a technology first widely used in cell phones) for fiber-optics, not optic(al) cell phones!
BThanks! I was looking for something like the Quantum DX30 a few weeks back when two of our DDS drives got jammed and caused us hissy-fits.
Unfortunately given its size and cost, the DX30 only fills a high-end niche. I'd be perfectly happy with a solution that has 5 40G drives in a RAID5 (i.e 160G) and would cost no more than ~ $3/G (i.e. $500). This would take care of most of our daily backups, but we'd still do weeklies to tape.
Anyone know of a cheap/small DX30 equivalent?
Staying on topic, I do use DVD+R at home for archival storage, but they're still not big enough to really be used for regular backup. A full 100 G backup still needs over 20 shiny disks, and swapping them out is a royal pain.
As others have pointed out it's better than CD-ROM, but we really need larger capacity removable storage for home backup...
BalamIMHO knowing the business is key. I'm a scientist working in a small high-tech manufacturing company and don't do IT for a living, but I dabble. We have one in-house IT person to handle everything from help-desk to maintaining our ERP system for ~250 people. I take care of the linux boxen and generaly act as a sounding board for the IT guy when stuff ain't working...
When stuff really hits the fan, everyone thinks that their particular issue is priority #1. One of the roles of a well-trained IT staff is to sort out those priorities and get the comapny back to business efficiently. You really need to know how the pieces are interconnected in order to do that effectively.
Another example: my wife works for a large company that recently outsourced most, but not all, of their IT staff. Now, when she has issues with the PCs in her office/lab she no longer has a single point of contact to deal with recurring problems and ends up having to explain the issue from the beginning again with the tech-of-the-day (Can you close all your apps and reboot? Is it plugged in?)... So what happens? One of the people in her group who knows something about PCs ends up being the local "mr. fix it" and ends up doing that instead of his real job.
Yet another example: She ordered a PC to drive a lab instrument since the old one died a horrible death. It took over two months for it to show up. Why? The only authorized PC for that purpose came with a "free" RAM upgrade and a 19" monitor, and even though the PC showed up within days the RAM was delayed. So the PC and, the >$100,000 piece of equipment was idled because it only had 128M of RAM and could not be delivered without the RAM upgrade. Never mind that the old PC that ran the machine had only 32M to begin with. Oh yeah, and that 19" monitor? It wouldn't fit in the equipment rack, so they ended up repurposing it as someone's desktop monitor. Of course the people in the lab knew it wan't going to fit, and mentioned this up front but the package deal could not be unbundled.
The irony of the whole thing was that it later turned out that the PC was incompatible with the data aquistion board required to drive the instrument even though it met all the manufacturer's specifications.
How did they find out? The in-house IT person from a neighboring department dropped by for something else and mentioned that they had found the same problem with their instruments. She found them an old clunker that was up to the job, and had them up and running the next day....
So, if you add up all the time wasted in dealing with these consultants that don't know what the group does or how it fits into the big picture of the company's business, do they still save money over a dedicated in-house IT staff?
You be the judge...
BalamNow we're diverging further OT.
I've looked, but never found a way to have NT4's NTBACKUP dump to anything but a tape drive. How do you set that up? (Windows 2000 ntbackup is different, since it's a stripped down version of Backup Exec.)
Personally, I don't like Exchange backup period. Exmerge is really useful, but still doesn't give you the ability to restore to where you were, since you lose single instance file storage when you re-import the PST to Exchange.
And I've heard far more horror stories restoring Exchange stores from "offline" (i.e. file level) backups than "online" (i.e. ntbackup) backups.
BalamThanks, been well aware of samba since the early days. In fact that's what got me into linux in the first place around 1994 when I finally gave up on a WfWG 3.1x "server" and replaced it with Slackware ... I've also recently deployed two samba 2.2.x servers for quick & dirty jobs in my current job.
So, why not samba for this application?
- We still do full back ups every night (~50-100G) and don't want that clogging up our network
- We have fairly complex ACLs in some cases that don't map over to unix security all that well
- We have two MS Exchange 5.5 servers on NT4 with over 30G of data between them that can only be backed up using NTBACKUP or Backup Exec, and these like to talk to SCSI drives*...
I saw some interesting stuff regarding SCSI target mode on Google when I was researching this a while ago, but it doesn't seem ready for prime time and may require real SCSI devices... Particulary this seems neat, but runs only on Windows, so there goes cheap...*(BE, might be able to write to a network share, I haven't tried).
Balam
OK this is slightly OT: Given the low cost of IDE drives today I was wondering if it would make sense to make an adapter that would make a large IDE drive (or array of drives) look like a SCSI DDS DAT drive.
This way, it would be transparent to the server and could use any backup solution that would write to DDS, but it would be faster, cheaper and more reliable* for routine backups. Archival would still go to tape.
(* we seem to have run into a bad spell where even new tapes seem to be getting jammed in our DDS drives/autoloaders)
Anyone have any other suggestions for using IDE drives to back up NT/Exchange servers?
Balam
ObGNURecursiveAcronym: AOL = AOL On Linux!
One minor correction. You can actually find out the status of any application for which you have the correct reference numbers at http://pair.uspto.gov.
This will let you know if a Notice of Allowance has been sent and a patent is about to issue.
Balam