Lack of redundancy. With two redundant routers you can't trivially share the same DHCP range across both without problems. ISC dhcpd has a failover protocol where two redundant servers communicate with each other when they assign a lease.
Too simplistic. You don't get as much control over the options and setting you can assign via DHCP with the Cisco router dhcp implementation. For example I don't know of a way to do vendor space DHCP options. If you're dealing with a trivial config thats no big deal.
Logging, control, state. You can't get much information out of the router easily in terms of what requests its seeing and responding too. And to make things worse all the DHCP client state is stored entirely in memory, if the router reboots it will forget all the leases it already assigned, and may try to re-assign those same addresses to new clients.
There are more, depending on the exact setup you're deploying and the level of complexity. (DHCP Option 82 for example)
Carnegie Mellon's NetReg is an open source system that provides a pretty complete IP Address Management toolset, including management of DNS & DHCP configurations for ISC bind/dhcpd. It can manage ISC dhcpd's failover configuration, and multiple server groups, etc.
Rather then just repeating what I've said before when the subject of IP Address Management came up on slashdot, I'll just link to it.
Note: While the project has been pretty quiet for quite some time now, thats mostly because its the system is very stable and there hasn't been a lot of major new development in the last couple of years. I used to be one of the core developers of the system before I moved on to another job, but its still in active use by many sites.
Carnegie Mellon's NetReg is an open source system that provides a pretty complete IP Address Management toolset, including management of DNS & DHCP configurations for ISC bind/dhcpd.
Rather then just repeating what I said the last time the subject of IP Address Management came up on slashdot, I'll just link to it.
I'm a DHCP and DNS Dominatrix. I'm not even a woman. Craziness. Pays well, though. Get to wear jeans. And a ball gag.
Damn, I wish this wasn't posted by an AC. I'm in desperate need of a DHCP and DNS Dominatrix to join my team, and we might even provide the ball gag...
Think about it. Traditional TV is a indirect-funding system. Networks pay for TV shows to be made and sell advertising time during the airing of the shows. The typical viewer gets the show for "free" (modulo any cable/satellite costs). The expectation is that the advertising will translate into additional sales for the companies purchasing ads, thus justifying continued purchase of those ads.
Systems like the iTunes store provide a direct funding model between the consumer and the producer. Sure the sales aren't enough at this time to fund the show directly, but if they become great enough to pay the entire cost of the show, why should there be ads?
I think the true story is is Nielsen whining about *their* funding model going away. They make money by helping the networks set rates for their indirect-funding system. If that becomes irrelevant, Nielsen becomes irrelevant.
Join the League of Professional System Administrators. We're a relatively new group, but we're growing quickly. You'll have an instant peer community to talk with, and a good peer community may be more important to your long term IT career then a few training classes. I also suspect that asking this question on the lopsa-discuss mailing list would generate a different set of suggestions from Ask Slashdot.
I'll second this recommendation for LISA. The tutorials are a good way to get a base understanding of a specific topic. (The tutorial schedule for LISA'06 is not yet announced.) Check out other USENIX events as well, http://www.usenix.org/events/
While I've never personally paid to attend a USENIX conference, my employer has paid for me to attend several.
In addition to looking for a mouse replacement, look at alternatives to using the mouse at all. What options are available will depend upon the OS. I use Linux at work, and use Ion as my window manager. For most of the operations I do I can avoid using the mouse entirely. Avoding moving between keyboard and mouse makes a big difference. The only thing I use my mouse for on a regular basis is firefox, and with properly designed web UIs you can navigate from the keyboard pretty heavily.
For a mouse replacement I use the Kensington Expert Mouse, which is a trackball with a nice large ball and four buttons located around the ball. If I'm using my fingertips to move the ball I can reach any of the buttons with my fingers.
Actually, the best you can do is 802.11a (also 54Mbps). The 5.4Ghz range has less utilization, particularly from neighboring wireless networks, and the performance should be noticably better. Running both A and G simultaneously and balancing your clients between A & G might also help.
But the original poster should remember that wireless is a shared medium, just like ethernet was back in the days when everyone used hubs. The 54Mbps is per-AP for ALL clients of the AP, and doesn't take into account the overhead inherent in the protocols. Expect no better then about 25-30Mbps total throughput for all clients of an AP, and that assumes that al clients are high speed. Legacy 802.11b clients take more air time, denying that time to other clients. Compare that to either a 100Mbps switched ethernet, or even better a full Gigabit ethernet. If the users spend a lot of time accessing remote file servers and moving data around the faster and more reliable network is worth the additional cost of the infrastructure.
The university I work for has a campus wide wireless network consisting of over 1000 wireless access points, but we still strongly recommend that anyone needed high speed reliable connections used a wired network outlet. Wireless is a network of convenience, not a network of guaranteed performance.
(And thats completely ignoring the security implications, for which there are various reasonably good solutions...)
Hey, somebody mentioned NetReg before I could... NetReg is probably way more then the OP wants, but it certainly does do IPAM fairly well. The screenshot on our site of the subnet map is a bit out of date, the current version looks slightly different, but you can see the idea.
The rest of this post I grabbed from my own comment on a Ask Slashdot story a few weeks ago about DNS management systems: Carnegie Mellon's NetReg (*) is a DNS & DHCP management system (and much more) that we wrote in house to replace our previous database. We manage DNS & DHCP for 50K machines, and NetReg does it all. It is available under an OSS license and is in use at several other locations. NetReg provides a self service web interface with flexible permissions, privilege delegation, IP address space management, DNS record validation, and more.
As the current primary developer of the system I'm a bit biased, but I think its a great system. It has a steep learning curve, and the documentation leaves something to be desired (like a tech writer...), but once you hit a certain scale the benefits outway the cost. On the site linked above you'll find a working demo with some base data you can experiment with, but obviously the full power of the system isn't utilized until you have lots of data and can see the resulting zones & config files.
There is an active mailing list. Feel free to join it and ask questions.
*: Not to be confused with Southwestern University's NetReg, which is a completely different system developed in parallel around the same time. The two systems have some similar features, but SW NetReg doesn't do everything that CMU NetReg does.
I knew somebody had to be applying High Availability tactics to a Cyrus system. Combined those techniques with the multiple server proxy capabilities of the Murder and you've got a system which should scale to unbelievable proportions.
A Cyrus IMAP Murder isn't a clustered system, its exactly the multiple servers with a proxy that the original post was describing. (Note: I work for the CMU IT department, I'm familiar with the way this works, but I don't work for the email group.)
However if you used the Murder as your frontend for clients, and applied fairly standard high availability tactics to the individual backends you could achieve clustering. Make each backend server a redundant load balanced virtual server, then make the Murder know about the mailbox locations on the virutal systems.
I'm sure it could be done, but its definitely not something that Cyrus does out of the box.
In practice the multiple servers w/ proxy has been good enough for CMU. With good hardware for the backend servers, and good RAID arrays, hardware failures are rare.
Nothing says the CEO can't report to someone. In fact typically the CEO would report to a Board of Directors or the company president.
Make your partner the CEO and a member of the Board of Directors. Make yourself the CTO, Chairman of the Board and President of the company. He reports to you but has primary authority in the day to day operations of the business. As company president you set the direction of the company, and thus give him instructions on strategic goals. Ultimately you could setup the structure so that as President you could fire/demote/replace the CEO if his work isn't taking the company in the direction you desire. He would still have 50% ownership, but that is a separate issue...
(IANAL, you should of course talk this over with a lawyer and your partner.)
For scalability and flexibility, try CMU's NetReg
on
Organizing Your DNS?
·
· Score: 1
Carnegie Mellon's NetReg (*) is a DNS & DHCP management system (and much more) that we wrote in house to replace our previous database. We manage DNS & DHCP for 50K machines, and NetReg does it all. It is available under an OSS license and is in use at several other locations. NetReg provides a self service web interface with flexible permissions, privilege delegation, IP address space management, DNS record validation, and more.
As the current primary developer of the system I'm a bit biased, but I think its a great system. It has a steep learning curve, and the documentation leaves something to be desired (like a tech writer...), but once you hit a certain scale the benefits outway the cost. On the site linked above you'll find a working demo with some base data you can experiment with, but obviously the full power of the system isn't utilized until you have lots of data and can see the resulting zones & config files.
There is an active mailing list. Feel free to join it and ask questions.
*: Not to be confused with Southwestern University's NetReg, which is a completely different system developed in parallel around the same time.
The US Chess Federation has a massive scholastic chess program, there may be a group in your area that you can get in contact with. Check out http://www.uschess.org/ - in particular the scholastic services page
Thats a pretty vague question, and you didn't provide enough information to really answer it right, but here's some recommendations.
Assuming you have managed switches, collecting per-port data with SNMP is a great first start. I think Cricket (http://cricket.sourceforge.net/ is a great system for collecting this data, but I prefer Drraw (http://web.taranis.org/drraw) for graphing the data. For an example of the power available by combining these two tools, see http://stats.net.cmu.edu/
Once you've got that, install Net-SNMP's snmpd on your host and collect & graph interface stats for your unix servers as well. If you don't have managed switches this may be good enough on its own. You can also graph load average, memory usage, etc.
For actually analyzing your network traffic I suggest Argus, http://www.qosient.com/argus. It's a network traffic auditing tool, think of it as tcpdump for flows instead of packets, or as netflow on crack. You can easily record complete flow statistics for your entire network for later perusal. All you need is a network topology that allows you to sniff most/all of the traffic. A span port on a switch is usually sufficient. If you've already got a snort server and it has enough processing capacity you can just run argus on the same host.
Speaking of which, if you don't have a snort server you probably want one. Nessus as well.
And once you've tracked down what machine(s) are causing the problem, do you have records of which machines belong to which users? (Insert plug here for CMU's NetReg system for management of DNS and DHCP, which provides that. (http://www.net.cmu.edu/netreg) I'm biased on this one as well...)
Oh, and my money would be on poorly timed overlapping network backups, saturating a switch uplink. Just a guess...
If you needed slashdot to figure out that the time estimate was way low then you obviously have no sysadmin/netadmin experience. Either say no, start looking for a new job, or expect to spend 30-50% of your time on admin tasks and to have your train of thought constantly interrupted while you're trying to make progress on your programming tasks.
The primary data source site is at my office, which has a nice connection (175Mbps). A second smaller data source is at home, where I've got a cable modem. All "critical" data will be published to one of these two locations.
One of the backup units is in my office, next to the source machine. Another is at home. Synchronizations to home aren't a big issue, syncs to work from home are slow, but I'm not concerned about the backup speed.
In a "oops the drive in machine X" died situation, I should have a clone of the data in the same building. If I need to go offsite I can always just drive there to retrieve the disk.
The third backup site is going to be at my parent's house, 1000 miles away. (Not up yet, will be in a month.) In theory the only reason I should ever need to do a restore from there is a catastrophic event. i.e. my house burns down and the drive at my office dies at the same time. In that case I'm not concerned about restoration speed, as long as I have the data I'll be happy.
I've recently made the personal commitment to have multiple backups of all my important data, in multiple locations. I figure the key issues are automation and refresh cost.
I'm using multiple Linksys NSLU2's, an embedded linux box designed to be an Bring Your Own USB Disk file server. Out of the box it only provides SMB file sharing, but mine are running the opensource unslung firmware to give me full control over the system.
I'm doing my backups via automated rsync over ssh, to multiple boxes in multiple locations. Each box has a pair of 250G USB disks, and I'm doing a two stage rsync, a remote to local sync, and a disk to disk sync, with the disk to disk rsync being configured to ignore existing files, so if I get corrupt data on the master server, the first tier of backups will get corrupted as well, but the second tier won't.
Cost per location: $90 for the NSLU2, $160 per disk. Total of just over $400. Compared to the other NAS options out there, a pretty good price. I expect to replace the disks when I see the first round of failures, and I'm hoping the nas box will last 3-4 years. At that point it'll be time to look for the latest tech to use.
Security sucks though. No encryption, only MAC authentication for registered cards. Of course, all campus email, grade servers are encrypted (even our library requests are!). But you could just snoop anyone's yahoo mail off the air for example. Maybe they should have criteria like how secure the network is, in the criteria for judging as well.
There are both technical and non technical reasons for this.
For one, WEP is useless, and at the point when the CMU wireless network was deployed, it was the only option. Its still the only option on many/most of the access points we have deployed. Its useless both because its trivial breakable, and because it provides no key distribution mechanism. So if we're going to provide a WEP key to all 12000 wireless users, it'll have to be through some trivially easy means, and thus the evil hacker could get the key. And don't forget that the evil hacker might be the student sitting next to you, or someone who has compromised his machine.
WPA solves some of the problems of WEP by using 802.1x to distribute WEP keys, and by using different keys per machine, and changing them frequently. But most of our hardware doesn't support it, and it requires firmware updates on client hardware. And since its clearly just an interim technology, we aren't going to be upgrading our wireless hardware to support it.
Some of the new systems (LEAP/PEAP/TTLS/etc) look promising, but we'll need to do widescale upgrades to make using them possible. We're trying to find the funds to do that, but its not going to be cheap. Hardware & installation costs for a full upgrade, including full 802.11 A & G coverage, could easily run $3-4 million.
More philosophically, relying on the network medium to be secure is a bad habit. Even if/when we provide an encrypted wireless network, as soon as your packets are off the wireless network they would be unencrypted. So an evil hacker just needs to compromise a system/network somewhere between you and the site you're accessing, and they can read your data. This is why we strongly recommend that you use end-to-end encryption whenever possible. Would you buy stuff from Amazon without using SSL? Email is a poor example of why encryption is good, since email is relayed around the internet over clear channels anyway. So the proverbial evil hacker may have already read your email before it got to Yahoo.
And even if we enable some form of encryption on wireless, we'll probably have to allow unencrypted connections for legacy devices. I doubt we'll see any wireless enabled cameras with full keyboards for PEAP/LEAP password entry anytime soon.
When they start stocking Linux machines in their physical stores, it'll be important. (And its not clear from the article whether they're referring only to walmart.com or not.)
Simply put, WalMart does NOT carry items in their physical stores that do not sell. If it doesn't sell, its wasting space, and costing them money. So they'll deap discount the remaining inventory to get rid of it, and stop carrying it.
Remember that most applications have no awareness of your desire to conserve battery life.
In particular, disabling your web browser's disk cache will prevent your disk from spinning up and staying that way when you web surf.
Think about what applications you're using, and how you can modify their behavior.
Check out SnapSync from FutureDial
I've never used their sync'ing software, but I bought the data cable for my phone from them.
SnapSync sync's with Outlook, so if Outlook isn't your PIM of choice you'll need something else.
They have a long list of phone that their software works with.
Slashdot Mirror
There are more, depending on the exact setup you're deploying and the level of complexity. (DHCP Option 82 for example)
Carnegie Mellon's NetReg is an open source system that provides a pretty complete IP Address Management toolset, including management of DNS & DHCP configurations for ISC bind/dhcpd. It can manage ISC dhcpd's failover configuration, and multiple server groups, etc.
Rather then just repeating what I've said before when the subject of IP Address Management came up on slashdot, I'll just link to it.
Note: While the project has been pretty quiet for quite some time now, thats mostly because its the system is very stable and there hasn't been a lot of major new development in the last couple of years. I used to be one of the core developers of the system before I moved on to another job, but its still in active use by many sites.
Rather then just repeating what I said the last time the subject of IP Address Management came up on slashdot, I'll just link to it.
Damn, I wish this wasn't posted by an AC. I'm in desperate need of a DHCP and DNS Dominatrix to join my team, and we might even provide the ball gag...
Why do you still need the advertisers?
Think about it. Traditional TV is a indirect-funding system. Networks pay for TV shows to be made and sell advertising time during the airing of the shows. The typical viewer gets the show for "free" (modulo any cable/satellite costs). The expectation is that the advertising will translate into additional sales for the companies purchasing ads, thus justifying continued purchase of those ads.
Systems like the iTunes store provide a direct funding model between the consumer and the producer. Sure the sales aren't enough at this time to fund the show directly, but if they become great enough to pay the entire cost of the show, why should there be ads?
I think the true story is is Nielsen whining about *their* funding model going away. They make money by helping the networks set rates for their indirect-funding system. If that becomes irrelevant, Nielsen becomes irrelevant.
Join the League of Professional System Administrators. We're a relatively new group, but we're growing quickly. You'll have an instant peer community to talk with, and a good peer community may be more important to your long term IT career then a few training classes. I also suspect that asking this question on the lopsa-discuss mailing list would generate a different set of suggestions from Ask Slashdot.
I'll second this recommendation for LISA. The tutorials are a good way to get a base understanding of a specific topic. (The tutorial schedule for LISA'06 is not yet announced.) Check out other USENIX events as well, http://www.usenix.org/events/
While I've never personally paid to attend a USENIX conference, my employer has paid for me to attend several.
In addition to looking for a mouse replacement, look at alternatives to using the mouse at all. What options are available will depend upon the OS. I use Linux at work, and use Ion as my window manager. For most of the operations I do I can avoid using the mouse entirely. Avoding moving between keyboard and mouse makes a big difference. The only thing I use my mouse for on a regular basis is firefox, and with properly designed web UIs you can navigate from the keyboard pretty heavily.
For a mouse replacement I use the Kensington Expert Mouse, which is a trackball with a nice large ball and four buttons located around the ball. If I'm using my fingertips to move the ball I can reach any of the buttons with my fingers.
Actually, the best you can do is 802.11a (also 54Mbps). The 5.4Ghz range has less utilization, particularly from neighboring wireless networks, and the performance should be noticably better. Running both A and G simultaneously and balancing your clients between A & G might also help.
But the original poster should remember that wireless is a shared medium, just like ethernet was back in the days when everyone used hubs. The 54Mbps is per-AP for ALL clients of the AP, and doesn't take into account the overhead inherent in the protocols. Expect no better then about 25-30Mbps total throughput for all clients of an AP, and that assumes that al clients are high speed. Legacy 802.11b clients take more air time, denying that time to other clients. Compare that to either a 100Mbps switched ethernet, or even better a full Gigabit ethernet. If the users spend a lot of time accessing remote file servers and moving data around the faster and more reliable network is worth the additional cost of the infrastructure.
The university I work for has a campus wide wireless network consisting of over 1000 wireless access points, but we still strongly recommend that anyone needed high speed reliable connections used a wired network outlet. Wireless is a network of convenience, not a network of guaranteed performance.
(And thats completely ignoring the security implications, for which there are various reasonably good solutions...)
The rest of this post I grabbed from my own comment on a Ask Slashdot story a few weeks ago about DNS management systems:
Carnegie Mellon's NetReg (*) is a DNS & DHCP management system (and much more) that we wrote in house to replace our previous database. We manage DNS & DHCP for 50K machines, and NetReg does it all. It is available under an OSS license and is in use at several other locations. NetReg provides a self service web interface with flexible permissions, privilege delegation, IP address space management, DNS record validation, and more.
As the current primary developer of the system I'm a bit biased, but I think its a great system. It has a steep learning curve, and the documentation leaves something to be desired (like a tech writer...), but once you hit a certain scale the benefits outway the cost. On the site linked above you'll find a working demo with some base data you can experiment with, but obviously the full power of the system isn't utilized until you have lots of data and can see the resulting zones & config files.
There is an active mailing list. Feel free to join it and ask questions.
*: Not to be confused with Southwestern University's NetReg, which is a completely different system developed in parallel around the same time. The two systems have some similar features, but SW NetReg doesn't do everything that CMU NetReg does.
I knew somebody had to be applying High Availability tactics to a Cyrus system. Combined those techniques with the multiple server proxy capabilities of the Murder and you've got a system which should scale to unbelievable proportions.
A Cyrus IMAP Murder isn't a clustered system, its exactly the multiple servers with a proxy that the original post was describing. (Note: I work for the CMU IT department, I'm familiar with the way this works, but I don't work for the email group.)
However if you used the Murder as your frontend for clients, and applied fairly standard high availability tactics to the individual backends you could achieve clustering. Make each backend server a redundant load balanced virtual server, then make the Murder know about the mailbox locations on the virutal systems.
I'm sure it could be done, but its definitely not something that Cyrus does out of the box.
In practice the multiple servers w/ proxy has been good enough for CMU. With good hardware for the backend servers, and good RAID arrays, hardware failures are rare.
Nothing says the CEO can't report to someone. In fact typically the CEO would report to a Board of Directors or the company president.
Make your partner the CEO and a member of the Board of Directors. Make yourself the CTO, Chairman of the Board and President of the company. He reports to you but has primary authority in the day to day operations of the business. As company president you set the direction of the company, and thus give him instructions on strategic goals. Ultimately you could setup the structure so that as President you could fire/demote/replace the CEO if his work isn't taking the company in the direction you desire. He would still have 50% ownership, but that is a separate issue...
(IANAL, you should of course talk this over with a lawyer and your partner.)
As the current primary developer of the system I'm a bit biased, but I think its a great system. It has a steep learning curve, and the documentation leaves something to be desired (like a tech writer...), but once you hit a certain scale the benefits outway the cost. On the site linked above you'll find a working demo with some base data you can experiment with, but obviously the full power of the system isn't utilized until you have lots of data and can see the resulting zones & config files.
There is an active mailing list. Feel free to join it and ask questions.
*: Not to be confused with Southwestern University's NetReg, which is a completely different system developed in parallel around the same time.
The US Chess Federation has a massive scholastic chess program, there may be a group in your area that you can get in contact with. Check out http://www.uschess.org/ - in particular the scholastic services page
Thats a pretty vague question, and you didn't provide enough information to really answer it right, but here's some recommendations.
Assuming you have managed switches, collecting per-port data with SNMP is a great first start. I think Cricket (http://cricket.sourceforge.net/ is a great system for collecting this data, but I prefer Drraw (http://web.taranis.org/drraw) for graphing the data. For an example of the power available by combining these two tools, see http://stats.net.cmu.edu/
Once you've got that, install Net-SNMP's snmpd on your host and collect & graph interface stats for your unix servers as well. If you don't have managed switches this may be good enough on its own. You can also graph load average, memory usage, etc.
For actually analyzing your network traffic I suggest Argus, http://www.qosient.com/argus. It's a network traffic auditing tool, think of it as tcpdump for flows instead of packets, or as netflow on crack. You can easily record complete flow statistics for your entire network for later perusal. All you need is a network topology that allows you to sniff most/all of the traffic. A span port on a switch is usually sufficient. If you've already got a snort server and it has enough processing capacity you can just run argus on the same host.
Speaking of which, if you don't have a snort server you probably want one. Nessus as well.
For monitoring/alerting I recommend Mon (http://www.kernel.org/software/mon), but then I'm biased.
And once you've tracked down what machine(s) are causing the problem, do you have records of which machines belong to which users? (Insert plug here for CMU's NetReg system for management of DNS and DHCP, which provides that. (http://www.net.cmu.edu/netreg) I'm biased on this one as well...)
Oh, and my money would be on poorly timed overlapping network backups, saturating a switch uplink. Just a guess...
If you needed slashdot to figure out that the time estimate was way low then you obviously have no sysadmin/netadmin experience. Either say no, start looking for a new job, or expect to spend 30-50% of your time on admin tasks and to have your train of thought constantly interrupted while you're trying to make progress on your programming tasks.
One of the backup units is in my office, next to the source machine. Another is at home. Synchronizations to home aren't a big issue, syncs to work from home are slow, but I'm not concerned about the backup speed.
In a "oops the drive in machine X" died situation, I should have a clone of the data in the same building. If I need to go offsite I can always just drive there to retrieve the disk.
The third backup site is going to be at my parent's house, 1000 miles away. (Not up yet, will be in a month.) In theory the only reason I should ever need to do a restore from there is a catastrophic event. i.e. my house burns down and the drive at my office dies at the same time. In that case I'm not concerned about restoration speed, as long as I have the data I'll be happy.
I'm using multiple Linksys NSLU2's, an embedded linux box designed to be an Bring Your Own USB Disk file server. Out of the box it only provides SMB file sharing, but mine are running the opensource unslung firmware to give me full control over the system.
I'm doing my backups via automated rsync over ssh, to multiple boxes in multiple locations. Each box has a pair of 250G USB disks, and I'm doing a two stage rsync, a remote to local sync, and a disk to disk sync, with the disk to disk rsync being configured to ignore existing files, so if I get corrupt data on the master server, the first tier of backups will get corrupted as well, but the second tier won't.
Cost per location: $90 for the NSLU2, $160 per disk. Total of just over $400. Compared to the other NAS options out there, a pretty good price. I expect to replace the disks when I see the first round of failures, and I'm hoping the nas box will last 3-4 years. At that point it'll be time to look for the latest tech to use.
There are both technical and non technical reasons for this.
Simply put, WalMart does NOT carry items in their physical stores that do not sell. If it doesn't sell, its wasting space, and costing them money. So they'll deap discount the remaining inventory to get rid of it, and stop carrying it.
Hmm.. Thats strange. I can't enter the URL for [REDACTED].
Oh, [REDACTED]! This new machine from [REDACTED] must have one of those damn [REDACTED] enabled BIOSes. No more [REDACTED] for me. [REDACTED]!
Remember that most applications have no awareness of your desire to conserve battery life. In particular, disabling your web browser's disk cache will prevent your disk from spinning up and staying that way when you web surf. Think about what applications you're using, and how you can modify their behavior.
If you don't have the budget for Retina, try Nessus. Even Eeye reccommends it, in this post on bugtraq.
Check out SnapSync from FutureDial
I've never used their sync'ing software, but I bought the data cable for my phone from them. SnapSync sync's with Outlook, so if Outlook isn't your PIM of choice you'll need something else. They have a long list of phone that their software works with.