You're new to this whole "dark fiber" thing, aren't you? When a telco sells you "dark fiber" they're either literally selling you unused MMF, with repeaters in place, or they're selling you an unused lambda. In either case, the interface to customer equipment is multi-mode fiber, and you can run anything over it that you would run over a shorter piece of fiber.
Again, you assume way too much. First of all, the poster says that the city was to let us have (for free) dark fiber links between several location in the city and our studio. He did not say a telco was providing him with anything. Further he says dark fibre links. He does not say that they are providing bandwidth or lamdas, meaning that it cannot be assumed that they have repeaters or muxes or DWDM equipment on these links. It is entirely possible, if not likely that they are getting strands of glass and nothing more.
You also talk about multi-mode fibre. While it is true that telcos often provide a multimode fibre connection to their customers, this is just a short link back to the telco's multiplexer on a single mode sonet ring. This case could easily be just glass strands, like I said before. If that is the case then they are much more likely to be single mode because multi mode cannot run the same distances that single mode can. If the run is longer than a kilometer it will almost certainly be single mode and require totally different equipment than the multimode scenario you propose. Again we don't know that from the post, as I stated earlier the poster did not provide nearly enough information to answer the question. But, maybe you are correct, provided that your other assumtion was correct when you said You're new to this whole "dark fiber" thing, aren't you?
The previous posts, though unforgiving and potentially offensive are right on the money! Your recommendation fails to take into account the two most important details of such a network. Details that the poster failed to provide. They are fibre type and distance.
Without knowing the fiber type and the length of the runs it is not possible to answer the question, and anyone who has a clue about it would know that type and distance are imperative.
Your recommendations would be great, assuming that the fiber runs are multimode fibre at under 500 meters. But, the post was talking about a MAN which suggests far greater distances than your proposed campus network. But, what are the distances? Are the runs one kilometer or are they 30 kilometers? What type of fibre is it? How may connections are there in the fibre? Has the fibre been tested(characterization) to determine dispertion levels due to fibre quality, distance and connections.
Going further, what is cheap? It's rather subjective, don't you think? Cheap to some people means a couple hundred dollars. It's highly unlikely that he could build the network for that. Cheap to some other non-profits that need such a network could be in the millions, as could this project. What's cheap to him? Budget information is imperative with an optical network. You have to have a power budget for the optics(not dollars) and you have to have a financial budget.
The poster didn't come close to providing the required information with the question and got what he deserved. Your recommendations, though well intended, are not applicable to the situation, in other words, just some wild ass guess(SWAG).
The tools that you describe as being past their prime are Time Domain Reflectometers(TDR). They measure the difference in time between when a signal is sent and when the signal returns after being reflected by the cut end or a kink in the wire. They are then able to calculate the length of a cable or the location of a break and so forth. They are extremely sensitive (though we bang them around quite a bit, don't we?) and highly specialized. This means that they cost a fair bit of money.
NIC cards are simply radio tranceivers that you plug into the wire. They aren't terribly sensitive and are usually cheap. They are designed and built to perform baseband signaling and little else.
NICs in general, are incapable of performing the functions that TDRs perform. While such a beast could be built, the cost would be astonishingly high, especially in a PCMCIA form factor.
There are very few companies that would build such a device, with Fluke being regarded as the best. But, presently none of them manufacture one. The fact that such a card would only be used in a very small niche market and would cost an arm, a leg and a first born means that they are highly unlikely to build one, any time soon.
I'm afraid that your search will be futile. I'd recommend budgeting for a Fluke LANMeter. You'll ever be sorry for buying the best.
This post is exactly why these companies are making people sign agreements that seem to simply restate common sense stuff that "everybody" knows.
The fact is that, what is common sense to you may not be common sense to the goober in the next cube. All too often this is the case, people seem clueless at the most common sense matters, as I stare at them in amazement. How could anyone be so stupid to not know that already? I frequently ask.
But, then there is the next level, where they do know the common sense ethic and they have even been formally informed of the policy and the punishment for breaking that policy, yet they justify their illicit actions with some form of glib nonsense that they feel makes it perfectly acceptable. As is so eloquently stated in the poster's final comment: I should not be surfing slashdot during work hours, but since they cut my pay by I say f****'em! I'm taking it out in bandwidth.
The agreement won't be regarded as a waste of time to them, when they fire you for breaking the company's policy, which you explicitly agreed to and signed.
I'd have to disagree with you. Sure, if you don't give a flying flip if anyone ever uses your project, then advertising isn't really important. But, the fact is that every project owner does want people to use their project and many feel that the more the better. You for example, would enjoy the added noteriety. No? Imagine how great you would feel if your project had the noteriety of Apache. Pretty good, eh?
Advertising can be invasive and offensive, there is no doubt. Especially bad advertising. This could be a poor quality TV commercial, or a good commercial that is repeated 15 times an hour, worst of all is obviously spam but, the fact is that most decent advertising works at least a little bit. I hate to use dot bomb speak but, marketshare comes after mindshare. If no one knows about your project then no one will use it, regardless of how good it may or may not be. For open source projects advertising offers a great benefit in terms of mindshare.
There is another angle as well. That is, the whole open source "movement". Dispite its popularity amongst the Slashdot free loaders, most of the world hasn't heard of open source or even Linux for that matter. If the open source movement is to gain momentum then more people need to know about it. This is where advertising comes in.
You speak of Linux on the desktop, what are the chances of this happening soley from word of mouth. I'll tell you that chances are slim, certainly for the short term. Almost no home users have heard of Linux and many, perhaps most, businesses haven't heard of it either. It can't take over the desktop if no one knows about it but, if you throw in some advertising then more people will have at least heard of it. They may not know what it is but, they may try to find out what it is if they have heard of it.
Advertising is important, even in free software and advertising works. Think for a moment about how many Linux users there would be if AOL simply mentioned Linux (in a positive light) in their constant barrage of television commercials. Just a simple plug like someone saying, "I like Linux".
People here, like to talk about Walmrt selling Linux machines. Believe me, it is a miniscule market. Why? Because they are selling them in their online store. Most Walmart shoppers buy at their local store, not online. Therefore, most Walmart shoppers have never heard of them. And, Slashdotters build their own so they aren't buying them either. If Walmart sold these boxes in their local stores and, more importantly, advertised them then hundreds of thousands (maybe millions) of people would become aware of them.
Nagios has been classified as a succesful project based on its wide spread use. Yet there are countless Slashdotters that had never heard of it prior to this interview, many of them sysadmins. Imagine how wildly succesful it would be if it were advertised and more people knew about it.
Open source needs some marketing, and it needs it now.
I've found another similar vulnerability in Windows IP stack. I'm sure that I am not the first to discover this but, it has existed for a long time and has never been fixed. I have verified the vulnerability on all Windows platforms except XP, which I simply haven't bothered to look at.
The "vulnerability" is very similar in behavior to the one described in the article but, is at the IP level rather than the link layer. The vulnerability has to do with padding of IP packets on Windows systems. Windows uses the contents of one of its buffers (sorry I can't say which one) to pad IP packets.
This is very easily reproducable when sniffing ping packets. The data portion of the packets are padded with the contents of the buffer. There are other utilities that demonstrate this behavior as well, but it is most easily reproduced with a simple ping and the bigger the ping packet the more data you'll see.
If you have been using IE and then sniff ping packets, you will see the data from your previous browsing. If you just logged in, you can sometimes find your password padding the ping packets.
As I said I have verified this on all WIndows platforms except XP. I have also looked for it on numerous Linux platforms and have NOT found Linux to suffer the same vulnerability. That is, Linux does NOT appear vulnerable.
As for sendmail, it is not meant for Windows weenies or wanna be Unix sysadmins, only for "real" Unix admins and those that wish to use a VERY robust product and are willing to learn the product to reap the rewards.
Though your post overall, does have merit, I'd have to disagree with your arguement. I thought Sendmail was supposed to be an MTA, not an elitist's source of sadomasochism.
When looking for an MTA I first look for something that is secure and something that works best. Then I look for an MTA that offers high performance. Never have I looked for or wanted ANY software package that was unnecessarily complex.
That's a bit like learning assembly for the hell of it, even though you don't have any interest in programming.
Verisign has realized that this part of their business is not profitable and is getting ready to sell it off, again. By putting the name back, they separate Network Solutions from Verisign and play on the name recognition for the eventual sale of the company. I doubt that such a sale would do as well if it were sold as The Company Formerly Known as a Division of Verisgn.
I've said this before....
on
Linux Is Cheaper
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· Score: 4, Insightful
It is because Linux admins, although slightly more expensive,
I've said this before but, while the above statement is frequently bandied about, I do not see evidence of this in the real world. Indeed the majority of job postings that I see for Linux sysadmins offer salaries that are a fair bit less than similar positions looking for MCSEs.
Indeed, there are also several commonly used salary surveys on the net that seem to indicate that Linux sysadmins are paid less than their Windows counterparts. I've even seen a few stupid cases where positions requiring Linux experence and an MCSE certification actually paid less than similar positions requiring an MCSE only.
Is this only the case in my region or is it the case on a wider scale?
Yes, you are missing out. A good sysadmin at a decent company can have a very good life. I have had sysadmin positions with small, medium and very large companies where I telecommuted 90% of the time. In one job I telecommuted 100% of the time for a year, before I felt a bit lonely and started frequenting the coorporate campus for a few hours a week. It's amazing what a difference there is when people can put a face with the voice at the other end of the phone.
I was a good sysadmin and I have greater aspirations than this guy does so, I have moved up and beyond these older jobs but, they were very good jobs while I was there.
You're missing out. The question you must ask is, why? Are you really as good at your job as you think you are? Are you able to relate to management or are you constantly trying to win pissing contests with them? Do the users like you, or do the fear or view you with disdane? Honest answers to these questions are harder to get than you might think. You may want to ask a peer or higher-up engineer type for brutally honest answers to these questions. Engineer types will usually oblige, provided they aren't close friends or subordinates. Once you have these answers, accepting them and working to truely address potential shortcomings could completely turn things around for you. Good luck.
I still check these books out in my search for the Holy Grail of Linux books, a good, well written book that I can recommend to people who are familar with computers but, unfamiliar with Linux.
This book sadly, is not it. The reviewer is actually quite generous in his review. I found the book to be convoluted in its arrangement with repeated early referrence to commands that were not explained until after the tenth chapter. It did not flow well which made it all the more difficult to read its copious 1000 pages.
As the reviewer stated it tries to cover the full breadth of a subject from very basic to very advanced but in both cases it simply touches on each topic without any real depth. For instance, after adequately explaining the installation steps, it describes recompiling the kernel in less than two pages with no real explanation or what or why. Hardly something necessary for new users or people who may never have compiled a program before, and really no information on the ins and outs of the kernel for advanced users.
Basically, the book is adequate for a referrence if someone needs to get a new service up and running quickly. If you've never setup MySQL or Sendmail the book will walk you through installation and basic configuration, beyond that, you're on your own. Read the Man page and check the news groups, as the book says repeatedly.
That's a great reason to put it on the front page.
I was hoping they would wait.
on
New Red Hat Beta
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· Score: 4, Interesting
KDE 3.1 has been delayed until early/mid January for a security audit. KDE 3.1 is VERY nice and is another big step forward for KDE. I had hoped that Red Hat would delay their 8.1? release until KDE 3.1 could be included. Unfortunately it looks like we will still have the "crippled" KDE 3.0.5 in Red Hat 8.1.
I definitely understand that Red Hat has an affinity for Gnome, and that's fine for them, but for full compatibility you really need to install both Gnome and KDE so why not have the best KDE?
With Mandrake's newly returned cash crunch, Suse is looking like a strong contender on the distro front. However, don't forget Knoppix, the newest "distro".
Ah, you pose a good question and as always the responses are typically emotionally motivated. Although there is no guarantee that the following solution will work, it is certainly the mostly likely option for success.
You state that you are threatened with dumping Nagios because of the issue you have with the plugin. Assuming that your organization requires a network monitoring system, it seems only logical that you would have to replace Nagios with a commercial system, a system that will likely cost a great deal of money.
Could you not get some funds allocated to allow you to contact the writer of the plugin directly and hire them as a consultant in order to fix the bug or implement a feature that you need. I suspect that for a couple of thousand dollars you could have the actual writer of the plugin address your needs directly. Surely this would be far cheaper than the likely hundreds of thousands of dollars that would be necessary to completely replace Nagios with a commercial system. Further, releasing your fix/enhancement to the open source community would advance the entire project that much more.
The solution to your quandry would be to fund the development of your project and then release the software under an open source license. However, there are already a few CAD packages that may meet your needs, though the best ones are not open source, just inexpensive.
Nagios' present event handling performs a prescribed action based on a state change in a monitored service, this is an excellent feature that pushes Nagios beyond a simple monitoring application into a true management application. In CA Unicenter, event handling goes a step further, allowing you to configure any action based on ANY message that appears in the event log. This in my opinion, is one of Unicenter's strongest features, though there are many.
Will Nagios be implementing similar event handling functionality or will using utilities such as Swatch remain necessary? And if Nagios will not gain this flexibility, why would you feel that this functionality is unnecessary?
Nagios is an outstanding project, not only in terms of its success but, also in terms of its power and broad scope. Looking at Nagios today it is increasingly apparent that its functionality is starting to approach that of HP OpenView and CA Unicenter TNG.
My twofold question is, what has determined Nagios direction thus far? Was it modeled after OpenView and TNG or something else? Also, where is Nagios going in the future, will it continue to develop the features of OpenView and TNG or is it going somewhere else?
I feel really sorry for them. How ever will they enforce their policies without this bill? Especially with half of Europe switching to Linux, the BSA rapidly approaches obsolescence.
It all depends on what your company does and how they do it. Do you work at an ISP or a bank or restaurant? Does your IT department provide PC support or do you develop your own applications in house as well? How big is your company, employee wise and revenue wise? How dependent is your company on IT?
What I've seen in small to mid-sized companies is that properly run IT departments typically have one or two admins per 50 users up to around 150 users. After 150 users it's one admin per 100 or 150 users. The IT head count may be slightly higher at companies that are very reliant on IT or have round the clock operations.
Now, if the company does in house development, then that's a whole other story. It all depends on what your business is and how much development there is. I've seen development depertments that were 50% of the company even though IT was not their core business. I've also seen 2000 user companies with 2 developers.
I'd say that you are the troll here. It seems that you are somewhat successful too. Contrary to your post, Taco does not discuss the recent issues in his journal. As for emailing him, that would be a pathetic waste of time as I'm quite sure his inbox is filled with a 1000 trolls a day.
But, it still doesn't change the fact that the many programmers and sys admins that read this site regularly, would like to know what is going on. Some may be able to offer help, and many others would gain very useful insite that could be invaluable to their own opertations.
Well, as most of you already know Slashdot is again, having major "issues". These have been increasingly frequent since the colo move a month or so ago and requests for information are ignored. Indeed, posts such as this one are summarily moderated into oblivion the moment they are posted.
Why does the Slashdot crew avoid this subject at all costs? Surely they see that people DO want to know about it and discuss it. As a very popular technical news site, surely they realize that such outages are news worthy.
So, come on CmdrTaco, or who ever is at the console, for the next story, how about reporting on Slashdot's own issues.
Slashdot Mirror
You're new to this whole "dark fiber" thing, aren't you? When a telco sells you "dark fiber" they're either literally selling you unused MMF, with repeaters in place, or they're selling you an unused lambda. In either case, the interface to customer equipment is multi-mode fiber, and you can run anything over it that you would run over a shorter piece of fiber.
Again, you assume way too much. First of all, the poster says that the city was to let us have (for free) dark fiber links between several location in the city and our studio. He did not say a telco was providing him with anything. Further he says dark fibre links. He does not say that they are providing bandwidth or lamdas, meaning that it cannot be assumed that they have repeaters or muxes or DWDM equipment on these links. It is entirely possible, if not likely that they are getting strands of glass and nothing more.
You also talk about multi-mode fibre. While it is true that telcos often provide a multimode fibre connection to their customers, this is just a short link back to the telco's multiplexer on a single mode sonet ring. This case could easily be just glass strands, like I said before. If that is the case then they are much more likely to be single mode because multi mode cannot run the same distances that single mode can. If the run is longer than a kilometer it will almost certainly be single mode and require totally different equipment than the multimode scenario you propose. Again we don't know that from the post, as I stated earlier the poster did not provide nearly enough information to answer the question. But, maybe you are correct, provided that your other assumtion was correct when you said You're new to this whole "dark fiber" thing, aren't you?
The previous posts, though unforgiving and potentially offensive are right on the money! Your recommendation fails to take into account the two most important details of such a network. Details that the poster failed to provide. They are fibre type and distance.
Without knowing the fiber type and the length of the runs it is not possible to answer the question, and anyone who has a clue about it would know that type and distance are imperative.
Your recommendations would be great, assuming that the fiber runs are multimode fibre at under 500 meters. But, the post was talking about a MAN which suggests far greater distances than your proposed campus network. But, what are the distances? Are the runs one kilometer or are they 30 kilometers? What type of fibre is it? How may connections are there in the fibre? Has the fibre been tested(characterization) to determine dispertion levels due to fibre quality, distance and connections.
Going further, what is cheap? It's rather subjective, don't you think? Cheap to some people means a couple hundred dollars. It's highly unlikely that he could build the network for that. Cheap to some other non-profits that need such a network could be in the millions, as could this project. What's cheap to him? Budget information is imperative with an optical network. You have to have a power budget for the optics(not dollars) and you have to have a financial budget.
The poster didn't come close to providing the required information with the question and got what he deserved. Your recommendations, though well intended, are not applicable to the situation, in other words, just some wild ass guess(SWAG).
The tools that you describe as being past their prime are Time Domain Reflectometers(TDR). They measure the difference in time between when a signal is sent and when the signal returns after being reflected by the cut end or a kink in the wire. They are then able to calculate the length of a cable or the location of a break and so forth. They are extremely sensitive (though we bang them around quite a bit, don't we?) and highly specialized. This means that they cost a fair bit of money.
NIC cards are simply radio tranceivers that you plug into the wire. They aren't terribly sensitive and are usually cheap. They are designed and built to perform baseband signaling and little else.
NICs in general, are incapable of performing the functions that TDRs perform. While such a beast could be built, the cost would be astonishingly high, especially in a PCMCIA form factor.
There are very few companies that would build such a device, with Fluke being regarded as the best. But, presently none of them manufacture one. The fact that such a card would only be used in a very small niche market and would cost an arm, a leg and a first born means that they are highly unlikely to build one, any time soon.
I'm afraid that your search will be futile. I'd recommend budgeting for a Fluke LANMeter. You'll ever be sorry for buying the best.
This post is exactly why these companies are making people sign agreements that seem to simply restate common sense stuff that "everybody" knows.
The fact is that, what is common sense to you may not be common sense to the goober in the next cube. All too often this is the case, people seem clueless at the most common sense matters, as I stare at them in amazement. How could anyone be so stupid to not know that already? I frequently ask.
But, then there is the next level, where they do know the common sense ethic and they have even been formally informed of the policy and the punishment for breaking that policy, yet they justify their illicit actions with some form of glib nonsense that they feel makes it perfectly acceptable. As is so eloquently stated in the poster's final comment: I should not be surfing slashdot during work hours, but since they cut my pay by I say f****'em! I'm taking it out in bandwidth.
The agreement won't be regarded as a waste of time to them, when they fire you for breaking the company's policy, which you explicitly agreed to and signed.
I'd have to disagree with you. Sure, if you don't give a flying flip if anyone ever uses your project, then advertising isn't really important. But, the fact is that every project owner does want people to use their project and many feel that the more the better. You for example, would enjoy the added noteriety. No? Imagine how great you would feel if your project had the noteriety of Apache. Pretty good, eh?
Advertising can be invasive and offensive, there is no doubt. Especially bad advertising. This could be a poor quality TV commercial, or a good commercial that is repeated 15 times an hour, worst of all is obviously spam but, the fact is that most decent advertising works at least a little bit. I hate to use dot bomb speak but, marketshare comes after mindshare. If no one knows about your project then no one will use it, regardless of how good it may or may not be. For open source projects advertising offers a great benefit in terms of mindshare.
There is another angle as well. That is, the whole open source "movement". Dispite its popularity amongst the Slashdot free loaders, most of the world hasn't heard of open source or even Linux for that matter. If the open source movement is to gain momentum then more people need to know about it. This is where advertising comes in.
You speak of Linux on the desktop, what are the chances of this happening soley from word of mouth. I'll tell you that chances are slim, certainly for the short term. Almost no home users have heard of Linux and many, perhaps most, businesses haven't heard of it either. It can't take over the desktop if no one knows about it but, if you throw in some advertising then more people will have at least heard of it. They may not know what it is but, they may try to find out what it is if they have heard of it.
Advertising is important, even in free software and advertising works. Think for a moment about how many Linux users there would be if AOL simply mentioned Linux (in a positive light) in their constant barrage of television commercials. Just a simple plug like someone saying, "I like Linux".
People here, like to talk about Walmrt selling Linux machines. Believe me, it is a miniscule market. Why? Because they are selling them in their online store. Most Walmart shoppers buy at their local store, not online. Therefore, most Walmart shoppers have never heard of them. And, Slashdotters build their own so they aren't buying them either. If Walmart sold these boxes in their local stores and, more importantly, advertised them then hundreds of thousands (maybe millions) of people would become aware of them.
Nagios has been classified as a succesful project based on its wide spread use. Yet there are countless Slashdotters that had never heard of it prior to this interview, many of them sysadmins. Imagine how wildly succesful it would be if it were advertised and more people knew about it.
Open source needs some marketing, and it needs it now.
I've found another similar vulnerability in Windows IP stack. I'm sure that I am not the first to discover this but, it has existed for a long time and has never been fixed. I have verified the vulnerability on all Windows platforms except XP, which I simply haven't bothered to look at.
The "vulnerability" is very similar in behavior to the one described in the article but, is at the IP level rather than the link layer. The vulnerability has to do with padding of IP packets on Windows systems. Windows uses the contents of one of its buffers (sorry I can't say which one) to pad IP packets.
This is very easily reproducable when sniffing ping packets. The data portion of the packets are padded with the contents of the buffer. There are other utilities that demonstrate this behavior as well, but it is most easily reproduced with a simple ping and the bigger the ping packet the more data you'll see.
If you have been using IE and then sniff ping packets, you will see the data from your previous browsing. If you just logged in, you can sometimes find your password padding the ping packets.
As I said I have verified this on all WIndows platforms except XP. I have also looked for it on numerous Linux platforms and have NOT found Linux to suffer the same vulnerability. That is, Linux does NOT appear vulnerable.
As for sendmail, it is not meant for Windows weenies or wanna be Unix sysadmins, only for "real" Unix admins and those that wish to use a VERY robust product and are willing to learn the product to reap the rewards.
Though your post overall, does have merit, I'd have to disagree with your arguement. I thought Sendmail was supposed to be an MTA, not an elitist's source of sadomasochism.
When looking for an MTA I first look for something that is secure and something that works best. Then I look for an MTA that offers high performance. Never have I looked for or wanted ANY software package that was unnecessarily complex.
That's a bit like learning assembly for the hell of it, even though you don't have any interest in programming.
I'd rather use Postfix. Simple, powerful, secure and fast as hell.
Verisign has realized that this part of their business is not profitable and is getting ready to sell it off, again. By putting the name back, they separate Network Solutions from Verisign and play on the name recognition for the eventual sale of the company. I doubt that such a sale would do as well if it were sold as The Company Formerly Known as a Division of Verisgn.
It is because Linux admins, although slightly more expensive,
I've said this before but, while the above statement is frequently bandied about, I do not see evidence of this in the real world. Indeed the majority of job postings that I see for Linux sysadmins offer salaries that are a fair bit less than similar positions looking for MCSEs.
Indeed, there are also several commonly used salary surveys on the net that seem to indicate that Linux sysadmins are paid less than their Windows counterparts. I've even seen a few stupid cases where positions requiring Linux experence and an MCSE certification actually paid less than similar positions requiring an MCSE only.
Is this only the case in my region or is it the case on a wider scale?
Yes, you are missing out. A good sysadmin at a decent company can have a very good life. I have had sysadmin positions with small, medium and very large companies where I telecommuted 90% of the time. In one job I telecommuted 100% of the time for a year, before I felt a bit lonely and started frequenting the coorporate campus for a few hours a week. It's amazing what a difference there is when people can put a face with the voice at the other end of the phone.
I was a good sysadmin and I have greater aspirations than this guy does so, I have moved up and beyond these older jobs but, they were very good jobs while I was there.
You're missing out. The question you must ask is, why? Are you really as good at your job as you think you are? Are you able to relate to management or are you constantly trying to win pissing contests with them? Do the users like you, or do the fear or view you with disdane? Honest answers to these questions are harder to get than you might think. You may want to ask a peer or higher-up engineer type for brutally honest answers to these questions. Engineer types will usually oblige, provided they aren't close friends or subordinates. Once you have these answers, accepting them and working to truely address potential shortcomings could completely turn things around for you. Good luck.
I still check these books out in my search for the Holy Grail of Linux books, a good, well written book that I can recommend to people who are familar with computers but, unfamiliar with Linux.
This book sadly, is not it. The reviewer is actually quite generous in his review. I found the book to be convoluted in its arrangement with repeated early referrence to commands that were not explained until after the tenth chapter. It did not flow well which made it all the more difficult to read its copious 1000 pages.
As the reviewer stated it tries to cover the full breadth of a subject from very basic to very advanced but in both cases it simply touches on each topic without any real depth. For instance, after adequately explaining the installation steps, it describes recompiling the kernel in less than two pages with no real explanation or what or why. Hardly something necessary for new users or people who may never have compiled a program before, and really no information on the ins and outs of the kernel for advanced users.
Basically, the book is adequate for a referrence if someone needs to get a new service up and running quickly. If you've never setup MySQL or Sendmail the book will walk you through installation and basic configuration, beyond that, you're on your own. Read the Man page and check the news groups, as the book says repeatedly.
I'd rate this book as a 5 out of 10.
more info than most people will ever care about
That's a great reason to put it on the front page.
KDE 3.1 has been delayed until early/mid January for a security audit. KDE 3.1 is VERY nice and is another big step forward for KDE. I had hoped that Red Hat would delay their 8.1? release until KDE 3.1 could be included. Unfortunately it looks like we will still have the "crippled" KDE 3.0.5 in Red Hat 8.1.
I definitely understand that Red Hat has an affinity for Gnome, and that's fine for them, but for full compatibility you really need to install both Gnome and KDE so why not have the best KDE?
With Mandrake's newly returned cash crunch, Suse is looking like a strong contender on the distro front. However, don't forget Knoppix, the newest "distro".
Ah, you pose a good question and as always the responses are typically emotionally motivated. Although there is no guarantee that the following solution will work, it is certainly the mostly likely option for success.
You state that you are threatened with dumping Nagios because of the issue you have with the plugin. Assuming that your organization requires a network monitoring system, it seems only logical that you would have to replace Nagios with a commercial system, a system that will likely cost a great deal of money.
Could you not get some funds allocated to allow you to contact the writer of the plugin directly and hire them as a consultant in order to fix the bug or implement a feature that you need. I suspect that for a couple of thousand dollars you could have the actual writer of the plugin address your needs directly. Surely this would be far cheaper than the likely hundreds of thousands of dollars that would be necessary to completely replace Nagios with a commercial system. Further, releasing your fix/enhancement to the open source community would advance the entire project that much more.
The solution to your quandry would be to fund the development of your project and then release the software under an open source license. However, there are already a few CAD packages that may meet your needs, though the best ones are not open source, just inexpensive.
FREEdraft Free GPL
LinuxCAD $99
ARCAD $900 ($80 Student)
OCTree Free for non-commercial use.
VariCAD $400
Nagios' present event handling performs a prescribed action based on a state change in a monitored service, this is an excellent feature that pushes Nagios beyond a simple monitoring application into a true management application. In CA Unicenter, event handling goes a step further, allowing you to configure any action based on ANY message that appears in the event log. This in my opinion, is one of Unicenter's strongest features, though there are many.
Will Nagios be implementing similar event handling functionality or will using utilities such as Swatch remain necessary? And if Nagios will not gain this flexibility, why would you feel that this functionality is unnecessary?
Nagios is an outstanding project, not only in terms of its success but, also in terms of its power and broad scope. Looking at Nagios today it is increasingly apparent that its functionality is starting to approach that of HP OpenView and CA Unicenter TNG.
My twofold question is, what has determined Nagios direction thus far? Was it modeled after OpenView and TNG or something else? Also, where is Nagios going in the future, will it continue to develop the features of OpenView and TNG or is it going somewhere else?
I feel really sorry for them. How ever will they enforce their policies without this bill? Especially with half of Europe switching to Linux, the BSA rapidly approaches obsolescence.
We'll miss them, won't we?
Ali estimates that for every e-mail Penn Media sends out, his firm wins one sale and retail stores win 20.
21 sales for every email sent???? Who the fuck is this guy trying to kid?????
That's the ticket. Grab a Console Operator's position for the mid-night shift.
It all depends on what your company does and how they do it. Do you work at an ISP or a bank or restaurant? Does your IT department provide PC support or do you develop your own applications in house as well? How big is your company, employee wise and revenue wise? How dependent is your company on IT?
What I've seen in small to mid-sized companies is that properly run IT departments typically have one or two admins per 50 users up to around 150 users. After 150 users it's one admin per 100 or 150 users. The IT head count may be slightly higher at companies that are very reliant on IT or have round the clock operations.
Now, if the company does in house development, then that's a whole other story. It all depends on what your business is and how much development there is. I've seen development depertments that were 50% of the company even though IT was not their core business. I've also seen 2000 user companies with 2 developers.
I'd say that you are the troll here. It seems that you are somewhat successful too. Contrary to your post, Taco does not discuss the recent issues in his journal. As for emailing him, that would be a pathetic waste of time as I'm quite sure his inbox is filled with a 1000 trolls a day.
But, it still doesn't change the fact that the many programmers and sys admins that read this site regularly, would like to know what is going on. Some may be able to offer help, and many others would gain very useful insite that could be invaluable to their own opertations.
Well, as most of you already know Slashdot is again, having major "issues". These have been increasingly frequent since the colo move a month or so ago and requests for information are ignored. Indeed, posts such as this one are summarily moderated into oblivion the moment they are posted.
Why does the Slashdot crew avoid this subject at all costs? Surely they see that people DO want to know about it and discuss it. As a very popular technical news site, surely they realize that such outages are news worthy.
So, come on CmdrTaco, or who ever is at the console, for the next story, how about reporting on Slashdot's own issues.
I'm not sure I heard you the second time.