Does anyone have any pointers on managing a team of programmers on the other side of the world?"
...You need to be pointed at a few "help wanted" sites!
Seriously, don't burn your brains out (or sport-death your team-mates) to meet this fabricated emergency. If you complete the task, but wreck somebody's health, the senior management will most likely see this as a success, and an endorsement for chopping geek staffing beyond rational levels.
Re:the REAL origin of Polack Jokes
on
Enigma
·
· Score: 1
You dummy, all the Polack jokes are created and disseminated by the telephone companies.
They're always driving Poles into the ground.
Babbage did not invent the computer
on
Enigma
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· Score: 2, Informative
Oh, and by the way, the code breakers at Bletchley Park didn't invent the computer - Charles Babbage did that a great many years earlier.
No, the computer was invented long before Babbage. We know from the AnkytheraMechanism that at least one computer existed circa 87 BC. There is historical evidence to suggest that other, more complicated mechanical computers were built by the ancients; but the Ankythera device is the oldest extant machine. You can't play Quake on it, but it's still a computer.
AFAIK, there are no mainframes that run NT. And I've never seen one with a USB port, either.
Your post makes absolutely no sense from a mainframe perspective. What are you talking about with "dual boot"? Mainframes can run multiple simultaneous LPARs, which are virtual machines sort of like VMware provides, but nobody ever boots a mainframe if they can avoid it. And mainframers don't use the word "boot" anyway, since individual components of the mainframe can be individual restarted. Mainframers IPL from the HMC, which is the analogous operation to rebooting.
Mainframes run VM, MVS, OS/390, and similar. They don't run NT or OpenBSD (though OpenBSD could probably be ported). There is no graphics console device on a mainframe, so how the hell could you run NT?
Um, Solaris, Irix, and HP/UX (shudder) are *NOT* mainframe operating systems.
MVS and OS/390 are mainframe operating systems.
You are talking out of your nether regions, especially when you call linux's TCP/IP stack inferior to HP/UX. I have adminned every operating system mentioned above except Irix, and you sir are grossly incorrect.
I was with you until you called that piece of crap "sensible". Yes, SMB sucks even worse than NFS, (though not as much as PCNFS) but NFS shares many of the same design weaknesses - although NFS clearly beats SMB for speed.
And of course, the HP-UX "patch-a-day" version of NFS is probably the worst implementation ever, but HP-UX is a horror show anyway.
After you spend a year or two with Coda or Andrew you can make a more informed decision about what's "sensible".
Set up a strong linux or OpenBSD server with OpenSSH on it.
Configure OpenSSH to allow passwordless access using nice big (e.g. 1536) keys.
Configure a restricted account so that it can do absolutely nothing but run the curses-based version of TN3270.
Define an SSH-command key so that anyone authenticating with that key gets automagically hurled into TN3270.
Go get TeraTerm SSH by Teranisi and O'Callahan and load it on the client PC. This is freeware, albeit with a weird license.
Modify TeraTerm's keymap to trigger the appropriate key sequences for your applications and users. This is highly idiosyncratic (speaking from experience).
Script TeraTerm, using the TTMACRO tool, to connect to the linux server via SSH using the dedicated TN3270 command key.
Voila, 100% free fully encrypted TN3270 on windows platforms!
Caveats: 1) communication between the mainframe and the linux box is not encrypted, so put that part on a secure link. 2) You still have to pay for the intermediary linux box.
Right, TN5250 emulation is very similar to TN3270 - both of which are *extremely* different from regular telnet, because you are emulating a EBCDIC "half-smart" terminal rather than an ASCII dumb terminal.
You can readily configure any good quality TN3270 transport to be a TN5250 emulator - just prepend an extra escape to some function keys, basically. As long as you have key remapping ability (something all decent emulators have) it's trivial.
I use the (relatively cheap, but not free) QWS TN3270 emulator from Jolly Giant Software in Canada to do this - it is far better quality than anything from Attachmate, Wall, etc. and costs much less.
Most proprietary 3270 and 5250 clients share resources, and consequently anything that goes wrong in one session impacts all other sessions - drop a few bits talking to mainframe A, the session bluescreens due to the latest windows security patch treading on some part of the IP stack, and when you kill the offending session you lose your other six sessions to mainframes B through G.
QWS 3270, on the other hand, is implemented as a single session per image - you could crash one (something I've never managed to do accidentally, despite having dozens of simultaneous sessions) and it wouldn't do anything to the others. This is obviously a very big deal!
OK, enough shilling for Canucks, the TN3270 and TN5250 protocols are documented in the eponymous RFCs. The differences are pretty trivial, and creating one from the other should be easy in the Open Source world.
On DOS boxen (including, of course, all the non-VMS derived Windows releases, which boot COMMAND.COM and are thus DOS based) all local users are root superusers.
Proof of concept: On a Windows 98 machine, cancel the "windows login" and start a DOS session. Now delete the entire filesystem (including hidden, system, and read-only files). Tada, it works, you are ROOT.
On VMS-derived windows (such as all versions of Windows NT and of course Windows 2K) the root superuser account is named "Administrator" and is directly analogous to Unix "root"
One of the reasons MS can't effectively compete against linux and the BSDs in the server market is that their systems include this same fatal weakness. At least *nix is stable!
Incidentally, now that linux has "capabilities" built into the kernel, and Linus wants to put a resource handle into the filesystem API, the groundwork has been laid to get rid of this stupid root superuser concept and create a real successor to Unix rather than just a clone. Hopefully linux (or perhaps the Hurd) will one day incorporate all the strengths of Unix while jettisoning ancient kludges like "root" and the primitive "rwxrwxrwx" access control system.
Slashdot Mirror
...You need to be pointed at a few "help wanted" sites!
Seriously, don't burn your brains out (or sport-death your team-mates) to meet this fabricated emergency. If you complete the task, but wreck somebody's health, the senior management will most likely see this as a success, and an endorsement for chopping geek staffing beyond rational levels.
You dummy, all the Polack jokes are created and disseminated by the telephone companies.
They're always driving Poles into the ground.
Naah, I've been trolled enough on this topic, I need to go have this hook removed from my lip.
AFAIK, there are no mainframes that run NT. And I've never seen one with a USB port, either. Your post makes absolutely no sense from a mainframe perspective. What are you talking about with "dual boot"? Mainframes can run multiple simultaneous LPARs, which are virtual machines sort of like VMware provides, but nobody ever boots a mainframe if they can avoid it. And mainframers don't use the word "boot" anyway, since individual components of the mainframe can be individual restarted. Mainframers IPL from the HMC, which is the analogous operation to rebooting. Mainframes run VM, MVS, OS/390, and similar. They don't run NT or OpenBSD (though OpenBSD could probably be ported). There is no graphics console device on a mainframe, so how the hell could you run NT?
Um, Solaris, Irix, and HP/UX (shudder) are *NOT* mainframe operating systems.
MVS and OS/390 are mainframe operating systems.
You are talking out of your nether regions, especially when you call linux's TCP/IP stack inferior to HP/UX. I have adminned every operating system mentioned above except Irix, and you sir are grossly incorrect.
I was with you until you called that piece of crap "sensible". Yes, SMB sucks even worse than NFS, (though not as much as PCNFS) but NFS shares many of the same design weaknesses - although NFS clearly beats SMB for speed.
And of course, the HP-UX "patch-a-day" version of NFS is probably the worst implementation ever, but HP-UX is a horror show anyway.
After you spend a year or two with Coda or Andrew you can make a more informed decision about what's "sensible".
--Charlie
Set up a strong linux or OpenBSD server with OpenSSH on it.
Configure OpenSSH to allow passwordless access using nice big (e.g. 1536) keys.
Configure a restricted account so that it can do absolutely nothing but run the curses-based version of TN3270.
Define an SSH-command key so that anyone authenticating with that key gets automagically hurled into TN3270.
Go get TeraTerm SSH by Teranisi and O'Callahan and load it on the client PC. This is freeware, albeit with a weird license.
Modify TeraTerm's keymap to trigger the appropriate key sequences for your applications and users. This is highly idiosyncratic (speaking from experience).
Script TeraTerm, using the TTMACRO tool, to connect to the linux server via SSH using the dedicated TN3270 command key.
Voila, 100% free fully encrypted TN3270 on windows platforms!
Caveats: 1) communication between the mainframe and the linux box is not encrypted, so put that part on a secure link. 2) You still have to pay for the intermediary linux box.
--Charlie
Right, TN5250 emulation is very similar to TN3270 - both of which are *extremely* different from regular telnet, because you are emulating a EBCDIC "half-smart" terminal rather than an ASCII dumb terminal.
You can readily configure any good quality TN3270 transport to be a TN5250 emulator - just prepend an extra escape to some function keys, basically. As long as you have key remapping ability (something all decent emulators have) it's trivial.
I use the (relatively cheap, but not free) QWS TN3270 emulator from Jolly Giant Software in Canada to do this - it is far better quality than anything from Attachmate, Wall, etc. and costs much less.
Most proprietary 3270 and 5250 clients share resources, and consequently anything that goes wrong in one session impacts all other sessions - drop a few bits talking to mainframe A, the session bluescreens due to the latest windows security patch treading on some part of the IP stack, and when you kill the offending session you lose your other six sessions to mainframes B through G.
QWS 3270, on the other hand, is implemented as a single session per image - you could crash one (something I've never managed to do accidentally, despite having dozens of simultaneous sessions) and it wouldn't do anything to the others. This is obviously a very big deal!
OK, enough shilling for Canucks, the TN3270 and TN5250 protocols are documented in the eponymous RFCs. The differences are pretty trivial, and creating one from the other should be easy in the Open Source world.
--Charlie
On DOS boxen (including, of course, all the non-VMS derived Windows releases, which boot COMMAND.COM and are thus DOS based) all local users are root superusers.
Proof of concept: On a Windows 98 machine, cancel the "windows login" and start a DOS session. Now delete the entire filesystem (including hidden, system, and read-only files). Tada, it works, you are ROOT.
On VMS-derived windows (such as all versions of Windows NT and of course Windows 2K) the root superuser account is named "Administrator" and is directly analogous to Unix "root"
One of the reasons MS can't effectively compete against linux and the BSDs in the server market is that their systems include this same fatal weakness. At least *nix is stable!
Incidentally, now that linux has "capabilities" built into the kernel, and Linus wants to put a resource handle into the filesystem API, the groundwork has been laid to get rid of this stupid root superuser concept and create a real successor to Unix rather than just a clone. Hopefully linux (or perhaps the Hurd) will one day incorporate all the strengths of Unix while jettisoning ancient kludges like "root" and the primitive "rwxrwxrwx" access control system.
--Charlie