Way back in the day (early/mid 1980s) I did a job like this.
Person A left company AA and started company BB then started taking customers. Attorney for AA got a court order allowing inspection of all magnetic media. Of course, by the time I was allowed access to the drive, several months had passed during which time "something had gone wrong with the computer" and "I think the repair shop had to format one of the drives". Yeah, right.
In any case, they thought that a basic reformat of a DOS hard-disk removed all the data. As I started pulling off and saving directory-fragments and disk sectors which showed that they had illegally installed specialized and unusual software belonging to the former employer as well as lists of names of clients they made fundamental mistake #2 - they started blabbing "explanations" for the data I was recovering. As a former law-enforcement employee I simply listened attentively to their stories...and included the additional incriminating evidence in my report.
Never even had to go to court and testify.
Things are more complicated, today. You are right to get a computer forensic expert involved. Many of the disk-recovery services like Drivesavers provide forensic services in addition to data-recovery.
The contents of the box are pretty generic for most purposes. Motherboard from Asus/Intel/..., BIOS from Phoenix/Award/..., Processor from Intel/AMD/Motorola/...
What really makes a difference is the vendor. I have a local guy who I can call and ask for recommendations and advice. If I tell him I want a Dual Opteron with 12 gig RAM, mirrored 74 GB hot-swap drives, dual hot-swap PS and a rack-mount case of my choosing he personally delivers it a couple days later.
Drive in my raid-array dies? He brings by a replacement the following day.
Oh, and the only number he gives me is his cell phone. And he answers it. Always.
With the exception of some specialized telephony equipment (actually a different white-box vendor specializing in that market - Dell et. al. wouldn't have a clue about this stuff), he is always my first call.
I've been using him for years. When the company he worked for ceased operations he started his own and service has remained outstanding.
I guarantee that nobody who uses the "name brand" machines can come anywhere close to the responsiveness and support that I get from my local vendor.
I've known small companies that, when someone resigns, immediately change not only passwords but also all the door locks and any other form of access. This also works to protect you. It's a lot harder to say you came back and stole, damaged, etc. company property if they denied you access.
Having said thai, my experience has been the exact opposite:
Layoff 1: I knew my termination date several months in advance and was terminated with 3-months severance. Additionally, all access rights remained unchanged and I continued to work part-time as a consultant for a couple more years.
Layoff 2: 30% of the company laid off. My employer suggested that I could continue to work during my 2-months severance since "it's always easier to find a job when you are working." (This was at the height of the dot-com boom.) I politely counteroffered that I would continue to work as long as they continued to pay me and at the time either one of us cut the cord, severance would kick in. I finally dragged myself out the door on a Friday 4-months later and started work at my new company the following Monday.
Layoff 3: The dot-com boom couldn't last but we didn't really go completely bust. Last day was on a Monday as we hauled the last of the equipment out of the offices. No severance but I started my new job on Tuesday and continued as a consultant for the dot-com (still had my passwords, colo access and everything). It's been nearly 5-years and they just pulled me back for a bit of additional consulting.
The company does not have the right to provide Microsoft's code, he said, adding it would be impossible to provide the names of every programmer who worked on Windows.
And for which OS would providing the names of every programmer be easy or even possible?
What open-source information and reference site(s) would you find it most difficult to live without? What if freshmeat just disappeared? Or osnews? Or Slashdot or SourceForge?
One need only look at how the federal banking regulations are repeatedly used to crush California's much more stringent privacy requirements to see the real reason behind federalized "privacy" laws.
Hills are even worse for hybrids than you might imagine.
The current generation of hybrids aren't very smart. They try to keep the battery close to topped up which means that you don't have much room to dump regenerated energy. It's classic: in Berkeley you tend to see the more affluent people buying hybrids. They also tend to live up the hill rather than in the flatlands. So...the hybrid's engine runs while they are on the way home as there isn't any way to tell it "don't charge, I'm going home and will come back down the hill tomorrow". Similarly, you can't tell it "don't bother starting the engine, I'm about to go down Marin with a 22% grade and will need all the regenerative braking I can get."
Even worse, one of my mechanic's customers was heading up I5 from LA. As noted above, he couldn't drain the battery flat on his way up the mountain but when he put his Prius in "b" mode (apparently this is the hybrid equivalent of downshifting for engine braking) when he headed down the grapevine toward Bakersfield his car ended up just quitting part way down the hill. It turned out that with no place to put all the regenerated energy he ended up overheating the batteries and tripping an automatic shutdown. After being stranded for a while, everything cooled off and he was able to continue. You simply can't ride brakes down the Grapevine - those who do end up taking the runaway truck ramps and a car that can't provide sufficient engine braking for a basic freeway trip from LA to SF has serious engineering problems (and that doesn't even count the problems some people had with the car dying and having to be towed when you listened to the radio with the engine off then tried to start the car).
Generally I love Toyotas. My first and only car is a 20+ year old Tercel with 230,000 miles on it that just won't offer me the opportunity to need a new one. I get in the mid 30mpg range and insurance/registration is dirt cheap. For now, I'm content to watch the hybrid pioneers get the arrows in their backs.
You are correct. Definitions are key. Be VERY VERY careful what constitutes "scheduled" downtime. Scheduling downtime to fix a problem is unacceptable.
Circa Y2K, we had a provider who promised full redundancy on everything but they had a piece-o-crap load balancer and firewall from a company that got bought by Cisco. Every so often this would cause an amusing array of serious network problems but only on a portion of the sites that were handled by this equipment. This had a severe impact on our site but rebooting the balancer would "fix" the problem. The company would refuse to reboot because it would impact the other users of the balancer, they would claim that since some packets were handled correctly we weren't "down", then they would schedule some downtime that night to reboot and tell us that we weren't entitled to compensation because the downtime was "scheduled", not unplanned.
Of course these were the same jerks (who shall remain nameless but who trade under the symbol NAVI) who, when a machine would go down, would get alerts on http, https, ping, smtp, and all the many other system checks. Fine, so far - the tech would spend 5 minutes rebooting the machine. But when we got the bill it was 5 minutes for http, 5 minutes for https, 5 minutes for smtp, 5 minutes for ping... Somehow a single reboot would cost us an hour and a half. When we challenged them, they said they didn't have time to correct their bills and tried to get us to do their work for them. I guess that should surprise me - we had to diagnose their load-balancer problem for them, too.
You will find that "availability" is a vague term. First you need to have a discussion to determine what availability means. It must be able to be put in measurable and non-vague terms. 99% uptime is not a good definition. The system must handle 99.7% of requests in 30 milliseconds or less is much better in part because it includes a performance expectation. It's also recognizes that not every request will receive the desired level of response. Additionally, if you determine that you want N+1 redundancy then you need to know the appropriate value of N (how many servers are needed to provide our required response times).
You may find that one valuable outcome of this exercise is that it puts everything on a sliding scale rather than a managerial edict of "just make sure we don't go down." It also means that costs can be attached to everything. Peak time slowness is OK and we can take the system down 30 minutes each night for maintenance? Here's the tab. No maintenance windows allowed and peak-load must be handled well? That costs more. We need to stay up even if a hurricane/earthquake/volcano/terror-attack/plague- of-locusts destroys our primary site? Cough up the dough.
Managers deal with money/value issues all the time and expressing things this way is really just giving them the info they need to do their job.
Once you know the requirements, list everything that may impact your availablity including hardware, os, application(s), network switches, internet connectivity, etc. And it doesn't just include the web server - any database, app-server, dns-server, load-balancer or other necessary piece of the puzzle must be included as well. You will have to determine the likelyhood of failure of each piece, its impact on your defined goal, and the speed with which the failure must be corrected.
With this in hand you can start to make informed decisions on whether to have single drives (since your servers are mirrored), non hot-swap drives, hot-swap drives or hot-swap drives with warm spare. You can determine if you need hot redundant networking or if a spare switch on the shelf is good enough. Can you page a tech and have him be there in 2 hours or do you need people on-site 24/7?
A personal note: to be really well covered you have to have multiple sites located at significant distances from each other. I've suffered FAR more cumulative downtime due to fiber cuts (when a backhoe hits a OC192 the backhoe wins and large parts of the city lose) than to all other failures combined. Colo facilities have suffered downtime due to improper use of the Emergency Power Off switch or large natural disaster. To do this you can use DNS failover (from the inexpensive but effective dnsmadeeasy to the high-end and pricey UltraDNS) to switch traffic to your backup site within a few minutes or, if you are really big (ie. can afford $$$), you can use routing protocols to reroute the traffic to your other location at the TCP/IP level very quickly. But one nice thing about having two sites is that each individual site doesn't need to be as highly reliable in order to achieve the desired system reliability.
I've quoted some California law below. As with many sections of law, there is a "reasonable man" standard. In other words, "She said it wasn't stolen" doesn't wash in court if the prosecutor can show that a "reasonable man" would find the transaction suspicious. In this case that may be pretty easy since Alburati said, "She seemed suspicious, because she sold me an expensive laptop for such a low price..."
It's likely that he reformatted the computer for sale on eBay. If, while working on it, he noticed anything that would further lead him to believe that the laptop was actually stolen (UC Berkeley property tag, data that would lead him to believe the laptop actually belonged to UC, etc.) and he continues to conceal the computer from its rightful owner then that also makes him guilty.
Additionally, this guy had an active business of buying and selling used laptops and phones. While you don't generally need licenses for the occasional garage sale, you usually do for an ongoing business operation even if most of it is handled on eBay and Craigslist. If he is not in compliance with the appropriate zoning, business license, sales-tax, income-tax and other laws then moving stolen goods may just be the beginning of his fun.
Here's the law:
496. (a) Every person who buys or receives any property that has been stolen or that has been obtained in any manner constituting theft or extortion, knowing the property to be so stolen or obtained, or who conceals, sells, withholds, or aids in concealing, selling, or withholding any property from the owner, knowing the property to be so stolen or obtained, shall be punished by imprisonment in a state prison, or in a county jail for not more than one year. However, if the district attorney or the grand jury determines that this action would be in the interests of justice, the district attorney or the grand jury, as the case may be, may, if the value of the property does not exceed four hundred dollars ($400), specify in the accusatory pleading that the offense shall be a misdemeanor, punishable only by imprisonment in a county jail not xceeding one year.
I've ridden my Brompton to various jobs for years. I don't know how many miles are on it but well over 4,000 since I finally put on a bike-computer. I got (at the time) top-of-the-line version along with extended seat-tube due to my leg-length, rack, and the nice removable front bag. I also added some more lighting and reflectors and replaced the standard seat.
Folding or unfolding takes 15-20 seconds and it is very small when folded so I can put it in any number of out-of-the-way places. It will fit under my desk if no other spot is available.
All told I probably have spent ~$1,400 on the bike, upgrades and maintenance. Assuming a very conservative 4,000 miles, my per/mile cost is $0.35. If the current IRS business mileage deduction rate of $0.405/mile in some way reflects average operating costs, then the bike became "free" quite a while ago. At current rates, fuel cost alone for my 30-something mpg car is over $0.08/mile so given my approximately 13 mile round-trip commute, I save about $20/month on fuel alone. Parking in the building would cost another $60/month. Incremental maintainence on the car is probably at least another $20/month. All told, it's easy to save $100/month and get some exercise as well.
It doesn't take long to pay for even a moderately pricey bike at those savings.
Sure, you are supposed to check that switch on the PSU to make sure it set for the correct input voltage but have you ever checked the outlet into which the machine was plugged for the appropriate line voltage?
I've had two friends in the last year suffer during data-center upgrades (different friends, different companies, different data-centers). In each case, an electrician had incorrectly wired power to the racks so the 120V outlets were actually wired for 240V.
In one case they blew up the PSU on the main corporate mailserver but fortunately the machine was otherwise unharmed and they were able to salvage a spare PSU from another Sun box.
In the other case they blew out a whole rack of CSUs that handled all the voice lines to corporate headquarters and found out that it's nearly impossible to get 5 CSUs to their location rushed on a weekend in time for business Monday. Fortunately, I ran into my friend that weekend on his way in to work and was able to grab 5 CSUs from my supply shelf for him so both disasters had satisfactory endings.
To be honest I don't have enough info to praise or trash Franklin specifically. Perhaps its all their slick stores that I walk past that made it the first one that popped into my mind. I suppose I could have said Dayrunner as easily.
If it works for you, great. I haven't had much luck with the pre-printed organizers although I could see that for certain specific job categories or styles they could be quite useful.
It's not that the Palm is the end-all either. Mine had pretty much become a paperweight until after I re-purposed the todo list after reading GTD. Now I use it constantly. If I had started with a Franklin Covey paperweight instead of a Palm paperweight I might have found the same success.
Watch out. I just read the same book after my sister recommended it but when I posted my comments in response to a recent article some anonymous coward flamed me - apparently said coward seemed to think I was a shill.
As someone else commented, learning to organize takes practice and I do have a way to go but I have already seen a significant jump in my organization and productivity since I read the book a few months ago and started using some of its ideas.
As you say, it's "tech agnostic" - it's a book about concepts which can work well with your tool of choice (KOrganizer, Palm, Outlook, pencil and paper - whatever).
I found that I appreciated a book that didn't try to indoctrinate me into, say, the "Cult of Franklin" with planners, refills, tote-bags, Palm plugins, Outlook add-ons, binder-charms (whatever the hell they are) etc. It was upfront about saying, hey, if you aren't ready to change everything but just try an idea or two and find them helpful, that's great.
Weren't these iBooks school district property? I guess it's good to see that the schools in Henrico County are so flush with cash that they can dump their iBooks at what is obviously below market value plus pay for whatever damages and lawsuits may result from their lack of planning.
I've been at similar mega-sales and all it took to prevent chaos was to pass out numbers to people as they arrive then let people enter in small batches. Problem solved and injuries prevented for the cost of a couple dollars of paper.
To the O.P.: Provide some info - we're not mind-readers. Today's User Friendly is somehow appropriate.
How well normalized is the schema? Mostly reads? Writes? Both? 280,000 users? So what. Do you mean simultaneous users or are only 2 on at a time? Are they accessing a single 100 record table or lots of large tables? Are they indexed properly? What is the OS, memory, disk, processor...? How much processing is required of the DB vs. the front-end. Have you run into any specific problems that might indicate that a different db might be more appropriate. What have you tried and what was the result?
To the editors: Please reject Ask Slasdot questions from posters who can't be bothered to provide the most basic background info.
This is Slashdot. I would like to believe that the typical reader could be rather more technically erudite.
Find out why your memory is lacking or diary overly busy - remembering things shouldn't be such a problem. If it is reflect why so.
Your mind is a terrible place to clutter up with stuff that needs doing. It's why you so often have that vague unease that you're forgetting something important. You probably are. However otherwise brilliant your mind is, it is probably lousy at general organizing and task management (remembering to buy new flashlight batteries when you are already at the grocery store rather than when you grab the flashlight to check on the strange noise at night).
The trick is to find a organizing method that works for you - something that I had not done very well till recently.
My sister got my attention by mentioning that, by her estimates, reading a book called "Getting Things Done" and implementing many of its ideas had increased her consulting income by $20,000/year. I am rather leary of the managementOrganizationMethodDuJour but I read the book anyway.
I found the book very valuable and especially appreciated the fact that, unlike so many methods that are closely tied to a particular vendor's books or software, this book says it's about understanding some basic principles. If you like Outlook, use Outlook. Palm? Great. Pencil and paper? They work fine, too.
I can't duplicate the whole book here but the most valuable change I've made - and one which changed my Palm from the infrequently-used paperweight it had become into an indispensible tool - was to eliminate the concept of the todo list and implement the concept of the project and the next-action.
The typical Palm user tries to use the thing by agonizing over due-dates and priorities and categorizing items as "work" or "personal", etc. Instead, use the todo feature as a "project" list where a project is defined as "anything you want to get done that will take more than one step".
You will find that almost everything is a project and if you spend a few seconds thinking about the project you can identify the single next-action that will move that project toward completion. The "notes" feature in the todo list works very well for this.
As an example, say your car windshield is cracked then "fix car windshield" is the project. A few moments of thinking takes you from "I need to find a windshield shop" to "Bob at the tennis-club mentioned he liked the place that fixed his" to "I'll call Bob" to "but I don't have his number" to "it's probably in the club roster". OK, the single next action that will move this project forward is to find Bob's number and the place that it can be done is at home when you have the club roster handy.
This leads to the other important change I made after reading the book. My projects are now organized by "context" - basically, where can I accomplish the next-action. The categories that work for me include "at home", "at computer", "at phone", "with wife", etc. For the example above, the project would start in the "at home" category. After I look up the number and scribble it in the note for that project I would move it to the "at phone" category and so on. A project at the "select paint color" stage might be in the "with wife" category. Whenever I need to go to a store I glance at the "errands" category and see what might be combined into the same trip. While the "priority" feature in most listing programs seems like a good idea it matters little if the absolute most-important item is to send an email and you are nowhere near a computer. But if you are waiting for your flight to leave you may be able to pull out your cellphone and use the time to move items in the "at phone" category forward.
One useful category is the "waiting for" category - the rebate that will be coming in 6-8 weeks, the shop that told you that they will get a quote to you by Friday. When your project is on hold for some external reason you move it to "waiting for" and put a due-date in it. If you hav
Oh, I see. Quote the middle of the sentance out of context with the rest of the sentance and the rest of the post.
I did not say that logging into any ftp server as anonymous proves that you are intentionally attemping to break in. I said that basically anyone trying to log into mine can be placed into that category. Note the explanation in the rest of the sentance: "...I can see from the logs that the other attempts are just scripted tries." (Those three dots are called "ellipses" and they indicate that information has been omitted. Try using them sometime.)
If someone were to accidentally happen upon this ftp server they would be rejected at which point they might retry a time or two or would look to see that they are at the wrong site and leave. When I see large batches of hits occurring too fast for humans to be making the attempts and coming from address blocks with reputations for break-in attempts then I suspect a breakin attempt. When I can correlate that activity with attempts to other machines I administer or other services on the same machine then I can be reasonably certain that I'm not looking at someone who is lost on the information superhighway.
If I hear someone pushing on, pulling on and shaking the handles on the doors of my house and then starting on the windows I'm more likely to call the cops and load the gun than assume that it's just some lost soul who thinks they're at the 7-11.
It's pretty clear that both "Anonymous" and "Coward" fit you quite well.
The real problem which I encountered many years ago is that the AOL client software uses a proprietary format and they are, naturally, not eager to help you export your mail.
Fortunately, others have solved this problem. Unfortunately it only exports to Outlook formats but then you can use a different program to convert to mbox or a variety of other formats and from there you could probably send it to Google. (These programs were discovered through an arduous 10 seconds of Googling.)
But why not import it all into Thunderbird and just use the email address your cable company offers? Alternately, if you are desparate to use Gmail, use the pop feature on Gmail to download the mail into Thunderbird.
Frankly I'm a lot more afraid of a successful breakin that I don't discover than heaps of unsuccessful attempts that I do.
Essentially everyone who attempts to hit my ftp server with anonymous is trying to break in - the address is only known to a few people who have accounts and I can see from the logs that the other attempts are just scripted tries.
Similarly, I'm see several attempts every day to log into my machines via ssh (where an attempt may involve from a dozen to hundreds of tries to log in). Don't even get started on what I see in the http or smtp logs.
I work at a small company, too, and I could pull everyone off their jobs and still not have enough manpower to investigate each attempted breakin, locate and contact the appropriate parties, etc.
As mentioned elsewhere, most of these machines are compromised so you are really spending your time to provide unpaid antivirus support for the other party's machine. You have to pick your battles.
Depending on my workload and the probability of a positive result I'll contact someone as a courtesy. Generally my criteria is that I am able to make telephone contact with a person responsible for the machine relatively quickly.
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Way back in the day (early/mid 1980s) I did a job like this.
Person A left company AA and started company BB then started taking customers. Attorney for AA got a court order allowing inspection of all magnetic media. Of course, by the time I was allowed access to the drive, several months had passed during which time "something had gone wrong with the computer" and "I think the repair shop had to format one of the drives". Yeah, right.
In any case, they thought that a basic reformat of a DOS hard-disk removed all the data. As I started pulling off and saving directory-fragments and disk sectors which showed that they had illegally installed specialized and unusual software belonging to the former employer as well as lists of names of clients they made fundamental mistake #2 - they started blabbing "explanations" for the data I was recovering. As a former law-enforcement employee I simply listened attentively to their stories...and included the additional incriminating evidence in my report.
Never even had to go to court and testify.
Things are more complicated, today. You are right to get a computer forensic expert involved. Many of the disk-recovery services like Drivesavers provide forensic services in addition to data-recovery.
The contents of the box are pretty generic for most purposes. Motherboard from Asus/Intel/..., BIOS from Phoenix/Award/..., Processor from Intel/AMD/Motorola/...
What really makes a difference is the vendor. I have a local guy who I can call and ask for recommendations and advice. If I tell him I want a Dual Opteron with 12 gig RAM, mirrored 74 GB hot-swap drives, dual hot-swap PS and a rack-mount case of my choosing he personally delivers it a couple days later.
Drive in my raid-array dies? He brings by a replacement the following day.
Oh, and the only number he gives me is his cell phone. And he answers it. Always.
With the exception of some specialized telephony equipment (actually a different white-box vendor specializing in that market - Dell et. al. wouldn't have a clue about this stuff), he is always my first call.
I've been using him for years. When the company he worked for ceased operations he started his own and service has remained outstanding.
I guarantee that nobody who uses the "name brand" machines can come anywhere close to the responsiveness and support that I get from my local vendor.
I've known small companies that, when someone resigns, immediately change not only passwords but also all the door locks and any other form of access. This also works to protect you. It's a lot harder to say you came back and stole, damaged, etc. company property if they denied you access.
Having said thai, my experience has been the exact opposite:
Layoff 1: I knew my termination date several months in advance and was terminated with 3-months severance. Additionally, all access rights remained unchanged and I continued to work part-time as a consultant for a couple more years.
Layoff 2: 30% of the company laid off. My employer suggested that I could continue to work during my 2-months severance since "it's always easier to find a job when you are working." (This was at the height of the dot-com boom.) I politely counteroffered that I would continue to work as long as they continued to pay me and at the time either one of us cut the cord, severance would kick in. I finally dragged myself out the door on a Friday 4-months later and started work at my new company the following Monday.
Layoff 3: The dot-com boom couldn't last but we didn't really go completely bust. Last day was on a Monday as we hauled the last of the equipment out of the offices. No severance but I started my new job on Tuesday and continued as a consultant for the dot-com (still had my passwords, colo access and everything). It's been nearly 5-years and they just pulled me back for a bit of additional consulting.
they've rolled a car over it without any ill effects
So what did the I-pod select then? "Under pressure"? Something from the Crash Test Dummies?
And for which OS would providing the names of every programmer be easy or even possible?
What open-source information and reference site(s) would you find it most difficult to live without? What if freshmeat just disappeared? Or osnews? Or Slashdot or SourceForge?
Just curious.
One need only look at how the federal banking regulations are repeatedly used to crush California's much more stringent privacy requirements to see the real reason behind federalized "privacy" laws.
Ask the lab for a copy. They can do this, you know.
1. If the fact that Sun has so-far signed up exactly zero customers for its grid computing product, this concept will be a hard sell.
2. If anything will push customers to open-source, this is it.
Hills are even worse for hybrids than you might imagine.
The current generation of hybrids aren't very smart. They try to keep the battery close to topped up which means that you don't have much room to dump regenerated energy. It's classic: in Berkeley you tend to see the more affluent people buying hybrids. They also tend to live up the hill rather than in the flatlands. So...the hybrid's engine runs while they are on the way home as there isn't any way to tell it "don't charge, I'm going home and will come back down the hill tomorrow". Similarly, you can't tell it "don't bother starting the engine, I'm about to go down Marin with a 22% grade and will need all the regenerative braking I can get."
Even worse, one of my mechanic's customers was heading up I5 from LA. As noted above, he couldn't drain the battery flat on his way up the mountain but when he put his Prius in "b" mode (apparently this is the hybrid equivalent of downshifting for engine braking) when he headed down the grapevine toward Bakersfield his car ended up just quitting part way down the hill. It turned out that with no place to put all the regenerated energy he ended up overheating the batteries and tripping an automatic shutdown. After being stranded for a while, everything cooled off and he was able to continue. You simply can't ride brakes down the Grapevine - those who do end up taking the runaway truck ramps and a car that can't provide sufficient engine braking for a basic freeway trip from LA to SF has serious engineering problems (and that doesn't even count the problems some people had with the car dying and having to be towed when you listened to the radio with the engine off then tried to start the car).
Generally I love Toyotas. My first and only car is a 20+ year old Tercel with 230,000 miles on it that just won't offer me the opportunity to need a new one. I get in the mid 30mpg range and insurance/registration is dirt cheap. For now, I'm content to watch the hybrid pioneers get the arrows in their backs.
You are correct. Definitions are key. Be VERY VERY careful what constitutes "scheduled" downtime. Scheduling downtime to fix a problem is unacceptable.
Circa Y2K, we had a provider who promised full redundancy on everything but they had a piece-o-crap load balancer and firewall from a company that got bought by Cisco. Every so often this would cause an amusing array of serious network problems but only on a portion of the sites that were handled by this equipment. This had a severe impact on our site but rebooting the balancer would "fix" the problem. The company would refuse to reboot because it would impact the other users of the balancer, they would claim that since some packets were handled correctly we weren't "down", then they would schedule some downtime that night to reboot and tell us that we weren't entitled to compensation because the downtime was "scheduled", not unplanned.
Of course these were the same jerks (who shall remain nameless but who trade under the symbol NAVI) who, when a machine would go down, would get alerts on http, https, ping, smtp, and all the many other system checks. Fine, so far - the tech would spend 5 minutes rebooting the machine. But when we got the bill it was 5 minutes for http, 5 minutes for https, 5 minutes for smtp, 5 minutes for ping... Somehow a single reboot would cost us an hour and a half. When we challenged them, they said they didn't have time to correct their bills and tried to get us to do their work for them. I guess that should surprise me - we had to diagnose their load-balancer problem for them, too.
1) Get rid of the pets or do a better job of cleaning (oops, sorry - I forgot we're all geeks, here)
9 /29/2224204&tid=222&tid=137). No fans, no dust.
2) See story just following yours (http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/0
You will find that "availability" is a vague term. First you need to have a discussion to determine what availability means. It must be able to be put in measurable and non-vague terms. 99% uptime is not a good definition. The system must handle 99.7% of requests in 30 milliseconds or less is much better in part because it includes a performance expectation. It's also recognizes that not every request will receive the desired level of response. Additionally, if you determine that you want N+1 redundancy then you need to know the appropriate value of N (how many servers are needed to provide our required response times).
- of-locusts destroys our primary site? Cough up the dough.
You may find that one valuable outcome of this exercise is that it puts everything on a sliding scale rather than a managerial edict of "just make sure we don't go down." It also means that costs can be attached to everything. Peak time slowness is OK and we can take the system down 30 minutes each night for maintenance? Here's the tab. No maintenance windows allowed and peak-load must be handled well? That costs more. We need to stay up even if a hurricane/earthquake/volcano/terror-attack/plague
Managers deal with money/value issues all the time and expressing things this way is really just giving them the info they need to do their job.
Once you know the requirements, list everything that may impact your availablity including hardware, os, application(s), network switches, internet connectivity, etc. And it doesn't just include the web server - any database, app-server, dns-server, load-balancer or other necessary piece of the puzzle must be included as well. You will have to determine the likelyhood of failure of each piece, its impact on your defined goal, and the speed with which the failure must be corrected.
With this in hand you can start to make informed decisions on whether to have single drives (since your servers are mirrored), non hot-swap drives, hot-swap drives or hot-swap drives with warm spare. You can determine if you need hot redundant networking or if a spare switch on the shelf is good enough. Can you page a tech and have him be there in 2 hours or do you need people on-site 24/7?
A personal note: to be really well covered you have to have multiple sites located at significant distances from each other. I've suffered FAR more cumulative downtime due to fiber cuts (when a backhoe hits a OC192 the backhoe wins and large parts of the city lose) than to all other failures combined. Colo facilities have suffered downtime due to improper use of the Emergency Power Off switch or large natural disaster. To do this you can use DNS failover (from the inexpensive but effective dnsmadeeasy to the high-end and pricey UltraDNS) to switch traffic to your backup site within a few minutes or, if you are really big (ie. can afford $$$), you can use routing protocols to reroute the traffic to your other location at the TCP/IP level very quickly. But one nice thing about having two sites is that each individual site doesn't need to be as highly reliable in order to achieve the desired system reliability.
I've quoted some California law below. As with many sections of law, there is a "reasonable man" standard. In other words, "She said it wasn't stolen" doesn't wash in court if the prosecutor can show that a "reasonable man" would find the transaction suspicious. In this case that may be pretty easy since Alburati said, "She seemed suspicious, because she sold me an expensive laptop for such a low price..."
It's likely that he reformatted the computer for sale on eBay. If, while working on it, he noticed anything that would further lead him to believe that the laptop was actually stolen (UC Berkeley property tag, data that would lead him to believe the laptop actually belonged to UC, etc.) and he continues to conceal the computer from its rightful owner then that also makes him guilty.
Additionally, this guy had an active business of buying and selling used laptops and phones. While you don't generally need licenses for the occasional garage sale, you usually do for an ongoing business operation even if most of it is handled on eBay and Craigslist. If he is not in compliance with the appropriate zoning, business license, sales-tax, income-tax and other laws then moving stolen goods may just be the beginning of his fun.
Here's the law:
496. (a) Every person who buys or receives any property that has been stolen or that has been obtained in any manner constituting theft or extortion, knowing the property to be so stolen or obtained, or who conceals, sells, withholds, or aids in concealing, selling, or withholding any property from the owner, knowing the property to be so stolen or obtained, shall be punished by imprisonment in a state prison, or in a county jail for not more than one year. However, if the district attorney or the grand jury determines that this action would be in the interests of justice, the district attorney or the grand jury, as the case may be, may, if the value of the property does not exceed four hundred dollars ($400), specify in the accusatory pleading that the offense shall be a misdemeanor, punishable only by imprisonment in a county jail not xceeding one year.
All available foam-coating engineers have been reassigned to the Superdome.
I've ridden my Brompton to various jobs for years. I don't know how many miles are on it but well over 4,000 since I finally put on a bike-computer. I got (at the time) top-of-the-line version along with extended seat-tube due to my leg-length, rack, and the nice removable front bag. I also added some more lighting and reflectors and replaced the standard seat.
Folding or unfolding takes 15-20 seconds and it is very small when folded so I can put it in any number of out-of-the-way places. It will fit under my desk if no other spot is available.
All told I probably have spent ~$1,400 on the bike, upgrades and maintenance. Assuming a very conservative 4,000 miles, my per/mile cost is $0.35. If the current IRS business mileage deduction rate of $0.405/mile in some way reflects average operating costs, then the bike became "free" quite a while ago. At current rates, fuel cost alone for my 30-something mpg car is over $0.08/mile so given my approximately 13 mile round-trip commute, I save about $20/month on fuel alone. Parking in the building would cost another $60/month. Incremental maintainence on the car is probably at least another $20/month. All told, it's easy to save $100/month and get some exercise as well.
It doesn't take long to pay for even a moderately pricey bike at those savings.
Sure, you are supposed to check that switch on the PSU to make sure it set for the correct input voltage but have you ever checked the outlet into which the machine was plugged for the appropriate line voltage?
I've had two friends in the last year suffer during data-center upgrades (different friends, different companies, different data-centers). In each case, an electrician had incorrectly wired power to the racks so the 120V outlets were actually wired for 240V.
In one case they blew up the PSU on the main corporate mailserver but fortunately the machine was otherwise unharmed and they were able to salvage a spare PSU from another Sun box.
In the other case they blew out a whole rack of CSUs that handled all the voice lines to corporate headquarters and found out that it's nearly impossible to get 5 CSUs to their location rushed on a weekend in time for business Monday. Fortunately, I ran into my friend that weekend on his way in to work and was able to grab 5 CSUs from my supply shelf for him so both disasters had satisfactory endings.
To be honest I don't have enough info to praise or trash Franklin specifically. Perhaps its all their slick stores that I walk past that made it the first one that popped into my mind. I suppose I could have said Dayrunner as easily.
If it works for you, great. I haven't had much luck with the pre-printed organizers although I could see that for certain specific job categories or styles they could be quite useful.
It's not that the Palm is the end-all either. Mine had pretty much become a paperweight until after I re-purposed the todo list after reading GTD. Now I use it constantly. If I had started with a Franklin Covey paperweight instead of a Palm paperweight I might have found the same success.
Watch out. I just read the same book after my sister recommended it but when I posted my comments in response to a recent article some anonymous coward flamed me - apparently said coward seemed to think I was a shill.
As someone else commented, learning to organize takes practice and I do have a way to go but I have already seen a significant jump in my organization and productivity since I read the book a few months ago and started using some of its ideas.
As you say, it's "tech agnostic" - it's a book about concepts which can work well with your tool of choice (KOrganizer, Palm, Outlook, pencil and paper - whatever).
I found that I appreciated a book that didn't try to indoctrinate me into, say, the "Cult of Franklin" with planners, refills, tote-bags, Palm plugins, Outlook add-ons, binder-charms (whatever the hell they are) etc. It was upfront about saying, hey, if you aren't ready to change everything but just try an idea or two and find them helpful, that's great.
Weren't these iBooks school district property? I guess it's good to see that the schools in Henrico County are so flush with cash that they can dump their iBooks at what is obviously below market value plus pay for whatever damages and lawsuits may result from their lack of planning.
I've been at similar mega-sales and all it took to prevent chaos was to pass out numbers to people as they arrive then let people enter in small batches. Problem solved and injuries prevented for the cost of a couple dollars of paper.
To the O.P.: Provide some info - we're not mind-readers. Today's User Friendly is somehow appropriate.
How well normalized is the schema? Mostly reads? Writes? Both? 280,000 users? So what. Do you mean simultaneous users or are only 2 on at a time? Are they accessing a single 100 record table or lots of large tables? Are they indexed properly? What is the OS, memory, disk, processor...? How much processing is required of the DB vs. the front-end. Have you run into any specific problems that might indicate that a different db might be more appropriate. What have you tried and what was the result?
To the editors: Please reject Ask Slasdot questions from posters who can't be bothered to provide the most basic background info.
This is Slashdot. I would like to believe that the typical reader could be rather more technically erudite.
Find out why your memory is lacking or diary overly busy - remembering things shouldn't be such a problem. If it is reflect why so.
Your mind is a terrible place to clutter up with stuff that needs doing. It's why you so often have that vague unease that you're forgetting something important. You probably are. However otherwise brilliant your mind is, it is probably lousy at general organizing and task management (remembering to buy new flashlight batteries when you are already at the grocery store rather than when you grab the flashlight to check on the strange noise at night).
The trick is to find a organizing method that works for you - something that I had not done very well till recently.
My sister got my attention by mentioning that, by her estimates, reading a book called "Getting Things Done" and implementing many of its ideas had increased her consulting income by $20,000/year. I am rather leary of the managementOrganizationMethodDuJour but I read the book anyway.
I found the book very valuable and especially appreciated the fact that, unlike so many methods that are closely tied to a particular vendor's books or software, this book says it's about understanding some basic principles. If you like Outlook, use Outlook. Palm? Great. Pencil and paper? They work fine, too.
I can't duplicate the whole book here but the most valuable change I've made - and one which changed my Palm from the infrequently-used paperweight it had become into an indispensible tool - was to eliminate the concept of the todo list and implement the concept of the project and the next-action.
The typical Palm user tries to use the thing by agonizing over due-dates and priorities and categorizing items as "work" or "personal", etc. Instead, use the todo feature as a "project" list where a project is defined as "anything you want to get done that will take more than one step".
You will find that almost everything is a project and if you spend a few seconds thinking about the project you can identify the single next-action that will move that project toward completion. The "notes" feature in the todo list works very well for this.
As an example, say your car windshield is cracked then "fix car windshield" is the project. A few moments of thinking takes you from "I need to find a windshield shop" to "Bob at the tennis-club mentioned he liked the place that fixed his" to "I'll call Bob" to "but I don't have his number" to "it's probably in the club roster". OK, the single next action that will move this project forward is to find Bob's number and the place that it can be done is at home when you have the club roster handy.
This leads to the other important change I made after reading the book. My projects are now organized by "context" - basically, where can I accomplish the next-action. The categories that work for me include "at home", "at computer", "at phone", "with wife", etc. For the example above, the project would start in the "at home" category. After I look up the number and scribble it in the note for that project I would move it to the "at phone" category and so on. A project at the "select paint color" stage might be in the "with wife" category. Whenever I need to go to a store I glance at the "errands" category and see what might be combined into the same trip. While the "priority" feature in most listing programs seems like a good idea it matters little if the absolute most-important item is to send an email and you are nowhere near a computer. But if you are waiting for your flight to leave you may be able to pull out your cellphone and use the time to move items in the "at phone" category forward.
One useful category is the "waiting for" category - the rebate that will be coming in 6-8 weeks, the shop that told you that they will get a quote to you by Friday. When your project is on hold for some external reason you move it to "waiting for" and put a due-date in it. If you hav
Oh, I see. Quote the middle of the sentance out of context with the rest of the sentance and the rest of the post.
I did not say that logging into any ftp server as anonymous proves that you are intentionally attemping to break in. I said that basically anyone trying to log into mine can be placed into that category. Note the explanation in the rest of the sentance: "...I can see from the logs that the other attempts are just scripted tries." (Those three dots are called "ellipses" and they indicate that information has been omitted. Try using them sometime.)
If someone were to accidentally happen upon this ftp server they would be rejected at which point they might retry a time or two or would look to see that they are at the wrong site and leave. When I see large batches of hits occurring too fast for humans to be making the attempts and coming from address blocks with reputations for break-in attempts then I suspect a breakin attempt. When I can correlate that activity with attempts to other machines I administer or other services on the same machine then I can be reasonably certain that I'm not looking at someone who is lost on the information superhighway.
If I hear someone pushing on, pulling on and shaking the handles on the doors of my house and then starting on the windows I'm more likely to call the cops and load the gun than assume that it's just some lost soul who thinks they're at the 7-11.
It's pretty clear that both "Anonymous" and "Coward" fit you quite well.
The real problem which I encountered many years ago is that the AOL client software uses a proprietary format and they are, naturally, not eager to help you export your mail.
Fortunately, others have solved this problem. Unfortunately it only exports to Outlook formats but then you can use a different program to convert to mbox or a variety of other formats and from there you could probably send it to Google. (These programs were discovered through an arduous 10 seconds of Googling.)
But why not import it all into Thunderbird and just use the email address your cable company offers? Alternately, if you are desparate to use Gmail, use the pop feature on Gmail to download the mail into Thunderbird.
Frankly I'm a lot more afraid of a successful breakin that I don't discover than heaps of unsuccessful attempts that I do.
Essentially everyone who attempts to hit my ftp server with anonymous is trying to break in - the address is only known to a few people who have accounts and I can see from the logs that the other attempts are just scripted tries.
Similarly, I'm see several attempts every day to log into my machines via ssh (where an attempt may involve from a dozen to hundreds of tries to log in). Don't even get started on what I see in the http or smtp logs.
I work at a small company, too, and I could pull everyone off their jobs and still not have enough manpower to investigate each attempted breakin, locate and contact the appropriate parties, etc.
As mentioned elsewhere, most of these machines are compromised so you are really spending your time to provide unpaid antivirus support for the other party's machine. You have to pick your battles.
Depending on my workload and the probability of a positive result I'll contact someone as a courtesy. Generally my criteria is that I am able to make telephone contact with a person responsible for the machine relatively quickly.