The valid request is not "open these ports for me, tech-monkey!". The valid request is "we want to teleconference with folks at these other places. Here are email addresses and phone numbers for their tech guys. Can you figure something out that isn't too expensive?"
You'd think a/. poster might have more respect for their IT department...
It's not clear whether you're expected to be the systems administrator, the network engineer, or the all-purpose all-singing all-dancing IT guy. Let's examine all three scenarios.
We'll suppose you work a 50 hour week. 1% of that is 30 minutes. In the "network engineer" circumstance, that's about enough time -- assuming that you have a very well designed and stable, simple network built on the most reliable hardware available, and you never change anything, just fix it. That won't happen, of course, because you've never done this before and therefore you won't get it exactly right the first time. I won't even mention that your boss is a cheapskate who won't be buying the most reliable hardware anyway. The first time you need to deal with your upstream ISP will chew up 30 minutes. If you ever need to buy replacement hardware, that will take a few weeks' time as well.
Now, as a systems administrator for 30 people, plus maybe five or six servers, you'll blow through your 30 minutes of allotted time every Monday before lunch. Someone needs a password changed. Someone else says "mail isn't working". The sales critter hands you a laptop and says "I spilled beer on it, can you get my files back?" Those are just the incidental time-users. When are you going to upgrade your antispam system? There's an intermittent problem with one of the file servers. Diagnosis may take more than half an hour.
Do I really have to say anything about being the defacto IT shop? No, I didn't think so.
Tell your boss that you want to keep track of your IT hours and be paid for everything over 45 minutes a week at the same rate he would pay an outside contractor. Since he's certain that you'll never go over 30 minutes, this is a great bet for him.
You should start looking for a new job with management that can make more realistic predictions about workloads. Meanwhile, explain to your boss that you heard that your coworker runs a network at home -- maybe he's a better choice?
Leaving high school, I was certain I wanted to do something with computers... but who knew what? I went to a largish university with a good undergraduste CS program. It was only during the course of those four years that I realized that systems administration and network engineering were what I really wanted to do. Meanwhile, many of my peers had changed major once or several times. My point is that it's unlikely that what you want now is what you'll want later. Keep your options open.
In the other direction, I can point to quite a few sysadmins and network engineers with degrees in engineering, chemistry, physics, medieval literature or technical writing. The world changes fast enough that learning how to think systematically, solve new problems and recognize old problems in new guises is more important than the domain of technical knowledge you eventually build.
The IRS defines what things constitute a home office for the purpose of deducting those expenses from your income tax. That's a pretty good guide. For instance, you'll discover that a space which you use 100% for business purposes is easier to account for than a space which you use 20/80 or 50/50... so look at setting a small room aside as your office. Divide your budget into capital costs and recurring costs.
On the other hand, maybe all of that is overkill. Your actual cost of occasional telecommuting may be as simple as "enable an SSH and IPsec gateway on the corporate LAN, pay a monthly DSL/cable modem/frac-T1 fee".
I feel strange advocating a MS-originated protocol -- but the truth us, serving files via Samba on Linux is going to be the best-performing[1], most-compatible remote file system available.
As for hardware, for small servers I like Linux software RAID, but for a big multidisk farm, you can't beat 3Ware cards. They take nice cheap IDE drives and turn them into a SCSI RAID. Moderately expensive, but beautifully functional. Finally, I've been having good luck with Seagate and WD drives, and bad luck with Maxtors. Your mileage may vary.
[1] Samba beats the MS implementations of SMB/CIFS. No guarantees about Samba vs NFS, GFS, Coda, whatever.
CVS or your favorite equivalent is vital in any multi-sysadmin environment. Operating without your configurations in CVS is like juggling priceless eggs in variable gravity.
I can see you aren't an astrophysicist. The dark side of the moon is called that because it faces away from the Earth, not from the Sun. It gets the same semi-lunar worth of daytime as the near side.
I think the "useful source of material resources" is kind of key. Using a space station for interplanetary vehicle construction means that the vehicle, the station, the scaffolding, the blast shield in csae the fuel goes up, etc. all have to be hauled up from Earth, at huge cost.
"Blast shield in case the fuel goes up"? There's no oxidising (or reducing, for that matter) atmosphere in space. If you have the sense of a gopher, you'll keep your oxidizer on one side and the fuel safely away from that.
That said, while the moon is a potential resource site, you need a fully equipped base to exploit it. That's a goal that should come after a major space station, not before.
For serious manned space missions, the moon is not a particularly good waystation. What's needed is a serious long-term space station for interplanetary vehicle construction, industrial micro-gravity operations, and scientific research. (This implies a two-part station, incidentally, with a rotating section for living quarters and office space and a stationary section for labs, factories and docks.)
The moon is a gravity well. It may be shallower than the Earth, but it still takes a lot of energy to slow descents and then escape again. Eventually it may be a useful source of material resources, but there's nothing particularly attractive about it now.
Several methods spring to mind immediately as useful safeguards:
Sunlight-intensity ultraviolet light - your nanite is only usable in the dark because UV breaks a chemical bond necessary for functioning.
Dissolves in moderate acid - pouring a cup of strong vinegar ought to lock up the bugs. In fact, requiring a narrow pH range is a good idea in itself.
Requires an environmental nutrient - how do you get power to nanites anyway? Make them dependent on a fuel that has to be added to their environment.
Requires an unusual temperature - if they need oven-like temperatures to function, there's not much danger keeping them at roomtemp
Just a few thoughts. Basically, if you keep the nanites dependent on an unusual environment or disrupted by an easily-achieved environment, you'll be going a long ways toward preventing a grey goo disaster.
If you have or can develop people skills -- presentations, answering questions, talking without stuttering, explaining complex technical subjects to your Mom -- then you may want to look into sales engineering.
A sales engineer has a few important functions: uphold the technical reputation of the company, find solutions to customer problems, and keep the salescritters honest. (Bad sales engineers destroy the company's rep, push the most expensive products even when there's a better cheaper solution, and care only about their salescritters' quarterly numbers. That's a short-term ticket to wealth, followed by the death of your company.)
If Apple does this properly, they have an advantage over Linux for the desktop (besides the advantage of focussing their efforts on one desktop system instead of n): open source software. Any software which will run on Linux can be easily ported to Mac OS X. Any software which can't be ported easily can be replicated without fear of a look-and-feel lawsuit. So, if Apple does the smart thing and continues to fund their core programmers and continue to make their API available und so weiter, Apple should be able to stay at least on a technological par with Linux for the foreseeable future. Now, as for price/performance... if you've bought the expensive Apple hardware, you already have the OS. If you aren't going to buy the Apple hardware, for whatever reason, then you are much more likely to become a Linux convert. My prediction: if Adobe decides that releasing Photoshop for Linux is a good idea, then Linux will be in the process of wiping out Apple's raison d'etre.
One very fast check is extremely effective: look at the first line of each MIME attachment to see if it's a Microsoft executable file. If it is, quarantine it.
(I wish I had thought of this, but Russell Nelson did.)
One of your customers asked me to relay this question to you:
How can you justify bouncing mail addressed to World users based on a cc: to another user on another ISP?
This is not mail FROM the ISP that offends you, it is TO that other provider. And it is not UCE, it is legitimate, personal, correspondence to the World customer from another individual.
In other words, your customers want to know why they aren't getting their mail.
If your helpdesk doesn't consistently use a good ticket system -- like RequestTracker, plug, plug -- then it doesn't matter even if they always answer every question accurately and immediately: they can't prove it.
Using a ticket system will focus the helpdesk's attention on solving and documenting the problem. It's much easier to complain that you're overworked when you have the stats to prove it; it's much easier to tell your boss that the bozo in Marketing has already asked that dumb question six times -- and has received the correct answer -- when you can show the ticket history as proof.
And if the helpdesk isn't doing well, having them document what they are doing will let a reasonable person figure out what they need to change.
The poster is clearly looking for technological fixes (speakers, lighting, etc.) to a non-technological problem.
Here are my recommendations:
- Get rid of all the technology in the room that doesn't contribute to your life. Take out the laptops, the terminals, the cellphones. (Find a place nearby your door to charge the cellphones and PDAs and whatever. Not the bedroom door, the door to the Big Blue Room.)
- Take out all the phones in the bedroom. Unless you are on-call, you don't need a phone there.
- Get good, heavy drapes for the windows. Block out light and sound for a good night's sleep. If you work a night shift, upgrade all the way to blackout curtains.
- Keep it quiet. You probably have music available all the rest of the day. Make this room different from the others.
- Change the lighting. You need a good lamp for reading, which should be directional enough that you don't disturb your bed partner. (Get a separate lamp for said partner.) Make your general light adjustable, so that you can turn it up to full illumination for cleaning, and down to a soft glow for other activities. Nothing should blink, nothing should be fluorescent. (Exception: the compact-fluorescent spiral bulbs can be bought with solar color temperatures. These make excellent reading lights with a proper shade.)
- Get more exercise. Nothing will do as much for a good night's sleep as regular exercise -- you won't need as much sleep, either. Don't exercise right before going to sleep, though -- you'll wake up sore.
- Learn what your body wants. I, for example, have a real problem if I eat within two hours of going to bed. So I don't. Maybe you need more water before sleep, maybe you need less. Experiment and find out what works.
DSL isn't a shared medium, bucko. Each PSTN line gets provisioned to a central office, and from there is either sent to an ISP-specific aggregator or a CO-aggregator that sends each connection off to an ISP-specific aggregator.
Now, these boxes could probably be reprogrammed to act as DSL gateways for another service -- but you would need to get an ISP to reprovision the line to your house.
Assuming you can boot Linux/PPC or NetBSD on them, you could use them as high-speed links on dry pairs. Either run your own wiring, or get the telco to string you an "alarm circuit" from point to point.
Just run a central LDAP server. Everything you've mentioned can authenticate from LDAP. For details, just Google for LDAP and the OS name and "password".
Re:"The Rapture for atheists"
on
True Names
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· Score: 1
Ken MacLeod. "The Singularity is just the Rapture for geeks."
I'm surprised no one's pointed out the interesting side of this equation: Ucentric's hardware and software combo.
Basically, it's YALinux-based settop box: integrated DSL modem, ethernet, a little expansion capability for 802.11b and USB; the usual suite of firewall/NAT/NFS/Samba, and some nifty front end software, including TV/web integration.
Take a look at what the most common *second* language is for all those Mandarin, Hindi, and Spanish speakers.
Next, note that Mandarin is extremely difficult to touch-type; there are a few Big-5 word processors out there, but it doesn't have anywhere near the support base of *any* of the European languages, with their repeatable phoneticization and limited character set. Hindi has many of the same problems - look how many Indian programmers there are, then look at what languages they write in. English-derivatives, right.
English has an installed-user base in computing that dwarfs the other natural languages.
English also has a head start because it is already in place as the language for aviation.
Slashdot Mirror
Erm, no.
/. poster might have more respect for their IT department...
The valid request is not "open these ports for me, tech-monkey!". The valid request is "we want to teleconference with folks at these other places. Here are email addresses and phone numbers for their tech guys. Can you figure something out that isn't too expensive?"
You'd think a
It's not clear whether you're expected to be the systems administrator, the network engineer, or the all-purpose all-singing all-dancing IT guy. Let's examine all three scenarios.
We'll suppose you work a 50 hour week. 1% of that is 30 minutes. In the "network engineer" circumstance, that's about enough time -- assuming that you have a very well designed and stable, simple network built on the most reliable hardware available, and you never change anything, just fix it. That won't happen, of course, because you've never done this before and therefore you won't get it exactly right the first time. I won't even mention that your boss is a cheapskate who won't be buying the most reliable hardware anyway. The first time you need to deal with your upstream ISP will chew up 30 minutes. If you ever need to buy replacement hardware, that will take a few weeks' time as well.
Now, as a systems administrator for 30 people, plus maybe five or six servers, you'll blow through your 30 minutes of allotted time every Monday before lunch. Someone needs a password changed. Someone else says "mail isn't working". The sales critter hands you a laptop and says "I spilled beer on it, can you get my files back?" Those are just the incidental time-users. When are you going to upgrade your antispam system? There's an intermittent problem with one of the file servers. Diagnosis may take more than half an hour.
Do I really have to say anything about being the defacto IT shop? No, I didn't think so.
Tell your boss that you want to keep track of your IT hours and be paid for everything over 45 minutes a week at the same rate he would pay an outside contractor. Since he's certain that you'll never go over 30 minutes, this is a great bet for him.
You should start looking for a new job with management that can make more realistic predictions about workloads. Meanwhile, explain to your boss that you heard that your coworker runs a network at home -- maybe he's a better choice?
Leaving high school, I was certain I wanted to do something with computers... but who knew what? I went to a largish university with a good undergraduste CS program. It was only during the course of those four years that I realized that systems administration and network engineering were what I really wanted to do. Meanwhile, many of my peers had changed major once or several times. My point is that it's unlikely that what you want now is what you'll want later. Keep your options open.
In the other direction, I can point to quite a few sysadmins and network engineers with degrees in engineering, chemistry, physics, medieval literature or technical writing. The world changes fast enough that learning how to think systematically, solve new problems and recognize old problems in new guises is more important than the domain of technical knowledge you eventually build.
The IRS defines what things constitute a home office for the purpose of deducting those expenses from your income tax. That's a pretty good guide. For instance, you'll discover that a space which you use 100% for business purposes is easier to account for than a space which you use 20/80 or 50/50... so look at setting a small room aside as your office. Divide your budget into capital costs and recurring costs.
On the other hand, maybe all of that is overkill. Your actual cost of occasional telecommuting may be as simple as "enable an SSH and IPsec gateway on the corporate LAN, pay a monthly DSL/cable modem/frac-T1 fee".
I feel strange advocating a MS-originated protocol -- but the truth us, serving files via Samba on Linux is going to be the best-performing[1], most-compatible remote file system available.
As for hardware, for small servers I like Linux software RAID, but for a big multidisk farm, you can't beat 3Ware cards. They take nice cheap IDE drives and turn them into a SCSI RAID. Moderately expensive, but beautifully functional. Finally, I've been having good luck with Seagate and WD drives, and bad luck with Maxtors. Your mileage may vary.
[1] Samba beats the MS implementations of SMB/CIFS. No guarantees about Samba vs NFS, GFS, Coda, whatever.
The Last Starfighter, right? Video games scattered across the nation as secret military training, and the high-scorers being recruited.
Does the DoD now get *all* of their ideas from Hollywood?
CVS or your favorite equivalent is vital in any multi-sysadmin environment. Operating without your configurations in CVS is like juggling priceless eggs in variable gravity.
I can see you aren't an astrophysicist. The dark side of the moon is called that because it faces away from the Earth, not from the Sun. It gets the same semi-lunar worth of daytime as the near side.
I think the "useful source of material resources" is kind of key. Using a space station for interplanetary vehicle construction means that the vehicle, the station, the scaffolding, the blast shield in csae the fuel goes up, etc. all have to be hauled up from Earth, at huge cost.
"Blast shield in case the fuel goes up"? There's no oxidising (or reducing, for that matter) atmosphere in space. If you have the sense of a gopher, you'll keep your oxidizer on one side and the fuel safely away from that.
That said, while the moon is a potential resource site, you need a fully equipped base to exploit it. That's a goal that should come after a major space station, not before.
For serious manned space missions, the moon is not a particularly good waystation. What's needed is a serious long-term space station for interplanetary vehicle construction, industrial micro-gravity operations, and scientific research. (This implies a two-part station, incidentally, with a rotating section for living quarters and office space and a stationary section for labs, factories and docks.)
The moon is a gravity well. It may be shallower than the Earth, but it still takes a lot of energy to slow descents and then escape again. Eventually it may be a useful source of material resources, but there's nothing particularly attractive about it now.
Just a few thoughts. Basically, if you keep the nanites dependent on an unusual environment or disrupted by an easily-achieved environment, you'll be going a long ways toward preventing a grey goo disaster.
If you have or can develop people skills -- presentations, answering questions, talking without stuttering, explaining complex technical subjects to your Mom -- then you may want to look into sales engineering.
A sales engineer has a few important functions: uphold the technical reputation of the company, find solutions to customer problems, and keep the salescritters honest. (Bad sales engineers destroy the company's rep, push the most expensive products even when there's a better cheaper solution, and care only about their salescritters' quarterly numbers. That's a short-term ticket to wealth, followed by the death of your company.)
If Apple does this properly, they have an advantage over Linux for the desktop (besides the advantage of focussing their efforts on one desktop system instead of n): open source software.
Any software which will run on Linux can be easily ported to Mac OS X. Any software which can't be ported easily can be replicated without fear of a look-and-feel lawsuit. So, if Apple does the smart thing and continues to fund their core programmers and continue to make their API available und so weiter, Apple should be able to stay at least on a technological par with Linux for the foreseeable future.
Now, as for price/performance... if you've bought the expensive Apple hardware, you already have the OS. If you aren't going to buy the Apple hardware, for whatever reason, then you are much more likely to become a Linux convert. My prediction: if Adobe decides that releasing Photoshop for Linux is a good idea, then Linux will be in the process of wiping out Apple's raison d'etre.
Buy a cheap audio mixer and control all your sound inputs individually.
One very fast check is extremely effective: look at the first line of each MIME attachment to see if it's a Microsoft executable file. If it is, quarantine it.
(I wish I had thought of this, but Russell Nelson did.)
In other words, your customers want to know why they aren't getting their mail.
If your helpdesk doesn't consistently use a good ticket system -- like RequestTracker, plug, plug -- then it doesn't matter even if they always answer every question accurately and immediately: they can't prove it. Using a ticket system will focus the helpdesk's attention on solving and documenting the problem. It's much easier to complain that you're overworked when you have the stats to prove it; it's much easier to tell your boss that the bozo in Marketing has already asked that dumb question six times -- and has received the correct answer -- when you can show the ticket history as proof. And if the helpdesk isn't doing well, having them document what they are doing will let a reasonable person figure out what they need to change.
The poster is clearly looking for technological fixes (speakers, lighting, etc.) to a non-technological problem.
Here are my recommendations:
- Get rid of all the technology in the room that doesn't contribute to your life. Take out the laptops, the terminals, the cellphones. (Find a place nearby your door to charge the cellphones and PDAs and whatever. Not the bedroom door, the door to the Big Blue Room.)
- Take out all the phones in the bedroom. Unless you are on-call, you don't need a phone there.
- Get good, heavy drapes for the windows. Block out light and sound for a good night's sleep. If you work a night shift, upgrade all the way to blackout curtains.
- Keep it quiet. You probably have music available all the rest of the day. Make this room different from the others.
- Change the lighting. You need a good lamp for reading, which should be directional enough that you don't disturb your bed partner. (Get a separate lamp for said partner.) Make your general light adjustable, so that you can turn it up to full illumination for cleaning, and down to a soft glow for other activities. Nothing should blink, nothing should be fluorescent. (Exception: the compact-fluorescent spiral bulbs can be bought with solar color temperatures. These make excellent reading lights with a proper shade.)
- Get more exercise. Nothing will do as much for a good night's sleep as regular exercise -- you won't need as much sleep, either. Don't exercise right before going to sleep, though -- you'll wake up sore.
- Learn what your body wants. I, for example, have a real problem if I eat within two hours of going to bed. So I don't. Maybe you need more water before sleep, maybe you need less. Experiment and find out what works.
DSL isn't a shared medium, bucko. Each PSTN line gets provisioned to a central office, and from there is either sent to an ISP-specific aggregator or a CO-aggregator that sends each connection off to an ISP-specific aggregator.
Now, these boxes could probably be reprogrammed to act as DSL gateways for another service -- but you would need to get an ISP to reprovision the line to your house.
Assuming you can boot Linux/PPC or NetBSD on them, you could use them as high-speed links on dry pairs. Either run your own wiring, or get the telco to string you an "alarm circuit" from point to point.
Just run a central LDAP server. Everything you've mentioned can authenticate from LDAP. For details, just Google for LDAP and the OS name and "password".
Ken MacLeod. "The Singularity is just the Rapture for geeks."
I spent the last ten minutes with a bad case of the hiccups. What do you think that would have done to my weekly report?
I hate to say this, but it would be better for everyone except Dimitry if Adobe had continued to press charges.
The DMCA has to go.
Basically, it's YALinux-based settop box: integrated DSL modem, ethernet, a little expansion capability for 802.11b and USB; the usual suite of firewall/NAT/NFS/Samba, and some nifty front end software, including TV/web integration.
Nothing revolutionary; all evolutionary.
Take a look at what the most common *second* language is for all those Mandarin, Hindi, and Spanish speakers.
Next, note that Mandarin is extremely difficult to touch-type; there are a few Big-5 word processors out there, but it doesn't have anywhere near the support base of *any* of the European languages, with their repeatable phoneticization and limited character set. Hindi has many of the same problems - look how many Indian programmers there are, then look at what languages they write in. English-derivatives, right.
English has an installed-user base in computing that dwarfs the other natural languages.
English also has a head start because it is already in place as the language for aviation.