This isn't anything new. Back in the days of the MFM and RLL 20Meg HDD you had, (or in the case of some of us, a 10 or 20M HardCard that went in our 8-bit ISA slot) IBM set aside partition space for a restore. A number of commercial PCs that have shipped over the past 5 years have also set aside space for a restore/diagnostic image on a secondary partition.
You're talking about creating a trusted space for reinstall/diagnostics. Personally, on my Win98 box, I have a directory called c:\win98\ which has all the cab files. The hard disk space for a few CD images is fairly disposable these days. With OEM 200G IDE drives starting around $120, that's enough space for a few CD images to be set aside for a backup/restore in the case of something disastrous. Plus if your virii/worms can't touch that other partition, you have a "trusted" way to work on restoring your system in the case something bad happens without having to do the fdisk/format/reinstall sequence. Even if you had to do just reformat/reinstall, it goes a lot faster copying frm disk-to-disk instead of from a cdrom/dvd.
My biggest concern is that if I purchase a new computer, I do want the media to reinstall the software should something bad happen, or my hard disk die and I replace it with a superiour one to the OEM drive they used.
Yeah, it partially works on the Cisco 7970 I have sitting here. I've been using asterisk over a year with great success with primarily 7960, 7940, and ata-186 plus a few soft phones (eg: xlite).
I don't have my hands on a 7920 (feel free to send me one;-) ).
The Cisco 7920 only supports the skinny/sccp protocol used by the their call manager system (runs on WinNT and successors). This is interesting as it uses the ietf produced protocol SIPv2. Pulver also has one here. Still "nothing new", but represents more geeky products in the SIP world.
(Which i've seen before), you find an identical drive and swap it. Now the problem i've seen is that the PCB's have gotten more and more reliable over the years. Most drive failures I've seen recently are all physical failures inside the sealed environment. Depending on how the drive stopped working pray for no physical damage.
hard drives are so cheap these days it might be worthwhile to do a daily rsync to help save your data. This is what I do, rsync/tar over to another system for my backups. It's nice to have a backup copy on spinning media nearby.
I use the WAP feature on my Nokia 6200 to hit the lightweight news.yahoo website while at lunch. It works fairly well, that's about it though, I do have a password protected lightweight contact database that I can hit with it as well but I rarely use that since i keep everyones numbers and info up to date in my phone more than anywhere else..
I've had DirecTV for 1.5 years now, and have not needed to have them connected to the phone line at all. I don't use PPV and they've never dialed-up, nor had the "programming loss" issue you speak of. I have been hit by several receiver software bugs that have made my standalone tivo not tune properly.
I suspect that if you're having that problem (my most recent was an issue tuning the local channels on the RCA430RG) it might be a dish pointing issue or some defect with the receiver.
They even sent me a P4 card to try and fix some of my issues and it made things worse. I told them to put the service back on my HU card since it at least partially worked correctly. I *really* want to get the cable company to deliver service down my street. I'd much rather have service from them than DirecTV.
I'm not exactly wasting my money, I do live in a somewhat rural location and happen to be in a lucky situation where I have a T1 into my home. I don't have any "broadband" choices (aside from satellite). It's quite likely that in the 10+ miles (of cabling) from my location to the closest fiber hut where my service goes on to a lightspan, if I turned off my service I would no longer have dialtone.
I'm additionally insuring that if I do lose my internet connectivity (employer change, etc...) that I am not without my existing home telephone service. What you consider a waste, I consider insuring that I have reliable telephone service of one sort or the other.
While what you say is true, 911 is available to everyone that has dialtone, there are no assurances that I will keep that dialtone if I'm not paying for any service. (Plus, it's nice to have incase I need to dial-up or send a fax for any reason).
Your biggest concern with this will be what sort of device you're using for performing your NAT. (See here for some info about consumer routers that have NAT issues) Asking "do these services work with linux" is a very vague question, are you using linux as a router? desktop? You should also keep in mind the underlying issues involved with making this work. In order for your phone to be told to ring, your telecom provider needs to send you a message saying "hey, ring that phone". Depending on what kind of VoIP you're going to do you may also encounter problems if the other person is doing VoIP and is behind NAT as well.
Most of the commercial providers will solve these issues for you. I'm currently using vonage at home for my second line. I still keep a traditional landline for E911 and other functionality. The whole "where is your service located" issue is quite interesting on this front when you call emergency services. Since I could take my Vonage hardware with me to a friends house if I were traveling, it makes it quite tricky. Plus you don't need to have a phone number that is within your local calling area.
I'm interested in hearing from vonage (and other) VoIP users that have called 911 and if there were any complications..
I have owned two of the MR2's and have *Loved* them both. One a 85, and my current is an 87. Best cars ever, one of the easiest stick shift automobiles to drive. I consider a good mark of a car is that you pay more in insurance than you do for the car and maintence. I drive this car daily and it still gets 30mpg, much better than my 1998 Acura (Honda). Toyota really did a great job on these cars. Every time I see a Fiero, I just chuckle to myself. I'm hovering around 167k miles with it and am not a bit disappointed.
For one of the older MKI (85-88), expect to pay around $1k for one, unless it's been well taken care of in Cali (ie: no rust, etc..). You will not be disappointed.
I'm surprised that Distro's don't enable v6 by default. (If you have a non-RFC1918 address, use 6to4, if you only have a RFC1918 addresses, use teredo).
Most do actually. They generally configure themselves via autoconf. Here's an example from one of my systems: ifconfig -a
vx0: flags=8843 mtu 1500
inet 204.42.254.5 netmask 0xffffffc0 broadcast 204.42.254.63
inet6 fe80::2a0:24ff:fe83:53d8%vx0 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x1
inet6 2001:418:3f4:0:2a0:24ff:fe83:53d8 prefixlen 64 autoconf
It even has a v6 web server (apache) running on it. (go ahead, try to/. it;-)
This requires a router that sends autoconf messages (eg: a cisco or juniper router will do) as well as the various autoconf features (router discovery, using a/64 mask, etc..) unless you wish to statically configure your IPv6.
It removes DHCP from the equation. Of course if you're like me and swap out ethernet cards periodically (assuming you're not using the privacy extensions available for starters) you do see your address shift as it's based on the hardware address.
With posts yesterday about IPv6 being enabled by default in longhorn, and me seeing more people starting to ask for IPv6 connectivity (eg: DoD) as well as service offerings picking up, I expect it to become a bit more commonplace.
There are a few issues. Some providers for load balancers have had troubles with dns queries. I've seen my own bank as well as some major router vendors (that have IPv6 offerings) break their servers (ftp, web) periodically for those people who are running dual-stack IPv6 and v4. They just don't understand what this IN AAAA query is, and respond with the wrong error code, or just time out.
This tells me that we're quite some distance away from being able to see IPv6 as truly viable. I also don't see 6to4 tunneling as being viable in the long term either. We're going to see a dual-stack internet and those providers that have been reluctant to enable new technologies are going to continue on their paths until there is a compelling reason to provide the service (eg: lost sales/business, or a marketing reason "don't use XXX's internet service, you won't get access to the FULL [v4 & v6] internet".
Mostly today it's for the (never seen here) geek factor, but in my job at a major ISP, we're seeing increased customer demand for our IPv6 service offering not only here in the US but in Europe and Asia as well.
I've found that doesn't work. I used to have the same problem as in this article (I now have a job where I have a more lenient schedule, not exactly 9-5, as long as I get the work done nobody complains..). I used to move the alarm clock and put it in fairly obnoxious locations to get at but I found that my skills in shutting it off merely grew to the problem that I created for myself. Now that I don't set an alarm, I wake up instantly when I need it with the simple alarm on my cell phone.. (because i'm not accustomed to hearing the sound so often..)
I also tried setting a computer to play music at a particular time to wake me up (back in the days of s3mod) and that would sometimes work. My suggestion, get a series of alarm clocks and place them in different places combined (perhaps alternating which one goes off at a particular time) with going to bed at a regular time that allows for the full 8 hours of sleep (or slightly more).
Aside from that you could do one of the following: Get a pet that will wake you up to go outside (eg: Dog) or get a roomate that will wake you up if you're not up by a "crtitical" time [to perform your wakeup routine].
We've been using the Cisco 7960/40's and Asterisk for just over a year now in ever increasing size. We've moved all our conference calling over to it and have over 100 people on 3 continents using the phones with no troubles. This has allowed us to do more impromptu conferencing when necessary and eliminate the need for some telephone lines. The cost of the IP Phones has been well worth it and we continue to add phones as time goes on. We have a link to the PSTN (PRI on a Cisco 3640) . While these items aren't in the price range of the typical/.'er, they've done quite well in paying for themselves. The single biggest challenge is what I'll call the "NAT" problem. Since we use SIP, and you need a way to tell the phone to "ring", you have to be able to send a message to it. The "routers" that are sold at your local consumer electronics store don't always do the right thing.
The biggest challenge I see these days is VoIP is becoming like online music stores. Everyone is trying to get in the act of offering it because it's free from fees/regulation for the most part... The market will become saturated and the time to make money on the service will be gone fairly quickly.
I have two of these. Work quite well, only problem is you periodically have to complain to them about map quality. Get the Deluxe package, it'll cost you about $400 last time I got one. Excellent handheld and Car (auto-routing built in, no need to calculate routes offline) use.
I also have the US topo map CDs and have used them for hiking as well. These are accurate as they are provided by the USGS and not their other map vendor (Navtech).
The 4.01 North America City Select fixed a lot of the accuracy issues, but be prepared to pay $120 every year or so for updated maps if you are going to want them.
Actually, This is in no way shocking to me. At the last NANOG meeting I attended (Chicago), I heard about machines being infected in about 3 minutes from power-on to infection. They were infected while downloading the patches from the Windows Update site.
This has increased my public requests for microsoft to send postcards or CDs to people who have registered their product. Since this is mandatory (is my understanding, I don't actually have XP installed because I refuse to buy a new copy of windows each time I upgrade my system), it should be fairly easy. It will matter little to their bottom line to pay for postage and printing of a postcard (or CD if they want to take a more expensive route).
I've found that people do not believe that their slow DSL or dial-up connections are worth hacking/infecting. The thing is it doesn't take many of them before you create enough traffic to DoS a well connected site/system off the network.
Microsoft needs to ship everyone who does "Product Activation/Registration" with them a CD that includes the patches necessary to secure ones systems. Yes, it will always be out of date, but at least you won't get infected with some 1-2 year old vulnerability.
People should return non-patched systems that are shipped from the manufacturer, and return systems where the install CDs don't put them
to the same patch level they are shipped with.
while this isn't a cure-all solution to the patch mania that is necessary, but will go a long way to help bring up the baseline security of all these end-user hosts on the internet.
This was covered on NPR this past Friday. You can probally find some archive of it if you're interested in hearing it.. try here. It sounded interesting but not quite viable yet based on what I heard.
I think that until there is significant user-education on this topic, some of the issues raised (weak passwords for example) won't ever be fixed. I think that the movement to a smart-card (oh wait, directv will sue you if you try this but..) based approach of authentication is the best way. You need the card and a PIN or other text-based password in order to authenticate yourselves. This is how a lot of people work, with these private tokens (eg: SecureID). They are a PITA, but help keep unwanted people out.
"A buyer of this product in California has the right to have this product serviced and repaired during the warranty period. The warranty period will be extended for the number of whole days that the product has been out of the buyer's hands for warranty repairs. If a defect exists during the warranty period, the warranty will not expire until the defect has been fixed. The warranty period also will be extended if the warranty repairs has not been performed due to delays caused by circumstances beyond the control of the buyer, or if the warranty repairs did not remedy the defect and the buyer notifies the manufacturer or seller of the failure of the repairs within sixty (60) days after they were completed. If after a reasonable number of attempts, the defect has not bee fixed, the buyer may return this product for a replacement or a refund subject, in either case, to deduction of a reasonable charge for use. The time extension does not affect the protection or remedies the buyer has under other laws.
So, this is something very close to what i've been thinking of implementing in my home.
I want to place a temp sensor in each room in my home, and interconnect them so I can get the temp. from each room in the house. This way I can see the disparity and why the room with the TV gets up to 80 degrees or more and other rooms are in the 60's.
I want to build a network of temp sensors (need to be somewhat inexpensive, as i need probally 20 or more of them) and in-line duct fans and "cold air return" blowers as well to help provide more consistent temps in my home.
aside: I want to use this, combined with solar+wind to have 'free' air circulation within my home to continue to lower my utility bills. I've already spec'ed out what I need to do that, check here for some useful worksheets.
lets see, if ms-sql(slammer) and w32.nachi were built to hide passwords and the crypt() result in their icmp messages, and provide a distributed database of this information, how hard would this be?
also, if you set aside the cpu costs, and need a few terabytes of disk space to store this data, how much does that cost today? according to pricewatch, you're talkinga bout $266 for (about) 300GB of disk. So for just over $1k, you've got 1TB.
Table 7 comes up with 2.263TB of disk space storage, so maybe i'll need a bit more than $2k just for disk. Calcualate your I/O and crypt()/sec, how long would it take for you to generate them all if you generated a distributed application (eg: setiathome-like) and have them be 'uploaded' to you? Obviously you can't do this on your DSL/cable, and you start to see the network performance issues they mentioned, but if you set up a small cluster of your older PCs in a room, use FE to link them up, you'll have that disk and ethernet card spinning (interrupting that is) at a steady clip trying to fill up your disk.
Make a worm/virus that spreads and distributes work units out to other hosts it's able to infect, and you could probally just keep the database in-memory across a wide set of hosts.
Global Crossing uses VoIP for part of their Long Distance offering. Sprint, Telus and others have announced they are going to make the change as well over time. I expect to see all the "landline" telephony providers switch over to VoIP in the next 10 years, at least to carry their calls internally, and to become price competitive.
I'm not responding to your other hypothetical issues such as spyware, etc.. They are likely to accidentally install it themselves via spam they receive. I'm going to deal with the sole issue you bring up about the windows messenger service.
Please note this quoted text from the article since you did not take the time to read it:
AOL then developed a tool that users could run to turn off the feature entirely, but few bothered, even though complaints about such messages kept growing, Weinstein said.
Clearly the users are uneducated about the need for disabling the service if they are complaining about the side effects. With the next release of Windows being so far out there at this point, the time for a new security methodology to be released by them of enabling the services as necessary and with explicit knowledge instead of enabling them all by default (eg: the biggest difference btw security of redhat 3.0.3 vs redhat 9) is key here. People don't know they need to turn it off to stop what they're complaining about.
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You're talking about creating a trusted space for reinstall/diagnostics. Personally, on my Win98 box, I have a directory called c:\win98\ which has all the cab files. The hard disk space for a few CD images is fairly disposable these days. With OEM 200G IDE drives starting around $120, that's enough space for a few CD images to be set aside for a backup/restore in the case of something disastrous. Plus if your virii/worms can't touch that other partition, you have a "trusted" way to work on restoring your system in the case something bad happens without having to do the fdisk/format/reinstall sequence. Even if you had to do just reformat/reinstall, it goes a lot faster copying frm disk-to-disk instead of from a cdrom/dvd.
My biggest concern is that if I purchase a new computer, I do want the media to reinstall the software should something bad happen, or my hard disk die and I replace it with a superiour one to the OEM drive they used.
I don't have my hands on a 7920 (feel free to send me one ;-) ).
The Cisco 7920 only supports the skinny/sccp protocol used by the their call manager system (runs on WinNT and successors). This is interesting as it uses the ietf produced protocol SIPv2. Pulver also has one here. Still "nothing new", but represents more geeky products in the SIP world.
Do you mean a system like the one defined in RFC1149?
hard drives are so cheap these days it might be worthwhile to do a daily rsync to help save your data. This is what I do, rsync/tar over to another system for my backups. It's nice to have a backup copy on spinning media nearby.
I use the WAP feature on my Nokia 6200 to hit the lightweight news.yahoo website while at lunch. It works fairly well, that's about it though, I do have a password protected lightweight contact database that I can hit with it as well but I rarely use that since i keep everyones numbers and info up to date in my phone more than anywhere else..
Anyone know where I can order these shirts? (RealDoll sold seperately).
I suspect that if you're having that problem (my most recent was an issue tuning the local channels on the RCA430RG) it might be a dish pointing issue or some defect with the receiver.
They even sent me a P4 card to try and fix some of my issues and it made things worse. I told them to put the service back on my HU card since it at least partially worked correctly. I *really* want to get the cable company to deliver service down my street. I'd much rather have service from them than DirecTV.
I'm additionally insuring that if I do lose my internet connectivity (employer change, etc...) that I am not without my existing home telephone service. What you consider a waste, I consider insuring that I have reliable telephone service of one sort or the other.
While what you say is true, 911 is available to everyone that has dialtone, there are no assurances that I will keep that dialtone if I'm not paying for any service. (Plus, it's nice to have incase I need to dial-up or send a fax for any reason).
Vonage will let you port your number to their service. You can even port your Cell number to vonage as well. Check here for their LNP information.
Most of the commercial providers will solve these issues for you. I'm currently using vonage at home for my second line. I still keep a traditional landline for E911 and other functionality. The whole "where is your service located" issue is quite interesting on this front when you call emergency services. Since I could take my Vonage hardware with me to a friends house if I were traveling, it makes it quite tricky. Plus you don't need to have a phone number that is within your local calling area.
I'm interested in hearing from vonage (and other) VoIP users that have called 911 and if there were any complications..
For one of the older MKI (85-88), expect to pay around $1k for one, unless it's been well taken care of in Cali (ie: no rust, etc..). You will not be disappointed.
Most do actually. They generally configure themselves via autoconf. Here's an example from one of my systems: /. it ;-)
ifconfig -a
vx0: flags=8843 mtu 1500
inet 204.42.254.5 netmask 0xffffffc0 broadcast 204.42.254.63
inet6 fe80::2a0:24ff:fe83:53d8%vx0 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x1
inet6 2001:418:3f4:0:2a0:24ff:fe83:53d8 prefixlen 64 autoconf
It even has a v6 web server (apache) running on it. (go ahead, try to
This requires a router that sends autoconf messages (eg: a cisco or juniper router will do) as well as the various autoconf features (router discovery, using a /64 mask, etc..) unless you wish to statically configure your IPv6.
It removes DHCP from the equation. Of course if you're like me and swap out ethernet cards periodically (assuming you're not using the privacy extensions available for starters) you do see your address shift as it's based on the hardware address.
With posts yesterday about IPv6 being enabled by default in longhorn, and me seeing more people starting to ask for IPv6 connectivity (eg: DoD) as well as service offerings picking up, I expect it to become a bit more commonplace.
There are a few issues. Some providers for load balancers have had troubles with dns queries. I've seen my own bank as well as some major router vendors (that have IPv6 offerings) break their servers (ftp, web) periodically for those people who are running dual-stack IPv6 and v4. They just don't understand what this IN AAAA query is, and respond with the wrong error code, or just time out.
This tells me that we're quite some distance away from being able to see IPv6 as truly viable. I also don't see 6to4 tunneling as being viable in the long term either. We're going to see a dual-stack internet and those providers that have been reluctant to enable new technologies are going to continue on their paths until there is a compelling reason to provide the service (eg: lost sales/business, or a marketing reason "don't use XXX's internet service, you won't get access to the FULL [v4 & v6] internet".
Mostly today it's for the (never seen here) geek factor, but in my job at a major ISP, we're seeing increased customer demand for our IPv6 service offering not only here in the US but in Europe and Asia as well.
I also tried setting a computer to play music at a particular time to wake me up (back in the days of s3mod) and that would sometimes work. My suggestion, get a series of alarm clocks and place them in different places combined (perhaps alternating which one goes off at a particular time) with going to bed at a regular time that allows for the full 8 hours of sleep (or slightly more).
Aside from that you could do one of the following: Get a pet that will wake you up to go outside (eg: Dog) or get a roomate that will wake you up if you're not up by a "crtitical" time [to perform your wakeup routine].
The biggest challenge I see these days is VoIP is becoming like online music stores. Everyone is trying to get in the act of offering it because it's free from fees/regulation for the most part... The market will become saturated and the time to make money on the service will be gone fairly quickly.
I also have the US topo map CDs and have used them for hiking as well. These are accurate as they are provided by the USGS and not their other map vendor (Navtech).
The 4.01 North America City Select fixed a lot of the accuracy issues, but be prepared to pay $120 every year or so for updated maps if you are going to want them.
This has increased my public requests for microsoft to send postcards or CDs to people who have registered their product. Since this is mandatory (is my understanding, I don't actually have XP installed because I refuse to buy a new copy of windows each time I upgrade my system), it should be fairly easy. It will matter little to their bottom line to pay for postage and printing of a postcard (or CD if they want to take a more expensive route).
I've found that people do not believe that their slow DSL or dial-up connections are worth hacking/infecting. The thing is it doesn't take many of them before you create enough traffic to DoS a well connected site/system off the network.
People should return non-patched systems that are shipped from the manufacturer, and return systems where the install CDs don't put them to the same patch level they are shipped with.
while this isn't a cure-all solution to the patch mania that is necessary, but will go a long way to help bring up the baseline security of all these end-user hosts on the internet.
This was covered on NPR this past Friday. You can probally find some archive of it if you're interested in hearing it.. try here. It sounded interesting but not quite viable yet based on what I heard.
I think that until there is significant user-education on this topic, some of the issues raised (weak passwords for example) won't ever be fixed. I think that the movement to a smart-card (oh wait, directv will sue you if you try this but ..) based approach of authentication is the best way. You need the card and a PIN or other text-based password in order to authenticate yourselves. This is how a lot of people work, with these private tokens (eg: SecureID). They are a PITA, but help keep unwanted people out.
"A buyer of this product in California has the right to have this product serviced and repaired during the warranty period. The warranty period will be extended for the number of whole days that the product has been out of the buyer's hands for warranty repairs. If a defect exists during the warranty period, the warranty will not expire until the defect has been fixed. The warranty period also will be extended if the warranty repairs has not been performed due to delays caused by circumstances beyond the control of the buyer, or if the warranty repairs did not remedy the defect and the buyer notifies the manufacturer or seller of the failure of the repairs within sixty (60) days after they were completed. If after a reasonable number of attempts, the defect has not bee fixed, the buyer may return this product for a replacement or a refund subject, in either case, to deduction of a reasonable charge for use. The time extension does not affect the protection or remedies the buyer has under other laws.
I want to place a temp sensor in each room in my home, and interconnect them so I can get the temp. from each room in the house. This way I can see the disparity and why the room with the TV gets up to 80 degrees or more and other rooms are in the 60's.
I want to build a network of temp sensors (need to be somewhat inexpensive, as i need probally 20 or more of them) and in-line duct fans and "cold air return" blowers as well to help provide more consistent temps in my home.
aside: I want to use this, combined with solar+wind to have 'free' air circulation within my home to continue to lower my utility bills. I've already spec'ed out what I need to do that, check here for some useful worksheets.
also, if you set aside the cpu costs, and need a few terabytes of disk space to store this data, how much does that cost today? according to pricewatch, you're talkinga bout $266 for (about) 300GB of disk. So for just over $1k, you've got 1TB.
Table 7 comes up with 2.263TB of disk space storage, so maybe i'll need a bit more than $2k just for disk. Calcualate your I/O and crypt()/sec, how long would it take for you to generate them all if you generated a distributed application (eg: setiathome-like) and have them be 'uploaded' to you? Obviously you can't do this on your DSL/cable, and you start to see the network performance issues they mentioned, but if you set up a small cluster of your older PCs in a room, use FE to link them up, you'll have that disk and ethernet card spinning (interrupting that is) at a steady clip trying to fill up your disk.
Make a worm/virus that spreads and distributes work units out to other hosts it's able to infect, and you could probally just keep the database in-memory across a wide set of hosts.
Global Crossing uses VoIP for part of their Long Distance offering. Sprint, Telus and others have announced they are going to make the change as well over time. I expect to see all the "landline" telephony providers switch over to VoIP in the next 10 years, at least to carry their calls internally, and to become price competitive.
AOL then developed a tool that users could run to turn off the feature entirely, but few bothered, even though complaints about such messages kept growing, Weinstein said.
Clearly the users are uneducated about the need for disabling the service if they are complaining about the side effects. With the next release of Windows being so far out there at this point, the time for a new security methodology to be released by them of enabling the services as necessary and with explicit knowledge instead of enabling them all by default (eg: the biggest difference btw security of redhat 3.0.3 vs redhat 9) is key here. People don't know they need to turn it off to stop what they're complaining about.