Not full disk. If it looks like you're got something to hide, eg anything your average AOL using person wouldn't have on their PC, they'll be all over you. You want to look as much like your typical PC user as possible.
Use truecrypt with the encrypted volume option. When truecrypt is running you'll see an additional drive letter where you store your documents. When truecrypt isn't running, you just see a file. The file can be anywhere, named anything, say C:\windows\system64.dll.
Before you hit customs, remove or hide truecrypt.
It's very unlikely anyone would notice anything out of the ordinary.
Of course if you're the type of person who's randomly selected for special screening, then you might still be better off uploading the files.
As far as I can tell, the killer app preventing linux from taking over the corporate world is the lack of an outlook replacement. More and more of our work is web based.
Evolution has a beta mapi extension for exchange 2007, and exchange 2003 support (via screenscraping OWA). My attempts to get it working with exchange 2007 so far have failed.
I'm really perplexed that no one seems to have nailed this down yet.
Most interesting to the geek community is this: What are the terms of his imprisonment?
1) Will he have fairly regular internet access?....
I can't speak for California, but the county jail I've worked with in NY absolutely does not permit Internet access for prisoners. They have a small computer lab they use for GED classes, we were told early on in the project there would be no Internet access, even for remote troubleshooting the server.
OT Question/comment. I just bought a car with an ipod interface. Instead of a cable with docking connector, this is actually a dock. Did apply screw me with a whole new form factor/docking connector layout? It's a 2008 Audi A4 FYI.
The wiring part should be easy. You can go with conduit and pull anything in the future, or probably be safe with a lot of cat5e and coax.
But the hard part is knowing what to do with your network.
CentraLite has some nice stuff, LCD touch-screens let you control all your lights, HVAC, and virtually anything else you might hook up to the system. You can even have cameras, and view the video on any of the control panels in the house.
The 7.1 speakers in your AV room is good, you can get nice in-wall speakers, which makes things look cleaner. Also consider some additional in wall speakers all over the house, you can pipe music all over for parties. If you have a hottub or deck outdoors, a couple of outdoor speakers are virtually a requirement. Again, with the proper control, you can adjust audio source and volume for any zone from any panel in the house.
As long as you're wiring, also remember that you need power for stuff. Don't skimp on electrical outlets. In fact, consider running a couple of separate circuits all over the house, with a UPS in the basement.
Consider an intercom instead of shouting up the stairs at the kids.
Finally, make sure you don't get too carried away. Some day you'll sell the house, if the neighborhood isn't affluent enough or attacks the wrong kind of buyers to appreciate all the wizz-bang technology, it's a waste. My boss did much of what I described to his summer-house on a lake. But most of the people who moved there were retired folks. The couple that bought the place were totally baffled by virtually everything in the house.
Tom is kind of flaky in the game. He dances around and talks nonesense. But the music they play in his house is really nice. It's the only place in the game I've heard the particular track.
You'll be sad to hear that he's an NPC, and as far as I can tell, can't be killed.
Businesses buy SANs to consolidate storage, placing all their eggs in one basket. They need redundant everything, which this doesn't have. Additionally, SATA drives are not as reliable long term as SCSI. Compare the data sheets for Seagate drives, they don't even mention MTBF on the SATA sheet.
Businesses also want service and support. They want the system to phone home when a drive starts getting errors, so a tech shows up at their door with a new drive before they even notice there are problems. They want to have highly trained tech support available 24/7 and parts available within 4 hours for as long as they own the SAN.
Finally, the performance of this solution almost certainly pales as compared to a real SAN.
These are all things that a home grown solution doesn't offer. Saving 47K on a SAN is great, unless it breaks 3 years from now and your company is out of business 3 days waiting for a replacement motherboard off Ebay.
That being said, everything has a cost associated with it. If management is ok with saving actual money in the short term by giving up long term reliability and performance, then go for it. But by all means, get a rep from EMC or HP in so the decision makers completely understand what they're buying.
Good luck trying to block it. I work in several K-12 schools. Access to myspace is a big problem, not because students waste time, but because of some of the content and the possibility they can use myspace to bully/threaten each other.
If you block myspace.com, be prepared to block every single anonymous proxy out there, new ones pop up every day, it's pretty much a never-ending battle. Commercial content filters help, but still can't keep up.
You're probably much better off with the embarrassment system. Log web access by whatever method, then post a weekly list of time on myspace/friendster/match.com or whatever. You probably shouldn't identify people by name, but people will quickly realize you know every web site they go to, and so does their boss.
It's true, but only for specific problems. We used to call it stiction at the shop I worked at. I don't think we really knew what we were doing, but if the drive didn't spin up, putting it in the freezer could fix it. It usually fixed it enough to spin up and get your data back, but that was good enough.
Exactamundo. In my case I monitor outgoing proxy logs for popular web sites. Proxy sites get are immediately blocked and any student using the site gets written up and has their account suspended for at least a week.
The sites which tend to slip through are the low usage ones, and sites that masquerade as legitimate (hint, click on Abe in the upper left).
To be honest, I could really care less about what content the students look at, I fix the computers, not teach. But every student sucking down bandwidth looking at 50-cent videos is depriving another student the chance to use the Internet for legitimate reasons. That doesn't seem right to me.
Also, knowing how irrational some parents can be... If little Johnny gets a look at some boobies via your site, parents will sue. Given that you're setting up a site specifically to avoid the content filter at that school, you should expect to get dragged into the middle of any parent/school lawsuits.
I like servicedesk from AdventNet. It seems to work pretty well, it's very easy to configure. I have only 2 complaints.. It's perpetually 95% there. They release features, but don't add the next logical step to the feature. For example, they have a nice reporting module, but you have to be a full administrator to access it. Secondly, don't pay attention to any of their release dates for updates. They always miss their own deadlines by a couple months, and tend to promise more new features than they actually deliver. I think they're just overly optimistic.
False positive rate?
Not sure, but we do work for schools. I walked in to a computer lab one day, and saw perhaps 5 out of 30 machines with a stupid WGA error message. Mind you, all of these machines were the identical model PC, purchased at the same time, imaged at the same time, with the exact same WinXP disk image and the exact same internet access.
Based on that, I'd say their 22% rate is just about accurate, though not for the reasons they think.
It was in the basement of building 9. I can't remember the room. There was one place where you had to climb a short flight of stairs to walk along a wooden platform over a 3 or 4 foot pipe. But above you was another similar pipe, you had to crouch down to fit between.
MIT has deployed wireless all over the place. I go there once a year for the MIT Mystery Hunt. I was amazed last year as part of the hunt took us into a boiler room deep inside the basement of some building. The boiler room was a maze of pipes and of questionable safety, but screwed to the wall was a WAP; in the boiler room.
You can get a couple of VBricks. The MPEG4 models are what you want. They have a videoconferencing mode which is low delay.
We use them specifically to do what you're describing to do some surgical training. One box in the OR, another in a conference room attached to a projector. They even support a really nice echo canceling microphone, which normalizes audio levels no matter how far the people are from the mic.
The vbricks also have scripting, support SNMP puts and contact relays. So there are a number of different ways you could have non-technical people control the conference, if you didn't want it running 24/7.
You could buy the model with the internal hard drive, and have a big red button to start/stop recording the whole conference.
Best of all, they run a hardened RTOS. No patching the OS, updating virus software or whatever. It'll take under an hour to setup, including opening the box, and you won't have to worry about the things ever again.
Have you determined if your schools are E-Rate eligible? If you're in the US, a PBX is eligible for E-Rate reimbursement, though the handsets are not. If you are a poorer school, you'll be able to fund most (up to 90%) of the cost of the PBX through E-Rate.
You can look at getting an air conditioned rack, though you'll probably spend more for the rack than for your whole server setup. Likewise, any carrier grade type servers will have the same cost issues.
You could outsource everything, use one of those Internet based backup services. Or co-locate a server someplace and rsync all your desktops data to it nightly.
If they're not keen on Air Conditioning a large office all the time, is there a closet you can take for a server room? You just need enough room for a server and AC unit. If the area doesn't have an outside wall for a standard wall AC unit, consider a portable AC unit, where the heat exhaust could be piped outside via normal ducting.
Other than that, run it over spec, keep good backups, and make sure management knows by not taking care of the environment, they're being penny wise and pound foolish.
I have cingular, in upstate NY. After navigating the maze of "support" options, I gave up and called the normal tech support number and complained about poor reception at my house, yet full signal on a road 400 yards away.
Less than a week later, and I'm now getting full signal on the first floor inside my house, during a rainstorm; normally those conditions mean phone = paperweight.
I'll second that. I just sold their helpdesk solution to a school to replace a $30,000 copy of BMC Magic. You can add a custom field to handle bar codes to each asset item. It's priced per technician logon as a yearly subscription, though you still host it on your own servers. A 10 tech license is normally $2000 per year, though they have a 10% educational discount, perhaps something similar for non-profit. In addition to inventory and helpdesk, it also handles Purchase Orders and Maintenance Contracts.
I don't know how to send a message either. Single channel WM encoder is $4595 US list price. I'm not sure what pricing is like for Australia. Shoot me an email, I'll find out. - jeffj AT nessnetworks DOT com.
A rack-mount shelf is available, it's 2U high, holds 2 Vbrick appliances (4 encoder/decoders total).
You said you want to stick with a PC based solution, but seriously, you should look at vbrick. They have a web based configuration panel, which literally takes 5 minutes to setup, including the time to unbox the unit. They are appliances, running some RTOS, so you never need to security patch, install Anti-virus etc... They are also designed to run 24x7, I've literally never seen one crash, ever.
They don't do real media streams, Windows media is good though. You can buy an appliance with a built in hard drive (60GB)and record directly to that while simultaneously streaming to a reflector service and/or your PC. Or ftp push the streams to your video editing station.
The windows media appliance will also act as a wm server, it can stream as many streams as the bandwidth will allow, the box comes with a 10/100 NIC, or OC3 ATM if you need.
I've traveled on a plane with 2 vbricks and a laptop in the overhead bin, so the portability is great. Each appliance holds 2 cards, which can be encoders or decoders, mpeg2, 4 or windows media.
You'd have to contact a reseller (like me) for official Vbrick pricing, especially if you want several boxes. They also make some management software, VOD servers, etc... There is a bunch of stuff you can do, if you're interested in streaming video, you'd want to talk to someone who understands the product lineup.
I don't have access to a price list right now, but a mpeg4 single channel encoder is about $4500, MPEG2 is $6500, WM is less.
Thanks, that's about a 1000 times better. My biggest gripe is the new design follows the windows trend of more graphics and less information. Remember when we all had 14 inch monitors (12.5 inch viewable) at 640x480?? These days that size screen would mostly be filled with toolbars and icons.
I'm off topic, but que sera.
It's not true.
Pencils have a problem where the leads can break off and weightlessly float into an eye or nose, or short circuit gear. There was a very nice pen developed, and both USA and Russia used it. But development was funded by a private company.
First, get every student a copy of "The Elements of Style". It's a very small book originally written around WWI. It points out the most frequent mistakes in writing. It's an excellent book, following the tips within will make anyone a better writer.
Second, teach people to write to their audience. Far too often I see engineers write a recomendation to a customer that points out technical merits or problems, but doesn't frame those issues with reguard to the customer's business. A COO probably doesn't care about the problems with an ACL entry in a VPN setup. They do care if their employees can't work while on the road.
Third, while you might not be able to help people with their grammar or spelling, make sure they understand that those things do matter and need to be fixed. One of my co-workers is Jeopardy smart, but his writing is awful. If you were to judge him by his writing you'd think he was a complete idiot. Proofreading is sometimes more important that the initial writing. Students who have severe grammar problems should read their work out loud to themselves. That will help a LOT.
Slashdot Mirror
Not full disk. If it looks like you're got something to hide, eg anything your average AOL using person wouldn't have on their PC, they'll be all over you. You want to look as much like your typical PC user as possible.
Use truecrypt with the encrypted volume option. When truecrypt is running you'll see an additional drive letter where you store your documents. When truecrypt isn't running, you just see a file. The file can be anywhere, named anything, say C:\windows\system64.dll.
Before you hit customs, remove or hide truecrypt.
It's very unlikely anyone would notice anything out of the ordinary.
Of course if you're the type of person who's randomly selected for special screening, then you might still be better off uploading the files.
As far as I can tell, the killer app preventing linux from taking over the corporate world is the lack of an outlook replacement. More and more of our work is web based. Evolution has a beta mapi extension for exchange 2007, and exchange 2003 support (via screenscraping OWA). My attempts to get it working with exchange 2007 so far have failed. I'm really perplexed that no one seems to have nailed this down yet.
Most interesting to the geek community is this: What are the terms of his imprisonment? 1) Will he have fairly regular internet access? ....
I can't speak for California, but the county jail I've worked with in NY absolutely does not permit Internet access for prisoners. They have a small computer lab they use for GED classes, we were told early on in the project there would be no Internet access, even for remote troubleshooting the server.
OT Question/comment. I just bought a car with an ipod interface. Instead of a cable with docking connector, this is actually a dock. Did apply screw me with a whole new form factor/docking connector layout? It's a 2008 Audi A4 FYI.
The wiring part should be easy. You can go with conduit and pull anything in the future, or probably be safe with a lot of cat5e and coax. But the hard part is knowing what to do with your network. CentraLite has some nice stuff, LCD touch-screens let you control all your lights, HVAC, and virtually anything else you might hook up to the system. You can even have cameras, and view the video on any of the control panels in the house.
The 7.1 speakers in your AV room is good, you can get nice in-wall speakers, which makes things look cleaner. Also consider some additional in wall speakers all over the house, you can pipe music all over for parties. If you have a hottub or deck outdoors, a couple of outdoor speakers are virtually a requirement. Again, with the proper control, you can adjust audio source and volume for any zone from any panel in the house.
As long as you're wiring, also remember that you need power for stuff. Don't skimp on electrical outlets. In fact, consider running a couple of separate circuits all over the house, with a UPS in the basement.
Consider an intercom instead of shouting up the stairs at the kids.
Finally, make sure you don't get too carried away. Some day you'll sell the house, if the neighborhood isn't affluent enough or attacks the wrong kind of buyers to appreciate all the wizz-bang technology, it's a waste. My boss did much of what I described to his summer-house on a lake. But most of the people who moved there were retired folks. The couple that bought the place were totally baffled by virtually everything in the house.
Tom is kind of flaky in the game. He dances around and talks nonesense. But the music they play in his house is really nice. It's the only place in the game I've heard the particular track.
You'll be sad to hear that he's an NPC, and as far as I can tell, can't be killed.
Businesses buy SANs to consolidate storage, placing all their eggs in one basket. They need redundant everything, which this doesn't have. Additionally, SATA drives are not as reliable long term as SCSI. Compare the data sheets for Seagate drives, they don't even mention MTBF on the SATA sheet.
Businesses also want service and support. They want the system to phone home when a drive starts getting errors, so a tech shows up at their door with a new drive before they even notice there are problems. They want to have highly trained tech support available 24/7 and parts available within 4 hours for as long as they own the SAN.
Finally, the performance of this solution almost certainly pales as compared to a real SAN. These are all things that a home grown solution doesn't offer. Saving 47K on a SAN is great, unless it breaks 3 years from now and your company is out of business 3 days waiting for a replacement motherboard off Ebay.
That being said, everything has a cost associated with it. If management is ok with saving actual money in the short term by giving up long term reliability and performance, then go for it. But by all means, get a rep from EMC or HP in so the decision makers completely understand what they're buying.
Good luck trying to block it. I work in several K-12 schools. Access to myspace is a big problem, not because students waste time, but because of some of the content and the possibility they can use myspace to bully/threaten each other.
If you block myspace.com, be prepared to block every single anonymous proxy out there, new ones pop up every day, it's pretty much a never-ending battle. Commercial content filters help, but still can't keep up.
You're probably much better off with the embarrassment system. Log web access by whatever method, then post a weekly list of time on myspace/friendster/match.com or whatever. You probably shouldn't identify people by name, but people will quickly realize you know every web site they go to, and so does their boss.
It's true, but only for specific problems. We used to call it stiction at the shop I worked at. I don't think we really knew what we were doing, but if the drive didn't spin up, putting it in the freezer could fix it. It usually fixed it enough to spin up and get your data back, but that was good enough.
Exactamundo.
In my case I monitor outgoing proxy logs for popular web sites. Proxy sites get are immediately blocked and any student using the site gets written up and has their account suspended for at least a week.
The sites which tend to slip through are the low usage ones, and sites that masquerade as legitimate (hint, click on Abe in the upper left).
To be honest, I could really care less about what content the students look at, I fix the computers, not teach. But every student sucking down bandwidth looking at 50-cent videos is depriving another student the chance to use the Internet for legitimate reasons. That doesn't seem right to me.
Also, knowing how irrational some parents can be... If little Johnny gets a look at some boobies via your site, parents will sue. Given that you're setting up a site specifically to avoid the content filter at that school, you should expect to get dragged into the middle of any parent/school lawsuits.
I like servicedesk from AdventNet. It seems to work pretty well, it's very easy to configure. I have only 2 complaints.. It's perpetually 95% there. They release features, but don't add the next logical step to the feature. For example, they have a nice reporting module, but you have to be a full administrator to access it. Secondly, don't pay attention to any of their release dates for updates. They always miss their own deadlines by a couple months, and tend to promise more new features than they actually deliver. I think they're just overly optimistic.
False positive rate?
Not sure, but we do work for schools. I walked in to a computer lab one day, and saw perhaps 5 out of 30 machines with a stupid WGA error message. Mind you, all of these machines were the identical model PC, purchased at the same time, imaged at the same time, with the exact same WinXP disk image and the exact same internet access.
Based on that, I'd say their 22% rate is just about accurate, though not for the reasons they think.
It was in the basement of building 9. I can't remember the room. There was one place where you had to climb a short flight of stairs to walk along a wooden platform over a 3 or 4 foot pipe. But above you was another similar pipe, you had to crouch down to fit between.
MIT has deployed wireless all over the place. I go there once a year for the MIT Mystery Hunt. I was amazed last year as part of the hunt took us into a boiler room deep inside the basement of some building. The boiler room was a maze of pipes and of questionable safety, but screwed to the wall was a WAP; in the boiler room.
You can get a couple of VBricks. The MPEG4 models are what you want. They have a videoconferencing mode which is low delay.
We use them specifically to do what you're describing to do some surgical training. One box in the OR, another in a conference room attached to a projector. They even support a really nice echo canceling microphone, which normalizes audio levels no matter how far the people are from the mic.
The vbricks also have scripting, support SNMP puts and contact relays. So there are a number of different ways you could have non-technical people control the conference, if you didn't want it running 24/7.
You could buy the model with the internal hard drive, and have a big red button to start/stop recording the whole conference.
Best of all, they run a hardened RTOS. No patching the OS, updating virus software or whatever. It'll take under an hour to setup, including opening the box, and you won't have to worry about the things ever again.
Have you determined if your schools are E-Rate eligible? If you're in the US, a PBX is eligible for E-Rate reimbursement, though the handsets are not. If you are a poorer school, you'll be able to fund most (up to 90%) of the cost of the PBX through E-Rate.
You can look at getting an air conditioned rack, though you'll probably spend more for the rack than for your whole server setup. Likewise, any carrier grade type servers will have the same cost issues.
You could outsource everything, use one of those Internet based backup services. Or co-locate a server someplace and rsync all your desktops data to it nightly.
If they're not keen on Air Conditioning a large office all the time, is there a closet you can take for a server room? You just need enough room for a server and AC unit. If the area doesn't have an outside wall for a standard wall AC unit, consider a portable AC unit, where the heat exhaust could be piped outside via normal ducting.
Other than that, run it over spec, keep good backups, and make sure management knows by not taking care of the environment, they're being penny wise and pound foolish.
I have cingular, in upstate NY. After navigating the maze of "support" options, I gave up and called the normal tech support number and complained about poor reception at my house, yet full signal on a road 400 yards away.
Less than a week later, and I'm now getting full signal on the first floor inside my house, during a rainstorm; normally those conditions mean phone = paperweight.
I'll second that. I just sold their helpdesk solution to a school to replace a $30,000 copy of BMC Magic. You can add a custom field to handle bar codes to each asset item. It's priced per technician logon as a yearly subscription, though you still host it on your own servers. A 10 tech license is normally $2000 per year, though they have a 10% educational discount, perhaps something similar for non-profit. In addition to inventory and helpdesk, it also handles Purchase Orders and Maintenance Contracts.
I don't know how to send a message either. Single channel WM encoder is $4595 US list price. I'm not sure what pricing is like for Australia. Shoot me an email, I'll find out. - jeffj AT nessnetworks DOT com.
A rack-mount shelf is available, it's 2U high, holds 2 Vbrick appliances (4 encoder/decoders total).
You said you want to stick with a PC based solution, but seriously, you should look at vbrick. They have a web based configuration panel, which literally takes 5 minutes to setup, including the time to unbox the unit. They are appliances, running some RTOS, so you never need to security patch, install Anti-virus etc... They are also designed to run 24x7, I've literally never seen one crash, ever.
They don't do real media streams, Windows media is good though. You can buy an appliance with a built in hard drive (60GB)and record directly to that while simultaneously streaming to a reflector service and/or your PC. Or ftp push the streams to your video editing station.
The windows media appliance will also act as a wm server, it can stream as many streams as the bandwidth will allow, the box comes with a 10/100 NIC, or OC3 ATM if you need.
I've traveled on a plane with 2 vbricks and a laptop in the overhead bin, so the portability is great. Each appliance holds 2 cards, which can be encoders or decoders, mpeg2, 4 or windows media.
You'd have to contact a reseller (like me) for official Vbrick pricing, especially if you want several boxes. They also make some management software, VOD servers, etc... There is a bunch of stuff you can do, if you're interested in streaming video, you'd want to talk to someone who understands the product lineup.
I don't have access to a price list right now, but a mpeg4 single channel encoder is about $4500, MPEG2 is $6500, WM is less.
Thanks, that's about a 1000 times better. My biggest gripe is the new design follows the windows trend of more graphics and less information. Remember when we all had 14 inch monitors (12.5 inch viewable) at 640x480?? These days that size screen would mostly be filled with toolbars and icons.
I'm off topic, but que sera.
It's not true.
Pencils have a problem where the leads can break off and weightlessly float into an eye or nose, or short circuit gear. There was a very nice pen developed, and both USA and Russia used it. But development was funded by a private company.
First, get every student a copy of "The Elements of Style". It's a very small book originally written around WWI. It points out the most frequent mistakes in writing. It's an excellent book, following the tips within will make anyone a better writer.
Second, teach people to write to their audience. Far too often I see engineers write a recomendation to a customer that points out technical merits or problems, but doesn't frame those issues with reguard to the customer's business. A COO probably doesn't care about the problems with an ACL entry in a VPN setup. They do care if their employees can't work while on the road.
Third, while you might not be able to help people with their grammar or spelling, make sure they understand that those things do matter and need to be fixed. One of my co-workers is Jeopardy smart, but his writing is awful. If you were to judge him by his writing you'd think he was a complete idiot. Proofreading is sometimes more important that the initial writing. Students who have severe grammar problems should read their work out loud to themselves. That will help a LOT.