It's similar to a Pix 501, but certainly not a pix 506e. If I could pick up a pix 501 for under $200 though for my house, it seems like a good deal. A shiny green cisco logo not required for equipment in my attic.
But for any size business I don't think a pix 501 is a good choice for a VPN concentrator.
If the submittor already has a Windows network, which is likely, is there any reason not to use the PPTP already built into the Windows servers?
It's coming...
Different company, but its the same guy who made the original, Chris Taylor. Though another company owns the TA name, he's said that Supreme Commander is the spiritual sequel to TA.
I have firefox 1.5.0.1 on windows xp with latest adblock and filterset G updater, nothing else.
I've noticed that web pages that refresh themselves cause a run-away memory situation. Specifically the win32 MRTG package from open innovations causes FF to use huge amounts of memory. It auto refreshes graphs I think every 10 seconds. If I leave a graph up on screen and leave for the weekend, FF will be using 1.8 GB memory when I come back on Monday. I've been unable to find out if this is a known problem or not, so I've not submitted this as a bug.
If it's similar at all to any of the Symantec home all in one AV type packages it will be an enormous mess. The last time I worked on this, a 256MB machine used 270 MB of memory with nothing but Windows XP home and the Norton package running. Worse, when I disabled things they didn't need, like the firewall or spam scanner, it didn't actually unload them from memory.
I stopped using Symantec for AV a while ago. But home users will still buy this for the same reason they buy a dishwasher with 19 different settings when all they ever use is the pots and pans setting.
An anecdote, but somehow fitting. A guy I worked with briefly was Chinese. He explained how his grandparents, who lived in Bejing, only within the last couple years learned what had occured in Tiananmen Square. They always knew that something had happened, but explained that the government controlled media simply told them there was a dangerous situation and that everyone was to remain in their homes or workplaces while the authorities dealt with the problem.
It took over 10 years, and I'd imagine news from their western children/grandchildren, before they knew what really occured. I find this amazing. It's a level of goverment control that I don't think most of us can really grasp.
I think a lot of his popularity has to deal with the fact that E=mc^2 is simple enough for anyone to remember. That and his theories were used to create the atomic bomb, ending WWII.
Those 2 things make Einstein much more tangible to the average person. One can remember what he actually did, and see an enormous practical application.
You mention what you plan on buying, but not what you're buying it for.
How many concurrent connections? How many VPN tunnels? How much bandwidth do you have? Most importantly, as others have mentioned, who is your admin? A firewall is only implimenting a set of access rules, the hard part is crafting those rules. Don't buy a Cisco firewall if your security guy only knows checkpoint. If you don't have a security guy, get one.
I'll assume if you have no firewall at all right now, and you're not talking about a lot of stuff, so my WAG would be to grab a PIX 515E unrestricted firewall. The PIX is pretty reliable, but if reliability is key, get 2 with the failover option.
They're about 4 grand. 2 of them with failover will be 10.
Make sure you have a security policy (with teeth!!) for your employees, and that it's enforced. That policy will change as they discover more uses for their new firewall/Internet connection. Make sure management understands there is a security policy and that any changes involving the firewall need to be evaluted and added to the plan.
Don't try to con the con, they've been at it longer than you have. That same web site is likely to try and exploit holes in your browser and start installing who knows what on your machine.
Basically you're not seeing eye to eye with management. It doesn't matter if you're responsible for IS, or the coffee fund, if you can't convince management that your involvement will save money, they probably won't listen. Keep in mind, you're also dealing with turf battles. I deal with this all the time.
You need to show that you're adding value. Did anyone recently buy any IT type stuff that turned out not to work and was a waste of money. Did it work but there were cheaper alternatives?
Look at things not just from a engineer level, but from a management level. How can you use IT to improve the business? Can you remove punch timecards and get an automated system? If you do that, how many hours a week will you save HR in compiling timecards and making out paychecks.
I think you get the idea, but basically if management doesn't want to listen to you as another manager and treats you like another lackey, then you either need to get a manager onboard to champion your causes, or you might as well give up.
That link you have is actually to products by Smartsight. They were bought by Verint, and the product line renamed to Nextiva.
Their stuff works very nicely, though it's tailored more for security applications. They have an S1100, which is wireless, though it will set you back 2000$ per endpoint(TV).
The other poster is correct, unless you have need for the serial connection or alarms, going with just wireless video is great.
If you want cheap, X10 has a package for under 100$
Perhaps, but corporate programs are intended to be installed and controlled centrally.
No matter how free spybot is, paying techs to install the app, keep it updated and scan PCs is a huge expense and a logistical nightmere.
You can't have users do it. Ideally, your users won't have admin rights, which makes it hard to remove spyware via any piece of software. Don't even get me started on the training issues.
Pelco makes pretty nice stuff. I'm not sure that a security solution is going to be what he's after. Unless combined with a keyboard or a serial connection, it would be too much of a pain to switch modes.
My company distributes Pelco, a MX4009CD - 9 input NTSC color multiplexer is going to run you about 1300$.
But as long as we're turning his living room into a CCTV paradise, we can put together a nice digital package. Unlimited video inputs, all digitized. They all get sent to a DVR server, recorded if he'd like, then we can output it to a dual screen PC with up to 16 videos each, in about a dozen different configurations, point and click to change the video setup. Figure 5000$ plus another 600$ per input.
Problem is, kids AREN'T going around shooting and killing each other, at least not in the US.
The FBI reports that crime overall has gone down steadily since 1994. The most recent stats show that 2004 had the lowest level of violence in over 3 decades.
I wish I could find the specific graphs on this, but here's the raw data for each year... and if you take the time to look at it, it also shows that juvenile crime specifically is at it's lowest level in over a decade.
What you want is a video mixer, like you might find at a TV station. Problem is, they're not cheap.
here's a 4 channel for about 1100$ US. And 8 channels for 2600$ US.
I don't know anything about this model, or really anything else. I suspect if you find something that does what you want, it will be far outside your budget.
No. Lets say we mount the users' home drive as drive letter H. You can do this with windows policies or a login script. No touching workstations. Then we configure the base install of OO.org to look in H:\ooo-settings\ for all it's config data.
Boom! Unique settings for each user without roaming profiles
A firefox plugin that enables ActiveX. I'll be sure to download that!
I use firefox as much to avoid the heavy-handed control Microsoft and other corporations are trying to exert over how my PC should operate. Just now I'm noticing that macromedia is poping up an icon in my system tray! Hello?, it's a browser plugin. It should only do stuff within the browser!
My experiences with Norton Ghost: The multicast feature can crash some networking equipment.
It's not just you, but it's not really Ghost's fault. I deal with multicast quite a bit, not just ghost. Multicast can be a pain. If you have network gear that isn't multicast aware (impliments IGMP), then you'll be a sad panda when you fire up ghost in multicast mode. One of the issues Ghost does have is the entire multicast goes at the speed of the slowest PC. So if you have a dodgy disk in a PC, your whole image might slow down to the point of stopping.
Cisco developed their own multicast standard, called CGMP, some older cisco switches "support" multicast, but only this older standard, which won't work with virtually anything else.
The point to remember is this - enable IGMP (also called IGMP pruning or IGMP sniffing) on every VLAN on every switch you intend to have multicast traffic on. On your router(s), enable PIM or DVMRP.
Not cheap. But it lets us create a hardware independant disk image and deploy it remotely to PCs. I believe it has some Linux support, but is mostly a windows product. It gathers hardware inventory on most any coporate level machine (including serial numbers). We can also build remote install packages to deply software and settings after images have been created.
While it keeps track of all the packages and images deployed, it doesn't automatically restore everything.
CA also has a similar product, it doesn't deploy images, only the windows unattended install stuff. However in addition to keeping track of packages, it will automatically redeploy them. Useful for when a HDD dies. You start the base image deployment, CA takes care of everything done since then.
Both packages support PXE boot and Wake On Lan. So you can remotely boot up a bare metal machine and get it operational.
These are pretty large programs, you'll want to talk to a sales person at those places and get a demo. Even if a demo is available, get them to demo it to you, you can't hope to learn the stuff in a couple days on your own.
eh? Internet2 is supposed to be fast, way, way fast. 100 mbit between machines and 1 mbit on the Internet2? That's as fast as my home network. At work, we have a 100 Mbit pipe to the Internet 1 and 2 Gigabit between servers. Don't even get me started on how fast I can transfer data between my CPU and cache memory. It's way l33t.
You keep using that word "Mbit". I do not think it means what you think it means.
what? So you're going to let some outside unknown party go into your network, examine logs, mirror ports, capture data and export it??
Sorry, no. Besides the obvious security and privacy issues, a network as large as this is far too complex to hand off a network diagram and list of passwords and expect anyone to reasonably gather any info.
So to uninstall this mess, they want me to go to a web site, hosted by the company who wrote the spyware/rootkit, and run an activeX control. Hahahahaha.
This is exactly the sort of thing that makes me channel Nancy Regan, and "Just Say NO!".
Windows user here, but when I have a problem to solve, I look first to Open Source, usually a search of sourceforge. There are some very nice OSS windows apps, as well as *nix apps ported to Win32. There are also a good number of "Windoze" type comments which do nothing but let me know the maturity level of the author(s).
Hint for the flamers - that maturity level would be low.
If I'm trying to get a OSS project into a predominatly windows shop, I already face some sort of battle. My CTO sees a polished salesperson offering a packaged product with SLAs; then they see me and the PFY. Don't give the salesperson ammo, be professional.
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There is a VNC like that. Get ultra-vnc along with the rc4 plugin. Generate your very own secure key and away you go.
It's similar to a Pix 501, but certainly not a pix 506e. If I could pick up a pix 501 for under $200 though for my house, it seems like a good deal. A shiny green cisco logo not required for equipment in my attic.
But for any size business I don't think a pix 501 is a good choice for a VPN concentrator.
If the submittor already has a Windows network, which is likely, is there any reason not to use the PPTP already built into the Windows servers?
It's coming...
Different company, but its the same guy who made the original, Chris Taylor. Though another company owns the TA name, he's said that Supreme Commander is the spiritual sequel to TA.
I have firefox 1.5.0.1 on windows xp with latest adblock and filterset G updater, nothing else.
I've noticed that web pages that refresh themselves cause a run-away memory situation. Specifically the win32 MRTG package from open innovations causes FF to use huge amounts of memory. It auto refreshes graphs I think every 10 seconds. If I leave a graph up on screen and leave for the weekend, FF will be using 1.8 GB memory when I come back on Monday. I've been unable to find out if this is a known problem or not, so I've not submitted this as a bug.
If it's similar at all to any of the Symantec home all in one AV type packages it will be an enormous mess. The last time I worked on this, a 256MB machine used 270 MB of memory with nothing but Windows XP home and the Norton package running. Worse, when I disabled things they didn't need, like the firewall or spam scanner, it didn't actually unload them from memory.
I stopped using Symantec for AV a while ago. But home users will still buy this for the same reason they buy a dishwasher with 19 different settings when all they ever use is the pots and pans setting.
An anecdote, but somehow fitting. A guy I worked with briefly was Chinese. He explained how his grandparents, who lived in Bejing, only within the last couple years learned what had occured in Tiananmen Square. They always knew that something had happened, but explained that the government controlled media simply told them there was a dangerous situation and that everyone was to remain in their homes or workplaces while the authorities dealt with the problem.
It took over 10 years, and I'd imagine news from their western children/grandchildren, before they knew what really occured. I find this amazing. It's a level of goverment control that I don't think most of us can really grasp.
I think a lot of his popularity has to deal with the fact that E=mc^2 is simple enough for anyone to remember. That and his theories were used to create the atomic bomb, ending WWII.
Those 2 things make Einstein much more tangible to the average person. One can remember what he actually did, and see an enormous practical application.
You mention what you plan on buying, but not what you're buying it for.
How many concurrent connections? How many VPN tunnels? How much bandwidth do you have? Most importantly, as others have mentioned, who is your admin? A firewall is only implimenting a set of access rules, the hard part is crafting those rules. Don't buy a Cisco firewall if your security guy only knows checkpoint. If you don't have a security guy, get one.
I'll assume if you have no firewall at all right now, and you're not talking about a lot of stuff, so my WAG would be to grab a PIX 515E unrestricted firewall. The PIX is pretty reliable, but if reliability is key, get 2 with the failover option. They're about 4 grand. 2 of them with failover will be 10.
Make sure you have a security policy (with teeth!!) for your employees, and that it's enforced. That policy will change as they discover more uses for their new firewall/Internet connection. Make sure management understands there is a security policy and that any changes involving the firewall need to be evaluted and added to the plan.
No.
Don't try to con the con, they've been at it longer than you have. That same web site is likely to try and exploit holes in your browser and start installing who knows what on your machine.
Basically you're not seeing eye to eye with management. It doesn't matter if you're responsible for IS, or the coffee fund, if you can't convince management that your involvement will save money, they probably won't listen. Keep in mind, you're also dealing with turf battles. I deal with this all the time.
You need to show that you're adding value. Did anyone recently buy any IT type stuff that turned out not to work and was a waste of money. Did it work but there were cheaper alternatives?
Look at things not just from a engineer level, but from a management level. How can you use IT to improve the business? Can you remove punch timecards and get an automated system? If you do that, how many hours a week will you save HR in compiling timecards and making out paychecks.
I think you get the idea, but basically if management doesn't want to listen to you as another manager and treats you like another lackey, then you either need to get a manager onboard to champion your causes, or you might as well give up.
That link you have is actually to products by Smartsight. They were bought by Verint, and the product line renamed to Nextiva.
Their stuff works very nicely, though it's tailored more for security applications. They have an S1100, which is wireless, though it will set you back 2000$ per endpoint(TV).
The other poster is correct, unless you have need for the serial connection or alarms, going with just wireless video is great.
If you want cheap, X10 has a package for under 100$
In Europe, Billion is typically used to mean the same number as Million in the US.
So to recap... Europe Billion = US Million = 1,000,000
Perhaps, but corporate programs are intended to be installed and controlled centrally.
No matter how free spybot is, paying techs to install the app, keep it updated and scan PCs is a huge expense and a logistical nightmere.
You can't have users do it. Ideally, your users won't have admin rights, which makes it hard to remove spyware via any piece of software. Don't even get me started on the training issues.
Oh yea, and since the point here is to contribute to the discussion... You reap what you sow. When those kids become adults, where will they shop?
Pelco makes pretty nice stuff. I'm not sure that a security solution is going to be what he's after. Unless combined with a keyboard or a serial connection, it would be too much of a pain to switch modes.
My company distributes Pelco, a MX4009CD - 9 input NTSC color multiplexer is going to run you about 1300$.
But as long as we're turning his living room into a CCTV paradise, we can put together a nice digital package. Unlimited video inputs, all digitized. They all get sent to a DVR server, recorded if he'd like, then we can output it to a dual screen PC with up to 16 videos each, in about a dozen different configurations, point and click to change the video setup. Figure 5000$ plus another 600$ per input.
Problem is, kids AREN'T going around shooting and killing each other, at least not in the US.
The FBI reports that crime overall has gone down steadily since 1994. The most recent stats show that 2004 had the lowest level of violence in over 3 decades.
I wish I could find the specific graphs on this, but here's the raw data for each year... and if you take the time to look at it, it also shows that juvenile crime specifically is at it's lowest level in over a decade.
What you want is a video mixer, like you might find at a TV station. Problem is, they're not cheap.
here's a 4 channel for about 1100$ US. And 8 channels for 2600$ US.
I don't know anything about this model, or really anything else. I suspect if you find something that does what you want, it will be far outside your budget.
No. Lets say we mount the users' home drive as drive letter H. You can do this with windows policies or a login script. No touching workstations. Then we configure the base install of OO.org to look in H:\ooo-settings\ for all it's config data.
Boom! Unique settings for each user without roaming profiles
A firefox plugin that enables ActiveX. I'll be sure to download that!
I use firefox as much to avoid the heavy-handed control Microsoft and other corporations are trying to exert over how my PC should operate. Just now I'm noticing that macromedia is poping up an icon in my system tray! Hello?, it's a browser plugin. It should only do stuff within the browser!
My experiences with Norton Ghost: The multicast feature can crash some networking equipment.
It's not just you, but it's not really Ghost's fault. I deal with multicast quite a bit, not just ghost. Multicast can be a pain. If you have network gear that isn't multicast aware (impliments IGMP), then you'll be a sad panda when you fire up ghost in multicast mode. One of the issues Ghost does have is the entire multicast goes at the speed of the slowest PC. So if you have a dodgy disk in a PC, your whole image might slow down to the point of stopping.
Cisco developed their own multicast standard, called CGMP, some older cisco switches "support" multicast, but only this older standard, which won't work with virtually anything else.
The point to remember is this - enable IGMP (also called IGMP pruning or IGMP sniffing) on every VLAN on every switch you intend to have multicast traffic on. On your router(s), enable PIM or DVMRP.
Not cheap. But it lets us create a hardware independant disk image and deploy it remotely to PCs. I believe it has some Linux support, but is mostly a windows product. It gathers hardware inventory on most any coporate level machine (including serial numbers). We can also build remote install packages to deply software and settings after images have been created.
While it keeps track of all the packages and images deployed, it doesn't automatically restore everything.
CA also has a similar product, it doesn't deploy images, only the windows unattended install stuff. However in addition to keeping track of packages, it will automatically redeploy them. Useful for when a HDD dies. You start the base image deployment, CA takes care of everything done since then.
Both packages support PXE boot and Wake On Lan. So you can remotely boot up a bare metal machine and get it operational.
These are pretty large programs, you'll want to talk to a sales person at those places and get a demo. Even if a demo is available, get them to demo it to you, you can't hope to learn the stuff in a couple days on your own.
eh? Internet2 is supposed to be fast, way, way fast. 100 mbit between machines and 1 mbit on the Internet2? That's as fast as my home network. At work, we have a 100 Mbit pipe to the Internet 1 and 2 Gigabit between servers. Don't even get me started on how fast I can transfer data between my CPU and cache memory. It's way l33t.
You keep using that word "Mbit". I do not think it means what you think it means.
what? So you're going to let some outside unknown party go into your network, examine logs, mirror ports, capture data and export it??
Sorry, no. Besides the obvious security and privacy issues, a network as large as this is far too complex to hand off a network diagram and list of passwords and expect anyone to reasonably gather any info.
So to uninstall this mess, they want me to go to a web site, hosted by the company who wrote the spyware/rootkit, and run an activeX control. Hahahahaha.
This is exactly the sort of thing that makes me channel Nancy Regan, and "Just Say NO!".
Windows user here, but when I have a problem to solve, I look first to Open Source, usually a search of sourceforge.
There are some very nice OSS windows apps, as well as *nix apps ported to Win32. There are also a good number of "Windoze" type comments which do nothing but let me know the maturity level of the author(s).
Hint for the flamers - that maturity level would be low.
If I'm trying to get a OSS project into a predominatly windows shop, I already face some sort of battle. My CTO sees a polished salesperson offering a packaged product with SLAs; then they see me and the PFY. Don't give the salesperson ammo, be professional.