Good points. I'm paying in blood for the security snippet. I'll say it again: having security at the OS authentication is inherently more sound/secure. When you have a huge corporation with sites all over north america on all sorts of connections (dialup, etc.), you tend to compromise security in order to streamline support. With exchange/outlook/active directory, this is handled better out-of-the-box. Something like lotes is more easily secured on a smaller network (LAN).
Yes, the guy who setup our lotes was a noob. No, it wasn't me....
At the risk of being modded down as a troll I offer this:
From a business perspective, as we were evaluating whether to go with Exchange or Lotes, IBM majorly dropped the ball. Microsoft courted us heavily, sending people in on a regular basis, phone calls, one-on-ones, etc. We tried communicating with lotes reps and they wouldn't even return our calls at times. They had had our business for years after all. Finally, once the decision had been made, the money spent, and we were well on our way to Exchange, two IBM guys came in with a "wtf" attitude. We tried telling them that they never took the time to make any offers about anything -- not even any money offers to try to out-bid Microsoft. About the only thing I remember from the meeting is the guy saying he didn't realize how serious the situation was and that IT education is meaningless. I agree with him, almost, on the last point.
So, from my experience, IBM/Lotes totally sucks at business. Mind you, I didn't care, but management did, and they went with the company that did the dealing and wheeling, saved money on licenses (beating lotes), etc.
So, mark me a troll again if ya want. I've been nothing but factual in all these posts today....
Oh I agree. Lotes, with separate.id and.nsf files is easier to support. There's a trade-off with security/support in any tech work. Exchange/Outlook, out-of-the-box, is more secure and more of a pain if someone, say, 'leaves' the company and you are not to change their AD password, but still need to get to their mail file. In that case, we do a restore of their mail storage to a test domain and change the AD password there. This would be a cinch in lotes.
I know I was hard on lotes originally, and it does have it bright spots, but overall, I still have to say I'd prefer at least two other platforms before using it again....
I'm all for bashing MS as much as you, but exchange ain't bad at all. The way microsoft chose to snub its nose at age-old smtp commands and screw with cisco pix configuration (mail guard?) was a pisser (they decided to spell "hello" right -- the nerve!!!). And I hate the way microsoft can finally get it right by copying others. I still stand by what I said that I prefer Squirrelmail to all others. Still, Exchange/Outlook is both useable, great interface and pretty darn secure out-of-the-box. I am majorly repeating myself now. Sum up: OS, interactive authentication to the mail storage; the mail storage embedded in the greater mail database, and I do believe default encryption -- unlike lotes....
Maybe I should repeat the part where I did this for 2 or 3 years 2 or 3 years ago....
My facts are all correct. And you can believe what you want. The thing is crap. Yes, for support purposes, we created.id files with generic passwords and then let the user set a copy for themselves. As I've responded above, out-of-the-box, lotes lends itself to worse support and, therefore, worse security. Handing-off authentication to the OS is far more supportable and secure.
No email administrator who had worked with the main platforms out there would, in his right mind, choose lotes....
10 years? You poor man. I'm sure you read the same mule-choking lotes admin books I have which have to spend some time apologizing in each chapter....
We run exchange/outlook and have no problems with viruses. Even without patching regularly, I've seen no problems with it -- good virus defs seem to be enough.
I concur that lotes security 'can' be good, but out-of-the-box, exchange/sendmail is far better. Microsoft got security right with exchange. Relying on authentication at the OS-level & the interactive logon for your email is far more secure and supportable than dealing with the disjointed nature of lotes with its grabable.id files and.nsf files. Exchange mail storage for each user is contained within the great storage database. To hack it, you'd have to grab the entire thing -- all user's mail storage. If you decide to try and hack a user's password, then you have to deal with AD security/logging. The only hole I see in Exchange/Outlook is the.pst file which is the closest resemblance to the disjointed lotes architecture.
You may be right. I think the issue was that, for support, user's mail databases/ids were created by a support tech and a copy stored on a server with a generic pw. Even if the user changed their password, their original.id file could be copied over and the mail database gotten into....trying to remember.
Still, the disjointed nature of it all -- mail database files being separate from a larger database, authentication occuring via the local app and not the main interactive logon to the OS, etc., lent itself to bad security. Out-of-the-box, Exchange is far more secure. No one's going to quickly grab the storage facility of an exchange server....
I administered email for a large corporation. I installed, setup, configured, made-route-to-one-another email across Lotes (lotus notes, or should I say "domino" -- wtf with the naming?), exchange & sendmail. Of all the email server/client platforms, lotes was the worst.
The client, alone, was the most horrible thing witnessed upon a tech. Let's see if I remember: turning on auto spell check and having a certain amount of hyphens in your sig would unquestionably crash the client each and every time. There was absolutely no knowledge on this error and I had to figure it out myself as several users had such a sig with spell check set to auto (maybe there's a knowledge-base doc on it now).
It was impossible to totally close the open relay in version 5.08 I think it was. I had an on-going argument with the orbs blacklist on this, begging them to cut me some slack as users on my network could not route email to certain servers running the blacklist. The issue was finally resolved by taking away lotes as the public mail gateway.
Back to the client: in certain versions of the client, if you edited the text-based config file, and didn't put in a hard return at the end of the final line, the thing would refuse to attach to the server. This was another one I had to figure out on my own.
Security: lotes was incredibly easy to crack as far as getting into a user's email. Simply grab their.id file, copy it to your local machine, and change the password on it. Viola! You can now read their mail database. Out-of-the-box, this was dumb. Exchange & sendmail were inherently much more secure (and lotes was written for the CIA?).
Interface: both the client and the server had the most incredibly stupid interfaces ever designed. What sort of crack were the developers on? I could have forgiven the server if the console came with all the commands, and more, than the GUI could offer, but it didn't. Most of the time, you had to use the GUI and it blew chunks hard. I remember taking an advanced lotes class and even the instructor got lost in the GUI and continued the lesson (in theory).
Yes, this is/was a rant, but some where there is a review of the client rating it the worst application ever designed. Mind you, I was all for lotes at one point, mostly because it's all I ever knew. Exchange and Sendmail are far more elegant to use -- Exchange mostly cuz it's ripped everything from Sendmail.
Of all the mail servers I've ever setup and ran, I prefer Squirrelmail. No, I am no email expert or know-it-all, and I've not done it in several years now. My entire time was about 2 to 3 years, and I had to figure out some pretty big routing between Lotes, Exchange & Sendmail (I used Sendmail to handle all routing between Lotes and Exchange as we migrated). I had Squirrel mail pulling users from Active Directory, but as an admin it was very sweet and to the point with the best documentation IMO. Unfortunately, I let management see the little squirrel graphic, and it never had a chance after that....
Bill Gates: How do you build Linux?
Boy: You cannot build Linux. That's impossible. You can only realize the truth.
Bill Gates: What truth?
Boy: That there is no Linux. It is not you who builds Linux. It is Linux who builds you....
From my limited understanding, Iran couldn't conquer the-much-stronger Iraq (before the Gulf War whittled it down to a nub) in a decade's worth of fighting. The U.S. annihilated Iraqi armed forces ("the fourth largest army in the world") with such ease that it made military history hallmarks. I read the same sort of fearsome predictions back then about Iraq -- russian t-series tanks, south african-made artillery (the best in the world, arguably, due to the influence of gerald buhl I think was his name), and not to mention the specter of chemical warfare as sadam had used against his internal and external enemies.
Still, it didn't make a hang of a difference. The Iraqi forces were leveled and the contest was extremely lop-sided. In Afghanistan, prior to the invasion there, I heard the same-type-stuff. Don't do it. Russia couldn't, and before them the British had a hell of a time, but the U.S. pulled off quite a spectacle of military might.
It is arguable and time will tell what will become of these conquests in the long-term. Nations are not built in a day, and Japan and Germany, post ww2, took some time to convert into working, free governments. But even if it fails the military achievement of simply knocking-out an opposing military force cannot be argued in recent American endeavors. Hannibal was eventually put down by the Romans, but not before putting his name in the history books with spectacular battlefield victories.
Whether the U.S. is right or wrong I'm not arguing, but I am stating that it is the most powerful military force on the planet, and arguments against that fact ignore recent achievements, not to mention its entire history (queue George Carlin, "we've been in a lot of f*cking wars!").
The Internet does not exist by IP routing alone....
STP prevents loops that will take a network down. We are currently going through all of our layer 2 switches and enabling it as loops have cost us a lot. Yes, our network uses IP routing to run, but that doesn't negate any layer beneath layer 3. The layers build on one another, and, thus, her invention provided stability for layer 2 and everything above it....
You forgot: ruins small businesses -- family country stores ran by generations suddenly without a prayer to compete.
You also forgot: ruins medium sized businesses who have had a half dozen stores across several counties and cities, suddenly and entirely eclipsed by this juggernaut that bestrides the narrow world as a colossus.
You also forgot: a company that has the most successful jewelry business... alone, that has the most successful eye exam/retail business... alone, that has the most single successful ANYTHING.
You also forgot: a company that single-handidly decides what game makers should produce and what other business that create products should do as they are entirely owned and controlled by Walmart.
I've been reading Dvorak for years -- heck, since the early 90s I guess. Off and on that is. I enjoyed watching his boring show on techtv and his failed banterings with leo laporte too. Is he a troll? Yes. Is he sometimes right? Yes. Is he always nutty? Yes. Did he predict a 2 inch floppy drive? Yes. Is he worth reading? Sometimes. All of the above is true, but not all, all of the time.
In the case of this latest article regarding IE -- I tend to agree. I do not agree that there will be a 2 inch floppy disk....
Things are massively better (no pun) now with wow (didn't mean to rhyme there either) than when I played eq1 for some 4 or 5 years several years ago. Brad McQuaid gave himself a 60 ranger -- which he never leveled -- and handed it a fiery avenger (which that class couldn't use). He would log in, gather players around and then kill them -- quite fun I'm sure. And then, the other ops nazi, Abashi, would taunt players on the official message board by basically telling them they were stupid and what they said didn't matter. Sys admins were absent from the game or if there would commonly do things such as pull a group of players into "rooms" to tongue lash them, or spawn them in front of an epic dragon where they were killed over and over.
Also, some people published things on websites that had nothing to do with EQ or Verant/Sony, and were consequently banned from the game (Mystere and Tweety -- google it).
To top it all off, you could easily grief people on PvE servers by training mobs onto them, offering a duel to noobs and telling them "type/d for devotion," and exploit tons of other things.
All of this was backed up by Verant's "Your in our world now," which nicely summed-up the attitude of the ops nazis described above.
Verant made the game personal and those guys were power-drunken ops nazis as bad as I've ever seen (we've all dealt with 'em in irc channels). In the least, Blizzard and other modern MMOGs are professional and I've received prompt service everytime I've asked for help. The game is well done and runs great and flows nicely in story-line with WC3 (well done Bliz).
I'm not going to try and answer how they should run their data center (I work with one too), but that game is hammered with players and runs fine when I log in. Yes, the 30 min queues suck, but I figure they'll deal with it. They don't want to lose players and will do whatever it takes in order to keep the bucks. It'll just take a bit of time to catch up to the glut of new accounts....
So, you're basically saying that because a government is well known for taking action against those things that threaten it, then only an idiot would do those things.
By that logic, only idiots harbored and read books during the third reich....
Slashdot Mirror
Good points. I'm paying in blood for the security snippet. I'll say it again: having security at the OS authentication is inherently more sound/secure. When you have a huge corporation with sites all over north america on all sorts of connections (dialup, etc.), you tend to compromise security in order to streamline support. With exchange/outlook/active directory, this is handled better out-of-the-box. Something like lotes is more easily secured on a smaller network (LAN).
Yes, the guy who setup our lotes was a noob. No, it wasn't me....
At the risk of being modded down as a troll I offer this:
From a business perspective, as we were evaluating whether to go with Exchange or Lotes, IBM majorly dropped the ball. Microsoft courted us heavily, sending people in on a regular basis, phone calls, one-on-ones, etc. We tried communicating with lotes reps and they wouldn't even return our calls at times. They had had our business for years after all. Finally, once the decision had been made, the money spent, and we were well on our way to Exchange, two IBM guys came in with a "wtf" attitude. We tried telling them that they never took the time to make any offers about anything -- not even any money offers to try to out-bid Microsoft. About the only thing I remember from the meeting is the guy saying he didn't realize how serious the situation was and that IT education is meaningless. I agree with him, almost, on the last point.
So, from my experience, IBM/Lotes totally sucks at business. Mind you, I didn't care, but management did, and they went with the company that did the dealing and wheeling, saved money on licenses (beating lotes), etc.
So, mark me a troll again if ya want. I've been nothing but factual in all these posts today....
Oh I agree. Lotes, with separate .id and .nsf files is easier to support. There's a trade-off with security/support in any tech work. Exchange/Outlook, out-of-the-box, is more secure and more of a pain if someone, say, 'leaves' the company and you are not to change their AD password, but still need to get to their mail file. In that case, we do a restore of their mail storage to a test domain and change the AD password there. This would be a cinch in lotes.
I know I was hard on lotes originally, and it does have it bright spots, but overall, I still have to say I'd prefer at least two other platforms before using it again....
I'm all for bashing MS as much as you, but exchange ain't bad at all. The way microsoft chose to snub its nose at age-old smtp commands and screw with cisco pix configuration (mail guard?) was a pisser (they decided to spell "hello" right -- the nerve!!!). And I hate the way microsoft can finally get it right by copying others. I still stand by what I said that I prefer Squirrelmail to all others. Still, Exchange/Outlook is both useable, great interface and pretty darn secure out-of-the-box. I am majorly repeating myself now. Sum up: OS, interactive authentication to the mail storage; the mail storage embedded in the greater mail database, and I do believe default encryption -- unlike lotes....
Maybe I should repeat the part where I did this for 2 or 3 years 2 or 3 years ago....
My facts are all correct. And you can believe what you want. The thing is crap. Yes, for support purposes, we created .id files with generic passwords and then let the user set a copy for themselves. As I've responded above, out-of-the-box, lotes lends itself to worse support and, therefore, worse security. Handing-off authentication to the OS is far more supportable and secure.
No email administrator who had worked with the main platforms out there would, in his right mind, choose lotes....
10 years? You poor man. I'm sure you read the same mule-choking lotes admin books I have which have to spend some time apologizing in each chapter....
We run exchange/outlook and have no problems with viruses. Even without patching regularly, I've seen no problems with it -- good virus defs seem to be enough.
.id files and .nsf files. Exchange mail storage for each user is contained within the great storage database. To hack it, you'd have to grab the entire thing -- all user's mail storage. If you decide to try and hack a user's password, then you have to deal with AD security/logging. The only hole I see in Exchange/Outlook is the .pst file which is the closest resemblance to the disjointed lotes architecture.
I concur that lotes security 'can' be good, but out-of-the-box, exchange/sendmail is far better. Microsoft got security right with exchange. Relying on authentication at the OS-level & the interactive logon for your email is far more secure and supportable than dealing with the disjointed nature of lotes with its grabable
You may be right. I think the issue was that, for support, user's mail databases/ids were created by a support tech and a copy stored on a server with a generic pw. Even if the user changed their password, their original .id file could be copied over and the mail database gotten into. ...trying to remember.
Still, the disjointed nature of it all -- mail database files being separate from a larger database, authentication occuring via the local app and not the main interactive logon to the OS, etc., lent itself to bad security. Out-of-the-box, Exchange is far more secure. No one's going to quickly grab the storage facility of an exchange server....
I administered email for a large corporation. I installed, setup, configured, made-route-to-one-another email across Lotes (lotus notes, or should I say "domino" -- wtf with the naming?), exchange & sendmail. Of all the email server/client platforms, lotes was the worst.
.id file, copy it to your local machine, and change the password on it. Viola! You can now read their mail database. Out-of-the-box, this was dumb. Exchange & sendmail were inherently much more secure (and lotes was written for the CIA?).
The client, alone, was the most horrible thing witnessed upon a tech. Let's see if I remember: turning on auto spell check and having a certain amount of hyphens in your sig would unquestionably crash the client each and every time. There was absolutely no knowledge on this error and I had to figure it out myself as several users had such a sig with spell check set to auto (maybe there's a knowledge-base doc on it now).
It was impossible to totally close the open relay in version 5.08 I think it was. I had an on-going argument with the orbs blacklist on this, begging them to cut me some slack as users on my network could not route email to certain servers running the blacklist. The issue was finally resolved by taking away lotes as the public mail gateway.
Back to the client: in certain versions of the client, if you edited the text-based config file, and didn't put in a hard return at the end of the final line, the thing would refuse to attach to the server. This was another one I had to figure out on my own.
Security: lotes was incredibly easy to crack as far as getting into a user's email. Simply grab their
Interface: both the client and the server had the most incredibly stupid interfaces ever designed. What sort of crack were the developers on? I could have forgiven the server if the console came with all the commands, and more, than the GUI could offer, but it didn't. Most of the time, you had to use the GUI and it blew chunks hard. I remember taking an advanced lotes class and even the instructor got lost in the GUI and continued the lesson (in theory).
Yes, this is/was a rant, but some where there is a review of the client rating it the worst application ever designed. Mind you, I was all for lotes at one point, mostly because it's all I ever knew. Exchange and Sendmail are far more elegant to use -- Exchange mostly cuz it's ripped everything from Sendmail.
Of all the mail servers I've ever setup and ran, I prefer Squirrelmail. No, I am no email expert or know-it-all, and I've not done it in several years now. My entire time was about 2 to 3 years, and I had to figure out some pretty big routing between Lotes, Exchange & Sendmail (I used Sendmail to handle all routing between Lotes and Exchange as we migrated). I had Squirrel mail pulling users from Active Directory, but as an admin it was very sweet and to the point with the best documentation IMO. Unfortunately, I let management see the little squirrel graphic, and it never had a chance after that....
I'm sure they're willing. They're great danes....
The one OS to rule them all....
I guess that would make Richard Stallman the IBM of Microsoft....
Or something. My head is spinning....
Bill Gates: How do you build Linux?
Boy: You cannot build Linux. That's impossible. You can only realize the truth.
Bill Gates: What truth?
Boy: That there is no Linux. It is not you who builds Linux. It is Linux who builds you....
evenish
Was that spoken by the sindarian or laiquendi in middle earth?
He meant:
This hack may be ok for my workstation, but I wouldn't do it to my gaming rig.
I do agree that if we can be sure of anything it is the past....
Good comments. But for the most part, you've proven my point.
From my limited understanding, Iran couldn't conquer the-much-stronger Iraq (before the Gulf War whittled it down to a nub) in a decade's worth of fighting. The U.S. annihilated Iraqi armed forces ("the fourth largest army in the world") with such ease that it made military history hallmarks. I read the same sort of fearsome predictions back then about Iraq -- russian t-series tanks, south african-made artillery (the best in the world, arguably, due to the influence of gerald buhl I think was his name), and not to mention the specter of chemical warfare as sadam had used against his internal and external enemies.
Still, it didn't make a hang of a difference. The Iraqi forces were leveled and the contest was extremely lop-sided. In Afghanistan, prior to the invasion there, I heard the same-type-stuff. Don't do it. Russia couldn't, and before them the British had a hell of a time, but the U.S. pulled off quite a spectacle of military might.
It is arguable and time will tell what will become of these conquests in the long-term. Nations are not built in a day, and Japan and Germany, post ww2, took some time to convert into working, free governments. But even if it fails the military achievement of simply knocking-out an opposing military force cannot be argued in recent American endeavors. Hannibal was eventually put down by the Romans, but not before putting his name in the history books with spectacular battlefield victories.
Whether the U.S. is right or wrong I'm not arguing, but I am stating that it is the most powerful military force on the planet, and arguments against that fact ignore recent achievements, not to mention its entire history (queue George Carlin, "we've been in a lot of f*cking wars!").
The Internet does not exist by IP routing alone....
STP prevents loops that will take a network down. We are currently going through all of our layer 2 switches and enabling it as loops have cost us a lot. Yes, our network uses IP routing to run, but that doesn't negate any layer beneath layer 3. The layers build on one another, and, thus, her invention provided stability for layer 2 and everything above it....
You forgot: ruins small businesses -- family country stores ran by generations suddenly without a prayer to compete.
... alone, that has the most successful eye exam/retail business ... alone, that has the most single successful ANYTHING.
You also forgot: ruins medium sized businesses who have had a half dozen stores across several counties and cities, suddenly and entirely eclipsed by this juggernaut that bestrides the narrow world as a colossus.
You also forgot: a company that has the most successful jewelry business
You also forgot: a company that single-handidly decides what game makers should produce and what other business that create products should do as they are entirely owned and controlled by Walmart.
+1 Funny
+1 Redundant
I've been reading Dvorak for years -- heck, since the early 90s I guess. Off and on that is. I enjoyed watching his boring show on techtv and his failed banterings with leo laporte too. Is he a troll? Yes. Is he sometimes right? Yes. Is he always nutty? Yes. Did he predict a 2 inch floppy drive? Yes. Is he worth reading? Sometimes. All of the above is true, but not all, all of the time.
In the case of this latest article regarding IE -- I tend to agree. I do not agree that there will be a 2 inch floppy disk....
I meant to say, "WoW is huge." ...Darn html....
Things are massively better (no pun) now with wow (didn't mean to rhyme there either) than when I played eq1 for some 4 or 5 years several years ago. Brad McQuaid gave himself a 60 ranger -- which he never leveled -- and handed it a fiery avenger (which that class couldn't use). He would log in, gather players around and then kill them -- quite fun I'm sure. And then, the other ops nazi, Abashi, would taunt players on the official message board by basically telling them they were stupid and what they said didn't matter. Sys admins were absent from the game or if there would commonly do things such as pull a group of players into "rooms" to tongue lash them, or spawn them in front of an epic dragon where they were killed over and over.
/d for devotion," and exploit tons of other things.
Also, some people published things on websites that had nothing to do with EQ or Verant/Sony, and were consequently banned from the game (Mystere and Tweety -- google it).
To top it all off, you could easily grief people on PvE servers by training mobs onto them, offering a duel to noobs and telling them "type
All of this was backed up by Verant's "Your in our world now," which nicely summed-up the attitude of the ops nazis described above.
Verant made the game personal and those guys were power-drunken ops nazis as bad as I've ever seen (we've all dealt with 'em in irc channels). In the least, Blizzard and other modern MMOGs are professional and I've received prompt service everytime I've asked for help. The game is well done and runs great and flows nicely in story-line with WC3 (well done Bliz).
I'm not going to try and answer how they should run their data center (I work with one too), but that game is hammered with players and runs fine when I log in. Yes, the 30 min queues suck, but I figure they'll deal with it. They don't want to lose players and will do whatever it takes in order to keep the bucks. It'll just take a bit of time to catch up to the glut of new accounts....
WoW is huge
How does this affect 88MPH and the need for 1.21 jiggawatts?....
So, you're basically saying that because a government is well known for taking action against those things that threaten it, then only an idiot would do those things.
By that logic, only idiots harbored and read books during the third reich....