Maybe I'm not understanding the level this occurs at, but doesn't that lock out any of your employees sending work email from a home account using their work return address? Or an employee without VPN access emailing the company from the road?
Why are employees sending work emails from a home account? Offer them a HTTPS webmail server to deal with those cases. (IOW, there are technical fixes for the border cases such as webmail, VPN, 800 number dial-up access or using a dial-up ISP account.)
Don't some industries have laws requiring them to keep track of all e-mail that is work-related? Kind of difficult to do if your employees are not routing their work e-mail through your central SMTP server.
Bottom-line, if you allow forgery of your domain in one case, there's no way to disprove other forgeries of your domain. (Well, maybe with a permissive SPF record.)
I really doubt that there are a lot of ordinary people that sit at their PC's with a microphone making phone calls.
Gamers, especially online gamers, tend to be users of voice chat products. Those are the sorts of people who I'd expect to make phone calls via their PC. I wouldn't classify all of them as geeks (a lot of them are rather techno-illiterate).
But I also know some average joes who are interested in VOIP for the cost-savings (Vonage is frequently mentioned).
I love the power my system has, but the heat and noise the thing puts out is driving me up the wall these days. I'm starting to put a lot of consideration into either watercooling the thing or going mini-ITX.
A good case can fix a bit of that.
Using 80mm case fans? Switch to a case that uses 120mm fans (same airflow, fewer RPMs, less noise). Using old noisy ball-bearing drives? Switch to the newer fluid ones (FDBs). Noisy CPU fan? Go shopping for a new quieter one. Using half a dozen small drives? Switch to a pair of large ones.
A little empathy goes a long way. Even if I'm in the right in requesting something, I try to do so in a way that works with the person on the other end. Or I try to find out why they can't meet my needs and what the options are.
Oh, and since this thread is about crappy service... In Information Week (6/12/06, pg 11) Paul English of Kayak.com says (in part) "Dell is in a customer service death spiral." That's being kind. I couldn't agree more. Virtually every customer (90%+) complained of long hold times, 4 to 6 hour or more troubleshooting sessions from brain dead techs or the guy named Sam or Fred that couldn't speak understandable english. Then when Dell did customer service surveys they'd complain LOUDLY and Dell would blame us because their shit didn't stink.
There was also an article mention on a recent copy of BusinessWeek (2 weeks ago? I've already tossed that issue) talking about (3) companies and how their customer service woes are impacting the bottom line.
Also mentioned was Northwest airlines and another company that I can't recall.
Personally I have been trying to get the company to go away from dell for the next round due to the nasty problems but they like the 3+ years extended service agreement.
Last time I looked, all business-class laptops offered extended service warranties. Lenovo offers a 5 year warranty extension and Toshiba offers at least 3 years. So I suspect there's a different reason at work.
(And from what I've seen ThinkPads are built like tanks and some of the Toshiba Tecras are pretty sturdy as well.)
And I don't know of any other database (free or otherwise) that can support that kind of fine-grained access control without coding. (I'm sure someone will correct me, if I'm wrong here)
I'm curious as well. (Although I think I can meet my needs with customized views... maybe... I'm still thinking about the architecture / design.)
We go the low-tech route for our laptops / home users using Knoppix+NTFSClone (periodic images of the O/S) along with SecondCopy (for the data files, which runs every few hours) copying to encrypted USB/Firewire drives protected by TrueCrypt. TrueCrypt does very well in that scenario with good performance and SecondCopy is a very good file-level backup tool for user files.
The hard part is files that are open all the time (such as Outlook PSTs). Mostly, we rely on a batch file that zips them up after logging in (and SecondCopy then sweeps the ZIP files to the external drive). Or we use Acronis TrueImage which images the drive in the background.
Personally, I have multiple 300GB drives that I've mounted in StarTech DRW115 drive trays shoved into a BYTECC FireWire drive (I think the ME-320U2F). I had to drill 4 holes in the enclosure to mount the removable drive bay and it sticks out slightly, but it's working very well. If I didn't already own the drive trays, I'd have simply bought BYTECC ME-835U2F units which are aluminum, built-in P/S and include a fan to cool the hard drive directly. So far I've been rotating drives on a weekly basis with no issues.
We've also considered whole-disk encryption systems like the DriveCrypt Plus Pack. CPU speeds are finally high enough (and have been for a few years) where it wouldn't be a significant performance hit.
Knoppix + NTFSClone are your friend in situations like that. The next time you set it up, image it. Then you only have to spend about 15 minutes the next time to restore the drive image. (Backing up user data is another matter, best handled at the file level.)
(The big exception to the "four-year-old computer is fine" thing is laptops. Even so, probably anything with 512 MB RAM would work.)
Well, I'm still using a 4 year old laptop. And this laptop will probably still be in service for another 4+ years barring any catastrophic failures. (Things leveled off about 4 years ago in terms of performance increase per year.)
It probably helps that it's a business class Tecra 9100 with 1GB of RAM. Which exceeds your 512MB criteria. Plus I can give it to a less demanding user who will not tax it, giving it a few more years of life. Heck, the main reason that I want to replace it is that 1GB of RAM isn't enough for my work style (I really need 2 or 3GB).
Our expected lifespan for a system that we buy today is now 8-10 years. That's up from a 6 year lifespan of systems bought in 2006. We just make sure to buy them with 1GB or 2GB of RAM with expansion options for more. The systems slowly move down the food chain from people who tax their machines to people who are mostly doing word processing or data entry.
4096 bit symetrical encryption is simply overkill. For a block cipher like AES / Blowfish / Twofish / Serpent, 128 bits is considered secure and 256 bits is considered secure for 50-100 years.
Take a look at Practical Cryptography.
Most of the time, people who toss around 2048 and 4096 bit numbers are confusing the key sizes used for asymetric ciphers like Public Key Cryptography and the key sizes used for symetric ciphers like AES, Blowfish, etc. Asymetric ciphers require large bit counts due to the mathmatics involved (and are also slow as molasses).
The only blacklists that I support are the ones based on testing for open-relays.
That's an objective measure. I can get behind that concept.
The rest of the blacklists typically turn into power-monger-fests where the admins get a power-rush from blacklisting large swaths of the network. All it takes is one stupid user, who decides that rather then follow the unsubscribe instructions printed at the bottom of every e-mail, they'd rather report you as a spammer and get you blocked.
Hell, it wouldn't surprise me if it's a competitor who does in order to harm your business.
I'm counting real-world values based on what I see in PerfMon when monitoring the PhysicalDisk object. My sample interval is 72 seconds (for a 2-hour window) or 288 seconds (for an 8-hour window).
From what I've seen, copying from 250GB to 250GB (both SATA drives or one SATA and one PATA) gets me 25-40MB/s read and 25-40MB/s write. Whether that's running into some other sort of bottleneck or is simply a limitation of the O/S (WinXP) and file system (NTFS) is beyond what I care about. Copying between the 500GB drives is a bit faster, but I think I'm running into the limits of what the SATA controller can do.
Most of the 40GB PATA drives that I have laying around here were never speed demons, typically in the 15-20MB/s range at the upper end. But they may have been the less-dense / more-platter designs. (Higher bit density on a platter directly drives transfer rate for a given RPM.)
The newer perpendicular recording drives will give us a good speed increase due to the higher bit density.
Personally, I've grown very fond of Software RAID. Especially mdadm.
I've dealt with both (hardware RAID, hardware RAID that is really software RAID and Linux Software RAID) and for a smaller company, Software RAID wins out. I don't have to worry about driver issues, I don't have to worry about keeping 2 extra RAID controllers on-hand in case the first one fries, and I can move the disks to another machine with different hardware and still get the RAID back up and running.
Software RAID seems very flexible when compared to the hardware cards and performance is typically pretty good.
More modern drives (250GB+) can sustain 20-25MB/s as long as only one application is touching the spindle (extraneous seeks will usually trash ATA drive performance). Some of the larger 500GB drives are closer to 30-35MB/s for SATA/PATA. I've even seen peaks of 40MB/s when pulling from one spindle and writing to another (40MB/s read and 40MB/s write).
And personally, I wouldn't capture 640x400 at 24bits without using a lossless codec like HuffYUV. That cuts the size down a good bit without sacrificing quality. HDTV captures are still pretty hefty though.
The problem with the car analogy is that cars are specialized machines and computers are general purpose machines.
Your analogy makes more sense if you apply it to a specific application within a computer system, such as the web browser. Most people, once they learn how web browsers work can move to other web browsers without too many issues. (i.e. most web browsers include "back", "forward", "bookmark", "address line" functionality).
Heck, it's a good use of a blog. Anytime I run into a technical issue that stumps me, I create a blog entry with the problem, my attempts and the ultimate solution.
Easy to publish, doesn't matter that it's not indexed 6 ways to Sunday and it doesn't matter that it's stored in reverse-calendar order. Odds are high that anyone who stumbles across it probably hit the page directly from a search engine anyway.
Also makes for a nice "I know I fixed that last year..." archive for the absent minded.
Indeed, SuperCat is a wonderful program. Each index for a CD/DVD is a standalone file so it's easy to put them on a shared LAN drive and move them around as needed.
I use the 128/192 CD binders that hold (4) CDs per page in a 2x2 grid (8 CDs per leaf). Each binder holds a category / classification and I simply store them in calendar order (these are data archives where the disks are named SYS2005[ABC] or BKP0512[ABC]). Works fairly well and lets me pull data off the shelf behind me in quick order but without taking up lots of space.
For Music CDs... rip to FLAC and store the CD in a box. My car has a CD/MP3 player so I just convert the FLACs to MP3s for use there. At home, I mostly listen to music on the laptop while working so FLAC (actually 256Kbps MP3) works well.
DVDs are another issue. My current solution is getting two "chests of drawers" made by a local furniture maker. I'll be storing the DVDs, spine-up, inside each drawer. The drawers are about 16" deep inside (holding 16 linear inches of DVDs) and wide enough to allow me to fit 4 columns across. Add it all up and each piece of furniture holds 256 linear inches (4x16 x 4 drawers). Getting the rear-most DVD out of a column might be tricky, but only if I over-fill a particular column.
I think it will look very nice and I won't have huge shelves filled with DVDs lining the walls. I'm not worried about the browse ability because I know what's in each drawer already. And it will be a lot less obvious that I have a large DVD collection until I start pulling open drawers looking for a movie.
If your text editor is typing out ^H instead of doing backspaces, quit, then on the console type "stty erase ^H"
Ah, thank you very much. A command that I did not know.
The Solaris boxes at the office drive me up the wall because they don't support the [Backspace] key. So I added the following line to my ~/.profile file:
stty erase '^h'
I also found out that SecureCRT has a checkbox that will automatically change [Backspace] into [Delete] on the fly.
That's right, you can cut and paste across the network, through multiple machines. Do any of the M$ "Desktop Anywhere" type interfaces do that right?
While I'm not entirely sure of all the limitations, I reguarly copy-n-paste between Remote Desktop windows. As in, I have a window open to a Terminal Services session on server A and I copy and paste text into another window that is a session on server B. Basically, the clipboard is shared between my laptop and the two servers.
Rather useful. Much nicer then the old pcAnywhere method where you had to manually transfer the clipboard with a GUI button. Whether it stacks up against the SSH+X copy-n-past I don't know. (I only run linux on servers, the desktop and laptop are both Windows XP. So I do all my linux work at the command line through SecureCRT.)
No, I get what you're saying, but I haven't run into a game yet that needed more than 1 GB of RAM to function at 100%. More important would be the the RAM modules on the video card itself.
The only example I know off off-hand is Civilization IV when using the larger and more complex settings. The size (number of tiles) drives the memory size and I think I was using 1.5GB of RAM for Civ4 last December. I could've run a smaller map and fit within 1GB, but I preferred large maps. I haven't kept up with the patch situation so I don't know if they trimmed memory usage.
Memory is around $80/GB right now. Not terribly expensive in my book. I tend to order machines with a minimum of 1GB RAM now and 2GB of RAM for more demanding users.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe I'm not understanding the level this occurs at, but doesn't that lock out any of your employees sending work email from a home account using their work return address? Or an employee without VPN access emailing the company from the road?
Why are employees sending work emails from a home account? Offer them a HTTPS webmail server to deal with those cases. (IOW, there are technical fixes for the border cases such as webmail, VPN, 800 number dial-up access or using a dial-up ISP account.)
Don't some industries have laws requiring them to keep track of all e-mail that is work-related? Kind of difficult to do if your employees are not routing their work e-mail through your central SMTP server.
Bottom-line, if you allow forgery of your domain in one case, there's no way to disprove other forgeries of your domain. (Well, maybe with a permissive SPF record.)
I really doubt that there are a lot of ordinary people that sit at their PC's with a microphone making phone calls.
Gamers, especially online gamers, tend to be users of voice chat products. Those are the sorts of people who I'd expect to make phone calls via their PC. I wouldn't classify all of them as geeks (a lot of them are rather techno-illiterate).
But I also know some average joes who are interested in VOIP for the cost-savings (Vonage is frequently mentioned).
Some of us who get mod points browse at -1, Flat, Newest First. So there's no nesting levels involved.
(I browse at -1 flat-mode to look for mod point candidates, then open then up in a new tab in nested mode to check context.)
Home Depot
Thanks, wonder why I couldn't remember that. I've even shopped there once or twice in the past few years.
I love the power my system has, but the heat and noise the thing puts out is driving me up the wall these days. I'm starting to put a lot of consideration into either watercooling the thing or going mini-ITX.
A good case can fix a bit of that.
Using 80mm case fans? Switch to a case that uses 120mm fans (same airflow, fewer RPMs, less noise). Using old noisy ball-bearing drives? Switch to the newer fluid ones (FDBs). Noisy CPU fan? Go shopping for a new quieter one. Using half a dozen small drives? Switch to a pair of large ones.
Definitely can be a lengthy process.
You are indeed wise beyond your years.
A little empathy goes a long way. Even if I'm in the right in requesting something, I try to do so in a way that works with the person on the other end. Or I try to find out why they can't meet my needs and what the options are.
Oh, and since this thread is about crappy service... In Information Week (6/12/06, pg 11) Paul English of Kayak.com says (in part) "Dell is in a customer service death spiral." That's being kind. I couldn't agree more. Virtually every customer (90%+) complained of long hold times, 4 to 6 hour or more troubleshooting sessions from brain dead techs or the guy named Sam or Fred that couldn't speak understandable english. Then when Dell did customer service surveys they'd complain LOUDLY and Dell would blame us because their shit didn't stink.
There was also an article mention on a recent copy of BusinessWeek (2 weeks ago? I've already tossed that issue) talking about (3) companies and how their customer service woes are impacting the bottom line.
Also mentioned was Northwest airlines and another company that I can't recall.
Personally I have been trying to get the company to go away from dell for the next round due to the nasty problems but they like the 3+ years extended service agreement.
Last time I looked, all business-class laptops offered extended service warranties. Lenovo offers a 5 year warranty extension and Toshiba offers at least 3 years. So I suspect there's a different reason at work.
(And from what I've seen ThinkPads are built like tanks and some of the Toshiba Tecras are pretty sturdy as well.)
And I don't know of any other database (free or otherwise) that can support that kind of fine-grained access control without coding. (I'm sure someone will correct me, if I'm wrong here)
I'm curious as well. (Although I think I can meet my needs with customized views... maybe... I'm still thinking about the architecture / design.)
We go the low-tech route for our laptops / home users using Knoppix+NTFSClone (periodic images of the O/S) along with SecondCopy (for the data files, which runs every few hours) copying to encrypted USB/Firewire drives protected by TrueCrypt. TrueCrypt does very well in that scenario with good performance and SecondCopy is a very good file-level backup tool for user files.
The hard part is files that are open all the time (such as Outlook PSTs). Mostly, we rely on a batch file that zips them up after logging in (and SecondCopy then sweeps the ZIP files to the external drive). Or we use Acronis TrueImage which images the drive in the background.
Personally, I have multiple 300GB drives that I've mounted in StarTech DRW115 drive trays shoved into a BYTECC FireWire drive (I think the ME-320U2F). I had to drill 4 holes in the enclosure to mount the removable drive bay and it sticks out slightly, but it's working very well. If I didn't already own the drive trays, I'd have simply bought BYTECC ME-835U2F units which are aluminum, built-in P/S and include a fan to cool the hard drive directly. So far I've been rotating drives on a weekly basis with no issues.
We've also considered whole-disk encryption systems like the DriveCrypt Plus Pack. CPU speeds are finally high enough (and have been for a few years) where it wouldn't be a significant performance hit.
Please note I now have to reformat and reinstall.
Knoppix + NTFSClone are your friend in situations like that. The next time you set it up, image it. Then you only have to spend about 15 minutes the next time to restore the drive image. (Backing up user data is another matter, best handled at the file level.)
(The big exception to the "four-year-old computer is fine" thing is laptops. Even so, probably anything with 512 MB RAM would work.)
Well, I'm still using a 4 year old laptop. And this laptop will probably still be in service for another 4+ years barring any catastrophic failures. (Things leveled off about 4 years ago in terms of performance increase per year.)
It probably helps that it's a business class Tecra 9100 with 1GB of RAM. Which exceeds your 512MB criteria. Plus I can give it to a less demanding user who will not tax it, giving it a few more years of life. Heck, the main reason that I want to replace it is that 1GB of RAM isn't enough for my work style (I really need 2 or 3GB).
Our expected lifespan for a system that we buy today is now 8-10 years. That's up from a 6 year lifespan of systems bought in 2006. We just make sure to buy them with 1GB or 2GB of RAM with expansion options for more. The systems slowly move down the food chain from people who tax their machines to people who are mostly doing word processing or data entry.
try hitting '/' on make menuconfig, type ov511 hit enter. That's a hot tip that's saved me quite a bit of time... It'll find it if it's there.
Very handy tip, in the past I've resorted to grep'ing the kernel source code tree to find drivers.
Well, just goes to show how useless the slashdot moderation system is.
That, or not enough people are meta-modding.
4096 bit symetrical encryption is simply overkill. For a block cipher like AES / Blowfish / Twofish / Serpent, 128 bits is considered secure and 256 bits is considered secure for 50-100 years.
Take a look at Practical Cryptography.
Most of the time, people who toss around 2048 and 4096 bit numbers are confusing the key sizes used for asymetric ciphers like Public Key Cryptography and the key sizes used for symetric ciphers like AES, Blowfish, etc. Asymetric ciphers require large bit counts due to the mathmatics involved (and are also slow as molasses).
The only blacklists that I support are the ones based on testing for open-relays.
That's an objective measure. I can get behind that concept.
The rest of the blacklists typically turn into power-monger-fests where the admins get a power-rush from blacklisting large swaths of the network. All it takes is one stupid user, who decides that rather then follow the unsubscribe instructions printed at the bottom of every e-mail, they'd rather report you as a spammer and get you blocked.
Hell, it wouldn't surprise me if it's a competitor who does in order to harm your business.
I'm counting real-world values based on what I see in PerfMon when monitoring the PhysicalDisk object. My sample interval is 72 seconds (for a 2-hour window) or 288 seconds (for an 8-hour window).
From what I've seen, copying from 250GB to 250GB (both SATA drives or one SATA and one PATA) gets me 25-40MB/s read and 25-40MB/s write. Whether that's running into some other sort of bottleneck or is simply a limitation of the O/S (WinXP) and file system (NTFS) is beyond what I care about. Copying between the 500GB drives is a bit faster, but I think I'm running into the limits of what the SATA controller can do.
Most of the 40GB PATA drives that I have laying around here were never speed demons, typically in the 15-20MB/s range at the upper end. But they may have been the less-dense / more-platter designs. (Higher bit density on a platter directly drives transfer rate for a given RPM.)
The newer perpendicular recording drives will give us a good speed increase due to the higher bit density.
Personally, I've grown very fond of Software RAID. Especially mdadm.
I've dealt with both (hardware RAID, hardware RAID that is really software RAID and Linux Software RAID) and for a smaller company, Software RAID wins out. I don't have to worry about driver issues, I don't have to worry about keeping 2 extra RAID controllers on-hand in case the first one fries, and I can move the disks to another machine with different hardware and still get the RAID back up and running.
Software RAID seems very flexible when compared to the hardware cards and performance is typically pretty good.
More modern drives (250GB+) can sustain 20-25MB/s as long as only one application is touching the spindle (extraneous seeks will usually trash ATA drive performance). Some of the larger 500GB drives are closer to 30-35MB/s for SATA/PATA. I've even seen peaks of 40MB/s when pulling from one spindle and writing to another (40MB/s read and 40MB/s write).
And personally, I wouldn't capture 640x400 at 24bits without using a lossless codec like HuffYUV. That cuts the size down a good bit without sacrificing quality. HDTV captures are still pretty hefty though.
The problem with the car analogy is that cars are specialized machines and computers are general purpose machines.
Your analogy makes more sense if you apply it to a specific application within a computer system, such as the web browser. Most people, once they learn how web browsers work can move to other web browsers without too many issues. (i.e. most web browsers include "back", "forward", "bookmark", "address line" functionality).
Indeed.
Heck, it's a good use of a blog. Anytime I run into a technical issue that stumps me, I create a blog entry with the problem, my attempts and the ultimate solution.
Easy to publish, doesn't matter that it's not indexed 6 ways to Sunday and it doesn't matter that it's stored in reverse-calendar order. Odds are high that anyone who stumbles across it probably hit the page directly from a search engine anyway.
Also makes for a nice "I know I fixed that last year..." archive for the absent minded.
Indeed, SuperCat is a wonderful program. Each index for a CD/DVD is a standalone file so it's easy to put them on a shared LAN drive and move them around as needed.
I use the 128/192 CD binders that hold (4) CDs per page in a 2x2 grid (8 CDs per leaf). Each binder holds a category / classification and I simply store them in calendar order (these are data archives where the disks are named SYS2005[ABC] or BKP0512[ABC]). Works fairly well and lets me pull data off the shelf behind me in quick order but without taking up lots of space.
For Music CDs... rip to FLAC and store the CD in a box. My car has a CD/MP3 player so I just convert the FLACs to MP3s for use there. At home, I mostly listen to music on the laptop while working so FLAC (actually 256Kbps MP3) works well.
DVDs are another issue. My current solution is getting two "chests of drawers" made by a local furniture maker. I'll be storing the DVDs, spine-up, inside each drawer. The drawers are about 16" deep inside (holding 16 linear inches of DVDs) and wide enough to allow me to fit 4 columns across. Add it all up and each piece of furniture holds 256 linear inches (4x16 x 4 drawers). Getting the rear-most DVD out of a column might be tricky, but only if I over-fill a particular column.
I think it will look very nice and I won't have huge shelves filled with DVDs lining the walls. I'm not worried about the browse ability because I know what's in each drawer already. And it will be a lot less obvious that I have a large DVD collection until I start pulling open drawers looking for a movie.
If your text editor is typing out ^H instead of doing backspaces, quit, then on the console type "stty erase ^H"
Ah, thank you very much. A command that I did not know.
The Solaris boxes at the office drive me up the wall because they don't support the [Backspace] key. So I added the following line to my ~/.profile file:
stty erase '^h'
I also found out that SecureCRT has a checkbox that will automatically change [Backspace] into [Delete] on the fly.
That's right, you can cut and paste across the network, through multiple machines. Do any of the M$ "Desktop Anywhere" type interfaces do that right?
While I'm not entirely sure of all the limitations, I reguarly copy-n-paste between Remote Desktop windows. As in, I have a window open to a Terminal Services session on server A and I copy and paste text into another window that is a session on server B. Basically, the clipboard is shared between my laptop and the two servers.
Rather useful. Much nicer then the old pcAnywhere method where you had to manually transfer the clipboard with a GUI button. Whether it stacks up against the SSH+X copy-n-past I don't know. (I only run linux on servers, the desktop and laptop are both Windows XP. So I do all my linux work at the command line through SecureCRT.)
No, I get what you're saying, but I haven't run into a game yet that needed more than 1 GB of RAM to function at 100%. More important would be the the RAM modules on the video card itself.
The only example I know off off-hand is Civilization IV when using the larger and more complex settings. The size (number of tiles) drives the memory size and I think I was using 1.5GB of RAM for Civ4 last December. I could've run a smaller map and fit within 1GB, but I preferred large maps. I haven't kept up with the patch situation so I don't know if they trimmed memory usage.
Memory is around $80/GB right now. Not terribly expensive in my book. I tend to order machines with a minimum of 1GB RAM now and 2GB of RAM for more demanding users.