As you surmised, my company has a blanket license for Win2k/OfficeXP, Norton System Works (although only the anti-virus portion is installed), and other office software.
I don't know about Norton System Works, but If I use a bootable CD of Norton Utilities on a machine, then later use it on another machine, I think I only need one license.
I'd like to use more Open Software, but my company only uses "certified" software. Usually this just means that the publisher paid some 3rd party a lot of money in exchange for a certification. I once asked "If they certified Win2k as being secure, then why do we trust them?" The legal yes-man never did give me a straight answer.
The first thing I try to keep is a list of how to clear the BIOS settings for every computer I manage. You would be amazed at how dumb you feel if you have all these nifty CDROM/floppy based utilities and are unable to make the damn PC boot from anything other than the screwed up hard drive.
The second thing I keep is a NT password recovery disk. About 90% of my problems are based on not knowing the admin password for a machine that has been in some users closet for 3 years. The user suddenly needs the PC on his network, and there I am trying to figure out the admin password. The best disk I have found is here.
The third thing I keep is a Norton Utilities CDROM. You can boot off the CDROM and scan for a virus or diagnose a flaky hard drive.
I also keep a Gentoo live CD. I have thought about going over to Toms Boot Disk, but the Gentoo disk usually does what I need.
Although I don't carry it with me, I also keep a spare hard drive and a Win2k disk with all the latest patches and utilities that my company uses for the standard install. If worse comes to worse, I just move the users hard drive over to the secondary IDE and then install on a fresh hard drive. Then I can copy the users data onto the new hard drive. After that, the users old hard drive becomes my spare for the next user.
I also have a folder with a hard copy of every config for every switch, router, and other configurable device on my network. This folder also has IP address schemes, network maps, building diagrams, and user names and phone numbers. The folder also has a floppy with soft copies of the above, PuTTY, and a TFTP server for uploading into a router quickly.
I try to locate at least one geek for every office. I try to show this geek some of the details about his office. I let him have localadmin for the computers in his office. If the (l)users in his office need a printer reinstalled or otherwise need localadmin access, I direct them to their local geek. This also serves to deflect all the "my home PC is acting dumb and can you fix it" type users.
Finally, I try to write a "Why Stuff Breaks" document for all the major problems on my network. "User in office 12a keeps unplugging the switch so he can make coffee" type comments for common problems can help my minions diagnose a problem quickly.
Make the box the property of a small company. Base the company in Botswanaland. Even if the RIAA sued, the company could declare bankrupcy and then the RIAA would't get it's settlement.
So, let me get this right... Some dude wrote a 2 page article explaining how to download a tool and run it? Isn't doing "./foo" one of the first things you learn in linux?
Oh, he does take 2 lines to restate stuff that is in the readme.
Oh well, I guess it is time we compete with Microsoft's "click here, type this, click there, click OK, Apply, OK, OK, reboot" type of help articles.
I don't mind competition, but let me play the devil's advocate here:
I spend lots of money designing a printer, software drivers, and ink carts. I sell the printer at or below cost with the intention of recouping my R&D expendutures by selling the carts above cost. My marketing division has already set out a 2-year life cycle and set prices at an acceptable margin.
Then, some worthless knockoff shows up and under sells my carts. He didn't put anything into R&D other than making his carts fit in my printer. He didn't design the heads to operate properly in my printer. His carts outsell mine and the people who buy them end up shorting the life cycle.
End the end, who gets screwed? I'm not going to sell a product if it is a hemmorage to my bottom line. I'm not going to make carts for an end-of-life product. The knockoff isn't going to make carts for a printer that sold poorly. The people who bought the printer can't find ink they need.
I don't think that works. It still tries to eat up bandwidth.
Instead, list the URLs of annoying companies in your/etc/hosts file as 127.0.0.1. This way, the OUTGOING request for the data is never made. You never have to wait for the stupid http response.
Under windows, the same thing can be done by editing C:\WINNT\system32\drivers\etc\hosts.
Goverment passes more and more laws until everyone is a criminal. Then they can lock up anyone for any reason at any time. After a while, the people revolt or move.
In the worst case scenario (well, almost worse case), you get arrested by a local cop for something that the NCIC said you did. You go to jail for a few days, then your lawyer sorts it all out.
After that, you sue the city for relying on a database that they know is not correct. You sue the PD for false imprisonment. You sue the FBI for slander/libel. You sue the Justice Dept for allowing these idiots to ruin your standing in the community.
Hell, you could even get 10 other people together and file a class-action with millions in punitave damages. Sure, the lawyers would get 40%, but that is still 60% of something you would have never seen. Than take your money and become a naturalized citizen of Swizerland. I hear Bern is nice this time of year...
If you are in a boat hundreds of miles away from land, will +-100M really make a difference? If you are navigating a shoal, 100M could cause a prob, but if they know GPS isn't accurate, they can use standard navigation. People navigated the oceans for hundreds(thousands?) of years before GPS.
Agian, in a plane, 100M shouldn't matter. Unless you are talking about altitude. The altimeter in every plane should be calibrated at the airport before every takeoff.
The basic American stance on GPS is that we paid for the research, we paid for the infrastructure, you are using the system because of our goodwill. If you don't like the terms of use, buy another product.
100 meters should be close enough for navigation. I think the super-duper accuracy mode is used in GPS guided bombs or for tracking multi-million dollar assets across a battlefield.
I've recently taken up DAoC. And while I like Sony's release once, update often Everquest model, I think the way to go is to have a MMORPG with an end.
You could have a "Final Chapter" with an end goal. Anyone who completes this goal could either start AC1 over agian as a nobody, or start AC2 as "Sir" this or "Lady" that. You'd migrate your customer base over to the new game and give the "karma cap" people some status in the new game.
This is probably the first valid Beowulf post in about 2 years...
If you have a master node acting as round-robbin server, you could have hundreds of machines behind it. Each of those, in turn, could be the master node of a large Beowulf cluster.
Or just picture your ISP's core switch. It is transfering the data for thousands of users. That data is being read and written, just not by one computer...
What advantages does SMB have over NFS? We use SPARC workstations with a NFS mounted application directory. Other than sucking up a ton of bandwidth, NFS seems OK.
Routing protocols are finiky things. Just this morning, I spent an hour troubleshooting an OSPF network that used static routes for non-ospf-speaking equipment.
Anyway, If I crack (not gonna happen) a core router and advertise your network as living on fas0/0, then your network would cease to exist for a large portion of the internet. All the filters in the world will not stop that traffic from being shunted into oblivion.
Seems to me it would be just as effective as a DDoS. Well, not quite. A DoS would cost you bandwidth. The blackhole just causes you hits.
Of course, I could tell the router that every Class B lives on your line. Then the traffic would DoS you in a heartbeat.
I spent several years in Italy. The internet access there was 33.6 dialup when I arrived. The worst part about it was the fact that there is no "local call" there. Every call is charged by the minute.
Around '96, the ISP upgraded to 56k modems. In late '97 Telecom Italia offered ISDN. the line to the house was 2B+D (128kbps), but in traditional Italian fassion, they fucked it all up. You still had to pay connections per minute, and each channel was charged seperately. A 128k connection to my local ISP was about 2 or 3 cents per minute.
Telecom Italia upgraded, once agian, to ADSL in 2000. And, once agian, they fucked it up. They implemented ADSL using PPPoE. If you have not used PPPoE, your modem establishes a connection using a username/password. ISPs do this so they can monitor how much bandwidth you use. I paid $50 per month for the line, and another $50 per gigabyte of traffic.
I figured all my problems were over when I moved to Japan. Unfortunately, I live in an area (in Tokyo) that is not covered by DSL. I pay $30/month for 90 hours of 56k dialup. My only other real option is to use a cell phone to get wireless service at a cost of $100/month for 128k access. I have tried this, but the actual bandwidth is about 70kbps and the packet loss and delay is way too high to make it useful.
A new ISP is talking about wiring our neghborhood for 128kbps SDSL. They have mentioned a 1GB per month cap with no way to go over that ammount. They also want $50 per month with a $150 install cost. What really makes it hurt is that they guy down the street from me (150 feet away, but no LOS for a 2.4ghz link) pays $35/month for 100mbps fiber. Yep, he actually has fiber running into a modem sitting on his desk.
Sometimes, I wonder who I pissed off to get so screwed on internet access...
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As you surmised, my company has a blanket license for Win2k/OfficeXP, Norton System Works (although only the anti-virus portion is installed), and other office software.
I don't know about Norton System Works, but If I use a bootable CD of Norton Utilities on a machine, then later use it on another machine, I think I only need one license.
I'd like to use more Open Software, but my company only uses "certified" software. Usually this just means that the publisher paid some 3rd party a lot of money in exchange for a certification. I once asked "If they certified Win2k as being secure, then why do we trust them?" The legal yes-man never did give me a straight answer.
The first thing I try to keep is a list of how to clear the BIOS settings for every computer I manage. You would be amazed at how dumb you feel if you have all these nifty CDROM/floppy based utilities and are unable to make the damn PC boot from anything other than the screwed up hard drive.
The second thing I keep is a NT password recovery disk. About 90% of my problems are based on not knowing the admin password for a machine that has been in some users closet for 3 years. The user suddenly needs the PC on his network, and there I am trying to figure out the admin password. The best disk I have found is here.
The third thing I keep is a Norton Utilities CDROM. You can boot off the CDROM and scan for a virus or diagnose a flaky hard drive.
I also keep a Gentoo live CD. I have thought about going over to Toms Boot Disk, but the Gentoo disk usually does what I need.
Although I don't carry it with me, I also keep a spare hard drive and a Win2k disk with all the latest patches and utilities that my company uses for the standard install. If worse comes to worse, I just move the users hard drive over to the secondary IDE and then install on a fresh hard drive. Then I can copy the users data onto the new hard drive. After that, the users old hard drive becomes my spare for the next user.
I also have a folder with a hard copy of every config for every switch, router, and other configurable device on my network. This folder also has IP address schemes, network maps, building diagrams, and user names and phone numbers. The folder also has a floppy with soft copies of the above, PuTTY, and a TFTP server for uploading into a router quickly.
I try to locate at least one geek for every office. I try to show this geek some of the details about his office. I let him have localadmin for the computers in his office. If the (l)users in his office need a printer reinstalled or otherwise need localadmin access, I direct them to their local geek. This also serves to deflect all the "my home PC is acting dumb and can you fix it" type users.
Finally, I try to write a "Why Stuff Breaks" document for all the major problems on my network. "User in office 12a keeps unplugging the switch so he can make coffee" type comments for common problems can help my minions diagnose a problem quickly.
Make the box the property of a small company. Base the company in Botswanaland. Even if the RIAA sued, the company could declare bankrupcy and then the RIAA would't get it's settlement.
So, let me get this right... Some dude wrote a 2 page article explaining how to download a tool and run it? Isn't doing "./foo" one of the first things you learn in linux?
Oh, he does take 2 lines to restate stuff that is in the readme.
Oh well, I guess it is time we compete with Microsoft's "click here, type this, click there, click OK, Apply, OK, OK, reboot" type of help articles.
My heart jumped about 3 feet before I rememberd it is April 1.
I'll just remember to disregard everything for the next 24 hours.
Come to think of it, most of the stories are misleading anyway. Why should 1 April be any different.
I don't mind competition, but let me play the devil's advocate here:
I spend lots of money designing a printer, software drivers, and ink carts. I sell the printer at or below cost with the intention of recouping my R&D expendutures by selling the carts above cost. My marketing division has already set out a 2-year life cycle and set prices at an acceptable margin.
Then, some worthless knockoff shows up and under sells my carts. He didn't put anything into R&D other than making his carts fit in my printer. He didn't design the heads to operate properly in my printer. His carts outsell mine and the people who buy them end up shorting the life cycle.
End the end, who gets screwed? I'm not going to sell a product if it is a hemmorage to my bottom line. I'm not going to make carts for an end-of-life product. The knockoff isn't going to make carts for a printer that sold poorly. The people who bought the printer can't find ink they need.
Who gets screwed?
I don't think that works. It still tries to eat up bandwidth.
/etc/hosts file as 127.0.0.1. This way, the OUTGOING request for the data is never made. You never have to wait for the stupid http response.
Instead, list the URLs of annoying companies in your
Under windows, the same thing can be done by editing C:\WINNT\system32\drivers\etc\hosts.
Goverment passes more and more laws until everyone is a criminal. Then they can lock up anyone for any reason at any time. After a while, the people revolt or move.
Just wait and see, US is no different.
That just makes the suit sweeter. Besides, who gives a freak about the "community" and what they write or think.
Most "community" people are too small minded to matter anyway.
In the worst case scenario (well, almost worse case), you get arrested by a local cop for something that the NCIC said you did. You go to jail for a few days, then your lawyer sorts it all out.
After that, you sue the city for relying on a database that they know is not correct. You sue the PD for false imprisonment. You sue the FBI for slander/libel. You sue the Justice Dept for allowing these idiots to ruin your standing in the community.
Hell, you could even get 10 other people together and file a class-action with millions in punitave damages. Sure, the lawyers would get 40%, but that is still 60% of something you would have never seen. Than take your money and become a naturalized citizen of Swizerland. I hear Bern is nice this time of year...
Ever hear of Jack the Ripper?
So, who gets to decide which tools are bad?
OK, I gotta jump on this one:
If you are in a boat hundreds of miles away from land, will +-100M really make a difference? If you are navigating a shoal, 100M could cause a prob, but if they know GPS isn't accurate, they can use standard navigation. People navigated the oceans for hundreds(thousands?) of years before GPS.
Agian, in a plane, 100M shouldn't matter. Unless you are talking about altitude. The altimeter in every plane should be calibrated at the airport before every takeoff.
The basic American stance on GPS is that we paid for the research, we paid for the infrastructure, you are using the system because of our goodwill. If you don't like the terms of use, buy another product.
100 meters should be close enough for navigation. I think the super-duper accuracy mode is used in GPS guided bombs or for tracking multi-million dollar assets across a battlefield.
So, should guns be banned?
Should Kazaa be banned?
Should linux (because it is an "untrusted" OS) be banned?
There is no such thing as a bad tool. Just bad people using tools.
Isn't it a common geek mantra that the maker of a device isn't bad, the device isn't bad, it's just the way it is used that is bad?
kazaalite.com is not the page for Kazaa Lite. That guy is. from what I have heard, a domain squatter.
Try www.kazaalite.tk instead.
Also, kazaa lite runs just fine under WINE.
Mmm, Grappa. My fav...
Someone should sue MaBell for the contnt of their networks...Maybe then ppl would see how stupid ISP filtering is.
I've recently taken up DAoC. And while I like Sony's release once, update often Everquest model, I think the way to go is to have a MMORPG with an end.
You could have a "Final Chapter" with an end goal. Anyone who completes this goal could either start AC1 over agian as a nobody, or start AC2 as "Sir" this or "Lady" that. You'd migrate your customer base over to the new game and give the "karma cap" people some status in the new game.
This is probably the first valid Beowulf post in about 2 years...
If you have a master node acting as round-robbin server, you could have hundreds of machines behind it. Each of those, in turn, could be the master node of a large Beowulf cluster.
Or just picture your ISP's core switch. It is transfering the data for thousands of users. That data is being read and written, just not by one computer...
What advantages does SMB have over NFS? We use SPARC workstations with a NFS mounted application directory. Other than sucking up a ton of bandwidth, NFS seems OK.
Routing protocols are finiky things. Just this morning, I spent an hour troubleshooting an OSPF network that used static routes for non-ospf-speaking equipment.
Anyway, If I crack (not gonna happen) a core router and advertise your network as living on fas0/0, then your network would cease to exist for a large portion of the internet. All the filters in the world will not stop that traffic from being shunted into oblivion.
Seems to me it would be just as effective as a DDoS. Well, not quite. A DoS would cost you bandwidth. The blackhole just causes you hits.
Of course, I could tell the router that every Class B lives on your line. Then the traffic would DoS you in a heartbeat.
I spent several years in Italy. The internet access there was 33.6 dialup when I arrived. The worst part about it was the fact that there is no "local call" there. Every call is charged by the minute.
Around '96, the ISP upgraded to 56k modems. In late '97 Telecom Italia offered ISDN. the line to the house was 2B+D (128kbps), but in traditional Italian fassion, they fucked it all up. You still had to pay connections per minute, and each channel was charged seperately. A 128k connection to my local ISP was about 2 or 3 cents per minute.
Telecom Italia upgraded, once agian, to ADSL in 2000. And, once agian, they fucked it up. They implemented ADSL using PPPoE. If you have not used PPPoE, your modem establishes a connection using a username/password. ISPs do this so they can monitor how much bandwidth you use. I paid $50 per month for the line, and another $50 per gigabyte of traffic.
I figured all my problems were over when I moved to Japan. Unfortunately, I live in an area (in Tokyo) that is not covered by DSL. I pay $30/month for 90 hours of 56k dialup. My only other real option is to use a cell phone to get wireless service at a cost of $100/month for 128k access. I have tried this, but the actual bandwidth is about 70kbps and the packet loss and delay is way too high to make it useful.
A new ISP is talking about wiring our neghborhood for 128kbps SDSL. They have mentioned a 1GB per month cap with no way to go over that ammount. They also want $50 per month with a $150 install cost. What really makes it hurt is that they guy down the street from me (150 feet away, but no LOS for a 2.4ghz link) pays $35/month for 100mbps fiber. Yep, he actually has fiber running into a modem sitting on his desk.
Sometimes, I wonder who I pissed off to get so screwed on internet access...