I'm not going to buy into the IBM LVM vs Linux Software Raid debate, but no one has mentioned something thatâ(TM)s just as important. One of the big advantaged with a good SCSI enclosure is the ability to pull and pop drives in and out without powering down.
With good hardware, you can walk up to a running machine and replace the failed drive then and there. Hopefully your 144Gb raid-5 array has been fully rebuilt by the time you come back from lunch. If you don't have hot-swap hardware, you have to schedule downtime, come back later that night, shut it down, pull the drive and pop in a new one. And hope everything powers up OK, cos if the power supply stuffs up at that time of night and you don't have a (good) support contract you are going to have a lot of fun getting everything going again before the rest of the office shows up for work.
I know you can get hot-swap IDE hardware these days, but I've never used them. I suspect hot-swap IDE drives are not that much cheaper then SCSI, but I could be wrong.
One last little bit of advice, try including a hot spare in your array. Its nice to come in in the morning and read an email saying that a hard drive failed last night, and the array was automatically re-built using the spare before start of business. If you are going to go with non hot-swap hardware, Iâ(TM)d say this is a must. Running raid-5 in degraded mode is no fun.
The real problem is not so much the download cap as the horrific excess charges. My ISP (Pacific Internet) offers an entry-level ADSL plan (256/64 with 500MB of downloads) for $44.95 per month (US$30). Once you go over the 500MB, you are charged at 14.9c per MB - $149 per GB (US$100). That's a fairly typical charge across the industry.
Have you any idea how much bandwidth in Australia costs? If you run a large company, and you want an Internet connection, you will be paying about 9c/Mb for international downloads. Sure this is cheaper then home, but this wasnâ(TM)t a 512kbps ADSL, it was a 155Mb OC-3.
Note that this was international traffic, not domestic. So if half of you downloads come from OS (actually pretty low for most users) you are effectively being charged 4.5c/Mb (US$30 / Gb). This is also assuming domestic downloads are free.
These costs may seem astronomical to people in the US, but when you research the economic relationship between Australian ISPs and US Tier 1 and 2 ISPs you begin to see why the costs are so high. This doesnâ(TM)t explain why service can be really bad for Australian ISPs, but it does go some way to explaining the costs.
Fine, then you can't trust your employees. So I ask again, why does it matter if non-employees have access?
Because I trust my fellow employees not to do anything deliberately malicious. Incompetence, complacency, and downright stupidity I expect, (does it sound like I spent too much time on a helpdesk?) but I donâ(TM)t think they will do something to hurt the company, or steal from it. Sure that wireless access point is a nice toy, and means they can move around the office easier. It also allows anyone on the street to connect to the network and attack an internal server. If I allow WAP access ports, I may as well get rid of the firewall.
I would suspend any new Linux-related activities until this is all sorted out.
How unfortunate that he left out the "... and buy SCO instead."
Why bother with that. Just keep using linux, but pay them for a license. The GLP code stays GLP, so you can use it, and you have to pay SCO before you can use the code they claim as their own. It looks like they are saying that linux wouldn't run if you cut out their code, so to use lunix you are running under two licenses, GPL and whatever they choose to use.
From their point of view they get a product they don't have to write and support, but yet people ahve to pay them money to use.
Yes I know there are things in the GLP to try and stop the bundling of GPL and non-GPL code, but SCO will try and ignore this.
Of course there may be a few things that this breaks (not that they shouldn't be fixed to work a different way). One is email intermediaries. SMTP was originally designed to be store and forward, and it used to be quite common that mail took many sometimes unpredictable hops along its way
Trying to remember the MX specifications.
I own domain example.com (for example), and I want to send an email to joe.smith@slashdot.org. I might have several SMTP servers, but each would be listed in the RMX of example.com, I might configure my server to relay via my up-stream provider, but if I do that I should include their servers in my RMX record.
The relay host will deliver to one of the hosts listed in the MX record for slashdor.org, maybe not their server, but a server that the administrator of slashdot.org has decided they can trust their mail to. If they can point their MX record at a server, they can damn well exclude it from RMX checking. Even easier, a MTA that does RMX should also check for MX records on the destinatin domain.
There should be no other hosts. The days of open relays are long gone, they do exist unfortunatly, but they are rare enough that relying on them to deliver non-spam is crazy.
Wow. Ogg Vorbis music files encoded at 45-kbps sound very close to the original. I think they need to use some better quality.
You don't really care how long it takes to encode a music file, and you can compress in chunks as large as you like. What matteres to a telephone conversation is lag, if I say something I don't want to have to wait 10 seconds for a reply. I can't record 10 seonds worth of data, compress it, and send it. I have to record something like 10ms worth (80 samples), compress this, and send it.
This limits the size of the packets, down to the point that the IP header takes up a substantial portion of the bandwidth. In additon, with only 80 samples, there isn't really much you can work with when compressing.
Always wanted to know this. I am a sysadmin for a College (i'm a student there), and I always leave a backdoor or two in case of emergencies. like someome else chaniging the root passwords etc. Does anyone else do this, or is it just me?
The console should be logged in as root. If your console is physically secure, then you can get back into the system without a reboot. Even works if the password file gets trashed.
Never leave anything open that can be done remotely. If you can use it from home, so could someone else. Is it that important that you can fix a system without physically going in? I've worked with systems which had remote console access (the servers were located in a different country) but we never left those logged it. If something happened to prevent us logging in then we would arrange to have the server power cycled by someone local and we would bring them up in single user mode.
How often does it happen that you would need a backdoor anyway? Sure mistakes happen, but is it really worth the risk?
I am not a huge conspiracy theorist myself, but playing devil's advocate on this is irresistable - do you really think that simply because the agency reported only 16 or 18 wiretaps for the given years that only 16 or 18 actually took place?
This was the number of wiretaps that were executed and encountered encryption. According to this part of the article there were 1,358 wiretaps, of which only about 1.5% involved encryption.
Does this sound like crypto technology is a major issue for law enforcement?
Why not build some of their own sea lines, then? I'd bet a private AU company could probably afford, and profit from a huge pipe to Japan, or even the US. But would they be allowed to make money with Telstra around?
Its not the cost of the pipe through to another country. Sure this is a cost that is going to increase the cost of trans-pacific IP. Its the peering arrangement with the major US ISPs. I once worked for a large.au website. We had an upload:download ration of 8:1, for both international and domestic. Because of this we didn't pay for domestic Internet traffic, out ISP could bill other ISPs for the traffic they downloaded off our site, so we were a good customer to have. This relates to your next point.
Also, wouldnâ(TM)t it make sense for them to allow unlimited in-country bandwidth while capping international traffic? At my school they have an outbound cap at 200 megs a day, but you can send as much as you want on campus.
This does happen. My old University had three charge rates for home dialup. The account cost nothing, you paid X cents/meg for international traffic, Y cents/meg for domestic, and downloads from within the university networks was free (this included the other major domestic universities). X was approximatly 6.5 times Y. This could possibly be because of the cost of the trans-pacific pipe? Maybe, but Maybe not.
When I worked for the website, we received credit for domestic traffic, but not international. We had to pay approx $US45/Gb downloaded from overseas. Why were we charged this when we had such a good upload:download ratio? Because our ISP did not get credit from their US based ISP for uploads. Our uploads were worth nothing to out ISP, so we didn't get any credit for them. Of course the US based ISP would be charging their customers for downloading our traffic from their network, but they wouldn't have to pay anyone for it. Advantage of being a Tier 1 ISP.
But what they need to start doing, is imprison more of the right-type people, and less of the people who are being nailed for minor crimes, or wrongfully imprisoned, etc.
First of all, a nice dark cell for white-collar execs, complete with a large guy named "bubba", would go nicely towards prevent future Enrons
I think people who commit those sort of crimes think they will never be caught. Sure simetimes people say "$50- fine, its worth the risk" but is there the same sort of judgement about "its only 5 years". In other words, how many people who commit a crime with a "light" jail sentence would still commit if there was a "heavy" punishment? Think about it.
how about HTTP? I don't done have (read "can't be bothered") a copy of the RFC but I'm almost sure there are headers defined to request the MD5 checksum of a file.
Why invent a new protocol if you already have one with the required functionality.
The course notes for this subject were basically the chapters of the book. He asked all his students to read through the code examples and let him know if there were any problems. I don't know if we can claim all the credit (I found some errors in the early chapters) but this book has a very short errata page.
Mind you I can't remember a code example where they got sizeof(char) wrong!!
What's wrong with the current titles? I mean, if someone tells me they're a network administrator, I have a pretty good idea
I'd say that the term "network administrator" is ambiguous. To they administer the Microsoft Windows servers and user base, or to they work with Network equipment (switches, routers, PABXs etc.).
In a previous position I worked in the âoeserver managementâ team, and there was a separate âoenetwork teamâ. One of the programmers once seriously asked me if there were any problems between the two teams as to who was responsible for what. When I explained that it was pretty simple, the network team stops at the end of the blue cable coming out of the wall their reply was âoeoh, I suppose soâ.
People out there donâ(TM)t know what a âoesystem adminâ does. They donâ(TM)t see the difference between comms people and server people. Its all infrastructure, but they would use the term âoethe networkâ to describe everything that isnâ(TM)t their desktop.
This is why the best asset a large IT organisation can have is a good helpdesk. Getting from a user complaint to a solved problem in the shortest possible time is very hard, and almost impossible to appreciate unless youâ(TM)ve participated in and understand every step in the process.
It doesnâ(TM)t matter how quickly the helpdesk answers the call if the problem ticket ends up in the wrong teams inbox. You can have the best system administrators that can fix any problem in under 30 minutes, but if they arenâ(TM)t working on the problems causing the user complaints then youâ(TM)re wasting their time.
I find it sickening that a supposedly respectable publication
Time? respectable? Not in my house.
I remember being talked into subscribing to that junk in my last year of high school. Biased, lowbrow reporting. They combine a lack of depth in their reporting with a lack of breadth in their story selection.
Back on topic, I remember something like this happening to a footballer. Not grid-iron or what ever its called, it was some where else in the world.
The guy bloke an arm or dislocated an elbow or something. He was helped off teh field by another person, but some paper edited it out and put a photo on the front page of him running off by himself. Left the helpers thumb on the players wrist through.
Can someone remember this? It could have been Australia or the UK?
Re:How did this one sneak in? FP =P
on
4l-j4z333ra 0wn3d
·
· Score: 1
According to this article on MSNBC the US government is considering purchasing advertising time on Al Jazeera in order to get their message to "Arab Street".
I went looking at the mail Al Jazeera web page looking for english information a few weeks ago( I don't speak any other language>, but I didn't see any link to this site. I don't know if its new, or they just don't link there from their Arabic language pages.
I can't find a google cache of it anyway, I hope it comes back up soon.
Can't wait so spend a whole 9 hours watching for the full DVD release of LOTR!"
Only 9 hours? Come on, if you can't watch all 10 1/2 hours of all three extended editions back to back youâ(TM)re not serious! Except of course for the 5 DVD changes.
In Sydney, Australia there are two major news papers. One I think is imparial, but I am very strongly opposed to the war so it could be said it leans my direction. It does carry stories that might support action though.
The other paper recently was recently criticized by in parliament by an anti-war MP for its coverage. He said
It says the only thing missing when the bombs start dropping over Iraq will be the thumping crescendo of the 1812 Overture
What determines signifigance, why should France, Gremany, Russia, and China's opinion when our national defense and economic stability is threatened
Why should your opinion be signifigant when my econimic stability is threatened? Just as valid as your argument. Yet you can vote for all sorts of laws to stop me making money. In fact, I could be starving and yet you have the right to vote for a law that will stop me stealing bread.
Read the sig.
Re:The Propaganda machine is already running.
on
Strike on Iraq
·
· Score: 1
The very first steps are: disable the enemy's military communications infrastructure, and, use the civilian channels to deliver propaganda.
But to use the civilian channels you have to take them out, with bombs in this case. So they deliberatly targeted a civilian site in order to make the delivery of propaganda easier.
Maybe I should have added a disclamer that I used to work for a broadcaster, so I feel that if the roles were reversed this attack could have been aimed at me.
Re:Not a troll: How many civilians died last time?
on
Strike on Iraq
·
· Score: 1
So, where do these people come up with numbers near 1 million?
The honest answer is no one knows for sure. The biggest killer (IMHO) was the lack of modern medical supplies for Iraqi hospitals after the war. If you kept you eye out you might have seen the odd story about doctors that would travel to iraq with their personal luggage full of meicine.
Non-pescription medicine, stuff that you can buy over the counter in western countries, and giving these to hospitals in Iraq. If customs detected them the medicines were conficsated because they were breaking the trade embargo in place against Iraq for the last 12 years.
How many people died because they couldn't get basic medicine? How can you tell if they would have survived if they had received it? No one knows but when senior members of the Clinton administration (I think Madeline Albrecht) say that the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children would be worth it to get rid of Saddam I am horrified. Even if they are off by a factor of 10 its a scarily high number.
The Propaganda machine is already running.
on
Strike on Iraq
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
There are reports that a third air strike in an hour has hit Baghdad.
The new attack is again targeting the south-east of the Iraqi capital sending huge clouds of smoke billowing into the dawn sky as the United States launches its long-threatened war on Iraq.
Meanwhile a report from Baghdad says the main frequency of Iraqi state radio appears to have been taken over by the US military.
The normal Iraqi broadcast went off the air within minutes of US air strikes starting.
Shortly afterwards an announcer said in Arabic "This is the day we have been waiting for".
I have to admire this in a purely tactical way. Take out the national broadcaster and replace it with your own content.
I like how G.B. can call a radio station a site of "military importance" or whatever term he used in his speach.
This is from a letter I mailed my Prime Minister. I apologize to anyone directly involved with the World Trade Center disaster, my words are not intended to diminish the loss you ahve suffered, only to prevent an even larger tradegy.
In any attack against Iraq, people will die. The death of some three thousand people on September the 11th pales in comparison to the over four hundred and fifty thousand military personal now stationed in the gulf region. Iraqi soldiers will die, attacking soldiers will die, and civilians will die. Iraqi young men, people my age and younger, people who do not support Saddam Hussein or want weapons of mass destruction, will pick up a gun and try to defend their home.
The though of these innocent young men and Australian soldiers shooting at each other makes me want to scream with frustration. Neither person could be blamed for their actions, and yet these two innocent people would be trying to kill each other. How can an attack against Iraq be justified when it would lead to this situation?
This is a sad day, but I suspect there is worse to come.
This is the most annoying aspect of email in the workplace. CC'ing somebody's f***** boss as if the recipient is going to think "Ah, he's CC'd my boss, i'd better get a move on with this."
All it does is PISS THEIR BOSS OFF.
Depends on how itâ(TM)s used. The thing is, its only going to work if the person you are dealing with is really stalling. If theyâ(TM)re honestly busy, and their manager is half decent, then all that is going to happen is the manager knows the sender is in a hurry.
I find that when dealing with different departments putting your own manager in the CC list is usually a good thing. It keeps them up to date with what you are doing, and if the other department manager asks your manager about the work, they know whatâ(TM)s going on.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not going to buy into the IBM LVM vs Linux Software Raid debate, but no one has mentioned something thatâ(TM)s just as important. One of the big advantaged with a good SCSI enclosure is the ability to pull and pop drives in and out without powering down.
With good hardware, you can walk up to a running machine and replace the failed drive then and there. Hopefully your 144Gb raid-5 array has been fully rebuilt by the time you come back from lunch. If you don't have hot-swap hardware, you have to schedule downtime, come back later that night, shut it down, pull the drive and pop in a new one. And hope everything powers up OK, cos if the power supply stuffs up at that time of night and you don't have a (good) support contract you are going to have a lot of fun getting everything going again before the rest of the office shows up for work.
I know you can get hot-swap IDE hardware these days, but I've never used them. I suspect hot-swap IDE drives are not that much cheaper then SCSI, but I could be wrong.
One last little bit of advice, try including a hot spare in your array. Its nice to come in in the morning and read an email saying that a hard drive failed last night, and the array was automatically re-built using the spare before start of business. If you are going to go with non hot-swap hardware, Iâ(TM)d say this is a must. Running raid-5 in degraded mode is no fun.
Big difference between Australia and Canada, its canned the pacific Ocean.
Take a look at a map and then ask why Internet Access is so much more expensive in Australia then in Canada.
Have you any idea how much bandwidth in Australia costs? If you run a large company, and you want an Internet connection, you will be paying about 9c/Mb for international downloads. Sure this is cheaper then home, but this wasnâ(TM)t a 512kbps ADSL, it was a 155Mb OC-3.
Note that this was international traffic, not domestic. So if half of you downloads come from OS (actually pretty low for most users) you are effectively being charged 4.5c/Mb (US$30 / Gb). This is also assuming domestic downloads are free.
These costs may seem astronomical to people in the US, but when you research the economic relationship between Australian ISPs and US Tier 1 and 2 ISPs you begin to see why the costs are so high. This doesnâ(TM)t explain why service can be really bad for Australian ISPs, but it does go some way to explaining the costs.
Trying to remember the MX specifications.
I own domain example.com (for example), and I want to send an email to joe.smith@slashdot.org. I might have several SMTP servers, but each would be listed in the RMX of example.com, I might configure my server to relay via my up-stream provider, but if I do that I should include their servers in my RMX record.
The relay host will deliver to one of the hosts listed in the MX record for slashdor.org, maybe not their server, but a server that the administrator of slashdot.org has decided they can trust their mail to. If they can point their MX record at a server, they can damn well exclude it from RMX checking. Even easier, a MTA that does RMX should also check for MX records on the destinatin domain.
There should be no other hosts. The days of open relays are long gone, they do exist unfortunatly, but they are rare enough that relying on them to deliver non-spam is crazy.
On the whole, I like the idea.
These figures don't incldue IP header overhead.
You don't really care how long it takes to encode a music file, and you can compress in chunks as large as you like. What matteres to a telephone conversation is lag, if I say something I don't want to have to wait 10 seconds for a reply. I can't record 10 seonds worth of data, compress it, and send it. I have to record something like 10ms worth (80 samples), compress this, and send it.
This limits the size of the packets, down to the point that the IP header takes up a substantial portion of the bandwidth. In additon, with only 80 samples, there isn't really much you can work with when compressing.
The console should be logged in as root. If your console is physically secure, then you can get back into the system without a reboot. Even works if the password file gets trashed.
Never leave anything open that can be done remotely. If you can use it from home, so could someone else. Is it that important that you can fix a system without physically going in? I've worked with systems which had remote console access (the servers were located in a different country) but we never left those logged it. If something happened to prevent us logging in then we would arrange to have the server power cycled by someone local and we would bring them up in single user mode.
How often does it happen that you would need a backdoor anyway? Sure mistakes happen, but is it really worth the risk?
This was the number of wiretaps that were executed and encountered encryption.
According to this part of the article there were 1,358 wiretaps, of which only about 1.5% involved encryption.
Does this sound like crypto technology is a major issue for law enforcement?
Its not the cost of the pipe through to another country. Sure this is a cost that is going to increase the cost of trans-pacific IP. Its the peering arrangement with the major US ISPs. I once worked for a large
This does happen. My old University had three charge rates for home dialup. The account cost nothing, you paid X cents/meg for international traffic, Y cents/meg for domestic, and downloads from within the university networks was free (this included the other major domestic universities). X was approximatly 6.5 times Y. This could possibly be because of the cost of the trans-pacific pipe? Maybe, but Maybe not.
When I worked for the website, we received credit for domestic traffic, but not international. We had to pay approx $US45
I think people who commit those sort of crimes think they will never be caught. Sure simetimes people say "$50- fine, its worth the risk" but is there the same sort of judgement about "its only 5 years". In other words, how many people who commit a crime with a "light" jail sentence would still commit if there was a "heavy" punishment? Think about it.
how about HTTP? I don't done have (read "can't be bothered") a copy of the RFC but I'm almost sure there are headers defined to request the MD5 checksum of a file.
Why invent a new protocol if you already have one with the required functionality.
I was once a student of Rob Pike
The course notes for this subject were basically the chapters of the book. He asked all his students to read through the code examples and let him know if there were any problems. I don't know if we can claim all the credit (I found some errors in the early chapters) but this book has a very short errata page.
Mind you I can't remember a code example where they got sizeof(char) wrong!!
I'd say that the term "network administrator" is ambiguous. To they administer the Microsoft Windows servers and user base, or to they work with Network equipment (switches, routers, PABXs etc.).
In a previous position I worked in the âoeserver managementâ team, and there was a separate âoenetwork teamâ. One of the programmers once seriously asked me if there were any problems between the two teams as to who was responsible for what. When I explained that it was pretty simple, the network team stops at the end of the blue cable coming out of the wall their reply was âoeoh, I suppose soâ.
People out there donâ(TM)t know what a âoesystem adminâ does. They donâ(TM)t see the difference between comms people and server people. Its all infrastructure, but they would use the term âoethe networkâ to describe everything that isnâ(TM)t their desktop.
This is why the best asset a large IT organisation can have is a good helpdesk. Getting from a user complaint to a solved problem in the shortest possible time is very hard, and almost impossible to appreciate unless youâ(TM)ve participated in and understand every step in the process.
It doesnâ(TM)t matter how quickly the helpdesk answers the call if the problem ticket ends up in the wrong teams inbox. You can have the best system administrators that can fix any problem in under 30 minutes, but if they arenâ(TM)t working on the problems causing the user complaints then youâ(TM)re wasting their time.
Time? respectable? Not in my house.
I remember being talked into subscribing to that junk in my last year of high school. Biased, lowbrow reporting. They combine a lack of depth in their reporting with a lack of breadth in their story selection.
Back on topic, I remember something like this happening to a footballer. Not grid-iron or what ever its called, it was some where else in the world.
The guy bloke an arm or dislocated an elbow or something. He was helped off teh field by another person, but some paper edited it out and put a photo on the front page of him running off by himself. Left the helpers thumb on the players wrist through.
Can someone remember this? It could have been Australia or the UK?
Z
-
Lameness filter avoider
According to this article on MSNBC the US government is considering purchasing advertising time on Al Jazeera in order to get their message to "Arab Street".
I went looking at the mail Al Jazeera web page looking for english information a few weeks ago( I don't speak any other language>, but I didn't see any link to this site. I don't know if its new, or they just don't link there from their Arabic language pages.
I can't find a google cache of it anyway, I hope it comes back up soon.
Only 9 hours? Come on, if you can't watch all 10 1/2 hours of all three extended editions back to back youâ(TM)re not serious! Except of course for the 5 DVD changes.
In Sydney, Australia there are two major news papers. One I think is imparial, but I am very strongly opposed to the war so it could be said it leans my direction. It does carry stories that might support action though.
The other paper recently was recently criticized by in parliament by an anti-war MP for its coverage. He said
See this.
Why should your opinion be signifigant when my econimic stability is threatened? Just as valid as your argument. Yet you can vote for all sorts of laws to stop me making money. In fact, I could be starving and yet you have the right to vote for a law that will stop me stealing bread.
Read the sig.
But to use the civilian channels you have to take them out, with bombs in this case. So they deliberatly targeted a civilian site in order to make the delivery of propaganda easier.
Maybe I should have added a disclamer that I used to work for a broadcaster, so I feel that if the roles were reversed this attack could have been aimed at me.
So, where do these people come up with numbers near 1 million?
The honest answer is no one knows for sure. The biggest killer (IMHO) was the lack of modern medical supplies for Iraqi hospitals after the war. If you kept you eye out you might have seen the odd story about doctors that would travel to iraq with their personal luggage full of meicine.
Non-pescription medicine, stuff that you can buy over the counter in western countries, and giving these to hospitals in Iraq. If customs detected them the medicines were conficsated because they were breaking the trade embargo in place against Iraq for the last 12 years.
How many people died because they couldn't get basic medicine? How can you tell if they would have survived if they had received it? No one knows but when senior members of the Clinton administration (I think Madeline Albrecht) say that the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children would be worth it to get rid of Saddam I am horrified. Even if they are off by a factor of 10 its a scarily high number.
I have to admire this in a purely tactical way. Take out the national broadcaster and replace it with your own content.
I like how G.B. can call a radio station a site of "military importance" or whatever term he used in his speach.
This is from a letter I mailed my Prime Minister. I apologize to anyone directly involved with the World Trade Center disaster, my words are not intended to diminish the loss you ahve suffered, only to prevent an even larger tradegy.
This is a sad day, but I suspect there is worse to come.
Depends on how itâ(TM)s used. The thing is, its only going to work if the person you are dealing with is really stalling. If theyâ(TM)re honestly busy, and their manager is half decent, then all that is going to happen is the manager knows the sender is in a hurry.
I find that when dealing with different departments putting your own manager in the CC list is usually a good thing. It keeps them up to date with what you are doing, and if the other department manager asks your manager about the work, they know whatâ(TM)s going on.