Can you identify which protocols/ports the "chatter" is using? TCP 139,445? UDP 137,138,139?
I suspect your workstations are running Windows XP, which creates quite a bit more traffic than its predecessors as it attempts to discover network resources such as file shares and printers.
On your workstations, from Windows Explorer:
Click Tools->Folder Options
Select the "View" tab
Uncheck the "Automatically search for network folders and printers" option.
Layer 1 is most certainly the only purely physical layer, where the "hardware" lives. And it would seem that Layer 2 is a purely software layer, considering that frame assembly is a function of the protocol stack, which is software.
Most will agree that a network card is a physical device, usually associated with Layer 1, the "hardware" layer. That network card, however, contains a chip with a hard-coded MAC address, making it also a Layer 2 device...?
The effect for Layer 2, is that the line separaring "hardware layer" from "software layer" becomes a bit blurred. Unless I'm mistaken, the MAC will be read into memory when the protocol stack is initialized, and then never referenced again. So, I think it would probably be okay to consider it a Layer 1 device, for practical matters.
Still, it is probably debatable, with some interest:o)
Please tell me this is a joke....? If not, then you certainly haven't met my good friend google, and most certainly you haven't seen the inside of an Introduction to Networking classroom:
The OSI model makes no account for power or power cords. Under the model, Layer 1 describes the physical medium upon which electronic bits (layer 2 frames) will be carried. Layer 1 devices (like hubs) usually depend on power, so we like to *joke* that the power cord is Layer 0. Nothing works if its not plugged in!
If you were just joking then I'm sorry for the stuffy reply. But if you're not joking, everyone who might believe you needs to follow the links above.
I've got a white apple on the back of my silver motorcycle helmet. I keep telling people its my "iHelmet". Strangely, nobody laughs. Well, one guy did.
"But despite their best efforts, mistakes are inevitable and patents may be granted to unworkable ideas. Some 5,000 examiners must currently handle a load of 350,000 applications per year."
According to my math 350,000 applications / 5,000 examiners = 70 applications pear year per examiner = 1.35 applications per week per examiner.
Does that seem like a heavy workload to you? Granted, I don't know anything about these applications, but it makes me think about social workers who juggle 20, 30 or 40 cases simultaneously.
Just my $0.02. Feel free to disregard as you see fit:o)
...and a decent internet experience i.e. good plugins that can handle.swf.wav.ogg.mp3.mov.mp4.wma.wmv, etc. as seamlessly as on a Windows or OS X desktop.
My wife, a kindergarten teacher, agreed to try linux for a short while. She's a smart woman but will admit to anyone that she doesn't "know" computers.
She used Gnome, OpenOffice, K3B, Thunderbird, Gimp, gFTP, Sound Juicer, Rhythmbox, and Xine (among others) with very little incident.
The one area that kept failing for her is web browsing. Too often she would come across a page with embedded audio/video which would not play [Firefox: additional plugins are required to view the content on this page].
Even audio & video that are plain http links can be a problem. "Do I Open With... or Save As...?" What do I use to open it with? Where did it save it? What is a "home directory"?
Personally, I prefer a terse environment and can handle such cases. LotD, however, needs to be as easy as OS X. Not because people aren't smart enough to figure out what to do, but because people want it to be easy, non-repetitive and automatic. And as well they should; computers, after all, are supposed to make our lives easier.
As for my wife--now she uses OS X with many of the same applications listed above, plus the quicktime and Windows Media Player applications, and their associated browser plugins.
Oh yeah, and you have to figure out how to make people/want/ to switch. Fear of something new/different might be the biggest hurdle of them all, as some distributions are very close to achieving the aforementioned simplicity (Ubuntu?).
I'm in a similar situation to yours, maintaining ~200 lab PCs for the ITE program at a Community College. Like you, I put a lot more work into creating a clean, stable image on the front end. But one piece of software has made my maintenance/ virus/ spyware/ user error worries dissapear:
Deep Freeze works by "freezing" a workstation after you've imaged it (with remote console functions in the Enterprise version). All changes after that point are journaled (?) and the journal is flushed on reboot.
If something is wrong (in software)...reboot! Problem is gone:o)
Of course...your images had better well be perfect before you deploy, because this does make small after-the-fact changes a bit more difficult.
Of course the device is so inefficient! Everyone knows these things need Trilithium. Sheesh.
Doing it with shell scripts
on
Backups to CD-R?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I wrote bash shell scripts to make full (Sunday) and differential (Monday through Saturday) backups of key parts of my filesystems. This is the basic structure of the script which runs every day as a cron job:
# perform a full or differential backup based on [Sunday|!Sunday] case `/bin/date +%A` in Sunday) # perform a full backup tar cfj/backup/$DATE-full.tar.bz2 $DIRECTORIES chmod 600/backup/$DATE-full.tar.bz2 ;; *) # perform a differential backup tar cfj/backup/$DATE-diff.tar.bz2 $DIRECTORIES -N $LAST_SUNDAY chmod 600/backup/$DATE-diff.tar.bz2 ;; esac
Then I back the full up to CD-R on Sunday using another script, which also runs as a cron job (you just have to remember to load the CD before you go home for the weekend!):
I suggest you check out NetOp School. I manage 8 computer labs for a community college in Gainesville, FL and we use this in several of them. At a glance, the instructors can tell who is logged in & where (uses machine name and windows login name information). Additionally, NetOp School provides controls, i.e. lockout and demo mode. You can run commands on the remote machine, transfer files, etc. Also, you can create breakout sessions where small groups are formed, and one person in that group would be granted all of the above controls.
It installs remotely (from the "instructor" station) and runs as a service. Our instructors love it. I think you should check it out.
That sounds fairly ideal, except perhaps the part about the document feeder...I would presume that most people don't have that kind of equipment.
I love that your solution is command-line based. Could your script be modified to handle multiple page documents, fed one at a time (some kind of a pause-while-you-change-pages)?
Would you be willing to share your script here? Thank you....
I'd love to get away from hardcopies alltogether, and in doing so, i think I could come up with a folder heirarchy/filename structure that would make it easy enough for me to find things...but there are some things I'd like to file in two places. So one option would be to use symlinks...but I can see some advantages to the database design you suggest.
Perhaps your database could hold (a) image title (b)the image (c) the OCR text from the image, for searching purposes and (d) several "category" fields. For example, a credit card bill:
Title: Chase Manhattan Visa Statement, December 2003
OCR: credit, visa, , etc., userful terms
Category 1: bills
Category 2: December 2003 expenses
Category 3: visa_credit_account
Maybe the Title field would be searchable too, with a higher priority on title-based matches.
Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Your reply is helpful...informative...friendly, and I appreciate that your response wasn't something like "Why bother?"
If I had moderator points (and could moderate this thread) I would give them all to you. Moderators please mod up.:o)
The rare earth magnet sounds good but what I need now is a refrigerator that I can ssh into and have it read me the contents of the menus;o)
Seriously...I can think of a number of times where I have a simple piece of paper on my desk at home, and if I could only retrieve it remotely (i.e. from work) than I could save myself a lot of time.
A good, recent example: I just got an eye exam, and needed to fax a copy of the prescription to the [separate] optics store to get my new lenses. If I'd had a scanned image on my server (or some other universally-accessible storage solution), I could have pulled the image down and sent it over to the store in about 10 minutes. But because it was a physical piece of paper, I had to retrieve it from home and wait until the following day to get it to the optician.
Maybe I'm trying to be too speedy?!?! I'm sure there are better, more crucial situations out there anyway.
Andy
Slashdot Mirror
Riiiiiight...I forgot. China has no navy whatsoever...
Hypotheses only create more questions, according to Phaedrus.
If the car drives itself, doesn't that make every side the passenger side?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_Paralysis
I suspect your workstations are running Windows XP, which creates quite a bit more traffic than its predecessors as it attempts to discover network resources such as file shares and printers.
On your workstations, from Windows Explorer:
Whiz-bang-boom! Instantly quieter XP :o)
> "What if we described electrical power in terms of the OSI model?"
How does this sound:
Ha ha. -Andy
Most will agree that a network card is a physical device, usually associated with Layer 1, the "hardware" layer. That network card, however, contains a chip with a hard-coded MAC address, making it also a Layer 2 device...?
The effect for Layer 2, is that the line separaring "hardware layer" from "software layer" becomes a bit blurred. Unless I'm mistaken, the MAC will be read into memory when the protocol stack is initialized, and then never referenced again. So, I think it would probably be okay to consider it a Layer 1 device, for practical matters.
Still, it is probably debatable, with some interest :o)
Please tell me this is a joke....? If not, then you certainly haven't met my good friend google, and most certainly you haven't seen the inside of an Introduction to Networking classroom:
webopedia on the OSI Model
wikipedia on the OSI Model
The OSI model makes no account for power or power cords. Under the model, Layer 1 describes the physical medium upon which electronic bits (layer 2 frames) will be carried. Layer 1 devices (like hubs) usually depend on power, so we like to *joke* that the power cord is Layer 0. Nothing works if its not plugged in!
If you were just joking then I'm sorry for the stuffy reply. But if you're not joking, everyone who might believe you needs to follow the links above.
...or layer 0 (the power cord)
I've got a white apple on the back of my silver motorcycle helmet. I keep telling people its my "iHelmet". Strangely, nobody laughs. Well, one guy did.
According to my math 350,000 applications / 5,000 examiners = 70 applications pear year per examiner = 1.35 applications per week per examiner.
Does that seem like a heavy workload to you? Granted, I don't know anything about these applications, but it makes me think about social workers who juggle 20, 30 or 40 cases simultaneously.
Just my $0.02. Feel free to disregard as you see fit :o)
Is this helpful to you, or have I misunderstood the question?
QCAD
My wife, a kindergarten teacher, agreed to try linux for a short while. She's a smart woman but will admit to anyone that she doesn't "know" computers.
She used Gnome, OpenOffice, K3B, Thunderbird, Gimp, gFTP, Sound Juicer, Rhythmbox, and Xine (among others) with very little incident.
The one area that kept failing for her is web browsing. Too often she would come across a page with embedded audio/video which would not play [Firefox: additional plugins are required to view the content on this page].
Even audio & video that are plain http links can be a problem. "Do I Open With... or Save As...?" What do I use to open it with? Where did it save it? What is a "home directory"?
Personally, I prefer a terse environment and can handle such cases. LotD, however, needs to be as easy as OS X. Not because people aren't smart enough to figure out what to do, but because people want it to be easy, non-repetitive and automatic. And as well they should; computers, after all, are supposed to make our lives easier.
As for my wife--now she uses OS X with many of the same applications listed above, plus the quicktime and Windows Media Player applications, and their associated browser plugins.
Oh yeah, and you have to figure out how to make people /want/ to switch. Fear of something new/different might be the biggest hurdle of them all, as some distributions are very close to achieving the aforementioned simplicity (Ubuntu?).
I'm in a similar situation to yours, maintaining ~200 lab PCs for the ITE program at a Community College. Like you, I put a lot more work into creating a clean, stable image on the front end. But one piece of software has made my maintenance/ virus/ spyware/ user error worries dissapear:
:o)
Faronics Deep Freeze
Deep Freeze works by "freezing" a workstation after you've imaged it (with remote console functions in the Enterprise version). All changes after that point are journaled (?) and the journal is flushed on reboot.
If something is wrong (in software)...reboot! Problem is gone
Of course...your images had better well be perfect before you deploy, because this does make small after-the-fact changes a bit more difficult.
Of course the device is so inefficient! Everyone knows these things need Trilithium. Sheesh.
Then I back the full up to CD-R on Sunday using another script, which also runs as a cron job (you just have to remember to load the CD before you go home for the weekend!):
Good Luck! Andy
I suggest you check out NetOp School. I manage 8 computer labs for a community college in Gainesville, FL and we use this in several of them. At a glance, the instructors can tell who is logged in & where (uses machine name and windows login name information). Additionally, NetOp School provides controls, i.e. lockout and demo mode. You can run commands on the remote machine, transfer files, etc. Also, you can create breakout sessions where small groups are formed, and one person in that group would be granted all of the above controls.
It installs remotely (from the "instructor" station) and runs as a service. Our instructors love it. I think you should check it out.
That sounds fairly ideal, except perhaps the part about the document feeder...I would presume that most people don't have that kind of equipment.
I love that your solution is command-line based. Could your script be modified to handle multiple page documents, fed one at a time (some kind of a pause-while-you-change-pages)?
Would you be willing to share your script here? Thank you....
Andy
I'd love to get away from hardcopies alltogether, and in doing so, i think I could come up with a folder heirarchy/filename structure that would make it easy enough for me to find things...but there are some things I'd like to file in two places. So one option would be to use symlinks...but I can see some advantages to the database design you suggest.
Perhaps your database could hold (a) image title (b)the image (c) the OCR text from the image, for searching purposes and (d) several "category" fields. For example, a credit card bill:
Title: Chase Manhattan Visa Statement, December 2003
OCR: credit, visa, , etc., userful terms
Category 1: bills
Category 2: December 2003 expenses
Category 3: visa_credit_account
Maybe the Title field would be searchable too, with a higher priority on title-based matches.
???
You can't blame a guy for being hopeful :oD
Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Your reply is helpful...informative...friendly, and I appreciate that your response wasn't something like "Why bother?"
:o)
If I had moderator points (and could moderate this thread) I would give them all to you. Moderators please mod up.
Andy
The rare earth magnet sounds good but what I need now is a refrigerator that I can ssh into and have it read me the contents of the menus ;o)
Seriously...I can think of a number of times where I have a simple piece of paper on my desk at home, and if I could only retrieve it remotely (i.e. from work) than I could save myself a lot of time.
A good, recent example: I just got an eye exam, and needed to fax a copy of the prescription to the [separate] optics store to get my new lenses. If I'd had a scanned image on my server (or some other universally-accessible storage solution), I could have pulled the image down and sent it over to the store in about 10 minutes. But because it was a physical piece of paper, I had to retrieve it from home and wait until the following day to get it to the optician.
Maybe I'm trying to be too speedy?!?! I'm sure there are better, more crucial situations out there anyway.
Andy