How about "unsecured WEP"? I know of several WEP-active APs that will gladly hand out the WEP keys (at least to the windows wireless configuration crap) It might be the stupidest damn thing in the world, but it's true.
Depending on area, one may be required by various laws (almost always more than one) to have a licensed electrician do any work. (and maybe have the work inspected.) As such, one or more laws may have been violated by removing that panel.
In any case, an electrician is needed to rewire that entire panel before this thing blacks out another section of the grid:-)
True. Nothing short of a nuke or plasma fire (neither of which will be built from "common household supplies") will any functional damage to the transformer's core. The windings are what must be damaged. However, this is not the 2lb transformer found in "wall warts." The windings are much larger, much better protected, and repairable (tho' not without some work.) So, without walking through the substation with a chainsaw (see other comments re: smoking backhoe operators), I doubt any real damage could be done.
Many years ago, one of the transfer stations for REA went off-line. It turned out someone had shot one of the transformers with a.22 rifle (maybe on purpose, and maybe not.) There was a small hole in one of the cooling fins that leaked all the coolant out and the transformer eventually overheated. (They patched the hole, filled 'er up, and went on their way. Total repair time was about 2hrs with 1.5hrs in dispatching a truck.)
When it takes 18months to order a new one, you keep a spare around somewhere. There may be a single spare for a six state area, but there is a spare.
Two things... first, you've obviously never tried to destory one of those things. A stage one transmission transformer is 90+% solid metal. No handheld weapon (rocket launchers aside) is going to make much of a dent. Unless you have a nuke or an M1 in the barn, you will not do any serious damage. The wires and connectors are targets but they are simple to fix.
Second, I know of no power company in the US that does not have spares for every component in their grid. Granted, it will take a few hours to move a 30ton transformer.
Osama isn't a true terrorist. I don't see him willing to strap TNT to his chest and march into a mall. However, he has an army of idiots willing to do that for him.
... or hardware routing. Do you remember a company called NetStar? Bought by Ascend? They made the "GRF" router that was BSD based with some funky hardware assited routing.
They don't want a "dir flash:". They want the output of "show ver" so they can see what version and feature set is currently running on the router. If you have access to CCO (and thus ftp.cisco.com), you can download any image you want for any device. Cisco does record all that, but I'm not aware of them ever auditing it.
I've worked with TAC as well. For hardware support issues (where one has a hardware support contract), Cisco is exceptional -- if it's broken, they replace it - period. However, for software related issues, it's a very ugly picture. The first thing TAC suggests is to load a new version of IOS... "I cannot update to that IOS version because you cheese dicks won't patch IPM v2.2 to work with that version and I'm not paying $10k for a new version of Ciscoworks and all of it's bugs." In the end, they are just replacing one set of bugs with another.
(And when we refused to upgrade because of bugs listed in the release notes, guess what? Two weeks later, they had been removed from the release notes and DELETED from the bug database -- not resolved, not closed, not removed from view but purged, completely deleted, as if it never existed.)
"deep discounts"? Unless that's 90% off list, you're still being screwed. Any company with the size and sufficient volume to get those discounts have the revenue to pay wholesale prices. With the current economy, no one has the money to pay what Cisco expects for their junk.
That ceased to be true about five years ago. Cisco has bought way too many companies, fired too much talent, and attempted to wire IOS into everything. In the process, they've screwed up everything and things they "fix" don't stay fixed -- just because it's fixed in this version doesn't mean it's fixed in any of the future versions. (I've seen their monkeys un-fix too many things far too many times to trust them to do anything correctly. And after seeing them break things that have worked for a decade, I just want to turn a few of them inside out.)
I would. Years ago, Cisco made very high quality hardware and software. Today, shit out as much crap as every other boob. The 7401 had a hardware design flaw that caused it to hard-lock. And then it took us several months of constant bitching to Cisco to get a version of IOS that worked correctly -- 12.2.9S that was never publically released -- and even that has hundreds of nasties in it. But, none of them are causing us problems. ISDN dial technology on a 1720... what a cluster fuck that is; even the LEDs don't light up correctly.
In the case of Cisco... around the time of the Sept. 15, 2000 document, they were seeing an increasing amount of virtually new hardware entering the marketplace for pennys on the dollar from all these failed dot-com's for which Cisco was never paid. It's not a big leap to see how Cisco would want to stop that immediately. And if they can come up with this vague, unspecified cash-cow of a "recertification" process, then it's even better for Cisco.
Having seen what little is available on this laughable process, I'd rather start my own router company than deal with the bullshit. $7000 to "inspect" a 7206VXR. They will only do the inspection during business hours (8-5M-F); the router will be powered down and disassembled during the process; only Cisco is allowed to be present at the inspection. And the best part: it's a binary process... it either passes or fails. No other information is provided -- i.e. why it failed and what we need to do it get it to pass.
Umm, the article talks about an unspecified model netapp and a cisco 2611. Depending on model and configuration, the netapp could be in the 60k$ range, but not a 2611.
That being said, the NetApp is not worth the cost, esp. in today's world. It's a nice device, but easily reproduced in many ways for orders of magnitude less. In the current environment, equipment is replaced every few years. So, the investment in NetApp gear that will physically last decades is useless. And it's made worse by changes in storage requirements.
For routers, mid- and high-end router hardware is expensive brand new and has zero parallel in the cheap, build-it-yourself arena. Once your needs go beyond T1 speed WAN links or you need to run a real routing protocol, you've gone into an expensive area of PC parts -- if the parts even exist. And a homebrew solution may not interoperate with your provider's hardware.
I'm all for do-it-yourself -- after all "if you want it done right..." -- but there are somethings that simply cannot be done without specific, customized hardware geared directly for the task.
The original tivo code base was forked from Linux v2.1! Yes, v2.1. The series2 (and maybe everything now) is based from v2.4.4. I seriously doubt Tivo has anything to worry about as they've made numerous changes to the kernel (scheduling and I/O systems.) Plus, they can always tell SCO to kiss their [censored] and return to 2.1.whatever.
As much as I hate to be accountable for inciting violence, I think it's time to call for a jehad. Someone go tell Milton, SCO has his stapler!
No one will charge to the aid of Sealand... and if they did, Sealand wouldn't be there by the time they arrived. It's a pair of ~60year old pilons with a deck. There isn't a military on the planet that couldn't obliterate that place with the first shot. (The range of the cannons on a US battleship is "over 26 miles.")
800#'s are handled by very different hardware: Long Distance Switches. They are designed to handle a great deal more than a local switch. And they do things much different.
LD switches have a large volume of highly fluid data to manage. This gave rise to SS7 and offloading of the database management and lookups. Local switches have only recently (relatively speaking) begun to use the same kind of SS7 infrastructure because of the size of the database(s) and the frequency of changes. All they used to need were NPANXX tables -- and those don't change everyday.
Telco switches don't run OSPF:-) Imagine trying to run the internet via static routes. Even with various databases and systems to generate the route tables, it's still a mess. And that's exactly how the telecom world works... Go wander around the Number Portability Administration Center (NPAC) website and learn how all this mess works.
Setup costs are a very small drop in the bucket. Get the phone's ID code and assign it a phone number (or put a pre-programmed SIM in it.)
It's only slightly more complicated than assigning an IP address for a cablemodem... punch the MAC address into your DHCP server and off you go.
How long does it take to activate a DSS receiver? A few minutes for a new customer and seconds for an existing customer (in fact, existing customers can activate it themselves either by phone or web.)
The opposition to number portability is mostly because of the technical problems with actually doing it. Image if number portability were applied to IP addresses... That's the exact same mess LNP creates. LNP updates can (and usually do) take days.
Please remember the age and size of the devices at the core of the PSTN. This isn't a network of state-of-the-art Cisco 12000's with TB's of RAM. Phone switches have extremely simple brains with less RAM than most modern hard drives. No telecom is going to rip out their existing 30+ year investment in Lucent/AT&T/Nortel equipment for modern, new (read: unproven) technologies -- which do exist. (For starters, no one has the money to do it and stay in business.)
And on Linux,/bin/shisbash. And you'd be very surprised to see how many "hackers" fail to clear out the history. It has been my experience that most of the nuts breaking into systems are mostly idiots simply running stuff someone else designed.
I've never ran into a real hacker... they know how to cover their tracks so they aren't noticed. And, I don't have any systems containing information of any value from which the real hacker could profit (thus, I'm left alone.)
Idiot. *sigh* The only problems NAT causes are to crappy implementations that make assumptions they shouldn't be making. (i.e. putting address info within the data of the protocol.)
IPSEC works perfectly fine through NAT -- I do so all the time without "non-standard encapuslation and such". The only part of IPSEC that will not work through NAT is header authentication and the various non-standard implementations that cryptographicly sign the entire packet. If the crypto integrity covers the packet header, then altering the address(es) within the header invalidates the packet.
Yes it is. If it can read CD-R's then it has a dual pickup head and therefore is designed to handly them. The inability to read CD-RW's is either a flaw or intentional.
Cyanimide dyes are not visible with a red spectrum laser. And the reflectivity of a CD-R is much too low (that's why a lot of car CD players have trouble with CD-R's)
That's expected... the dyes used in CD-R's are invisible to the red laser used to read DVD's. CD-RW's use a different formulation that is very readable by a red laser -- in fact, DVD readers can read CD-RW better than CD drives can.
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How about "unsecured WEP"? I know of several WEP-active APs that will gladly hand out the WEP keys (at least to the windows wireless configuration crap) It might be the stupidest damn thing in the world, but it's true.
Amen.
:-)
Depending on area, one may be required by various laws (almost always more than one) to have a licensed electrician do any work. (and maybe have the work inspected.) As such, one or more laws may have been violated by removing that panel.
In any case, an electrician is needed to rewire that entire panel before this thing blacks out another section of the grid
True. Nothing short of a nuke or plasma fire (neither of which will be built from "common household supplies") will any functional damage to the transformer's core. The windings are what must be damaged. However, this is not the 2lb transformer found in "wall warts." The windings are much larger, much better protected, and repairable (tho' not without some work.) So, without walking through the substation with a chainsaw (see other comments re: smoking backhoe operators), I doubt any real damage could be done.
.22 rifle (maybe on purpose, and maybe not.) There was a small hole in one of the cooling fins that leaked all the coolant out and the transformer eventually overheated. (They patched the hole, filled 'er up, and went on their way. Total repair time was about 2hrs with 1.5hrs in dispatching a truck.)
Many years ago, one of the transfer stations for REA went off-line. It turned out someone had shot one of the transformers with a
When it takes 18months to order a new one, you keep a spare around somewhere. There may be a single spare for a six state area, but there is a spare.
Two things... first, you've obviously never tried to destory one of those things. A stage one transmission transformer is 90+% solid metal. No handheld weapon (rocket launchers aside) is going to make much of a dent. Unless you have a nuke or an M1 in the barn, you will not do any serious damage. The wires and connectors are targets but they are simple to fix.
Second, I know of no power company in the US that does not have spares for every component in their grid. Granted, it will take a few hours to move a 30ton transformer.
Osama isn't a true terrorist. I don't see him willing to strap TNT to his chest and march into a mall. However, he has an army of idiots willing to do that for him.
... or hardware routing. Do you remember a company called NetStar? Bought by Ascend? They made the "GRF" router that was BSD based with some funky hardware assited routing.
They don't want a "dir flash:". They want the output of "show ver" so they can see what version and feature set is currently running on the router. If you have access to CCO (and thus ftp.cisco.com), you can download any image you want for any device. Cisco does record all that, but I'm not aware of them ever auditing it.
I've worked with TAC as well. For hardware support issues (where one has a hardware support contract), Cisco is exceptional -- if it's broken, they replace it - period. However, for software related issues, it's a very ugly picture. The first thing TAC suggests is to load a new version of IOS... "I cannot update to that IOS version because you cheese dicks won't patch IPM v2.2 to work with that version and I'm not paying $10k for a new version of Ciscoworks and all of it's bugs." In the end, they are just replacing one set of bugs with another.
(And when we refused to upgrade because of bugs listed in the release notes, guess what? Two weeks later, they had been removed from the release notes and DELETED from the bug database -- not resolved, not closed, not removed from view but purged, completely deleted, as if it never existed.)
"deep discounts"? Unless that's 90% off list, you're still being screwed. Any company with the size and sufficient volume to get those discounts have the revenue to pay wholesale prices. With the current economy, no one has the money to pay what Cisco expects for their junk.
- People expect Cisco to be good
That ceased to be true about five years ago. Cisco has bought way too many companies, fired too much talent, and attempted to wire IOS into everything. In the process, they've screwed up everything and things they "fix" don't stay fixed -- just because it's fixed in this version doesn't mean it's fixed in any of the future versions. (I've seen their monkeys un-fix too many things far too many times to trust them to do anything correctly. And after seeing them break things that have worked for a decade, I just want to turn a few of them inside out.)I would. Years ago, Cisco made very high quality hardware and software. Today, shit out as much crap as every other boob. The 7401 had a hardware design flaw that caused it to hard-lock. And then it took us several months of constant bitching to Cisco to get a version of IOS that worked correctly -- 12.2.9S that was never publically released -- and even that has hundreds of nasties in it. But, none of them are causing us problems. ISDN dial technology on a 1720... what a cluster fuck that is; even the LEDs don't light up correctly.
In the case of Cisco... around the time of the Sept. 15, 2000 document, they were seeing an increasing amount of virtually new hardware entering the marketplace for pennys on the dollar from all these failed dot-com's for which Cisco was never paid. It's not a big leap to see how Cisco would want to stop that immediately. And if they can come up with this vague, unspecified cash-cow of a "recertification" process, then it's even better for Cisco.
Having seen what little is available on this laughable process, I'd rather start my own router company than deal with the bullshit. $7000 to "inspect" a 7206VXR. They will only do the inspection during business hours (8-5M-F); the router will be powered down and disassembled during the process; only Cisco is allowed to be present at the inspection. And the best part: it's a binary process... it either passes or fails. No other information is provided -- i.e. why it failed and what we need to do it get it to pass.
Umm, the article talks about an unspecified model netapp and a cisco 2611. Depending on model and configuration, the netapp could be in the 60k$ range, but not a 2611.
That being said, the NetApp is not worth the cost, esp. in today's world. It's a nice device, but easily reproduced in many ways for orders of magnitude less. In the current environment, equipment is replaced every few years. So, the investment in NetApp gear that will physically last decades is useless. And it's made worse by changes in storage requirements.
For routers, mid- and high-end router hardware is expensive brand new and has zero parallel in the cheap, build-it-yourself arena. Once your needs go beyond T1 speed WAN links or you need to run a real routing protocol, you've gone into an expensive area of PC parts -- if the parts even exist. And a homebrew solution may not interoperate with your provider's hardware.
I'm all for do-it-yourself -- after all "if you want it done right..." -- but there are somethings that simply cannot be done without specific, customized hardware geared directly for the task.
See Also: AX.25
The original tivo code base was forked from Linux v2.1! Yes, v2.1. The series2 (and maybe everything now) is based from v2.4.4. I seriously doubt Tivo has anything to worry about as they've made numerous changes to the kernel (scheduling and I/O systems.) Plus, they can always tell SCO to kiss their [censored] and return to 2.1.whatever.
As much as I hate to be accountable for inciting violence, I think it's time to call for a jehad. Someone go tell Milton, SCO has his stapler!
We still have a few. But, you are correct; they will never be on active duty. There's been one parked in Wilmington, NC for decades.
The battleship is of the same era. And there's a lot to smile at from firing VW bug sized (mass) shells at something.
No one will charge to the aid of Sealand... and if they did, Sealand wouldn't be there by the time they arrived. It's a pair of ~60year old pilons with a deck. There isn't a military on the planet that couldn't obliterate that place with the first shot. (The range of the cannons on a US battleship is "over 26 miles.")
That money would be better spent on ammo, or contracting with a "terrorist" organization.
800#'s are handled by very different hardware: Long Distance Switches. They are designed to handle a great deal more than a local switch. And they do things much different.
:-) Imagine trying to run the internet via static routes. Even with various databases and systems to generate the route tables, it's still a mess. And that's exactly how the telecom world works... Go wander around the Number Portability Administration Center (NPAC) website and learn how all this mess works.
LD switches have a large volume of highly fluid data to manage. This gave rise to SS7 and offloading of the database management and lookups. Local switches have only recently (relatively speaking) begun to use the same kind of SS7 infrastructure because of the size of the database(s) and the frequency of changes. All they used to need were NPANXX tables -- and those don't change everyday.
Telco switches don't run OSPF
Setup costs are a very small drop in the bucket. Get the phone's ID code and assign it a phone number (or put a pre-programmed SIM in it.)
It's only slightly more complicated than assigning an IP address for a cablemodem... punch the MAC address into your DHCP server and off you go.
How long does it take to activate a DSS receiver? A few minutes for a new customer and seconds for an existing customer (in fact, existing customers can activate it themselves either by phone or web.)
The opposition to number portability is mostly because of the technical problems with actually doing it. Image if number portability were applied to IP addresses... That's the exact same mess LNP creates. LNP updates can (and usually do) take days.
Please remember the age and size of the devices at the core of the PSTN. This isn't a network of state-of-the-art Cisco 12000's with TB's of RAM. Phone switches have extremely simple brains with less RAM than most modern hard drives. No telecom is going to rip out their existing 30+ year investment in Lucent/AT&T/Nortel equipment for modern, new (read: unproven) technologies -- which do exist. (For starters, no one has the money to do it and stay in business.)
And on Linux, /bin/sh is bash. And you'd be very surprised to see how many "hackers" fail to clear out the history. It has been my experience that most of the nuts breaking into systems are mostly idiots simply running stuff someone else designed.
I've never ran into a real hacker... they know how to cover their tracks so they aren't noticed. And, I don't have any systems containing information of any value from which the real hacker could profit (thus, I'm left alone.)
bash# kill -9 $$
Idiot. *sigh* The only problems NAT causes are to crappy implementations that make assumptions they shouldn't be making. (i.e. putting address info within the data of the protocol.)
IPSEC works perfectly fine through NAT -- I do so all the time without "non-standard encapuslation and such". The only part of IPSEC that will not work through NAT is header authentication and the various non-standard implementations that cryptographicly sign the entire packet. If the crypto integrity covers the packet header, then altering the address(es) within the header invalidates the packet.
Yes it is. If it can read CD-R's then it has a dual pickup head and therefore is designed to handly them. The inability to read CD-RW's is either a flaw or intentional.
Cyanimide dyes are not visible with a red spectrum laser. And the reflectivity of a CD-R is much too low (that's why a lot of car CD players have trouble with CD-R's)
That's expected... the dyes used in CD-R's are invisible to the red laser used to read DVD's. CD-RW's use a different formulation that is very readable by a red laser -- in fact, DVD readers can read CD-RW better than CD drives can.