They had been paying $220 a month to co-locate a Postfix smtp/web server. I moved the email and web server to Bluehost which cost them $6 a month (saving them a bundle in both co-location fees and the cost of a new SMTP/Web server to replace the one they had which was 7 years old).
Then the suits decided they wanted to share calendars and the only way they'd go for it was Exchange (which they also decided would be on the same server that they use for their internal files). We built the Exchange server but I managed to convey my qualms about putting an Exchange server (with their internal files) on the Internet without some idea of who is accessing it. Since Bluehost also offers a very cheap Postini option ($1 per month per user) that they had been very happy with I simply forwarded the emails to Exchange and set the router up to deny access to any one else.
This gives them what they wanted without a lot of latency (at least latency they'll notice), gives some protection to their files (which, last week, they decided might be better off on another server altogether), gives them pretty good (inexpensive) Postini email filtering, AND saves them over $2k a year.
Which part of this would not be reasonable? They pay less (way less), they no longer have to worry about whether their server will die, they get their Exchange server along with calendar sharing, and they don't have to deal with complaints from users about "latency".
One of my clients has gone to an in-house cloud to support international email on an Exchange server located in Southern California and supporting subsidiaries spread from Asia through the USA and into Europe. It's a frigging mess with latency problems frustrating everyone. Between the VPN and the distances involved plus the inevitable mis-configuration of desktops, everyone is frustrated. Luckily, I can lay the blame off on the guys who run the centralized shop they hired to implement this.:)
For another client, with only two locations connected by VPNs, I put an Exchange server in the main office but set up outside email at a hosted service (Bluehost) with Postini. Then I set up Bluehost to forward outside email tot he Exchange box, and set up the router to only allow Bluehost servers access to port 25. Users access only the local Exchange server which uses Bluehost's authenticated SMTP server for outbound connections. Everyone seems happy.
So I suspect we'll see a combination of cloud and local IT.
What is even more amazing is that with all the blocking and getting information out to users apparently spam is still profitable enough to keep on doing it. I have *never* responded to email spam but enough people must. Truly amazing.
You don't have anything to worry about... unless, of course, your name is the same as someone else who *has* done something wrong... or maybe look a little like someone who has done something wrong... or look like someone who might be doing something wrong.. or....
They may be looking at browser tags and anything that doesn't come standard on an un-jailbroken cell phone would be considered an unauthorized tether. But that's just a guess. And, of course, it can easily be spoofed.
You're right... it's just too bad that S&P didn't warn investors about the even greater risks involved in bundling questionable home loans and calling the result "investments".
I have hosted several web and mail sites on Bluehost with very little problem. They take care of the servers, we take care of the backups. They have some sort of agreement with a spam filter site that is ridiculously cheap. One of my clients gets email forwarded to their Exchange server (the router only allows email from the Bluehost boxes to have access), others just use IMAP and POP3. I don't have to add users or tweak mail servers. And all for about $7 a month.
I have run email servers for County agencies, local munisipalities, international corporations, school districts, and ISPs. So far the Bluehost solution has been the easiest by far.
The Puget Sound area amateur radio operators had a tcp/ip network using the 2-meter ham bands and I put my Zeneth Z-100 laptop on it. I remember camping on San Juan Island with a ham group in 1989 and demonstrating how I could telnet from our campground into the Z-100 using a little Radio Shack hand-held computer. I couldn't do much of anything useful but it was very impressive.
In about 1993 we had moved to a farm in central WA state and Internet access was available but was long distance until a Wenatchee ISP put in a set of modems at the community college in Moses Lake. These were 35 miles away but, more importantly, due to a recent change in long-distance charges made by Qwest it was a local call. I got a shell account at the Wenatchee ISP and could then use Lynx to surf the web. It was pretty cool.
At about the same time I found a utility (I can't recall the name) that let me use my shell account to get a true PPP connection from my home Windoes 3.11 desktop. I had to be careful though because the utility allegedly used up enough resources at the other end that the system admin would notice. I renamed the utility and got a copy of Mosaic for my Windoes 3.11 box and then ran the utility and connected up. I can still recall that my first web page was about Egyptology featuring the treasures from King Tutankhamen's tomb. It was astonishingly better than Lynx. LOL
About a week later my shell account was cancelled by the admins in Wenatchee. They had noticed that I was using more resources than usual and detected my ruse. It was about then that I bought into a partnership in Moses Lake that started up an ISP called atnet.net and since I was the main system admin no one could tell me what I could - or could not - do.
Good times. And it was also nice - as a Unix guy - to disprove Byte Magazine's cover story claiming that Unix was dead. I went on to own two more ISPs and they all used either Unix or Linux. And instead Byte Magazine became dead.
Because I live in a US county that publicly owns two hydro-electric dams our electric power rates are low enough to make it much more economical to use an electric-powered lawn mower instead of a gasoline-powered lawn mower. The safest method of mowing the grass would be to ensure that the power cord always stays out of the way of the grass-cutting head of the mower. This complicates the efficient mowing technique because, in general, it's better to simply mow so that the power cord is always on the freshly mowed grass and never on the soon-to-be-mowed grass.
I wonder what effect this would have on the system.
This has happened to many economies... even to Japan which at the time was the world's second largest economy. Japan has a debt to GDP ratio of over 100% (USA is about 90% depending upon which set of numbers are used).
Who was it said, "Reagan proved deficits don't matter"? Oh ya... Dick Cheney. No wonder we're in this mess.
You got control of the PLCs, started the emergency generator, set it to run at 75Hz, and forced it to connect to the mains? I'm thinking that might blow up a few bits and pieces of electronics.
Remember that Stuxnet was designed to use the PLCs to vary the frequency of the equipment.
The PLCs (and their controllers) form their own network that is not connected to the Internet; it's not even TCP/IP.
However... the desktop computers that interface with the controllers are often on the Internet because they use the local area network to communicate with both the controllers and get email, surf the web, etc. There is a close connection between the SCADA software on the desktop PC and the PLC so that if a sophisticated attack on that PC is successful then the attacker can have complete control over the PLC system.
Worse yet... many of the PCs controlling the PLC systems are older versions of Windows because updates are expensive (usually requiring specialists from outside the plant due to the nature of the systems) so people tend to put them off. I've seen lots of desktops running NT, for instance.
It is a small subset of the population that would call this "working".
I see your point... and even then it was valid. But getting up to two iced drinks a day on a 32-foot sailboat cruising in the tropics in 1982 was a pretty big deal. Those two panels (40" long by 15" wide) were all I could fit on that little boat and still keep them secured but pointed at the sun. Cruisers in Baja saw out system and flew back to California to get their own. And there was once an entire group of yachties carving wind-generator propellers on the beach in La Paz. But tourists wondered what they were for. Still, I guess no one had seen them before. The Mexicans always thought our little diesel heater - mounted on the salon bulkhead - was an espresso machine.:D
That being said, this is so cool, I wanna have your baby.
Too late! When we returned to the USA (my wife thought the kids should be put in a "real" school - HA!) we sold the boat and bought a farm. One day she had both me and one of the cats fixed on the same trip to town. When you live on a farm you do not waste trips to town.
On the old Galaxynet IRC network a middle-aged man impersonated a young girl for at least half a decade and managed to get promoted to IRCop on several servers. "Kimba" presented "herself" as a teen-age girl who had a history of being sexually molested. Her persona was bolstered by the job the real person had which was as a night security guard in a bank in Perth, Australia. By virtue of his job he could manage to be on-line a great deal of the time. "Kimba" had a succession of male "boyfriends" over the years but all of them carefully chosen for their geographic locations: e.g.: not close to Perth, Australia.
Some guessed that Kimba was a guy but no one knew for sure until "she" confessed to me and explained how the impersonation was done, described "her" real life (married with children) and then quit IRC for (as far as I know) good.
I must admit that some things "she" said made me wonder. One time "she" claimed that she had to take a quick bathroom break because it was "poking its head out, mate". I thought to myself that those Australian girls were certainly earthy. LOL. I bet that semantics program would have caught "her" out in a few minutes.
No scanned pics... but we used galvanized pipe in a 4-piece "cross", strung a stainless steel wire through one that became the "upright", and clamped plywood to the end of one as a "tail". Carved a propeller out a 2x4 and had a local (Mexican) machine shop make a coupling to the 35vdc electric motor which was connected to the pipe using large oval clamps. Really simple design. It made a lot of noise when the wind was brisk... but a lot of power too. We had a line connected to the tail so we could simply tie it cross-ways to the wind to shut it off. Unusable underway but that wasn't a big deal. I think it cost me all of about $100 total to make it.
When we built our 32-foot sailboat and embarked upon a 5-year cruise of the eastern North Pacific (read: Washington, Oregon, California, Baja and the Sea of Cortez) we bought two 33-watt solar panels in Oakland, CA and used them throughout the cruise. They worked amazingly well but we did spend a bit of time making sure they were oriented properly. We later augmented them with a wind generator (hand-carved propellor and a 35vdc motor hung in the rigging) which helped the refrigeration system make enough ice per day for two drinks each at sundown instead of just one.
We were a novelty then...
Now we're solar in our little 21-foot camp trailer and, guess what..... we're *still* a novelty. Two 40-watt panels (about half the size physically as those we bought in 1981 but roughly the same price in 2010 dollars) still give us all the power we need but we're typically the only solar-powered RV in the campground. And other campers continually ask us if they actually work.
I'm convinced that distributed solar power is the best answer to the energy problems facing the USA but I've been skeptical that we're educated enough as a culture to get there. Nice to see this piece.
Due to its government contracts the security force (made up mostly of ex-marines armed with assault rifles) can requisition fuel wherever they find it locally in the event of a power outage???
You won't be able to find anything until you either take a certification course or spend hours clicking on buttons searching for the simple commands you used to be able to find instantly.
I remember when the state I lived in was having a referendum about daylight savings time. There were several arguments against it. One was that it flaunted "God's time" (as if the railroads were endowed by the Creator for standard time zones). The best one was that if you died during daylight savings time you would be losing an hour of your life that you would never get back.
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They had been paying $220 a month to co-locate a Postfix smtp/web server. I moved the email and web server to Bluehost which cost them $6 a month (saving them a bundle in both co-location fees and the cost of a new SMTP/Web server to replace the one they had which was 7 years old).
Then the suits decided they wanted to share calendars and the only way they'd go for it was Exchange (which they also decided would be on the same server that they use for their internal files). We built the Exchange server but I managed to convey my qualms about putting an Exchange server (with their internal files) on the Internet without some idea of who is accessing it. Since Bluehost also offers a very cheap Postini option ($1 per month per user) that they had been very happy with I simply forwarded the emails to Exchange and set the router up to deny access to any one else.
This gives them what they wanted without a lot of latency (at least latency they'll notice), gives some protection to their files (which, last week, they decided might be better off on another server altogether), gives them pretty good (inexpensive) Postini email filtering, AND saves them over $2k a year.
Which part of this would not be reasonable? They pay less (way less), they no longer have to worry about whether their server will die, they get their Exchange server along with calendar sharing, and they don't have to deal with complaints from users about "latency".
One of my clients has gone to an in-house cloud to support international email on an Exchange server located in Southern California and supporting subsidiaries spread from Asia through the USA and into Europe. It's a frigging mess with latency problems frustrating everyone. Between the VPN and the distances involved plus the inevitable mis-configuration of desktops, everyone is frustrated. Luckily, I can lay the blame off on the guys who run the centralized shop they hired to implement this. :)
For another client, with only two locations connected by VPNs, I put an Exchange server in the main office but set up outside email at a hosted service (Bluehost) with Postini. Then I set up Bluehost to forward outside email tot he Exchange box, and set up the router to only allow Bluehost servers access to port 25. Users access only the local Exchange server which uses Bluehost's authenticated SMTP server for outbound connections. Everyone seems happy.
So I suspect we'll see a combination of cloud and local IT.
What is even more amazing is that with all the blocking and getting information out to users apparently spam is still profitable enough to keep on doing it. I have *never* responded to email spam but enough people must. Truly amazing.
By growing his bamboo bicycle frame into the shape he wants. Fairly cool!
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2008/09/growing-bamboo/
$ uptime
04:13:18 up 645 days, 18:04, 2 users, load average: 0.69, 0.66, 0.44
You don't have anything to worry about... unless, of course, your name is the same as someone else who *has* done something wrong... or maybe look a little like someone who has done something wrong... or look like someone who might be doing something wrong.. or....
They may be looking at browser tags and anything that doesn't come standard on an un-jailbroken cell phone would be considered an unauthorized tether. But that's just a guess. And, of course, it can easily be spoofed.
And I remember when a major tech magazine had a cover touting Microsoft's NT server and saying "Unix is Dead". Actually, the magazine died first.
You're right... it's just too bad that S&P didn't warn investors about the even greater risks involved in bundling questionable home loans and calling the result "investments".
Let's ee... 8 seconds at a time for $500... so if you only put one up every minute for an hour that's... uh.... oh, wait...
I have hosted several web and mail sites on Bluehost with very little problem. They take care of the servers, we take care of the backups. They have some sort of agreement with a spam filter site that is ridiculously cheap. One of my clients gets email forwarded to their Exchange server (the router only allows email from the Bluehost boxes to have access), others just use IMAP and POP3. I don't have to add users or tweak mail servers. And all for about $7 a month.
I have run email servers for County agencies, local munisipalities, international corporations, school districts, and ISPs. So far the Bluehost solution has been the easiest by far.
The Puget Sound area amateur radio operators had a tcp/ip network using the 2-meter ham bands and I put my Zeneth Z-100 laptop on it. I remember camping on San Juan Island with a ham group in 1989 and demonstrating how I could telnet from our campground into the Z-100 using a little Radio Shack hand-held computer. I couldn't do much of anything useful but it was very impressive.
In about 1993 we had moved to a farm in central WA state and Internet access was available but was long distance until a Wenatchee ISP put in a set of modems at the community college in Moses Lake. These were 35 miles away but, more importantly, due to a recent change in long-distance charges made by Qwest it was a local call. I got a shell account at the Wenatchee ISP and could then use Lynx to surf the web. It was pretty cool.
At about the same time I found a utility (I can't recall the name) that let me use my shell account to get a true PPP connection from my home Windoes 3.11 desktop. I had to be careful though because the utility allegedly used up enough resources at the other end that the system admin would notice. I renamed the utility and got a copy of Mosaic for my Windoes 3.11 box and then ran the utility and connected up. I can still recall that my first web page was about Egyptology featuring the treasures from King Tutankhamen's tomb. It was astonishingly better than Lynx. LOL
About a week later my shell account was cancelled by the admins in Wenatchee. They had noticed that I was using more resources than usual and detected my ruse. It was about then that I bought into a partnership in Moses Lake that started up an ISP called atnet.net and since I was the main system admin no one could tell me what I could - or could not - do.
Good times. And it was also nice - as a Unix guy - to disprove Byte Magazine's cover story claiming that Unix was dead. I went on to own two more ISPs and they all used either Unix or Linux. And instead Byte Magazine became dead.
Because I live in a US county that publicly owns two hydro-electric dams our electric power rates are low enough to make it much more economical to use an electric-powered lawn mower instead of a gasoline-powered lawn mower. The safest method of mowing the grass would be to ensure that the power cord always stays out of the way of the grass-cutting head of the mower. This complicates the efficient mowing technique because, in general, it's better to simply mow so that the power cord is always on the freshly mowed grass and never on the soon-to-be-mowed grass.
I wonder what effect this would have on the system.
This has happened to many economies... even to Japan which at the time was the world's second largest economy. Japan has a debt to GDP ratio of over 100% (USA is about 90% depending upon which set of numbers are used).
Who was it said, "Reagan proved deficits don't matter"? Oh ya... Dick Cheney. No wonder we're in this mess.
You got control of the PLCs, started the emergency generator, set it to run at 75Hz, and forced it to connect to the mains? I'm thinking that might blow up a few bits and pieces of electronics.
Remember that Stuxnet was designed to use the PLCs to vary the frequency of the equipment.
The PLCs (and their controllers) form their own network that is not connected to the Internet; it's not even TCP/IP.
However... the desktop computers that interface with the controllers are often on the Internet because they use the local area network to communicate with both the controllers and get email, surf the web, etc. There is a close connection between the SCADA software on the desktop PC and the PLC so that if a sophisticated attack on that PC is successful then the attacker can have complete control over the PLC system.
Worse yet... many of the PCs controlling the PLC systems are older versions of Windows because updates are expensive (usually requiring specialists from outside the plant due to the nature of the systems) so people tend to put them off. I've seen lots of desktops running NT, for instance.
It is a small subset of the population that would call this "working".
I see your point... and even then it was valid. But getting up to two iced drinks a day on a 32-foot sailboat cruising in the tropics in 1982 was a pretty big deal. Those two panels (40" long by 15" wide) were all I could fit on that little boat and still keep them secured but pointed at the sun. Cruisers in Baja saw out system and flew back to California to get their own. And there was once an entire group of yachties carving wind-generator propellers on the beach in La Paz. But tourists wondered what they were for. Still, I guess no one had seen them before. The Mexicans always thought our little diesel heater - mounted on the salon bulkhead - was an espresso machine. :D
That being said, this is so cool, I wanna have your baby.
Too late! When we returned to the USA (my wife thought the kids should be put in a "real" school - HA!) we sold the boat and bought a farm. One day she had both me and one of the cats fixed on the same trip to town. When you live on a farm you do not waste trips to town.
Thanks, though. :)
the disappearance of the glaciers.
On the old Galaxynet IRC network a middle-aged man impersonated a young girl for at least half a decade and managed to get promoted to IRCop on several servers. "Kimba" presented "herself" as a teen-age girl who had a history of being sexually molested. Her persona was bolstered by the job the real person had which was as a night security guard in a bank in Perth, Australia. By virtue of his job he could manage to be on-line a great deal of the time. "Kimba" had a succession of male "boyfriends" over the years but all of them carefully chosen for their geographic locations: e.g.: not close to Perth, Australia.
Some guessed that Kimba was a guy but no one knew for sure until "she" confessed to me and explained how the impersonation was done, described "her" real life (married with children) and then quit IRC for (as far as I know) good.
I must admit that some things "she" said made me wonder. One time "she" claimed that she had to take a quick bathroom break because it was "poking its head out, mate". I thought to myself that those Australian girls were certainly earthy. LOL. I bet that semantics program would have caught "her" out in a few minutes.
No scanned pics... but we used galvanized pipe in a 4-piece "cross", strung a stainless steel wire through one that became the "upright", and clamped plywood to the end of one as a "tail". Carved a propeller out a 2x4 and had a local (Mexican) machine shop make a coupling to the 35vdc electric motor which was connected to the pipe using large oval clamps. Really simple design. It made a lot of noise when the wind was brisk... but a lot of power too. We had a line connected to the tail so we could simply tie it cross-ways to the wind to shut it off. Unusable underway but that wasn't a big deal. I think it cost me all of about $100 total to make it.
When we built our 32-foot sailboat and embarked upon a 5-year cruise of the eastern North Pacific (read: Washington, Oregon, California, Baja and the Sea of Cortez) we bought two 33-watt solar panels in Oakland, CA and used them throughout the cruise. They worked amazingly well but we did spend a bit of time making sure they were oriented properly. We later augmented them with a wind generator (hand-carved propellor and a 35vdc motor hung in the rigging) which helped the refrigeration system make enough ice per day for two drinks each at sundown instead of just one.
We were a novelty then...
Now we're solar in our little 21-foot camp trailer and, guess what..... we're *still* a novelty. Two 40-watt panels (about half the size physically as those we bought in 1981 but roughly the same price in 2010 dollars) still give us all the power we need but we're typically the only solar-powered RV in the campground. And other campers continually ask us if they actually work.
I'm convinced that distributed solar power is the best answer to the energy problems facing the USA but I've been skeptical that we're educated enough as a culture to get there. Nice to see this piece.
It's also nice to have been a pioneer.
Due to its government contracts the security force (made up mostly of ex-marines armed with assault rifles) can requisition fuel wherever they find it locally in the event of a power outage???
Say, that's reassuring.
"Nuff said.
You won't be able to find anything until you either take a certification course or spend hours clicking on buttons searching for the simple commands you used to be able to find instantly.
Bwhahahaha!
I remember when the state I lived in was having a referendum about daylight savings time. There were several arguments against it. One was that it flaunted "God's time" (as if the railroads were endowed by the Creator for standard time zones). The best one was that if you died during daylight savings time you would be losing an hour of your life that you would never get back.