Did it ever occur to you to work with your users (and yes they are the users of the system) instead of acting like you were god? Or do you think you are?
Students pay for the access as part of their fees. Now when a few are going overboard the better method is to work with them not get into wargames with them. Which is basicly what you're doing. They will start circumventing your DHCP pools next then start pulling from others systems and basicly working around you. If you contacted them and just nicely asked what they were doing and if there was any way that they could throttle the usage just a bit or do it in strange off hours you'd probably get not only a positive effect but may just have support from them.
I'm a network administrator now myself but I remember my college days. The more the admins tried to squeeze me the more I fought back. I finally ended up just self descructing most of the network to point that everything had to be turned off and the switches code reuploaded to them. All of which untraceably enough to me so they couldn't do a thing to me. But they knew they had pissed a student off bad. Next time around they were much more, shall we say, less ham fisted toward the student population. They got better results that way I assure you.
Well if you are a network admin just call your friend over at corp legal (I know you got one... remember the guy's computer that you fixed?) and say "you may get a live one soon try not to hurt them too bad". Then download the code onto the company network system, propogate it to 5 countries servers, then mirror it out to 407 contractor sites (separate companies) who then issue copies of it through all their systems along with actual business data. Then call all your buddies and say "Come and get it boyz". Then you clear it off the main company site in the USA and sit back and let the bored lawyers play if anyone is game.
Lets see them issue an injuction against the planet.
As one put it, this is the mole game. You take a hammer and try to hit the head that pops up. I'm betting that the computer geeks of the world can pop up and disappear faster. We've done it before, we'll do it again.
Heaven knows if nothing else the really underground (what we called "elite" sites in the 80s, kinda kiddy grounds now in lot of cases) will always have this stuff now.
But at the same time I've got a few questions about their announcement.
Is it running the application with it's own memory space (ie client processor churning) or is the server's processor handling it and handing off basicly screenwipes? I couldn't find the answer to that spelled out though I admit freely to not having read every page on their website.
Does this mean that GraphOn is going opensource? Or are they only supplying binaries?
Hype is part of the world. People are irrationally excitable. It's just part of things. If you can't stand people getting all uptight with the 'sky is falling' syndrome leave the human race now. It is how people function.
I'm the main network admin where I work. I came in for 15 minutes Saturday (around 1pm in the afternoon after I rolled out of bed) to check my systems.
I had several talks before then with management and the y2k "team" (read people justifying their jobs solely though hype and fear) and it boiled down to the following: 1) I'd stay within 30 min drive. 2) I promised I'd stay semi sober until after midnight. If I didn't get a call by 12:30 I could go wild. Believe me I did. 3) I'd come in the next day to double check things.
Others came in that night (that y2k team being one. they reminded me of vultures hovering hopeing something would die). I sure didn't. My stuff worked. I told them it would work. Repeatedly for months. Management decided to place their bets on their 25 year old network admin. It paid off for them. One happy network admin and the bonus that nothing went wrong.
I've found that if I spend a little time explaining the situation and laying out the possibilities I don't have to do nasty things like come in and spend new years night working. I keep my act together ahead of time. I talk to the managers and explain it in their talk what the possibilities are and what has been done. That prevents these sort of problems.
I had a great time myself. Those who didn't, well tough. You picked your profession for good or bad. If it isn't worth it then change. Or maybe try talking with the people making the unpleasant decisions so that maybe, just maybe, they might understand what is going on and stop beliving the hype.
The best way to phrase it is we are non-traditional social. To most groups the majority of computer people seem unsocial but we do socialize heavily, in our own ways. Slashdot is a good example. BBSes were probably a better example if anything. Such 'impersonal' socialization seems unsocial to the average person who only defines socializing as talking with someone voice to voice.
I guess in a since we are the non-traditional sociable techno-socialites.
The answer to your questions are in brief Yes, various, depends on the size of the log.
In detail lets start at the top: All nt server boxes as they come out of the package are set to a limited log size (I keep thinking 512kb but may not be exactly right) and set to overwrite events older than 7 days. What that means is if you get hardcore hammered in the security events the system can and will stop.
The types of events depends on how you have the system configured. If you do not audit anything then very little to nothing ever goes in the security log. Audit events against the system are what typically fill it up but I've seen a couple of MS products that will write to the security log (I don't think MS allows any 3rd party to write to security logs.) Thus for the most part, taking a standard NT system unmodified, nothing goes in it since there's no auditing. When you audit those events start appearing.
The size of the log allowed dictates the number of events. Each event is a various size so theres no 'cookie cutter' number. If you set the log for 500 gigabytes you'll be set (watch the HD space). If you set it for 512kb and do extensive auditing you'll fill up in a day or so tops in an unattacked environment.
Now to expand on this slightly there are 2 things that can result from a filled event log. You can have the system halt or it will just pop up messages on your screen saying its filled. When filled it stops recording new stuff until it can truncate out some old (remember default is 7 days). If you set the NT4.0 system up and use the C2 Configuration manager from the resource kit you'll notice direct control over which it does. By default it just pops up messages all day complaining.
A team of us got together yesterday and we went bashing on it for a while. Judging from its reaction while we were after it I think we probably did bluescreen it or otherwise 'freaked it out' (to be technical). It came back up not too long after that though so nothing permanent. Probably just a reboot but no way for us to prove it was definitely our doing or someone else getting the KO punch in.
I think someone REALLY got a suckerpunch in on them judging by its current reaction (or lack there of apparently). Probably is bandwidth flooding though.
(The no-DOS attack method their rules were saying not do was for just swamping by the power of bandwidth. We just aimed at making it run out of ram and/or blue screening with as few packets as we could from multiple sites.)
Ok I'm taking issue with this one. I'm a big fan of Linux and FreeBSD the rap you're giving Exchange here is not accurate.
First off I have 1200 users on a dual processor 16G hard drive, 512mb ram system. It has run 372 days without crashing/reboots/etc. Mail delivery is fast enough that it might as well be a chat room at times from people sending emails and replying so fast.
It has taken a good 4 waves of the Melissa virus without crashing or even blinking hard.
Other than adding uses and deleteing users there is NO, I reiterate- NO, other work done on it. The damn thing just runs. Period. No extra maintenance at all.
Yes the license cost blows goats. Yes MS does too. No Exchange isn't all that bad for a large scale environment if the people setting it up have a clue.
If they have a decent website all the way through then people will go back to the other pages on the site. Trying to funnel people through a roadway is like taking an 8 lane highway down to a single lane in the middle of rush hour. Yes it can be forced, no its not a good way to endear one self to others.
Well as much as I disagree with the theater's overreactive policies I can understand somewhat where they are coming from. They're being hit right and left by politics and all they want to do is make money, not fight moral wars.
Its really up to people to 'get a grip' and tell the politicians where the boundaries are. As it stands the politicans are (and always will being a class of useless leeches) aiming towards whatever they can to make themselves look proactive towards a social problem. Even if the actions are silly.
Businesses by their very natures have no spine, they want money and political battles are costly. They will bend when the wind blows.
Well the problem with it is the fact that not everyone is as determined as the Greeks (thats who the trojans were fighting btw). Sadly it takes rather technical wiz-kids to do that kind of looking.
I'm in a fortune 500 company and theres only 1 other person who could even come within the ballpark of being able to poke through say a linux kernel and see if there are any gotchas. Thats a very low number percent wise.
I disagree with this premise. I've lived quite nicely without that bird all my life, I can continue just as well.
I see this endevor as an acedemic 'can we do it', not as a solution to any kind of problem. There isn't a problem with that particular animal not being in existance.
W2K has a bad gotcha to it as well. Despite their hype that it is backward compatable with the 4.0 you don't gain any of the real new features for the most part until EVERYTHING is at W2k. Sure you get a couple of the more minor ones but nothing to justify the cost involved.
Sadly you're rather on the mark about most NT admins not being able to handle command line stuff.
I can't change out the NT servers for linux ones where I work... one of the prodominate reasons is that none of the other techs understand how to operate in that environment.
Lowest common denominator wins sometimes. I long for the day where I can sit at a Linux console all day. Anyone got a job opening or a current NT admin who would rather be a Linux admin?:)
There is a key fallacy in what Kratz is pushing: That things should be equal.
No, I'll break the political correctness and say things had damn well better stay unequal. There has to be someone sweeping the floor. If thats a black or hispanic fine. If thats a white person thats fine too. I never care as long as its swept.
Computers require literacy to function. That rules nice segment of the country right off the top. In fact that rules out a sizable portion of the world. If you can't get someone to the point of reading and writing, complaining that they don't have a computer isn't going to help.
Computers can be had for litteraly free these days if you agree to view advertising. It can't get much cheaper than that. What would people like to do? Pay people to have a computer to make the stats look nice? What does that solve? Not a thing. You haven't addressed the basic problem and that is the people's own choices.
The stats themselves indicate that incomes being equal blacks and hispanics aren't spending their money on computers like the whites. If they're screwing themselves, its apparently their own choice. CompUsa doesn't care if you are purple or green, as long as your money is good they'll sell you anything you like. Someone would have to have their heads in the dirt deeper than any politician not to have heard of the internet and all the "glories" of it (in quotes since its only as good as you use it for, more on that soap box in a minute). So people are making a choice that the 'experts' don't agree with. Deal with it. Thats life. Trying to 'solve' it is another way of saying you're going to force your views down someones throats. They tried that during the Crusades. I would have hoped the world had progressed further in its attitudes, but apparently not yet.
The internet is basicly a tool. You can make it whatever you like. If you're into pictures of 11 year old girls getting fisted then you can see it. If you're into reading the latest on quantum mechanics you can get that too. However neither use is avaliable if you don't know how to do the basic research and neither is useful at all unless you know how to apply your knowledge. As such handing it to the poor is almost useless. They are poor for a reason. Typically because they aren't that well educated. I'll say two things: First I'm damn glad there are some poorly educated people in the world. Otherwise I wouldn't have someone to clean up the trash and like. I could do it myself but why bother when I can have someone else do it. Second a computer in of itself can't teach a thing. You have to have the desire, ability and resources to spend time using it to leverage actual information that can teach you. The computer and internet is a card catalog system. It can show you where the books are but it sure can't read them for you and dump the info into your head.
In summary my opinion is obviously don't dork with the system. Those who will advance using the computer and internet will do so, those who won't, won't. There will always be haves and have-nots. Fact of life is there is limited resources and that means if one person is a have the guy next door may very well not be. Since stores aren't discriminating about selling computers to people then its not a society issue but a personal issue within those making their own decisions. I say deep six the report and let the world turn without micromanaging.
Slashdot Mirror
Did it ever occur to you to work with your users (and yes they are the users of the system) instead of acting like you were god? Or do you think you are?
Students pay for the access as part of their fees. Now when a few are going overboard the better method is to work with them not get into wargames with them. Which is basicly what you're doing. They will start circumventing your DHCP pools next then start pulling from others systems and basicly working around you. If you contacted them and just nicely asked what they were doing and if there was any way that they could throttle the usage just a bit or do it in strange off hours you'd probably get not only a positive effect but may just have support from them.
I'm a network administrator now myself but I remember my college days. The more the admins tried to squeeze me the more I fought back. I finally ended up just self descructing most of the network to point that everything had to be turned off and the switches code reuploaded to them. All of which untraceably enough to me so they couldn't do a thing to me. But they knew they had pissed a student off bad. Next time around they were much more, shall we say, less ham fisted toward the student population. They got better results that way I assure you.
Well if you are a network admin just call your friend over at corp legal (I know you got one... remember the guy's computer that you fixed?) and say "you may get a live one soon try not to hurt them too bad". Then download the code onto the company network system, propogate it to 5 countries servers, then mirror it out to 407 contractor sites (separate companies) who then issue copies of it through all their systems along with actual business data. Then call all your buddies and say "Come and get it boyz". Then you clear it off the main company site in the USA and sit back and let the bored lawyers play if anyone is game.
Lets see them issue an injuction against the planet.
As one put it, this is the mole game. You take a hammer and try to hit the head that pops up. I'm betting that the computer geeks of the world can pop up and disappear faster. We've done it before, we'll do it again.
Heaven knows if nothing else the really underground (what we called "elite" sites in the 80s, kinda kiddy grounds now in lot of cases) will always have this stuff now.
But at the same time I've got a few questions about their announcement.
Is it running the application with it's own memory space (ie client processor churning) or is the server's processor handling it and handing off basicly screenwipes? I couldn't find the answer to that spelled out though I admit freely to not having read every page on their website.
Does this mean that GraphOn is going opensource? Or are they only supplying binaries?
Hype is part of the world. People are irrationally excitable. It's just part of things. If you can't stand people getting all uptight with the 'sky is falling' syndrome leave the human race now. It is how people function.
I'm the main network admin where I work. I came in for 15 minutes Saturday (around 1pm in the afternoon after I rolled out of bed) to check my systems.
I had several talks before then with management and the y2k "team" (read people justifying their jobs solely though hype and fear) and it boiled down to the following:
1) I'd stay within 30 min drive.
2) I promised I'd stay semi sober until after midnight. If I didn't get a call by 12:30 I could go wild. Believe me I did.
3) I'd come in the next day to double check things.
Others came in that night (that y2k team being one. they reminded me of vultures hovering hopeing something would die). I sure didn't. My stuff worked. I told them it would work. Repeatedly for months. Management decided to place their bets on their 25 year old network admin. It paid off for them. One happy network admin and the bonus that nothing went wrong.
I've found that if I spend a little time explaining the situation and laying out the possibilities I don't have to do nasty things like come in and spend new years night working. I keep my act together ahead of time. I talk to the managers and explain it in their talk what the possibilities are and what has been done. That prevents these sort of problems.
I had a great time myself. Those who didn't, well tough. You picked your profession for good or bad. If it isn't worth it then change. Or maybe try talking with the people making the unpleasant decisions so that maybe, just maybe, they might understand what is going on and stop beliving the hype.
The best way to phrase it is we are non-traditional social. To most groups the majority of computer people seem unsocial but we do socialize heavily, in our own ways. Slashdot is a good example. BBSes were probably a better example if anything. Such 'impersonal' socialization seems unsocial to the average person who only defines socializing as talking with someone voice to voice.
I guess in a since we are the non-traditional sociable techno-socialites.
The answer to your questions are in brief Yes, various, depends on the size of the log.
In detail lets start at the top: All nt server boxes as they come out of the package are set to a limited log size (I keep thinking 512kb but may not be exactly right) and set to overwrite events older than 7 days. What that means is if you get hardcore hammered in the security events the system can and will stop.
The types of events depends on how you have the system configured. If you do not audit anything then very little to nothing ever goes in the security log. Audit events against the system are what typically fill it up but I've seen a couple of MS products that will write to the security log (I don't think MS allows any 3rd party to write to security logs.) Thus for the most part, taking a standard NT system unmodified, nothing goes in it since there's no auditing. When you audit those events start appearing.
The size of the log allowed dictates the number of events. Each event is a various size so theres no 'cookie cutter' number. If you set the log for 500 gigabytes you'll be set (watch the HD space). If you set it for 512kb and do extensive auditing you'll fill up in a day or so tops in an unattacked environment.
Now to expand on this slightly there are 2 things that can result from a filled event log. You can have the system halt or it will just pop up messages on your screen saying its filled. When filled it stops recording new stuff until it can truncate out some old (remember default is 7 days). If you set the NT4.0 system up and use the C2 Configuration manager from the resource kit you'll notice direct control over which it does. By default it just pops up messages all day complaining.
Hope that answers your questions.
4. You can't do anything but browse the main web page in IE 5.0. Anything else wouldn't be fair.
5. You can't send any data at it. A 512byte packet would count as packet flooding.
A team of us got together yesterday and we went bashing on it for a while. Judging from its reaction while we were after it I think we probably did bluescreen it or otherwise 'freaked it out' (to be technical). It came back up not too long after that though so nothing permanent. Probably just a reboot but no way for us to prove it was definitely our doing or someone else getting the KO punch in.
I think someone REALLY got a suckerpunch in on them judging by its current reaction (or lack there of apparently). Probably is bandwidth flooding though.
(The no-DOS attack method their rules were saying not do was for just swamping by the power of bandwidth. We just aimed at making it run out of ram and/or blue screening with as few packets as we could from multiple sites.)
Ok I'm taking issue with this one. I'm a big fan of Linux and FreeBSD the rap you're giving Exchange here is not accurate.
First off I have 1200 users on a dual processor 16G hard drive, 512mb ram system. It has run 372 days without crashing/reboots/etc. Mail delivery is fast enough that it might as well be a chat room at times from people sending emails and replying so fast.
It has taken a good 4 waves of the Melissa virus without crashing or even blinking hard.
Other than adding uses and deleteing users there is NO, I reiterate- NO, other work done on it. The damn thing just runs. Period. No extra maintenance at all.
Yes the license cost blows goats. Yes MS does too. No Exchange isn't all that bad for a large scale environment if the people setting it up have a clue.
Ah but if you tell them you know how to install a male connection into a female port does that help any?
Or you can try the ever famous 'computer guys like me all have big joysticks to play with'
Better yet you can break out the jokes about how the girls are so pretty they can turn a floppy drive into a hard drive.
Our industry is just too easy to make those kind of jokes.
If they have a decent website all the way through then people will go back to the other pages on the site. Trying to funnel people through a roadway is like taking an 8 lane highway down to a single lane in the middle of rush hour. Yes it can be forced, no its not a good way to endear one self to others.
Well as much as I disagree with the theater's overreactive policies I can understand somewhat where they are coming from. They're being hit right and left by politics and all they want to do is make money, not fight moral wars.
Its really up to people to 'get a grip' and tell the politicians where the boundaries are. As it stands the politicans are (and always will being a class of useless leeches) aiming towards whatever they can to make themselves look proactive towards a social problem. Even if the actions are silly.
Businesses by their very natures have no spine, they want money and political battles are costly. They will bend when the wind blows.
Well the problem with it is the fact that not everyone is as determined as the Greeks (thats who the trojans were fighting btw). Sadly it takes rather technical wiz-kids to do that kind of looking.
I'm in a fortune 500 company and theres only 1 other person who could even come within the ballpark of being able to poke through say a linux kernel and see if there are any gotchas. Thats a very low number percent wise.
I disagree with this premise. I've lived quite nicely without that bird all my life, I can continue just as well.
I see this endevor as an acedemic 'can we do it', not as a solution to any kind of problem. There isn't a problem with that particular animal not being in existance.
Its pure flamebait.
W2K has a bad gotcha to it as well. Despite their hype that it is backward compatable with the 4.0 you don't gain any of the real new features for the most part until EVERYTHING is at W2k. Sure you get a couple of the more minor ones but nothing to justify the cost involved.
Sadly you're rather on the mark about most NT admins not being able to handle command line stuff.
:)
I can't change out the NT servers for linux ones where I work... one of the prodominate reasons is that none of the other techs understand how to operate in that environment.
Lowest common denominator wins sometimes. I long for the day where I can sit at a Linux console all day. Anyone got a job opening or a current NT admin who would rather be a Linux admin?
There is a key fallacy in what Kratz is pushing:
That things should be equal.
No, I'll break the political correctness and say things had damn well better stay unequal. There has to be someone sweeping the floor. If thats a black or hispanic fine. If thats a white person thats fine too. I never care as long as its swept.
Computers require literacy to function. That rules nice segment of the country right off the top. In fact that rules out a sizable portion of the world. If you can't get someone to the point of reading and writing, complaining that they don't have a computer isn't going to help.
Computers can be had for litteraly free these days if you agree to view advertising. It can't get much cheaper than that. What would people like to do? Pay people to have a computer to make the stats look nice? What does that solve? Not a thing. You haven't addressed the basic problem and that is the people's own choices.
The stats themselves indicate that incomes being equal blacks and hispanics aren't spending their money on computers like the whites. If they're screwing themselves, its apparently their own choice. CompUsa doesn't care if you are purple or green, as long as your money is good they'll sell you anything you like. Someone would have to have their heads in the dirt deeper than any politician not to have heard of the internet and all the "glories" of it (in quotes since its only as good as you use it for, more on that soap box in a minute). So people are making a choice that the 'experts' don't agree with. Deal with it. Thats life. Trying to 'solve' it is another way of saying you're going to force your views down someones throats. They tried that during the Crusades. I would have hoped the world had progressed further in its attitudes, but apparently not yet.
The internet is basicly a tool. You can make it whatever you like. If you're into pictures of 11 year old girls getting fisted then you can see it. If you're into reading the latest on quantum mechanics you can get that too. However neither use is avaliable if you don't know how to do the basic research and neither is useful at all unless you know how to apply your knowledge. As such handing it to the poor is almost useless. They are poor for a reason. Typically because they aren't that well educated. I'll say two things: First I'm damn glad there are some poorly educated people in the world. Otherwise I wouldn't have someone to clean up the trash and like. I could do it myself but why bother when I can have someone else do it. Second a computer in of itself can't teach a thing. You have to have the desire, ability and resources to spend time using it to leverage actual information that can teach you. The computer and internet is a card catalog system. It can show you where the books are but it sure can't read them for you and dump the info into your head.
In summary my opinion is obviously don't dork with the system. Those who will advance using the computer and internet will do so, those who won't, won't. There will always be haves and have-nots. Fact of life is there is limited resources and that means if one person is a have the guy next door may very well not be. Since stores aren't discriminating about selling computers to people then its not a society issue but a personal issue within those making their own decisions. I say deep six the report and let the world turn without micromanaging.
It will anyways.