They are also porting their nss filesystem to linux (according to some of their guys here at Brainshare). This means salvage/undelete, trustees, and "higher resolution" file permissions on a file system that does not fragment. I do not know if it is journaled or not. This sounds like great news to me...
I have both a BS and MS in Electrical Engineering. I chose to stay on after my degrees to do sysadmin work at the university because I liked the area, but there were few jobs available. I'm close to family and the atmosphere is fairly relaxed, but it is definitely not for everyone.
Advantages: - Work completely independently. - Get to do everything: Hardware, Solaris, Linux, Novell, Windows, MAC, Apache, Perl, PHP, (and on and on)... - Chance to teach an occasional course - Good job security
Disadvantages: - Work completely independently (nobody to back you up or fill in when you're sick -- everything piles up) - Get to do everything: Never completely master one thing - Chance to teach an occasional course (and the headaches associated with it) - NO BUDGET (must train yourself, no paying for tech support calls, use the cheapest solutions possible -- even if they cost much of your time...) - Salary (not usually up to industry standards and often put in a salaried position that is overtime exempt)
This is somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but is basically accurate for our environment. All in all, I enjoy my job and my co-workers. We are fortunate to have many quality individuals in our department. Many of the advantages are a double-edged sword, but I enjoy most of them. Environment makes up for much!
The best bet is a simple buzzer for the alert itself (555 timer + a speaker or just a piezo buzzer).
As far as the trigger goes, many good ideas have already been given. The canidates I see are:
1.) Mercury or "ball switch". Mercury switches are glass or plastic tubes with to wires in them. When the mercury flows to one end of the tube it shorts the wires out. Similarly, there are switches used to detect inclines that have two wires that a small ball can roll against. Couple this with creative use of velcro and you have a reasonably easy to use switch. Strap it around the head, wrist, etc and adjust it's angle to work with the degree of movement the person has.
2. IR break-beam sensor. Several people have mentioned using IR or light sensors. The main problem is that ambient light interferes with straigt IR or photo sensors. One good way to get around this is a modulated IR detector like remote controlls use. Use something like a 555 time to generate the required 44 KHz signal (cookbook circuits exist for this on the web) and genertate the modulated source. Then use a stock detector (available at most electronic shops such as radio shack) to trigger the buzzer.
3. Touch sensors. Things like touch lamps can use the 60Hz noise that exists all around us to trigger another device. Your body just acts like an antenna for the signal. When it gets a signal it triggers (these types are prone to false triggers during lightning storms).
Another general idea for you: go to the nearest university with an electrical engineering program. Tell them your situation. I would be willing to bet that there would be student EE's (electrical engineers) thrilled to devote hours to solve your problem. Many times things like this work out to be nice honors/senior design projects.
I really like the idea of single sign-on. There are products that do it (and have been doing it for a while). We use NDS (Yeah, I know it's from Novell, but it WORKS!). We have a mixed network with Solaris, Linux, and Windows and it seems to work well. My main concern is that the company is going to be a casualty of Microsoft and Novell's own of marketing. At this point cross platform authentication seems to be their only hope. If they do go under, I really hope they GPL their directory first... Novell seems to have realized that their future lies with authentication services, but the realization may have come too late.
I work in a university environment. We have a mixed environment with labs containing dual boot Linux/Win2K machines and Solaris boxes. We also have some NT 4.0 machines and a bunch of 9x boxes. We have Netware, Solaris, NT, and Linux servers. We are using Novell's NDS Corporate Edition. This allows us to have one account/password for each user that will work on all of our platforms. All of the passwords are stored in NDS and authentication between clients and the NDS servers is encrypted. I am pretty happy with this product. The weakest part seems to be in Novell's documentation (another area that Novell has historically struggled a bit in). NDS seems to be VERY "durable", but it requires a bit of experience to properly maintain.
I also don't think that you can directly compare NDS and LDAP. LDAP is a protocol to access a directory (and is supported by NDS). NDS is a distributed directory service. I know that NDS has been tested with a billion users (granted this was on a real-no-kidding-around server). NDS can also run natively on Linux and Solaris. I have also heard rumors of other platforms being included. There is also a product (I believe developed at Clemson University) called Authserv that will interface with NDS and allow authentication on about any platform you'd like (including mainframes).
We also use Novell's Zenworks to distribute applications to our Win9x/NT/2K boxes. This is a very slick package. The newest version of it supports imaging (side note -- they are using Linux boot disks to do this!).
Netware itself is not all that special. It is very stable -- my Unix boxes and my Netware boxes both stay up unless I take them down on purpose. However, it is just a file and print sharing OS at heart. In my opinion NDS and Zenworks are Novells two strongest products (groupwise is kinda nice, but I don't feel that it is as on the same level as NDS or Zen).
Having said all of that, I believe the company is in big trouble. I would like to see them come out of it, but this seems unlikely. To me the best possible outcome is for a company (hmmm, RedHat for instance) to buy them and keep NDS and Zen alive.
Novell has had a lot of good ideas and sound products. They have done a really lousy job of marking them, however. NDS has been around for years, but there are a lot more people familiar with Active Directory than NDS (even though, in my opinion, NDS is a far superior directory service). Similarly MS started looking at ZEN and seems to be trying to counter with ZAN. Novell starts talking about "One Net" and Microsoft comes out with ".NET". The difference is MS can market themselves and Novell can't -- even after cleaning house in the marketing department. Their TV commercials don't seem to be very effective at describing what it is that Novell can do. It just seems to me to be a case of too little, too late.
I don't think that the company is going to go belly up anytime soon, but with their stock so cheap someone is likely to buy them. I just hope that when they do, they don't screw up NDS. It would be very great if a Linux company did buy them and then made NDS opensource, but that would probably make my life too easy...
I like tcpwrappers. They not only allow you to restrict where people connect from, they can also be configured to send you mail if you have people try to connect from sites you have blocked. In my case I block everything but my ISP and my office. Wrappers can be easily configured for all services that run from inetd.
Very good question.:-) I wasn't paying real close attention to the time when I posted. I just noticed that there weren't any other comments posted at the time. Something got apparently got stamped wrong...
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They are also porting their nss filesystem to linux (according to some of their guys here at Brainshare). This means salvage/undelete, trustees, and "higher resolution" file permissions on a file system that does not fragment. I do not know if it is journaled or not. This sounds like great news to me...
I have both a BS and MS in Electrical Engineering. I chose to stay on after my degrees to do sysadmin work at the university because I liked the area, but there were few jobs available. I'm close to family and the atmosphere is fairly relaxed, but it is definitely not for everyone.
Advantages:
- Work completely independently.
- Get to do everything: Hardware, Solaris, Linux, Novell, Windows, MAC, Apache, Perl, PHP, (and on and on)...
- Chance to teach an occasional course
- Good job security
Disadvantages:
- Work completely independently (nobody to back you up or fill in when you're sick -- everything piles up)
- Get to do everything: Never completely master one thing
- Chance to teach an occasional course (and the headaches associated with it)
- NO BUDGET (must train yourself, no paying for tech support calls, use the cheapest solutions possible -- even if they cost much of your time...)
- Salary (not usually up to industry standards and often put in a salaried position that is overtime exempt)
This is somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but is basically accurate for our environment. All in all, I enjoy my job and my co-workers. We are fortunate to have many quality individuals in our department. Many of the advantages are a double-edged sword, but I enjoy most of them. Environment makes up for much!
The best bet is a simple buzzer for the alert itself (555 timer + a speaker or just a piezo buzzer).
As far as the trigger goes, many good ideas have already been given. The canidates I see are:
1.) Mercury or "ball switch". Mercury switches are glass or plastic tubes with to wires in them. When the mercury flows to one end of the tube it shorts the wires out. Similarly, there are switches used to detect inclines that have two wires that a small ball can roll against. Couple this with creative use of velcro and you have a reasonably easy to use switch. Strap it around the head, wrist, etc and adjust it's angle to work with the degree of movement the person has.
2. IR break-beam sensor. Several people have mentioned using IR or light sensors. The main problem is that ambient light interferes with straigt IR or photo sensors. One good way to get around this is a modulated IR detector like remote controlls use. Use something like a 555 time to generate the required 44 KHz signal (cookbook circuits exist for this on the web) and genertate the modulated source. Then use a stock detector (available at most electronic shops such as radio shack) to trigger the buzzer.
3. Touch sensors. Things like touch lamps can use the 60Hz noise that exists all around us to trigger another device. Your body just acts like an antenna for the signal. When it gets a signal it triggers (these types are prone to false triggers during lightning storms).
Another general idea for you: go to the nearest university with an electrical engineering program. Tell them your situation. I would be willing to bet that there would be student EE's (electrical engineers) thrilled to devote hours to solve your problem. Many times things like this work out to be nice honors/senior design projects.
Good luck!
I really like the idea of single sign-on. There are products that do it (and have been doing it for a while). We use NDS (Yeah, I know it's from Novell, but it WORKS!). We have a mixed network with Solaris, Linux, and Windows and it seems to work well. My main concern is that the company is going to be a casualty of Microsoft and Novell's own of marketing. At this point cross platform authentication seems to be their only hope. If they do go under, I really hope they GPL their directory first... Novell seems to have realized that their future lies with authentication services, but the realization may have come too late.
I work in a university environment. We have a mixed environment with labs containing dual boot Linux/Win2K machines and Solaris boxes. We also have some NT 4.0 machines and a bunch of 9x boxes. We have Netware, Solaris, NT, and Linux servers. We are using Novell's NDS Corporate Edition. This allows us to have one account/password for each user that will work on all of our platforms. All of the passwords are stored in NDS and authentication between clients and the NDS servers is encrypted. I am pretty happy with this product. The weakest part seems to be in Novell's documentation (another area that Novell has historically struggled a bit in). NDS seems to be VERY "durable", but it requires a bit of experience to properly maintain.
I also don't think that you can directly compare NDS and LDAP. LDAP is a protocol to access a directory (and is supported by NDS). NDS is a distributed directory service. I know that NDS has been tested with a billion users (granted this was on a real-no-kidding-around server). NDS can also run natively on Linux and Solaris. I have also heard rumors of other platforms being included. There is also a product (I believe developed at Clemson University) called Authserv that will interface with NDS and allow authentication on about any platform you'd like (including mainframes).
We also use Novell's Zenworks to distribute applications to our Win9x/NT/2K boxes. This is a very slick package. The newest version of it supports imaging (side note -- they are using Linux boot disks to do this!).
Netware itself is not all that special. It is very stable -- my Unix boxes and my Netware boxes both stay up unless I take them down on purpose. However, it is just a file and print sharing OS at heart. In my opinion NDS and Zenworks are Novells two strongest products (groupwise is kinda nice, but I don't feel that it is as on the same level as NDS or Zen).
Having said all of that, I believe the company is in big trouble. I would like to see them come out of it, but this seems unlikely. To me the best possible outcome is for a company (hmmm, RedHat for instance) to buy them and keep NDS and Zen alive.
Novell has had a lot of good ideas and sound products. They have done a really lousy job of marking them, however. NDS has been around for years, but there are a lot more people familiar with Active Directory than NDS (even though, in my opinion, NDS is a far superior directory service). Similarly MS started looking at ZEN and seems to be trying to counter with ZAN. Novell starts talking about "One Net" and Microsoft comes out with ".NET". The difference is MS can market themselves and Novell can't -- even after cleaning house in the marketing department. Their TV commercials don't seem to be very effective at describing what it is that Novell can do. It just seems to me to be a case of too little, too late.
I don't think that the company is going to go belly up anytime soon, but with their stock so cheap someone is likely to buy them. I just hope that when they do, they don't screw up NDS. It would be very great if a Linux company did buy them and then made NDS opensource, but that would probably make my life too easy...
I like tcpwrappers. They not only allow you to restrict where people connect from, they can also be configured to send you mail if you have people try to connect from sites you have blocked. In my case I block everything but my ISP and my office. Wrappers can be easily configured for all services that run from inetd.
Very good question. :-)
I wasn't paying real close attention to the time when I posted. I just noticed that there weren't any other comments posted at the time. Something got apparently got stamped wrong...
The Berman owns the fish, lives in a green house,drinks coffee, and smokes prince.