We have lots of different clients accessing our server and have never run into any problem like that. It may indeed do that, but it hasn't affected our use of it in any way. Even Outlook works great with it, which was surprising.
We've been using Courier for a couple of years now. We run several thousand users through it using Courier's POP3 and IMAP servers, Squirrelmail, and LDAP integration for all the user accounts. We've never had a single problem with it.
That's true, but it is still much better than not having that option;)
I've had two IDE drives fail at the same time a few years ago, probably from heat. That was a generic box that wasn't really made to be a server. We use all Compaq Proliants now with hardware SCSI raid, redundant fans, etc. I've never had more than one fail since then, and only then because we had the server shut off for an extended period.
His point is that if you have a 2TB partition made of 8 250GB drives, you have no data protection at all. That's known as striping. If one drive fails, you lose the entire array with no way to rebuild it without a professional data recovery service (and even that might be iffy with Reiser).
RAID5 would give you a 1.75TB partition with the equivalent space of one drive reserved for fault tolerance. My preference would be RAID5+Spare with that much space which would give you a 1.5TB partition with 250GB reserved for fault tolerance and one hot spare drive in case one of the others fails. With that setup, you're okay until you lose three drives.
I don't understand why you think rebooting every 30 days would keep that drive from still failing? That small amount of time to reboot is not going to keep the driving from failing at about the same time it would have if it were never rebooted.
I do agree that reboots will take care of the other things in your post, but it won't save drives.
I agree with you regarding Compaq laptops (their Deskpros and Proliants have always been good) until the last year or so. They've gotten much better. My department supports about 2000 Compaq computers, but was standardized on Thinkpads until the last year.
Which Compaqs have you looked at? I agree that their consumer/home versions are pretty cheesy looking.
We use the Evo N800c model at work. They look professional, are very reliable, and work with everything we've tried. We've been all Compaq except laptops up until the past year (IBM Thinkpads). Once I saw the newer Evo notebooks, we switched over to the Compaq laptops as well. The IBM's were great too, just pricey as you said. I don't even normally put my Compaq in a case unless I need extra peripherals or are traveling very far with it. It's pretty sturdy.
Before Thinkpads, we used all Toshibas. They were great a few years ago. I think their build-quality and reliability has gone down though, at least based on the ones we've bought.
My $160 garage door opener has a manual release. I assume this would as well.
How do paramedics get in now if the doors are locked and you can't open them? I assume they would bust them down or something.. doesn't matter if the door has a manual or electronic lock in that case.
I haven't looked at this one, but I know Packeteers can still differentiate between regular web and Kazaa traffic. That's why so many colleges and universities have purchased them.
2500s are dead reliable though, which means tons of them are still in use. For remote sites with T1s or frame-relay circuits, they are cheap, dependable, and fast enough. I'll take one any day over a Linux box with some weird WAN card in it.
Not at Layer-7, that's what makes it ideal. The expensive shapers like Packeteers work the same way. It doesn't matter what port, it actually looks at the traffic itself at the application layer.
Stuff any holes you find with steel wool before caulking them. If they try to eat through, they don't get very far. After filling all the holes in our 50 year old house, I haven't seen a mouse in over a year. We used to get several every winter.
The site listed in my profile generates 5-8 million total pageviews each month and is entirely supported by advertising. We have a slightly unique take on things though. For one, we charge a flat rate per month, not based on CPM (the supposed industry standard which never made sense to me). We have two plans, Standard and Premium. Standard advertisers get about 5,000 impressions per day depending on traffic and # of active advertisers. Premiums get about double that and are shown at a higher priority.
We started out using outside services like Flycast, Burst, etc. during the.com boom and did fairly well. They never sold to our target companies though so we got mostly Run Of Network (RON) ads that were very low paying.
When the bottom dropped, we started selling our own ads. We started out with companies that used our forums or were recommended by our users. As traffic grew and advertisers reported great success with our site, we began having advertisers contact us rather than us trying to sell it to them. Bear in mind that this took several years to get to the point that the site is entirely paid for by advertising. We started in July 1997, started advertising in May 1999, and finally started paying all the bills in 2000. I wouldn't want to start something new at this point unless I could sustain several months (years?) of losses. Remember that the advertisers won't come until the users and traffic are already there. Most of our advertisers sell fairly expensive items as well.. $400+ average I would think. One or two sales a month and it pays off for them. Lower ticket items might not do as well.
To sum up, don't even think that ad networks will pay off, sell your own ads, and target companies that are directly related to your site content.
Excellent comment, wish I had moderator points today. We've been trying, but no luck yet. You had some very interesting thoughts that I hadn't even considered.
My wife and I ended up walking out of Circuit City a couple of years ago over this extended warranty for a new Sony digital video camera we were trying to purchase. I explained to the salesman I didn't want it, then his boss, then the store manager. I finally asked if it was more important they sell the camera without a warranty or not sell anything at all. None of them had an answer, so we walked and I ordered the same model from Crutchfield that night. They lost a very expensive sale of a camera because they wouldn't let me buy it without the warranty.
I think they were very deceptive in how they explained the warranty as well. The salesman told us that DV cameras were very delicate and needed to be professionally cleaned twice a year at a cost of nearly $100/year just for cleaning. I explained that my department at work supports several of these in an educational environment and they are never cleaned, but that didn't satisfy him. Really frustrating.
We use the backup2l script from Sourceforge to backup about a dozen servers each night to a remote NAS server. It keeps multiple generations (not sure how many, but we can restore files from several months or even years later) and has worked great for us. It is tar based, but that hasn't caused any problems and we're backing up about 150 gigs with it.
Yep, the US Gypsum plant is near my house. The guys that work there say it is so fine that you can touch the surface of a large mass of it and it will ripple like water.. pretty cool!
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We have lots of different clients accessing our server and have never run into any problem like that. It may indeed do that, but it hasn't affected our use of it in any way. Even Outlook works great with it, which was surprising.
Jason
We've been using Courier for a couple of years now. We run several thousand users through it using Courier's POP3 and IMAP servers, Squirrelmail, and LDAP integration for all the user accounts. We've never had a single problem with it.
Jason
I agree. I still consider it the best game I've ever played, particularly as story goes.
Jason
That's true, but it is still much better than not having that option ;)
I've had two IDE drives fail at the same time a few years ago, probably from heat. That was a generic box that wasn't really made to be a server. We use all Compaq Proliants now with hardware SCSI raid, redundant fans, etc. I've never had more than one fail since then, and only then because we had the server shut off for an extended period.
Jason
His point is that if you have a 2TB partition made of 8 250GB drives, you have no data protection at all. That's known as striping. If one drive fails, you lose the entire array with no way to rebuild it without a professional data recovery service (and even that might be iffy with Reiser).
RAID5 would give you a 1.75TB partition with the equivalent space of one drive reserved for fault tolerance. My preference would be RAID5+Spare with that much space which would give you a 1.5TB partition with 250GB reserved for fault tolerance and one hot spare drive in case one of the others fails. With that setup, you're okay until you lose three drives.
Jason
I have an original Airport as well that has never gone down.
Jason
The handheld vs notebooks argument seems strange since most Palms and Pocket PCs are cheaper than almost any notebook.
Jason
I don't understand why you think rebooting every 30 days would keep that drive from still failing? That small amount of time to reboot is not going to keep the driving from failing at about the same time it would have if it were never rebooted.
I do agree that reboots will take care of the other things in your post, but it won't save drives.
Jason
I agree with you regarding Compaq laptops (their Deskpros and Proliants have always been good) until the last year or so. They've gotten much better. My department supports about 2000 Compaq computers, but was standardized on Thinkpads until the last year.
Jason
Linux runs fine on ours (Debian). We also use the USB-Serial converters.
Jason
Which Compaqs have you looked at? I agree that their consumer/home versions are pretty cheesy looking.
We use the Evo N800c model at work. They look professional, are very reliable, and work with everything we've tried. We've been all Compaq except laptops up until the past year (IBM Thinkpads). Once I saw the newer Evo notebooks, we switched over to the Compaq laptops as well. The IBM's were great too, just pricey as you said. I don't even normally put my Compaq in a case unless I need extra peripherals or are traveling very far with it. It's pretty sturdy.
Before Thinkpads, we used all Toshibas. They were great a few years ago. I think their build-quality and reliability has gone down though, at least based on the ones we've bought.
Jason
My $160 garage door opener has a manual release. I assume this would as well.
.. doesn't matter if the door has a manual or electronic lock in that case.
How do paramedics get in now if the doors are locked and you can't open them? I assume they would bust them down or something
Jason
I haven't looked at this one, but I know Packeteers can still differentiate between regular web and Kazaa traffic. That's why so many colleges and universities have purchased them.
Jason
2500s are dead reliable though, which means tons of them are still in use. For remote sites with T1s or frame-relay circuits, they are cheap, dependable, and fast enough. I'll take one any day over a Linux box with some weird WAN card in it.
Jason
Not at Layer-7, that's what makes it ideal. The expensive shapers like Packeteers work the same way. It doesn't matter what port, it actually looks at the traffic itself at the application layer.
Jason
Stuff any holes you find with steel wool before caulking them. If they try to eat through, they don't get very far. After filling all the holes in our 50 year old house, I haven't seen a mouse in over a year. We used to get several every winter.
Jason
You are confusing civil law with criminal law. Either can appeal a civil case.
Jason
The site listed in my profile generates 5-8 million total pageviews each month and is entirely supported by advertising. We have a slightly unique take on things though. For one, we charge a flat rate per month, not based on CPM (the supposed industry standard which never made sense to me). We have two plans, Standard and Premium. Standard advertisers get about 5,000 impressions per day depending on traffic and # of active advertisers. Premiums get about double that and are shown at a higher priority.
.com boom and did fairly well. They never sold to our target companies though so we got mostly Run Of Network (RON) ads that were very low paying.
.. $400+ average I would think. One or two sales a month and it pays off for them. Lower ticket items might not do as well.
We started out using outside services like Flycast, Burst, etc. during the
When the bottom dropped, we started selling our own ads. We started out with companies that used our forums or were recommended by our users. As traffic grew and advertisers reported great success with our site, we began having advertisers contact us rather than us trying to sell it to them. Bear in mind that this took several years to get to the point that the site is entirely paid for by advertising. We started in July 1997, started advertising in May 1999, and finally started paying all the bills in 2000. I wouldn't want to start something new at this point unless I could sustain several months (years?) of losses. Remember that the advertisers won't come until the users and traffic are already there. Most of our advertisers sell fairly expensive items as well
To sum up, don't even think that ad networks will pay off, sell your own ads, and target companies that are directly related to your site content.
Jason
Excellent comment, wish I had moderator points today. We've been trying, but no luck yet. You had some very interesting thoughts that I hadn't even considered.
Jason
Life really is imitating art. Didn't this thing drug and kidnap Mulder and Scully in an episode?
Jason
They wouldn't let me have the camera so I could go to the register and pay for it.
Jason
My wife and I ended up walking out of Circuit City a couple of years ago over this extended warranty for a new Sony digital video camera we were trying to purchase. I explained to the salesman I didn't want it, then his boss, then the store manager. I finally asked if it was more important they sell the camera without a warranty or not sell anything at all. None of them had an answer, so we walked and I ordered the same model from Crutchfield that night. They lost a very expensive sale of a camera because they wouldn't let me buy it without the warranty.
I think they were very deceptive in how they explained the warranty as well. The salesman told us that DV cameras were very delicate and needed to be professionally cleaned twice a year at a cost of nearly $100/year just for cleaning. I explained that my department at work supports several of these in an educational environment and they are never cleaned, but that didn't satisfy him. Really frustrating.
Jason
Jason
Yep, the US Gypsum plant is near my house. The guys that work there say it is so fine that you can touch the surface of a large mass of it and it will ripple like water .. pretty cool!
Jason
Ever worked on a British car?
Jason