I have to agree. Considering the prices on hardware to light fiber over any type of non-metro area distance, it's almost impossible for a small company to even attempt to take advantage of what's there to provide service to the more rural areas now that the venture capital money that laid all that fiber out there is gone. Then you would also have to add in the co-lo costs, and I've never known the phone companies to be very friendly about their pricing on that, especially since they're struggling to turn profit on their own broadband endeavors. It's a real shame, but at least it is there if the future ever gets rosy again. Does anyone know if there have been any MAN initiatives in the metro areas? From the article, it sounded like the fiber was there for that, and short range gig speed isn't that unreasonably priced on the hardware side. Not that it would help everyone, but then at least some of it would be well used...
True, but don't forget it's a hospital. Have you priced a 6509 with an MSFC card lately? I know they're nice & all, but that's a lot of $$. Edge routers, yes, but they might be better served to use 2600 series routers and stick with L2 switches for port density.
First of all, this was apparently a flat layer-2 network. From the information I have seen, it was a very large network. Spanning tree is a wonderful protocol and layer-2 networks are not bad things, BUT spanning tree is very complex in a large network, and latency is going to be an issue if there are no routed boundaries to control traffic. I have experience in designing networks for hospitals (and financial institutions and universities and gov't institutions), so I am aware that implementing layer-3 to the edge is not necessarily feasible for many reasons - financial, legacy setups, etc. That being siad, however, there should be some layer-3 at some point to segregate traffic and protect the critical pieces of the network. Identify the critical points of the networks and put redundancy there - i.e. the server farm, critical care monitoring systems, WAN connection. All network equipment vendors have some type of redundancy feature that would take care of automatic failover for these devices.
Full redundancy is impossible - are you really going to have dual NICs in every workstation and expect that everything would just work in the event of a failover? First of all, the expense would be incredible, and the maintenance would be a nightmare. If they are like most institutions, they are already understaffed and overworked - they wouldn't be able to keep something like that together. Dual-home closet switches to redundant routers/switches that are in turn dual-homed to a redundant core. Servers should have multiple NICs that are attached to multiple switches specifically to provide redundancy.
The worst problem here, though, was not the network itself. This is probably the most prevalent common problem to all institutions - they had no test environment. As multiple other posters have pointed out, this experimental database should never have been attached to a production network, regardless of the expected impact it might have. The key word about it is EXPERIMENTAL - you don't know how it might impact anything. As long as there is no separate environment for testing, there's really no such thing as redundancy no matter how the network is configured.
Say, for example, that the application took down the primary network, so the secondary comes up and takes over. Did anyone realize what caused the failover? Probably not, since a properly configured network will failover in a matter of seconds. So, the application is still running. How long until the secondary network fails as well? Then all of the expense and reconfiguration that went into building the redundant network were for nothing.
If this hospital is like most, they have an extremely diverse hodgepodge of equipment - some incredibly old stuff that they keep around because it works and some really cool cutting edge gadgets that everyone can see the benefit of. They've also epxanded the network as needed and tried not to take anything down when they did it, so what they've ended up with is a logical rat's nest. VLANs probably have been created, but they're probably trunked everywhere, because the goal of the expansion was to connect more devices, not to segregate by function. Hospitals don't get down time, so it's not a simple thing to say that things have to be reconfigured. Odds are that the workstations may not all even be on DHCP, so chainging an IP may require a person (back to that understaffed thing again) touching possibly hundreds of workstations. Yes that needs to be done, and I don't know a single network admin who wouldn't agree, but when you have to have outages cleared by upper management who are going to be chewed by the board if the time frame goes longer than you expected, it turns into a lot more than just what is actually best for the network.
The solution: use down time wisely. Stage implementations and keep them within the allotted time frames. And DOCUMENT. I know - nobody likes to do the documentation, but I think we can all say that it's a lot easier to plan migrations if you have documentation of what is currently there. Realize that no matter what you do, it's not going to last forever. Your cable plant probably has a lifspan of 10 years (not to say that you may not get 20 or even 30 years out of it, as long as you're willing to stay slow), but your network devices will probably only be there for 5 years. Are you still going to be there for the next change? Probably not, so be nice to the company and to the people who follow after you and document.
Just my $0.02, and I'm just that blond chick, so what do I know anyway...
It may not be your ideal solution, but my husband and I set up our son's PC to dual-boot Win98 and RedHat over 2 years ago when he was 5. He's 8 now, and he can transition easily from one to the other. Like other posters, we didn't want him getting too attached to all of the quirks and such of a single OS. LILO makes it easy for him to choose what he wants to do. Like your children, he mainly uses Windows for his games and VB Programming (I KNOW but it's easy for an 8 year old). We haven't tried WINE for him because we didn't think he could handle the quirks there. Besides, he's starting to bring home software from school now and trades games with his friends, and of course, that's all Windows, and we expect that he should be able to install and run things on his own, which he does just fine. He uses his RedHat for everything else - OpenOffice for his papers, Mozilla for web browsing via our proxy server, PICO (we're working on vi (HAH!) but it's slow going) for his HTML development, and he's addicted to Tux Racers. Anyway, the point of all this is that he's found the things that he likes best about each OS without just having one or the other, and he gets the benefits of both.
Don't complain here - complain to your elected rep
on
HomeSec In the News
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Maybe if we all flood our Senators with the way we all feel about this bill instead of just ranting on Slashdot, they might actually notice. To get your Congressmen's email addresses (and links to their home pages for snail mail addresses) try this page . Maybe you didn't vote (not like most of us had much in the way of a choice), but it's not too late to tell these people how Americans feel about the laws they want to govern us with.
And is it just me, or are Congressmen's web pages very frightening places? I may have nightmares for days...
I had a wireless gyroscopic mouse a couple of years ago. I don't remember what brand, but it was too inaccurate and too slow to be any fun to use. I could see it being useful for slide presentations, but for everyday use and gaming, it was impossible to deal with. The comfort factor wasn't so great, either. It's now collecting dust somewhere in my pile of should-have-been-cooler-than-this junk. Hopefully, being optical will help with the accuracy issues, but I'm not going to run right out and spend my money again.
FYI - if anyone is in/around Las Vegas right now there is a good demo IPv6 network in the iLabs section of Interop. There are also some free classes/tutorials going on there.
Backups could be a concern if you did not get a good backup of the link reference database but since the links are stored in a database this may have some rebuilding information included. I don't know.
A quick comment before I start - First Microsoft mimics MAC OS and now it appears that they have been attempting to mimic Unix. So if Amazon can patient a web page concept how can Microsoft get away with this. Now on to the subject of the article - My first thought is how much additional over head this database would take-up. Unix references links through inodes so the file is more of a pointer on the physical disk using a database would be more of a redirect. Not only is reading a database at an application level more system intensive than reading the lower level inode reference but can be of potential danger in different ways.
... don't say anything at all. This used to be a really good maxim for all of us to live by. However, limiting negative comments would defeat the whole principle of a discussion group. If you find yourself too offended to go on living because a comment you made got flamed then maybe you shouldn't post at all. Yes, people do tend to be more hostile in an anonymous environment, but hostility is a part of life. Comments need to be criticized; if someone posts something that is wrong, it is the duty of the more-informed to correct the error in order to help not only the original poster but also any less-informed readers. Now, admittedly, these criticisms can be constructive instead of derogatory. It's a lot more effective to tell someone that he/she is on the right track, but... than to tell that person that he/she is a moron who shouldn't even be here. The kiddies who flame do it for attention - isn't their behavior the main reason that we classify them as kiddies? Ignore them, and they'll get bored and either go away or grow up.
I do not feel that slashdot prevents anyone, regardless of gender/race/age from posting. Knowledge level would seem to be the most limiting factor here. Maybe in today's society, the old maxim should read "If you don't have something intelligent to say..." However, that determination should be made by the poster, not by slashdot. Free speech includes inane, off-topic comments, whether we like that or not, and the 'net is the one place where people can fully use free speech. I am certain that people say things here that they would never say in the "real world", but isn't that the whole point?
I understand your feelings but I also feel that a certification is not a true reflection on the knowledge that occupies ones mind. I have seen far too many Certified Administrators that couldn't understand why they kept running out of swap when they were using it as a standard file system. I do agree with you that the CCIE is a truly accrediting certification, but this is only due to the amount of hands on one must have to complete the upper level exams. This exam still is not able to differentiate between rote learning and conceptual understanding. I do not however feel that a CCNA is as true a test of ability as it possibly should be. All to many certifications are composed of memorizing a bunch of facts that may and may not help you depending on how your mind works. Real results come from the ability to use those facts in a real world environment. I feel that in the future employers will begin to get tired of hiring a supposed "experts" who proves only to waste a lot of the companies valuable time, and will look for those employees with proven experience in the field. I do agree that certifications can definitely help you get your foot in the door; but don't try to sell yourself for more than you really know, because in the end what you really know is going to show through.
Actually Solaris has not obtained TCSEC approval as stated by Anonymous Coward with reference to the listed URL http://www.radium.ncsc.mil/tpep/epl/epl-by-vendor. html but do have a similar equivalency.
This is true but I don't think that this is because Solaris is unable to attain this level of certification. Solaris 2.6 has attained ITSEC certification of E3/F-C2 effective since December 1998 and Trusted Solaris 2.5 has attained E3/F-B1 effective since November 1995.
Not to be too picky, but that wasn't Columbus. It was actually the Renaissance architect Fillipo Brunelleschi (maybe I spelled that right??) in Florence, Italy. To the actual point, Cisco isn't promising 44Mbps. In their specifications for the wireless modem card for the uBR7200 series router, they are very careful to point out that the data rate may be up to 44Mbps if you have a 12Mhz channel. If you only get a 6Mhz channel, the best you could hope for is 22Mbps. Still, even if there is a loss of 50% on the data rate, even at the lower input bandwidth, the speed is still substantially better than the G.Lite speeds being offered by DSL carriers in my part of the world (if you're fortunate enough to have your line qualify). Also, those are full duplex data rates, so you don' thave the upstream/downstream issues you get with ADSL. I'd definitely be willing to try it. I only wish I had the funds to get to become one of those lucky ISPs to get it first:)
Slashdot Mirror
I have to agree. Considering the prices on hardware to light fiber over any type of non-metro area distance, it's almost impossible for a small company to even attempt to take advantage of what's there to provide service to the more rural areas now that the venture capital money that laid all that fiber out there is gone. Then you would also have to add in the co-lo costs, and I've never known the phone companies to be very friendly about their pricing on that, especially since they're struggling to turn profit on their own broadband endeavors. It's a real shame, but at least it is there if the future ever gets rosy again. Does anyone know if there have been any MAN initiatives in the metro areas? From the article, it sounded like the fiber was there for that, and short range gig speed isn't that unreasonably priced on the hardware side. Not that it would help everyone, but then at least some of it would be well used...
On the sappy romantic front, as the geek wife of a geek guy, just be your sweet geeky self :) Us girls kinda like that stuff.
True, but don't forget it's a hospital. Have you priced a 6509 with an MSFC card lately? I know they're nice & all, but that's a lot of $$. Edge routers, yes, but they might be better served to use 2600 series routers and stick with L2 switches for port density.
First of all, this was apparently a flat layer-2 network. From the information I have seen, it was a very large network. Spanning tree is a wonderful protocol and layer-2 networks are not bad things, BUT spanning tree is very complex in a large network, and latency is going to be an issue if there are no routed boundaries to control traffic. I have experience in designing networks for hospitals (and financial institutions and universities and gov't institutions), so I am aware that implementing layer-3 to the edge is not necessarily feasible for many reasons - financial, legacy setups, etc. That being siad, however, there should be some layer-3 at some point to segregate traffic and protect the critical pieces of the network. Identify the critical points of the networks and put redundancy there - i.e. the server farm, critical care monitoring systems, WAN connection. All network equipment vendors have some type of redundancy feature that would take care of automatic failover for these devices.
Full redundancy is impossible - are you really going to have dual NICs in every workstation and expect that everything would just work in the event of a failover? First of all, the expense would be incredible, and the maintenance would be a nightmare. If they are like most institutions, they are already understaffed and overworked - they wouldn't be able to keep something like that together. Dual-home closet switches to redundant routers/switches that are in turn dual-homed to a redundant core. Servers should have multiple NICs that are attached to multiple switches specifically to provide redundancy.
The worst problem here, though, was not the network itself. This is probably the most prevalent common problem to all institutions - they had no test environment. As multiple other posters have pointed out, this experimental database should never have been attached to a production network, regardless of the expected impact it might have. The key word about it is EXPERIMENTAL - you don't know how it might impact anything. As long as there is no separate environment for testing, there's really no such thing as redundancy no matter how the network is configured.
Say, for example, that the application took down the primary network, so the secondary comes up and takes over. Did anyone realize what caused the failover? Probably not, since a properly configured network will failover in a matter of seconds. So, the application is still running. How long until the secondary network fails as well? Then all of the expense and reconfiguration that went into building the redundant network were for nothing.
If this hospital is like most, they have an extremely diverse hodgepodge of equipment - some incredibly old stuff that they keep around because it works and some really cool cutting edge gadgets that everyone can see the benefit of. They've also epxanded the network as needed and tried not to take anything down when they did it, so what they've ended up with is a logical rat's nest. VLANs probably have been created, but they're probably trunked everywhere, because the goal of the expansion was to connect more devices, not to segregate by function. Hospitals don't get down time, so it's not a simple thing to say that things have to be reconfigured. Odds are that the workstations may not all even be on DHCP, so chainging an IP may require a person (back to that understaffed thing again) touching possibly hundreds of workstations. Yes that needs to be done, and I don't know a single network admin who wouldn't agree, but when you have to have outages cleared by upper management who are going to be chewed by the board if the time frame goes longer than you expected, it turns into a lot more than just what is actually best for the network.
The solution: use down time wisely. Stage implementations and keep them within the allotted time frames. And DOCUMENT. I know - nobody likes to do the documentation, but I think we can all say that it's a lot easier to plan migrations if you have documentation of what is currently there. Realize that no matter what you do, it's not going to last forever. Your cable plant probably has a lifspan of 10 years (not to say that you may not get 20 or even 30 years out of it, as long as you're willing to stay slow), but your network devices will probably only be there for 5 years. Are you still going to be there for the next change? Probably not, so be nice to the company and to the people who follow after you and document.
Just my $0.02, and I'm just that blond chick, so what do I know anyway...
It may not be your ideal solution, but my husband and I set up our son's PC to dual-boot Win98 and RedHat over 2 years ago when he was 5. He's 8 now, and he can transition easily from one to the other. Like other posters, we didn't want him getting too attached to all of the quirks and such of a single OS. LILO makes it easy for him to choose what he wants to do. Like your children, he mainly uses Windows for his games and VB Programming (I KNOW but it's easy for an 8 year old). We haven't tried WINE for him because we didn't think he could handle the quirks there. Besides, he's starting to bring home software from school now and trades games with his friends, and of course, that's all Windows, and we expect that he should be able to install and run things on his own, which he does just fine. He uses his RedHat for everything else - OpenOffice for his papers, Mozilla for web browsing via our proxy server, PICO (we're working on vi (HAH!) but it's slow going) for his HTML development, and he's addicted to Tux Racers. Anyway, the point of all this is that he's found the things that he likes best about each OS without just having one or the other, and he gets the benefits of both.
Maybe if we all flood our Senators with the way we all feel about this bill instead of just ranting on Slashdot, they might actually notice. To get your Congressmen's email addresses (and links to their home pages for snail mail addresses) try this page . Maybe you didn't vote (not like most of us had much in the way of a choice), but it's not too late to tell these people how Americans feel about the laws they want to govern us with.
And is it just me, or are Congressmen's web pages very frightening places? I may have nightmares for days...
I had a wireless gyroscopic mouse a couple of years ago. I don't remember what brand, but it was too inaccurate and too slow to be any fun to use. I could see it being useful for slide presentations, but for everyday use and gaming, it was impossible to deal with. The comfort factor wasn't so great, either. It's now collecting dust somewhere in my pile of should-have-been-cooler-than-this junk. Hopefully, being optical will help with the accuracy issues, but I'm not going to run right out and spend my money again.
I know that's why I married my husband :)
Pres Bush is/was apparently at Barksdale AFB in Louisiana. He is promising punishment.
FYI - if anyone is in/around Las Vegas right now there is a good demo IPv6 network in the iLabs section of Interop. There are also some free classes/tutorials going on there.
Backups could be a concern if you did not get a good backup of the link reference database but since the links are stored in a database this may have some rebuilding information included. I don't know.
A quick comment before I start - First Microsoft mimics MAC OS and now it appears that they have been attempting to mimic Unix. So if Amazon can patient a web page concept how can Microsoft get away with this. Now on to the subject of the article - My first thought is how much additional over head this database would take-up. Unix references links through inodes so the file is more of a pointer on the physical disk using a database would be more of a redirect. Not only is reading a database at an application level more system intensive than reading the lower level inode reference but can be of potential danger in different ways.
... don't say anything at all. This used to be a really good maxim for all of us to live by. However, limiting negative comments would defeat the whole principle of a discussion group. If you find yourself too offended to go on living because a comment you made got flamed then maybe you shouldn't post at all. Yes, people do tend to be more hostile in an anonymous environment, but hostility is a part of life. Comments need to be criticized; if someone posts something that is wrong, it is the duty of the more-informed to correct the error in order to help not only the original poster but also any less-informed readers. Now, admittedly, these criticisms can be constructive instead of derogatory. It's a lot more effective to tell someone that he/she is on the right track, but... than to tell that person that he/she is a moron who shouldn't even be here. The kiddies who flame do it for attention - isn't their behavior the main reason that we classify them as kiddies? Ignore them, and they'll get bored and either go away or grow up.
I do not feel that slashdot prevents anyone, regardless of gender/race/age from posting. Knowledge level would seem to be the most limiting factor here. Maybe in today's society, the old maxim should read "If you don't have something intelligent to say..." However, that determination should be made by the poster, not by slashdot. Free speech includes inane, off-topic comments, whether we like that or not, and the 'net is the one place where people can fully use free speech. I am certain that people say things here that they would never say in the "real world", but isn't that the whole point?
I understand your feelings but I also feel that a certification is not a true reflection on the knowledge that occupies ones mind. I have seen far too many Certified Administrators that couldn't understand why they kept running out of swap when they were using it as a standard file system. I do agree with you that the CCIE is a truly accrediting certification, but this is only due to the amount of hands on one must have to complete the upper level exams. This exam still is not able to differentiate between rote learning and conceptual understanding. I do not however feel that a CCNA is as true a test of ability as it possibly should be. All to many certifications are composed of memorizing a bunch of facts that may and may not help you depending on how your mind works. Real results come from the ability to use those facts in a real world environment. I feel that in the future employers will begin to get tired of hiring a supposed "experts" who proves only to waste a lot of the companies valuable time, and will look for those employees with proven experience in the field. I do agree that certifications can definitely help you get your foot in the door; but don't try to sell yourself for more than you really know, because in the end what you really know is going to show through.
Actually Solaris has not obtained TCSEC approval as stated by Anonymous Coward with reference to the listed URL http://www.radium.ncsc.mil/tpep/epl/epl-by-vendor. html but do have a similar equivalency.
This is true but I don't think that this is because Solaris is unable to attain this level of certification. Solaris 2.6 has attained ITSEC certification of E3/F-C2 effective since December 1998 and Trusted Solaris 2.5 has attained E3/F-B1 effective since November 1995.
http://www.itsec.gov.uk/
They do specify Mhz as the channel rates. Check out the tech specs at http://www.cisco.com/univercd/cc/td/doc/product/wi reless/wspg/wspgapb.htm.
It appears that this would be each user's individual channel rate, not a shared bandwidth situation
Not to be too picky, but that wasn't Columbus. It was actually the Renaissance architect Fillipo Brunelleschi (maybe I spelled that right??) in Florence, Italy. To the actual point, Cisco isn't promising 44Mbps. In their specifications for the wireless modem card for the uBR7200 series router, they are very careful to point out that the data rate may be up to 44Mbps if you have a 12Mhz channel. If you only get a 6Mhz channel, the best you could hope for is 22Mbps. Still, even if there is a loss of 50% on the data rate, even at the lower input bandwidth, the speed is still substantially better than the G.Lite speeds being offered by DSL carriers in my part of the world (if you're fortunate enough to have your line qualify). Also, those are full duplex data rates, so you don' thave the upstream/downstream issues you get with ADSL. I'd definitely be willing to try it. I only wish I had the funds to get to become one of those lucky ISPs to get it first :)