From ddowdle at leopard.net Fri Sep 2 10:50:17 2005 From: ddowdle at leopard.net (David M. Dowdle) Date: Fri, 2 Sep 2005 10:50:17 -0700 (PDT) Subject: recommendations for/against SAN classes? Message-ID: Work wants me to take a class, and I'd like to learn more about SANS, can anybody recommend classes to take or ones to avoid? Thanks! From Donald_Mann at affymetrix.com Fri Sep 2 11:59:49 2005 From: Donald_Mann at affymetrix.com (Mann, Donald) Date: Fri, 2 Sep 2005 11:59:49 -0700 Subject: recommendations for/against SAN classes? Message-ID: <678AB01224C64D4DAE69F6A8AA7BFC48019306E8@msex01> Last year 2 of my engineers attended this course: SEC502: Firewalls, Perimeter Protection & VPNs And they thought it was Excellent! One of them said it was more valuable than any one course he had ever attended. I've never heard bad comments about SANS courses. If you've never been, I recommend the class above as it seems to be their most general course. Myself and 2 others from my company will be there this year. I'm attending the CISSP course and they are attending the course listed above (different individuals from last year). -don -----Original Message----- From: owner-baylisa at baylisa.org [mailto:owner-baylisa at baylisa.org] On Behalf Of David M. Dowdle Sent: Friday, September 02, 2005 10:50 AM To: baylisa at baylisa.org Subject: recommendations for/against SAN classes? Work wants me to take a class, and I'd like to learn more about SANS, can anybody recommend classes to take or ones to avoid? Thanks! From bobs at tellme.com Fri Sep 2 12:11:59 2005 From: bobs at tellme.com (Bob Sutterfield) Date: Fri, 2 Sep 2005 12:11:59 -0700 Subject: recommendations for/against SAN classes? Message-ID: David M. Dowdle wrote: > Work wants me to take a class, and I'd like to learn more about SANS, > can anybody recommend classes to take or ones to avoid? Do you mean SANs (Storage Area Networks) or the SANS Institute? If the former, your incumbent SAN vendor probably offers training that would be most valuable as a starting point. You'll also find some classes and workshops and papers on storage at . If the latter, try looking at the Career Roadmap at which will help you form a more specific question. -- Bob Sutterfield Tellme Networks From michael at halligan.org Fri Sep 2 13:21:24 2005 From: michael at halligan.org (Michael T. Halligan) Date: Fri, 02 Sep 2005 13:21:24 -0700 Subject: recommendations for/against SAN classes? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <4318B444.7060600@halligan.org> David M. Dowdle wrote: > Work wants me to take a class, and I'd like to learn more about SANS, > can anybody recommend classes to take or ones to avoid? > > Thanks! > Dowdle, Fancy seeing you here :) Anyways, what are you trying to learn? Is this more of a vendor specific thing? or? Our old manager would actually have some really good input. He's working at a new start-up being run & funded by the guy who owns OpenSourceStorage. Take Mark out to Lunch and pick his brain, see if he can get Eren to let you play around on some gear & make reccomendations. Beyond that, I've heard that the HP San bootcamp is pretty good, and not "too" vendor focused. I can probably get you a deal on them, one of our partners is a pretty active HP Var. So when are you going to buy a server and host with me? I'm trying to get everybody on your team to drop a box in my cabinet *grins* -- Michael T. Halligan Chief Technology Officer ------------------- BitPusher, LLC http://www.bitpusher.com/ 1.888.9PUSHER 415.724.7998 (Mobile) 415.520.0876 (Fax) From ddowdle at leopard.net Fri Sep 2 14:13:46 2005 From: ddowdle at leopard.net (David M. Dowdle) Date: Fri, 2 Sep 2005 14:13:46 -0700 (PDT) Subject: recommendations for/against SAN classes? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Fri, 2 Sep 2005, Bob Sutterfield wrote: > David M. Dowdle wrote: >> Work wants me to take a class, and I'd like to learn more about SANS, >> can anybody recommend classes to take or ones to avoid? > > Do you mean SANs (Storage Area Networks) or the SANS Institute? I forgot about SANS Institute, meant Storage Area Networks currently we use 3par, EMC, redhat's GFS and different iSCSI subsystems > From michael at halligan.org Fri Sep 2 14:48:26 2005 From: michael at halligan.org (Michael T. Halligan) Date: Fri, 02 Sep 2005 14:48:26 -0700 Subject: recommendations for/against SAN classes? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <4318C8AA.60509@halligan.org> >>> Work wants me to take a class, and I'd like to learn more about SANS, >>> can anybody recommend classes to take or ones to avoid? >> >> >> Do you mean SANs (Storage Area Networks) or the SANS Institute? > > > I forgot about SANS Institute, meant Storage Area Networks > > > currently we use 3par, EMC, redhat's GFS and different iSCSI subsystems > >> Dave, With this information, I'll tell you that the redhat "architect" training classes are actually a pretty good executive overview and might give you some of the information you want. Probably the only good part about redhat is their training staff. RH436 should at least give you a good idea as to the "RedHat" way of managing storage.. RH401 also goes into "clustering" (heartbeat failover) multipathed storage, but to be honest, read the man pages for piranha, and you'll save 3 grand. In all, though, I've been happy with the RH "architect" classes I took, and they were worth the money.. Well, except for 401. 401 was a really good basic overview class, but it's main function was giving me time to catch up on work. My main problem with most Vendor classes is that they try to balance "useful" technical information with product line information. The higher-end classes, I think, should have a very strong focus on best practices and process development with those technologies.. In the end, they are usually vehicles to just try to sell more expensive products. From david at fetter.org Wed Sep 7 10:13:20 2005 From: david at fetter.org (David Fetter) Date: Wed, 7 Sep 2005 10:13:20 -0700 Subject: PostgreSQL in Genomics Message-ID: <20050907171320.GK2090@fetter.org> Folks, If you'd like to find out how the World's Most Advanced Open Source Database is helping out in genomics, come to the next SF PostgreSQL Users' Group meeting on Wednesday, September 14, 2005. Details at http://pugs.postgresql.org/sfpug/ RSVP to david at fetter.org. If you want to have pizza from Zachary's (google "best pizza in the bay area" ;), it usually comes to about $7. Cheers, Dave. -- David Fetter david at fetter.org http://fetter.org/ phone: +1 510 893 6100 mobile: +1 415 235 3778 Remember to vote! From hso at nosneros.net Sat Sep 10 21:37:58 2005 From: hso at nosneros.net (Holt Sorenson) Date: Sun, 11 Sep 2005 04:37:58 +0000 Subject: ShmooCon 2006 Security/Hardware Hacks Conference and Call For Papers Announcement Message-ID: <20050911043758.GA20606@nosneros.net> ShmooCon 2006 Event Summary =========================== The Shmoo Group (http://www.shmoo.com), a non-profit think-tank comprised of security professionals from around the world who donate their free time and energy to information security research and development, is soliciting papers and presentations for the second annual ShmooCon. ShmooCon 2006 will be a highly-technical and entertaining East coast information security convention focused on technology exploitation, inventive software & hardware solutions, as well as open discussion on a variety of technology & security topics. ShmooCon 2006 (http://www.shmoocon.org/) will be held in Washington, D.C., from January 13th to January 15th, 2006. It will be held at the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel (http://www.wardmanpark.com/) just minutes from your choice of 3-letter agencies. ShmooCon 2006 will have three tracks, each dedicated to the following: 1. Break It! Technology Exploitation 2. Build It! Inventive Software & Hardware Solutions 3. BoF It! Open Discussion of Technology & Security Topics Registration is now open with the following costs, depending on time of registration: August 1, 2005 - October 1, 2005 $75 October 2, 2005 - December 31, 2005 $150 January 1, 2006 - January 13, 2006 $300 ShmooCon 2006 Call for Papers ============================= Topics for the Break It! track may include, but are not limited to, EXPLOITATION of: * Consumer electronic devices * Application, host, and network security * Telephony * Physical security Topics for the Build It! track may include, but are not limited to, inventive software & hardware SOLUTIONS in: * Robotics * Distributed computing * Community wireless networking * Mobile personal computing Topics for the BoF It! track may include, but are not limited to, open DISCUSSION of the following: * Privacy and anonymity * Exploit and vulnerability disclosure / databases * DRM (Digital Rights Management), fair use, copyright infringement * Open source software world domination strategies Presentation Format: All presentations & discussions will be 55 minutes in length. Presentations in the Break It! and Build It! tracks must include demonstrations of personally developed techniques, working code, and/or devices, with code and/or schematics being open-source and released to the public for free. Initiating an open discussion for BoF It! requires subject matter expertise, active involvement with the topic at hand, and a brief presentation of the topic/problem scope. Shmooballs will be issued to the audience, to facilitate a frank and open discussion of opinions. Speakers are encouraged to present innovative ideas that not everyone agrees with. Submission Procedure To submit, email cfp at shmoocon.com with the following information: 1. Speaker name(s) and/or handle(s) 2. Presentation Title 3. Track preference 4. Two to three paragraph presentation description and/or outline 5. List facilities required. Projector for use with VGA input, flipchart, sound projection, Internet connectivity will be provided. 6. Speaker bio 7. Contact info for speaker (email AND mobile number, please) Accepted speakers will receive free admission to the conference, as well as a $200 honorarium after evaluation of their completed presentation. 6 runner-ups will receive free admission as hot-alternates. They should come to ShmooCon 2006 prepared to speak, and, if it becomes necessary for them to speak as an alternate, they too will receive a $200 honorarium after evaluation of their completed presentation. NOTE: select presentation submissions which are not accepted will be awarded a 50% discounted admission to ShmooCon 2006. Preference will be given to presentations that plan to include source code / schematics. Additionally, speakers who do not provide source code / schematics by presentation time will not receive an honorarium. Presentation proposals will be reviewed by members of the Shmoo Group. A list of the reviewers will be posted on the ShmooCon 2006 web site when the Call For Papers is formally issued. If you feel you have a presentation that would be appropriate but that does not meet these guidelines, feel free to submit it anyway but be sure to include a cover letter explaining your reasoning so we can evaluate your proposal. All questions regarding this call for papers should be addressed to cfp at shmoocon.org. Feel free to contact us if you have an idea for a talk but you're not sure how to present it at a conference. Schedule * Check the web site for dates! * July 29, 2005 - CFP opens * Early Fall 2005 papers for preferential first round consideration due * Middle Fall 2005 - final due date for all papers * Late Fall 2005 - speakers notified Any accepted speakers who have pre-registered for ShmooCon will receive a refund of their registration fees. Yes, it is wise to pre-register for ShmooCon if you are unsure you will be accepted as a speaker to ensure you get in to ShmooCon. Submissions are due by late fall 2005. Preference will be given to submissions received by early fall 2005. Selected speakers will be notified by Halloween, 2005. We look forward to receiving your submissions as well as seeing you at ShmooCon 2006! From hmbjuggler at yahoo.com Sat Sep 10 10:47:55 2005 From: hmbjuggler at yahoo.com (greg edwards) Date: Sat, 10 Sep 2005 10:47:55 -0700 (PDT) Subject: please send out this notice of a wireless security course Message-ID: <20050910174756.79605.qmail@web40725.mail.yahoo.com> [Recipient address changed from blw@ to baylisa@ by postmaster] Folks I am the somewhat too plump person who shows up at about a third of your wonderful meetings who is interested in computer security (more than admin). I am requesting that you send out the below notice of an upcoming wireless security course that I am teaching. Thank you Greg Edwards (email from home address rather than work due to ethics reasons) /// UC Santa Cruz Extension 5836 Wireless Security: 802.11b and Other Protocols X459.5 CMPS (3.0) Course Description: Wireless Fidelity (Wi-Fi) is another name for the 802.11a/b/g IEEE wireless local area network (LAN) standards. Wi-Fi allows a LAN to be connected wirelessly in much the same manner as Ethernet cards and cables have been used to interconnect LANs. The problem of providing an appropriate level of security for wireless networks has been a deterrent to the widespread adoption of Wi-Fi. This course will cover the basics of 802.11a/b/g (and the other 802.11 current and proposed extensions) and other wireless networking protocols, their security problems and solutions. Additional topics include: Encryption, as it relates to wireless networking Antennae and security for wireless networking Drive-by scanning and wireless security Policy, Accreditation, and Certification issues Securing 802.11a/b/g networks Auditing wireless networks The future of wireless networks and security (including Bluetooth, WiMax and RFID) Those completing this course will have been given a thorough introduction to wireless networking using the 802.11a/b/g standards, the related security issues and their solutions. Prerequisite(s): General knowledge of networks and networking is recommended. Required Text: Building Wireless Community Networks, Flickenger, O'Reilly, 2002. Recommended Text: 802.11 Wireless Networks, The Definitive Guide, Matthew S. Gast, O'Reilly, 2002. Applies Towards the Following Certificate(s) & Award(s): Certificate Program in Internet Security Thursdays 6:30PM to 9:30PM Sep 29, 2005 to Oct 27, 2005 Number of Sessions: 5 Campus: SUNNYVALE Instructor(s): Gregory W Edwards ______________________________________________________ Click here to donate to the Hurricane Katrina relief effort. http://store.yahoo.com/redcross-donate3/ From sigje at sigje.org Wed Sep 14 10:22:01 2005 From: sigje at sigje.org (Jennifer Davis) Date: Wed, 14 Sep 2005 10:22:01 -0700 (PDT) Subject: TOMORROW: Sep 15, 2005: BayLISA: Security from the Trenches In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Date: Thursday, September 15, 2005 Where: Apple Campus, Building 1, Singapore PLEASE NOTE CHANGE IN LOCATION FOR MONTH OF SEPTEMBER Free and Open to the General Public! 7:30 pm Introductions and announcements 7:45 pm Formal Presentation 9:45 pm After-meeting dinner/social outing (BJ's, next door) Anne Henmi from Juniper Networks, will be presenting "Security War Stories from the Trenches". Giveaways this month include Apress recent titles "Pro Perl Parsing" by Christopher M. Frenz, "Pro DNS and Bind" by Ron Aitchison, and "Pro Perl Debugging" by Richard Foley, and Andy Lester. We also have some recent O'Reilly titles. We also have 20 USB hubs from USENIX (the organization that brings us the great conferences LISA, USENIX Security, and USENIX Annual Conference), and the August edition of ;login:, chock full of great articles (SAN vs NAS for Oracle: A tale of Two Protocols by Adam Levin, The Inevitability of Xen by Jon Crowcroft, Keir Fraser, Steven Hand, Ian Pratt, and Andrew Warfield too name a couple). ______________________________________________ baylisa mailing list: baylisa at baylisa.org rsvp for meeting: rsvp at baylisa.org baylisa board (request to sponsor or present): blw at baylisa.org From sigje at sigje.org Wed Sep 14 10:38:42 2005 From: sigje at sigje.org (Jennifer Davis) Date: Wed, 14 Sep 2005 10:38:42 -0700 (PDT) Subject: Tomorrow's meeting followup information Message-ID: I just wanted to send a followup to BayLISA general list about tomorrow's meeting. Please note that tomorrow's meeting HAS moved for this month only to room Singapore in Building 1 on the Apple Campus in Cupertino. As always, BayLISA members get first dibs on books, so if one of the books sounds interesting let me know (if you are a member), and I'll set it aside for you. I also just realized.. some of the boxes are hubs, and some of them are extendible network cables..That's pretty nifty. So we have 10 retractible network cables, and 10 4 port USB Hubs. Both are a brilliant blue color and compact in design. Elections are coming up in November, so if you are interested in running for the Board and helping guide the group for the next 2 years 1 - Make sure your BayLISA membership is current. 2 - Talk to one of the current Board members at the meeting tomorrow to find out what's involved, come to a Board meeting, and/or send an email to blw at baylisa.org. 3 - Let blw at baylisa.org know you are planning on running by sending a candidate statement in. The Elections Committee (made up of directors who are not up for reelection this year) will get back in touch with you. Thanks all! -- Jennifer Davis BayLISA Board of Directors From michael at halligan.org Wed Sep 14 13:55:41 2005 From: michael at halligan.org (Michael T. Halligan) Date: Wed, 14 Sep 2005 13:55:41 -0700 Subject: Less worthless DSL providers? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <43288E4D.40700@halligan.org> I just moved, and as seems to be typical, every time I move, my DSL provider proves incompetence, and I seek a new vendor. At this point Speakeasy, Covad, and now DSLExtreme are no longer vendors I will give business to. Excluding those three companies, which DSL providers are people finding at least tolerable lately? Michael T. Halligan Chief Technology Officer ------------------- BitPusher, LLC http://www.bitpusher.com/ 1.888.9PUSHER 415.724.7998 (Mobile) 415.520.0876 (Fax) From rick at linuxmafia.com Wed Sep 14 14:27:50 2005 From: rick at linuxmafia.com (Rick Moen) Date: Wed, 14 Sep 2005 14:27:50 -0700 Subject: Less worthless DSL providers? In-Reply-To: <43288E4D.40700@halligan.org> References: <43288E4D.40700@halligan.org> Message-ID: <20050914212750.GD4774@linuxmafia.com> Quoting Michael T. Halligan (michael at halligan.org): > Excluding those three companies, which DSL providers are people finding > at least tolerable lately? RawBandwidth.com (aka Tsoft) Works for Me. -- Cheers, "Due to circumstances beyond our control, we regret to Rick Moen inform you that circumstances are beyond our control." rick at linuxmafia.com --Paul Benoit From rsr at inorganic.org Wed Sep 14 14:28:49 2005 From: rsr at inorganic.org (Roy S. Rapoport) Date: Wed, 14 Sep 2005 14:28:49 -0700 Subject: [rsr@inorganic.org: Re: [baylisa] Less worthless DSL providers?] Message-ID: <20050914212849.GB16920@puppy.inorganic.org> Sorry, didn't cc baylisa on this for some reason. ----- Forwarded message from "Roy S. Rapoport" ----- From: "Roy S. Rapoport" To: David Alban Cc: "Michael T. Halligan" Subject: Re: [baylisa] Less worthless DSL providers? Date: Wed, 14 Sep 2005 14:24:05 -0700 On Wed, Sep 14, 2005 at 02:12:03PM -0700, David Alban wrote: > www.cliq.com. Very clueful. There is no first tier customer support. > The guy doing support is one of the core of geeks who run it. > > It was on Roy Rapoport's recommendation that I went with them, and I > haven't been sorry. Perhaps Roy would like to comment on them, too... If there are ways in which cliq sucks, I haven't found them yet. I've had them for about five years now, through two moves. Their technical competence is solid; their customer service is unmatched; I really cannot rave enough about them. -roy ----- End forwarded message ----- -- "Don't be an asshole -- vote Democratic in 2004." From leslie.devlin at cnet.com Wed Sep 14 14:38:33 2005 From: leslie.devlin at cnet.com (Leslie Devlin) Date: Wed, 14 Sep 2005 14:38:33 -0700 Subject: Less worthless DSL providers? In-Reply-To: <43288E4D.40700@halligan.org> Message-ID: Raw Bandwidth. On 9/14/05 1:55 PM, "Michael T. Halligan" wrote: > I just moved, and as seems to be typical, every time I move, my DSL > provider proves incompetence, and I seek a new > vendor. At this point Speakeasy, Covad, and now DSLExtreme are no longer > vendors I will give business to. > > Excluding those three companies, which DSL providers are people finding > at least tolerable lately? > > > Michael T. Halligan > Chief Technology Officer > ------------------- > BitPusher, LLC > http://www.bitpusher.com/ > 1.888.9PUSHER > 415.724.7998 (Mobile) > 415.520.0876 (Fax) From rsr at inorganic.org Wed Sep 14 14:39:03 2005 From: rsr at inorganic.org (Roy S. Rapoport) Date: Wed, 14 Sep 2005 14:39:03 -0700 Subject: Less worthless DSL providers? In-Reply-To: <43288E4D.40700@halligan.org> References: <43288E4D.40700@halligan.org> Message-ID: <20050914213903.GA17397@puppy.inorganic.org> On Wed, Sep 14, 2005 at 01:55:41PM -0700, Michael T. Halligan wrote: > I just moved, and as seems to be typical, every time I move, my DSL > provider proves incompetence, and I seek a new > vendor. At this point Speakeasy, Covad, and now DSLExtreme are no longer > vendors I will give business to. > > Excluding those three companies, which DSL providers are people finding > at least tolerable lately? More points about cliq: I've occasionally lost connectivity to my system due to problems at home. It's nice to be able to call someone and say "hey, I can't ssh to my home system. Do you guys still have link to the DSL modem?" It's nice, when it's a more wide-spread network issue, to call with "hey, I just tried tracerouting home and it seem sto get into an infinite loop at hop " and get a response along the lines of "Oh dear, I'll talk to that provider," or "I'll kick it," rather than "OK, first, ipconfig /release..." When I was unemployed a little more than a year back and money was tight and I owed cliq a bunch of money, they said "well, we hate losing customers because they've lost their job, and we know how it feels, so we don't want to be an added stress point in your life right now. Why don't we downgrade your service, saving you a bunch of money, which will allow you to at least keep up with the monthly costs and you can pay us back once you're employed?" Cliq would basically have to slaughter a herd of kittens, firebomb my house, and rootkit my systems in order to run down the good will balance they've got with me. -roy From michael at halligan.org Wed Sep 14 14:53:02 2005 From: michael at halligan.org (Michael T. Halligan) Date: Wed, 14 Sep 2005 14:53:02 -0700 Subject: [baylisa] Less worthless DSL providers? In-Reply-To: <4c714a9c05091414124e8067d9@mail.gmail.com> References: <43288E4D.40700@halligan.org> <4c714a9c05091414124e8067d9@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <43289BBE.5070900@halligan.org> David, Thanks for the information. It looks like everybody is recommending Cliq & RawBandwidth time and time again when this question gets asked. Looking at the pricing though, around $225 per month. I'm wondering what comparable pricing for a point to point T1 between my home & datacenter might be. David Alban wrote: >www.cliq.com. Very clueful. There is no first tier customer support. > The guy doing support is one of the core of geeks who run it. > >It was on Roy Rapoport's recommendation that I went with them, and I >haven't been sorry. Perhaps Roy would like to comment on them, too... > >On 9/14/05, Michael T. Halligan wrote: > > >>I just moved, and as seems to be typical, every time I move, my DSL >>provider proves incompetence, and I seek a new >>vendor. At this point Speakeasy, Covad, and now DSLExtreme are no longer >>vendors I will give business to. >> >>Excluding those three companies, which DSL providers are people finding >>at least tolerable lately? >> >> > > > -- Michael T. Halligan Chief Technology Officer ------------------- BitPusher, LLC http://www.bitpusher.com/ 1.888.9PUSHER 415.724.7998 (Mobile) 415.520.0876 (Fax) From scott at sonic.net Wed Sep 14 15:37:35 2005 From: scott at sonic.net (Scott Doty) Date: Wed, 14 Sep 2005 15:37:35 -0700 Subject: [scott@sonic.net: Re: [baylisa] Less worthless DSL providers?] Message-ID: <20050914223735.GC18758@sonic.net> ----- Forwarded message from Scott Doty ----- Date: Wed, 14 Sep 2005 15:34:16 -0700 From: Scott Doty To: "Michael T. Halligan" Subject: Re: [baylisa] Less worthless DSL providers? On Wed, Sep 14, 2005 at 02:53:02PM -0700, Michael T. Halligan wrote: > David, > > Thanks for the information. It looks like everybody is recommending > Cliq & RawBandwidth time and time again > when this question gets asked. Looking at the pricing though, around > $225 per month. I'm wondering what comparable > pricing for a point to point T1 between my home & datacenter might be. Is that a typo? Sheesh, go with Sonic.net http://www.sonic.net/sales/broadband/dsl/residential.php Compare the report cards with others on http://broadbandreports.com... http://broadbandreports.com http://www.dslreports.com/comments/896 -Scott p.s. I'm one of the owners. ----- End forwarded message ----- Oh, and you can discuss things with the CEO and staff in the sonic.* newsgroups... -Scott From david at catwhisker.org Thu Sep 15 05:29:49 2005 From: david at catwhisker.org (David Wolfskill) Date: Thu, 15 Sep 2005 05:29:49 -0700 Subject: A bit of irony (with respect to DSL providers) Message-ID: <20050915122949.GQ54033@bunrab.catwhisker.org> I had sent Robert a private note stating that my Pac*Bell residential DSL (with a grandfathered static /32) has been pretty good for the last several years -- though I still ran a Perl script on my firewall box that does periodic reality checks on connectivity, initiates evasive action if called for, and logs its activities. The log in question is one of the logs I check every morning. And this morning, I see: Sep 15 01:56:00 janus dsl_mon: DSL now down Sep 15 01:56:15 janus dsl_mon: DSL still down after ifconfig (00:00:15 so far) Sep 15 01:56:16 janus dsl_mon: Got RC 0 from turning DSL MODEM off Sep 15 01:56:47 janus dsl_mon: Got RC 0 from turning DSL MODEM on Sep 15 01:58:02 janus dsl_mon: DSL now back up after 00:02:02 (This is the first time I've seen anything in that log other than the note that newsyslog rotated it in months.) It is rather nice to finally(!) have things in place to take that evasive action automatically. Of course, it's ideal to not need it, but not running it would appear to be foolish. :-} (The original version, from November 2001, would wake up periodically and actively ping the DSLAM. It wasn't until June 2003 that figured out that I could just look at the NIC counters, and if they were increasing from one look to the next, that was a clear indication that traffic had been flowing during the interval. So now it checks the NIC counters, and if they fail to show traffic flowing, then it tries an active ping. (At any point, if the maneuver succeeds, it goes back to sleep -- after logging everything, of course.) If the ping also fails, it uses ifconfig to bring the NIC down, then back up. (The box is a P-150 with 64 MB RAM; it also does my SMTP service, including anti-virus/anti-spam checks in milters: sometimes mbufs get to be scarce resources.) Finally, if bouncing the NIC with ifconfig still fails to allow the ping to work, it uses a bit of X10 (home automation) hardware to drop power to the DSL MODEM for 30 seconds, then powers it back up (at which point the script goes back to sleep, as there's little point in having it wait actively for the DSL MODEM to re-sync itself). And the next time it wakes up, it does its check, and if the link is still down or it changed state, that's logged... as you see. :-} So it's not on-topic for the original discussion, but I thought some of y'all might find it amusing. And yes, I can make the script available for folks who want to play with it. It was cobbled up in a FreeBSD environment, and depends on /usr/ports/misc/bottlerocket -- the program to handle the X10 stuff via serial interface comes from that. Peace, david -- David H. Wolfskill david at catwhisker.org Prediction is difficult, especially if it involves the future. -- Niels Bohr See http://www.catwhisker.org/~david/publickey.gpg for public key. From sigje at sigje.org Thu Sep 15 14:37:16 2005 From: sigje at sigje.org (Jennifer Davis) Date: Thu, 15 Sep 2005 14:37:16 -0700 (PDT) Subject: TODAY: Sep 15, 2005: BayLISA: Security from the Trenches In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Date: TODAY, Thursday, September 15, 2005 Where: Apple Campus, Building 1, Room ROME, Cupertino, California Address: One Infinite Loop, Cupertino, CA 95014 PLEASE NOTE NEW CHANGE IN LOCATION FOR MONTH OF SEPTEMBER Due to the location within Apple, attendees will have to sign in, and wear a printed sticker badge. As always Meetings are free and open to the General Public! 7:30 pm Introductions and announcements 7:45 pm Formal Presentation 9:45 pm After-meeting dinner/social outing (BJ's, next door) Anne Henmi from Juniper Networks, will be presenting "Security War Stories from the Trenches". This talk will be a great lead in for next month's talk from Brent Chapman, USENIX/SAGE LISA 2005 Invited Talk "Incident Command for IT: What We Can Learn from the Fire Department". ______________________________________________ baylisa mailing list: baylisa at baylisa.org rsvp for meeting: rsvp at baylisa.org baylisa board (request to sponsor or present): blw at baylisa.org From sigje at sigje.org Thu Sep 15 14:44:38 2005 From: sigje at sigje.org (Jennifer Davis) Date: Thu, 15 Sep 2005 14:44:38 -0700 (PDT) Subject: New Camera.. Message-ID: So for those people who have attended BayLISA in the last few months, you will have noticed that we haven't been recording the meetings. This is because the camera is broken. We have been looking at replacing the camera with a camera that is better suited for digital video direct to disk. Any recommendations? Also, anyone want to donate money or the camera itself (no old/creaky/questionable equipment here :)? -- Jennifer Davis From laura at usenix.org Fri Sep 16 08:40:04 2005 From: laura at usenix.org (Laura Sheehan) Date: Fri, 16 Sep 2005 08:40:04 -0700 (PDT) Subject: Call for Papers Message-ID: <200509161540.j8GFe4uw026037@voyager.usenix.org> --------------------------------------- Call for Papers: 2006 USENIX Annual Technical Conference Tuesday, May 30-Saturday, June 3, 2006, Boston, MA http://www.usenix.org/usenix06/cfpspe/ --------------------------------------- Dear Colleague, The 2006 USENIX Annual Technical Conference is moving back to its usual June timeframe. It will be held May 30-June 3, 2006, in Boston, MA. Please note the schedule change: The Technical Program will run Thursday-Saturday. On behalf of the 2006 USENIX Annual Technical Conference program committee, we request your ideas, proposals, and papers for invited talks, tutorials, refereed papers, Guru Is In sessions, Poster Session, and Work-in-Progress reports. ----------------------------------------------------- Call for Papers 2006 USENIX Systems Practice & Experience Refereed Papers (formerly the Refereed Papers General Track) Technical Program, Thursday-Saturday, June 1-3, 2006 Submissions Deadline: January 17, 2006 http://www.usenix.org/usenix06/cfpspe/ ----------------------------------------------------- The Program Committee for the Systems Practice & Experience Track (formerly the the Refereed Papers General Track) is seeking your participation. Please note that the submissions deadline is January 17, 2006. Authors are invited to submit original and innovative papers that further the knowledge and understanding of modern computing systems, with an emphasis on practical implementations and experimental results. We encourage papers that break new ground or present insightful results based on experience with computer systems. The USENIX conference has a broad scope, and we encourage papers in a wide range of topics in systems. Possible topics include but are not limited to: -- Architectural interaction -- Benchmarking -- Deployment experience -- Distributed and parallel systems -- Embedded systems -- Energy/power management -- File and storage systems -- Networking and network services -- Operating systems -- Reliability, availability, and scalability -- Security, privacy, and trust -- Self-managing systems -- Usage studies and workload characterization -- Virtualization -- Web technology -- Wireless and mobile systems In addition to full-length papers, we are also soliciting short papers, at most 6 pages long. Accepted short-paper submissions will be included in the Proceedings, and time will be provided in the Short Papers sessions for brief presentations of these papers. Papers accepted for the Short Papers sessions will automatically be included in the Poster Session. More information on these and other submission guidelines is available on our Web site: http://www.usenix.org/usenix06/cfpspe/ IMPORTANT DATES: Submissions due: Tuesday, January 17, 2006 Notification to authors: Monday, February 27, 2006 Final papers due: Monday, April 17, 2006 Please note that January 17 is a hard deadline; no extensions will be given. We look forward to your submissions. On behalf of the USENIX '06 Conference Organizers, Atul Adya, Microsoft Erich Nahum, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center 2006 USENIX Annual Technical Conference Program Co-Chairs From sigje at sigje.org Fri Sep 16 09:33:38 2005 From: sigje at sigje.org (Jennifer Davis) Date: Fri, 16 Sep 2005 09:33:38 -0700 (PDT) Subject: Call for Papers (fwd) Message-ID: For those people interested, the call for papers is out for the USENIX Annual Technical Conference. If you are looking for a way to get involved in the admin community, this is one way to share your knowledge. ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Fri, 16 Sep 2005 08:40:04 -0700 (PDT) From: Laura Sheehan Subject: Call for Papers --------------------------------------- Call for Papers: 2006 USENIX Annual Technical Conference Tuesday, May 30-Saturday, June 3, 2006, Boston, MA http://www.usenix.org/usenix06/cfpspe/ --------------------------------------- Dear Colleague, The 2006 USENIX Annual Technical Conference is moving back to its usual June timeframe. It will be held May 30-June 3, 2006, in Boston, MA. Please note the schedule change: The Technical Program will run Thursday-Saturday. On behalf of the 2006 USENIX Annual Technical Conference program committee, we request your ideas, proposals, and papers for invited talks, tutorials, refereed papers, Guru Is In sessions, Poster Session, and Work-in-Progress reports. ----------------------------------------------------- Call for Papers 2006 USENIX Systems Practice & Experience Refereed Papers (formerly the Refereed Papers General Track) Technical Program, Thursday-Saturday, June 1-3, 2006 Submissions Deadline: January 17, 2006 http://www.usenix.org/usenix06/cfpspe/ ----------------------------------------------------- The Program Committee for the Systems Practice & Experience Track (formerly the the Refereed Papers General Track) is seeking your participation. Please note that the submissions deadline is January 17, 2006. Authors are invited to submit original and innovative papers that further the knowledge and understanding of modern computing systems, with an emphasis on practical implementations and experimental results. We encourage papers that break new ground or present insightful results based on experience with computer systems. The USENIX conference has a broad scope, and we encourage papers in a wide range of topics in systems. Possible topics include but are not limited to: -- Architectural interaction -- Benchmarking -- Deployment experience -- Distributed and parallel systems -- Embedded systems -- Energy/power management -- File and storage systems -- Networking and network services -- Operating systems -- Reliability, availability, and scalability -- Security, privacy, and trust -- Self-managing systems -- Usage studies and workload characterization -- Virtualization -- Web technology -- Wireless and mobile systems In addition to full-length papers, we are also soliciting short papers, at most 6 pages long. Accepted short-paper submissions will be included in the Proceedings, and time will be provided in the Short Papers sessions for brief presentations of these papers. Papers accepted for the Short Papers sessions will automatically be included in the Poster Session. More information on these and other submission guidelines is available on our Web site: http://www.usenix.org/usenix06/cfpspe/ IMPORTANT DATES: Submissions due: Tuesday, January 17, 2006 Notification to authors: Monday, February 27, 2006 Final papers due: Monday, April 17, 2006 Please note that January 17 is a hard deadline; no extensions will be given. We look forward to your submissions. On behalf of the USENIX '06 Conference Organizers, Atul Adya, Microsoft Erich Nahum, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center 2006 USENIX Annual Technical Conference Program Co-Chairs From sigje at sigje.org Fri Sep 16 11:13:52 2005 From: sigje at sigje.org (Jennifer Davis) Date: Fri, 16 Sep 2005 11:13:52 -0700 (PDT) Subject: AS 400 Expert? Message-ID: Anyone an AS 400 expert? Jennifer From david at catwhisker.org Sat Sep 17 11:43:00 2005 From: david at catwhisker.org (David Wolfskill) Date: Sat, 17 Sep 2005 11:43:00 -0700 Subject: Forged From header in bounce-o-grams??!? :-( Message-ID: <20050917184300.GA70434@bunrab.catwhisker.org> One of the more dubious pleasures of being postmaster -- as I am certain that many of my colleagues well understand -- is dealing with spam. This is exacerbated by mail systems that accept mail, then later determine that -- for whatever reason or lack thereof -- the mail in question is not deliverable to one or more of the addressed recipients. Among systems that commit this crime against nature, there seem to be some that take this a rather mind-boggling step further: they go so far, in generating their bounce-o-grams, as to forge the From header (and envelope-sender) in said bounce-o-gram so that it claims to be from the domain to which the bounce-o-gram is addressed. So (for example), some random spam-generation process performs its intended task (generating spam) with a forged envelope-sender that claims that it's from someone with an email address @baylisa.org, and sends said spam to some machine operated by the Massachusetts Higher Education Computer Network (netblock UMAP). The MTA on the UMAP net accepts the spam; some time later, a machine at the IP address 134.241.224.145 tries to send the MX for baylisa.org a bounce-o-gram addressed to some address @baylisa.org (baylisa at baylisa.org, in this case), claiming to be from some (other) address @baylisa.org (noreply at baylisa.org, which doesn't exist). I'm pleased to report that in the special case of baylisa.org, where we do not have valid mail *from* baylisa.org arriving at our MX, I believe I have stopped the behavior. The last mail filtering step I have configured for the SMTP conversation runs something called milter-regex; as the name indicates, it permits applying regular expressions for various combinations of components of an email message; based on this, it can accept the message, (silently) discard it, or reject it (with a custom message). The message I use for recognition of the above condition is a simple "5.7.1 Liar," as seen here: Sep 17 10:17:48 www sendmail[2542]: [ID 801593 mail.info] j8HHHlvA002542: from=, size=1813, class=0, nrcpts=1, msgid=<081890bee67a$417bbaaa$e8696c96 at isvqxpj>, proto=ESMTP, daemon=MTA, relay=[134.241.224.145] Sep 17 10:17:48 www sendmail[2542]: [ID 801593 mail.info] j8HHHlvA002542: Milter: data, reject=554 5.7.1 Liar Sep 17 10:17:48 www sendmail[2542]: [ID 801593 mail.info] j8HHHlvA002542: to=, delay=00:00:01, pri=31813, stat=Liar (I have also seen cases where the bounce-o-gram is alleged to come from postmaster at baylisa.org; the extent to which I appreciate that should be discernable from the above, I think.) Oh: yes, I did send a note to postmaster at umassp.edu a couple of days ago. I'm not holding my breath awaiting a response. Now: anyone know of any plausible justification for the forgery in the generated bounce-o-grams? Or have a better way to deal with the situation? (For home, I do something similar, but arriving mail coming from someone @catwhisker.org is a normal occurrence, so I restrict it to the bogus "noreply at catwhisker.org" and "postmaster at catwhisker.org.") Thanks! Peace, david -- David H. Wolfskill david at catwhisker.org Prediction is difficult, especially if it involves the future. -- Niels Bohr See http://www.catwhisker.org/~david/publickey.gpg for public key. From "Wolfgang S. Rupprecht" at wsrcc.com Sat Sep 17 13:44:04 2005 From: "Wolfgang S. Rupprecht" at wsrcc.com ("Wolfgang S. Rupprecht" at wsrcc.com) Date: Sat, 17 Sep 2005 13:44:04 -0700 Subject: Forged From header in bounce-o-grams??!? :-( References: <20050917184300.GA70434@bunrab.catwhisker.org> Message-ID: <87fys3e86j.fsf@bonnet.wsrcc.com> david at catwhisker.org (David Wolfskill) writes: > Among systems that commit this crime against nature, there seem to be > some that take this a rather mind-boggling step further: they go so > far, in generating their bounce-o-grams, as to forge the From header (and > envelope-sender) in said bounce-o-gram so that it claims to be from > the domain to which the bounce-o-gram is addressed. I see I'm not the only person annoyed by these losers. What I do here is to check the body of any bounce message and I reject any bounce that doesn't have both an email-address and fullname in the header-from. That has cut down on the blow-back bounce-spam quite a bit. Luckily spammers haven't started forging the fullnames into the messages yet. In my case I use postfix and I add this to body_checks. This regexp is only tested against anything inside the msg body. /etc/postfix/body_checks: /^From: ([---a-z.+]+)@(|[a-z.]+\.)wsrcc\.com$/ REJECT Microsoft viruses and virus scanner spam rejected. I'm sure milters can do something similar. -wolfgang -- Wolfgang S. Rupprecht http://www.wsrcc.com/wolfgang/ Microsoft Vista - because "Virus Installer" was too long. From ames at montebellopartners.com Sat Sep 17 14:07:01 2005 From: ames at montebellopartners.com (Ames Cornish) Date: Sat, 17 Sep 2005 14:07:01 -0700 Subject: Forged From header in bounce-o-grams??!? :-( In-Reply-To: <20050917184300.GA70434@bunrab.catwhisker.org> References: <20050917184300.GA70434@bunrab.catwhisker.org> Message-ID: <1126991221.4728.9.camel@localhost.localdomain> On Sat, 2005-09-17 at 11:43 -0700, David Wolfskill wrote: > Now: anyone know of any plausible justification for the forgery in > the > generated bounce-o-grams? Or have a better way to deal with the > situation? (For home, I do something similar, but arriving mail > coming > David, You might check out "Sender Permitted From", aka "Sender Policy Framework". (http://spf.pobox.com/) You can set up DNS records that specify where baylisa.org mail is allowed to come from, and then enforce that policy in your MTA. As an added bonus, other MTA's may use your baylisa.org policy to help identify these emails as being spam-related. Best, - Ames -- Ames Cornish ~ http://montebellopartners.com/ 650-331-1402 ~ ames at montebellopartners.com From david at catwhisker.org Sun Sep 18 06:36:16 2005 From: david at catwhisker.org (David Wolfskill) Date: Sun, 18 Sep 2005 06:36:16 -0700 Subject: Forged From header in bounce-o-grams??!? :-( In-Reply-To: <87fys3e86j.fsf@bonnet.wsrcc.com> References: <20050917184300.GA70434@bunrab.catwhisker.org> <87fys3e86j.fsf@bonnet.wsrcc.com> Message-ID: <20050918133616.GY54033@bunrab.catwhisker.org> On Sat, Sep 17, 2005 at 01:44:04PM -0700, "Wolfgang S. Rupprecht"@wsrcc.com wrote: > ... > I see I'm not the only person annoyed by these losers. "Misery loves company" would seem to be an apropos expression. :-} > What I do here is to check the body of any bounce message and I reject > any bounce that doesn't have both an email-address and fullname in > the header-from. That has cut down on the blow-back bounce-spam quite > a bit. Luckily spammers haven't started forging the fullnames into > the messages yet. Well, the log extract I cited earlier was from sendmail, so it didn't show the From header value (just the envelope-sender). Here's a message logged to messages from milter-regex; it shows the From header & Subject; as you can see, the situation I'm dealing with doesn't quite match the above criteria: Sep 18 04:22:17 www milter-regex[2696]: [ID 702911 daemon.notice] 134.241.224.145: REJECT: Liar, From: "Bounced mail" , To: , Subject: > In my case I use postfix and I add this to body_checks. ... > I'm sure milters can do something similar. Right. Though in the case of mail purportedly coming from baylisa.org arriving at the MX for baylisa.org is ... well, adequately peculiar for the present distress. And on a vaguely-related note, since Sep 14 13:39:25, the Ironport box at 63.251.108.100 has been poking at my home MX/firewall's 2525/tcp. There were 289 such "pokes" from that time until Sep 15 04:20:31; I haven't bothered counting since (though I see them in the logs. I sent a note to admin at ironport.com; I suppose if I don't get a response from someone by sometime on Tuesday or so, I'll need to escalate a bit & see if some of my former colleagues who work there can shed any light. Must be a rather dull-witted machine for the novelty to have not worn off after the first few pokes, though I suppose a sufficiently devious recipient of such attention might be able to try using the behavior to try to gain information.... I don't think I have the necessary combination of time & interest just now, though. :-} [Then again, maybe a variant on what I have listening on 113/tcp might prove amusing....] Peace, david -- David H. Wolfskill david at catwhisker.org Prediction is difficult, especially if it involves the future. -- Niels Bohr See http://www.catwhisker.org/~david/publickey.gpg for public key. From "Wolfgang S. Rupprecht" at wsrcc.com Sun Sep 18 11:22:30 2005 From: "Wolfgang S. Rupprecht" at wsrcc.com ("Wolfgang S. Rupprecht" at wsrcc.com) Date: Sun, 18 Sep 2005 11:22:30 -0700 Subject: Forged From header in bounce-o-grams??!? :-( References: <20050917184300.GA70434@bunrab.catwhisker.org>, <20050918133616.GY54033@bunrab.catwhisker.org> Message-ID: <874q8i9qxl.fsf@bonnet.wsrcc.com> david at catwhisker.org (David Wolfskill) writes: > From: "Bounced mail" > > Right. Though in the case of mail purportedly coming from baylisa.org > arriving at the MX for baylisa.org is ... well, adequately peculiar > for the present distress. I wouldn't let that unusual header-from dissuade you from targeting it with a regexp. eg. /^From: "Bounced mail" <[^@]+ at baylisa.org>$/ REJECT Nobody here by the name 'bounced mail'. Please fix your mailer. > Must be a rather dull-witted machine for the novelty to have not worn > off after the first few pokes, though I suppose a sufficiently devious > recipient of such attention might be able to try using the behavior to > try to gain information.... I don't think I have the necessary > combination of time & interest just now, though. :-} [Then again, > maybe a variant on what I have listening on 113/tcp might prove > amusing....] Back before the openbsd folks stopped including ethereal due to the abundance of buffer-overrun bugs I used to packet-log all port 25 traffic with 'tcdump -w' and spot-check the log with ethereal to make sure that things were working as expected. The "follow tcp stream" command of ethereal is a very useful feature. One thing that became very clear is that some malware just didn't take 5xx to mean "go away". Quite often it would wait a whole 10 seconds and then retry the exact same envelope/header/body again. -wolfgang From david at catwhisker.org Mon Sep 19 16:26:55 2005 From: david at catwhisker.org (David Wolfskill) Date: Mon, 19 Sep 2005 16:26:55 -0700 Subject: This is what happens when a BSD hacker is told to use Linux Message-ID: <20050919232655.GT54033@bunrab.catwhisker.org> So work issued me one of those "Great Quality" laptops from Fry's, and informed me that I was expected to be able to boot whatever Microsoft thing was on it, as well as "Linux" (note that which distribution wasn't specified at this point). After rather a struggle, I managed to do that, as well as reserve enough space to also be able to boot FreeBSD 5-STABLE. (I figured that this way, I'd at least have a known reference.) The flavor of M$ stuff is "Windows XP Home Edition;" since it's not relevant to what I was planning on mentioning, I won't discuss it further in this note. The flavor of "Linux" I chose was "Fedora Core 3." This turns out to have been fortuitous, since that just happens to be the flavor that the Linux-folk back in NJ had decided on. There is apparently some discussion about "Fedora Core 4," but they're unwilling to do that yet. Whatever; I got lucky. :-} (There's a first time for everything that happens.) So Fedora appears to default to useing the Gnome environment. Ummm.... I'm used to xdm, and as a window manager, I use a slight variation on tvtwm called "piewm". It looks just like ancient, crufty twm, except it has a little miniature "virtual desktop" in the lower right-hand corner. I normally use a 3x3 array, so I have 9 virtual screens. I have a tendency to clutter them, too. (For reference, I started using tvtwm on my Sun 3/60 about a dozen years ago. I do not tend to be a big fan of using newer, fancier software merely because it's newer & fancier -- or even just because it consumes more resources.) In any case, I have, for some years, had things set up with xdm so that my ~/.xsession would invoke ssh-add before doing anything else, thus making my most common use of my laptop very convenient: I effectively have "single signon" for large numbers of machines. Since it's my laptop's keyboard, mouse, & display that I nearly always use to access other machines, this is quite handy. I thought it might be a reasonably Good Thing to see if I could set up similar functionality with Gnome. This may not bequite as straightforward as I had thought: I found a PR in which a respondent alluded to the difficulty of invoking ssh-add in a useful way from a Gnome environment -- but did not provide any pointers on how to accomplish it. So I started poking around under "Preferences." Hmmm... "Deskyop Wallpaper" -- obviously unrelated to ssh-add, but surely changing it won't hurt anything. It had been the one cleverly named "Default," so after looking over the available selections, I tried "Earth from Space," which was kinda cool. But something about that image bugged me. [Rick, I can hear you laughing about now....] I am possessed of the fantasy that I am somewhat familiar with geography. And I did not (quite) recognize the depicted land masses... except that it kinda looked as if it showed a mirror-image of part of North & Central America ... upside-down and mirror-imaged. I finally decided to actually look at a map of Baja California.... I was right: it *is* North & Central AMerica, upside down (north near the bottom of the screen) and mirror-imaged. I think that's perverse. Hmmph...! Peace (anyway), david -- David H. Wolfskill david at catwhisker.org Prediction is difficult, especially if it involves the future. -- Niels Bohr See http://www.catwhisker.org/~david/publickey.gpg for public key. From patti at sdf.lonestar.org Mon Sep 19 17:44:24 2005 From: patti at sdf.lonestar.org (Patti Ames) Date: Mon, 19 Sep 2005 17:44:24 -0700 Subject: Exchange replacements Message-ID: <20050920004424.GA13126@SDF.LONESTAR.ORG> I'm looking at enterprise-grade email/calendar servers that work well with Outlook. I tried Scalix - if everything else is like that, I'm going to find myself running Exchange pretty soon. :\ What have you all used to satisfy management's need to calendar and reserve conference rooms inside of Outlook? Since my userbase are already pretty solidly occupying PSTs, easy migration is key. (Scalix crashed Outlook or popped up virus warnings on attempts to merge old contacts and calendar with the Scalix one.) The other half of my users use Thunderbird, so it would be great if they could, in some way, also schedule and find out about meetings and conference room availability. From michael at halligan.org Mon Sep 19 18:05:00 2005 From: michael at halligan.org (Michael T. Halligan) Date: Mon, 19 Sep 2005 18:05:00 -0700 Subject: Exchange replacements In-Reply-To: <20050920004424.GA13126@SDF.LONESTAR.ORG> References: <20050920004424.GA13126@SDF.LONESTAR.ORG> Message-ID: <432F603C.7070407@halligan.org> Patti, Scalix, Mirapoint, and Communigate are the best of breed.. Supposedly Oracle's collaboration suite is really good, but even with TCO considerations, Exchange is a fraction of Oracle's cost. We evaluated about 14 different exchange-clone solutions over the summer. Mirapoint is the best of them, but a magnitute more expensive than Scalix. For the Thunderbird integration, there's always Sunbird.. but Sunbird is pretty worthless right now. Patti Ames wrote: >I'm looking at enterprise-grade email/calendar servers that work well >with Outlook. I tried Scalix - if everything else is like that, I'm >going to find myself running Exchange pretty soon. :\ > >What have you all used to satisfy management's need to calendar and >reserve conference rooms inside of Outlook? Since my userbase are >already pretty solidly occupying PSTs, easy migration is key. (Scalix >crashed Outlook or popped up virus warnings on attempts to merge old >contacts and calendar with the Scalix one.) > >The other half of my users use Thunderbird, so it would be great if >they could, in some way, also schedule and find out about meetings and >conference room availability. > > -- Michael T. Halligan Chief Technology Officer ------------------- BitPusher, LLC http://www.bitpusher.com/ 1.888.9PUSHER 415.724.7998 (Mobile) 415.520.0876 (Fax) From jxh at jxh.com Mon Sep 19 18:28:12 2005 From: jxh at jxh.com (Jim Hickstein) Date: Mon, 19 Sep 2005 20:28:12 -0500 Subject: Exchange replacements In-Reply-To: <20050920004424.GA13126@SDF.LONESTAR.ORG> References: <20050920004424.GA13126@SDF.LONESTAR.ORG> Message-ID: <4215670D37A1264F56DD5B83@[10.9.18.3]> > I'm looking at enterprise-grade email/calendar servers that work well > with Outlook. I tried Scalix - if everything else is like that, I'm > going to find myself running Exchange pretty soon. :\ Well, maybe not a direct replacement, depending on features, but www.mirapoint.com. (Disclosure: I work there, and run a Mirapoint box on the side as well: www.imap-partners.net.) There is an Outlook plug-in (www.synqinfo.com) that talks XML to the MP calendar server, which is otherwise available in HTTP. And of course it's an IMAP server, so t-birders are welcome, but they must use the web interface for the calendar. I use it daily myself. It's actually not bad. And the recent "corporate edition" looks much more like Outlook. From rsr at inorganic.org Mon Sep 19 18:35:08 2005 From: rsr at inorganic.org (Roy S. Rapoport) Date: Mon, 19 Sep 2005 18:35:08 -0700 Subject: Exchange replacements In-Reply-To: <432F603C.7070407@halligan.org> References: <20050920004424.GA13126@SDF.LONESTAR.ORG> <432F603C.7070407@halligan.org> Message-ID: <20050920013508.GA29168@puppy.inorganic.org> On Mon, Sep 19, 2005 at 06:05:00PM -0700, Michael T. Halligan wrote: > Patti, > > Scalix, Mirapoint, and Communigate are the best of breed.. Supposedly We've not been incredibly impressed here with Communigate (I don't mean that as a euphemism for "it really really sucked," just ... eh). On the other hand, I just hired a mail engineering that had some work with UC Berkeley's efforts at using Communigate, and mentioning the product to him is a good way to get him to spit blood. -roy From jxh at jxh.com Mon Sep 19 18:36:32 2005 From: jxh at jxh.com (Jim Hickstein) Date: Mon, 19 Sep 2005 20:36:32 -0500 Subject: Exchange replacements In-Reply-To: <432F603C.7070407@halligan.org> References: <20050920004424.GA13126@SDF.LONESTAR.ORG> <432F603C.7070407@halligan.org> Message-ID: <98A04F35F49C7D4DC839EB1C@[10.9.18.3]> > Scalix, Mirapoint, and Communigate are the best of breed.. Supposedly > Oracle's collaboration suite is > really good, but even with TCO considerations, Exchange is a fraction of > Oracle's cost. Dude. I just migrated a large university off of OCS and onto Mirapoint. (It's my job, but only after someone makes the decision.) They hated OCS with a passion, and I don't think it was only the CIO and the Treasurer who did. They didn't go into specifics. In general, the CIOs _love_ Mirapoint and the sysadmins are slightly less enthusastic. (It's a change.) But I run a specialty email provider in my spare time and I get to sleep at night. That's worth a lot. > We evaluated about > 14 different exchange-clone solutions over the summer. Mirapoint is the > best of them, but a magnitute more > expensive than Scalix. Ask for a BayLISA member discount! :-) (Joking, but only in part.) > For the Thunderbird integration, there's always Sunbird.. but Sunbird is > pretty worthless right now. Whatever became of Ximian Evolution? From michael at halligan.org Mon Sep 19 18:41:58 2005 From: michael at halligan.org (Michael T. Halligan) Date: Mon, 19 Sep 2005 18:41:58 -0700 Subject: Exchange replacements In-Reply-To: <20050920013508.GA29168@puppy.inorganic.org> References: <20050920004424.GA13126@SDF.LONESTAR.ORG> <432F603C.7070407@halligan.org> <20050920013508.GA29168@puppy.inorganic.org> Message-ID: <432F68E6.9090103@halligan.org> Roy S. Rapoport wrote: >On Mon, Sep 19, 2005 at 06:05:00PM -0700, Michael T. Halligan wrote: > > >>Patti, >> >>Scalix, Mirapoint, and Communigate are the best of breed.. Supposedly >> >> > >We've not been incredibly impressed here with Communigate (I don't mean >that as a euphemism for "it really really sucked," just ... eh). On the >other hand, I just hired a mail engineering that had some work with UC >Berkeley's efforts at using Communigate, and mentioning the product to him >is a good way to get him to spit blood. > >-roy > > Roy, Ditto on Communigate. I haven't been overly impressed with them either. They definitely get points for their staying power... I started seeing their booths at conferences a decade ago. Their interface is ugly, and ambigious. Some simple tasks are very unintuitive, like selecting the type of mailbox an account should use, but easily remediedif you read the directions (gasp). Communigate does have the added bonus of being one of three (out of the 20ish) solutions we reviewed that was built for an ASP-like environment.. Which meant truely separate LDAP domains. The only other two were Bynari and Mirapoint. Scalix has hope, though, since it was built on HP's OpenMail codebase. They all need work. Honestly, Exchange is the best solution for this problem right now. Michael T. Halligan Chief Technology Officer ------------------- BitPusher, LLC http://www.bitpusher.com/ 1.888.9PUSHER 415.724.7998 (Mobile) 415.520.0876 (Fax) From jbrainard at mirapoint.com Mon Sep 19 18:43:53 2005 From: jbrainard at mirapoint.com (Jeff Brainard) Date: Mon, 19 Sep 2005 18:43:53 -0700 Subject: Exchange replacements In-Reply-To: <432F603C.7070407@halligan.org> References: <20050920004424.GA13126@SDF.LONESTAR.ORG> <432F603C.7070407@halligan.org> Message-ID: <432F6959.8080004@mirapoint.com> Happy to discuss Mirapoint with you, Patti. I work at the company and am located in Bay area. Michael T. Halligan wrote: > Patti, > > Scalix, Mirapoint, and Communigate are the best of breed.. Supposedly > Oracle's collaboration suite is > really good, but even with TCO considerations, Exchange is a fraction > of Oracle's cost. We evaluated about > 14 different exchange-clone solutions over the summer. Mirapoint is > the best of them, but a magnitute more > expensive than Scalix. > > For the Thunderbird integration, there's always Sunbird.. but Sunbird > is pretty worthless right now. > > > Patti Ames wrote: > >> I'm looking at enterprise-grade email/calendar servers that work well >> with Outlook. I tried Scalix - if everything else is like that, I'm >> going to find myself running Exchange pretty soon. :\ >> >> What have you all used to satisfy management's need to calendar and >> reserve conference rooms inside of Outlook? Since my userbase are >> already pretty solidly occupying PSTs, easy migration is key. (Scalix >> crashed Outlook or popped up virus warnings on attempts to merge old >> contacts and calendar with the Scalix one.) >> >> The other half of my users use Thunderbird, so it would be great if >> they could, in some way, also schedule and find out about meetings >> and conference room availability. >> > > -- Jeff Brainard Mirapoint Inc. Phone: +1 408-720-3861 Mobile: +1 408-329-2342 (Alt Mobile: +1 650-533-8986) Fax: +1 408-720-3725 Jbrainard at mirapoint.com From michael at halligan.org Mon Sep 19 18:44:41 2005 From: michael at halligan.org (Michael T. Halligan) Date: Mon, 19 Sep 2005 18:44:41 -0700 Subject: Exchange replacements In-Reply-To: <98A04F35F49C7D4DC839EB1C@[10.9.18.3]> References: <20050920004424.GA13126@SDF.LONESTAR.ORG> <432F603C.7070407@halligan.org> <98A04F35F49C7D4DC839EB1C@[10.9.18.3]> Message-ID: <432F6989.4050409@halligan.org> Jim, >>Scalix, Mirapoint, and Communigate are the best of breed.. Supposedly >>Oracle's collaboration suite is >>really good, but even with TCO considerations, Exchange is a fraction of >>Oracle's cost. >> >> > >Dude. I just migrated a large university off of OCS and onto Mirapoint. >(It's my job, but only after someone makes the decision.) They hated OCS >with a passion, and I don't think it was only the CIO and the Treasurer who >did. They didn't go into specifics. In general, the CIOs _love_ Mirapoint >and the sysadmins are slightly less enthusastic. (It's a change.) But I run >a specialty email provider in my spare time and I get to sleep at night. >That's worth a lot. > > I agree with you on Mirapoint. I'm only looking for a good justification, then I'm buying one for my customer-base. For the low-end, it's relatively expensive, but I think will be mitigated by a far lower total cost of ownership than the other exchange clones. I'd be happier if clustering them was easier/cheaper. >>We evaluated about >>14 different exchange-clone solutions over the summer. Mirapoint is the >>best of them, but a magnitute more >>expensive than Scalix. >> >> > >Ask for a BayLISA member discount! :-) (Joking, but only in part.) > > I've been talking for a while now about trying to create a buyer's club out of BayLisa.. If a dozen sysadmins call up a vendor at the same time saying "Hey, I'm a member of BayLisa, all the other BayLisa members are buying from you, I will too if the price was right" .... that could mean something. >For the Thunderbird integration, there's always Sunbird.. but Sunbird is >pretty worthless right now. > > > >Whatever became of Ximian Evolution? > > -- Michael T. Halligan Chief Technology Officer ------------------- BitPusher, LLC http://www.bitpusher.com/ 1.888.9PUSHER 415.724.7998 (Mobile) 415.520.0876 (Fax) From michael at halligan.org Mon Sep 19 19:06:50 2005 From: michael at halligan.org (Michael T. Halligan) Date: Mon, 19 Sep 2005 19:06:50 -0700 Subject: Exchange replacements In-Reply-To: <432F6DCB.5090803@mirapoint.com> References: <20050920004424.GA13126@SDF.LONESTAR.ORG> <432F603C.7070407@halligan.org> <98A04F35F49C7D4DC839EB1C@[10.9.18.3]> <432F6DCB.5090803@mirapoint.com> Message-ID: <432F6EBA.9070202@halligan.org> I think so. Novell also had a rebranding arrangement with OpenExchange, but is apparantly not continuing that. > i think ximian got sucked up by novell, correct? > > Jim Hickstein wrote: > >>>Scalix, Mirapoint, and Communigate are the best of breed.. Supposedly >>>Oracle's collaboration suite is >>>really good, but even with TCO considerations, Exchange is a fraction of >>>Oracle's cost. >>> >>> >> >>Dude. I just migrated a large university off of OCS and onto Mirapoint. >>(It's my job, but only after someone makes the decision.) They hated OCS >>with a passion, and I don't think it was only the CIO and the Treasurer who >>did. They didn't go into specifics. In general, the CIOs _love_ Mirapoint >>and the sysadmins are slightly less enthusastic. (It's a change.) But I run >>a specialty email provider in my spare time and I get to sleep at night. >>That's worth a lot. >> >> >> >>>We evaluated about >>>14 different exchange-clone solutions over the summer. Mirapoint is the >>>best of them, but a magnitute more >>>expensive than Scalix. >>> >>> >> >>Ask for a BayLISA member discount! :-) (Joking, but only in part.) >> >> >> >>>For the Thunderbird integration, there's always Sunbird.. but Sunbird is >>>pretty worthless right now. >>> >>> >> >>Whatever became of Ximian Evolution? >> >> >> > >-- >Jeff Brainard >Mirapoint Inc. >Phone: +1 408-720-3861 >Mobile: +1 408-329-2342 >(Alt Mobile: +1 650-533-8986) >Fax: +1 408-720-3725 >Jbrainard at mirapoint.com > > > > > -- Michael T. Halligan Chief Technology Officer ------------------- BitPusher, LLC http://www.bitpusher.com/ 1.888.9PUSHER 415.724.7998 (Mobile) 415.520.0876 (Fax) From jbrainard at mirapoint.com Mon Sep 19 19:17:38 2005 From: jbrainard at mirapoint.com (Jeff Brainard) Date: Mon, 19 Sep 2005 19:17:38 -0700 Subject: Exchange replacements In-Reply-To: <432F6989.4050409@halligan.org> References: <20050920004424.GA13126@SDF.LONESTAR.ORG> <432F603C.7070407@halligan.org> <98A04F35F49C7D4DC839EB1C@[10.9.18.3]> <432F6989.4050409@halligan.org> Message-ID: <432F7142.8080304@mirapoint.com> Just for the record and then I'll stop hammering the list here with Mirapoint plugs... I'm happy to offer an additional discount to any deals that comes my way from BayLisa members. Michael T. Halligan wrote: > Jim, > > >>> Scalix, Mirapoint, and Communigate are the best of breed.. Supposedly >>> Oracle's collaboration suite is >>> really good, but even with TCO considerations, Exchange is a >>> fraction of >>> Oracle's cost. >>> >> >> >> Dude. I just migrated a large university off of OCS and onto Mirapoint. >> (It's my job, but only after someone makes the decision.) They hated >> OCS >> with a passion, and I don't think it was only the CIO and the >> Treasurer who >> did. They didn't go into specifics. In general, the CIOs _love_ >> Mirapoint >> and the sysadmins are slightly less enthusastic. (It's a change.) >> But I run >> a specialty email provider in my spare time and I get to sleep at night. >> That's worth a lot. >> >> > > I agree with you on Mirapoint. I'm only looking for a good > justification, then I'm buying one > for my customer-base. For the low-end, it's relatively expensive, but > I think will be mitigated > by a far lower total cost of ownership than the other exchange clones. > I'd be happier if clustering > them was easier/cheaper. > >>> We evaluated about >>> 14 different exchange-clone solutions over the summer. Mirapoint is the >>> best of them, but a magnitute more >>> expensive than Scalix. >>> >> >> >> Ask for a BayLISA member discount! :-) (Joking, but only in part.) >> >> > > I've been talking for a while now about trying to create a buyer's > club out of BayLisa.. If a dozen > sysadmins call up a vendor at the same time saying "Hey, I'm a member > of BayLisa, all the other > BayLisa members are buying from you, I will too if the price was > right" .... that could mean something. > > >> For the Thunderbird integration, there's always Sunbird.. but Sunbird is >> pretty worthless right now. >> >> >> >> Whatever became of Ximian Evolution? >> >> > > > -- Jeff Brainard Mirapoint Inc. Phone: +1 408-720-3861 Mobile: +1 408-329-2342 (Alt Mobile: +1 650-533-8986) Fax: +1 408-720-3725 Jbrainard at mirapoint.com From sigje at sigje.org Mon Sep 19 21:54:35 2005 From: sigje at sigje.org (Jennifer Davis) Date: Mon, 19 Sep 2005 21:54:35 -0700 (PDT) Subject: Exchange replacements In-Reply-To: <432F7142.8080304@mirapoint.com> References: <20050920004424.GA13126@SDF.LONESTAR.ORG> <432F603C.7070407@halligan.org> <98A04F35F49C7D4DC839EB1C@[10.9.18.3]> <432F6989.4050409@halligan.org> <432F7142.8080304@mirapoint.com> Message-ID: > Just for the record and then I'll stop hammering the list here with Mirapoint > plugs... I'm happy to offer an additional discount to any deals that comes my > way from BayLisa members. I asked Jim exactly how much of a discount, and he said 5% on top of the sale price for BayLISA members. Jennifer Davis From michael at halligan.org Mon Sep 19 22:22:27 2005 From: michael at halligan.org (Michael T. Halligan) Date: Mon, 19 Sep 2005 22:22:27 -0700 Subject: Exchange replacements In-Reply-To: References: <20050920004424.GA13126@SDF.LONESTAR.ORG> <432F603C.7070407@halligan.org> <98A04F35F49C7D4DC839EB1C@[10.9.18.3]> <432F6989.4050409@halligan.org> <432F7142.8080304@mirapoint.com> Message-ID: <432F9C93.20909@halligan.org> Jennifer Davis wrote: > >> Just for the record and then I'll stop hammering the list here with >> Mirapoint plugs... I'm happy to offer an additional discount to any >> deals that comes my way from BayLisa members. > > > I asked Jim exactly how much of a discount, and he said 5% on top of > the sale price for BayLISA members. > > Jennifer Davis Exactly what I've been rambling about. Any vendor should be happy to extend discounts to a professional organization, and any professional organization should be happy to ask vendors for those discounts. -- Michael T. Halligan Chief Technology Officer ------------------- BitPusher, LLC http://www.bitpusher.com/ 1.888.9PUSHER 415.724.7998 (Mobile) 415.520.0876 (Fax) From guy at extragalactic.net Mon Sep 19 22:31:00 2005 From: guy at extragalactic.net (Guy B. Purcell) Date: Mon, 19 Sep 2005 22:31:00 -0700 Subject: This is what happens when a BSD hacker is told to use Linux In-Reply-To: <20050919232655.GT54033@bunrab.catwhisker.org> References: <20050919232655.GT54033@bunrab.catwhisker.org> Message-ID: <9ACDF353-4E16-4A6F-A9D7-ED9A98A728B1@extragalactic.net> On Sep 19, 2005, at 16:26, David Wolfskill wrote: > I was right: it *is* North & Central AMerica, upside down (north near > the bottom of the screen) and mirror-imaged. > > I think that's perverse. Actually, that's something done by most astronomical optics systems. Getting things right side up requires extra bits in the optical path, which lowers the light throughput (by something like 5% per surface). Since astronomers frequently push detection thresholds to start with, cutting down light throughput isn't tolerated. Just digitally rotate/flip the image back to the expected orientation. -Guy P. S. Did you ever figure out how to make Gnome & xdm play together? Knowing that may come in handy someday (I used to do something similar when I had Solaris on my desktop). From alvin at Mail.Linux-Consulting.com Mon Sep 19 22:57:56 2005 From: alvin at Mail.Linux-Consulting.com (Alvin Oga) Date: Mon, 19 Sep 2005 22:57:56 -0700 (PDT) Subject: discounts -- Re: Exchange replacements In-Reply-To: <432F9C93.20909@halligan.org> Message-ID: hi ya On Mon, 19 Sep 2005, Michael T. Halligan wrote: > Exactly what I've been rambling about. Any vendor should be happy to > extend discounts to a professional organization, and any professional > organization should be happy to ask vendors > for those discounts. good discounts vs "negligible" discounts will also reflect how "happy" the vendor is or maybe their discount calcaulator is broken by the bean counters that have to okay it "picking on 5%": 5% discount from hardware vendors is like a free machine since most folks hardware costs approaches 95% of the retail due to competition - there are some exceptions to costs like dell that makes their own custom hardware to widen their gross margins to 25% or more and than they add their silly "pre-paid warranty" that boosts their profits thru the roof 5% discounts from software vendors ... humm that's when i look for other vendors, but again depends on which sw one is buying c ya alvin From alvin at Mail.Linux-Consulting.com Mon Sep 19 23:04:38 2005 From: alvin at Mail.Linux-Consulting.com (Alvin Oga) Date: Mon, 19 Sep 2005 23:04:38 -0700 (PDT) Subject: This is what happens when a BSD hacker is told to use Linux In-Reply-To: <20050919232655.GT54033@bunrab.catwhisker.org> Message-ID: hi ya david On Mon, 19 Sep 2005, David Wolfskill wrote: > The flavor of "Linux" I chose was "Fedora Core 3." This turns out to > have been fortuitous, its not just you ... i've installed fc1, fc2, fc3, fc4 and i would NOT deploy it remotely if it's my keyboard that has to keep the box up for more than a week or month ( not one "fedora" has lasted more than a couple weeks .. and i've built on may different hardware ) if there's any good option .. fc-4 seems to be the better of the bunch and lasted the longest bfore it too died ( broken security patches ) i suspect if one only installs and not attempt to harden and apply the fc patches regularly ( daily, weekly ), you might last a little longer > So Fedora appears to default to useing the Gnome environment. yup.. and yuck .. but is easily changeable to kde, but fc/redhat mixed and merged gnome/kde into "redhat gui child" ( it is neither kde nor gnome ) > I'm used to xdm, and as a window manager, I use a slight variation on > tvtwm called "piewm". It looks just like ancient, crufty twm, except it > has a little miniature "virtual desktop" in the lower right-hand corner. > I normally use a 3x3 array, so I have 9 virtual screens. I have a fvwm2 is nice for that ... vs twm, vs mwm, vs 100-others c ya alvin From alvin at Mail.Linux-Consulting.com Mon Sep 19 23:06:49 2005 From: alvin at Mail.Linux-Consulting.com (Alvin Oga) Date: Mon, 19 Sep 2005 23:06:49 -0700 (PDT) Subject: This is what happens when a BSD hacker is told to use Linux In-Reply-To: <9ACDF353-4E16-4A6F-A9D7-ED9A98A728B1@extragalactic.net> Message-ID: On Mon, 19 Sep 2005, Guy B. Purcell wrote: > P. S. Did you ever figure out how to make Gnome & xdm play > together? Knowing that may come in handy someday (I used to do > something similar when I had Solaris on my desktop). that should be defined in /etc/X11/xinit and or you can make your own ~/.xinitrc or ~/.xsessions that will work with either desktop with any window manager and login screen c ya alvin From michael at halligan.org Mon Sep 19 23:14:48 2005 From: michael at halligan.org (Michael T. Halligan) Date: Mon, 19 Sep 2005 23:14:48 -0700 Subject: discounts -- Re: Exchange replacements In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <432FA8D8.5080707@halligan.org> Alvin, Read through the e-mail again. Michael > >On Mon, 19 Sep 2005, Michael T. Halligan wrote: > > > >>Exactly what I've been rambling about. Any vendor should be happy to >>extend discounts to a professional organization, and any professional >>organization should be happy to ask vendors >>for those discounts. >> >> > >good discounts vs "negligible" discounts will also reflect how "happy" >the vendor is or maybe their discount calcaulator is broken by the bean >counters that have to okay it > >"picking on 5%": > >5% discount from hardware vendors is like a free machine >since most folks hardware costs approaches 95% of the retail >due to competition > - there are some exceptions to costs like dell that makes > their own custom hardware to widen their gross margins to > 25% or more and than they add their silly "pre-paid warranty" > that boosts their profits thru the roof > >5% discounts from software vendors ... humm that's when i look >for other vendors, but again depends on which sw one is buying > >c ya >alvin > > > -- Michael T. Halligan Chief Technology Officer ------------------- BitPusher, LLC http://www.bitpusher.com/ 1.888.9PUSHER 415.724.7998 (Mobile) 415.520.0876 (Fax) From sigje at sigje.org Tue Sep 20 00:10:26 2005 From: sigje at sigje.org (Jennifer Davis) Date: Tue, 20 Sep 2005 00:10:26 -0700 (PDT) Subject: discounts -- Re: Exchange replacements In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: > > "picking on 5%": > > 5% discount from hardware vendors is like a free machine > since most folks hardware costs approaches 95% of the retail > due to competition > - there are some exceptions to costs like dell that makes > their own custom hardware to widen their gross margins to > 25% or more and than they add their silly "pre-paid warranty" > that boosts their profits thru the roof > > 5% discounts from software vendors ... humm that's when i look > for other vendors, but again depends on which sw one is buying That's 5% discount on top of any other discount negotiated. It's not the sole discount. (Just wanted to make that clear) From jxh at jxh.com Tue Sep 20 07:06:28 2005 From: jxh at jxh.com (Jim Hickstein) Date: Tue, 20 Sep 2005 09:06:28 -0500 Subject: discounts -- Re: Exchange replacements In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <1C37D96BF9BDBE77FE0D6318@[10.9.18.3]> > good discounts vs "negligible" discounts will also reflect how "happy" > the vendor is or maybe their discount calcaulator is broken by the bean > counters that have to okay it Well, Jeff did say "additional" discount. :-) And Mirapoint is both hardware and software. From david at catwhisker.org Tue Sep 20 11:13:14 2005 From: david at catwhisker.org (David Wolfskill) Date: Tue, 20 Sep 2005 11:13:14 -0700 Subject: This is what happens when a BSD hacker is told to use Linux In-Reply-To: References: <9ACDF353-4E16-4A6F-A9D7-ED9A98A728B1@extragalactic.net> Message-ID: <20050920181314.GZ54033@bunrab.catwhisker.org> On Mon, Sep 19, 2005 at 11:06:49PM -0700, Alvin Oga wrote: > > On Mon, 19 Sep 2005, Guy B. Purcell wrote: > > > P. S. Did you ever figure out how to make Gnome & xdm play > > together? Knowing that may come in handy someday (I used to do > > something similar when I had Solaris on my desktop). > > that should be defined in /etc/X11/xinit Not really, unless Linux is doing somethiung fairly twisted: if xinit is used, the logged-in user is starting X. if xdm (or its relatives) are used, a process that need not correspond to a login, or even to a flesh-and-blood user (what the law calls a "natural person") is starting X. That's a non-trivial distinction. > and or you can make your own ~/.xinitrc or ~/.xsessions > that will work with either desktop with any window manager > and login screen And ~/.xsession is used in xdm-created environments, while ~/.xinitrc is used for xinit. Now, whether or not you'd have equivalent function in those different environments is an open question.... :-} Peace, david -- David H. Wolfskill david at catwhisker.org Prediction is difficult, especially if it involves the future. -- Niels Bohr See http://www.catwhisker.org/~david/publickey.gpg for public key. From tony at usenix.org Tue Sep 20 11:15:33 2005 From: tony at usenix.org (Tony Del Porto) Date: Tue, 20 Sep 2005 11:15:33 -0700 Subject: acme micro/8anet.com Message-ID: <1E52DA65-3C20-4705-8FDE-4BEF2EB27AEF@usenix.org> Hey folks, Does anyone have anything good or bad to say about Acme Microsystems/ 8anet.com? They have the right machine at the right price but I'm a little disturbed that their sales person uses a yahoo.com e-mail address. I've been buying from Iron Systems, but they don't have what I need this time. Thanks, Tony Del Porto SysAdmin USENIX Association 2560 9th Street, Suite 215, Berkeley CA 94710 510 528 8649 x16 desk tony at usenix.org | www.usenix.org | www.sage.org From vraptor at employees.org Tue Sep 20 11:40:28 2005 From: vraptor at employees.org (vraptor at employees.org) Date: Tue, 20 Sep 2005 11:40:28 -0700 (PDT) Subject: Exchange replacements In-Reply-To: <20050920004424.GA13126@SDF.LONESTAR.ORG> References: <20050920004424.GA13126@SDF.LONESTAR.ORG> Message-ID: <20050920113203.I55719@willers.employees.org> On Mon, 19 Sep 2005, Patti Ames wrote: > I'm looking at enterprise-grade email/calendar servers that work well > with Outlook. I tried Scalix - if everything else is like that, I'm > going to find myself running Exchange pretty soon. :\ > > What have you all used to satisfy management's need to calendar and > reserve conference rooms inside of Outlook? Since my userbase are > already pretty solidly occupying PSTs, easy migration is key. (Scalix > crashed Outlook or popped up virus warnings on attempts to merge old > contacts and calendar with the Scalix one.) > > The other half of my users use Thunderbird, so it would be great if > they could, in some way, also schedule and find out about meetings and > conference room availability. I'm not sure if anyone has mentioned this, but Samsung Contact appears to be getting good press: http://www.samsungcontact.com/en/ I have not used it, but it looks like it's doing the right things from the documentation. Supposedly it's more MAPI compliant than Exchange. Good luck with the search-- =Nadine= From michael at halligan.org Tue Sep 20 11:51:10 2005 From: michael at halligan.org (Michael T. Halligan) Date: Tue, 20 Sep 2005 11:51:10 -0700 Subject: acme micro/8anet.com In-Reply-To: <1E52DA65-3C20-4705-8FDE-4BEF2EB27AEF@usenix.org> References: <1E52DA65-3C20-4705-8FDE-4BEF2EB27AEF@usenix.org> Message-ID: <43305A1E.6060707@halligan.org> Tony Del Porto wrote: > Hey folks, > > Does anyone have anything good or bad to say about Acme Microsystems/ > 8anet.com? They have the right machine at the right price but I'm a > little disturbed that their sales person uses a yahoo.com e-mail > address. I've been buying from Iron Systems, but they don't have what > I need this time. > > Thanks, > > Tony Del Porto > SysAdmin > USENIX Association > 2560 9th Street, Suite 215, Berkeley CA 94710 > 510 528 8649 x16 desk > tony at usenix.org | www.usenix.org | www.sage.org > > > Tony, Acme has treated me right for years.. Deal with them directly over the phone, though. Michael From cat at reptiles.org Tue Sep 20 12:02:32 2005 From: cat at reptiles.org (Cat Okita) Date: Tue, 20 Sep 2005 15:02:32 -0400 (EDT) Subject: Exchange replacements In-Reply-To: <98A04F35F49C7D4DC839EB1C@[10.9.18.3]> References: <20050920004424.GA13126@SDF.LONESTAR.ORG> <432F603C.7070407@halligan.org> <98A04F35F49C7D4DC839EB1C@[10.9.18.3]> Message-ID: <20050920150128.O1291@skink.reptiles.org> On Mon, 19 Sep 2005, Jim Hickstein wrote: > Whatever became of Ximian Evolution? It's passed over to Novell, and still exists, and actually does a pretty decent job, all things considered. I'll cheerfully admit that my implementation is a bit broken (personal problem, not the software), but it does mail/calendaring against exchange quite nicely. I don't know if it's got a standalone server setup though. cheers! ========================================================================== "A cat spends her life conflicted between a deep, passionate and profound desire for fish and an equally deep, passionate and profound desire to avoid getting wet. This is the defining metaphor of my life right now." From sigje at sigje.org Tue Sep 20 13:53:32 2005 From: sigje at sigje.org (Jennifer Davis) Date: Tue, 20 Sep 2005 13:53:32 -0700 (PDT) Subject: Discount to San Jose .NET class at SANS Message-ID: BayLISA members receive a 5% discount for the San Jose .NET class. Please contact blw at baylisa.org for more details. (Following is from David Rice with information about the class.) Dear Colleagues, I would like to personally invite you to join us for "SEC 616 .NET Security" at SANS Silicon Valley 2005 on September 25th . 29th. The .NET Security courseware is the premier offering of security-specific issues related to desktop and web-based applications as well as web services technologies. There are no other .NET courses in the industry that comprehensively address the concerns of administrators, program managers, and developers within a 5 day period. There is an incredible amount of information packed into every day. No one is shortchanged and everyone leaves having learned critical information. As one student declared in SANSFIRE Atlanta, "Wow! If you are using .NET you need this course or you are waiting for trouble." SEC616 is based on real-world experience with .NET applications and supports the recently released National Security Agency's "Guide to .NET Framework Security" for which I served as the original Program Manager. If you or your organization is working with .NET this course is essential for success. Enjoy a fantastic course at a fantastic hotel in the cradle of modern technology . Silicon Valley. I look forward to seeing you there. Cheers, David Rice SANS Silicon Valley September 25 . 29, 2005 http://www.sans.org/siliconvalley2005/ From jxh at jxh.com Tue Sep 20 14:17:11 2005 From: jxh at jxh.com (Jim Hickstein) Date: Tue, 20 Sep 2005 16:17:11 -0500 Subject: acme micro/8anet.com In-Reply-To: <1E52DA65-3C20-4705-8FDE-4BEF2EB27AEF@usenix.org> References: <1E52DA65-3C20-4705-8FDE-4BEF2EB27AEF@usenix.org> Message-ID: <07CFC3FDBCE49EDD6D19A38B@[10.9.18.3]> > They have the right machine at the right price but I'm a little > disturbed that their sales person uses a yahoo.com e-mail address. Send them this: :-) From ulf at Alameda.net Tue Sep 20 15:08:50 2005 From: ulf at Alameda.net (Ulf Zimmermann) Date: Tue, 20 Sep 2005 15:08:50 -0700 Subject: acme micro/8anet.com In-Reply-To: <1E52DA65-3C20-4705-8FDE-4BEF2EB27AEF@usenix.org> References: <1E52DA65-3C20-4705-8FDE-4BEF2EB27AEF@usenix.org> Message-ID: <20050920220850.GU10572@evil.alameda.net> On Tue, Sep 20, 2005 at 11:15:33AM -0700, Tony Del Porto wrote: > Hey folks, > > Does anyone have anything good or bad to say about Acme Microsystems/ > 8anet.com? They have the right machine at the right price but I'm a > little disturbed that their sales person uses a yahoo.com e-mail > address. I've been buying from Iron Systems, but they don't have what > I need this time. > > Thanks, > > Tony Del Porto > SysAdmin > USENIX Association > 2560 9th Street, Suite 215, Berkeley CA 94710 > 510 528 8649 x16 desk > tony at usenix.org | www.usenix.org | www.sage.org I have dealt with them about 2 - 2.5 years ago when we first switched to x86 from Sun and they treated me ok, didn't use a yahoo email then. I used them as they sold supermicro motherboards/chassis/servers and they usual tended to be the cheapest on price watch. -- Regards, Ulf. --------------------------------------------------------------------- Ulf Zimmermann, 1525 Pacific Ave., Alameda, CA-94501, #: 510-865-0204 You can find my resume at: http://seven.Alameda.net/~ulf/resume.html From jbrainard at mirapoint.com Tue Sep 20 15:47:49 2005 From: jbrainard at mirapoint.com (Jeff Brainard) Date: Tue, 20 Sep 2005 15:47:49 -0700 Subject: Exchange replacements In-Reply-To: <20050920113203.I55719@willers.employees.org> References: <20050920004424.GA13126@SDF.LONESTAR.ORG> <20050920113203.I55719@willers.employees.org> Message-ID: <43309195.4040708@mirapoint.com> i believe contact is the old hp openmail code. industry rumor is that hp licensed it to two peeps from my knowledge - scalix and samsung. vraptor at employees.org wrote: > On Mon, 19 Sep 2005, Patti Ames wrote: > >> I'm looking at enterprise-grade email/calendar servers that work well >> with Outlook. I tried Scalix - if everything else is like that, I'm >> going to find myself running Exchange pretty soon. :\ >> >> What have you all used to satisfy management's need to calendar and >> reserve conference rooms inside of Outlook? Since my userbase are >> already pretty solidly occupying PSTs, easy migration is key. (Scalix >> crashed Outlook or popped up virus warnings on attempts to merge old >> contacts and calendar with the Scalix one.) >> >> The other half of my users use Thunderbird, so it would be great if >> they could, in some way, also schedule and find out about meetings and >> conference room availability. > > > I'm not sure if anyone has mentioned this, but Samsung Contact > appears to be getting good press: > > http://www.samsungcontact.com/en/ > > I have not used it, but it looks like it's doing the right things > from the documentation. Supposedly it's more MAPI compliant than > Exchange. > > Good luck with the search-- > =Nadine= -- Jeff Brainard Mirapoint Inc. Phone: +1 408-720-3861 Mobile: +1 408-329-2342 (Alt Mobile: +1 650-533-8986) Fax: +1 408-720-3725 Jbrainard at mirapoint.com From sigje at sigje.org Tue Sep 20 16:58:52 2005 From: sigje at sigje.org (Jennifer Davis) Date: Tue, 20 Sep 2005 16:58:52 -0700 (PDT) Subject: NAS/SAN/iSCSI resource... Message-ID: Not sure, but may be of interest to those people who are interested in data storage (SAN, NAS, iSCSI, ..). It's from my employer (NetApp), so I want to qualify this.. but I've always been a big fan of the information available on the NOW site, as well as the NetApp presence at USENIX's LISA, so I don't think I'm being a dweeb by forwarding this information on :) Figure out the value yourself though. http://www.netapp-web.com/ontap/ You can sign up for Tech OnTap .. I've asked what this is as the blurb says "exclusive access to research, demos, best practices, white papers, invitations to private events, and free beer" .. and digging a little I found that it was newsletter, knowledge kit, webcast, in person events, round tables, seminars (all based around your interests that you listed on the registration page). This will include discounted technical training, so if you are looking for NetApp training this might be a good way to get discounted training. What kind of email traffic can you expect? 1 monthly newsletter, 1-2 bundles (information/research type things), and 1-2 announcements/offers depending on what kind of interests you selected when you registered. So .. in summary. It looks like it will be a nice technical resource. It's supposed to be geared towards techies, and not marketing speak. If it's _not_ technical enough, let me know. I'll pass on the comments people make to the appropriate people. I think this is a great opportunity for the people who actually use the product to get involved in having a voice with a particular vendor, and perhaps other vendors will follow suit. Jennifer From sigje at sigje.org Tue Sep 20 17:41:27 2005 From: sigje at sigje.org (Jennifer Davis) Date: Tue, 20 Sep 2005 17:41:27 -0700 (PDT) Subject: Salary Survey.. Message-ID: So the SAGE Salary Survey is always of interest, but it's targeted towards a more global/US centric scale. It might be of interest if we could get sufficient number of people to do this specifically for the Bay area so that we have a better idea of what is happening around this area. It would give us a chance to actually get more specific in detail. Does this sound like a good idea? If so, what kind of items are you interested in knowing about your fellow IT workers? Jennifer Davis From rsr at inorganic.org Tue Sep 20 18:17:03 2005 From: rsr at inorganic.org (Roy S. Rapoport) Date: Tue, 20 Sep 2005 18:17:03 -0700 Subject: Salary Survey.. In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <20050921011703.GB29828@puppy.inorganic.org> On Tue, Sep 20, 2005 at 05:41:27PM -0700, Jennifer Davis wrote: > > So the SAGE Salary Survey is always of interest, but it's targeted towards > a more global/US centric scale. It might be of interest if we could get > sufficient number of people to do this specifically for the Bay area so > that we have a better idea of what is happening around this area. It > would give us a chance to actually get more specific in detail. Does this > sound like a good idea? If so, what kind of items are you interested in > knowing about your fellow IT workers? Whether or not they're in IT, for example :) (e.g. I've got about 12 years of sysadmin-type jobs on my resume; my last job was as a developer, and I'm managing the test/releng/benchmarking group at $CURDAYJOB; would you want to know how much I'm making? How would you correct for me not being in IT?) (I'd be curious to see if I could make more by going back into IT, though realistically, given that I work at basically The Best Place On Earth, and every time I'm working at 3am it's because _I_want_to_, there's not a huge incentive :) ) -roy From alvin at Mail.Linux-Consulting.com Tue Sep 20 18:31:02 2005 From: alvin at Mail.Linux-Consulting.com (Alvin Oga) Date: Tue, 20 Sep 2005 18:31:02 -0700 (PDT) Subject: This is what happens when a BSD hacker is told to use Linux In-Reply-To: <20050920181314.GZ54033@bunrab.catwhisker.org> Message-ID: hi ya On Tue, 20 Sep 2005, David Wolfskill wrote: > > that should be defined in /etc/X11/xinit > > Not really, unless Linux is doing somethiung fairly twisted: if xinit > is used, the logged-in user is starting X. if xdm (or its relatives) "linux" is twisted ... every distro has a variation of /etc/X11/xinit that defines its system defaults ( to use kde or gnmome or fvwm or twm or mwm as the default window manager ) > are used, a process that need not correspond to a login, or even to a > flesh-and-blood user (what the law calls a "natural person") is starting > X. That's a non-trivial distinction. if you use xdm, gdm etc... the "natural person" does NOT start X directly as it's already up ... > And ~/.xsession is used in xdm-created environments, while ~/.xinitrc is > used for xinit. you can also make .xession and .xinitrc be the same so that you always get the same desktop environment no matter which machine you login on that is use some foo-dm ( xdm, gdm, kdm... ) flavor of x11 login c ya alvin From alvin at Mail.Linux-Consulting.com Tue Sep 20 19:23:28 2005 From: alvin at Mail.Linux-Consulting.com (Alvin Oga) Date: Tue, 20 Sep 2005 19:23:28 -0700 (PDT) Subject: acme micro/8anet.com In-Reply-To: <1E52DA65-3C20-4705-8FDE-4BEF2EB27AEF@usenix.org> Message-ID: hi ya On Tue, 20 Sep 2005, Tony Del Porto wrote: > Does anyone have anything good or bad to say about Acme Microsystems/ > 8anet.com? They have the right machine at the right price but I'm a > little disturbed that their sales person uses a yahoo.com e-mail > address. I've been buying from Iron Systems, but they don't have what > I need this time. if they have it in stock, call them and show up within the hr for pickup .. they've carried some stuff ( 3ware ) in stock which is when i go there to pickup stuff withing the hr - for chassis ... most everybody sells the same vendor's chassis # # these guys tend to have random stuff in stock # in the past for me, when folks insists on non-1u chassis # http://www.anova.com/index.php?manufacturers_id=6 http://www.anova.com/index.php?manufacturers_id=4 note that most all pc stores and websites does NOT have inventory ... they just go pick it up within the hr of getting your credit card info the extra "i need it now and can i pickup within the hr" is what makes a good vendor/distributor or just a shop w/ zero inventory that buy's from someone else before shipping to you with their addons c ya alvin From michael at halligan.org Tue Sep 20 22:03:27 2005 From: michael at halligan.org (Michael T. Halligan) Date: Tue, 20 Sep 2005 22:03:27 -0700 Subject: Exchange replacements In-Reply-To: <43309195.4040708@mirapoint.com> References: <20050920004424.GA13126@SDF.LONESTAR.ORG> <20050920113203.I55719@willers.employees.org> <43309195.4040708@mirapoint.com> Message-ID: <4330E99F.4010903@halligan.org> Three. Scalix, Samsung, and Bynari. Jeff Brainard wrote: > i believe contact is the old hp openmail code. industry rumor is that > hp licensed it to two peeps from my knowledge - scalix and samsung. > > vraptor at employees.org wrote: > >> On Mon, 19 Sep 2005, Patti Ames wrote: >> >>> I'm looking at enterprise-grade email/calendar servers that work well >>> with Outlook. I tried Scalix - if everything else is like that, I'm >>> going to find myself running Exchange pretty soon. :\ >>> >>> What have you all used to satisfy management's need to calendar and >>> reserve conference rooms inside of Outlook? Since my userbase are >>> already pretty solidly occupying PSTs, easy migration is key. (Scalix >>> crashed Outlook or popped up virus warnings on attempts to merge old >>> contacts and calendar with the Scalix one.) >>> >>> The other half of my users use Thunderbird, so it would be great if >>> they could, in some way, also schedule and find out about meetings and >>> conference room availability. >> >> >> >> I'm not sure if anyone has mentioned this, but Samsung Contact >> appears to be getting good press: >> >> http://www.samsungcontact.com/en/ >> >> I have not used it, but it looks like it's doing the right things >> from the documentation. Supposedly it's more MAPI compliant than >> Exchange. >> >> Good luck with the search-- >> =Nadine= > > > -- Michael T. Halligan Chief Technology Officer ------------------- BitPusher, LLC http://www.bitpusher.com/ 1.888.9PUSHER 415.724.7998 (Mobile) 415.520.0876 (Fax) From dannyman at toldme.com Wed Sep 21 10:48:59 2005 From: dannyman at toldme.com (Danny Howard) Date: Wed, 21 Sep 2005 10:48:59 -0700 Subject: Filesystems: Linux versus FreeBSD Message-ID: <20050921174859.GG65449@ratchet.nebcorp.com> Hello, NO I AM NOT LOOKING TO START A FLAMEWAR. I'm a FreeBSD admin who is soliciting wisdom from Linux admins. :) Okay, that out of the way. I'm looking to build a production service pod. Two tiers - web server, db server. We are using PostgreSQL and FreeBSD. No database replication, just yet. Our incumbent failover strategy is to have two database servers, and dump the database every 30 minutes, copy it to the backup db server. IF the primary DB server fails, we turn our web application to the "down page" and load the database on the backup DB, and resume service from there. Instead of building two expensive DB servers with screamin'-fast disks, I have wandered pretty far down the path to putting a disk appliance in the rack, that can provide high performance and high availability. If a database server fails, I can take that out of production and connect the backup to our storage backend, run FS-level and pg-level consistency checks, and get back to work. One nice thing about FreeBSD is that the SoftUpdates feature bundles writes intelligently to keep the filesystem in a sufficiently consistent state, so that most of the time a fsck operation is not required to bring the server back up even after a hard reset. Using FreeBSD, my normal failover procedure will allow me to boot, mount unclean filesystem, run pg consistency check, and load database, and fsck in the background. UNFORTUNATELY FreeBSD's support for vendor-approved HBAs tends to be, shall we say, spotty ... there is a very good chance that we will want to replace the database OS with Fedora Core ... which leads me to ask, does Linux these days have an FS option that can offer similar advantages to SoftUpdates, such that I needn't fsck after a server crash? Is it robust? And to answer the obvious question, YES I understand that relying on SoftUpdates means that it is possible for certain DB transactions to be lost shortly before the server crash. We have determined that this is an acceptible risk. Thanks for the advice. :) Sincerely, -danny -- http://dannyman.toldme.com/ From dannyman at toldme.com Wed Sep 21 10:59:47 2005 From: dannyman at toldme.com (Danny Howard) Date: Wed, 21 Sep 2005 10:59:47 -0700 Subject: FibreChannel Stuff Message-ID: <20050921175947.GH65449@ratchet.nebcorp.com> Hello, This is a sufficiently different question from my last question that I figured I'd send a new thread out. :) WHAT'S WITH FIBRECHANNEL? My understanding is its basically another generation of SCSI, with a more complicated set of connectors. But whenever I look at a disk appliance, there's a list, usually a very very very very very short list of supported HBAs. For example, if I want an Apple Xserve RAID, the supported non-Mac HBA is the LSI7202XP. Okay ... well, what if my server OS doesn't have a driver for the HBA? Can I try a different HBA? Isn't the point of FC to be a standard to connect bits of hardware together and have them interoperate? So, does an "unsupported" HBA just not work? Or is "supported" merely a means of saying "yes, we have tested it to some degree, and maybe got some money from our partner, and bless this one HBA?" IF I have the temerity to use a non-"supported" HBA ... do things usually still work? Or is FC some delicate twitchy thing where if I can only reliably connect bits together only after the hardware vendors have collud^H^Haborated sufficiently to work out all the subtle little bugs in the FC standards that only creep out under high loads, or such? Lastly, are there any FreeBSD admins on here who use FC HBAs in a production environment, and could vouch for or reccoment particular solutions? Thanks again. Sincerely, -danny -- http://dannyman.toldme.com/ From jkavitsk at Brocade.COM Wed Sep 21 12:14:59 2005 From: jkavitsk at Brocade.COM (Jim Kavitsky) Date: Wed, 21 Sep 2005 12:14:59 -0700 Subject: FibreChannel Stuff Message-ID: <24BD2D5F3CEF4F4780606124741B48169939@hq-ex-7.brocade.com> When people talk about fiberchannel, what they are usually talking about is SCSI encapsulated in the FC protocol. It is possible to run other protocols encapsulated within FC, for instance, IP. As you have suspected, many fiberchannel HBAs that are not "supported" will work just fine, as the basic fiberchannel standard, and that of SCSI have been well defined for quite a while. Non-supported cards usually just have not been tested extensively. This typically means you are on your own when a problem arises. The relevant question is: How important is it to me to be able to get support for my configuration from my array vendor when I have a problem? You have suggested that this is going to be a production system. Are you going to be capable of debugging and fixing problems on your own? If you do decide to jump into an unsupported configuration, go with the HBA that your OS has a stable driver for. Take a look at Emulex, too. We are using a few Redhat machines with Emulex LP9000 series cards with good luck, and have generally found them to be quite reliable and widely applicable. Are you willing (or is it even possible) to change the OS in question? You may find more supported options when dealing with something like Redhat ES, or Solaris. I have not personally used FreeBSD on my SANs. Are you planning to use this system "direct attached" via a fiber channel arbitrated loop (FCAL) or through a switched fabric SAN? -jimk -----Original Message----- From: owner-baylisa at baylisa.org [mailto:owner-baylisa at baylisa.org] On Behalf Of Danny Howard Sent: Wednesday, September 21, 2005 11:00 AM To: baylisa at baylisa.org Subject: FibreChannel Stuff Hello, This is a sufficiently different question from my last question that I figured I'd send a new thread out. :) WHAT'S WITH FIBRECHANNEL? My understanding is its basically another generation of SCSI, with a more complicated set of connectors. But whenever I look at a disk appliance, there's a list, usually a very very very very very short list of supported HBAs. For example, if I want an Apple Xserve RAID, the supported non-Mac HBA is the LSI7202XP. Okay ... well, what if my server OS doesn't have a driver for the HBA? Can I try a different HBA? Isn't the point of FC to be a standard to connect bits of hardware together and have them interoperate? So, does an "unsupported" HBA just not work? Or is "supported" merely a means of saying "yes, we have tested it to some degree, and maybe got some money from our partner, and bless this one HBA?" IF I have the temerity to use a non-"supported" HBA ... do things usually still work? Or is FC some delicate twitchy thing where if I can only reliably connect bits together only after the hardware vendors have collud^H^Haborated sufficiently to work out all the subtle little bugs in the FC standards that only creep out under high loads, or such? Lastly, are there any FreeBSD admins on here who use FC HBAs in a production environment, and could vouch for or reccoment particular solutions? Thanks again. Sincerely, -danny -- http://dannyman.toldme.com/ From rick at linuxmafia.com Wed Sep 21 12:39:22 2005 From: rick at linuxmafia.com (Rick Moen) Date: Wed, 21 Sep 2005 12:39:22 -0700 Subject: Filesystems: Linux versus FreeBSD In-Reply-To: <20050921174859.GG65449@ratchet.nebcorp.com> References: <20050921174859.GG65449@ratchet.nebcorp.com> Message-ID: <20050921193922.GE4774@linuxmafia.com> Quoting Danny Howard (dannyman at toldme.com): > One nice thing about FreeBSD is that the SoftUpdates feature bundles > writes intelligently to keep the filesystem in a sufficiently consistent > state, so that most of the time a fsck operation is not required to > bring the server back up even after a hard reset. SoftUpdates on FFS is a neat hack (as is back-ground fsck). Here's a Usenix technical paper by McKusick and others comparing it against typical journaling filesystems: http://www.usenix.org/publications/library/proceedings/usenix2000/general/full_papers/seltzer/seltzer_html/ I'm not sure whether it's still under patent encumbrance; my guess is that it still is. > UNFORTUNATELY FreeBSD's support for vendor-approved HBAs tends to be, > shall we say, spotty ... there is a very good chance that we will want > to replace the database OS with Fedora Core ... which leads me to ask, > does Linux these days have an FS option that can offer similar > advantages to SoftUpdates, such that I needn't fsck after a server > crash? Is it robust? Well, you pretty much always have to go through a _minimal_ fsck even with a journaled filesystem, but it's so quick you will barely see it. The extent of journaling (metadata-only or metadata + data) can generally be set via mount options -- with the exception that Reiser4 apparently cannot be set for metadata-only. Of the filesystems commonly in use on Linux, ext2 Very much like FFS with the "-o async" mount option (which explains why it's prone to occasional lossage in crashes). I still tend to use it for performance reasons on /tmp & similar, and on filesystems normally mounted read-only (e.g., /usr). ext3 Modified ext2 with integrated journaling ("logging" in Solaris lingo). Good performance generally, fast I/O speed for reads. ext3 has by far the most mature, conservative[1], effective fsck and mkfs utilities (maintained by Ted T'so), and general operation. It is designed to be forgiving of the failure modes of commodity x86 hardware, which can be dangerous to data.[2] Reports say that ext3 with data=journal[3] is great for mail spools, and directory indexing supposedly improves access for directories with many small files significantly. data=journal provides highest throughput for MAIL SPOOLS because the small files are written, sent, then removed. When this is all done in the journal things supposedly go much faster. Otherwise, data=writeback, which is the default, provides best overall performance AFAIK. ReiserFS ReiserFS has gone through (at last count) four distinct, on-disk formats, with at best rocky compatibility from one to the next. The "fsck" (filesystem check) utilities for ReiserFS has earned a reputation for often repairing filesystems by massive deletion of files. This appears to happen primarily because of loss of metadata, as opposed to damage to datafiles. Many observers have been leery of the design, for those two reasons. Some would object that the characteristics of versions before ReiserFS4 are no longer relevant: Others hold the inconsistent, changing design, and severe reliability problems of the prior code against it. ReiserFS enjoys fast file creation/deletion. It's best used for filesystems housing large numbers of small, changeable files, e.g., a machine running a Usenet news server. Reiser is space-efficient and does not pre-allocate inodes: They are done on the fly. ReiserFS defaults to writing metadata before data. ext3-like behaviour can be forced, instead, by using a "data=ordered" mount parameter. XFS SGI's XFS is generally the fastest of the journaled filesystems, having exceptionally good performance for filesystems housing (individually) very large files (gigabytes each) on very large partitions, e.g., for video production: XFS was designed (on SGI IRIX) to be a full 64-bit filesystem from the beginning, and thus natively supports files as large as 2^63 = 9 x 10^18 = 9 exabytes (about a million terabytes) as implemented on 2.6 kernels, or 64 terabytes as implemented on 2.4. XFS is much faster than the other filesystems at deleting large files an order of magnitude faster than ext3 and two orders of magnitude faster than ReiserFS. When last I used it, XFS performance on small and medium-sized files tended to be relatively a little slower than ReiserFS and a bit faster than ext3, but it's possible that this may have changed. XFS defaults to writing metadata before data, and this behaviour cannot be overridden. The biggest problem with XFS is that the very extensive changes SGI had to make to the Linux kernel's VFS layer, to incorporate it, seem troubling. Older versions had some problems with files getting populated with binary nulls when written to immediately before a crash because of the way XFS handled its cache and preallocation of space. This has been fixed, though, and things are very stable now. Delete speeds are also much faster than before, when they used to be noticeably slow because they were done syncronously. JFS Like most people I have no experience with IBM's JFS for Linux (which IBM ported from OS/2, rather than from AIX). However, a friend who's used it extensively on Linux sends the following report: JFS is generally reliable, but lost/damaged files show up in lost+found more often than they do with XFS. On the other hand, such files are more likely to be intact: XFS tends to pad them with null sections, which you most remove. JFS has a somewhat higher CPU cost than does XFS. Other considerations Both ReiserFS and XFS impose significant additional CPU load, relative to ext3 (except that XFS has very low CPU load, relatively speaking, when handling very large files. By the way, if you're not wedded to the idea of Fedora Core, please consider one of the better RHEL rebuilds such as CentOS 4.1: http://www.centos.org/ (Why? Because Fedora Core tends to be scarily beta. I would very much avoid its use on any production system.) [1] http://kerneltrap.org/node/10 [2] http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Filesystems/reiserfs.html [3] Options are: data=writeback: Metadata-only, and best performance. Could allow recently modified files to become corrupted in the event of an unexpected reboot. data=ordered: Officially journals only metadata, but it logically groups metadata and data blocks into a single unit called a transaction. When it's time to write the new metadata out to disk, the associated data blocks are written first. data=ordered effectively solves data=writeback's corruption risk (shared by other journeled FSes generally), without resorting to full journaling. data=ordered tends to be perform slightly slower than data=writeback, but significantly faster than full journaling. When appending data to files, data=ordered provides all of full data journaling's integrity protection. However, if part of a file is being overwritten when the system crashes, it's possible the region being written will receive a combination of original blocks interspersed with updated blocks. This is because data=ordered provides no guarantees as to which blocks are overwritten first, so you can't assume that just because overwritten block x was updated, that overwritten block x-1 was updated as well. Data=ordered leaves the write ordering up to the hard drive's write cache. In general, this doesn't bite people often; file appends are much more common than overwrites. So, data=ordered is a good higher-performance replacement for full journaling. data=journal: Full data and metadata journaling: All new data are written to the journal first. Oddly, in certain situations, data=journal can be blazingly fast, where data needs to be read from and written to disk at the same time (interactive I/O). -- Cheers, Never criticize anybody until you have walked a mile Rick Moen in their shoes, because by that time you will be a rick at linuxmafia.com mile away and have their shoes. -- Brian Servis From dannyman at toldme.com Wed Sep 21 13:19:59 2005 From: dannyman at toldme.com (Danny Howard) Date: Wed, 21 Sep 2005 13:19:59 -0700 Subject: FibreChannel Stuff In-Reply-To: <24BD2D5F3CEF4F4780606124741B48169939@hq-ex-7.brocade.com> References: <24BD2D5F3CEF4F4780606124741B48169939@hq-ex-7.brocade.com> Message-ID: <20050921201959.GL65449@ratchet.nebcorp.com> On Wed, Sep 21, 2005 at 12:14:59PM -0700, Jim Kavitsky wrote: > Are you planning to use this system "direct attached" via a fiber > channel arbitrated loop (FCAL) or through a switched fabric SAN? Direct attached, if I can get away with it. For a newbie like me, introducing a SAN network ... that gets complicated, and complicated things are easier to break and harder to fix. I'm comfortable with the KISS principle where if my controller or host fails, I call the datacenter and asking them to move the connector, if need be. 20-40 minutes downtime ... versus an extra ten thousand dollars and mastery of new technology on my end. RAID appliances ... it sounds like the low-end is pretty much FC to SATA-backed storage. It sounds like a SATA drive can only attach to one RAID controller, so I can't have a system where redundant controllers fail over for each other if one controller fails, though I do some OS-level "clustering" (say, mirror across RAID controllers) which starts to violate my KISS principles. At the next level up, there seems to be this mythical Adaptec SANbloc which had two FC loops so the drives apparently attached to both Mylex controllers, but every time I ask the Adaptec vendor about this they come back at me with FS4500, their SATA-backed solution. The SANbloc manual says it supports only two HBAs, one of which is no longer available, and the other using PCI. And then there's NetApp ... As far as database replication, the dev team has a long-term project to get a multi-master replication setup. What about database scalability? Our database has grown over time and is crufty, the devs have developed tools to cut out the cruft, and we are moving toward a model where we can support smaller databases that are dedicated to particulart clients or client clusters. My scalability issue, if the devs work right, is that I get to shrink smaller, lighter databases. :) So, I need a high-performance solution that can offer if not high availability, at least a very clean failover process. FreeBSD is hardly required for the database, so unless we can find an HBA and disk appliance combo that we find to work great under load, we are happy to go with FreeBSD. I have received one response from this list that UFS3+journalling is robust with short time-to-recovery (no fsck required) in the face of a server crash. Thanks for all your responses so far. I'll probably have to write an article or two once I get through all this. :) Cheers, -danny -- http://dannyman.toldme.com/ From pmm at igtc.com Wed Sep 21 13:47:08 2005 From: pmm at igtc.com (Paul M. Moriarty) Date: Wed, 21 Sep 2005 13:47:08 -0700 Subject: Filesystems: Linux versus FreeBSD In-Reply-To: <20050921193922.GE4774@linuxmafia.com> References: <20050921174859.GG65449@ratchet.nebcorp.com> <20050921193922.GE4774@linuxmafia.com> Message-ID: <20050921204708.GG27077@igtc.igtc.com> Rick Moen writes: > [...] > > By the way, if you're not wedded to the idea of Fedora Core, please > consider one of the better RHEL rebuilds such as CentOS 4.1: > http://www.centos.org/ (Why? Because Fedora Core tends to be scarily > beta. I would very much avoid its use on any production system.) > I'll throw in a recommendation for CentOS as well. I find Fedora a little too quirky and high maintenance for my needs. - Paul - From npc at gangofone.com Wed Sep 21 14:14:39 2005 From: npc at gangofone.com (Nick Christenson) Date: Wed, 21 Sep 2005 14:14:39 -0700 (PDT) Subject: Filesystems: Linux versus FreeBSD In-Reply-To: <20050921174859.GG65449@ratchet.nebcorp.com> Message-ID: <200509212114.j8LLEdDu085792@prometheus.gangofone.com> > does Linux these days have an FS option that can offer similar > advantages to SoftUpdates, Not exactly, but most of them support journaling which provides very similar benefits. > such that I needn't fsck after a server > crash? Is it robust? Generally, I'm not happy about Linux FS stability, but they're more stable than they used to be. XFS and JFS are probably stable enough to meet your needs for this application. The risks of using these filesystems are probably lower than the risks you face from losing db transactions using your backup model. -- Nick Christenson npc at gangofone.com From bill at wards.net Wed Sep 21 14:48:13 2005 From: bill at wards.net (William R Ward) Date: Wed, 21 Sep 2005 14:48:13 -0700 Subject: Peninsula Linux Users' Group Meeting, Thursday, September 22nd, 2005 Message-ID: <17201.54557.944387.29710@komodo.home.wards.net> Peninsula Linux Users' Group, Thursday, September 22nd, 2005 We have a meeting of the Peninsula Linux Users' Group (PenLUG) this week (tomorrow night)! Here are the details about the next meeting. For more information or directions go to www.penlug.org Date: Thursday, September 22nd, 2005 Time: 7:00 - 9:00 PM Location: 100 Oracle Parkway, Redwood Shores, CA 94065 Room 104 Note: Building entrance is locked after 7pm, so please be on time. Someone can let you in if you're late, though. Agenda: ======= 7:00 - 8:30 PM: Presentation by Calvin Austin, SpikeSource 8:30 - 9:00 PM: Members' Minutes 8:45 - 9:00 PM: Adjourn to IHOP (Belmont) for social & food time Presentation by Calvin Austin, SpikeSource ====================================================================== SpikeSource provides tools, software, and services that facilitate the adoption of open source software. Calvin will talk about SpikeSource's offerings, the technology they employ to test and deliver OSS application stacks, and how they are working with the open source community. Members' Minutes ================ Members will have an opportunity to take a few minutes to... * Describe their latest Linux discovery * Ask questions and get help from other members * Discuss Linux projects You can just stand up and talk, or give a short demo or presentation. If you need audio/visual support for your Members' Minute, please contact me in advance to arrange for your needs. We have a limited number of books courtesy of Prentice-Hall, O'Reilly, and/or Apress to give away as an added inducement to participate in this portion of the meeting. :-) The publishers ask only that you write a review of the book and post it on the Internet. RSVP ==== Although it is NOT required, we like to have an idea of how many people to expect, so if possible please email rsvp at penlug.org if you are planning to attend. Bill Ward President, PenLUG From jbrainard at mirapoint.com Thu Sep 22 15:46:31 2005 From: jbrainard at mirapoint.com (Jeff Brainard) Date: Thu, 22 Sep 2005 15:46:31 -0700 Subject: [Fwd: Upcoming Educational Seminar on 9/30] Message-ID: <43333447.6070700@mirapoint.com> Fyi... wanted to share this with the BayLisa members, since I believe you might find valuable... My company is holding an educational seminar next Friday 9/30 in San Jose at Hotel Valencia. Topics will include email security, policies, compliance and encryption. We'll have experts from legal firm Thelen Reid & Priest present, as well as PGP and Mirapoint topic experts. This exclusive, morning seminar event will include free breakfast and giveaways for all attendees, and most importantly loads of good information. Please feel free to register below or share this invite with your friends in industry who might find valuable. Thxs. -JB -------- Original Message -------- ARE YOU AT RISK? LEGAL EXPERT EXPLAINS EMAIL REGULATIONS & SOLUTIONS FOR COMPLIANCE Friday, September 30 9:00 am - 12:00 pm Hotel Valencia, Santana Row, San Jose Register at http://www.mirapoint.com/complianceseminar/ RESERVE YOUR SPOT at the compliance event you can't afford to miss. To avoid criminal and civil penalties, bad publicity, and lost business, it is in the best interest of your organization to understand email regulations. It is also important to assess the risk exposure of your messaging infrastructure, and to develop policies and plans to address regulatory compliance. A legal representative who specializes in email compliance will assess the risks your organization is exposed to and survey the most important regulations regarding email. We will then summarize email features and usage requirements across these regulations, and introduce the email compliance solutions available from PGP - the leader in email encryption and digital signature solutions, and Mirapoint - the leading secure messaging vendor. Legal Expert - Robert E Camors Jr., Thelen Reid & Priest LLP Attorney with expertise in IT Encryption Expert - Doug McLean, PGP Corporation VP Online Operations & Commerce Messaging Expert - Bethany Mayer, Mirapoint Chief Marketing Officer Register at http://www.mirapoint.com/complianceseminar/ -- Jeff Brainard Mirapoint Inc. Phone: +1 408-720-3861 Mobile: +1 408-329-2342 (Alt Mobile: +1 650-533-8986) Fax: +1 408-720-3725 Jbrainard at mirapoint.com -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From sigje at sigje.org Thu Sep 22 16:07:32 2005 From: sigje at sigje.org (Jennifer Davis) Date: Thu, 22 Sep 2005 16:07:32 -0700 (PDT) Subject: SVOSUG - Sept 27 meeting - Menlo Park 17 7:30pm-10:00pm Message-ID: I'm just forwarding this on from Alan DuBoff. Please contact him directly if you have questions. This month's Silicon Valley Open Solaris User Group will be held at the Sun Menlo Park campus. All non-Sun employees should send an RSVP to be registered in the system so they can badge in at the MPK17 lobby. Those of you who showed up at the July meeting will remember that this was more difficult that it could have been had more people RSVP'd ahead of time. However, fear not, we will get you badged and allow you access to the meeting, at whatever length we need to go. This month's meeting will features some topics that rate fairly high on the coolness scale, or at least I hope so. We will kick the meeting off with Bart Smaalders and Phil Harman giving a short presentation on libmicro, a library which Bart originally developed to look at performance on Solaris. Both Bart and Phil will explain how they use libmicro to improve the performance, and since libmicro is released as a part of Open Solaris, all folks can get access and use it. The main presentation of the evening will on Power Management and the Solaris ACPI subsystem. The speakers for the main presentation will be Dana Meyers and Randy Fishel. Dana has worked on both the new boot architecture team, and now works on the Power Management team. He has done some work at Sun and I consider Dana to be another one of Sun's exceptional engineers. He focuses on ACPI issues for the Power Management team. Randy will be showing an AMD64 laptop performing suspend and resume, a major task for Solaris x86 which few folks would have ever thought possible. As always we will be taking questions and providing the best possible answer to them which we can. All of you folks who have come to our user group meetings have seen the level of engineers that we have support our community, and this meeting will be no exception. Open Solaris Community Members (non-Sun employees): As noted above, this meeting will be held at the Sun Menlo Park campus, in building 17. The Sun Menlo Park campus is located at the west end of the Dunbarton Bridge. To get there, take the Willow Rd. exit to the Dumbarton Bridge, heading east from the freeway. Willow Rd. run directly into the Sun Campus. As you enter the Sun Campus, bear to the right, and follow the road around to building 17. Please try to get there early so you can badge in, and please RSVP to Alan.DuBoff (AT) Sun.Com with your first and last name, as well as your email address. I will enter you in the system so you can badge in at he Kiosk in the lobby of MPK17. Sun employees will not need to RSVP but will need to badge in if you do not have a Sun badge. Where: Sun Campus - MPK17 Van Ness conference room When: Tues., Sept. 27th, 2005 Time: 7:30pm - 10:00pm (arrive early to badge in, 7:00pm if possible) Extra: Please RSVP if you are not a Sun employee (Alan.DuBoff (AT) Sun.Com) Hope to see you there! -- Alan DuBoff - Sun Microsystems Solaris x86 Engineering From vraptor at employees.org Mon Sep 26 14:52:01 2005 From: vraptor at employees.org (vraptor at employees.org) Date: Mon, 26 Sep 2005 14:52:01 -0700 (PDT) Subject: Exchange replacements In-Reply-To: <20050920150128.O1291@skink.reptiles.org> References: <20050920004424.GA13126@SDF.LONESTAR.ORG> <432F603C.7070407@halligan.org> <98A04F35F49C7D4DC839EB1C@[10.9.18.3]> <20050920150128.O1291@skink.reptiles.org> Message-ID: <20050926145044.S56569@willers.employees.org> On Tue, 20 Sep 2005, Cat Okita wrote: > On Mon, 19 Sep 2005, Jim Hickstein wrote: >> Whatever became of Ximian Evolution? > > It's passed over to Novell, and still exists, and actually does a pretty > decent job, all things considered. > > I'll cheerfully admit that my implementation is a bit broken (personal > problem, not the software), but it does mail/calendaring against exchange > quite nicely. > > I don't know if it's got a standalone server setup though. I also believe it may be picky about the version of Exchange it talks to, though, as I could not get it to communicate with our Exchange 2K servers here at $work. From my googling, it seems to work much better with Exchange 2003. =Nadine= From sigje at sigje.org Tue Sep 27 16:30:49 2005 From: sigje at sigje.org (Jennifer Davis) Date: Tue, 27 Sep 2005 16:30:49 -0700 (PDT) Subject: Super User Group meeting - November 12, 2005 Message-ID: More details forthcoming, but it should be a great event. Event: BaySUG 2005 Location: Computer History Museum Time: 1-5pm Date: November 12, 2005 Website: http://www.usenix.org/events/baysug05/ Cost: FREE! This is a USENIX, BayLISA co-coordinated event. If you are a Group leader, and interested in getting your group involved as well, do let me know. Jennifer From sigje at sigje.org Thu Sep 29 11:35:47 2005 From: sigje at sigje.org (Jennifer Davis) Date: Thu, 29 Sep 2005 11:35:47 -0700 (PDT) Subject: Oct 20, 2005: BayLISA: Incident Command for IT In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Date: Thursday, October 20, 2005 Where: Apple Campus, Building 4, upstairs meeting room (Garage 1) (Yes, we are back to our usual room, with power, and network galore!) Free and Open to the General Public! Please RSVP to rsvp at baylisa.org so we have an idea of how many sodas/snacks to provide. 7:30 pm Introductions and announcements 7:45 pm Formal Presentation 9:45 After-meeting dinner/social outings at a local restaurant D. Brent Chapman will be presenting "Incident Command for IT: What we can Learn from the Fire Department". This is one of the USENIX LISA 2005 invited talks http://www.usenix.org/events/lisa05/tech/. If you have ever been curious about what kind of value you get from the LISA conference, come check out Brent's talk. LISA packs in 5 days of training and 4 days of technical sessions (they overlap on days for a total of 6 days of technical immersion), and is the conference for System Administrators. It's being held in San Diego, California this year, so much easier for travelling. Many thanks to USENIX for sharing Brent's technical talk at BayLISA. ______________________________________________ baylisa mailing list: baylisa at baylisa.org rsvp for meeting: rsvp at baylisa.org baylisa board (request to sponsor or present): blw at baylisa.org From greg.edwards at lmco.com Thu Sep 29 12:26:25 2005 From: greg.edwards at lmco.com (Edwards, Greg) Date: Thu, 29 Sep 2005 12:26:25 -0700 Subject: rsvp 1 --- FW: Oct 20, 2005: BayLISA: Incident Command for IT Message-ID: <982A2933712F3740921D842654ED470D10AE7BF0@emss01m12.us.lmco.com> RSVP one please > -----Original Message----- > From: owner-baylisa at baylisa.org [mailto:owner-baylisa at baylisa.org] On > Behalf Of Jennifer Davis > Sent: Thursday, September 29, 2005 11:36 AM > To: balug-announce at balug.org; announce at bafug.org; baylisa at baylisa.org; > blw at baylisa.org; sfbay-announce at zorch.SF-Bay.ORG; > SVEvents at yahoogroups.com; smaug at lists.svlug.org; conspire at linuxmafia.com > Subject: Oct 20, 2005: BayLISA: Incident Command for IT > > > Date: Thursday, October 20, 2005 > Where: Apple Campus, Building 4, upstairs meeting room (Garage 1) > (Yes, we are back to our usual room, with power, and network galore!) > Free and Open to the General Public! > Please RSVP to rsvp at baylisa.org so we have an idea of how many > sodas/snacks to provide. > > 7:30 pm Introductions and announcements > 7:45 pm Formal Presentation > 9:45 After-meeting dinner/social outings at a local restaurant > > D. Brent Chapman will be presenting "Incident Command for IT: What we can > Learn from the Fire Department". > > This is one of the USENIX LISA 2005 invited talks > http://www.usenix.org/events/lisa05/tech/. > If you have ever been curious about what kind of value you get from the > LISA conference, come check out Brent's talk. LISA packs in 5 days of > training and 4 days of technical sessions (they overlap on days for a > total of 6 days of technical immersion), and is the conference for > System Administrators. It's being held in San Diego, California this > year, so much easier for travelling. > > Many thanks to USENIX for sharing Brent's technical talk at BayLISA. > ______________________________________________ > baylisa mailing list: baylisa at baylisa.org > rsvp for meeting: rsvp at baylisa.org > baylisa board (request to sponsor or present): > blw at baylisa.org From Brent at greatcircle.com Thu Sep 29 21:42:03 2005 From: Brent at greatcircle.com (Brent Chapman) Date: Thu, 29 Sep 2005 23:42:03 -0500 Subject: Oct 20, 2005: BayLISA: Incident Command for IT In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: I'm really looking forward to giving this talk. At the moment, I'm in Mississippi, working on hurricane recovery efforts as a volunteer (along with Jeff Allen, who many of you know) with Radio Response (http://www.radioresponse.org/), and seeing first hand how ICS works on an extremely large scale (involving thousands of responders). So, I should have some interesting stories to share in the talk, when I get back... By the way, Radio Response could definitely use more volunteers who can come out for a week or two at a time. Essentially, we're setting up WiFi connectivity to provide free Internet access and phone service (via VoIP) to the numerous other volunteer and charitable organizations here, such as shelters and relief kitchens, for use by both their staffs and their clients (the local residents who've been devastated by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita). Take a look at the Radio Response web site (http://www.radioresponse.org/); if that seems like something you might be able to help out with, either on-site or remotely, then please fill out the volunteer form there. There's also information about donations on the web site. Money is always good, but we could also use certain types of working WiFi, networking, PC, and VoIP gear; details and/or contact info are on the web site. -Brent At 11:35 AM -0700 9/29/05, Jennifer Davis wrote: >Date: Thursday, October 20, 2005 >Where: Apple Campus, Building 4, upstairs meeting room (Garage 1) >(Yes, we are back to our usual room, with power, and network galore!) >Free and Open to the General Public! >Please RSVP to rsvp at baylisa.org so we have an idea of how many >sodas/snacks to provide. > >7:30 pm Introductions and announcements >7:45 pm Formal Presentation >9:45 After-meeting dinner/social outings at a local restaurant > >D. Brent Chapman will be presenting "Incident Command for IT: What >we can Learn from the Fire Department". > >This is one of the USENIX LISA 2005 invited talks >http://www.usenix.org/events/lisa05/tech/. >If you have ever been curious about what kind of value you get from >the LISA conference, come check out Brent's talk. LISA packs in 5 >days of training and 4 days of technical sessions (they overlap on >days for a total of 6 days of technical immersion), and is the >conference for System Administrators. It's being held in San Diego, >California this year, so much easier for travelling. > >Many thanks to USENIX for sharing Brent's technical talk at BayLISA. >______________________________________________ >baylisa mailing list: baylisa at baylisa.org >rsvp for meeting: rsvp at baylisa.org >baylisa board (request to sponsor or present): > blw at baylisa.org -- Brent Chapman -- Great Circle Associates, Inc. Specializing in network infrastructure for Silicon Valley since 1989 For info about us and our services, please see http://www.greatcircle.com/ Network Automation blog: http://www.greatcircle.com/blog/network_automation