On Wed, Sep 23, 2009 at 2:50 PM, Michael Walker (VA3MW) <va...@portcredit.net> wrote: > Hi Brian > > I have a couple of concerns with this logic. The largest concern is that > Windows should never be used to run anything in production or anything to do > real time processing. It is just not designed that way from the ground up.
No argument. But that doesn't matter. The basic fact is that PowerSDR runs on Windows so you have to run Windows. Period, end-of-report. > That being said, we, as a group, need to come up with a list of required > services. Those that need to be run when you are a single box, not > connected to the internet and known to work. If there is such a list that > is bullet proof and works, I would love to see it. Several people (including me) have posted lists of disabled services to "strip down" Windows XP to its minimum function. Start with one of the sites on the web that discuss windows services and which ones you can turn off. If you don't need it, turn it off. (It is absolutely amazing what is in there and running that you don't need.) > Another list of services would be those that would be for a box that is > internet connected, but behind a firewall (not run on the box) and that > firewall would also do stateful packet inspection (like Astaro > www.astaro.com). As a home user, you can get that for free. I prefer m0n0wall myself. It is a stateful firewall, an IPSEC tunnel termination box, a traffic shaper, a filtering bridge, DHCP server/forwarder, DNS server/forwarder, etc. It supports 802.1q VLAN tagging and will let you treat a given VLAN tag as an interface. It runs on any PC hardware and supports multiple interfaces. It is also free. It comes as a standalone bootable image so you don't even need to bother loading an OS on the target hardware. It will boot from CD, HD, or CF. > You can very safely run without AV as long as you don't connect/browse. If > you do, only to those few web sites you trust. Many Trojans are installed > as scripts that come with the web page, and only packet inspection will > reliably find them. Yup. > Once we get a solution that is linux based (a real time OS), then I think > you will see the ability to run much better on less hardware. Well, Linux is not a panacea either but it is certainly better than Windows. I would bet that the Mach kernel in Darwin is probably better but I think it will be a long, cold, lonely day in hell before someone chooses to use that as their preferred target OS for these kinds of things. > Lastly, we are headed to the point where the only way this will run reliably > is if you buy the box and rf deck from the vender and you are not allowed to > modify it at all (sort of like every other HF rig). :) Well, not quite. One of the nice things about these radios is that, should the software demands increase, we can swap out the processing unit for one that has more processing power. I don't know of any other radio you can do that with. Still, it make a lot of sense to dedicate a processing unit to the radio. FWIW, so far I have successfully made every system I have tried work reliably with PowerSDR. That includes six or seven Mac hardware machines (Mac Mini, MacBook Pro, iMac), a custom AMD-based server box I built to run the 64-bit version of Solaris x86, and several little A-Open media-player machines (similar to Mac Mini) that have built-in Firewire. (I have one of these left if anyone wants it. It looks great sitting on top of the Flex 5000 and even has a matching blue-light-of-death power indicator.) But every one of the working systems was tweaked to run PowerSDR and do nothing else. -- 73 de Brian, WB6RQN/J79BPL _______________________________________________ FlexRadio Systems Mailing List FlexRadio@flex-radio.biz http://mail.flex-radio.biz/mailman/listinfo/flexradio_flex-radio.biz Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/flexradio%40flex-radio.biz/ Knowledge Base: http://kc.flex-radio.com/ Homepage: http://www.flex-radio.com/ Message delivered to arch...@mail-archive.com
