from:"Bill Horne"

Top 50 programmer quotes of all time

2010-12-15 Thread Bill Horne

http://www.junauza.com/2010/12/top-50-programming-quotes-of-all-time.html 

My personal favorite is #29. 

Bill
 
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No matter how fast I run, I can never seem to get away from me".
 - Jackson Browne




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Re: Since we are in stupid question mode.

2010-12-16 Thread Bill Horne

On Thu, 2010-12-16 at 16:06 -0500, Jerry Feldman wrote:
> I have a couple of web sites that I need to manage (because I can't talk
> anyone else into it). One web site is relatively small, and was created
> by FrontPage. What I would like to do is to use Kompozer to help me work
> with the site. There are a few pages on the site that need some
> maintenance now and then. The problem with using emacs or vi is that
> there are a lot of non-breaking spaces that were generated by FrontPage.

That should be an easy fix: just seach-and-replace all 
non-breaking space characters with "& nbsp ;" (remove two spaces).

HTH.

Bill

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[Position-available] Need Linux Team Lead for 2 month + contract in Massachusetts

2010-12-31 Thread Bill Horne

 Original Message 
Subject: 	[Position-available] Need Linux Team Lead for 2 month + 
contract in Massachusetts

Date:   Thu, 30 Dec 2010 11:43:45 -0600
From:   Patricia Price 
To: position-availa...@blu.org 

Hi All,

Symphony Services has a critical need for a Senior Lead Consultant with 
extensive Linux System-side programming experience as well as with knowledge of 
large web search/scan activities and load balancing across multiple application 
engines/servers.

Job Description:

This position requires in-depth knowledge of Linux operating systems, TCP/IP 
stack, networking concepts and network/server load balancing.
This person will lead a team with the specific goal of providing key technical 
research, architecture, design, implementation of a front end service providing 
load balancing, dispatching and request management.

Required Skills:

* Hands on experience architecting and developing commercial grade 
software systems pertaining to linux operating system, networking, storage and 
clustering.

*  Strong Linux system-side programming experience (8+ years in depth 
real world experience)

* Good understanding of TCP/IP stack, networking, network devices and 
concepts, network and server load balancing.

* Strong experience in low level system programming,  job and 
management, service scalability, clustering, caching and memory management, 
schedulers

*  Knowledge and understanding of parallel compute jobs and ability to 
troubleshoot and solve problems.

*  Experience in basics of items such as: compiling and linking, 
makefiles, build management.

* Strong C/C++ experience with familiarity of J2EE.

* Shell scripting experience will be useful. (bash, csh, ksh, etc.)

* Strong communication , coordination and inter-personnel  skills
Desired Experience:

* 10+ years in system-side UNIX, linux programming.

* Source code management experience.

*  Experience in developing automated kickstart/builds of Linux systems.

*  Virtualization Experience and exploiting virtual systems and 
possibilities

Patty Price | Senior Resource Manager
T  +1.978.256.1113 x7634 | M  +1.978.505.5288
ppr...@symphonysv.com

Engineering Outcome Certainty
Symphony Services
1 Technology Park Drive, Westford, MA 01886
www.symphonysv.com

Think GREEN. Please consider the environment before printing this email

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Re: keyboard trends

2011-01-18 Thread Bill Horne

On Tue, 2011-01-18 at 15:35 -0500, Tom Metro wrote:
> While looking at laptops and stand-alone keyboards recently, I see there
> are several trends happening. I'd be curious to know what people think
> of these "features."
> 
> Number pads seem to be showing up on more laptops, even those with 15"
> screens. I guess this is in part due to the wide aspect ratio screens.
> Have we all turned into accountants? Do you use your number pad?

It's a waste of effort for me: I'm so used to using the top row number
keys that a number pad is superfluous.

> F-keys on laptops have had a second function to control the hardware,
> such as changing the display brightness, when used with an Fn modifier
> key. Newer HP laptops reverse the logic of the Fn modifier key, such
> that you have to press the modifier to get the traditional F1-F12
> function. I rarely use either mode of these keys, so this wouldn't
> bother me, except I see they also put Insert into the F-key row, and I
> use that all the time. I tried making use of the Insert key on several
> demo laptops (of course running Windows) as part of the Shift-Insert
> shortcut for paste, but couldn't get it to work with or without the Fn
> modifier. (Have they removed that shortcut from Windows?)

Cntl-X|C|V is universal AFAIK, so I don't care where the insert key is
when I copy/cut and paste. I only use it occasionally to switch to
"overwrite" mode when editing text. As for having the other F# keys
accessible only via a "Fn" key, that would depend on the applications I
was using. If I were a WordPerfect user, I'd insist on having the
traditional function. Those who prefer mice might not care.

> Half height up/down keys. No doubt in an effort to save space and cost,
> several manufacturers are making keyboards with the up/down keys
> occupying the space of a single key. While Up/Down make be less used
> than right/left, this seems like it could be a disadvantage.

I'd be uncomfortable with that: I still use a number of "old world"
programs that require the arrow keys for navigation.

> By far the most visible trend in keyboards right now is "chiclet" keys
> or more formally island-style keyboard. 

I suppose it depends on what each user prefers: "Chiclet" keys are
probably the result of pressure-pad switch matrices instead of
individual switches under each key. I could get used to one so long as I
wasn't switching from "chiclet" to traditional all the time.

Bill

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Re: Das Keyboard Model S Ultimate

2011-01-19 Thread Bill Horne

On Wed, 2011-01-19 at 15:30 -0500, Ben Eisenbraun wrote:
> For home I think I'll buy the one with key inscriptions, 
> since it'll be tough for the 3 year old to use otherwise.

I recommend Dvorak for all children learning to type. 

I'm going to form an organization called Q.W.E.R.T.Y. - Quietly, We End
Restrictive Typing Years. (I'll have to work on the acronym)

Bill Horne

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Re: Das Keyboard Model S Ultimate

2011-01-19 Thread Bill Horne

On Wed, 2011-01-19 at 22:14 -0500, Ben Eisenbraun wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 19, 2011 at 09:21:52PM -0500, Bill Horne wrote:
> > On Wed, 2011-01-19 at 15:30 -0500, Ben Eisenbraun wrote:
> > > For home I think I'll buy the one with key inscriptions, 
> > > since it'll be tough for the 3 year old to use otherwise.
> > 
> > I recommend Dvorak for all children learning to type. 
> 
> Oh no.  He's definitely going to be a vi user.  :-)
> 
> I thought they decided the Dvorak advantage was a myth?

I hadn't heard that: please cite the study that proved it.

ISTM that the advantage of Dvorak is so fundamental that it can't be
overcome; the most-often used keys are closer to the home row. It's not
something that seems debatable to me: shorter distance means less finger
travel, ergo more speed. 

Then again, I've been wrong before, so I'd like to look at the data.

Bill

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Re: Das Keyboard Model S Ultimate

2011-01-20 Thread Bill Horne

On Thu, 2011-01-20 at 19:32 +, j...@trillian.mit.edu wrote:

> (Actually, that's an easy question to answer: When people  are  dying
> of cancer, heart disease, malaria and AIDS by the millions, why would
> we spend our limited human and financial resources studying something
> so  inconsequential  as  a  keyboard  layout?  So only people with an
> interest in the Dvorak layout have a motive to study the topic.  ;-)

Well, it may be inconsequential to researchers responsible for providing
solutions to those (admittedly serious) problems, but that's not the
day-to-day stuff of business, where managers must concern themselves
with increasing their firms' profitability to the point where those
companies can afford to contribute to research for cures of disease. The
tools available to businessmen, unlike those in research laboratories,
are the prosaic ones of Operations Research, so let's do a little
back-of-the-envelope analysis:

An "average" typing speed is 30 Words per minute, or 7200 words per day
in an eight-hour-shift, assuming a 50% mix of typing and other tasks.

For an environment where the "loaded" cost of each employee is $100.00,
an eight hour shift costs $800. That equates to a cost-per-word of
$0.056. If the Dvorak layout increased typing speed by 10%, then the
cost per word goes down to $0.05. This is, of course, a simplistic
comparison, but my point is that when a company is paying $100/hour,
small changes add up. 

The question, then, is whether Dvorak is more efficient to a degree that
would justify altering our childrens' keyboards so that they grow up
with it, and having computers instead of mechanical typewriters gives us
the chance to find out.  It doesn't take that many people, and there may
already be a sufficienctly large sample of Dvorak users available to
settle the question: if not, we can train some children on Dvorak
without affecting their job prospects or employability in any
significant way.

FWIW. YMMV.

Bill

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Fwd: [Position-available] Linux ACE wanted

2011-01-29 Thread Bill Horne

 Original Message 
Subject:[Position-available] Linux ACE wanted
Date:   Sat, 29 Jan 2011 14:52:05 -0500
From:   Robert Pelmas 
To: position-availa...@blu.org

Hey,

We're looking for a really smart, fast learning *nix person:

The premiere integrator for the graphic arts industry has an immediate opening 
for a Tier 2 technical support person. This position requires excellent 
troubleshooting skills, great communications and customer management ability, 
and the ability to wrestle a solution out of any and all sources!

Responsibilities include:
o Telephone Support
o Case Management: prosecuting calls, maintaining contact and momentum on 
issues with both vendors and customers.
o Escalating calls as needed to Tier3 support personnel, and vendors.
o Continuously expand technical knowledge through in house training, formal 
training, daily experience

Requirements:
o 3 or more years of Linux experience (RHEL a strong plus)
o Work history of providing phone or end user support
o Great phone presence
o Reliable and steady under pressure

Strong Plus:
o Sun and/or OSX knowledge
o Familiarity with devices like Raids, Tape Libraries, Networking HW.
o We're integrators, so we deal with EVERYTHING. The more you know, the better 
a fit you'll be!
o Graphics arts background a very strong plus

Basically, since we're system integrators, we have to learn and deal with 
everything under the sun, from networking, to printing, to performance, to 
backups, to HW, to patching, to security, you get the idea. You'll learn more 
here than you could ever imagine or hope to, and you'll never have the same day 
twice. We're also very sarcastic, mean-spirited in a 
deep-belly-laugh-sort-of-way.

rp

---
Robert H. Pelmas
CTO
NAPC

rpel...@napc.com
www.napc.com
blog.napc.com

tel 781.894.3114
fax 781.894.3997

NAPC | technology matters

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Re: list netiquette

2011-02-25 Thread Bill Horne

On 02/25/2011 09:41 AM, Jerry Feldman wrote:
> [snip]
> One issue is that by replying both to the sender and the list, the
> thread gets broken. Depending on the speed of the list server, when
> someone replies to the sender and the list, the direct message generally
> gets to the sender before the message sent by the list gets there. If
> you reply to the one sent to you by the poster, then that breaks the
> thread. These are relatively minor issues. I only see one message, not
> both.
>
I don't understand why: when I "Reply All", the replies should have the 
same headers. How does that break threading?

Bill

-- 


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  No matter how fast I run, I can never seem to get away from me"
   - Jackson Browne

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Re: Help Desk Software

2011-02-25 Thread Bill Horne


On 2/25/2011 9:15 PM, Dan Ritter wrote:

On Fri, Feb 25, 2011 at 07:52:39PM -0500, Richard Pieri wrote:

On Feb 25, 2011, at 7:14 PM, Chris O'Connell wrote:

Can anyone recommend some open source help desk software?

All ticketing software sucks.  RT sucks less.

This, with the major caution: the success of help desk software
depends on people actually using it. Motivation is key.




The success of help-desk software depends on making people /want/ to use 
it! I've seen multiple companies buy expensive "does everything" 
packages, and then they all wind up wondering why all their customer 
service problems weren't solved as soon as they wrote the check.


Too often, customer support software is crippled by fuzzy thought and 
lazy managers who won't go to the effort - or spend the political 
capital - needed to get their front-line support people a well-defined 
/and enforceable /escalation chain, with access to needed expertise, 
ability to require help from "that's so yesterday" coders (who are 
always out of time), and with authority to ignore "it's not a bug, it's 
a feature" salesdroids who want to have all tickets closed before their 
next visit to a customer.


If a support manager /starts/ with a certain software package, he loses: 
at that moment, he is committing himself and his staff to fitting the 
corporation to the software, instead of choosing the software which best 
fits the corporation.


FWIW. YMMV.

Bill

--

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 No matter how fast I run, I can never seem to get away from me."
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Re: Network Solutions

2011-03-12 Thread Bill Horne

On 03/12/2011 09:28 AM, Mark Woodward wrote:
> How come Godaddy can update your domain records in a matter of minutes
> but Network Solutions still takes 24~48 hours!??
>
> It frustrating.

AFAICT, Network Solutions' business model is to take advantage of 
corporate ignorance and pretend that they still have a monopoly on 
domain registrations. Most corporations just pay their bill without 
questioning it, probably because it isn't worth their time to do 
research. That kind of attitude pervades through an organization, and 
I'd bet it causes slow updates as well.

The one time I had to deal with them to renew a company domain, I called 
them up and said that I wanted it released to Godaddy. They immediately 
offered to match Godaddy's renewal price.

Needless to say, I avoid Network Solutions like the plague.

Bill

-- 

"I've been up and down this highway, far as my eye can see
  No matter how fast I run, I can never seem to get away from me"
   - Jackson Browne

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Re: Network Solutions

2011-03-12 Thread Bill Horne


On 3/12/2011 4:09 PM, Doug wrote:

Hello Bill:

I try to avoid GoDaddy like the plague. They have a horrible control
page that is focused on selling me more of their crap.  Next time I
will let dreamhost take over.  To each their own poison.

Doug



I'm not married to Godaddy; the enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my 
friend.


If I did domain stuff every day, I'd be worried about the UI, but I just 
do a once-in-a-while renewal or mx, whatever: Godaddy is "good enough" 
for now, but feel free to provide a sales pitch for dreamhost or 
whomever, and we'll see if it lowers my point of pain.


Bill


--


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 No matter how fast I run, I can never seem to get away from me."
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Re: Computer died

2011-04-03 Thread Bill Horne

On 04/03/2011 09:26 AM, Jerry Feldman wrote:
> Additioal question how canyou test if power supply is dead with a
> multimeter? I'm not a hardware guy

Whoa!

Switching power supplies have to be tested with a load on them: they 
need the load to deliver proper voltages, and can be damaged if started 
without one.

The problem is that you can't be sure if the motherboard is in trouble, 
the power supply, etc., without sectionalizing the components, and 
you'll need a test jig to do that. Something as simple as a three 
automobile brake lights will usually do, but you'll need a 6-volt lamp 
(good luck finding one!) for the +5 lead. You can build a test jig with 
lamps or resistors, and I always intended to but never did: it's easier 
to swap in a new supply.

I recommend you check the existing supply for blown fuses (if there are 
any: some supply manufacturers don't bother) and then try a new supply.

HTH.

Bill

-- 

"This line of life is quick and keen
  The time arrives - the knife is clean
  I am older now and I have seen
  Great flames of life expire"
   - Dave Mallett

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Re: Computer died

2011-04-03 Thread Bill Horne

On 04/03/2011 01:03 PM, Jack Coats wrote:
> About 3 years ago I broke down and purchased an 'idiot light power
> supply tester'.  It was cheap and I have found several dead/dying
> power supplies.  Typically the -5 or -12 seems to go out first.
>
> It could help many folks if Blu could purchase a box of them then use
> them as door prises, holiday presents, etc so that anyone in the area
> could borrow one from a member when the time arises.
>
> It has also saved me from putting in a new PS when it wasn't warranted
> more than once.
>
> I'm not in the area, but I do loan out 'specialty tools' to local
> friends regularly.  I am sure someone in the area would do the same if
> they have one available.
>
> I think my tester was in the $5 to $10 range back when.

If it's an off-the-shelf component, please tell us the
brand name and model number. If not, I'm sure we
have enough expertise on the list to design our own.

When I think about it, there _must_ be an off-the-shelf
unit available from somewhere; after all, they have
to test them at the factory.

Bill

-- 


"He's gonna put his two cents in
  'cause he's got a gun
  But I'm gonna put in three
  'cause history owes me one"
   - Ani DiFranco

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Re: Android Tablet

2011-04-05 Thread Bill Horne

Mark,

Feel free to donate your old, worn out, barely working, aged HP laptop 
to the Bill Horne Memorial Laptop Museum. Our staff will give the unit 
proper care, assure it a fitting resting place in our collection, and 
conduct regular tests and inspections to make sure it's still functional.

We haven't yet obtained our tax-free status, but it's for a very good 
cause and we're looking forward to hearing from you.

Bill Horne

On 04/05/2011 10:14 AM, Mark Woodward wrote:
> OK, for those of you who attended my robotics talk, you know that I have
> an aging HP pavilion laptop. I'll probably buy a new laptop soon, but
> for portable use, I think laptops are too big. I'm looking for a tablet.
> No, I don't want an iPad.
>
> Anyway, does anyone have any experience with any of the android tablets
> out there? What about NextBook? The Viewsonic?
>
>
> Also, I've seen Intel Atom based tablets that claim to run Android? I
> thought Android is currently only available for ARM processors?
>
> Should I wait for a few more months until better ones become available?
>
> My wish list is.
>
> WiFi - A Must
> Linux Access - I have to be able to get below the Android front to run
> ssh and stuff.
> full Linux tool set - Whether I have to put it on an SD card or what
> ever, I want to be able to use the standard Linux tools.
> better than 800x600 video.
> USB ports, both device and host.
> SD ports, preferably two.
> Headphone jack
>
> Wired networking - good to have but not needed
>
>
> Any suggestions?
>
>
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Re: Ubuntu 10.04 (minimal install)

2011-04-11 Thread Bill Horne


On 4/11/2011 9:46 AM, johnmal...@comcast.net wrote:

I have a project that has Ubuntu 10.04 installed on a kiosk with less than 4gb 
of space on the boot disk.

Any suggestions on what to delete (minimal install)?

Thanks!


I suggest you check out xubuntu, which is designed for limited-resource 
environments.


http://www.xubuntu.org/

HTH.

Bill

--
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 'cause he's got a gun
 But I'm gonna put in three
 'cause history owes me one"
  - Ani DiFranco

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Re: SpiderOak Woes

2011-04-11 Thread Bill Horne


On 4/11/2011 9:36 PM, Chris O'Connell wrote:

This level of customer service isn't really acceptable.  Also, I should have
more control over my files.  Who ever heard of a solution that requires you
to delete your account?!?


One of my all-time-favorite Dilbert cartoons is appropriate here:

http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1995-09-02/

HTH.

Bill

--


"I am just a poor boy though my story's seldom told
 I have squandered my resistance for a pocketfull of mumbles
 Such are promises. All lies in jest
 'till a man hears what he wants to and disregards the rest"
 - Paul Simon


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Re: SpiderOak Woes

2011-04-12 Thread Bill Horne

On 04/12/2011 07:35 AM, Jerry Feldman wrote:
> Love it. When I worked for Burger King back in the early 70s, they
> discovered that a computer operator had mounted the wrong tape 5 years
> earlier, and they had to restate their taxes and financials going back 5
> years. While I was hired primarily as a DEC PDP-8 assembler programmer,
> they were a COBOL shop, but my boss saw that I had some BASIC in my
> background so I got tapped for writing some BASIC on GE Timesharing to
> get data for accounting.

When I was in IS at NYNEX, we would get Automatic Message Accounting 
tapes from the various central offices every day. And twice a year, we 
would have to correct the times on at least one tape that came from a CO 
where the tech has forgotten to reset the clock to or from DST.

I don't know why they didn't use Zulu time.

Bill
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Re: Las Vegas firm buys Unix...

2011-04-14 Thread Bill Horne

On 04/13/2011 05:43 PM, edwa...@linuxmail.org wrote:
> http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Las-Vegas-company-buys-Unix-apf-2422952490.html?x=0&.v=2
>
> ...from a bankrupt Utah company.
>
Does this mean that SCO is, at last, finally, really, sincerely, dead? 
Stake-in-the-heart, garlic-around-the-neck, killed-with-a-silver-bullet 
dead?

Bill "One can only hope" Horne

-- 



"This line of life is quick and keen
  The time arrives, the knife is clean
  I am older now, and I have seen
  Great flames of life expire"
  - Dave Mallett

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[Discuss] Do you know of a Dynamic DNS service that doesn't demand I install software?

2011-10-24 Thread Bill Horne


Thanks for reading this.

I'm looking for a free dynamic dns service provider to use for a couple 
of days on my "home" server. I have a WordPress site set up, and I'd 
like to show it to a potential employer, but I can't find a dynamic dns 
provider that I can use without installing software on my machine.


I've been using dyndns.org, but I can't get that to work and I'm looking 
for an alternative: it's just for a couple of days at most, so I don't 
want to pay for another service or install update software if I can 
avoid it.


Thanks for your suggestions. I appreciate your time.

Bill

--
Bill Horne
774-219-7638 (cell)
339-364-8487 (office)

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[Discuss] Verizon ADSL and port blocking

2011-10-25 Thread Bill Horne

I've decided to put a web server up for a couple of days, but Verizon 
DSL is blocking the ports I've tried to use.


If you have experience with Verizon ADSL, please tell me what ports are 
available for my own server.


TIA.

Bill

--
Bill Horne
774-219-7638 (cell)
339-364-8487 (office)

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Re: [Discuss] Verizon ADSL and port blocking

2011-10-26 Thread Bill Horne

On Tue, 2011-10-25 at 22:26 -0400, Nathan Burridge wrote:
> Bill Horne wrote:
> > 
> > I've decided to put a web server up for a couple of days, 
> > but Verizon DSL is blocking the ports I've tried to use.

> I have no issue accessing my HP Mediasmart server on both HTTP/HTTPS
> and I host Ventrilo and Mumble as well with no issue.
> 
> If you are using the Westel DSL Modem, disable the firewall built in,
> assuming you have another router and not directly connected from a
> PC.  I also recommend switching it to Bridge mode.  Search on Westel
> Bridged and there are plenty of articles with directions on how to do
> this.  

I have a different ADSL modem, and AFAIK there's no firewall capability
in it and it's already set to Bridge mode. I have opened the ports in my
Linksys router, and tried to access both standard and "high" ports from
different outside locaitons. Nothing has worked. 

If you're using non-standard ports to get through, please tell me which
ones Verizon is leaving open. TIA.

Bill

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Re: [Discuss] Verizon ADSL and port blocking

2011-10-26 Thread Bill Horne

On Wed, 2011-10-26 at 11:30 -0400, Gregory Boyce wrote:

> Turn off any local firewalling, and go to http://nmap-online.com/
> 
> After a quick scan, you will likely see a mix of open, closed and
> filtered ports.  Anything open or filtered should be fine to use.
> Anything filtered is not.

I got various errors when I tried the site: "Scan ran too long",
"Forbidden", etc. If there are other ways to scan my IP, please tell me
how. 

TIA.

Bill


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[Discuss] WordPress info and how-to's

2011-10-28 Thread Bill Horne


Thanks for reading this.

My humble thanks to Dan Ritter, who pointed out an anomaly in the HTTP 
response from my WordPress site, and thus allowed me to figure out the 
problem I've been having. I invite criticism of the site and setup: it's 
at http://939y240579k.homelinux.org/ .


I've got a chance to do some work with WordPress, and I'd appreciate any 
leads you can give me; expert advice, FAQ's, etc. I can read the 
documentation, but I'm looking for a different perspective: hints from 
those who have used the program and can tell me what it's strengths and 
weaknesses are, and how to take advantage of the first and avoid the later.


Please send any URL's, book titles, or ISBN numbers to my personal 
address as well as to the list, and thank you in advance.


Bill

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Re: [Discuss] Virtual hosting provider (me too)

2011-10-28 Thread Bill Horne


On 10/27/2011 12:43 PM, Dave Peters wrote:

Any suggestion for virtual hosting server provider? blueHost? Hostmonster, 
Godaddy, inmotion or networksolutions?


I'm also looking for a virtual host provider. It's for a "test" site to 
work on changes to the "production"  site that I use for The Telecom 
Digest, so I need to be able to put in a LAMP server, procmail, mutt, 
and other things that I use every day while preparing the Digest.


http://www.linode.com has an offer for ~$20/month that includes 512MB of 
RAM, 20GB storage and 200GB transfer. It's fine for what I need, but the 
price is just around my "point of pain", so I'd like to hear what others 
think about other possibilities.


Bill

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Re: [Discuss] Virtual hosting provider (me too)

2011-10-28 Thread Bill Horne


On 10/28/2011 6:42 PM, edwa...@linuxmail.org wrote:

Bill Horne wrote:

On 10/27/2011 12:43 PM, Dave Peters wrote:
Any suggestion for virtual hosting server provider? blueHost? 
Hostmonster, Godaddy, inmotion or networksolutions?


I'm also looking for a virtual host provider. It's for a "test" site 
to work on changes to the "production"  site that I use for The 
Telecom Digest, so I need to be able to put in a LAMP server, 
procmail, mutt, and other things that I use every day while preparing 
the Digest.


http://www.linode.com has an offer for ~$20/month that includes 512MB 
of RAM, 20GB storage and 200GB transfer. It's fine for what I need, 
but the price is just around my "point of pain", so I'd like to hear 
what others think about other possibilities.


Bill


Have you looked at 1&1?  Their prices seem to be quite reasonable.  
http://www.1and1.com/


Sorry, they're out of my league: the lowest-price offer for a virtual 
server is $49.95/month.


Anyone know of companies that are in the lower-rent district?

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[Discuss] Two Compaq ProLiant Servers free for the taking

2011-10-29 Thread Bill Horne

I'm going to give BLU members a little head start before I put these on
Craigslist. 

I have two Compaq ProLiant DL360 servers that I am giving away. 

These are rack mount units, intended for server rooms. 

1. single processor, 128 MB RAM, no drives. Boots OK with a 
   borrowed drive.

2. Dual processor, 256 MB RAM, two Ultra SCSI 68 pin drives in 
   "hot swap" trays. I stole one from the first machine to put 
   in a RAID1 array. Boots OK but Ubuntu install errored out 
   while trying to write to rd0. 

Caveats:

* These are server machines, not suitable for home use. They 
  are LOUD. They are intended for rack mounting.

* I have the Compaq setup CD that you'll need to reconfigure 
  the RAID or alter the disk layout. It comes _with_ the 
  machines.

* Pickup in Sharon, first come first served.

Bill Horne
781-784-7287


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Re: [Discuss] Data including email, stored in the cloud, may be available to law enforcement without search warrant

2011-11-03 Thread Bill Horne


On 11/3/2011 8:47 AM, scottmarydavid...@gmail.com wrote:

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/10/ecpa-turns-twenty-five/

Paraphrasing the article:

According to the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act, the law still
considers data that has been left on cloud servers for longer than six
months to be "abandoned.".

Law enforcement officers will continue to have access to citizens' stored
communications that are more than six months old without a warrant as long
as they assert that the content is relevant to a criminal investigation.
The law also allows law enforcement to access all files stored in the cloud
for longer than six months without a warrant, even though cloud storage
services, like Dropbox, did not exist in 1986.

A federal appeals court last year ruled that email stored in the cloud for
longer than six months still requires a warrant for access, but the ruling
applies only to Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio and Tennessee.


This is a problem that can be easily solved by using end-to-end 
encryption. The capability is already built-in to every common email 
client.


Bill, who encrypts all his email to prevent the FBI from finding out how 
boring his life is.


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Re: [Discuss] Data including email, stored in the cloud, may be available to law enforcement without search warrant

2011-11-03 Thread Bill Horne


On 11/3/2011 1:25 PM, Gregory Boyce wrote:

On Thu, Nov 3, 2011 at 1:07 PM, Daniel C.  wrote:

On Thu, Nov 3, 2011 at 11:06 AM,  wrote:

On 11/3/2011 at 10:11 AM, Bill Horne wrote:
This is a problem that can be easily solved by using end-to-end
encryption. The capability is already built-in to every common email
client.

Assuming your ISP allows encryption to a server on your premises. Most
email servers are outside of your premises and thus in the custody of a
"provider." The problem is that there is no 4th amendment protection for
your data in the custody of a vendor. They can be ordered to hand over
your data, unencrypted, by any number of government agencies.

I'm not sure what you're saying.  Email clients can encrypt and
decrypt - there's no need to rely on the provider to do any work, and
you don't need an email server at your home to encrypt an email before
you send it, or decrypt after it's received.

-Dan

I suspect he's talking about transport encryption (SSL/TLS) while
you're talking about message encryption (PGP/GPG)


I can't speak for Mr. Boyce, but _I_ was talking about _end_ _to_ _end_ 
encryption, i.e., encrypting data at the originating MUA,  in such a way 
that only the intended recipient(s) are able to decrypt it, usually 
using the built-in functionality of their MUA. Some systems use X.509 
certificate-based cryptography, and some use GPG/PGP. Neither of those 
methods depends on the MTA(s) or servers in between the MUA(s) involved.


Bill

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Re: [Discuss] foxconn

2011-11-06 Thread Bill Horne

' code of morality can or should apply - who see us an an aging 
nation of warriors who will, in due course, give way to more patient and 
more disciplined peoples who beat their spears into the pruning hooks 
they now use to gather the low-hanging fruit of Americans' love affair 
with  electronic toys . They know that things will change in time - 
maybe as little as one hundred years - and they are willing, in fact 
eager, to sacrifice the lives of peasants /now/ in return for the 
continued welfare of their nations /then/.


I prefer to keep my charity and my conscience close, so when Christmas 
comes, I take a Fifty-dollar bill and I give it to the Campesino who 
rides the trash truck in front of my home, and another to the 
Spanish-speaking girl who cleans the tables at my favorite restaurant. 
The cost-of-overhead is zero, the effectiveness immediate, and the money 
is put to use in my local community without delay.


I suggest, with all due respect, that your time and money would be 
better spent solving problems /here/,  in the communities of poorly-paid 
and disadvantaged people /here. /If you need to use a computer keyboard 
made in a foreign nation to affect change at home, please rest assured 
that the leaders of those nations are aware of the risks that your 
keyboard will come back to bite them, and made the trade with a clear 
conscience.


Bill

Copyright (C) 2011 E. William Horne. All Rights Reserved.

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Re: [Discuss] Nvidia announces the Tegra 3 -- Kal-El brings PC class performance to Android

2011-11-09 Thread Bill Horne

On Wed, 2011-11-09 at 17:32 -0500, Jay Kramer wrote:
> *Nvidia announces the Tegra 3 -- Kal-El brings PC class performance to
> Android*
> ANDROID CENTRAL - ANDROID FORUMS, NEWS, AND HELP | NOVEMBER 9, 2011
> http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/androidcentral/~3/TWuHSi5lkR0/story01.htm

"Kal-El"? Realy? when did the Kryptonite wear off?

Bill

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Re: [Discuss] sshd logging question

2011-11-16 Thread Bill Horne

On Wed, 2011-11-16 at 09:29 -0500, Jerry Feldman wrote:
> Sorry if this is an RTFM question.
> Every night our NY office connects in to our backup server. I have a
> script that checks the status of the most recent backup as well as those
> connects, but I would like to be able to track the time the NY office
> disconnects. The NY office is using rsync to connect through and ssh
> tunnel. A while back there was a case where they were not actually
> transferring any data. Certainly the NY office could also check the
> times on their end.

The login/logout times are in the file /var/log/auth.log on my Ubuntu
system. 

Bill


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Re: [Discuss] networking problem

2011-11-22 Thread Bill Horne

On Tue, 2011-11-22 at 11:23 -0500, j. daniel moylan wrote:
> i've recently installed ubuntu 10.10 on my asus eee pc 1005ha.  it gave me
> warning messages on bootup:
> 
>   waiting for network configuration
>   waiting  up to 60 more sec for network configuration
>   booting system without full network configuration
> 
> sure enough, the builtin wireless n didn;t come up.  i tried the
> networkmanager icon, and that came up with the first four lines light
> grey.  perservering, i punched the bottom line "edit connections", did
> that, and saved it but no network came up. i tried /etc/init.d/networking
> restart and that indeed brought up the network 192.168.0.103 as shown by
> ifconfig.  however that issued a warning that the command was deprecated
> and that everything might not come up (but no mention of the favored
> command).  none the less, things seemed to work fine -- the browser
> connected as desired, mutt worked and i was happy though i needed to do the
> init.d thing each time i booted.
> 
> today, i was able to bring up 192.168.0.103, but only locally. i can ping
> 192.168.0.1 but can't seem to get out past the local net.  firefox doesn't
> connect out and email doesn't work.
> 
> any suggestions would be warmly appreciated.

Dan,

Check your routing table: you may need to add a default route. 

Also, verify that /etc/resolv.conf has the correct IP addresses for the
nameservers you're able to reach on your network. 

HTH.

Bill

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[Discuss] Intel i685 video chipset with Ubuntu

2011-11-27 Thread Bill Horne

If you have experience getting the Intel i685 video chipset to work with 
Ubuntu, please contact me. TIA.


Bill

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[Discuss] Video driver for Intel i685 video chip under Ubuntu

2011-11-29 Thread Bill Horne

I'm working on a Dell with an Intel i685 video chipset. The Ubuntu 
distro doesn't support it, and the file I downloaded from Intel won't 
compile.
Anyone with experience in getting Ubuntu to work with i685 chipsets 
please contact me. TIA.


Bill Horne
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Re: [Discuss] Competition of broadband

2011-12-02 Thread Bill Horne

round to property owners and
write monopolistic contracts controlling all the best antenna and tower
locations.  (Invariably, the company will demand exclusive access:  if a
building owner does business with, e.g., Sprint--the contract will be breached
if the owner signs with, e.g., T-Mobile.)


FCC Rules regulate "Antenna Farms", and prevent any owner or lessee from 
playing "keep away".
Of course, it's possible for lessees to sub-let space, but that's just 
life in the big city: if owners
sign leases that they don't understand, that's their own fault, and it 
doesn't affect the issue:

if there's no other viable site, all radiators get equal space.


That's why Verizon's wireless
service works best here, and why no amount of money spent by another company
can ever achieve a truly competitive cell-phone offering.  So Verizon can
charge whatever it wants (optimized, as any monopoly does, to pull in the most
consumers can afford before dropping service entirely), and the prices have
nothing to do with the underlying cost of operations.


I think /that/ is also life in the big city. You are assuming that 
everybody "has to
have" a cellphone in their pocket and that "someone" needs to regulate 
the availability
and price of all cellular services so that hoi polloi can enjoy low-rent 
phone service,
internet connectivity, and entertainment 24/7/365 at any location they 
might ever

visit.

I don't own a cell phone. I've used them when my business needed one, 
but I don't
feel that it's a service that requires more regulation or government 
intrusion.
The great majority of the world's peoples survive quite well without 
having an
electronic leash tied to their side, and that's a lesson you /can/ take 
to the bank.



In order to reform anything, you'd really need to come up with a
national-level policy like in some other countries.  But in this country I
just don't see an even remotely legal or practical way to accomplish that.


And I don't see the /need/ to accomplish that.  The reason people go to 
/work/

is that /work/ is an organized environment dedicated to advancing a
corporation's goals. The very notion that everybody can be as productive
on the subway or in their car or sitting on a couch at home, as is 
possible in
an office with support staff, information, and resources *literally* 
close-to-hand

is just not credible.

"Smart" phones, or "goes everywhere" cellular connections, or any other 
system
that promotes the notion that workers might be productive no matter 
where they are
located, just don't fit human nature. This is the reason that car pools 
don't work,

and the reason that automobile advertisements are always filmed on empty
streets or open roads, and the reason that people play golf. Human 
beings need

time away from their responsibilities every day, or they go crazy.

FWIW. YMMV.

Bill

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Re: [Discuss] Competition of broadband

2011-12-04 Thread Bill Horne


On 12/4/2011 6:39 PM, Richard Pieri wrote:

On Dec 4, 2011, at 5:25 PM, Bill Bogstad wrote:

(a monopoly/pork barrel funding).   I'm sure that if Verizon was
willing to pay the same kind of fees that Comcast does that they could
find politicians willing to switch horses.

Two words: franchise fees.



Two words: time and materials.

Verizon won't compete with Comcast for broadband, because they'd have to 
complete their network with today's labor rates. They don't want to 
spend that much money, and are withholding service and making 
non-compete deals with Comcast in the cellular space, so that they can 
continue to wait as long as it takes for Comcast to set a foot wrong and 
scare the pols enough that they dictate favorable terms under which 
Verizon can "compete".


Two more words: common sense.

It's not the second coming, OK? The odds are overwhelming that you 
*still* work in a different place than the one where you live, and so 
long as corporate executives continue to practice "warm body" management 
(if you're body is still warm and you haven't fallen out of your chair, 
you must be productive), there won't be any driver for universal 
broadband or competition, because there is no driver for work-at-home 
capability.


Bill

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Re: [Discuss] Competition of broadband

2011-12-06 Thread Bill Horne


On 12/5/2011 7:16 PM, Tom Metro wrote:

The alternate approach taken by European governments was mentioned
earlier in this thread. I highly recommend watching this video on the topic:
http://www.engadget.com/2011/06/28/why-is-european-broadband-faster-and-cheaper-blame-the-governme/

(A variation of it ran on PBS earlier this year.)




I'm the moderator of comp.dcom.telecom and The Telecom Digest 
(http://www.telecom-digest.org/), which is the oldest 
continuously-published e-zine on the net.


This subject, although perhaps a bit OT here, would be perfect for the 
Digest, and I welcome posts from those who would like to have their 
ideas seen be a much wider community of telecommunications experts.


Please send posts to telecomdigestmoderator.at.telecom-digest.org, and 
put "[telecom]" in your subject line for anti-spam processing. I'm be 
happy to obfuscate email addresses if you like: just substitute 
"[obfuscate]" in your subject line.


Thanks in advance!

Bill Horne
Moderator
The Telecom Digest

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Re: [Discuss] Competition of broadband

2011-12-06 Thread Bill Horne


On 12/5/2011 7:50 PM, Richard Pieri wrote:

On Dec 4, 2011, at 7:49 PM, Bill Horne wrote:

Two words: time and materials.

Verizon won't compete with Comcast for broadband, because they'd have to 
complete their network with today's labor rates.

Say what?!  Verizon has been very aggressively pushing FiOS.  Perhaps not 
everywhere, but definitely in some of Comcast's strongest markets.


It's definitely not everywhere, nor even "manywhere". Close only counts 
in Horseshoes, hand grenades, and nuclear artillery: it's no good to 
have 50% of the available houses wired, because that means that your 
competition can still survive on the remaining half.



Cities like Boston already have the fibre trunks.  The only work that needs to 
be done is to connect residences to the trunks.  In most cases, Verizon pays 
the communities for the privilege of making those connections in addition to 
footing the bill for the runs, sometimes regardless of households actually 
subscribing.  Case in point, Verizon paid my condo complex $150 per unit times 
334 units just for the privilege of running fibre to each unit, and Verizon 
paid 100% of the cost of actually running all that fibre.  This all within the 
past year.  All that I've paid for out of pocket is for the tech to do the 
interior installation, wire up the ONT and configure the cable box.


Well, if Verizon is so eager, why isn't FiOS available in a /very/ 
well-to-do bedroom community like Sharon? If Verizontal is "aggressively 
pushing" FiOS, how come they've bypassed the profit that's available in 
Sharon and many other suburbs? Logically, in an area where average 
household incomes are over $126,000 per year, I must conclude that there 
are other factors in play.


AFAICT, Verizon now sees itself as a wireless company stuck with a 
legacy line of business called "wireline", which it is doing its best to 
abandon as soon as possible. Compared to wireless, the "wireline" 
business is a millstone around Verizon's neck, and they've been so 
successful with cellular that they just paid several Billion dollars to 
buy out the spectrum that Comcast was threatening to use for a competing 
cellular offering.


Don't forget that "3G" and "4G" (whatever that means) data plans 
contribute immensely to Verizon's profit margins, and I doubt that 
Verizon's actuaries would stack the potential profits from FiOS against 
the immense pay-per-minute-per-byte river of gold that they are standing 
in /right/ /now/.  If FiOS succeeds, then the cellular data margins go 
down, and that means that Verizon is giving FiOS lip-service while doing 
everything it can to maximize cellular income.



Boston and Somerville keep saying "no" to FiOS because of Comcast's 
think-of-the-community lobbying and the threat of renegotiated franchise fees reducing 
the Cities' revenue.  That's the real bottom line, and it's the origin of my subsidiaries 
quip.



The real bottom line (no offense) is that ordinary people never see the 
/real/ bottom line. Local bureaucrats want to be paid for allowing 
anyone to make a profit in "their" community, but cellular bypasses all 
the greedy hands that are out when anyone asks for a right-of-way on 
municipality poles, and that means multi-national corporations can play 
a waiting game, hoping that national elections will deliver a government 
more pliable to their "recommendations" and less concerned with 
appearances than those currently in power.  The U.S. Congress, tied to 
Nineteenth century paradigms of commerce and government, views the 
Internet as a party line where the village idiots go to pretend someone 
is listening, and in a world where the only political currency is 
/actual/ currency, Internet users aren't important[1].


Sorry to bear bad news, but Uncle Sam only cares about you and me if we 
have lots of money to spend. In the meantime, your local library has a 
"high speed" connection, so don't complain.


Bill

1. Although some upstarts have been successful at raising /some/ 
campaign funding via the Internet, contributions from Washington's 
Beltway Bandits dwarf the amounts gathered via the net. In any case, as 
far as Congress is concerned,  the idea of using the Internet for 
fundraising is lumped in with other campaign impedimenta: something 
handled by professionals who return from the beaches of Maui on their  
biennial rounds of the mudpits, where they blithely service their 
benefactors by performing what soon-to-be-former Congressman Barney 
Frank called "Slopping the Hogs".


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Re: [Discuss] Linux desktop is here (Re: Ubuntu alternatives)

2011-12-12 Thread Bill Horne


On 12/12/2011 11:52 AM, Rich Braun wrote:

Derek Martin commented:

It's clear to me that the desktop has improved in the last 15
years or so, but frankly the improvements since then have only
been marginal, and on the whole I believe I was more satisfied
with my simple FVWM configuration.  The one thing I give the
Gnome people is that it is much less work for me to get an
environment that satisfies my basic need

The whole concept of a window environment as pioneered at Xerox PARC gave us
the basic need.  There's only so many ways you can throw rectangular boxes of
content onto a 2-dimensional screen.  So improvements from the time they were
invented to the distant future will always be "marginal".


I wish I could marginalize the Gnome "Find me if you can" disappearing 
scrollbar that's 3 pixels high. I wish the "disappearing" application 
selection bar wouldn't cover the left side of my display every time my 
mouse wanders within an inch of the left border. I wish I didn't have to 
reinstall using KUBUNTU just to get a "stays where  I put it" desktop.


Long story short, someone needs to tell Ubuntu that change for the sake 
of change is not necessarily a good thing.


Bill "Excuse me while I vent" Horne

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Re: [Discuss] Off-Topic [IP] BufferBloat: What's Wrong with the Internet? (fwd)

2011-12-12 Thread Bill Horne

On 12/12/2011 4:13 PM, Stephen Ronan wrote:

Perhaps of interest -s.r.

-- Forwarded message --
Date: Fri, 9 Dec 2011 09:52:45 -0500
From: Dave Farber 
To: ip 
Subject: [IP] BufferBloat: What's Wrong with the Internet?

<http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2076798>

BufferBloat: What's Wrong with the Internet?
A discussion with Vint Cerf, Van Jacobson, Nick Weaver, and Jim Gettys

[snip]

I think this is a great discussion of how difficult it can be to change 
a widely-implemented protocol like TCP: engineers keep doing work-around 
solutions until the solutions create new problems.

At the heart of the TCP/IP protocol suite is a design philosophy of 
trading time for reliability: the whole idea was to make a reliable path 
using unreliable links (remember that in the 1960's, link reliability 
was horrific by today's standards), and because of that, there is no 
"minimum transit time" specification in the IP protocol. We have added 
on QOS and other hacks to improve traffic flow for near-real-time 
applications such as IPTV, but the bottom level protocols don't know 
about them and don't deal with them.

At some point, the Internet will need a major overhaul. For what I do, 
which is mostly email, it worked as originally designed. For what many 
ISP's and content providers are attempting to do, which is 
near-real-time content delivery, it can be "bent to fit" by adding 
ever-fatter pipes and ever-larger buffers, at the expense (as the OP 
pointed out) of degrading key performance metrics like latency.

For what common carriers are trying to do, which is to substitute 
common-channel bandwidth for the virtual-circuit design of the Public 
Switched Telephone Network (PSTN), TCP/IP can't be made to fit. There 
isn't enough elasticity in the available bandwidth structure to 
accommodate the (sometimes incredible) variability of telephone calling 
patterns, where by-hand intervention is still done, on a daily basis, to 
prevent outages due to mass-calling-events such as 
hurricane-or-other-severe-weather-related traffic, media outlet call-in 
promotions, and excess-demand holidays like Mother's Day. Unfortunately, 
the cost-per-transferred-bit of the Internet is so low compared to using 
virtual-circuit protocols such as ATM, that most executives put blinders 
on and opt for the cheap solution, usually with the assumption that we 
diode-heads will find a way around any problems like we always do.

I don't have any magic bullets to solve this issue. I think that 
voice-traffic will migrate to the Internet until there are service 
problem too obvious to ignore, such as those Comcast Voice customers are 
experiencing on a daily basis, and then the powers-that-be will push for 
a new protocol suite that preserves low cost-per-moved-bit price 
advantages at the expense of higher (I think MUCH higher) rates for 
anyone doing "anything but" traffic.

The battle of the titans is coming, but it won't be a fight about who 
sells which movie or who gets to download which song. This fight will be 
about which mega-corporations carve out virtual slices of Internet 
bandwidth so that they can avoid paying for their own.

My 2¢. YMMV.

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Re: [Discuss] Off-Topic [IP] BufferBloat: What's Wrong with the Internet? (fwd)

2011-12-12 Thread Bill Horne


On 12/12/2011 5:33 PM, Gordon Marx wrote:

On Dec 12, 2011, at 5:12 PM, Bill Horne  wrote:


At some point, the Internet will need a major overhaul. For what I do, which is mostly 
email, it worked as originally designed. For what many ISP's and content providers are 
attempting to do, which is near-real-time content delivery, it can be "bent to 
fit" by adding ever-fatter pipes and ever-larger buffers, at the expense (as the OP 
pointed out) of degrading key performance metrics like latency.

Hey, you should check out this startup in Kendall. They're called Akamai, 
they're 13 years old and have ~$1B in yearly revenue, and they deliver like 
30+% of internet traffic without fattening pipes or degrading latency.



Sorry, I don't think that will scale. Akamai is like Edison's plan to 
deliver power: he wanted to put a dynamo on every third streetcorner in 
America, and while it's (obviously) possible to store multiple copies of 
static content on every third "electronic" streetcorner, that won't work 
for telephone traffic, nor for any other traffic that needs real- or 
near-real-time *bidirectional* capacity. You can't store a phone call 
for delivery three seconds later, let alone the three minutes it takes 
Akamai to "spool" a NetFlix program to my pc before I can watch it.


Bill

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Re: [Discuss] [OT] Asset Management

2011-12-14 Thread Bill Horne

to 
Jamaica-the-country instead of Jamaica-in-Queens. Your most important 
asset is your attitude, and you must project a takes-it-in-stride 
sensibility that keeps your boss happy about picking you in the first place.


FWIW. YMMV.

Bill

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Re: [Discuss] Justify your existence

2011-12-15 Thread Bill Horne


On 12/15/2011 10:56 PM, Edward Ned Harvey wrote:

You're in a social situation - at a party or something - You're talking with
some CFO or otherwise interesting financial person about work, and Dilbert
cartoons, and the wastefulness and inefficiencies of typical corporations or
typical organizations, etc.  Somebody uses a term like "overhead" or
"secondary" referring to support roles.  But you're an IT person - You're a
support role, and depending on what is your core business, most likely
you're overhead.



With only a moment's thought, and only a few words, how do you describe the
value that your role adds to the organization?  How do you justify your own
existence, casually, when talking to a CFO or somebody in a social
situation?



I suggest something like this:

"I'm one of the team that makes sure the computers, networks, 
telephones, power, fire alarms, printers, and cell phones are always 
working.  In short, I'm the guy who keeps the magic smoke from leaking 
out of the wires, because computers run on magic smoke, and if it leaks 
out, things stop working. I like to think I do my job well, and the 
measure of my team's success is that you've probably never heard of us."


HTH.

Bill Horne
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Re: [Discuss] SOPA

2011-12-19 Thread Bill Horne

On 12/19/2011 3:01 PM, Matthew Gillen wrote:

On 12/19/2011 02:50 PM, Rich Braun wrote:
Ackkk, the politicians are turning their attention to the Internet
again.
First came the America Invents Act of 2011. Now comes SOPA, the Stop
Online
Piracy Act, which gives the same corporate clowns control over who
gets to say
what online. Appropriate for bureaucrats in China or North Korea,
perhaps,

but here I say hands off my Internet.

Re: [Discuss] SOPA

2011-12-19 Thread Bill Horne


On 12/19/2011 2:56 PM, Gordon Marx wrote:

Read more at:
http://www.informationdiet.com/blog/read/dear-internet-its-no-longer-ok-to-not-know-how-congress-works-



The URL only shows an "Add Comment" page on my browser. Please check the 
link. TIA.


Bill

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Re: [Discuss] Full disk encryption

2012-01-02 Thread Bill Horne


On 1/3/2012 12:16 AM, a k'wala wrote:
Any thoughts on the kind of security risk I might be vulnerable to 
because I only encrypt my home dir as opposed to the full disk?


Many applications use /tmp or /var files as working storage, and they 
leave ghosts behind.


Bill

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Re: [Discuss] Full disk encryption, why bother?

2012-01-04 Thread Bill Horne


On 1/3/2012 11:56 PM, Bill Bogstad wrote:

I just heard about a company selling
a product to maintain power on seized computers while you transport
them:

http://www.wiebetech.com/products/HotPlug.php

It came up in the context of moving servers from one power jack to
another one due to data center power changes.  (Someone wanted to
avoid downtime.)




Anyone buying this device would do well to have paid-up life insurance: 
the company is selling a UPS, but they're also selling "cheater" cords 
that allow their UPS to power a "live" outlet with a double-male 
connection cord, and that's flat-out dangerous.


Bill

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Re: [Discuss] Full disk encryption, why bother?

2012-01-04 Thread Bill Horne



On 1/4/2012 1:39 PM, Ben Eisenbraun wrote:

On Wed, Jan 04, 2012 at 09:24:47AM -0500, Bill Horne wrote:

Anyone buying this device would do well to have paid-up life insurance:
the company is selling a UPS, but they're also selling "cheater" cords
that allow their UPS to power a "live" outlet with a double-male
connection cord, and that's flat-out dangerous.

It's not a UPS. You have to supply your own UPS to power their capture
unit. And it doesn't appear to power the outlet until after the mains
power is cut. That's the "Patent-pending technology" part I suppose.




It may not be a UPS, but AFAICT it's also not UL or ETL listed. That's a 
$10,000 fine if an employee gets injured, and a "you betcha" lawsuit 
that will probably end a career, and an accident might even result in 
jail time.


I'm sorry to be such a spoilsport, but this stuff is /not/ software, and 
it is /not/ for amateurs: you don't learn about power factors and Class 
Zero gloves by trial-and-error.


Please consider these facts, which the manufacturer does not mention on 
their website:


1. Cutting wires that are carrying power is dangerous and error-prone, 
but this manufacturer implies that it can be done safely by amateurs. 
The /best/ result one can hope for is to "burn a hole" in the cutting 
tools, thus ruining them. At worst, flash burns and pieces of molten 
metal flying in unpredictable directions. Men have been blinded by such 
events.


2. Without a UL or ETL listing, there is no guarantee that the actual 
switching circuitry inside this device is designed to interrupt the 
current being carried.


3. Plugging a power source into a "hot" outlet, conductor, or power 
strip is an invitation to disaster. If there's a power strip in use, it 
may not have the "hot" leads on the "right" side of the outlets - after 
all, they're made for use on home computers by shops that cut every 
corner they can - and /that/ means that a failure of the "hotplug" 
device could place a "dead short" across the power source. Men have been 
killed by such events.


4. No matter what you do, no matter what precautions you take, no matter 
how wiling you are to learn about electricity, the BEST you can hope for 
is that nothing happens. That's a setup for failure, and electrical 
failures caused by using unapproved equipement in non-standard ways are 
a lawyer's wet dream.


FWIW. YMMV. I'll send flowers to your funeral.

Bill

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Re: [Discuss] What Happens when a cloud service shuts down

2012-01-21 Thread Bill Horne


On 1/20/2012 4:01 PM, Daniel C. wrote:

On Fri, Jan 20, 2012 at 2:35 PM, Jerry Feldman  wrote:

Theoretically, a cloud is a virtual storage device where the actual storage
media should be in several different locations fully mirrored.

I understand the value of backups, and I understand the value of
virtual computing, and parallel computing, and other things.  Could
someone (and I apologize if this is OT to the thread) explain to me
what exactly the buzzword "cloud computing" means, exactly?


I'd like to see that explanation myself.


My BS detector flashes every time someone says it, but I have been wrong
once (okay, *maybe* twice) in the past.


That happened to me about two months ago. It was actually a relief, 
knowing that I had finally made a mistake, and that I could stop 
wondering when it would happen.  BTW, my "BS detector" (which has an 
analog indicator) has been stuck at the mechanical stop limit since the 
start of the Reagan administration.



Is it just a way of saying that you have a distributed, parallel app whose 
individual nodes can
come online (or go offline) dynamically without interrupting the
service?  Is it strictly used to reference data storage - as in the
original email in this thread - or does it mean more than that?


I think it's a way of saying "I hired someone else to do it", with 
specifics left to the imagination of whomever hears the statement.  For 
practical purposes, it's a way of saying "Don't hold me accountable for 
any mistakes made in the future: I hired  to take the blame 
for them".


Bill

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Re: [Discuss] What Happens when a cloud service shuts down

2012-01-21 Thread Bill Horne


On 1/20/2012 4:34 PM, Bill Bogstad wrote:

I see "cloud" as inherently implying leasing/renting access to other
peoples' equipment.   In some sense, it is an extension of
outsourcing.  Except you may only outsource pieces of a long chain of
steps rather then the entire system and there is an implication that
you can adjust your outsourcing on the fly.


No criticism of Bil, but if I were placed in charge of a system that 
depended on being able to adjust an outsourced component or process 'on 
the fly', the first thing I would do would me to test how quickly it 
could be transitioned to another vendor or an in-house backup. I have 
seen several instances where a salesman's assurances of quick recoveries 
came to a full stop on-the-fly-in-the-ointment.


In each case, the "root cause" was the fact that the System 
Administration team did not have the training needed to prepare them for 
a multiple-failure scenario: each vendor assumed that they were not 
responsible for /anything/ but the smallest possible interpretation of 
what /they/ were legally obligated to provide, with all questions of 
integration, presentation, security, recoverability of meta-data, and 
total-time-to-repower being left to the customer. In effect, they left 
the companies that had purchased their services holding the bag, looking 
for help, and facing questions from stockholders about how they got into 
the mess.


I liken computing in the "Cloud" to the process of flying in clouds: it 
demands careful preparation, extensive training, and well-maintained 
hardware /before/ it's a reliable way to get from "A" to "B". In the 
case of pilots who have "Instrument" certification, that training 
includes the use of basic instruments such as a compass and airspeed 
indicator to navigate without being able to see anything outside the 
aircraft, since advanced electronics and autopilots can't be relied on 
during systemic failures. In like manner, using "Cloud" computing 
requires well-trained operators and managers whom have practiced the 
needed steps to recover, and are prepared to deal with multiple failures 
at the same time: I have seen something as trivial as a clip-on utility 
lamp cause a server shutdown because it added just enough electrical 
load to be the "straw that broke the camel's back", and popped a circuit 
breaker which cast an entire room into semi-darkness, at the same time 
it revealed that an apprentice electrician had inserted a "Delta" 
breaker into a panel wired for "Wye" service, thus interrupting only two 
legs of a three-phase power system, and leaving the lights in series 
with the servers and CRT's.  Some very interesting effects were visible 
on the monitors and lights during the time when the responsible parties 
waited in the almost-dark for me to dig a flashlight out of my case and 
then lead them to the door.


We recovered the data - at the time, the IS departement was  a 
soup-to-nuts organization, responsible for /every/ aspect of the 
company's IT, including having nightly backups in the safe, and we took 
a lot of pictures of the electrical panel before the electricians 
arrived, just to avoid questions from the insurance carrier.  The damage 
was limited to a few skinned fingers while we rushed around unplugging 
everything, and one failed ballast in an overhead fixture, plus (of 
course) some expensive server disks.


The moral of the story is that too many corporations switch to "Cloud" 
computing as a way to justify using junior-level employees in 
senior-level positions, and they tend to find out the hard way that 
managing a "Cloud-based" system requires /more/ expertise and training, 
not /less/.


FWIW. YMMV.

Bill

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Re: [Discuss] What Happens when a cloud service shuts down

2012-01-21 Thread Bill Horne


On 1/21/2012 4:15 PM, Daniel C. wrote:

On Sat, Jan 21, 2012 at 12:22 PM, Bill Horne  wrote:

I think it's a way of saying "I hired someone else to do it", with specifics
left to the imagination of whomever hears the statement.  For practical
purposes, it's a way of saying "Don't hold me accountable for any mistakes
made in the future: I hired  to take the blame for them".

I never thought I would meet another human who could out-cynicism me.
It is a pleasure to make your virtual acquaintance, sir.


You should read my take on SOPA: http://billhorne.com/.

Bill, who did 25 years at Verizon, and learned from the best

[A cynic is] a man who knows the price of everything and the value of 
nothing"

- Oscar Wilde

"By the time the suckers figure out they paid twice the value, I'll be 
rich and gone"

   - Me

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Re: [Discuss] Fwd: Re: Programming vs Engineering

2012-01-22 Thread Bill Horne


On 1/22/2012 3:05 AM, Matthew Gillen wrote:

Licensing is about having well-established / well-known ways of solving
problems. The problem-space for software is still expanding.  I don't
see how you could come up with licensing until your problem set is
stable (unless you take a very small subset: e.g., JBoss development, or
Win32 driver development).


In computer-related fields, certification has been a substitute for 
licensing in many areas. The problem, however, is that the technology 
has always changed too quickly for any single certification to provide a 
potential employer more than a general indication that an employee is 
able to acquire  a lot of task-oriented knowledge.  The issue, in a 
nutshell, is that there is no consensus about the professional standards 
that should apply to software or computer engineers, and therefore 
employers have found themselves settled for applicants who are more 
likely to do /some/ things well, even if their knowledge locks them and 
their employer into a single vendor's architecture.


I am a Certified NetWare Engineer - for version 3.12 of Novell NetWare, 
which was being shouldered aside by Windows NT at the very time that I 
was taking the seven exams that qualified me to write this sentence. I'm 
also an Microsoft Certified something-or-other: a credential that 
arrived unannounced in the mail after I took my first two exams for 
Windows 2000 certification, just as XP was taking over desktops and 
Windows 2003 (or was it 2002?) was being moved into server rooms. The 
certifications of today have the same problem: employers have learned 
that they are an indicator of skills and training which are likely to be 
obsolete before their holders finish filling out their W-9 forms, and 
job-seekers are more and more leery of being locked into a single 
technology silo that can be shoved aside as quickly as Novell was in 1996.


The difficulty of licensing is that there is no agreement about what 
constitutes "competency", for the same reason that certifications remain 
popular: employers have found out that "experts" are easy to find, but 
that "best practices" are not a substitute for the task-oriented 
knowledge needed to make things actually work. Doctors and lawyers have 
an advantage: the glacial pace of human evolution in the first case, and 
the slow pace of legal change in the later. With fields of study  that 
change so slowly, task-oriented knowledge /is/ generalized expertise, 
and I don't feel it will be possible to agree on licensing standards for 
software engineers unless, and until, the pace of change slows to one 
which spans multiple generations of practitioners.


Bill Horne

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Re: [Discuss] FORTRAN -> ???

2012-01-22 Thread Bill Horne


On 1/22/2012 2:02 PM, Daniel C. wrote:

I was talking to an ex-co-worker last night and he said that he's
having trouble finding a programmer to maintain their FORTRAN
codebase.  The conversation got me thinking - there must be a way to
automatically change older languages (FORTRAN, etc.) into something
newer.  At the very least you should be able to compile the program
into machine code, then use a decompiler to bring it back into C.
That really shouldn't be necessary though - you should be able to have
a compiler move FORTRAN straight into the language of your choice.

Does anyone know of an automated tool to do this?  I checked Google
and a few things came up but nothing that looked particularly helpful.




Dan,

I'm assuming that the tools available to convert FORTRAN to C have 
gotten better since the last time I was exposed to them, but a 
cautionary note is probably still in order.


I was witness to an overly-ambitious project during my time as a Systems 
Analyst in a previous life, and that project spelled the end of a career 
for an up-and-coming manager who was well regarded and respected in the 
company. The man made the mistake of believing forward-looking 
projections made by salesmen for a vendor which promised that 
software-aided-design tools would be able to translate existing COBOL 
and FORTRAN code into C.  A Systems Analyst I knew there, who was 
involved with the project, described the product they were selling as "A 
Gold-plated Cadillac, with Gold-plated hubcaps and Gold-plated tires, 
but without a steering wheel. But (he added) they tell you that when 
they have figured out the steering wheel, /that/ would be Gold-plated, 
too".


There were a number of complicating factors, all of which contributed to 
the disaster, and I mention some of them here to make it clear that 
code-conversion tools /can/ be used if you're careful not to make 
overly-optimistic assumptions about their capabilities, and to allow for 
lots of time to re-integrate the "new" programs into the existing 
application or system.


1. The project was intended to completely replace the existing "big
   iron" billing system, which had been built up over perhaps twenty
   years, with a leaner, more-focused, and markedly more efficient
   system written in C.   C was chosen, as far as I knew, because a
   recently-hired CIO had decided to make it the "official" language
   for all future development.
2. The project started out with the idea that it was possible to
   recover the business rules of the old software and implement them
   into C code by using CAD software to convert "old" code to "new"
   code. In other words, it was a classic "Deus ex machina" error,
   where the staff assumed that the "Gold-plated Cadillac" they had
   purchased would be able to discern what the C code would be, based
   on what it found inside COBOL and FORTRAN programs. Those programs
   had been written by company-trained programmers who had, based on
   their knowledge of the company and its operations, never bothered to
   include logical cases that they assumed, from experience outside the
   billing system, could never occur.
3. The company, unwilling to endure the high cost of retraining
   unionized employees, had decided that the "new" system would be a
   drop-in replacement for the old, with identical interfaces and
   procedures.


Suffice to say that it all collapsed after about a year, and the project 
manager - who had, as I wrote, been a rising star in the company - was 
fired. The moral of the story, as far as I can tell, is that it's not 
usually a good idea to convert "old" code to "new" languages, since the 
"old" code will most likely include decision trees and options that 
reflect a business model which is  either no longer productive or simply 
not worth trying to reconstruct.


In general terms, when I am asked about systems or applications written 
in FORTRAN, or any third-generation language, I recommend replacing the 
3GL application with a current commercial package that will accomplish 
most of the same functions, and that the owner plan for a substantial 
retraining and retooling effort in the process.


FWIW. YMMV.

Bill "God is real unless declared Integer" Horne

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Re: [Discuss] Samba4

2012-01-27 Thread Bill Horne


On 1/27/2012 8:05 PM, Tom Metro wrote:

... it does raise the question of whether it is still a wise recommendation
... to be deploying Samba.

When I first started using Samba I thought it was a fantastic idea, and
I though the old-school UNIX guys that disparaged it were just being
anti-Microsoft, but after using it for a decade I came to view it as a
mess of a protocol with an unreliable and insecure authentication model.


I agree. The protocol isn't pretty, and the security is insecure. But, 
that's the fate of any designer confronted with an existing, well 
established system: use what you can, improve what you can, make it work 
as best you can.



I'm sure with enough care and feeding it can be coerced into behaving
well, but my experience with small scale deployments is that I've
inevitably ran into unexplainable situations where share security had to
be relaxed in order to accomplish what was needed. I've never had that
experience with NFS. And that's not even getting into performance
comparisons.


I'm not an expert on NFS, so I won't compare SAMBA to NFS. It's not 
necessary, anyway.  SAMBA is a bridge between dissimilar architectures, 
and as such, it has to deal with the faults of both. To be sure, the 
permissions are complicated and confusing, and having two password files 
is a PITA, and there are lots of ways to think about its limitations. 
But, giving the need to integrate Windoze-based PCs into a LAN, while 
meeting ever-tighter budgets for back-office functions, SAMBA remains a 
useful tool

.

Of course it isn't fair to simply compare NFS to Samba, as Samba also
encompass name resolution and network-based authentication, but these
only make the situation more complicated, and the inevitable failures
harder to diagnose.

Would you choose to deploy Samba on a newly setup network?


Yes. It's imperfect, but it's avaiable, tested, and reliable. When I 
have to get traffic to flow between the rock of Redmond and the hard 
place of a "I can't afford that" customer, it's what bridges the gap.

Have your experiences with Samba been different?


No, they've matched most other users experiences: frustration,  and 
wondering if there will ever be a better choice. It's not a perfect 
tool, but it's what I've got in the toolbox. Every time I set it up, I 
recall my father's advice to a young plumber's apprentice who agonized 
over every strand of Oakum: "They don't pass us to get it perfect. They 
pay us to get it done."


Bill

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Re: [Discuss] wiki suggestions?

2012-01-29 Thread Bill Horne


On 1/29/2012 12:06 PM, Eric Chadbourne wrote:

Hi All,

I'm going to use a wiki to share some classes on-line.  Some of the 
teachers who will be using the wiki are not very technical.  So a 
simple user interface and ease of use are important.  I also have a 
very strong preference for open source software.  Right now I'm 
thinking http://www.twiki.org/


Any suggestions?


Is phpBB still available?

Bill

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Re: [Discuss] wiki suggestions?

2012-01-30 Thread Bill Horne


On 1/29/2012 12:06 PM, Eric Chadbourne wrote:

Hi All,

I'm going to use a wiki to share some classes on-line.  Some of the
teachers who will be using the wiki are not very technical.  So a
simple user interface and ease of use are important.  I also have a
very strong preference for open source software.  Right now I'm
thinking http://www.twiki.org/

Any suggestions?



I suggest that you involve all the participants in a search for the 
"right" answer, which they will, by definition, arrive at.


It's almost never going to be the program or environment or online tool 
that /you/ are most comfortable with, but it /will/ be the one that your 
users have bought into, and therefore the one they will use. Over time, 
as the tradeoffs of non-optimal first-pass choices become obvious, 
you'll be able to guide the group toward more robust and more easily 
maintained solutions, but if you start out by _dictating_ a course of 
action, it won't work.


FWIW. YMMV.

Bill

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Re: [Discuss] Network Traffic Visualization

2012-02-02 Thread Bill Horne


On 2/1/2012 3:40 PM, Daniel C. wrote:

As we discussed in another thread, I'm taking a class on data
visualization and for my final project I plan to write a piece of
software that will create a visualization of network traffic.  I have
a few questions that will help me get started:

- What problems do you have that a visualization tool could help
solve?  Are they well defined ("I need to keep an eye on http requests
in case we get Slashdotted"), or is it more nebulous ("I just want to
see what's going on in my network")?


Usage spikes, especially for non-standard ports. "Well defined" isn't 
well defined, sad to say: managers tend to brush off anything that 
causes employees to deviate from the script, so it's important to have a 
clear, concise guide for them to follow.




- What do you need to see in order to solve the problem(s)?


The information that will allow the troubleshooter to silence an 
infected or compromised machine quickly. Phone numbers aren't useful: 
users resist any order from someone they don't know. What the guy in the 
hot seat needs is the addressing, control, and security information that 
will allow him/her to drop any given machine out of the network. If your 
network isn't equipped with addressable/programmable Ethernet switches, 
then your system needs to show the lowest-level router that has 
MAC-address filtering capability, or the firewall that can embargo a 
certain port or IP, and (failing that), the closet and jack number that 
the tech can run to.


If you figure out how to keep this information up-to-date without 
needing to have a full-time data librarian, please tell me.




- Do you have any preference for how you see it?  For example, will
you have a single monitor (or projector screen, etc.) just for this
data, or will it be a single window that you check on occasionally,
but is otherwise minimized?
It depends on the personnel that are assigned to the monitoring job. If 
they are marginally trained, then you'll need specific pop-ups that 
can't be dismissed or minimized, and which demand specific action and 
supply all the information needed to accomplish the task. More 
experienced staff members will prefer separate windows that have 
color-coded borders for severity, but which can be "put on hold" while 
key players are paged or in transit.




- What workflows are currently in place to tackle the problems that
could be improved by having access to a visualization tool?


By "workflows", I assume you mean "applications". They run the gamut 
from having "tail" applications on system logs, to email alerts for 
high-water warnings. The short answer is "all of them": a visualization 
tool is mostly useful to create *RELATIVE* indicators that show unusual 
traffic flows, but is also very useful to alert employees to exceptional 
events such as foreign DNS access, web traffic to non-standard proxies, 
IRC traffic, shotgun emails, etc.



Thank you all in advance!  Hopefully I'll be able to produce something
genuinely useful.


When you do, copyright it before you tell anyone or show it to anybody. 
Don't ask me how I know.


Bill

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Re: [Discuss] The next Linux desktop: MATE and Cinnamon

2012-02-10 Thread Bill Horne


On 2/10/2012 3:28 AM, Tom Metro wrote:

On the BLU LinkedIn group ...


No offense, but I feel the BLU doesn't need a "linkedin" group. I looked 
at the page that was mentioned, and more than 50% of my screen was taken 
up by advertisements and promos: ISTM that this email reflector _is_ the 
only "group" the BLU needs. I use linkedin for its intended purpose, and 
I think its fine for _that_, but it's not a portal and I don't think 
using it for "groups" is a productive exercise.


Bill

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Re: [Discuss] Registration is OPEN! East coast LOPSA-PICC Sysadmin Conference, May 11-12, 2012, New Brunswick, NJ

2012-02-28 Thread Bill Horne


On 2/28/2012 9:14 AM, Amy Rich wrote:

Register now and avoid the rush!


Registration is open!

INTEREST IS ZERO!

REGISTER soon! Your boss will laugh you out of his office!!

I suggest new subscribers be placed in "moderate" mode for at least six 
months.


Bill "Am /I/ Rich? Are /you/ Rich?" Horne

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Re: [Discuss] Home Wireless Routers OT

2012-03-05 Thread Bill Horne


On 3/5/2012 1:08 PM, aldo albanese wrote:

On the same topic.  I have a Verizon Fios router and two access points.  Lately 
I have my friends asking for internet access.


Please tell us what the break-even point is, for a shared FiOS line vs. 
Cable or DSL: how many users are needed to drop individual costs below 
the those of the alternatives?  I wonder if my neighbors and I could 
have a micro-network with WiFi.


Bill

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[Discuss] [OT] Security Cameras

2012-03-20 Thread Bill Horne

I'm looking for information about security cameras that can be viewed 
over an IP connection. If you can share knowledge in this area, please 
call me.


Thanks!

Bill

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Re: [Discuss] Laptop memory card needs a good home

2012-04-07 Thread Bill Horne


On 4/7/2012 9:47 AM, Edward Ned Harvey wrote:

From: discuss-bounces+blu=nedharvey@blu.org [mailto:discuss-
bounces+blu=nedharvey@blu.org] On Behalf Of Nathan Meyers

I have a laptop memory card that needs a new home. It's a PC2700 (CL2.5)
512MB DDR SO-DIMM, manufactured by TwinMOS. It worked when I took it
out
of my laptop awhile ago to upgrade - as far as I know is still
functional. If someone is willing to come pick it up in Woburn, let me
know and it's yours.

Eek...  I regularly throw 1G and 2G modules in the garbage, as people
upgrade their laptops to 4G or 8G...  Even the users don't want the 1G or 2G
modules for home, because buying new ones is so cheap...



The BLU did an installfest at Tent City a few years back, and the South 
End Technology Center would welcome donations.


Bill

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Re: [Discuss] Laptop memory card needs a good home

2012-04-07 Thread Bill Horne


On 4/7/2012 12:36 PM, Jerry Natowitz wrote:


Of course you can question the wisdom to putting any time and effort 
into upgrading laptops that are at least 8 years old (like my Thinkpad 
T40 and T42).


No offense, but that depends on the laptop, you know? Older machines may 
be associated with older software (I've seen laptops running DOS-based 
accounting applications), and there's always the retraining cost to 
consider before switching users to a "better" machine that can't run the 
software they're used to.


As with any upgrade, it's important to think about "ripple" effects 
before buying new hardware:


* Internal IT staff may have parts and expertise for existing hardware, 
but no plans to integrate newer models into their support systems.


* A new docking station might arrive without a parallel port, and cause 
significant delays while USB converters are installed and tested to 
connect plotters or other hardware that is unthinkably expensive to 
replace: not to mention the user's impression of the planning effort 
that resulted in such a SNAFU. (Don't ask me how I know).


* Some online backup services rely on disk fingerprints or other 
security that will exclude a new machine and require extra-cost 
conversion efforts.


The list goes on, and it's sometimes simpler and cheaper to keep the 
existing hardware.


Bill

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[Discuss] [OT} Basement cleanout giveaway

2012-04-09 Thread Bill Horne

I'm getting ready to move, so I'm giving away the hardware I've 
accumulated.


I've got some printers, a Cisco 2524 router, a JetDirect card, various 
video and audio cards, a monitor, speakers, some Windows study guides, 
and other bric-a-brac.


I'm in Sharon: sorry, but I can't deliver.

Bill

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Re: [Discuss] A Little OT: The Password Post-It

2012-04-18 Thread Bill Horne


On 4/18/2012 2:16 PM, Richard Pieri wrote:

On 4/18/2012 1:20 PM, Chris O'Connell wrote:

So, end user training?  Good point!


Don't call it that.

Security isn't a destination.  Security isn't the journey.  Security 
is the faithful companion who accompanies you every step of the way.  
If you say "training" then your users are going to perceive security 
as a shackle dragging them down rather than the companion it is.




I will modestly suggest an alternative approach: advertise a free 
seminar on "tax avoidance".  EVERYONE wants to avoid taxes.


When the employees show up, tell them that the most certain way of 
avoiding taxes is to get fired for ignoring security rules.


FWIW. YMMV.

Bill

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Re: [Discuss] Web Maintenance software (for Windows)

2012-06-06 Thread Bill Horne


On 6/6/2012 11:35 AM, Jerry Feldman wrote:

The BLU hosts several guest web sites. One of our sites does not have a
webmaster, and the new webmaster would like to use DreamWeaver, but his
copy does not support SSH. Our server allows access only through SSH and
encryption keys.
What I would like to do is to find a solution for him that does not
require the purchasing of a newer version of DreamWeaver.


You can have him instal WinSCP, and script the transfers: see 
http://winscp.net/eng/docs/scripting for details.


HTH.

Bill

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Re: [Discuss] Web Maintenance software (for Windows)

2012-06-06 Thread Bill Horne


On 6/6/2012 4:16 PM, Jerry Feldman wrote:

On 06/06/2012 12:35 PM, Daniel Barrett wrote:

What I would like to do is to find a solution for him that does not
require the purchasing of a newer version of DreamWeaver. I personally
use emacs and vi as does JABR, but these webmasters are not tech savy.

[Snip]

3. Write a simple batch script, with a simple name like "sync-all," that
uses rsync to copy the files over SSH to your production site, and teach
your non-tech-savvy webmasters to run it from the command line:

   C:\>  sync-all

which runs something like:

   rsync -e ssh -a /cygdrive/c/some/dreamweaver/location yourhost:/path


Too complicated for him.


In that case, you can set Dreamweaver to upload its changes to an 
intermediate site via ftp, and then run a cron job there (or hook the 
ftp session) to forward the files on to the BLU machine via SSH.


Bill

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Re: [Discuss] Web Maintenance software (for Windows)

2012-06-06 Thread Bill Horne


On 6/6/2012 4:13 PM, Jerry Feldman wrote:

On 06/06/2012 12:19 PM, Bill Horne wrote:

On 6/6/2012 11:35 AM, Jerry Feldman wrote:

The BLU hosts several guest web sites. One of our sites does not have a
webmaster, and the new webmaster would like to use DreamWeaver, but his
copy does not support SSH. Our server allows access only through SSH and
encryption keys.
What I would like to do is to find a solution for him that does not
require the purchasing of a newer version of DreamWeaver.

You can have him instal WinSCP, and script the transfers: see
http://winscp.net/eng/docs/scripting for details.



He does not want to do that. I'm not sure that scripting will help him.



IIRC, Dreamweaver includes the capability to substitute a command line 
call for the standard FTP upload method. If that's the case, you can use 
that.


Bill

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[Discuss] Europe hits old internet address limits

2012-09-15 Thread Bill Horne



 The BBC has an interesting story about the coming demise of IPV4 in
 the UK and the rest of Europe.


 It's at http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-19600718


 I think it's time for a meeting on the topic: "IPV6 and you". I'm
 going to have to change my server for the "new" addresses, and I'll
 need all the help I can get.

Bill

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[Discuss] Please help convert a .pst file for use by Evolution

2012-10-03 Thread Bill Horne

Thanks for reading this. 

I've just flattened a seriously owned Wintel box and installed Ubuntu 11.04 LTS 
on it. 

The only remaining task is to convert my wife's emails into a format
that Evolution can use. I've read a bit of the doc on libpst, but it
seems to be overkill for a one-time transfer, so I'm looking for
alternatives.

I have a laptop with Windows 7 and Outhouse Express on it, but that's
the only M$ email software available if any is needed. The files were 
created by Outlook 2000. The .pst file is about 500 KB. 

All suggestions welcome. TIA.

Bill
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[Discuss] I'm looking for a "lightweight" nntp client

2012-10-27 Thread Bill Horne


Thanks for reading this.

I run a usenet group, and I've been given "posting" privileges on an 
nntp server so that I can send Usenet posts out if my regular channels 
fail.


However, the server doesn't understand nnrp, only nntp, so I'm looking 
for a "lightweight" nntp "client" that will speak nntp to the server. 
The alternative is to install my own nntp server, which is overkill, 
especially since it would only be peering with another machine a few 
racks away.


All suggestions welcome.

Bill

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[Discuss] The best Neal Stephenson quote

2012-11-24 Thread Bill Horne

This is the best Neal Stephenson quote I've ever seen, at least 
pertaining to open source software:


"Hacker with Bullhorn: "Save your money! Accept one of our free tanks! 
It is invulnerable, and can drive
across rocks and swamps at ninety miles an hour while getting a hundred 
miles to the gallon!"


Prospective Station Wagon Buyer: "I know what you say is 
true...but...er...I don't know how to maintain a tank!"


Bullhorn: "You don't know how to maintain a station wagon either!"

Buyer: "But this dealership has mechanics on staff. If something goes 
wrong with my station wagon, I can take a day
off work, bring it here, and pay them to work on it while I sit in the 
waiting room for hours, listening to elevator music."


Bullhorn: "But if you accept one of our free tanks, we will send 
volunteers to your house to fix it for free while you sleep!"


Buyer: "Stay away from my house, you freak!"


--Neal Stephenson 
<http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/545.Neal_Stephenson>,/In the 
Beginning...was the Command Line 
<http://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/530507>/


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Re: [Discuss] webmin

2013-01-25 Thread Bill Horne


On 1/24/2013 1:49 PM, Mark Woodward wrote:
 A GUI for this stuff should reduce the need for skilled admins to 
add/remove users, check logs, or check hard disk status.


GUI interfaces have their place: they are handy for routine tasks that 
change little from one occasion to another.


But ...

Over time, managers start to believe that GUI-based software can be a 
substitute for properly trained IT personnel, and at that point, the IT 
organization starts a downward spiral, as managers chase a deus ex 
machina that they hope will take the place of competent employees.


The first, and most obvious effect, is lessened security: semi-skilled 
workers will always rely on the cookbook pages that they have used 
before, and thus they will create all users with the same set of 
privileges, often including unnecessary authority to access backups, to 
reset passwords, and other features that their supervisors assume are 
"harmless" and "convenient" for everyone to have.


The downward spiral accelerates as the out-of-their-depth "experts" (who 
have been set up to fail) find out that they are expected to learn "just 
enough" about multiple GUI-based software tools to accomplish "just 
enough" to keep their bosses from looking like fools: and then they 
start to find problems, such as allocation of gargantuan volumes to 
what-should-have-been tiny backup sets, just because the GUI doesn't 
have any provision to compress and chain multiple small files together, 
or reams of paper wasted because the GUI default for newly-created print 
queues is to require job-separation sheets on every printout, or even 
duplicate IP addresses assigned to multiple router interfaces because 
the managers assumed that the cookie-cutter, reduced-skill-set employees 
could be given another recipe book that would enable them to do 
everything the high-priced guys used to.


A GUI is nice - sometimes - and for the same reason that a Master 
Carpenter will use a jig to fit hinges for /some/, but not /all/, doors 
in a building. Let's face it: It's impossible to cram a Master's 
expertise and experience into a single set of instructions, and the 
results are as predictable as the fact that the GUI designers start to 
modify their software so as to facilitate sales of related business 
sectors. The problem, in essence, is that what-you-see-is-what-you-get 
interfaces, if deployed without proper planning, will become 
what-you-see-is-ALL-you-get.


Bill

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Re: [Discuss] Encouraging Children to Explore Open Source

2013-02-03 Thread Bill Horne


On 2/3/2013 7:50 PM, Chris O'Connell wrote:

Can anyone recommend any ways/programs/resources to encourage interest in
Open Source to a kid of this age?


I suggest you set up an Apache2 server, and teach him how to put up a 
small web page.


The key to getting kids interested is to give them something that they 
can show their friends.


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Re: [Discuss] Sample Contract for Technology / Software consultant

2013-02-21 Thread Bill Horne


On 2/21/2013 2:26 PM, Greg Rundlett (freephile) wrote:
I paid $1,000.00, $520.00 of which will go for the payment to the 
Commonwealth of Massachusetts for the filing fee for the LLC


That's nice to know, and thanks for sharing. Do any of the readers know 
if it's cheaper to incorporate in places like Delaware or Florida?


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Re: [Discuss] Secure VNC

2013-02-22 Thread Bill Horne


On 2/22/2013 8:32 AM, Jerry Feldman wrote:

I was asked at last Wednesday's meeting about how to run VNC in a secure
environment. There is a package called SecureVNC. At work, I use
UltraVNC viewer from Windows 7, and it has a SecureVNC plugin, but you
can also secure VNC through an ssh tunnel. There is a lot of discussion
on how to do this online.


Speaking of ssh tunnels, can someone figure out how to tunnel through 
ssh to a virtual domain?


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Re: [Discuss] ssh tunnels

2013-02-22 Thread Bill Horne


On 2/22/2013 11:04 AM, Rich Pieri wrote:

On Fri, 22 Feb 2013 11:00:13 -0500
Bill Horne  wrote:


Speaking of ssh tunnels, can someone figure out how to tunnel through
ssh to a virtual domain?

Clarify what you mean by "virtual domain".


Many web servers, mine included, are set up so that they deliver 
different pages, based on which domain name is included in the http 
headers sent with the request.


For example:

67.190.84.154 - - [17/Feb/2013:15:42:25 -0800] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 4816 
"http://billhorne.com/"; "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:18.0) 
Gecko/20100101 Firefox/18.0"


Since the "200" line includes the domain name, Apache knows that it 
needs to deliver a "splash" page from the "billhorne.com" tree. If the 
request were for  the "william-warren.com" domain, Apache would deliver 
a "splash" page appropriate for a different domain. The point is that 
Apache needs to see the domain name in the "200" request, in order to 
know which page to deliver. That's why it's called a "virtual domain": 
it doesn't depend on the IP address per se.


Of course, it's also possible to set up the server so that it delivers 
the same page no matter which domain name is included in the headers. 
There is usually a default "splash" page to handle requests that are for 
an invalid domain, or which were sent with only an IP address. Since ssh 
tunnels require that the browser access the tunneled site via a 
localhost port, Apache doesn't get the desired domain name in the 
header, and it delivers the default page instead of the one that the 
user wanted.


Bill

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Re: [Discuss] [OT] Smart Phones

2013-03-01 Thread Bill Horne

information I can get from a map, or a bus schedule, or any clock 
on any wall I pass, or from any one of the secretaries whom work with 
any one of the expected participants in a meeting.


New ways of doing things don't work well unless, and until, a major 
fraction of the affected population adopts them. Cellphones and other 
mobile computing devices aren't in that zone yet: they are a /tool/, but 
not the only one.


Bill Horne


1.) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celestial_navigation
2.) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoke_signals

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Re: [Discuss] [OT] Smart Phones

2013-03-01 Thread Bill Horne


On 3/1/2013 12:44 PM, Kent Borg wrote:

On 03/01/2013 11:47 AM, Rich Pieri wrote:

But again, the nature of the activity hasn't changed, just the tools

used to perform them.

You make sense, but at the expense of being sensible.


No disrespect, but I disagree.



By your logic electric power and telegraph and trains and cars and 
radio and TV and lasers and maybe even space travel didn't change the 
nature of activity either, just the tools.


In the sense that the "activity" is spending a major portion of each 
workday earning the money that goes to support multi-national 
corporations, you're right.  In the sense that the "activity" is 
acquiring enough food to stay alive, shelter, and a chance to contribute 
to society, we differ.


My wife, who is a nurse, has a friend who works in the Public Health 
Service in Pennsylvania. They spent an unforgettable evening together in 
Lancaster, talking over old classmates and old memories, while we sat on 
the porch of a guest house, opposite a field where fireflies were as 
thick as the stars overhead, and where the only other sounds to be heard 
were made by horse-drawn wagons and carriages.


Be careful, so the saying goes, of what you ask for: we may have asked 
for more convenience in our lives, and more time for our families, and 
more options when choosing what route to take from out safe suburban 
enclave into the dangerous, dirty, crowded, threatening city. What we 
*got* was an electronic leash that makes us available to our rulers 
twenty-four by seven, that requires us to substitute knee-jerk reactions 
for heads-up thinking, and which condemns us to appear as if we are 
subalterns who need to be told what to do during every second of our lives.


I think the Amish have a better take on things: the limiting factor, 
after all, is human evolution.


Bill

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Re: [Discuss] [OT] Smart Phones

2013-03-01 Thread Bill Horne


On 3/1/2013 12:52 PM, Daniel Barrett wrote:

Mark Woodward  wrote:

I think I was the last human being above the age of 16 to get a smart
phone.

You're not the last. I still don't own one and perhaps never will.  My days
are already jam-packed with technology; the last thing I desire is to carry
more technology around with me.


I have a "smart" phone  of sorts: it was a gift from a ham operator who 
I helped to
connect his radio to his computer. He had just bought one with a bigger 
screen, and
offered me his old one: I got to renew the $30/month "everything" rate, 
and since
that is in the ballpark of what I was spending for voice service, I'm 
content to use it.



#define LIFESTYLE_GENTLE_RANT 1

Other than GPS (which I have in my car), I have yet to encounter a single
smartphone app that would make my life *happier*. This is not a troll so
please don't respond with your dozen favorite apps. :-) My priorities are
just different.


You're preaching to the choir!

I'm not sure if being wary of portable devices is a generational gap, a 
cultural divide, or a
class difference. No matter: the fact is that I'm happiest when I 
*don't* have the phone on,

since I really do think of it as an electronic leash.


If I'm standing in a long, boring line waiting for something, I don't want
to whip out a phone and surf the web or play a game. I'd rather think
interesting thoughts, compose music in my head, read a book, or harangue
the person responsible for the long delay. (I'd chat with the person next
to me, but he's playing with his smartphone.)


I take a paperback when I'm going to have to queue up for something. I 
am, however,
prone to occasional fits of impatience, so if the clerks are gossiping, 
I'll just shout
"I sure hope this doesn't take too long!". It always speeds up the line 
immensely.



Work is insanely busy. So when I'm not at work, I like living slowly,
cultivating patience.  Enjoying a meal without the beep of a text
message. I understand that others need to stay in contact with work
24x7. I've chosen not to live that way, and to accept whatever compromises
come with that choice. (Even so, I'm having a successful career in the tech
industry. It's a balancing act.)


I feel your pain. When my brother-in-law was just out of college, he 
came home with a
pager on his belt, back when they were still rare, and I said "You must 
be an important
person now!". He smiled, and said "No, Bill: the important people *do* 
the beeping!"



The only tough part is not having mobile access to my calendar. This means
every so often, I make an appointment for a time that's already booked, so
I have to phone later to change it. It's a small price to pay to stay
unhooked.


I think of it as "unchained". ;-)

Bill

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Re: [Discuss] [OT] Smart Phones

2013-03-01 Thread Bill Horne


On 3/1/2013 2:56 PM, Gordon Marx wrote:

On Fri, Mar 1, 2013 at 2:53 PM, Bill Horne  wrote:

My wife, who is a nurse, has a friend who works in the Public Health Service
in Pennsylvania. They spent an unforgettable evening together in Lancaster,
talking over old classmates and old memories, while we sat on the porch of a
guest house, opposite a field where fireflies were as thick as the stars
overhead, and where the only other sounds to be heard were made by
horse-drawn wagons and carriages.

As you know, it's impossible to remember things or talk to people face
to face if you use any sort of technology whatsoever, or if anyone
around you is doing so.



Let's not be disingenuous, Gordon. We both know that that "always on" 
society and the
expensive devices some people use to stay chained to it have created a 
parallel "Never Off"
world whose adherents are condemned to be at work from the moment they 
wake up

until the moment they fall asleep.

It's a lot more relaxing and fulfilling to talk to an old friend when 
you know for a fact that
your friend and your family and your church all expect you to stop 
working when the sun
goes down. It's a lot more healthy to follow the diurnal rhythms which 
mankind was

bound to for all but the last couple of centuries.

The Amish elders don't forbid their flocks from using modern technology: 
they just
keep it at arms length. They ask the faithful to avoid using 
electricity, because it

requires men to work on the Sabbath, but when woodworking shops have a
legitimate need for electric tools, they simply install a generator to 
power
them, and shut it down at the end of the workday. I've heard that it's 
actually

less expensive than getting power from the electric grid.

I'm not Amish, and I made a decision a long time ago to make my living 
by tending
machines. I accepted the requirements of being a technical professional: 
3 AM
wake-up calls, weekend call-outs, and even a terminal in my home that 
allowed

me to solve problems without having to scrape ice or snow off my car, a
decade before dial-up Internet connections were common.

The reservations I and other readers have expressed are, to my mind, just a
common-sense reflection of our desire to have a semblance of privacy and
a modicum of quiet enjoyment while we're in our homes. If you choose to
make yourself available to others at all times, that's /your/ choice.

Bill Horne

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[Discuss] Fwd: Special promotion/discount from rsync.net

2013-03-05 Thread Bill Horne

TWIMC,

I got this from another reflector. Feel free to pass it along.

Bill

 Original Message 
Subject:[Announce] Special promotion/discount from rsync.net
Date:   Fri, 1 Mar 2013 11:36:43 -0500
From:   Nick Bebout 
Reply-To:   disc...@lists.prgmr.com
To: annou...@lists.prgmr.com

Hi everyone,

Normally we wouldn't send out any sales-related emails to the announce
list, however, this offer presents a very special discount to our
customers which is significantly cheaper than what rsync.net offers to the
general public and we believe many of our customers would be interested.

In interests of transparency, we (prgmr.com, Inc.), make nothing when our
customers sign up with this offer, and rsync.net has not paid us anything
to send it out to you.  Luke was actually asked if he wanted to do some
sort of reseller arrangement, and he declined, and asked that all the
savings be passed on to our customers.

The account they are offering (10GB) would normally cost $86.40 per year,
but our customers may purchase the same 10GB account for $12.00 per year.

See below for an email from rsync.net describing their offer.

Thanks,

Nick Bebout
prgmr.com, Inc.
n...@prgmr.com

--

rsync.net has been providing offsite backup since 2001.  We give our
customers an empty UNIX filesystem that they can do whatever they like
with.  We have two US locations as well as Swiss and Hong Kong locations.

Our platform is ZFS based.  In addition to end to end data integrity, this
enables all customers to have 7 days of versions, or snapshots, at the
fileystem level - with no setup or maintenance required.

We are committed to offering the simplest, most standard, native UNIX
offsite backup environment.  Please use the following URLs for very deeply
discounted offsite backup packages for prgmr users:

A 10 GB account, at any location, $12/year:

https://www.rsync.net/signup/signup_offer.html?code=prgmr

A 10 GB geo-redundant account (two locations), $20/year:

https://www.rsync.net/signup/signup_offer.html?code=prgmrg

Some notes:

- 10 GB is the minimum account size for this offering
- If you need more than 10 GB, email i...@rsync.net
- If you have other questions, email i...@rsync.net

We look forward to serving you!

rsync.net, Inc.
i...@rsync.net
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[Discuss] Opinions needed: wiki software

2013-03-10 Thread Bill Horne

I've been asked to help improve a wiki site that is currently using 
Mediawiki, and I'm seeking
information about alternative wiki packages which might be a better 
match for the uses

that are needed.

Here are the bullet points:

 * A combination of public and private info, with about 99% of it being
   "public".
 * The group needs to be able to restrict access to the private
   material, with
   a reasonable level of security.
 * The group installed a wiki to make it easier for individual group
   members to edit
   both shared and personal pages, and switched to Mediawiki because of
   some
   undefined security concern with a different wiki package.
 * The content of the wiki changes very slowly.
 * The Mediawiki documentation specifically warns against trying to use
   it for
   both public and private pages: it's used for Wikipedia, and isn't
   geared for
   a mixed public/private site.

All suggestions welcome. Thanks for your help.

Bill

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Re: [Discuss] Opinions needed: wiki software

2013-03-10 Thread Bill Horne


On 3/10/2013 1:31 PM, Rich Pieri wrote:

On Sun, 10 Mar 2013 13:10:04 -0400
Bill Horne  wrote:


   * The content of the wiki changes very slowly.

Then you don't need a wiki. You need a document management system.



The groups doesn't have any money, so any solution has to be 
open-source. Please suggest some Document Management Systems that 
qualify, and tell us why you recommend them.


I'll ask a favor, in advance: please couch your recommendation  in terms 
which I can pass along to absolutely non-technical users. My hardest job 
is going to be convincing other group members that they will benefit 
from learning to use a new system: it's an all-volunteer effort, and 
nobody gets paid, so I have to be able to persuade the members that 
they'll benefit from going outside of their comfort zones.


Thank you.

Bill

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Re: [Discuss] Opinions needed: wiki software

2013-03-11 Thread Bill Horne


On 3/11/2013 2:19 AM, Rich Braun wrote:

I use Wordpress for this kind of CMS-oriented site. It has the user account and 
publish/private features you want, in a straightforward UI. It's definitely not 
just a blog tool, and probably has more open-source plugins than any other CMS 
or wiki system, but even without plugins it has the essentials of what you 
describe. Put that on your short list for consideration.


Thanks for the tip: I appreciate your help.

Since I already have a Wordpress installation on my server, it's 
certainly on the list!


Is there a "wiki-like" skin for Wordpress that will allow multiple user 
logins,

public/private content areas, and email notifications when designated
pages change?

Bill

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Re: [Discuss] Opinions needed: wiki software

2013-03-11 Thread Bill Horne

On 3/11/2013 10:06 AM, Peter Jalajas wrote:

--
Message: 1
Date: Sun, 10 Mar 2013 13:10:04 -0400
From: Bill Horne
To: discuss@blu.org
Subject: [Discuss] Opinions needed: wiki software

I've been asked to help improve a wiki site that is currently using
Mediawiki, and I'm seeking
information about alternative wiki packages which might be a better
match for the uses
that are needed.

Hi Bill,

Can you give us a sense of the scale and complexity of their needs?

I guess some more info won't hurt: the site is http://www.big-8.org/ . 
It is hosted on a server
owned by the late Alexander Bartolich, who was the Chairman of the Big-8 
Board, of which
I'm a member. The site has remained online through the kindness of his 
heirs, but of
course that can't continue forever, and updating the software or 
deleting users or
doing other things that require root access will necessitate moving it 
to another server

at some point.

The mysqldump output from the existing db is about 22MB in size, so this 
isn't a very large
site. I want to be sure that I make the best choice for its replacement, 
and that's why
I'm posting these questions to the BLU. This is, of course, the classic 
"point of pain"
debate: do I introduce a new paradigm and re-educate the users, or try 
to make the

old one fit?

So the first question is "How much effort will it take to move the 
existing wiki"?
I installed Mediawiki 1.20 on a test machine with no problems. If we're 
going to keep

using Mediawiki, I need to move the data.

 * Is there a way to transfer the content when the old site is on v
   1.18 of
   Mediawiki and the current version is 1.20? I tried to do it via an SQL
   dump, but that didn't work, so I'm looking for a way to "roll" the db
   into the new release.  I don't want to backport the new install to v1.18
   unless that's the only option.

 * Can I use the "export" and "import" options of Mediawiki to move
   all the pages over? I tried /that/, and had mixed success: the "splash"
   page didn't change, although it looks like the documents were moved.

Next up on the list is the question "If not Mediawiki, then what"?

 * Can other wiki packages import the XML-formatted data that I
   exported from the old server? Which ones?
 * Are there more appropriate systems, wiki or other, that would
   be a better fit for a small volunteer organization with a limited
   number of technical members?

I will, of course, research the wiki and other options that Peter and 
other BLU members
have suggested, but the most important question at this point in the 
process is
not of /which/ wiki to use, but whether a wiki is the best option: the 
biggest cost

I need to consider is the time of the volunteers, and thus of whether a new
package is justified. I've only spent about five hours of time, but now 
I'm at the
"did I really want to do /that/?" phase of this project, so I appreciate 
your help:

I think it's worth doing, but I want to do it right.

Bill

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Re: [Discuss] Opinions needed: wiki software

2013-03-11 Thread Bill Horne


On 3/11/2013 6:33 PM, John Abreau wrote:
Does mediawiki keep everything in mysql? I've used TWiki in the past, 
and one of
the things I really liked about it was that the wiki pages were all 
stored as regular

text files, under RCS version control.


John,

I don't know, sorry. I /think/ the answer is "Yes", but I don't know 
enough about Mediawiki to say.


How is TWiki for ease-of-use and ease-of-adoption?

Bill

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Re: [Discuss] DNS question about DNSENUM.PL

2013-03-27 Thread Bill Horne


On 3/27/2013 1:13 PM, Derek Martin wrote:

On Wed, Mar 27, 2013 at 10:12:28AM -0400, Rich Pieri wrote:

Security by obscurity is no security at all.


This is a popular mantra of paid security professionals, but it is a
fallacy, and in fact is a tool that those very same people employ
every day (e.g. recommendations to run ssh servers on non-standard
ports, configure servers to respond with non-default banners, etc.).
The benefits of such measures often amount to foiling script kiddies
who may otherwise compromise your otherwise vulnerable system with
zero effort, but that itself can be a big win, since this is the
overwhelming majority of attack traffic that most sites see.


When combined with port-knocking, having a non-standard port for a 
service like ssh
is an effective means of preventing port-scanning attacks. It doesn't 
prevent an
attacker from knocking on all ports that end in "21", before trying all 
ports that end
in "22", or from gaining root access to your server by exploiting a bug 
in Exim4, but it

_IS_ an effective tool when properly deployed.

There is a difference between putting the key to your home under a rock 
in the front
yard or giving it to a neighbor: while the local "Script kiddie" may be 
willing to beat
up your neighbor to obtain the key to your home, it is not "security via 
obscurity".
What we have to deal with instead is a tendency I call 
"security-by-stupidity", i.e., the

tendency of some executives to assume that M$ has it all under control.


It's virtually impossible to completely harden your network against a
very knowledgable and determined attacker.  So, PART of the point of
securing your systems (passive measures) is to slow them down, to give
you a chance to notice their activites, so you can react and do
something about it (active measures).  Security through obscurity IS a
useful tool to that end.


*/ALL/* security is an effort to slow an attacker down. Underwriters 
Laboratories
rates safes in terms of the length of time they can withstand well-known 
attacks: a
safe with a UL rating of TRTL-30 is able to withstand an attack by an 
experienced
safecracker, with a torch and tools, for thirty minutes.  It is 
impossible to harden

/*ANY*/ network completely: the Defender's Dilemma applies.

That doesn't mean that you put the family jewels in a disguise safe 
among your cooking
spices: every experienced criminal will always looks there. It /*DOES*/ 
mean that
any security effort has to combine evaluations of the risks, rewards, 
and costs of each

security measure. The Iranian nuclear specialists could have anticipated
 STUXNET: they were simply unable to do so because of a cultural bias that
prevented them from anticipating that their own employees might be part 
of a

virus-delivery system.



It just needs to be understood that it is not sufficient, and it is
one of the least effective methods... you need security in depth, and
obscurity is a VERY SMALL part of that, but it is indeed a part.  The
REAL gains you get from it are small, but they're often trivial to
implement, so they're cost-effective.  In the end, security is about
trading costs... just like buying insurance.


Well, I (obviously) disagree.  S-T-O might be part of a /sales/ effort, 
and I'm as likely
as the next salesman to take advantage of my customers' preconceived 
notions

about how Hollywood taught them everything they need to know about
computers, but it is /*NOT*/ part of a realistic security program.

Security-by-obscurity is, IMNSHO, the all-too-human tendency to dismiss 
certain
attacks as "impossible", merely because they seem improbable. That 
doesn't mean
that I will ignore them or minimize their risks to my customers, merely 
that I
will account for their tendency to underrate them, and recommend 
appropriate
alternatives, such as added insurance, in place of the defense-in-depth 
needed to

secure against them.

Bill

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Re: [Discuss] DNS question about DNSENUM.PL

2013-03-27 Thread Bill Horne


On 3/27/2013 4:00 PM, Rich Pieri wrote:
--On Wednesday, March 27, 2013 3:28 PM -0400 Bill Horne 
 wrote:



When combined with port-knocking, having a non-standard port for a
service like ssh is an effective means of preventing port-scanning 
attacks.

It doesn't prevent an ...


It also makes you vulnerable to denial of service.


As does having a T-1 connection on local cables that anyone with a 
ladder can disrupt, or
having the vault alarm in a bank routed via a publicly-documented FM 
channel to a
well-known alarm center, or using UPS units that are only rated for the 
time it takes
to shut down your servers, or having a server room with an 
outside-facing window
that could be used to pour in gasoline, or renting a building with only 
plaster walls
between you and your co-tenants. There are a thousand ways to disrupt 
service,
but most corporate threat profiles can safely disregard them: the risk, 
at least with
the class of customer I deal with, is in having someone gain 
unauthorized access,

not in having someone unable to access the system for a legitimate purpose.



... but [port-knocking and mapping] _IS_ an effective tool when 
properly deployed.


I claim that obfuscation cannot be properly deployed. Obfuscation is 
wrapping a towel around your head and pretending that if you can't see 
the service then neither can anyone else.


Changing the port isn't giving your neighbor the key to your home. 
Keys are authentication tokens. The port is analogous to the keyway. 
Changing the port is the same as moving the keyway. The lock is still 
there and you still need the correct key; you've just moved it up or 
down from where it is normally located which is usually a convenient 
waist/elbow height.


The only security that you've added is that blind thieves are going to 
have a slightly harder time finding the keyway.


It's more like changing the lock to an unmarked housing that makes the 
lockpicker guess at
which manufacturer he's up against. As I wrote before, security is about 
delaying the
attacker until help can arrive, so if port-mapping and blocking is /all/ 
we do, then we're
going to fail: we've only slowed the attackers down. This is why most 
bank-vault
break-ins happen on weekends, since it takes more than sixteen hours to 
breach
a reinforced concrete barrier. It's also why banks don't keep as much 
cash in
their vaults on weekends, and why safe-deposit box holders are advised 
to purchase
insurance. It's /all/ about buying time: a $10 lock won't delay a thief 
long enough
for your neighbor to notice that there's someone next door, and being 
unwilling to

remove the system from /any/ chance of access will leave us vulnerable to
common-password attacks.

It is, of course, possible that the pool of black-hat expertise will 
become deep
enough that these measures are no longer worthwhile. We still have to 
consider

the threat model against available safeguards, and the cost of implementing
them. Telling ssh users to click on an icon, instead of opening the ssh 
client

themselves, is one of those costs.

Security is an arms race. If you have a defense that makes all potential 
attackers
think they lose by attacking you, then you win by default. Making your 
house
harder to break into than your neighbor's isn't security by obscurity: 
it's just the
first step you take to protect your house against a targeted attack. 
There are,

of course, other steps, and each must be evaluated in terms of the time
it takes an attacker to overcome them.

Bill

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[Discuss] Point-and-cluck groupware

2013-04-09 Thread Bill Horne


Thanks for reading this.

I'm involved with a volunteer-based organization, which has members in 
different
parts of the world, and which has a need to share private information 
with a minimum

of fuss.

The private information is composed of confidential files that the 
public should
not see, (Not the nuclear launch codes, but not just trivia, either) 
emails between

the members, and occasional online chats.

I'd appreciate ideas on how to give the members access to some form of 
groupware

which would allow these features:

 * Common file area that any member could contribute to
 * Email notifications when files change, if a member wants them
 * Ability to have online chat sessions, on the same idea as IRC
 * Group email reflector
 * Cannot require any purpose built software. A web browser and a
   POP-capable email client are the /only/ assumptions I can make about
   the
   computers used by the members.

Now, I've investigated various flavors of wiki, but I'm looking for 
something that's
available as a one-stop service for /all/ the items above. I'll consider 
something

that's reasonably priced, but advertiser-supported services
(Yahoogle, etc.) are a non-starter.

I need "Ease-of-use" with a capital "E". All suggestions are welcome, and
thank you for your help.

Bill

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Re: [Discuss] Point-and-cluck groupware

2013-04-09 Thread Bill Horne


On 4/9/2013 3:40 PM, Shirley Márquez Dúlcey wrote:

Is point-and-cluck groupware used only by hunt-and-peck typists?


No, no, I meant to type point and clank, I mean punt and click, I mean 
pint and cliche, I meant pant and clock ...




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Re: [Discuss] Verizon phasing out copper

2013-05-04 Thread Bill Horne


On 5/2/2013 7:54 PM, Richard Pieri wrote:
Which makes the alarm system a non-issue, too, since VZ will leave the 
copper in place. 


Alarm systems have been using modems and audio-band signalling for many 
years now, and there are so few McCulloch loop based burglar alarms that 
a lack of "dry" copper pairs won't affect the industry one way or another.


Bill

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Re: [Discuss] Verizon phasing out copper

2013-05-08 Thread Bill Horne


On 5/8/2013 4:21 PM, Tom Metro wrote:

Tom Metro wrote:

Today I received a letter from Verizon regarding my residence in Newton
saying "Verizon is replacing telephone wires...we'll need to move your telephone
service to our new fiber network. ..."

FYI, this note was also published in the Telecom Digest:
https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/comp.dcom.telecom/ortzIMuDUIk

which generated a few interesting responses...at least until it went on
off the tangent of discussing electromagnetic pulse weapons. :-)



Since I'm the Moderator of the Telecom Digest, I asked Tom, and several 
other posters, for
permission to report their emails: along with the responses from Digest 
readers, it's

been a very interesting thread.


If any BLU members are interested in telecom matters, I'll be glad to 
sign you up for the
email version, which can be set to "Digest" format, or for individual 
email delivery.



Bill

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Re: [Discuss] Spread Sheet printing question

2013-06-04 Thread Bill Horne


On 6/4/2013 9:40 AM, Jerry Feldman wrote:
I have been using spreadsheets since I bought my first copy of 
VisiCalc from Dan Bricklin at the New England Appletree meeting in 1978.
I have a spreadsheet (Libre Office Calc) that takes up 2 pages. The 
main question is how do I get Calc to print the column headings on 
each page.


The other 2 minor questions are how can I suppress the Sheet number 
that appears on the top of the page as well as the page number.


When I print, I select the data I want to print, and print selection.



Assuming it's the same as Open Office, here's a snippet from the help file:

If you have a sheet that is so large that it will be printed multiple 
pages, you can set up rows or columns to repeat on each printed page.


As an example, If you want to print the top two rows of the sheet as 
well as the first column (A)on all pages, do the following:


1.

   Choose *Format - Print Ranges - Edit*. The *Edit Print Ranges*
   dialog appears.

2.

   Click the icon at the far right of the *Rows to repeat* area.

   The dialog shrinks so that you can see more of the sheet.

3.

   Select the first two rows and, for this example, click cell A1 and
   drag to A2.

   In the shrunk dialog you will see $1:$2. Rows 1 and 2 are now rows
   to repeat.

4.

   Click the icon at the far right of the *Rows to repeat* area. The
   dialog is restored again.

5.

   If you also want column A as a column to repeat, click the icon at
   the far right of the *Columns to repeat* area.

6.

   Click column A (not in the column header).

7.

   Click the icon again at the far right of the *Columns to repeat* area.


For the "Sheet number", choose Format-Page-Header, and click the "Edit" 
box.


HTH.

Bill, who amazed the forman at Bowdoin Toll by putting printer 
formatting codes into Visicalc cells


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Re: [Discuss] Spreadsheet printing question

2013-06-04 Thread Bill Horne


On 6/4/2013 11:14 AM, Jerry Feldman wrote:

Thanks Bill,
To suppress the sheet# and page#, [just] turn header/footer off.


On the subject of spreadsheets, here's a different question: I'd like to 
read advice from those whom routinely use Pivot Tables (a.k.a. DataPilot 
tables) in spreadsheets. Please tell me when they are most useful, and 
send any URL's that point to tutorials I can read. As a 3GL 
count-the-columns programmer, I'm looking for ways to simplify (and 
speed up) report generation.


Thank you.

Bill


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[Discuss] Fwd: Important information from Ubuntuforums.org

2013-07-23 Thread Bill Horne

I got the following notice:

 Original Message 
Subject:Important information from Ubuntuforums.org
Date:   Mon, 22 Jul 2013 06:56:50 +
From:   Ubuntu forums 
Reply-To:   for...@ubuntu.com
To: (My Address)

Hello,

You are receiving this message because you have an account registered with this 
address on ubuntuforums.org.

The Ubuntu forums software was compromised by an external attacker. As a 
result, the attacker has gained access to read your username,
email address and an encrypted copy of your password from the forum database.

If you have used this password and email address to authenticate at any other 
website,
you are urged to reset the password on those accounts immediately as the 
attacker
may be able to use the compromised personal information to access these other
accounts. It is important to have a distinct password for different accounts.

The ubuntuforums.org website is currently offline and we are working to restore
this service. Please take the time to change your ubuntuforums.org account 
password
when service is restored.

We apologize for any inconvenience to the Ubuntu community, thank you for your 
understanding.

The Canonical Sysadmins.

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Re: [Discuss] Google Chrome

2013-07-31 Thread Bill Horne


On 7/3/2013 10:39 AM, Richard Pieri wrote:

Jerry Feldman wrote:


Second. There are several web sites that reject Chrome. In Firefox
there is a mode to pretend it is IE. Is there a way in Chrome to fool
the site into thinking it is Firefox. (Again, I have not really
researched this).


There's a user agent switcher in the Chrome webstore.  Dunnow if it
works or not. I dumped Chrome because of all the WontFix UI bugs.



I'm of two minds on this issue: on the one hand, I don't like Google 
being unwilling to offer compatibility, but OTOH, their marketing savvy, 
coupled with deep pockets and long-term view, allows them to insist that 
Chrome users come to terms with the M$ monopoly on "portable" code, and 
/that/ will mean that the web designers who settled on IE as "good 
enough" will have to redo their code to comply with standards and 
(hopefully) eliminate M$-specific language from the web.


No pain, no gain.


Bill
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Re: [Discuss] Google Chrome

2013-07-31 Thread Bill Horne


On 7/4/2013 7:39 AM, Edward Ned Harvey (blu) wrote:

From: discuss-bounces+blu=nedharvey@blu.org [mailto:discuss-
bounces+blu=nedharvey@blu.org] On Behalf Of Bill Horne

allows them to insist that
Chrome users come to terms with the M$ monopoly on "portable" code, and
/that/ will mean that the web designers who settled on IE as "good
enough" will have to redo their code to comply with standards and
(hopefully) eliminate M$-specific language from the web.

MMMmmm...  I think those days are gone.

Microsoft themselves, support IE, Firefox, Safari, and Chrome.
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/support/supported-browsers-in-office-2013-and-office-365-HA102789344.aspx

Intuit QuickBooks Online specifically supports chrome and nothing else.


Intuit has always been evil, but that's a topic for another thread.

My bank still demands IE for online banking, and they use a service 
bureau, instead of their own site, so this isn't a small problem and it 
isn't gone yet.


Bill

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Re: [Discuss] KeePassX

2013-07-31 Thread Bill Horne


On 7/23/2013 10:43 PM, Tom Metro wrote:
(It seems most hack attempts we hear about lately have been against 
fairly inconsequential
sites, where the hackers must be primarily after validated email 
addresses, and hoping

users have reused passwords on multiple sites.)


They are primarily after the password hashes as well as the email 
addresses. The addresses are the user id's for multiple sites, and the 
hashes allow a "Dictionary attack", where they just run every word in 
the dictionary through a hash function, and see what matches.


Since my password isn't in a dictionary, and doesn't contain any common 
substitutions that would allow for guessing, I'm not concerned about the 
breach.


Bill

--
Bill Horne
339-364-8487

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