AcoustiRack silent server cabinet arrived as promised, today, in
two large cardboard boxes securely strapped to a double-length
wooden palette. With the welcome assistance of the delivery driver,
who as usual pointed out that he shouldn't be helping me unload but
then proved perfectly willing to do just that, we dragged the thing
off the truck and deposited it in my front garden - at which point
he roared off leaving me looking at around 180Kg of hardware.
I've never assembled a cabinet from flat-pack
before, and I must admit to slight nagging doubts that the end
result will be as rigid as the conventional, welded models I'm used
to. The aluminium alloy extrusions that form the frame are
impressively crenulated in cross section, however, and one assumes
that a complex design like that isn't just to look good...
Assembling the cabinet itself will be no harder than building
flat-pack bedroom furniture, I would say, but every flat surface has
to be covered in pre-cut self-adhesive foam pieces and that
is going to be quite a task.
foam itself is somewhat of a surprise, as it's significantly
more dense than the "Magic Fleece" that was
the state of the art in PC
silencing back in February 2002, so a flat box containing enough to
line the cabinet was actually too heavy to carry inside unassisted
and I ended up unpacking it in front of the house. Having checked
the specifications, it's going to add something in the order of 50Kg
to the total weight of the cabinet, which will make even a routine
task such as lifting off one of the side panels something of a
chore... I hope that it lives up to expectations!
I'm still waiting for
the fan tray to assist in exhausting hot air from the top of the
cabinet (for some reason currently out of stock nationwide), which
is highly desirable given the thermal insulation qualities
provided by the all-enveloping foam lining and the relatively warm
environment of my kitchen, but in any case I don't intend to start
the migration into the new cabinet quite yet as it also involves a
migration of my home domain controller to the new Dell server
hardware. However, I expect that I can start attaching the foam
sheets ahead of time, a process that looks somewhat like assembling
a soft, squishy jigsaw, and will report back on how that progresses.
A few quick links, after a somewhat trying day...
But my Acoustirack cabinet arrives tomorrow, at least, so watch this
space for photos!
unexpected refill - the infamous "Hot Coffee" mod for GTA:
San Andreas has come back to haunt the manufacturer, Take-Two,
following a judicial ruling that a lawsuit over the hidden X-rated
elements of the game can indeed seek class action status.
Red Hat responds - following Oracle's somewhat premature
announcement of cheap commercial support for Enterprise Linux, Red
Hat has said that it won't cut its own prices in order to compete.
Given Oracle's might and Larry Ellison's cut-throat ethics, I think
Red Hat may be facing problems...
Feet in mouths - meanwhile, it seems that Oracle would be best
served attending to the plank in its own eye before the speck in its
brother's. Their MetaLink support site has been unavailable
for most of the day, doubtless causing some considerable banging of
fists on desks in the executive offices...
Caveat emptor - the Small Print Project continues to
gather the worst user agreements, including a clause in the license
for the Flash Player that allows Macromedia's new owner Adobe to
audit your PC at any time. "Agreements" like this are a worrying
trend, and really needs keeping an eye on.
Some like it hot - IBM has demonstrated two new cooling
techniques for modern high thermal load microprocessors. The grandly
named "high thermal conductivity interface technology" turns out to
be merely a new method of spreading thermal paste with a corrugated
chip cap, however...
comment - TechWeb has been chatting to Microsoft about
the clauses in the Vista license that prohibit transferring the OS
to more than one new PC, and the responses are hardly reassuring. As
suggested, it's basically one reassignment and then buy a new
license, which is far from ideal.
Puzzling evidence - a review at Time starts by saying
that the new Firefox 2 leaves IE7 "in the dust", but the article
itself doesn't seems to support this claim. In fact, the only
significant advantage mentioned seems to be a feature that is only
of use when the browser crashes and closes!
The shock of the new - and talking of the new browsers, it seems
that both are suffering from vulnerabilities familiar from their
previous versions: FF2 has a memory corruption bug dating from June,
and IE7 has a window injection flaw first encountered in IE6. Oops!
Every veteran techie knows that
black computers run
faster, which is why Dell overtook Compaq in the late nineties
when they revamped the PowerEdge range in black and gunmetal - a
lead which has remained firm until HP's recent re-launch of their
newly acquired ProLiant server hardware in a similar colour scheme.
I see no reason why this law shouldn't apply to storage systems as
well, and as the entire bottom half of my new kitchen server rack
was already going to be black the obvious solution was to re-spray
the front panel of my Clariion fibre channel DAE
to match. SAN giant EMC obviously knows about the black rule, as
when they acquired the Clariion company they immediately switched to
the higher performance colour scheme, but my DAE dates from before
the buy-out and is resolutely beige. Oh, the shame...
It was nothing that a quick trip to the back
garden with a can of matt black spray paint couldn't resolve,
fortunately and, especially considering the minimal preparation I
bothered with (not much more than a quick blast with an air duster)
the result is excellent. As usual the camera flash has bleached the
black to a charcoal shade, and the reflections from the silver EMI
shield behind the panel are far more apparent in the photo, but in
real life it matches the flat black of my newly acquired Dell
PowerEdge 4400 server, APC SmartUPS 3000, and PowerVault 132T tape
AcoustiRack that is going to house the new systems is due to
arrive early next week, and as it has to be assembled from flat-pack
before I can install the servers and infrastructure it's going to be
busy for a while. Photos as and when...
Links in the chain...
Syadmin persecuted - the operator of the BitTorrent tracker
Elitetorrents has been sentenced to sentenced to five months in
prison, followed by five months of home detention, and a $3000 fine.
the 23 year old pleaded guilty to various charges of criminal
- anti-DRM activist group Defective By Design is using
Amazon's own "tagging" system to flag products containing
usage-limiting DRM, such as Blu-Ray players, HD DVDs, Microsoft's
Zune and Apple's iPod. More power to them!
I've got a little list - PC Pro has a list of the ten worst IT
predictions, from the imminent death of email under a barrage of
spam, to the death of spam itself, via old chestnuts from the
industry's early days about the large size and small number of
computers in the years to come.
Repel boarders - the creator of an online program that generates
fake airline boarding passes (an idea mooted by security guru Bruce
Schneier back in 2003) has been visited by the FBI and instructed in
no uncertain terms to cease and desist - but given the climate I
think he was lucky...
Update: It didn't end there - later in the day
returned to Christopher's house with a search warrant, smashed
their way into his house, and seized his computers and other
belongings. Given that the boarding pass web site had already been
taken down, and there was never any suspicion that he was actually
involved in terrorist activities, this can only be interpreted as a
purely punitive action designed to send a message to anyone who
might wish to expose the wholly inadequate "security theatre"
behaviour of the DHS and TSA. If the US government spent even a
fraction of the effort in hunting and catching real terrorists
attacks of 2001? The powers that be certainly don't seem to...)
as they do persecuting citizens who dare to exercise the very
freedoms that we are told are being defended by this behaviour, the
world really would be a safer place.
Yours Truly - the widely prophesised crack-down on You Tube's
copyrighted content (which, face it, is most of it!) continues, with
a DMCA notice from attorneys at Comedy Central instructing the
site's operators to remove clips from political satire shows The
Colbert Report and The Daily Show.
Coming home to roost - criminally negligent practices on the
part of UK banks have been condemned by the Information
Commissioner, following revelations that customers' personal details
are being disposed of in a thoroughly insecure manner, enabling and
even encouraging identity theft.
The neutral zone - the judge presiding over a file-sharing case
brought by Sony and the RIAA has ruled that an independent analyst
will examine the defendant's computer, instead of a shill chosen by
the music industry.
Corporate bullying - at Slashdot, a poster neatly sums up the
practical aspects of Sony's suit against grey market tech importer
Lik Sang: whatever the legalities of the issue, if you're threatened
by a giant multinational company there is no point at all in trying
to defend yourself in court.
alienates home-brewers - the licensing restrictions which forbid
users from installing the Vista OS on more than two consecutive PCs
will prove to be a deterrent to people who build their own systems,
according to an article at Hexus, and I have to admit that I
am unimpressed with this stricture myself.
Voting felons - the management of voting machine manufacturer
Advanced Voting Solutions, previously known as Shoup Voting
Solutions, have a criminal record dating back to 1971, including
convictions for bribing politicians and obstruction of an FBI
enquiry into election fraud! Incredible...
steal an election - meanwhile, an article at Ars Technica
on the current state of electronic voting is receiving a lot of
(thoroughly deserved) attention, and as a summary of the current
state of the art it is both depressing and angering. Thanks to
for the pointer.
Dirty tricks - as if the thoroughly sleazy personality of Oracle
CEO Larry Ellison needed any further exposure, his recent
announcement of a support offering for Red Hat's Enterprise Linux
product, at this stage completely imaginary, has served to slash
their share price from $29 to $14 overnight...
Thus pimping Demon - the pioneering UK ISP, owned by the company
formerly known as Scottish Telecom since 1998, is for sale at an
asking price of around £20 million. This values each Demon user at
twice the value of an AOL user, based on their recent purchase by
Carphone Warehouse. :-)
another witch hunt - UK retailer Tesco has been vilified for
selling a home pole-dancing kit, after a quirk of their indexing
system lead to it being classified as a toy in their online
catalogue. The outraged hyperbole that has followed is typical of
the worst excesses of the overblown moral majority, with statements
that the kit will "destroy children's lives", that buyers
would be "depraved people who want to corrupt their children",
and that "it requires the intervention of members of Parliament".
In fact, the item was never intended as a children's toy, and in
spite of allegations that "it will be sold to four, five and
six-year olds" very few children of that age have their own
credit cards or are in the habit of doing their own online shopping,
something that the "think of the children" brigade conveniently
overlooks. These people are always ready to assume that the absolute
worst possible motives are behind any behaviour of which they don't
approve, which I am convinced says a lot more about their own
psychology than anything else. Fuck 'em all.
I am too old to work sixteen hour shifts. Thanks
to the traffic on the M25 motorway and visiting consultants without
the wit to look at a map before setting out, however, that's exactly
what I ended up doing yesterday. They arrived two hours later than
the planned six o'clock start, so I didn't leave the office until
1am (and even then problems with the configuration of the
RM/SE SAN replication software meant that another late night
will probably be required next week), and although I took today off
to compensate one of my PFYs phoned at lunchtime to talk about a
problem with a tape library, and I don't feel that I've had much
time to recover. Ah, well, at least it's the weekend now...
While I sit here and groan gently to myself,
then, some news links:
"Bruce as a bonus" - Counterpane Internet Security, the company
founded by guru Bruce Schneier, has been bought by UK telco BT for a
sum in excess of £10m. The company will retain its own branding for
a while, but ultimately it will be fully integrated into BT's
managed security services to provide subscribers with a proactive
warning of security threats. I have to admit that I'm surprised - I
hadn't even realised that Bruce was for sale, but I guess that $20
million is a nice little nest egg for one's retirement...
And this time, she's angry - Kathy Schoback, once employed by
the doomed games manufacturer Infinium Labs and instrumental in the
waste of $65 million of investor's money and the attempt to sue tech
site [H]ard|OCP for libel, has resurfaced
as a director of the CMP Game Group, organisers of various gaming
industry conferences in the US. Given Infinium's reputation in the
aforementioned industry, you can bet that appointment is going to
raise a few eyebrows to say the least.
Wars V2.0 - the BBC has reviewed the final versions of both IE7
and Firefox V2, and its final conclusion is that there's little
(except personal preference) to choose between the two. The problem
they describe with the IE7 taskbar icon not displaying a friendly
page title certainly doesn't occur with either of the PCs I've
installed it on, but on the other hand the comment that the
anti-phishing filter can slow page loading times a touch is
definitely something that I've noticed myself.
The Ego speaks - Steve Jobs has been touring the business
journals since the launch of Microsoft's Zune media player,
insisting each time that the iPod's dominance is under no threat
from either Microsoft or the horde of other devices on the market. I
think he may well be right, at least in the short term, but it's
typical of Steve's arrogance and if the iPod genuinely was on the
way down he would be the very last person to admit it.
Seeing both sides - UK modding site Bit-Tech is speaking out in
defence of Sony's decision to crack down on grey market importer Lik-Sang
and, like me, [H]ard|OCP is unimpressed
with their stance. The warranty issues that the column discusses are
rarely a deterrent for the early-adopters that companies like Lik-Sang
supply and, indeed, many of them supply at least a limited warranty
of their own. I have no time for the increasingly strong-arm tactics
that Sony are adopting these days, and don't intend to use their
products again unless their attitude changes for the better.
Lipstick on a
pig - Mark Shuttleworth, developer of the Ubuntu Linux
distribution, says that free software must be more visually
appealing if it is to attract more attention from mainstream
computer users, avoiding "bling for bling's sake" but
creating attractive, highly functional interfaces. Unfortunately the
main focus of his article seems to be on Ubuntu's pretty new
designer logo, so bizarrely it seems that he has actually managed to
miss the point of his own lecture...
a slip - Chinese industry journal DigiTimes suggests that
Vista's rumoured release to manufacturing at the end of October has
slipped a touch, and is predicting a new date of the second week of
November. Persistent and stability-threatening bugs in the upgrade
from Windows XP are being fingered for the latest delay, but the
full commercial launch is still set for January 2007 as before.
Too much time on their hands - the Popular Science blog
has published a wonderful article on the physics of pole dancing, as
the first part of part of a series analysing personal disasters
captured for posterity on YouTube. The laws of motion cannot easily
be flaunted, it seems from this clip, and at a certain point the
significant angular momentum acquired overcame the tenuous
coefficient of friction, to spectacular affect.
More astroturf - The MPAA is sneaking sly little "polls" in
amongst the reviews on MyMovieMuse, a site intended to allow
viewers to provide information on the sorts of movies they'd like to
see. As usual, their take on intellectual property and copyright is
just plain wrong ("86% of you feel that creative ideas are property,
just like furniture"), but cleverly designed to infiltrate the
public's collective unconscious and change the way people think
about both piracy and fair use.
And, finally, although Microsoft's IE7
sent a congratulatory cake to the Firefox developers in
celebration of the launch of Firefox 2, I am managing to resist the
urge to join the assembled green ink and tinfoil hat brigade in
attempting to decode Morse messages from the blobs of icing around
the edge of the cake. Some people may well have way too much time on
their hands, but this week, at least, I am not one of them...
My feet feel like blocks of wood following a day
spent in the Lakeside
shopping center, a mall of sufficiently excessive size that even the
most obsessive clothing and shoe fanatic I know was all shopped-out
and glad to leave by the middle of the afternoon. And the disturbing
thing is that, by the standards of its
in the US and elsewhere, it's positively tiny...
Meanwhile, then, all the news that's fit to blog:
dubious device - the Spam Cube is a little appliance designed to pre-process
a POP3 mailbox and clean it of unwanted messages, and the manufacturer claims
that its "Artificial
Intelligence engine" is a cut above the Bayesian algorithms so widely used
elsewhere. I'm always a touch dubious of claims like that, especially when they
use the term "AI", and as most of the reviews of the device that I've seen so
far are written by extremely non-technical users I'm reserving judgement
at this point...
All about YouTube - the recently-purchased video sharing site
has a skeleton in its closet, it seems, following the revelation
that it handed over identifying information about at least one of
its users to media giant Paramount Pictures following a subpoena
that they've always been quite happy to do this, of course, but one
legal expert has suggested that "YouTube seems to have given up too
Fear of RFID - the RIFD industry, together with the governments
and corporates who hope to make use of the technology to spy on
their citizens and customers, are going out of their way to convince
us that there are no risks associated with these remote data access
techniques. Unfortunately the observed facts usually contradict
these assurances, and this week's demonstration of how to hack the
next generation of conctactless credit cards is no exception.
Sony "cares" - Lik-Sang, a company that specialised in importing
the latest consumer hardware from Japan to Europe and the US, has
been forced out of business following legal threats from the
electronics giant. As Boing Boing notes, this kind of
behaviour is always highly counterproductive, as the people paying a
premium for these grey market gadgets are evangelising early
adopters who communicate their love of the technology to less
Under the bridge - for more than a year the Full Disclosure
security mailing list has been plagued by a troll going by the name
of "n3td3v", together with the usual army of sock puppets supporting
it. Now consultant Neal Krawetz has performed a statistical analysis
of its posts and deduced that the account is used by three or
possibly four writers, and is very probably a front for a hacking
group named "Gobble", who's postings elsewhere are an excellent
Reformed malware - the SpamThru trojan isn't the first virus to
attempt to remove other malware (remember the war between the
apparently endless versions of Netsky, Bagle and Mydoom a few years
ago?) but it's certainly the first to ship with a pirated copy of a
commercial anti-virus scanner. Having cleaned competing malware from
the infected PC, it proceeds to send out a flood of the stock "tips"
spam that is becoming so much of an annoyance these days.
Copywrong - with the media industry spreading as many lies about
copyright and intellectual property law as they can, it's no wonder
that some are confused, but one would expect people working in the
publishing industry, at least, to know the score. When it comes to
the investigative newsletter the North Country Gazette,
however, it seems that any attempt to point out their misconceptions
will only be met with unprovoked abuse and wild, meaningless threats
of legal action.
An annoying little bug has emerged in Microsoft's
Exchange email server, thanks to assumptions that have been
hard-coded into the system's CDO components. October of this year
has five Sundays, and as the component is programmed to
automatically switch from GMT to DST on the 4th Sunday, normally the
last, this month its clock will undergo the hour time change one
week early. The symptom is that some calendar appointments may
suddenly move one hour ahead during the last week of the month (yes,
this week), to the confusion and annoyance of all concerned.
I'm a little puzzled, however, as initial reports
of the problem suggested that the month's 5th Sunday was a
statistical oddity, but
the MS Exchange Blog reveals that in fact it happened last year
as well, and will happen again in 2010. Three times in five years is
more than an exception, if you ask me, and whoever coded the 4th
Sunday rule needs a good kick in the shin.
Fortunately the bug is easily fixed on post SP2
Exchange servers, although
the patch hasn't yet completed full regression testing and so
should be approached with a degree of caution... Given that the
problem only manifests when appointments are scheduled
programmatically or via Outlook Web Access, however, it might be
sensible just to ignore the whole problem until it goes away when
the real clock change day arrives a week later...
The Device - or, to give it its full name, the "Device
Patented Process Indicating Apparatus", is an Art Deco cabinet
featuring two large analogue meters, an eerily glowing tube of Agar
gel, and a red warning light that flashes "in extreme
circumstances". It connects to a PC via USB, and does nothing.
It begins - while everyone waits to see what is going to happen
to You ube following its acquisition by Google, the media industry
is flexing its muscles by suing Bolt.com and Grouper.com
(the latter recently acquired by Sony), two minor league video
sharing sites specialising in music videos.
nowhere - for those who are too lazy to even lift their mouse
fingers, Italian start-up Synthtravels is offering guided
tours of the best features of the popular online game worlds. I have
to admit that the appeal of this kind of virtual virtual tourism
somewhat escapes me...
A red herring - the IT chief of the London borough of Newham,
site of a highly-publicised "contest" between Microsoft and its open
source competitors a couple of years ago, has confirmed that he is
extremely pleased with the results of his decision to retain Windows
and MS Office.
Caught short - email pushing stocks and shares has been a
mainstay of the spam industry for years, now, and it's informative
to discover exactly how much one one could have lost by investing
based on these recommendations.
- this phishing scam attempts to extract user IDs and passwords from
the unwary, but I can't help but feel that most people's suspicions
would be roused by the atrocious spelling and bizarre turns of
phrase. "Please don't make more dificult this situation",
The purse-strings tighten - this year's $2 million prize for the
best computer-controlled vehicle is the last of its kind, it seems,
following DARPA's announcement that a newly-signed law forbids them
to offer cash prizes. Opinions differ as to to the effect this will
have on next year's contest.
A second attempt - I was extremely unimpressed with the
first podcast of Cory Doctorow's
wonderful SF novel Down And Out In The Magic Kingdom, and I'm
very much hoping that the second, a full-cast recording, will be an
Conviction quashed - the ruling that lead to the government's
current misguided witch hunt on
"violent porn" has been overturned on appeal, with a trio of judges
upholding an earlier decision by the Law Lords that the original
jurors should have been given the option of a manslaughter verdict.
Easynet heist - the ISP was the victim of a daring theft last
week, when thieves stole £6 million of infrastructure hardware from
their London headquarters in broad daylight. There seem to be a
number of mysteries about the crime, however, not least of which was
an apparent failure to inform the police!
Goodbye civil liberties - I was dismayed to read in The Register
that the government is funding local councils to pressure pub owners
into installing fingerprint-based ID systems at the doors under
threat of having their licenses revoked. Ah, the wonders of the
high-tech police state.. :-(
Blowing the whistle - a Maryland politico who has been a vocal
opponent of the state's electronic voting systems has been sent
anonymously a copy of the secret and proprietary source code form
the controversial Diebold voting machines. Needless to say, the
manufacturer is pretty much having a fit.
In the last few months I've outgrown the
350Gb-odd volumes provided by the pair of little
Sun StorEdge MultiPack
cabinets on my home server, and several weeks spent poring over eBay
finally turned up the solution. It's an old EMC Clariion DAE disk
cabinet, and although I had intended to find a SCSI solution rather
than fibre channel, the fact that it was fully-populated with ten
73Gb 1Gb FC hard disks had considerable appeal. It isn't widely
known that these DAEs can exist comfortably on their own, directly
connected to a server rather than via the matching Clariion storage
processors and acting in what is charmingly called "JBOD" mode (Just
a Bunch Of Disks) with the host system providing software RAID
management. Fibre channel is an unusual technology for home use, I
admit, but given that my new tape library also has a FC interface
it's obvious that a fully-fledged home SAN is only just around the
EMC hardware is solid and wonderfully built, as
one would expect from enterprise storage systems, and although this
unit is around five years old (when new, it would have cost well in
excess of £10,000) it's been well looked-after and certainly doesn't
look its age. 1Gb fibre channel hardware is old hat by current
standards, of course, but it's still at least as fast as any SCSI
system I could have afforded, and the relative obscurity of the
technology means that it comes in at noticeably less per gigabyte.
Unusually, EMC's own PowerLink support site
denies all knowledge of the FC4500-era systems, but just as with the
current models they were available rebadged by Dell (and others,
including Silicon Graphics) and plenty of information can be found
there instead. A stand-alone DAE doesn't need much
configuration, though, with just a single FC-over-copper connection
to an appropriate HBA in the server. I chose one of the standards, a
QLogic 2200A sourced from the same company who sold me the DAE and
recommended for use with it, and although it may take a moment of
fiddling to find which of the two Link Control Cards is the
favourite one, I'm not expecting too much trauma.
What would be traumatic, however, is
fitting the thing into my kitchen server cabinet. Although it
occupies a little less vertical height than the Sun desktop units it
will replace, with a depth of 60cm it will extend most of the way
back into the 80cm cabinet and I'm rather concerned about ensuring
adequate airflow. The tape library has a similar problem, and when I
add the Dell PowerEdge 4400 server that is on its way to replace the
old CompuAdd system, and the rack-format APC SmartUPS 3000 that is
replacing the existing tower-format 2200 (did I forget to mention
them?), unless I want a large stack of fried hardware something will
need to be done!
The best option will be to transplant everything
into a proper 100cm deep server cabinet, so after all the work
rearranging the cabinet to accommodate the tape library and camera
server, it looks as if I'll have to rip everything out again and
build a new one from scratch. This is where things may get a touch
expensive, though, as when I started shopping around I discovered a
wonderful unit by UK quiet PC specialist Acousti Products.
AcoustiRACK is a 42U cabinet, designed with cunning baffles in
the front and back doors, a baffled roof fan tray, and lined
throughout with noise insulation. It claims to reduce the sound
power levels significantly, without a proportionate increase in the
internal temperature, and in fact the only drawback is that it costs
not only an arm and a leg but an entire suite of internal organs
too. At the moment my head is fighting my heart, but I'm afraid the
battle may already be lost... Watch this space for details.
The end of the week at last... What relief!
News of upgrades to my home network tomorrow (I
am embarrassed to admit that I am installing a SAN) but until then
some quick tech links.
The will of the RIAA - MasterCard has followed VISA in
withdrawing its facilities from Russian music download site
AllOfMP3.com, leaving the company spitting in impotent fury.
Whatever the actual legality of the service, however, this is indeed
a dangerous precedent as there have been no court rulings made
anywhere in the world and the credit card companies are acting
purely unilaterally after pressure from the recording industry
associations and their tool the US government.
victim of Pipex - the final straw that led me
to dump Cix as a service
provider after more than ten years was their acquisition by GX
Networks, now rebranded under the Pipex banner, as every company
they acquire seems to go to the dogs in very short order. Now that
Bulldog has also been acquired by Pipex, the experiences of one of
my colleagues suggest that the rot has already started to set in.
Enterprise SATA - SATA drives are beginning to move up into the
niche traditionally occupied by SCSI, with new models from Seagate
and Western Digital offering 10,000 rpm spindle speeds, 24/7 design,
and best of all five year warranties. Of course, the enterprise SAS
and FC drives themselves
aren't standing still, with 15,000 rpm performance and massive
bandwidth, even if their capacities can't as yet match those of
their 500 and 750Gb SOHO rivals.
flaw - Undersound is a fascinating idea to allow subway
travellers to exchange music with each other, but nowhere in the
rather fluffy, new age project documentation do I see anything
discussing how the ever-litigious music industry associations will
feel about this - but I bet you a copy of "Steal This Book"
that they won't like it one little bit.
Vista woes - the angst over the licensing terms of the new OS
continues, including the discovery of a clause prohibiting users
from "working around any technical limitations in the software".
It is assumed that this is intended as a ban on avoiding the
built-in DRM, but the wording is sufficiently loose that it could
also include 3rd-party fixes for un-patched bugs.
Dirty tricks - organisers of the IFPI's Brazilian press
conference to announce their latest music-sharing lawsuits barred a
number of accredited legal experts from entering the room on what
turn out to be purely spurious grounds, in all probability because
of their opposition to the recording industry's lobbying for changes
to Brazil's copyright law.
A modest proposal - a report from the Gartner Group recommends
that Apple should stop manufacturing their own hardware, and instead
subcontract with Dell to build future Intel-based Macs. The all in
prices that could result, they say, together with Dell's excellent
distribution channel, could be just the thing to lift Apple out of
its tiny niche market.
What, already? - Secunia has announced a relatively trivial
security vulnerability in IE7 only a day after the official launch,
but given that the flaw affects IE6 as well (it is actually caused
by an Outlook Express component) it seems likely that in fact is has
been present throughout the betas but
for some reason has only just been publicised.
Jumping the gun - Microsoft co-president Jim Allchin has
dismissed rumours that Vista will RTM next week, explaining that
although the operating system itself is in good shape, the
"ecosystem" of 3rd party drivers and applications still has some way
to go. The suggested date for the business launch is
now the end of November...
The Wisdom Of Woz - Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak has been out
and about promoting his book iWoz, and one of his recent
stops was at Microsoft. David Weiss of the Mac Business Unit has
blogged some of the more memorable soundbites, and its nice to see
that there's life in the old dog yet. His comment that "Steve
jobs never programmed in his life" is especially poignant if you
know the story
Birth of the iPod - Steve Jobs has often claimed that the
best-selling music player was his own baby, but in fact the iTunes
software was originally licensed from another company and the
hardware was created by Jon Rubinstein, previously a senior engineer
at NeXT, and hired consultant Tony Fadell.
Apple on the hook - following the news that a small proportion
of recent iPods left the factory with a copy of the RavMonE.exe
virus pre-installed, Apple's flippant attempt to blame Windows for
being susceptible to malware has met with disapproval right across
The horror - Oracle has published a gigantic update package
containing 101 fixes for flaws in for long-standing flaws in its
database and application servers, almost half of which can be
exploited remotely, and some even bypass authentication and grant
unrestricted access via a web browser!
IE7 released - the final version of Microsoft's new browser is
now available for download, and is joined by a customised version
produced by Yahoo - although
initial reports suggested that the web company had actually
jumped the gun by releasing their version ahead of Microsoft's own.
Vista early? - meanwhile, rumours escaping from Microsoft
suggest that Vista might be released to manufacturing considerably
earlier than was expected, on or around the 25th of this month,
although if so it would be made available to businesses long before
the official consumer launch.
Controversy - a report from a team at the University of
Maastricht on the commercial penetration of open source software
suggests that it will manage well enough without further government
protection, according to industry pressure group the Institute for
Groggy but still punching - Russian music site AllOfMP3.com has
given their first official press conference, but it was somewhat
mysterious and contradictory (where has all the money gone?) and
brings news that the RIAA et al have pressured Visa into
withdrawing their credit card facility.
inna box - Sun's "Project Blackbox" is a 20' shipping container
containing enough power and cooling capacity to support up to 250
Sun Fire servers, together with their associated disk, tape and
network infrastructure. I gather that the remarkable
had a hand in the concept.
PITO warning - following widespread abuse of the Criminal
Records Bureau database, the chief executive of the UK's Police IT
Organisation has warned that much tighter controls must be placed on
private sector firms with authority to access government and police
Spamhaus to fight - the beleaguered spam fighting organisation
has reversed its earlier stance and announced that it will indeed
appeal against the $11.7m judgment won by e360 Insight. The
organisation hopes to prevent similar abuse of the US legal system
by other spam companies.
And finally, although the fantasy role-playing
game D&D was heavily inspired by the work of J.R.R Tolkien, the
Twenty Sided blog wonders how modern players would react if
suddenly exposed to Lord Of The Rings today. The answer is the web
Of The Rings, currently consisting of eighteen episodes
brutally ripped from the Peter Jackson movies, and it's brilliant.
A little batch of random links from around the
Geek chic - at arts and crafts marketplace Etsy, some
wonderful "Space Invador" cufflinks, and although the spelling
leaves something to be desired the jewellery more than makes up for
difficulties - we won't be able to be install Vista on an
endless series of PCs, it seems, but in spite of the fuss this isn't
really much different from the Product Activation in Windows XP.
The human legacy - if the human race disappeared overnight,
after a thousand years almost nothing would be left to show that we
had ever lived on the planet, except our chemical and nuclear
reprieve - following a long demonstration of the controversial
game "Bully", a Florida judge has rejected a plea by the crazed
anti-gaming lawyer Jack Thompson to ban the launch.
Thank the mesons - high energy physics has been in the doldrums
recently, but an interesting anomaly in the decay of B mesons has
breathed fresh air into the field while we wait for the LHC.
Let the seller beware - people advertising gaming PCs online are
being asked to run the FRAPS benchmarking tool, and helpfully
provided with a copy which contains a certain extra something...
8,000 lawsuits - recording industry group the IFPI has released
its latest batch of file-sharing suits worldwide, but in the UK the
BPI is having enough difficulties with just 59.
Collateral damage - an Apple laptop user is alleging that using
his MacBook Pro has left him with burns on the palms of his hands,
and is muttering about suing the manufacturer.
- IE7 may not be much less vulnerable to stupid browser
addons than its predecessor, but at least 99% of the damage can be
easily undone with a mouse click or two.
Bio-computing - a computer using logic gates formed from strands
of DNA has mastered the game of Tic-Tac-Toe, a remarkable
development even if it currently takes up to 30 minutes per move.
Jack - apropos of nothing much, Wikipedia has the full
skinny on the "RJ" part of the terminology used for the modular jack
plugs we know and love. One lives and learns!
Deep fried - we've all seen the PC motherboard running in a bath
of mineral oil, but using regular cooking oil instead allows you to
play Quake while waiting for your chips to fry.
Hand me the magnifier - the Small Print Project is collecting
examples of the terms and conditions forced upon us when we install
software, sign up to an online service, or unpack a product.
Deniable plausibility - the recent North Korean tub-thumping has
been provoked by the United States beginning to pull its forces out
of South East Asia, according to an article at The Register.
Theft of services - the latest firmware update for Creative's
Zen music players has removed the facility to record from the
built-in FM radio tuner, and needless to say some owners are not at
Atomic power - I was delighted to see at Boing Boing that
a whole bunch of information about Project Orion has suddenly
surfaced, including a still-classified schematic of
a design for a pulse unit.
A revelation - the "Campaign For Real Beauty", a PR project by
pharmaceuticals brand Dove, shows how a normal woman is physically
and digitally manipulated into a typical cover girl. Fascinating.
And finally, big changes at primo tech site
Dan's Data. Firstly, Dan has
recruited an old friend to assist with the hardware reviews, and his
initial review of a webcam with a gimmick has all the technical
depth and rich linking that I've always appreciated in Dan's own
writing, together with the subtly different flavour that only a
fresh hand can bring. Dan himself has been far from quiet, however,
as apart from a recent batch of letters, articles and reviews, he
has started a blog of his own. I was a little surprised by this, as
Dan's Data has always seemed remarkably blog-like itself and the new
site is not clearly differentiated as yet, but the content and style
are both excellent as always.
How To Spot A Psychopath
is named after one of Dan's more notorious articles, and the blog has
already made it to my nightly list of online reading. Recommended.
My SAP cluster proved remarkably tolerant of
having MS DTC, Server 2003 SP1, a bunch of firmware and driver
updates, and the latest version of the Dell Server Administrator
utility thrust onto it, and having upgraded the standby node
successfully during the afternoon I bounced the cluster resources
over from the live node right on the dot of six o'clock and was
driving home again a little after seven. I have no way of testing
SAP itself, though, and it remains to be seen whether I'm met in the
car park tomorrow morning by a mob of irate developers. Ah, well,
that's what shotguns are for.
past through tomorrow - at PC World magazine's blog (although
they call it a "techlog", presumably just to be different) a brief
history of computer advertising on television, from the Atari 400 in
the early eighties to Apple's current "Get A Mac" series featuring
the remarkable John Hodgman as a boring, office-based PC.
It will never catch on - a new display device from Toshiba gives
the user a 360 degree view - but it comes in the form of a giant,
fully-enclosed bubble-shaped helmet weighing 3Kg (and, incidentally,
making the wearer look like some kind of mutant alien cyborg) and so
is almost certainly doomed, like very other alternative display
device I've seen, to ignominious failure and total obscurity.
The drivers of the apocalypse - the Linux drivers for NVIDIA's
graphics cards contain a confirmed buffer overflow weakness that
could allow an attacker to run arbitrary code under root privileges,
and the report suggests that the drivers for FreeBSD and Solaris are
probably vulnerable as well. Ah, the wonders of alternative
Would you like malware with that? - 10,000 MP3 players given
away as prizes in a MacDonalds competition in Japan turn out to have
contained the QQPass password-stealing trojan as well as a selection
of free songs, and some reports suggest that simply connecting the
player to a PC can allow the malware to jump across.
foot in the door - the ever-expanding Carphone Warehouse group
(I remember them back when they sold carphones, from a warehouse) is
branching out again, this time with an auction site dedicated to
selling second-hand phone handsets, each of which will have its IMEI
checked against the CEIR to ensure that it's not stolen.
Much ado about something - EU ministers are determined to block
access to information disseminated by terrorists over the Internet,
or information that could be of use to them, but they don't seem to
have any idea of how to go about it - let alone how to go about it
without implementing a Chinese-style national firewall system.
More security theatre - following the conviction of the
"terrorist mastermind" behind the diabolical "dirty bomb" and "gas
limo" plans, The Register points us to a column at the
Dick Destiny blog on the perennial favourite theme "its easy for
terrorists", which makes me amazed that any of us godless Western
infidels are still alive to read it.
Steve Jobs is unconcerned about Microsoft's Zune player, he
insists, dismissing it with a collection of strange sexually-loaded
remarks: "It takes forever", he said in relation to the
Zune's wireless music sharing. "By the time you've gone through
all that, the girl's got up and left". Asked whether the iPod is
becoming less cool as it becomes more common, he replied "That's
like saying you don't want to kiss your lover's lips because
everyone has lips". Sounds to me like he has something on his
Just a few quick links, as it was my first day
back at the office after that bug laid me low last week, and so
thoroughly exhausting. Unfortunately tomorrow will be a long day
too, as I have to stay late to upgrade a clustered pair of servers
hosting the main SAP SQL databases with Server 2003 SP1, an
that will involve
installing a Distributed Transaction Coordinator (whatever that
is!) into the cluster beforehand. My team is still fairly
inexperienced with MSCS, so we'll be following the instructions
carefully with one hand and keeping the fingers of the other one
Fear Of A
Bot Planet - the style of the new Suicide Bots weblog is vaguely
reminiscent of a certain popular web site, but so far the promised
"hot bot on bot action" seems distressingly absent.
- a handheld inkjet that can print on irregular surfaces is an
excellent idea, but fortunately they already exist on the market so
there's no need to rip the guts out of an HP DeskJet like this...
Online trading - Julian Dibbell's "Play Money" is an
account of his year spent trying to earn a living by trading in the
virtual objects used in online games, and is definitely one for my
Amazon wish list.
100 - visitors to gaming site IGN have been voting for their
all-time favourite games, but the publisher has chosen to be tease
its readers by not releasing the top 50 until next week.
Education is pointless - it is unrealistic to expect users to
learn how to keep their own computers and data safe, says a Swedish
student, and all responsibility for security rests with the IT
Egg on face - The RIAA has abandoned a piracy lawsuit against
someone who hadn't copied the music in question, didn't use
file-sharing software, and had merely "ripped" MP3s from legal CDs.
Applying pressure - and talking of everybody's favourite
industry association, giant retail chain Wal-mart is leaning on the
RIAA to reduce CD costs, and they have a lot of commercial muscle.
to pre-sales - eBay has cracked down on people selling PS3
consoles ahead of the official launch in November, on the reasonable
grounds that in the past many similar auctions have been fraudulent.
Following the fatal shooting of the Brazilian Jean
Charles de Menezes in July 2005,
a date of October 2007 has been set for the trial in the case
that has been brought against the Metropolitan Police as a whole, on
the somewhat unexpected grounds of failing to provide for his
health, safety and welfare. The Met has attempted to have the case
dismissed out of hand, of course, and the rejection of this plea
caused a lawyer speaking on behalf of the Metropolitan Police
Commissioner Ian Blair to state that the trial will have "serious
implications on police policy nationwide". If these implications
include policemen having to think twice before shooting innocent men
seven times in the head (and once in the shoulder, although I assume
that bullet was intended for his head as well) for no good reason, however, then I for one
cannot see what the problem is: as a Londoner, right now I'm far
more scared of the police than I am of the terrorists!
former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev
suggested that the US
government squandered an opportunity to improve global politics
since the Cold War ended, instead cashing in (along with other
Western countries) on the unbridled burst of globalization that
followed. When former statesmen such as Gorbachev, with no immediate
political or financial axe to grind, are moved to compare US foreign
policy to the AIDS virus, you can be sure that something is badly
wrong. "The Americans will have to understand that in future they
will have to cooperate and make decisions jointly, instead of just
always wanting to give orders", said Gorbachev, and its clear
from the various international reactions to the recent North Korean
nuclear test that he is right. As usual, one of the most telling
aspects of the story are the comments to the article on the
Yahoo! News message boards, which highlight the
events common to much of the US population, and which has helped
their current government to get away with so much in the last few
years. Oh, and they can't spell worth a damn, either...
Elsewhere on the world stage,
an article at Boing Boing reminds us of what Yahoo's
policy of kow-towing to the Chinese government has actually achieved
- three dissident journalists jailed for a total of 21 years, thanks
to information willingly provided by the ISP in exchange for the
chance of making a pot of money selling advertising and services.
And just in case we needed a further reminder, this time of
the exact nature of the government with which Yahoo and others are
so keen to climb into bed,
reports are emerging that a group of Tibetans trying to flee
their country, annexed by China in the 1950s, have been shot dead by
Chinese soldiers near the border with Nepal. The refugees included a
nun and a group of children aged between six and ten, who were
evidently so terrifying that, according to the official government
statement, the troops had to open fire in self defence. Further
reports suggest that Communist party officials are trying to silence
witnesses, including Western hikers who were in the area when the
killings occurred - and some visitors to the area claim that this is
by no means the first such incident. Unfortunately
violations like this occur on a daily basis throughout China,
and it is very hard to see how any Western company can have
significant dealings with the Chinese government while still
maintaining (as Yahoo does) that it cares about doing business in an
With Linux the OS of choice of the IT community's rugged
individualists it shouldn't come as a surprise that everybody and
their dog wants their own customised version, and the endless
bickering over different interpretations of the GPL, together with
retaliation against any company that dares to try to make money out
of the OS, ensures that the code base seems doomed to fragment ad
infinitum. The CentOS build
that runs my revamped Raq web server
appliance is a good example of the latter, having been created
as a 100% binary compatible version of Red Hat's highly regarded
Enterprise Linux build, only without the corporate branding and
commercial support. With this in mind, it was rather depressing to
read that the same thing seems to be happening to the popular open
source applications as well, with the announcement of the
Iceweasel web browser, a version of Firefox developed to avoid
the trademarked Firefox logo and other code that cannot be freely
distributed. The tendency of the open source "community" towards
infighting and competition seems to be increasingly endemic, these
days, so it was good to read of a project designed to bring
integration and standardisation rather than further dissention. The
Portland software project intends to bridge the gap between the
two most popular Linux GUIs, KDE and GNOME, providing a common API
to allow developers to support both interfaces without trauma. If
Linux is ever going to make a significant impact at home and on the
corporate desktop, as the fanboys perpetually insist is imminent,
then it is clear that more time must be spent on collaboration between
groups and less on bickering - and when even the allegedly
philanthropic One Laptop Per Child project has apparently
succumbed to the disease, it's probably time for people to sit
up and take notice...
Wizard of Ozzie - with Bill Gates stepping even further back
from day-to-day management at Microsoft, his shoes are being filled
by Ray Ozzie, the widely respected inventor of Lotus Notes. Ozzie is
far removed from that of Gates and Ballmer in terms of both his
management style and his views on technology, and it will be
interesting to see in which direction he leads the company.
The price of freedom - the UK government has finally released
their own estimates of the cost of the controversial ID card scheme,
and to nobody's surprise it is considerably less than independent
figures. 15% of the estimated £5.4 billion covers the technology
itself, with the rest going on personnel and premises costs. Given
the government's record on IT
spending, I simply don't believe it.
Lies and damn lies - meanwhile, the latest Home Office Minister
is still frantically trying to justify the ID card scheme itself,
and this month the see-saw has bounced back from terrorism to
immigration once more. His claims about a similar project in Sri
Lanka turn out to be both misleading and irrelevant, however,
especially considering that it was abandoned a year ago after
Not with a bang, but a whimper - the first Hollywood movies on
Blu-ray disks are now being launched, but the offerings chosen to
highlight the new technology are lacklustre to say the least: Adam
Sandler in "Click", shoot-em-up "Black Hawk Down", and
something called "Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby".
Does this make you want to rush out an buy a whole new AV system?
No, me neither...
Blowing the golden whistle - a former Peoplesoft employee who
revealed the extent of their eight year price-fixing strategy for US
government contracts has been awarded $17.3 million, his share of
the $98.5 million returned to the government by the company's new
owner, Oracle. The Register is curious as to why no criminal
charges have been pressed against Peoplesoft's management, though.
Mergers and acquisitions - AOL UK has been bought by the
ever-expanding Carphone Warehouse group for £370 million, adding 1.5
million broadband subscribers to its customer base and a further
600,000 dial-up users. The latter are probably rather less
attractive to the new owner, and it will be interesting to see
whether they can increase the incentive to migrate onto broadband
Mergers and acquisitions #2 - the UK Internet market expanded
dramatically in first few years of the decade, but it has become
obvious that the country can't continue to support so many ISPs,
especially down at the cut-rate and free end of the market, and the
latest news is that one of the larger providers, PlusNet, may well
be acquired by British Telecom.
A small victory -
Wikipedia's no-compromise stand against Chinese government
censorship, almost unique amongst the big names in web services,
seems to have paid off following reports that the majority of the
English language site is now accessible. The Chinese language
version may still be blocked, however, as are articles on subjects
Share and share alike - reports on the perennial struggle for
web browser market shares are contradicting themselves again, with
one recent study claming that IE is losing ground to Firefox and
another suggesting that all is still rosy for Microsoft. With both
IE7 and Firefox V2 just around the corner, it will be interesting to
see whether the war between statistical analysis companies
Missing the boat - the writer of an article in Wired
admits that he is becoming less and less convinced by the threat of
cyber-terrorism, which he dismisses as a post-9/11 hoax intended to
screw money out of the federal government. Readers of Rob
Rosenbrger's VMyths site have
been aware of these absurd claims since well before the Millennium,
however, and dismissed them a long time ago...
Illegal abduction - a German lawyer is intending to pursue state
compensation for those who believe themselves to have been abducted
by aliens, based on a law which grants payments to kidnap victims.
His services will be in demand, he says, but "the trouble is,
people are afraid of making fools of themselves in court".
And finally, an article at DarkVision Hardware
more battery life from your digital camera" contains such
revolutionary advice as "recharge whenever you can" and
"carry another battery", and ends with the suggestion that
"until battery technologies improve to the extent that battery life
is so long that it practically lasts forever you will have to be
conscious about how you use your digital camera in respect to power
consumption". The author, a certain Ziv Haparnas, is described
as "a technology veteran" who "writes about practical
technology and science issues", but if that is a typical example
of his insight and vision I'd just like to go on record as
suggesting that he doesn't give up his day job...
Over the last few weeks I've been fascinated by
Steve Kemper's book "Code Name Ginger", an account of the
invention of the
Segway personal transporter by Dean Kamen's New Hampshire-based
DEKA engineering R&D company, so I was very surprised to read (in
article describing how George W Bush fell off one!) that it was
actually "developed by BAE Systems in Plymouth, Devon". I
grew up in Plymouth, as it happens, and although the city has a
proud history of naval and defence engineering, I can't let a
mistake like that pass unchallenged. The article was published in
June 2003, so it's a little late to request a correction, but
although BAE Systems did indeed design and manufacture the
gyroscopes used in the Segway's Balance Sensor Assembly (as well as
in many other products and systems, of course), and are in a
marketing partnership with the Segway company, I really can't see
that qualifying them as the device's developer - and I'm sure that
Kamen and his team would wholeheartedly agree!
Elsewhere, the scandal over electronic voting
machines continues to grow, with
fresh publicity for allegations by Clint Curtis, a former
programmer for electronics engineering firm Yang Enterprises, that
Florida Congressman Tom Feeney asked him to develop a way of
falsifying votes recorded on touch-screen voting machines in order
to benefit the Republican party. Curtis can hardly be described as
an unbiased witness, especially now that he's running against Feeney
for Congress, but given the recent revelations concerning the ease
with which machines from Diebold et al can be modified to run
arbitrary unauthorised code, there's nothing inherently implausible
in the claim. Meanwhile, the notorious German hacker group The Chaos
Computer Club has
called for a ban on the Nedap ES3B voting machine and similar
European models following the discovery that they can be modified so
extensively that they will even run
program! Although my entire career has revolved around the use
of computer technology as an enabler for business and government,
twenty-something years in the industry has also left me with a
healthy sense of scepticism, and it's quite clear that at this stage
electronic voting is simply not safe enough to use. Any organisation
that claims otherwise is either trying to sell voting machines, or
hoping to exploit their weaknesses for political gain.
recent furore concerns the court case brought against anti-spam
organisation Spamhaus by arch-spammer e360 Insight. Spamhaus is a
UK-based company, and they chose not to defend the case believing,
correctly, that a US court had no jurisdiction over them. However,
after the inevitable ruling against Spamhaus (including an award of
$11,715,000 in damages), concerns
started to circulate that the
court might be able to have the
spamhaus.org domain name
suspended, effectively removing access to the service unless client
systems worldwide were reconfigured to use an IP address or a
replacement domain name. The effect this could have on the global
levels of spam is
fairly horrifying, but the Internet housekeeping organisation
ICANN has already issued a statement saying that they do not have
the authority to take this action even if so ordered. The registrar
of the domain itself is in Canada and the DNS manager is in Europe,
both outside of the court's jurisdiction, so assuming that ICANN
sticks to its guns the only remaining US organisation is the
Virginia-based Public Interest Registry which manages the .ORG
hierarchy - and like ICANN they are very likely to refuse
responsibility. I have a great deal of respect for
Steve Linford and the other (largely volunteer) contributors to the
project, and lawsuits like this serve to illustrate how annoying his
anti-spam services are becoming to the heavyweight spam companies.
More power to him!
Although in computing terms I no longer consider
traditional virus code to be nearly the risk it once was, when it
comes to my own defences I'm not so confident, and this week a nasty
little bug has sneaked past my immune system and laid me low. The
culprit is probably the common cold rhinovirus, beautifully
illustrated here by the team at
University which determined the nature of the ICAM-1 receptor
sites in human cells that provide the virus' avenue of attack.
Knowing this does nothing to make me feel any better, however, and
in spite of significant research into the malady there's still
little one can do except treat the symptoms and pray for the
merciful release of death.
Elsewhere, at the weekend I had my first
encounter with a real eBay fraudster, as opposed to the petty
opportunists who try to pass off a faulty
disk drive or screw one over shipping
charges. I've outgrown the pair of
Sun StorEdge MultiPack disk
cabinets that are providing a home for the 350Gb-odd of data that
has accumulated on my home server over the years, and having
narrowly missed a beautiful
ProWare SCSI/SATA RAID array that would have scaled up to 4Tb, I
cast the eBay net a little wider.
I've been aware that Apple was manufacturing a
server range, and given their traditional penetration in the media
sector it seemed logical that they would have some kind of
large-scale storage system, but I'd never really noticed the
Xserve RAID systems
before and I so almost overlooked a unit that was being advertised a
little outside of the regular areas for this kind of hardware. With
a starting price of £100 for a capacity of 2.8Tb (and as many again
drive slots still free) it was certainly eye-catching, and a check
around the web revealed that not only was the system very similar to
the enterprise hardware I'm used to (if considerably prettier,
as befit's Apple's design ethos!) but that there was no reason why
it couldn't be used just as well in
a Wintel environment.
Connectivity to the host is via Fibre Channel
over copper, but the drives themselves are low-end SATA units, a
combination that provides an excellent cost/capacity ratio, if at a
considerably lower level of performance than 10,000 or 15,000 rpm
SCSI or FC drives. I hadn't seriously considered using Fibre Channel
on my home network before, but I have a generous quantity of it at
the office and provided that one matches components carefully a
point-to-point configuration is not inherently much more complicated
The listing was mostly marketing boilerplate ("Data
storage that rocks around the clock", indeed!) from Apple's web
site, with a few personal touches, but one thing that was
conspicuously absent was any information on payment methods accepted
or shipping costs - so I emailed the seller to enquire, at which
point everything started to feel a little odd... Here's the
Subject:* Re: eBay Xserve RAID
*Date:* Mon, 9 Oct 2006 18:09:52 EDT
This deal will go trough eBay.
You have the opportunity to purchase this item( same item) for GBP
700 Buy now. If you're ready for this purchase, I need to know
your eBay user ID, confirm item number and full name and
address for shipping. As soon as I have this informations I'll
start the official procedure, and eBay will notify you about
this. You'll also receive important guidelines + instructions from
them (please go through them exactly). I'll handle the shipping,
so this will be free of charge for you.
Looking forward to hearing from you.
Immediately after receiving this I checked eBay
again, and when I discovered that the item had
suddenly disappeared alarm bells started to ring: it's very
unusual for a seller to suddenly offer a Buy It Now deal mid-way
through the auction, very unusual to include shipping charges for
something so expensive in the purchase price, and very unusual not
to specify accepted payment methods - especially when asked about
them specifically. I emailed the seller once more, repeating my
request for that information, and also for his name (the unusual
anonymity of it all was also making me feel uncomfortable), as well
as an explanation of why the listing was no longer on eBay, but his
only response was to email me the exact text of the original
At this stage I started looking around eBay once
more, this time searching through the completed listings to discover
how much these arrays normally change hands for - and I was very
surprised to find
an absolutely identical listing, even down to the same
out-of-focus photographs and comments about its use in a home
office, having ended at the start of the month with a far more
plausible price of £2750 plus shipping.
I asked about this, too, although by this stage
the alarm bells were ringing so loudly that they threatened to
vibrate off their mountings, and it would have taken a pretty damn
convincing explanation to allay my fears - but the response I
actually received from the seller, or as I now realised the
purported seller, did absolutely nothing to reassure me at all:
Subject:* Re: eBay Xserve RAID
*Date:* Tue, 10 Oct 2006 16:02:39 EDT
Sorry NO Paypal we have our own link to a secure server for
payment with credit cards www.westernunion.com send cash at a
Western Union OR Agent location or use your credit or debit card
to send money online or use your credit or debit card to send
money by phone at 0800 833 833
Hmmm. Of course, it's traditional that Western
Union is the favoured method of all Nigerian funds fraudsters, eBay
scammers, and other con artists, and that was definitely the last
straw. I haven't responded, and he has presumably realised that the
fish has slipped the hook and moved on in search of other suckers. I
don't remember the name of the eBay seller's account, but it had a
single figure feedback rating and apparently hadn't been in active
use since last year, so it had probably been hijacked via a phishing
scam or similar. It's possible that the
mailbox was stolen as well, but AOL accounts are easy to come
by and that's definitely an address to beware of...
What strands out to me, really, is how stupid
the scammer was, and although I would certainly have balked at
sending money to a nameless Western Union account even if everything
else had appeared above board, he could so easily have strung me
along at least that far before arousing my suspicions. To
begin with, simply putting a fake name on the end of his emails
would have appeared far more normal, and leaving the eBay listing
intact until the deal was settled would never have caused my
eyebrows to raise in the way that suddenly cancelling it did. Not
stealing the listing verbatim from an item that had been sold only
ten days before would have helped a lot, too, as it's certainly not
unusual for prospective buyers to check completed listings to gain
an idea of the going price for items of interest. Of course, I
suppose we should actually be grateful that these people don't seem
able to implement their scams very well, or we'd all find ourselves
owners of the 21st century equivalents of
swampland or shares in the
Brooklyn Bridge. Thanks heavens for small mercies...
Please don't touch - just when you thought you'd heard every
possible problem with Diebold's voting machines, it turns out that
actually using the touch-screen of the current models will crash
Astroturf campaigning - Janet Jackson's boob flash at the 2004
Super Bowl generated more than 270,000 complaints to the FCC, thanks
to pressure group the Parents Television Council.
Down but not out - a federal judge has rejected the US
government's request to dismiss an ACLU lawsuit claiming that the
USA Patriot Act is unconstitutional, allowing the case to proceed.
The dark ages - the US Supreme Court has refused to consider a
case challenging an absurd and archaic Texas law that makes it a
crime to sell "sex toys shaped like sexual organs".
Anarchy in the UK - British activists The Open Rights Group
have published a list of suggestions for fighting the encroachment
of restrictive DRM into the country - before it's too late.
Vindicated after all this time - careful analysis of audio tapes
from the 1969 moon landing reveals that Neil Armstrong really did
say "one small step for a man", just as he had
Have space suit, will travel - and talking of the space race, a
vintage pressure suit from the Gemini program somehow turned up in a
Kansas antique shop, surely the last one outside a museum.
Vista FUD - an article in IT World claims that for a
business to upgrade its workstations to Vista will cost up to $5000
per user, an absurd figure that is roundly dismissed by Ken Fisher
at Ars Technica.
On the horizon - and talking of the Vista OS, an article at the
ever-useful Wikipedia summarises all the new features in one
surprisingly long list. I'm really looking forward to the launch
early next year.
- I was trying to catch up on the current model Palm handhelds,
today, and came across a useful comparison facility of both Windows
and PalmOS devices at Dave's PDA
- Japanese automata specialist Kokoro is hoping to rent out their
latest teenage female robot as an eye-catcher for trade shows and
exhibitions, a snip at $2500 per week.
No more modding
- console mod chip supplier Divineo has been fined more than $9
million in damages after a US federal court ruled that they had
violated the DMCA.
Locked away - with more and more people using PC security
systems to protect their personal data, there are growing problems
when they die leaving their records inaccessible to family members.
Casting the net wider - the creators of the Kazaa and Skype
peer-to-peer applications have started to promote a streaming video
service that will deliver high-quality legal media across the
And, finally, there's
always something new... The latest M12 range from PC power
supply specialist Seasonic has all the high power and
blissful silence of my S12-600, but adds the flavour of the month in
the form of a removable modular cabling system. I lust after it, but
although obsolete my existing
model is still extremely satisfactory and I really couldn't
justify the cost (and, more importantly, the effort!) to replace it.
The new version almost makes me hope for a catastrophic failure,
A blast from the
past - Mike tells me that the veteran microcomputer manufacturer
Imsai is still very much in business, and although their current
version can hold a modern ATX motherboard as well as the S100
backplane of the original, the front panel is still replete with all
the switches and LEDs of the classic CP/M era. The computer achieved
a certain notoriety following its use by hacker David Lightman in
the 1983 movie
Wargames, and I think the modern version would make a
wonderful platform for playing
Defcon, which was obviously
inspired by the movie's graphics.
Cold war relics - at Boing Boing, an Alaskan reader has
created a Flickr album of a derelict military installation in the
remote west of the country. The White Alice communications network
acted as a microwave relay between the DEW missile warning sites,
and although stations like these cost untold hundreds of millions of
dollars back in the sixties and seventies, these days they have been
abandoned and left to decay. They are striking memorials to the fear
that was endemic to the period.
Reinventing the wheel - to some people the Psion 5mx is one of
the iconic palmtop computers, let down by the manufacturer's
marketing and production quality rather than any problems with its
basic design. A project hosted at Tom's Hardware Guide is proposing
to create a modern palmtop inspired by the 5mx, but running
Microsoft's XP or Windows Mobile operating systems. It's an
interesting idea, but give the extreme difficulty of turning designs
into hardware I firmly expect it to stay as vapourware.
War is declared and battle come down - Russian music site
AllOfMP3.com is under fire from both the legislature in its own
country and the might of the
US State Department, but it is clearly
not going to go down without a fight. Still protesting that they are
100% legal in Russia (at least until the imminent change in
intellectual property law that the US has insisted on) the site
places responsibility firmly on their users to determine whether
usage is legal in their own countries.
- a team at UCLA has created a semiconductor by coating fragments of
the tobacco mosaic virus in carbon nanoparticles and embedding the
result in a polymer sandwiched between two electrodes. The result is
a transistor matrix with similar properties to conventional flash
memory chips, but capable of switching in microseconds rather than
milliseconds. A working prototype is expected within four years.
The reverse engineer - "DVD Jon" Johansen, the programmer who
became famous by cracking the minimal encryption on commercial DVDs,
originally so that he could play them on his Linux PC, is back in
the spotlight again following his release of a clone of Apple's
Fairplay iTunes DRM. Johansen claims to have stayed within the law
by cleanly reverse engineering the system, and is intending to
license it to companies that want to play their own content on Apple
- as a long-time fan of SMP multi-CPU computers at home I have to
confess to being surprised by how quickly Intel has introduced
multi-core CPUs onto the consumer market, and how quickly the number
of cores is ramping up. Tom's Hardware is playing with a
pre-production version of the four core Kentsfield-based "Quadro"
chip, and although there are still a few bugs, as could be predicted
it is an enormously powerful CPU when running properly
still not ready - Nokia doesn't think that Linux is mature
enough for widespread use a mobile phone OS, apparently, citing
problems with fragmentation of the standard code base and an
over-sized memory footprint, among others. This is quite telling, as
the company is one of the few manufacturers that have actually used
the OS in a mobile device, in this case the neat little 770 Internet
Tablet that Mike was showing me a few weeks ago.
Eye on the spy
- the US Government has confirmed (with gritted teeth, one suspects)
that a Chinese ground-based laser installation has blinded the
cameras of one of their orbiting spy satellites as it passed over
the country. Details are spares at this stage, and in information
has been released about which satellite was targeted, or whether the
effect was merely temporary or, as seems very likely, the cameras or
their electronic systems have been permanently damaged.
Some news links to end the week - and having
worked all last weekend I'm damn glad that it's here at last.
The Illuminated One - after Mark Frauenfelder of Boing Boing
appealed for donations to the cult author
Anton Wilson, dying from post polio syndrome and in dire
financial straits, to the amazement and delight of the author and
his family more than $68,000 has been raised to ensure that his last
few months are as comfortable as possible. I was blown away by Shea
and Wilson's "Illuminatus" trilogy, and the "Schrödinger's
Cat" trilogy that followed it, and I'm delighted to have been
able to repay (even if only in a small way) a person who had such an
effect on my thinking.
Inside information - the fundamentalist Islamic stance on DRM
and software copyright has now been clarified, thanks to Iranian
Supreme Leader Sayyid Ali Khameini. The Ayatollah has a weblog where
he offers advice and answers questions mailed to him (like the
Usenet Oracle, with extra fatwa), and following a question on
whether it was permissible under Sharia to crack time-limited demo
versions of software produced by Western Imperialist software
companies, it turns out that his viewpoints on intellectual property
are unexpectedly similar to those of the corporates in question.
Indian data theft - last night's TV documentary on the sale of
personal information from Indian call centres used by UK corporates
was certainly unsettling, but The Register reminds us that
fraud and theft of confidential data is not limited to India, or to
call centres, but is actually unsettlingly widespread. I was less
than amused to see the call centre management division of
consultancy firm Mphasis held up for censure, however, as their
development division is currently writing some Siebel applications
for my own company, and I've been obliged to give an unsettling
level of remote access to our core servers to their Indian
comedy arms trade - earlier this year the controversial and
confrontational political satirist Mark Thomas assisted a group of
teenage girls to set up an online arms brokering firm as part of a
project for Channel 4's Dispatches programme, and their company
traded in everything from small arms to the sort of "police and
security equipment" commonly used for torturing prisoners and
obtaining false confessions by repressive regimes such as the US
government. Questions in Parliament have now been followed by the
arrest of two men involved in illegal imports of the latter, but
British firms make astonishing quantities of money from arms deals
and I doubt that we'll see a change in the law.
rise and fall of Gizmondo - the spectacular crash of the game
console manufacturer after their over-hyped portable device burned
through nearly $400 million of capital in less than four years was
followed by the equally spectacular crash of the rare Ferrari Enzo
belonging to company founder Stefan Eriksson. The circumstances
surrounding the crash, and for that matter Eriksson in general, are
explored in an article at Wired, complete with illustrations
by comic book artist Jae Lee.
Unauthorised access - the hated Diebold are not the only
manufacturer of absurdly insecure electronic voting machines, it
seems, following a demonstration by Dutch security consultants
showing that the NEDAP machines, chosen two years ago by the Irish
government but not yet used in anger, could be made to record
inaccurate votes and even run arbitrary code in the form of a chess
program. It's quite clear that electronic voting is simply not safe
enough to use, and any organisation that claims otherwise is only
doing so because they are intending to exploit those weaknesses.
Now with less Appley goodness - After Steve Jobs's announcement
that the shiny new 2nd generation iPod Nano is even thinner than the
original version, a review at Ars Technica reveals that this
is indeed the case... But as the difference is a mere 0.01",
hardly detectable without a micrometer, it sounds as if the infamous
Jobs Reality Distortion Field is in action again.
All the news that's fit to link... Mostly
courtesy of Ars Technica, tonight.
Style over substance - research at Indiana University on the
media coverage of the 2004 Democratic and Republican national
conventions suggests that the topical news/comedy programme The
Daily Show is actually as substantive a source of news as other
more mainstream news programs - but they admit that the quality of
the latter is still depressingly poor.
The smoking gun - an internal investigation has concluded that
Apple supremo Steve Jobs definitely knew about the backdated stock
options that have attracted the baleful glare of the SEC, but that
he did not benefit financially from them. However, board member Fred
Anderson, who served as CFO during the period in question, has
resigned over the issue.
Interrogating MS - a shareholder proposal to oblige Microsoft to
describe their stance on net neutrality has been excluded by a
review board, but the source of the motion is a group acting as a
corporate lobbying organisation than an actual investment fund, and
in this case is presumably acting as a front for the telecoms
companies that are pressing for a multi-tiered Internet.
Lock-down - if Windows Vista is not activated within 30 days of
installation, it will switch into a significantly reduced mode
designed to limit the user to short sessions of web use and
read-only access to data files, and without the fancy new Aero user
interface at that - but it will not actually disable the PC
completely, as some have speculated.
The future of YouTube - I've always been puzzled by the popular
video site's continuing existence, given that they serve 200Tb of
data per day, don't charge for the service, and hold more copyright
violating video clips than you can shake a subpoena at. A new
advertising deal with Warner Music may help the finances a little,
but legally the site seems to be
hanging by a thread...
Life mirroring art - Cory Doctorow's excellent SF novel "Down
and Out in the Magic Kingdom" contains a social status mechanism
he terms "whuffie" (which always makes me think of primo crypto-geek
and the concept has now been translated into an open source service
based around Skype. Who knows, it might even catch on!
Kos censored - the influential left wing blog has somehow joined
the list of porn sites blocked by the SmartFilter web filtering
service, and based on anecdotal reports of other liberal sites that
are being mysteriously misclassified and blocked by SmartFilter and
its ilk, some are suggesting that it's not necessarily an
Sleeping with the enemy - back in August a team of programmers
working on the Firefox browser visited Microsoft to talk to the
Vista development team. Both groups seem to have gained from the
experience, and it even seems that Microsoft's open source
developers are going to contribute source code to ensure that
Firefox works smoothly with the new user interface technology.
A waste of time - my friend Mike is complaining that my recent
mention of the strategy game Defcon encouraged him to take a
look for himself, leading to the complete loss of a day from his
schedule. Judging by the comments of others, and the sudden rash of
YouTube, the strange little web toy Line Rider is equally
absorbing. Stay away, Mike, stay away!
More PS3 woes - with quotes such as "there is no way this
launch is going to go well", from a game retail store manager,
circulating around the web, the future of the console looks a touch
bleak. I loved one of the comments to the article at Ars Technica,
though: "Sony might have problems with the PS3, but their battery
business will pick up the slack." <laughing>
Wireless pricing - a major Wi-Fi hotspot operator has criticised
a report that objected to the cost of wireless access in UK hotels,
some of which charge up to £20 per day. Their argument that
"business class routers" are more expensive is largely spurious,
though, even when the additional cost of power-over-Ethernet
hardware is taken into account.
A little misunderstanding - a researcher at the Niels Bohr
Institute in Denmark has succeeded in "teleporting" the information
content of a macroscopic object containing thousands of billions of
atoms over a distance of around half a metre. The original CNN story
implies that matter itself was moved, but in fact it was simply
a packet of information representing its quantum state - but,
nevertheless, this is a significant and interesting achievement and
holds great promise for the future of quantum computing and
And finally, courtesy of
Kelly's Cool Tools blog, a tip that could save someone's
life - and for a change I'm going to reproduce it in its entirety:
A neurologist says that if he can get to a
stroke victim quickly he can totally reverse the effects of a
stroke. He said the trick was getting a stroke recognized,
diagnosed and getting to the patient within 3 hours, which is
tough. Sometimes symptoms of a stroke are difficult to identify.
But doctors say a bystander can recognize a stroke by asking three
1. Ask the individual to SMILE.
2. Ask him or her to RAISE BOTH ARMS.
3. Ask the person to SPEAK A SIMPLE SENTENCE (Coherently, ie: It
is sunny out today)
If he or she has trouble with any of these
tasks, call 9-1-1 immediately and describe the symptoms to the
-- Passed along by Michael Hawley
Still trying to catch up with myself, but as one
PFY is off on a week long training course and another is on a two
day site visit to our most far-flung sales office, life for the
remaining PFY and I is proving a touch busy. There have been
absolutely no problems arising from the work at the weekend, though,
which I am extremely pleased about - the four of us work very well
together, and as a team we've been pulling off some extremely smooth
upgrades and new installations over the last year or so. Applause
Without form, and void - recent reports of a large number of
serious vulnerabilities in the Firefox browser may well be untrue,
it seems, with the two hackers responsible for the announcement
backing down from statements made at the ToorCon security
conference. "The main purpose of our talk was to be humorous",
one of them claimed - thus guaranteeing that nobody ever takes them
seriously again - or invites them to speak at security conferences,
either, for that matter...
Addon for Excel - if pressed, I would have said that it wouldn't
be possible to create a fully-graphical version of Pacman running
under VBA in Microsoft's Excel spreadsheet, but this enterprising
Japanese geek has produced not only that but Space Invaders as well,
by treating the spreadsheet cells as the pixels of a raster display,
changing their background colour repeatedly to create animation.
You'd never know from looking at the games, certainly, that they
were a spreadsheet!
Going it alone - phone company Nokia is trying to drum-up
overnight industry support for their Wibree personal area
wireless networking standard, obviously intended to go head-to-head
with Bluetooth. The chipset has noticeably lower power consumption,
apparently, which is a definite bonus, but
competition from both established technologies and upcoming ones
will be stiff.
Cruelty to animals - just when you though it was safe to go back
to the USB hub, the latest dumb device is an animatronic hamster in
its own plastic exercise wheel, and once hooked up to that
wonderfully versatile port it monitors the Windows system so that
the faster you type the faster it spins. I have to assume that
somebody, somewhere, is paid to come up with ideas like this - which
an unsettling thought...
"I don't think so, Tim" - The leader of the Bracknell Forest
district council has suggested that selling the personal details of
residents that use the council's electronic entitlement cards to
marketing firms could reduce council tax to zero, but the idea was
later dismissed by an official statement - just as well, I suspect,
as the data protection issues that such a move would raise are a
The spam king - Hormel Foods, manufacturer of the original SPAM
meat product, has failed in its attempt to obtain a European
trademark for the word in connection with unsolicited commercial
email. Their intention was to claim licensing fees from the myriad
of companies who use "spam" in their product names etc, but their
case that the public doesn't associate the term with bulk email
really doesn't seem to hold much water.
Verity Stob on the many and varied varieties of Microsoft Word
users. Enough said.
Catching up on the news from the last few days...
Phreaking - hacker archivist Jason Scott is helping to preserve
a collection of audio recordings from the phone phreaking culture of
the early nineties. This is a decade or more after the wild days of
Captain Crunch and Steve Wozniak, but of great interest none the
Apple controversy - a demonstration of vulnerabilities in
MacBook wireless stack has been cancelled following pressure from
Apple, apparently, and the issue has
divided the Mac fanboys down the middle.
Subtly flawed - the myth of Firefox's security is also fading
somewhat, it seems, with the announcement of a flaw that can be
it is only one of around 30 that they are aware of.
Fighting back - podcast creators and are considering legal
action to fight Apple's continuing harassment of people using words
containing "pod", but it seems to me that they only have themselves
to blame for adopting it when a more generic term would actually
have been preferable.
Getting away with murder - UK consultancy Accenture is somehow
managing to withdraw from the doomed UK National Programme for IT
without paying the stiff penalty fees promised by the Director
General only a few months ago.
HP lawyer balks - Hewlett-Packard's General Counsel has resigned
from the company, and has invoked her 5th Amendment rights to avoid
to testifying before a government subcommittee that is investigating
HP's controversial spying activities.
TalkTalk quitters - dissatisfied users of the free ISP TalkTalk,
owned by UK cellphone bucket shop chain Carphone Warehouse, are
being allowed to escape binding 18 month contracts following
widespread claims that the company has been unable to live up to its
SWIFT violated - the Terrorist Finance Tracking programme run by
the US Treasury has violated the privacy of up to 7,800
international financial institutions by its secret examination of
financial records held by the Belgian interbanking agency SWIFT.
Security theatre - courtesy of The Onion, US citizens
offer their opinions on the War On Moisture: "The ban was a
necessary precaution. We have to be willing to make these kinds of
sacrifices if we're going to prevent scientifically impossible
Bullying Take-Two - the controversial gaming company is under
fire from the equally controversial lawyer Jack Thompson, who is
crusading against their new game "Bully" even before anyone has seen
an significant information about the game itself.
Blasphemy - this enterprising modder has installed a micro-ATX
SLI-capable motherboard into the chassis of a PowerMac G5, and he's
made a very neat job of it. I just hope he's prepared for the
outlandish hate mail that seems to follow these projects!
- Canadian company Suissa Computers is manufacturing PCs built into
beautifully crafted wooden cases looking more like designer
furniture than anything else. Prices are high, certainly, but not
outrageously so given the evident quality.
C&C 3 - the third major version of Westwood's long-running
strategy game is due next year, and although at this stage the web
site is a classic example of style over content I shall be watching
keenly for any genuine facts that emerge.
Shall we play a game? - inspired by Risk and the classic movie
Wargames, Defcon is the
latest offering from Introversion, creator of the hacking game
Uplink, and has as its theme the perennial favourite Global
Multi-core gaming - Remedy has demonstrated how rich a gaming
environment can be when multiple CPU cores are available - although
as a dual-CPU user for many years I'm feeling a bit jaundiced about
this sudden wave of enthusiastic support for SMP.
Testing Turing - following extensive hype over a pair of online
chat programs that are described as "artificial intelligence",
The Register is poking fun at their creator Rollo Carpenter. The
software is little more than an overgrown version of
Eliza, though, as
far as I can see...
Highly suspicious - the latest project from technology artist
Casey Smith is a device with no function other than to look
suspicious. His other works are equally wonderful and equally
pointless, and I'll definitely be keeping an eye on his web site
Taking the cake - this wedding cake inspired by Terry
Pratchett's novels comes complete with a turtle, four elephants and
a full-detailed Discworld, and the result is absolutely stunning. I
think it would be a shame to eat it!
And finally, the shrinking planet - Google Earth
has been a growing source of fascinating curiosities since its
launch, and these lists of interesting things
to do and
to see there are well worth exploring.
As promised, some pictures of the weekend's work
to replace a couple of network cabinets - photos courtesy of my
colleague Jim, who discovered a rather nifty blurring effect when he
switched his camera to a slower shutter speed to avoid reflections
from the flash, making me look like some kind of wiring dervish...
The entire team worked themselves to a standstill on the project,
this weekend, but the finished results were definitely worth it.
On the left, the pair of half-height cabinets
that have been holding our Cisco Catalyst 6509 switch and a bunch of
Raritan Paragon KVM hardware - and on the right, the work in
progress. The green cabling feeds ninety-odd servers, the vast
majority of which have multiple network interfaces, and took another
of my colleagues many hours of patient work to untangle the
spaghetti that a previous project had left them in. Above the core
switch are a bunch of smaller switches for DMZs, test subnets and
the like, each with their own bundle of brightly-coloured string.
The cabinet on the right of the picture is the new home for the KVM
hardware (with a set of ninety-something prettily pink cables safely
out of sight at the rear) and a Cisco Catalyst 5509 switch, bought
ridiculously cheap on eBay as both a test-bed for our plans for
implementing VLANs on the network and as an emergency backup in the
event that its bigger brother ever commits suicide.
Another blur of activity, and then the finished
product. The photograph shows that they're leaning forward a little
at present, as we haven't wound the stabilising feet down yet, and
also how well they highlight the boring grey colour scheme of the
patch panel cab next to them. We'd like to replace that one with a
black unit, to match the general ambience that nine black cabinets
full of tasteful black and gunmetal Dell PowerEdge servers has
brought, but it holds about 60U's worth of Krone strips and Cisco
workgroup switches as well as being attached to the PBX by cabling
as thick as my wrist, so I'm inclined to think that unfortunately it
would represent too much work to be worthwhile for purely cosmetic
reasons. If we ever have to rewire the ground floor, though, that
thing is history..
I spent all weekend in the office, along with the rest
of my team, moving a large quantity of network infrastructure hardware
(The wires! The wires!) from a pair of
small cabinets to a pair of much
larger ones, and given that when I finally reached home I was visited by a
friend bearing three laptops and a printer for me to repair, right now I
have had more than enough of technology. I'll post some photos of the work
at the office tomorrow, but until then I'm you'll have to content
yourselves with my traditional monthly stats before, I retire to the
settee to spend the rest of the evening groaning gently.
The eagle-eyed will have noticed that I've removed the
Tweakers Australia Top 50 voting button from the bottom of the page,
this month. A few weeks ago Mike pointed out that the page seemed to have
disappeared, and in any case the list has grown less and less useful over
the last few years, thanks to
automatic vote forgery from an unscrupulous IT training manuals
supplier. The site admins seem to have been completely unconcerned about
this, surprisingly, to the point where it seems probable that they were not
unconnected with said company, and all-in-all the thing has been
something of a dead loss... The stats provided by such mainstream weblog
analysis sites as
The Truth Laid Bear and
Technorati are far more accurate and reliable, of course, but
unfortunately they brutally expose Epicycle as the small-fry that it
currently is... It's a double-edged sword.