I've had fantastic luck with m0n0wall on a Soekris Net5501 box - The hardware was basically built for routing, switching and firewalling and m0n0wall is a great distribution.

Hit www.soekris.com for info on the products. (I have no financial connection whatsoever, just a satisfied customer)

Sounds like you both enjoy poking fun at each other and bickering about inconsequential things. Assuming this doesn't rise to the level of genuine arguments (like couch guy below) I say it sounds like a normal and healthy relationship. Just thought you might appreciate the thought after all the other comments soon to follow.

(5 year wedding anniversary 2 weeks ago, goin' on 9 years together, bicker like it's been 80)

I hate to say it and fuel the flames, but I also got my wife a Mac. Then her parents got one, and my parents both got them. Know what? My tech support load dropped significantly and they're really happy their machine doesn't give them problems anymore.

This whole "iPhones are an ungodly sum" meme is getting old. Have you priced out a smartphone vs an iphone lately?

My iPhone w/ 3G service is costing me $50/month LESS than a Palm Treo 755 w/ Verizon that I just gave up to make the switch. Same minutes, same texts, MMS is no skin off my teeth since the data unlimited gives me twitter/facebook to send photos instead.

Ouch! Generally we use interns and junior staff to watch over the techs on the floor. This policy stands mainly because it's not just Sun coming in to maintain Sun equipment, it's a vast range of vendors and suppliers. A/C guys to come change the A/C filters, fire guys to check the fire system, electrical guys, safety guys, structural guys for earthquale checks... you get the picture! Quite a lot of those folks are NOT at all capable of knowing not to (for example) lay a big plastic sheet across the air intake to a cooling system while they're trying to inspect the fire sprinklers.

Even our junior staff may not know the specifics of the board being replaced in the E4k by the Sun guy - but they've had datacenter care and respect driven into their skulls by the time they've been there a month, so they can keep watch.

Perhaps it's moronic to have a key and highly paid staff member watching over a tech in the datacenter, but I never said we had to have it be a highly paid senior person. We generally have our interns and junior folks supervise tech staff. They're not there to supervise the tech in their area of expertise, they're there to keep watch over the tech so they STICK to that area and don't accidentally muck up the rest of the datacenter.

It's not an issue of not having cameras in the datacenter (we do), but an issue of having someone right there to -prevent- the tech from doing anything stupid. "Hey, watch out, don't plug your cell phone recharger into that protected outlet" for instance. Security cameras can help you write the incident report after your outage and possibly prosecute malice, but that's not much comfort. The outage has been had, the damage has been done.

The technicians sent out by support contractors aren't familiar with the potential pitfalls of your datacenter, and often aren't even competent at anything beyond the exact task they're being sent out to do. Electrical guys repairing a UPS battery could easily decide that shutting off the power "just for a second" is an acceptable thing to do, and security cameras are no substitute for supervision.

It's great having someone tell you they will be there in three hours to replace your power supply, that you then have to dedicate a staff person to be with when they go out on the shop floor because some moron in security requires it.

Not to pick apart your comments too much, but I wouldn't allow a support (sub) contractor unrestricted access to the floor of our datacenter; there's too much they can accidentally screw up and then claim it wasn't them because no one was looking. If they're given permission to be on the floor with an open rack to do maintenance, someone should be watching them. I don't think that qualifies as moronic.

There was just recently a large discussion about this topic on NANOG. The mailing list archive where the thread begins can be found here: http://www.merit.edu/mail.archives/nanog/msg20241.html

Gee, I wonder why Verizon would think that consumers don't need VOIP? Perhaps competition has something to do with it...

I assume you're talking about the DNS names, so why not embed all that useful information in the IN TXT field, where the DNS RFC states that such information should be, and provides a huge dataspace in which to put it?

It's been a while since I spoke to their techies during my product evals, but as I understand it the drivers are loading and then encrypting the USB channel between the OS and the actual IronKey. They then accept your password and pass it to the key's cryptochip, which holds the keys that were generated during initialization, and decrypts/encrypts the data as it's leaving/entering the key (on the fly).

The drivers also, of course, have to power the key generation process since you can always nuke a key and regenerate its keys.

Finally, they do make a "Personal" and "Enterprise" product in addition to the Basic. In those models you get features like a hardened, privacy-tightened Firefox (for Win*) and, most important to me, remote management of the keys for your enterprise. Those kind of advanced features do require drivers.

It practically doubles the cost of the drive if you're a standalone user with no job involving computers; for me, it was very easy to go over to my officemates' desk and initialize it on his Windows machine.

Also, I did a pretty good amount of work using the IronKey inside a VM. Using VMWare Fusion in MacOSX Leopard and a Windows XP VMWare image, I was able to mount the key inside the Windows image and do an initialization successfully. One thing I did notice was that when doing so, it would always unmount my ipod from the VM, which was a bit odd.

I'm using an Ironkey at work (have been for about 2 years now) and the thing has been rock solid. However, the main reason I selected it is that it's the only key that I've had the opportunity to trial which is both FIPS 140-2l2 compliant *AND* supports Linux.

I use it with WinXP and MacOSX daily and yes, they do ship with "alpha" Linux drivers. Not full support like Win* but enough to read and write the encrypted data, which is all I really use.

Although the company claims that you can now "initialize" a key on MacOS, all the versions I've used required an initial bootstrapping under Windows before being cross-platform usable.

Hi there! I've been using a Kinesis Advantage keyboard for years now for exactly the first reason you listed (very little use of thumbs). On the Advantage, your thumbs operate: Backspace, Delete, Space, Enter, Ctrl, Alt, PgUp and PgDn. It's fantastic, helped me speed up my typing speed and also cut the annoying wrist pain. (Note: I don't work for them, own stock in them or anything. I just really like the keyboard).

Yet another thing that NASA has done to help society, that people don't know. NASA's Inspector General (IG) played a large role in helping shut this den of crap down.