What makes you think they don't?

The damages would have to be significant, and jurisdiction becomes a problem.

If you're in, say, italy, and you call up some US police station saying some kid in town is responsible for a giant DDOS network, you'er unlikely to get a response- because those officers aren't paid to protect you.

If you took it to local law enforcement, and it was escalated internationally, and the damages were high enough, maybe coupled with some publiity, then you might get some action.

Actually, albeit indirectly, offshore gaming and other out-of-jurisdiction (out of the US) business, fed a ton of information to the FBI/DHS and the Scotland Yard high-tech crimes unit several years ago to take down a ring of DDOS *extortionists*.

In the end, they followed the *money* - just like any other type of crime.

While the FBI is certainly not concerned with the welfare of the offshore gambling, and/or out of jurisdiction businesses, nor should they be, they were, and likely still are, certainly interested in the overall problem, as the extortion (which is the more important part of the crime here in legal terms) and subsequent money laundering (extortionists want to get paid, that means those kiddie hackers had to use traditional organized crime avenues to get paid) are of interest to law enforcement internationally. It's a global problem and one that's difficult to resolve without cooperation from everyone involved.

It's quite easy to just plain old DDOS places for fun, and probably not get caught.
If you want to use it to run a protection racket, which is about all you can do - that brings a whole set of other law enforcement institutions to bear on you, and if you keep it up long enough you'll likely be caught, and jailed, along with others involved.

"Try doing the same with software and pretty soon they will try to sell you a new desktop background."

They'll try - without much success.

I'd argue that watching free software evolve over the last 15 years or so along with the internet has set a constantly improving baseline which forced commercial software giants to stop shovelling garbage and start innovating again, rather than selling the same hashed-over junk with marginal improvements year by year, with few competitors.

(The mobile industry is undergoing this same shift now...)

And then keep policing every other group to ensure no binaries are posted there....
Then you'd look at what percentage of your customers are actually using the server -vs- the cost of running and maintaining it - and you'd probably come to the conclusion that there was no business sense in keeping it running.

The fraction of ISP customers who actually want NNTP access to local usenet servers is insignificant now - the cost of maintaing the hardware for your few customers that want it outweighs any commercial advantage of hosting it.

Usenet is becoming centralized and will no longer be usenet in the relatively near future.

Yes - that's why businesses never use network attached storage......

Does it not support hot-spares? Even with it's clever setup, having automatic rebuild eliminates risk - as soon as one drive fails you have data at risk - so you WANT a hot-spare.

I ran into a nasty boot problem with the latest official opensolaris when there were a pile of snapshots - it took a good 2 hours to boot the machine because it was doing something unnecessary regarding looking at every single snapshot and creating a vdev or something..... definitely a bug - has nexenta fixed that?

True that......

That's brilliant..... has nobody done this yet?

Works fine on all teh dell gear I've tried it on - opensolaris has been pretty good in it's latest incarnations....

After reading up, I think unRAID is great for this particular type of use - where the data isn't critical - I mean you can live without some of your consumable media - and your data loss potential is partitioned off nicely on a drive by drive basis.

Traditional raid, while simple to understand and set up is often not managed correctly - you have to have the right hot spares, you have to know what your rebuild times are, size the arrays right (right amount of parity -vs- data with relation to rebuild time) and you need to have it monitored correctly so you can act quickly when you have a mistake.

I'm seriously thinking of going out to hunt for some gear today and build a giant unRAID setup to replace my ZFS box...... I like it.

unRAID looks really interesting..... thanks!

My point was more around the setup of the RAID, and the migration to larger volumes - that's much simpler on a DROBO than with other systems like ZFS.

Also - their BeyondRaid is quite innovative - unlike the traditional RAID setups we all know, they've done it on a block by block (or at least by some allocation unit...) level - so when you pop a drive out and put in a larger one, it can restore redundancy and decide where to put things on a per-block basis. (That's probably where the apparent slowness comes from)

On a normal raid system, you can't take a 1TB drive and two 500GB drives and have it automatically set up a 1TB mirror. You would first have to create a raid-0 or JBOD of the two 500GB drives, then layer a mirror on top of that of 1TB. You also can't just decide you want to double the size of it and swap all the drives out and have it magically grow (except ZFS....).

SO yeah -drobo is good for those home users who don't want to mess around too much with raid innards and study how raid works.