Pretty much this is a major legal limbo.

There was a judgment that basically said that since we pay the cd-tax, we can't be sued civilly for using CDs to pirate music. That was appealed and set aside, meaning that legally the issue is undecided. The RCMP (our FBI) also said that they have much more important things to do then to investigate personal use pirates.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_sharing_in_Canada has a decent writeup of the situation.

Keep in mind that there is also much more to the Pirate Party then file sharing. Patents and Privacy are also very important aspects we fight on, and we've recently added Digital Sovereignty to counteract the Cybersecurity bill in the USA.

guest@xkcd:/$ who

Doctor Who?

(on the last comic)
guest@xkcd:/$ next

Time travel mode not enabled.

guest@xkcd:/$ enable time travel

TARDIS error: Time Lord missing.

guest@xkcd:/$ cat xkcd.com

You're a kitty!

I manage a bunch of physical and VPS servers, all colocated at various facilities. Using gvpe and dedicated switches, I've built a VPN between the locations and my house that allows ssh access between the machines. The vast majority of SSH servers only listen on the private IP address. There is no special access for traffic inside the VPN, and ssh keys are mandatory to login to these servers. In case something happens to the VPN gateways, there is an alternate host that accepts connections using port knocking (which is about 100% effective against automated attacks) and contains a whitelist of known good IP addresses. Fail2Ban still runs on it and it can ban IP addresses on the VPN is something untowards happen. Sometimes my customers require SSH access to the server. I apply the following order of preference:

• OpenVPN/PPTP to the client machines
• Port knocking
• Different SSH Port

The problem is that all solutions need more work from the customer and that's sometimes something they just don't want to deal with. If I'm really really stuck, what I do is set fail2ban to block on the first failed attempt. That server also gets removed from the VPN network and thus do not get any backup or MySQL replication. No matter what, there is no root password login enabled.

I look for colocation with a my own access card.
I also quiz the support staff I come into contact with basic network questions.

Not knowing the load required on the UPS makes it very hard to tell what kind of UPS you need. You need to know how many watts are used in the rack to be able to plan some proper UPS capacity.

apcupsd can be networked between machines and can trigger auto shutdowns of all of them, including VM guests.

Some virtual machine system can also suspend all VMs on shutdown which could be a better alternative then shutting them down. Again, without knowing which VM system you use it's hard to get into details.

As a Canadian, I have decided to actively help the Pirate Party set up shop in Canada. I am happy to say that we are on track to apply for registration in the next few weeks. We are just waiting on 2 pieces of paperwork (one from Industry Canada, one from an accounting firm) to complete the huge stack of paperwork we've already accumulated.

You can find more at http://www.pirateparty.ca/

A few people are inconvenienced because they have to connect to a different port then the default due to ISP firewalling.

I would really really like it if more ISPs were checking them and silently discard anything that is flagged as spam _AND_ fails SPF instead of bouncing it back.

We get thousands of bounces addressed to non-existant users, which in turn makes into a double bounce. Of course now I've set our system to silently delete them instead. Else it's just a colossal waste of resources.

http://www.pirateparty.ca/ , and we now have a new website

You can check out ours, Maximum CRM, http://www.maximumcrm.com/
We can do special pricing for non-profit organizations.
It is a hosted platform that would replace the contacts in Outlook.

Always give them 2 options, one of them to accept and one so bad that they have to refuse it. This creates the illusion of leadership and will make them feel important and valued.

Don't bring more then 2 options as everything will get muddled up.

As you said that it is a small company, see if you can have a quiet talk with the owner of the company, they might not actually be aware of the situation, nor of the danger.

Of course in a lot of cases a basic install of Ubuntu will allow someone to do their job. But keep in mind that it isn't in all of the cases.

Like many technological things (BGP and DNS comes to mind), caller id is trusting.

When you use *67 to block a caller id, the caller id is still sent, but with a privacy flag turned on so that the _end point_ equipment can conveniently not display it.

If I call into my Asterisk PBX on a SIP line with *67, the caller id will show up in the variable that holds the caller id, allowing me to do nice and wonderful things with it.

It won't show up on my Polycom phone, unless I explicitely set the privacy header of SIP to show the number.