When I discover a good book that is useful to me I always seek a way to reward the author, usually but buying the paper version. Kinda "magic spell" that is.

These two queuing disciplines allow you to create a fairly complete WAN simulator.
There are however few gotchas:

• Precise Bandwidth limitation at high speed required lots of CPU, powerful bus and quality network adapters (read: server class hardware)
• If you want to simulate a complex network and more than two nodes, you'll need IFB (or IMQ) in order to shape incoming traffic and yet some topologies would stay out of reach.
• Keep in mind that there are two types of latencies: the "serialization" latency that depends on packet size and link speed and "processing" latency that depends on packets rate and network hardware processing power. Netem simulates the "processing" one.
• Simulating "serialization" latency would be harder, require more CPU and as a "side" effect would also implement bandwidth limitation. As of today I'm not aware of any project that would accurately simulate "processing" latency in the Linux QoS framework.

All that being said in most cases having a rough simulation is sufficient to validate the behaviour of an application on WAN before deployment.
For those interested there is an excellent, 13years old but still relevant paper about latency: http://rescomp.stanford.edu/~cheshire/rants/Latency.html

This morning I had my son (4.5y) asking me to get him outside to ride his bicycle.
So I've asked him in turn to plan the whole thing: getting dressed, going to the place where the bicycle is stored, getting the key to open the door etc.

It was hard for him but he managed to have an "executive" plot.

So I think I'll do that little exercise again.

As a side note: would be interesting to conduct similar study on a representative population of executive officers and financial experts.

Hint for parents: to *always* explain why you want your kid to do such or such thing is a wrong path, they must know that there are circumstances (until certain age) that questioning parental authority is not allowed (and *that* could be explained: you are totally accountable on what they do and what happens to them).

If at your age you still have the ability and the will to undergo an academic cursus, it means you actually worth more than a youngster in terms of potential.

Now we have to convince the audience that FreeBSD, GNU/Linux etc are just browsers!

This is probably your last chance. I mean, it has not to be related to the reason you are leaving. But nobody's perfect, there is for sure something about you that was painful to your coworkers, recognize it, beg for pardon.

What's your real name allready?

http://www.owasp.org/index.php/Main_Page

When you put it that way it may seem wrong indeed.

Now please consider the facts from the following perspective:

- I do not need any of M$ products for any particular feature they may provide and I'm perfectly happy with free alternatives...
- Except when I have to exchange with the part of the universe that is captive of M$ formats
- There is so much of people that are captive because M$ have a monopoly
- The M$ created it's monopoly by resorting to illegal activities (convicted guilty in multiple courts)

In this situation I believe that I'm entitled to use M$ products for free in order to achieve interoperability.

"Security Engineering" by Ross Anderson http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/book.html/.
The best book ever, truly enlightening.
If you're young enough it will change your life.

We work 217 days/year here :D

PCI standart adresses only the environment where card numbers are stored and processed. You can reduce this perimeter with appripriate segmentation.

I suppose AIX servers were in PCI environment (otherwise your comment is out of scope).
Then the situation you describe probabely violates the following requirements:

req. 2.1: "Don't use default passwords"
req. 8.5.4 "Immediately revoke access for any terminated users."
req. 8.5.5 "Remove/disable inactive user accounts at least every 90 days."
req. 8.5.6 "Enable accounts used by vendors for remote maintenance only during the time period needed."
req. 8.5.8 "Do not use group, shared, or generic accounts and passwords."
req. 8.5.9 "Change user passwords at least every 90 days."
req. 8.5.10 "Require a minimum password length of at least seven characters."

About the fact that you can connect to servers from outside: that means no segmentation which in its turn means that the whole internet is to be considered as part of the PCI environment of this company.

Now please tell me by WHOM are they considered compliant?
Being financial institution means that they are provider (and may be merchant too) they certainly have to be audited by a QSA (self assessment questionnaire would not be sufficient) which could mean one of tho things:
The QSA did not his job properly
The company concealed things form the QSA