I have a friend who works at a facility that runs those very exercises. You make it sound like that was the end of the story. In reality, we re-ran the exercises again because you don't just walk away from expensive simulations like that; after a loss, you create a team to re-tool for a few years in the future that prevents that kind of loss again.

Today, that same strategy wouldn't work. We upgraded the anti-boat and anti-missile technologies. We have been running simulations against massive numbers of speedboats for a decade now, successfully.

I'm not saying we wouldn't take losses or that they wouldn't be significant, but I don't think the US Military would stand by and allow us to fall into utter complacency, there are a LOT of checks and balances preventing that. 'Safety' seems to be the one thing our government can do correctly, probably because we've established that it has an unlimited price ceiling.

Hey, give him a break. Most people who's job is to admin Windows systems don't even understand Windows.

I actually built a similar system, but you lost me at

"run a backup utility... Norton Ghost to wipe the drive"

ImageX is built-in to Windows (in the AIK) and it does a fantastic job of backups, it even does compression and single-instance storage to save time and space. To wipe the disks, you can run any number of free/cheap utilities (Active KillDisk?) or you can just run 'diskpart' with 'clean all' to write zeros (good enough for 99.5% of cases).

"Linux dd doesn't have a problem doing the backups of anything as long as it is mounted"

Linux DD will also save all your deleted data as gobbledygook and lead to GIANT image files. If anything, you want these backups at the file-level, not block-level. Bonus points if you can backup to something with deduplication or single-instance storage.

Here's what we do where I work:

You'll need a Windows Server 2008 R2 with Windows Deployment Services role. You basically want to set up an isolated network with PXE booting, load a Windows PE disk into the PXE server. Modify the PE image to mount a drive off the server (to store your backups), then run a wipe script. As soon as the backup is done, you can actually fire up the next machine, you don't need to be 'connected' to wipe the disk.

For our purposes, we use Active Killdisk to wipe, and ImageX to backup.

You'll need PXE-enabled NICs or a gPXE boot disk. You can also do the exact same thing with a Samba server, a PXE daemon, and a basic Linux boot drive being served-up over PXE, but the learning curve is steeper. Also, ImageX is pretty awesome because it allows single-instance storage. You can append ALL you computer backups to one image file and only the different files will be stored more than once, cutting a massive amount of time and space from your backups.

This. If you can MITM and decrypt 500MB of HDMI data on the fly, you may as well do some basic video compression before dumping out to disk.

Also, for high-data linear loads like video dumps, HDDs are still superior to SSDs.

> I sure wouldn't like some guy touching my food before I eat it

I love this idea that people seem to have that food is somehow at all 'clean'. Everything about food except for the part when the server brings it to you or the stockboy puts it on the shelf is hands-on and 'unsanitary' by most people's understanding.

I've fished commercially before. Do you know what the back-end of that market is like? Imagine a football-field sized warehouse with two or three inches of fish-gut water flowing by while strange-looking dudes poke and prod your fish and offer prices.

Those bags of chickpeas at the falafel place are sitting on the sidewalk for a good fifteen minutes, where thousands of people walk, hundreds spit, and several piss or vomit every day.

It's not a big deal, the world is awash with benign germs, they're not going to kill you. The stuff that will make you sick is the real nasty germs found in spoiled meats and such, not the harmless stuff on all of our hands.

In reality, someone picking through a bag of M&Ms isn't at all unsanitary or unsettling.

In that case, it's time top open up some performance counters and figure out what's causing the bottleneck. It could be the VM or host choking on interrupts, latency in the network adapters (virtual or physical), or the TCP window being too small for the latency.

FireWire was also supposed to 'go optical' at some point, but market forces kept it copper.

Well yeah, I can saturate a gigabit link from a Windows 2000 box running a Pentium III, or on my embedded Linux-based consumer router. My guess is that the issue here isn't actual network performance, it's the underlying disk performance. 600-700mbits is remarkably close to the single-spindle speed of the average spinning media.

"And any 100+ connection is materially more useful today than the existing 10-20Mbps connections."

Do you really think so?

Nobody at my house (four users) even noticed when I changed from 5mbits to 20mbits. Hell, from the back yard the wireless only gets 3-5mbits anyways.

I noticed, but that's because I do a fair amount of large file transfers and remote backups. Most people don't. Most people just want to watch Netflix while Johnny browses. Netflix connections only stream at a few megabits anyways. Even raw blu-ray is only 36mbits, and any distribution medium is going to use a codec that squeezes a bit more, just for sanity.

I have a 20mbit uplink at home and a milti-GB uplink at work.

Honestly, I see almost no difference when it comes to 'regular stuff' like watching movies, browsing, email, and gaming. Home users generally don't need to upload or download multi-gigabyte archives to the 'net. When they do need to download huge files, it's usually in the context of streaming, where the downlink just needs to be fast enough to play the media without hosing the connection.

"...in a virtual environment where there's no possibility of crappy hardware or drivers."

Um, there's definitely going to be a performance hit running in a VM. Every packet between VMs generates an interrupt on each VM involved and at least one on the host. There also very much is the chance for crappy drivers to be involved, your CPU is likely emulating an ancient generic NIC. Try using the Paravirtual drivers if you can, they'll offload as much as possible to the host, which knows more about how to schedule and buffer things.

Cool, I've never heard of that before. Thanks!