It has been implemented in IS-IS, used in some service provider networks.

Same thing for Plus, they've put a FAQ up which states they were subject to court orders to turn over their customers details, here.

There's a lot of comments saying "use a decent firewall and you're sorted".

On any non-trivial network, if the only security in place is a firewall on the boundary then you're probably one of the 3/4 of easily exploitable networks mentioned in the article.

Viruses, social engineering, playing with applications that are allowed through (e.g. HTTPS web apps), dial-ins, wireless, abusive staff, there is a never ending list of attack vectors if you only pay attention to the perimeter. Like the article says: 43% of respondents view planting a rogue member of staff inside a company as one of the most successful hacking methodologies..

The hub itself wouldn't generate any BPDUs, but since it just repeats electrical signals on the wire then it would be forwarding those from the next switch back up the loop (likely to be the same physical switch) so BPDU guard would still shut the port down.

There are other loop protections, Cisco switches send loopback packets onto the line and will shut the link down if they see their own loopback packet again. It's a default setting so should work even if BPDU guard (and storm control etc) aren't enabled, unless it's specifically turned off with the "no keepalive" command.

It's a shame they blew up with the ship, if they'd dropped then we'd now be reading the headline "eve pirates legally steal $1200".

My 1990 Celica did it with the original floor mat.

Happened twice in a couple of years, they did have clips in the floor to hold it in place but after 18 years the plastic had broken and the mat could slide around.

I believe you only need the infrastructure server if you want Virtual Center (to manage a load of ESX boxes from a central point), you can manage standalone ESXi boxes individually via their web interfaces.

VirtualBox is also great for network labs as you can bind physical NICs to seperate virtual machines. You can't do that with any others until you start getting into ESX territory afaik.

As an example you can run Checkpoint or Olive on it and link it in with Dynamips, get an entire enterprise network running on your desktop. Maybe not everyones idea of fun but a comparable hardware lab setup would run to many thousands of pounds.

I'd second your comments about the Atom too, it runs XP blazingly fast.

Handy for upgrades but also great for redundancy.

If you have a power outage in a data center you can have all of the servers instantly pop up in the backup data center without even dropping any sessions.