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Comment Re:Worried about the results of your actions? (Score 1) 730

by degradas (#29066479) Attached to: Why Should I Trust My Network Administrator?

Outsourcing to IBM has lead to a 30 to 60 day lead time.

I work for a major global outsourcing company (90K+ employees) and I sometimes wonder how do our clients put up with this. For example, a simple project (replacing one Wintel FTP server with another) is now taking more than 6 months to execute, and we are buying a complete server where a VMWare instance would be more than sufficient - load on that server is negligible. Entire project is costing maybe 30K $ just in time booked to the client - and that is something I could do in two days - but everybody takes it as "business as usual", including the client.

Makes me wanna go and start my own company, providing better quality services for 1/10th of a price. But then again, I wouldn't be able to claim that I've been in a market for 50 years and will not go bankrupt next year, crisis or no crisis.
Image

Lawyer Jailed For Contempt Is Freed After 14 Years Screenshot-sm 408

Posted by samzenpus from the all-we-need-is-a-little-patience dept.
H. Beatty Chadwick has been in a staring match with the judicial system for the past 14 years, and the system just blinked. Chadwick was ordered to pay his ex-wife $2.5 million after their divorce. He refused to pay saying that he couldn't because he lost the money in a series of "bad investments." The judge in the case didn't believe him and sent him to jail for contempt. That was 14 years ago. Last week another judge let Chadwick go saying that "continued imprisonment would be legal only if there was some likelihood that ultimately he would comply with the order; otherwise, the confinement would be merely punitive instead of coercive." Chadwick, now 73, is believed to have served the longest contempt sentence in US history.
Networking

What Would You Want In a Large-Scale Monitoring System? 342

Posted by timothy from the detect-curse-words-and-fine-a-quarter-apiece dept.
Krneki writes "I've been developing monitoring solutions for the last five years. I have used Cacti, Nagios, WhatsUP, PRTG, OpManager, MOM, Perl-scripts solutions, ... Today I have changed employer and I have been asked to develop a new monitoring solution from scratch (5,000 devices). My objective is to deliver a solution that will cover both the network devices, servers and applications. The final product must be very easy to understand as it will be used also by help support to diagnose problems during the night. I need a powerful tool that will cover all I need and yet deliver a nice 2D map of the company IT infrastructure. I like Cacti, but usually I use it only for performance monitoring, since pooling can't be set to 5 or 10 sec interval for huge networks. I'm thinking about Nagios (but the 2D map is hard to understand), or maybe OpManager. What monitoring solution do you use and why?"
Sci-Fi

Sarah Connor Chronicles — Why It Died 834

Posted by CmdrTaco from the because-it-was-boring dept.
brumgrunt writes "Sarah Connor was a non-populist, meditative, complex piece of television on a smash-bang, show-me-the-ratings kind of network. The two were never going to get on. Plus: how the Terminator name proved more hindrance than aid."
Security

Submission + - Obama could soon be able to shut down the internet (worldnetdaily.com) 2

Submitted by
Michael
Michael writes: "A pair of bills introduced in the U.S. Senate (773 & 778) by Senator Jay Rockefeller would grant the White House sweeping new powers to access private online data, regulate the cybersecurity industry and even shut down Internet traffic during a declared "cyber emergency. A working draft of the legislation obtained by an Internet privacy group also spells out plans to grant the Secretary of Commerce access to all privately owned information networks deemed to be critical to the nation's infrastructure "without regard to any provision of law, regulation, rule or policy restricting such access.""
Spam

Spam Replacing Postal Junk Mail? 251

Posted by kdawson from the connecting-the-dots dept.
TheOtherChimeraTwin writes "I've been getting spam from mainstream companies that I do business with, which is odd because I didn't give those companies my email address. It is doubly strange because the address they are using is a special-purpose one that I wouldn't give out to any business. Apparently knotice.com ('Direct Digital Marketing Solutions') and postalconnect.net aka emsnetwork.net (an Equifax Marketing Service Product with the ironic name 'Permission!') are somehow collecting email addresses and connecting them with postal addresses, allowing companies to send email instead of postal mail. Has anyone else encountered this slimy practice or know how they are harvesting email addresses?"
The Courts

Submission + - Prof. Yongdae Kim to Testify in Capitol v. Thomas (blogspot.com) 1

Submitted by
NewYorkCountryLawyer
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes: "With little help from her friends, this time around Jammie Thomas will have an expert witness of her own to help rebut the testimony of the RIAA's expert, Dr. Doug Jacobson, who testified for the RIAA (PDF) at the 2007 trial resulting in a $220,000 verdict over 24 song files having a retail market value of $23.76. The soundness of Jacobson's techniques and theories have been thoroughly vetted here on Slashdot, as well as on Groklaw. With a $3000 grant in hand from the Expert Witness Defense Fund maintained by the Free Software Foundation for just such a situation, Ms. Thomas had requested an extension of the discovery deadline to enable her to designate Assistant Professor Yongdae Kim to testify as an expert about techniques of group and internet security, including the means by which an internet protocol address can be "hijacked," or impersonated, by others who are not the owner of that address. The RIAA strenuously opposed the motion, not wanting to allow Ms. Thomas to have her own expert. In a 9-page decision (PDF), after a telephonic conference with the lawyers, the Magistrate Judge has granted Ms. Thomas's motion."
Windows

Post-Beta Windows 7 Build Leaked With New IE8 332

Posted by timothy from the seekret-leaks-from-nowhere-in-particular dept.
CWmike writes "A post-beta version of Windows 7, Build 7022, leaked to Internet file-sharing sites also includes an updated version of IE8, according to searches at several BitTorrent trackers. With Microsoft halting new Windows 7 beta downloads on Tuesday, and blocking all downloads as of noon (EST) today, users are again turning to illegal sources to get the new operating system."
The Almighty Buck

Microsoft Slaps $250K Bounty On Conficker Worm 258

Posted by timothy from the sic-the-french-air-force-on-'em dept.
alphadogg writes "The spreading Conficker/Downadup worm is now viewed as such a significant threat that it's inspired the formation of a posse to stop it, with Microsoft leading the charge by offering a $250,000 reward to bring the Conficker malware bad guys to justice. The money will be paid for 'information that results in the arrest and conviction of those responsible for illegally launching the Conficker malicious code on the Internet,' Microsoft said today in a statement, adding it is fostering a partnership with Internet registries and DNA providers such as ICANN, ORG, and NeuStar as well as security vendors Symantec and Arbor Networks, among others, to stop the Conficker worm once and for all. Conficker, also called Downadup, is estimated to have infected at least 10 million PCs. It has been slowly but surely spreading since November. Its main trick is to disable anti-malware protection and block access to anti-malware vendors' Web sites."
Networking

SoHo NAS With Good Network Throughput? 517

Posted by kdawson from the small-office-home-office dept.
An anonymous reader writes "I work at a small business where we need to move around large datasets regularly (move onto test machine, test, move onto NAS for storage, move back to test machine, lather-rinse-repeat). The network is mostly OS X and Linux with one Windows machine (for compatibility testing). The size of our datasets is typically in the multiple GB, so network speed is as important as storage size. I'm looking for a preferably off-the shelf solution that can handle a significant portion of a GigE; maxing out at 6MB is useless. I've been looking at SoHo NAS's that support RAID such as Drobo, NetGear (formerly Infrant), and BuffaloTech (who unfortunately doesn't even list whether they support OS X). They all claim they come with a GigE interface, but what sort of network throughput can they really sustain? Most of the numbers I can find on the websites only talk about drive throughput, not network, so I'm hoping some of you with real-world experience can shed some light here."
Censorship

Court Nixes National Security Letter Gag Provision 128

Posted by kdawson from the speak-we-will dept.
2phar sends news that on Monday a federal appeals court ruled unconstitutional the gag provision of the Patriot Act's National Security Letters. Until the ruling, recipients of NSLs were legally forbidden from speaking out. "The appeals court invalidated parts of the statute that wrongly placed the burden on NSL recipients to initiate judicial review of gag orders, holding that the government has the burden to go to court and justify silencing NSL recipients. The appeals court also invalidated parts of the statute that narrowly limited judicial review of the gag orders — provisions that required the courts to treat the government's claims about the need for secrecy as conclusive and required the courts to defer entirely to the executive branch." Update: 12/16 22:26 GMT by KD : Julian Sanchez, Washington Editor for Ars Technica, sent this cautionary note: "Both the item on yesterday's National Security Letter ruling and the RawStory article to which it links are somewhat misleading. It remains the case that ISPs served with an NSL are forbidden from speaking out; the difference is that under the ruling it will be somewhat easier for the ISPs to challenge that gag order, and the government will have to do a little bit more to persuade a court to maintain the gag when it is challenged. But despite what the ACLU's press releases imply, this is really not a 'victory' for them, or at least only a very minor one. Relative to the decision the government was appealing, it would make at least as much sense to call it a victory for the government. The lower court had struck down the NSL provisions of the PATRIOT Act entirely. This ruling left both the NSL statute and the gag order in place, but made oversight slightly stricter. If you look back at the hearings from this summer, you'll see that most of the new ruling involves the court making all the minor adjustments that the government had urged them to make, and which the ACLU had urged them to reject as inadequate."

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