A not-so-anonymous Anonymous Coward asks: "Like many Slashdot readers, I have accumulated a lot of data over the years. Emails, documents, 'media' etc. Although I try to keep up with backups, I still feel I need some other place where I could dump my data without worrying about hard drive crashes and other problems. Googling reveals that there is a whole slew of online storage providers. But most are around $10 a month with a couple of gigs of space. So what does Slashdot recommend for sites that offer plenty of storage and fit the budget of a poor home user?"

thusson asks: "I work at a lab doing intrinsic signal imaging of cat and mouse visual cortex (brains). We are using a Dalsa 1M60P camera, and we want to cool it about 30-50 degrees C to improve picture quality by reducing noise. Does anyone have any suggestions about how to do this? So far, heat sinks have helped but only by a few degrees. I figure the overclocking community is a good place for novel ideas."

Barrington Johnson asks: "I am an emergency physician, and am looking for a solution for authentication which is compatible with rapid logons and logoffs. We have several web-based terminals into which we put information. The web application gives a real-time representation of the emergency department, so it is important that it is kept up to date. We have an opportunity to re-design our system, and I know that if I make the authentication process too difficult e.g. username+password, doctors will store up their data entry, and do it all in one go, removing the real-time usefulness of the display. At what level (application/browser/system) should authentication occur, and what method would be best?" Might a smartcard-based authentication system work well in this situation?

wildzeke writes "I plan on switching Internet providers this summer to get a faster speed. Since losing an email account is the biggest pain when switching providers, I decided to pay the extra money to have email for the domain I registered. One of the options provided is to make one of your email accounts a catch-all account. In other words, any email sent to this domain with out a valid user name, will be dumped in the catch-all account. The question I have, is this a good idea or not? On one hand, it may catch important email such as admin, or postmaster or simply mis-typed user name. On the other hand, the catch-all will open the flood gates to spam who will send to [all user names in the world]@domain.com."

Shook asks: "Today, my fiancee and I talked to a wedding photographer known for being technologically savvy. (He uses fully digital equipment, the couple can make changes to the album online before printing, relatives can order prints of specific pictures online). I knew going into this that professional photographers generally retain the copyright to the images and all requests for reprints must go through the photographer. During our consultation, I asked him if it would be an option to obtain the copyright from him and get CDs of the original high-resolution images. He said that he has never sold a copyright, was not sure what he would want to charge, but he said it would 'be expensive.' In the end, the photographer is too expensive for our budget ($2000-$4500), so I didn't discuss it further. With the ongoing extension of copyright time limits, when does it even expire? What if my grandchildren want copies of my pictures? Do they need to track down his corporate (or actual) descendant and get permission? In addition, there is the classic issue, what if I can't find him in 20 years?"

Fortunato_NC asks: "I'm the IT manager for a small business that delivers its service via a browser-based application, and we take around two dozen to three dozen tech support calls from users each day. Many have something to do with pop-up ads making using our product nearly impossible, which is odd, since we don't have any advertising on our website. Of course, it's spyware causing the pop-ups, and we recommend using a product like Ad-aware to take care of the issue. However, not everyone gets the message. Today I was on a client's computer using WebEx helping them remove yet another 'browser helper'. The uninstaller for this program consisted of running no fewer than four separate programs, each of which forced closed the Internet Explorer windows, killing the WebEx session, and making it very difficult to service an already upset client ('What do you mean I have to join the meeting AGAIN?'). It seems as if this product anticipated the need to have someone remotely help the user remove it and went out of its way to make that task nearly impossible. Has anyone else on Slashdott encountered spyware or malware specifically designed to make life miserable for *remote* support techs? What other nasty tactics are spyware authors using that you've noticed?"

yemanja forwards along a request for a friend: "Justin Wiley, a young friend of mine is running an 'open source lab' in the Phillipines as a Peace Corps volunteer. He'd like to ask this question of Slashdot: 'Rhe NGO I am working with primarily supports governmental bodies. We are trying to convert them over to Open Source software, and have done so in some areas like putting Mandrake, Open Office, and Mozilla on all the desktops of the national economic development authority. However, it would be useful to have a body of applications providing more specific gov't. purposes. I'm looking for Open Source packages that can do things useful for the government, like inventory control, customer management, auditing, content-management, project management/monitoring, security, and so on. If I can make some of the kids into experts in these areas, it will be easier to get them a job in government, and easier to work in Open Source software if there are people trained in using and operating it. If you run into anything like that, let me know!' I know that cities like Munich have converted to Open Source, but I wonder if anyone on Slashdot has experience with this sort of question and can provide Justin with some specific suggestions that might be useful."

trifakir asks: "We are running some quite expensive SunFire servers with Solaris 8. In the 'crontabs' of these hosts we have scheduled maybe some hundred odd jobs, which are constrained by multiple factors: dependencies on other jobs, time constrains, CPU and memory usage, network bandwidth, and so on. Obviously this imposes a CSP. On the other hand the number of these jobs, each one of them can take from minutes to hours is growing and we are now experiencing performance problems given the limited resources we have. Of course we have opened the bag-of-tricks with our best *ad-hoc* solutions, using mostly Open Source software, to turn our system into an event-based and less dependent on the scheduling expertise of the admins. At certain point we were considering using AutoSys and I was looking for a grid-like scheduler like OpenPBS, both of which were discarded for various reasons. I am curious, how you guys, would solve this problem, which seems very trivial for many environments. Both advice about theory (scheduling) and practice will help us and any other readers who may be tackling this difficult problem."

jman251 asks: "I am presenting at a conference in September on a couple of Linux-centric topics. One of these is a collection of tips, tricks, and tools for configuring, securing, and maintaining a Linux-based server. I have a short list of tools I use, but would like some community input on the subject. What tools do you use that make your admin responsibilities easier or more automated on the Linux platform?"

mcovey asks: "Unix shell accounts used to be easy to find, with quality applications installed and free web space. Nowadays the only free ones left are either not accepting new accounts, have limited applications or send you on a wild goose chase to register. Does anyone know any free or low-cost shell accounts that include compilers, IRC, background processes, FTP, a decent editor and an email app (preferably pine, since I have a config file already on my IMAP server)?"

mstich asks: "I'm curious as to why some companies make it so difficult to ship to Canada (from the U.S.A.). I'm only about 200km (124mi) from Detroit, so distance surely can't be the problem. Companies like NewEgg state that they won't ship to Canada, even though they will ship to Alaska (albeit, at an inflated cost) and some, like Crucial, do ship to Canada but they won't extend their 'free second day shipping'. Are there really that many underlying costs that show up when crossing the border? Is this just another money grabber? Does NAFTA fit into all of this, somehow?"

sol2k asks: "I just got myself a G4 Powerbook 12' and I am still amazed at the thing. Mac OS X is beatiful and sometimes even too intuitive for someone crossing from the Windows world. I had some nice experiences with Linux on Intel machines but would love to try out a Linux on the Powerbook and make use of the great hardware. Here's a simple question: What are my options? I know about Yellow Dog (old and doesn't seemt to be updated often), Debian/PPC (a bit too much time to set up than what I have available) and Mandrake (9.1 - that's really old). What Linux adventures have you had on your Mac?"

cuzality asks: "The public library I work for is (hopefully) going to get some money in the coming months to replace some of our computers. Since we can't replace all of them at the same time, we need to decide which machines to replace first. We have begun working on a survey instrument to help us accomplish this, but since this is the first time we are replacing computers (most were bought in 1999), this is also the first time we have tried to put together a survey for this purpose. What kind of criteria have you used to prioritize replacement of computers? Examples of surveys you have used would also be very helpful..."

Carlos Camacho asks: "The Inkubator Project is a website for creating free, Open Source Mac games through a collaboration between experienced and inexperienced developers. As webmaster, I am interested in adding to the seven games we have listed in our link section. So, I would like to ask Slashdot readers for their picks of the best Open Source games. The Inkubator Project focuses on Mac developers, however any game project that uses cross-platform technologies is fine."

saintlupus asks: "I'm going to be teaching an introductory Computer Science class in the fall, and I'm using OpenOffice Impress on my Debian Powerbook for a lot of the lecture material. Does anyone know of a brand of wireless remote that works with this presentation software? I'd rather not be locked behind the podium while I'm teaching, so the idea of a remote is appealing, but nobody lists Linux compatibility for these things."

narzy asks: "To me one of the most important steps to keeping a computer secure is keeping the systems software up to date. The problem I run in to is that more and more of the applications in everyday use are web enabled in some context or another, making them high targets for attack and exploitation. I am beginning to find it difficult to keep clients computers completely up to date. I find that applications that have an auto update such as my anti-virus Nod32 which updates every day on its own a real blessing. It's a feature that is an option but and option that I personally wish was in a lot more software. Windows has this feature (so does Linux if you want it to) however in the case of Windows it's not exactly all that consistent. Unfortunately it opens another can of worms that isn't so enjoyable that being companies who abuse such a system for advertising purposes, modifying the software in such a way to reduce or change its functionality either because of internal decisions or external pressures from 3rd parties, compromise and abuse of the server the company uses to distribute the updates. But is it worth the added risk to know that 95%+ of the time your software is up to date? It's not a cure all but is it or is it not better then a reactive approach?"

sarig_magik asks: "It seems that Dell is testing the Linux desktop market worldwide, and their choice of desktop is Linspire 4.51. I wonder how Microsoft will view Dell, now? Could this be a real attempt to gain a foothold before any of the other distributors do? We know the hardware vendor, but can anyone comment on the choice of OS?" Although Dell is offering a system with a preloaded Linux Desktop, they aren't doing it here in the US, but through their Italian partner, Questar. While the choice of Linspire as a desktop may leave a few of you underwhelmed, this does seem to be a step in the right direction. Is Dell testing the market? Of course they are. How well do you think they will do?

An anonymous reader asks: "I have a Compaq IPAQ desktop system (legacy free) that will not boot headless. (Yes I did try to tell the BIOS to not generate a no keyboard error, but there is no such setting for the BIOS of this system.) Since I would like to use it such and don't wish to waste a keyboard just to keep it from complaining, I'd like to come up with a small dongle that would fake the system into thinking that there is a keyboard attached. This is the same basic thing that KVM's do, so the circuit shouldn't be that difficult to find. Has anyone heard of such a thing? Can anyone provide or point to somewhere where I can find the basic circuit for this?" How hard would it be to take the connector part from a old non-working keyboard and wiring something like this up?

Supp0rtLinux asks: "In order to meet uptime requirements and SLAs, we decided to get redundant T1's with BGP. We already had two Cisco 7200 routers and a T1. After the ISP turned up the additional circuit and we tested everything on our end, all seemed fine. But when the CO lost power and the generator failed, we had no access for 16+ hours. This prompted some investigations which revealed that yes, we did in fact have a redundant T1 with BGP setup and local redundant routers with separate UPS... on our side. However, on their side both our feeds were plugged into the *same* switch which was on the same PDU which happened to be in the same CO and was on the same sonet. And they were charging us for redundancy! Six month later, we have a truly redundant BGP setup. Each feed goes to separate CO's with the primary to the local one. This makes for separate physical switches, separate power, and we have confirmed we're on physically separate sonets. Now, the only true single point of failure is the physical cabling in the street, but in CA that doesn't get damaged very often. To those of you on Slashdot who know what I'm talking about: are your circuits truly redundant? What have your experiences in network redundancy been? How have you gotten past the sales guy to a tech that knows what redundancy really means? Have you been able to prove your redundancy? Have you found yourself paying for something that you weren't really getting?"

Omega1045 asks: "I am a software developer, writing client/GUI software in C# (.NET) on Windows and server software in a UNIX environment. I have used Linux in the past as a firewall, server and more but have never used it seriously as a desktop. What Linux distro and tools should I look to for a switch? I definitely still need to run Win2k (in a VM would be preferable) for testing and other purposes, but want to live as much of my monitor facing life as I can in Linux. I also need the best laptop and Wireless PC Card support (D-Link in my case) from the distro I choose. Have any Slashdot readers gone this route? What are your recommendations?"