I do have mod points, but unfortunately I can't find the +1 Pwned modifier. :)

That good sir, depends on how much money you have. http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/us/en/en/WF04a/12169-304612-82176-82176-82176.html

On the end of the extension cord you dangle from your third floor window, duh!

Even better would be a motorised reel, you could make it from Lego technic or harvested bits from an elcheapo rc helicopter.

This is only a problem if you're not capable of fully and completely supporting the systems that you are installing, and if that is the case you should not be installing them at all.

If debian disappeared tomorrow, i could still grab upstream sources, and patch/compile new versions and keep the machine in a fit state, then there's no blame to be had.

Commercial support contracts are security blankets for admin's that are under-skilled or worse totally incompetent. There are exceptions but a RHEL server running a mail/db/web/xen/radius/etc server is not one of them.

There also could (will) be business cases where it's just considered a good safety net to have, but its certainly not a requirement for information infrastructure to function reliably and successfully, and there are more real-world examples of it than I can even conceive.

No need for software just use either http://www.opendns.com/

Or if you want more control, setup a PC as a gateway with:

http://dansguardian.org/

It requires some knowledge of Unix type operating systems and proxies.

It can run on Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Mac OS X, HP-UX, and Solaris, (officially there are probably contributed builds for other operating systems.

Then again there's always education and supervision. You can't fix human & sociological problems with technological tools, it's like trying to fix a broken sink pipe with a car jack and a rubber mallet.

This aregument has some flaws.

This is a name for a machine, not a service/function.

We give the server it's self an arbitary name and then create cnames for the services that point to the physical machine's alias that currently provides that service.

That way if the person isn't sure they have

These tools are no doubt going to be very useful to everyone that uses p2p software for _any_ purpose.

The flipside is that as an administrator of a workplace network i can also use these tools to ascertain whether or not the traffic managment and qos i've put in place on the corporate network is working.

It doesn't really matter so much on this particular network as p2p protocols are blocked (infact every outgoing port is blocked from the internal lan, some https sites are whitelisted, and all non-ssl web access is proxied.

But it will allow me to ensure the qos for our voip trunks is effective.

Ok, who voted for the beammeupscotty tag?

I can't think of a worse place to be beamed, than 'up scotty'.