__/ [ Ian Hilliard ] on Friday 16 June 2006 22:03 \__
> I currently work for a very much all Microsoft house, but about six months
> ago we ran into a problem that the broadcasts that we required for our
> distrubuted communication system were being filtered out of the network.
> This became clear on a Friday afternoon. The following Sunday I sat down
> and looked for a solution for the problem.
>
> The easiest solution was to have the devices that required to register with
> one of he distributed communications agents send their requests to a proxy
> server which would forward the requests without any changes to the packet
> to each of the communications servers. This was a trivial task with Linux
> raw sockets. It took a couple of hours an half a bottle of wine and I had a
> little proxy program.
>
> The following Monday, I went to the stores a got an old computer that was
> destined to go to the recyclers. The case was a bit banged up where it had
> been thrown into the bin, to be scrapped. It didn't look like much but
> within half an hour I had a copy of Ubuntu running on it. I compiled my new
> little program and tested it. It seemed to work well. I was quite amazed
> considering the amount I wine I had drunk :)
>
> I wrote a simple auto start script and put the little proxy server into
> service. That as I said was about six months ago. In the mean time, the
> system has been running 24/7 and hasn't been restarted and hasn't missed a
> beat. In fact, it is so good that it is now going to become part of the
> final system, when it is delivered.
>
> Because the machine now needs to be monitored, I needed to put a second
> network card into it. This afternoon I looked at the machine for the first
> time in six months and discovered that the hard drive had completely
> failed. There is no way of telling how long it has been dead, because the
> drive is completely dead, totally U/S. Ubuntu didn't complain, I just kept
> chugging on. To me this is a perfect example of why we should be using more
> Linux. It works and it keeps on working, despite the world failing around
> it.
__^__ __^__
( ___ )----------------------------------------( ___ )
| / | I believe that Windows will have spewed | \ |
| / | out a warning, but I also suspect that a | \ |
| / | routine disk surface test would have | \ |
| / | revealed the problem. So, are you going | \ |
| / | to stuff a new hard-drive in that | \ |
| / | antique? Second-hand hard-drives with | \ |
| / | capacity for the task at hand are less | \ |
| / | than a tenner. One person's piece of | \ |
| / | grabage can be a treasure to you... a | \ |
| / | router for a fiver (+electricity bills). | \ |
|___| |___|
(_____)----------------------------------------(_____)
Best wishes,
Roy
--
Roy S. Schestowitz | The most satisfying eXPerience is UNIX
http://Schestowitz.com | Free as in Free Beer ¦ PGP-Key: 0x74572E8E
Cpu(s): 20.1% user, 3.8% system, 17.4% nice, 58.7% idle
http://iuron.com - semantic engine to gather information
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