News from PANUG/BizNix - July 8, 2003 http://panug.org - http://biznix.org Excuse us for the length of this message. Volunteer labor has been in short supply for the past two weeks so we've saved up quite a few articles. BIZNIX MEETING This Thursday at 6:30 pm is the July BizNix meeting. The main presentation will be Easy To Install Linux. If you've been struggling with installations of commercial Linux distributions, such as Red Hat Linux, you need to take a look at better ways of doing Linux installations. We'll demonstrate a Linux installation that installs Linux and a boatload of applications in under 20 minutes, while asking you a minimal amount of questions. SPAM Hormel Foods is suing companies that use the word spam to refer to unsolicited email. DONOTCALL.GOV by Ed Sawicki - Accelerated Learning Center / Tailored Computers The www.donotcall.gov (Do Not Call) folks expected to have tens of millions of people accessing their Web site on opening day last week. So, what web server did they choose for this busy site? Microsoft IIS. Predictably, the site was abysmally slow. I was unable to get past the first screen on my numerous attempts that day. There are web servers that can handle such a load but IIS is not one of them, unless you build a cluster with a room full of servers and buy all the licenses. While Apache would have been a better and less expensive choice, it too is not the best solution. Frequently, the best solutions are those that most practitioners have never heard of or ignore because it's not a politically correct solution for themselves or the company they work for. For examples of web servers that handle loads greater than donotcall.gov, you only need to look to sites such as aol.com. Since AOL is a for profit enterprise and can't afford to waste money (as donotcall.gov does), they use the AOLserver that is now an open source project. We'll demonstrate the AOLserver at an upcoming meeting. OS QUESTION by Jeremy Grand We have a couple of Novell 4.11 servers and a couple of MS servers. One of the Novell servers is very old and we expect to upgrade the box in the near future. It is used as a file server and an authentication server. Obviously, nw4.11 is also very old now, but it continues to work well & we expect that it would work fine on the new hardware too. Moreover, we own plenty of client licenses for Novell. The hardware upgrade means we need to reinstall an OS, no matter what, so we are considering whether we should get our feet wet with linux & samba. The end result would be 1 novell, 1 open source, 1 exchange, 1 iis, 1 sql2k, and 1 sql7 servers. I'm curious to hear how other folks think about adding the open source dimension to this mix. Please respond to this message and we'll compile a list of your responses. NUIHOTLABS by John Henry Maurice http://www.nuihotlabs.org/nakoma/details-nakoma.htm I am investigating the possibility of scheduling a stop in Portland at the end of August or the beginning of September. I call them and they need 13 confirmed people and a suitable room (they supply the equipment). PCC can not send 13 people, so I am wondering if anyone else is interested. Please respond to jmaurice@pcc.edu WESTERN UNION SCAM by Christian Bayer If you use an email client that, by default, displays HTML formatted email, be sure not to become victim of a scam which appears to have an origin of the Western Union Company. This fraudulent email message urges you to update your account information but the link contained in the email is to a server in use by a company in Beirut, Lebanon, not Western Union. QWEST SCAM by Ed Sawicki - Accelerated Learning Center / Tailored Computers In December, Qwest offered my company 3 months free local telephone service if we'd switch from AT&T. We agreed. Since then, we've spent about ten hours on the telephone trying to get Qwest to honor its promise. From January until May, they said that they were trying to get us the credit and offered numerous feeble excuses such as "The credit is over $100 so it needs a manager's approval." They now claim that they promised only one month of free service and insist that we pay the other two months. Has anyone else experienced this? DISCLAIMER PANUG and BizNix welcome contributions from all members. Member contributions do not necessarily represent the official positions of PANUG or BizNix. If you don't contribute, the views of members that contribute frequently may appear to be the official position of the group(s).