News from PANUG/BizNix - July 18, 2003 http://panug.org - http://biznix.org TAPE by Ed Sawicki - Accelerated Learning Center / Tailored Computers Last night's PANUG meeting was rather sparsely attended, though I don't know whether the topic had anything to do with that. The presentation topic was tape backup and the presenters were from Yosemite - makers of Tapeware. The product seemed OK and others in the room seemed to be satisfied by the product features. However, it was all pretty much lost on me. I seldom use tape. I don't trust it and I don't like it. I never have. To me, it's unreliable, expensive, and the procedures for backing up and restoring data are far too complicated and time consuming. I asked the presenter about the state of the art of tape storage devices in terms of capacity and cost. The answer was LTO devices. This morning I checked on LTO units. IBM and Seagate have units that store "100/200 GB" per tape, which means that raw capacity is 100 GB but data compression allows up to 200 GB. These units cost about $3,000. The Exabyte 1 GB (1/2) unit was about $7,000. The tapes for these units cost somewhere between $50 and $125. It seems to make more sense for me to backup to less expensive, faster, and more reliable storage devices - hard disks. A 100 or 200 GB hard disk is not much more than a LTO tape. Even a IDE hard disk can usually outperform a SCSI tape unit, though the 15 MB/s data rate of IBM's LTO is impressive. Of course, any good backup solution includes the ability to move the backup media to a secure location - preferrably off-site. This is easy to do if you have an Internet connection. I backup my data to another server miles away (using an encrypted data stream). I use incremental backup techniques so it doesn't cost me much bandwidth and takes little time. Last night, there was discussion of incremental backup techniques suffering from the backup not knowing when files have been deleted. Incremental restores put back data files that are no longer wanted. This is a non-issue for me. My remote site exists so I can recoved data that was lost. It's not there to track my file system in real time. Real time tracking is done by RAID on my server. Contact me if you want to use the same techniques as I do. CISCO ATTACK by Ed Sawicki - Accelerated Learning Center / Tailored Computers This Cisco IOS bug is big news: http://panug.org/33 http://panug.org/34 Cisco security holes this serious are rare (relative to other popular products). You shouldn't avoid buying Cisco routers because of this. However, note that many of us are using our own computers running Linux as routers. The benefit, aside from the cost savings, is that you can add other features whenever you like. My router is also a firewall, time server (NTP), DHCP server, DNS cache, and DNSBL (RBL) server. Serious security holes in a well-designed Linux-based router are also rare. WEEKLY WINDOWS SECURITY NOTICE by Dick Pilz - PANUG President Time to patch another "critical" flaw in MS Windows. This time, it is the first critical flaw found in Windows Server 2003. The flaw, which also affects NT, 2K and XP, involves a Remote Procedure Call via port 135. A client can end up owning the server. See the news article here, with links to the patches: http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,3959,1195713,00.asp 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).