News from PANUG/BizNix - October 14, 2003 http://panug.org - http://biznix.org SEALED SYSTEMS AT PANUG MEETING The October PANUG meeting is Thursday night at 6:15 pm at Novells office. Directions are here: http://panug.org/meetings The main presentation will cover sealed systems - a revolutionary technology that has these benefits and more: o Easily install and upgrade computer operating systems and application software in minutes with few or no questions asked. o Dramatically reduce the threat of attack by viruses, worms, human attackers, etc. o Lock down user desktops so they cannot make changes, reducing user-induced technical support issues. o Simplify system backups. o Disaster recovery procedures are greatly simplified. The presentation is suitable for non-technical people, so you can feel safe in bringing your manager, which you can do at no charge even if s/he isn't a member. Please RSVP by replying to this message. COMCAST DNS ISSUES by Ed Sawicki - Accelerated Learning Center / Tailored Computers Based on strange complaints voiced on the various DNS mailing lists, it seems that Comcast customers may have DNS problems under certain conditions. It appears that Comcast is redirecting _all_ DNS queries to their own DNS caches. This is OK for recursive queries but it's a disaster for anyone running their own DNS servers, caches, or proxies that make iterative queries. If you're a Comcast customer and having DNS problems, I'd appreciate hearing about it: ed@alcpress.com CLOAKING DEVICE MADE FOR SPAMMERS At last weeks PANUG meeting, Dick Pilz brought up the subject of spammers spoofing addresses using a new technique. Here's the article he was referring to: http://panug.org/49 DIRE PREDICTIONS http://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/digital-imprimatur/ ANTI-SPAM by Jeremy Grand There's alot of progress in the anti-spam war lately, at least for client-based solutions. I tried the consumer reports-recommended product a couple of months ago, but it just hung my PC. Spambayes seems to work really well. I use Outlook, so I don't know how well it works with other mail clients. It's an open source product available on sourceforge. FORMAT CHANGE We're testing a new format for the articles that we publish here. For articles where feedback is likely, we're sending the article to members that we think have expertise in the subject area in advance so their feedback can be included with the article. Other members are free to submit their feedback after the article is published. The article by Ray Robert (below) is the first. LINUX NOT A PERFORMER by Ray Robert - System Administrator Oregon Board of Medical Examiners During a commercial database vendor's benchmarking of their product on Linux vs. Windows they found that the ReiserFS (running on Linux) on average handily outperformed ext3. But this impressive average masked wildly erratic performance, including several episodes of 10 seconds of no response. JFS did slightly better than ext3. On the underlying benchmark on dual-processor systems, the Windows (2000 Server) and Linux versions ran comparably. They did not attempt kernel tuning, shutting off default services, etc. It did surprise me that there was no significant difference between Red Hat (7.3) and Mandrake (9.0). I thought Mandrake's i586 kernel would be an advantage. While there may be financial and security considerations, the test suggests that there is (yet?) no performance reason to migrate to Linux. The vendor's presentation is at http://panug.org/47 Dick Pilz: Readers can go to http://panug.org/48 for an article that discusses Linux file systems and why one file system might be chosen over another. Criteria to keep in mind are CPU load, space consumption, file size limitations, disk throughput and file security methods. Ken Barber: One database I/O benchmark test is an awfully narrow basis for making generalizations about overall performance. Ed Sawicki: a)It's common for disk benchmark tests to yield the same results with kernels compiled for different processors. Most systems are blocked by the disk channel(s) long before they're processor-bound. b)Benchmarking systems is a terribly complicated process to do right. Interpreting the results is harder still. Discussions of the results are almost always religious. c)Ray's conclusion may be correct. Linux might offer no performance benefit over Windows. However, the security, reliability, cost, flexibility, moral, choice, and freedom benefits are hard to ignore. DISCLAIMER PANUG and BizNix welcome contributions from all members. Member contributions do not necessarily represent the official positions of PANUG or BizNix. The views of members that contribute frequently may appear to be the official position of the group(s). If you contribute, you'll be adding vital diversity of opinion and outlook to these broadcasts.