Expert's answer

The problem you describe is one that more and more companies are facing in the current economy. I recently had the chance to interview Rick Clark of APTARE, a storage solution company for a future edition of my Help Desk ToolChest podcast. There are several areas where you can look to get control of your situation.

The big culprit I have seen on SANS is that the same file is kept in a variety of places. The users can forget how many copies of same file they have and where they are all so you end of wasting storage that could be put to better use elsewhere. Being able to run a periodic report will tell you who is using the most storage and who is potentially wasting storage that could be used by others.

If you arent already doing so, you may want to consider implementing some type of bill back system where the users who are requesting the storage pay for what they use. This cost shouldnt be just for the physical media but for the support contract need to get help on the system that you have and including the degree of overhead in terms of staff salaries and benefits for the time they spend keeping the system running.

As your storage pool grows you need think about how long it will take to back things up, replicating the info to another system located elsewhere and managing an increasing number of virtual servers that are probably keeping in step with the increased storage pool that you have.
The process that you will go through, whether you work with APTARE or a similar company is one that you will need to repeat on a periodic basis to make sure that you stay on top of things and stay one step ahead of users and management.

Expert's answer

In Java, URLConnection is an abstract superclass representing a communications link between an application and a URL. You can find examples of using URLConnection to read and write from an application to a URL in the networking documentation at java.sun.com. Since URLConnection is abstract you obtain a reference to a specific subclass of URLConnection via the URL class as shown in the documentation

URL yahoo = new URL("https://www.yahoo.com/");
URLConnection yc = yahoo.openConnection();

You can then read from the URLConnection

BufferedReader in = new BufferedReader(
new InputStreamReader(
yc.getInputStream()));
String inputLine;
while ((inputLine = in.readLine()) != null)
System.out.println(inputLine);

And to write you use something like

OutputStreamWriter out = new OutputStreamWriter(
connection.getOutputStream());
out.write("Hello URL");
out.close();

If you are going to use URLConnection to communicate with web sites and/or applications you should read through the Java World Article _Dodge the traps hiding in the URLConnection class_ to avoid some of the common difficulties encountered with the implementation.

Expert's answer

Using a command line SSH client like the one provided by MinGW or Cygwin you can accomplish your goal by first creating a tunnel through the first web facing server to the database server and then creating a second connection going through the first tunnel that establishes a tunnel connecting the PostGreSQL network port on your PC to the PostGreSQL port on the database server. Using two command windows and two separate SSH connections utilizing the -L flag to tunnel local ports the connection could be made in the following way.

First build a tunnel connecting some port, say 43, on the local PC to the SSH port 22 on the database server through the webserver using the command

ssh -l webusername -L 43:databaseserver:22 webserver

After logging in to the webserver open a second command window on the PC and build a tunnel connecting the local PostGreSQL port 5432 to that same port number on the database server by going through the first tunnel we built connecting local port 43 to database server port 22 by using the command

ssh -l dbusername -p43 -L 5432:localhost:5432 localhost

This creates an SSH connection to port 43 on our local PC (localhost) which connects to port 22 on the databaseserver (which calls itself as localhost) to make a tunnel through that first connection to connect port 5432 on the PC to port 5432 on the database server.

Now when the PGAdminIII database management utility on the PC connects to the local PostGreSQL port it will be directly connected to the database on the remote server.

Expert's answer

I have been working with a Netbook in the lab for several weeks now and it just happens to be an Asus but a different model. I think the problem you described is more a case of the 1 Gig of memory that most netbooks seem to be confined to. I have found a few models that can be upgraded to 2 Gig's of memory that seems to be the upper end of what the Netbooks can handle.

The problem you describe is more a case of the limited memory the Netbook can handle but is further hampered by the more limited video card that is being used by most of the Netbooks I have looked at. With the overhead of Powerpoint, I think you will see both better speed, perforance and graphics results on a Notebook platform. Depending on the level of sophistication of the graphics and other features that you may be using in Powerpoint, moving to the 64 bit version of XP and at least 4 gigs of memory in the notebook make take your performance to new levels.

Expert's answer

Going by the initials you provided for the certifications, I found several different certifications by that name. I will assume that you are asking about Converged Technologies Professional (CTP)/Avaya Certified Associate (ACA). The challenge I think you will find for an exam simulation is that most companies have their exam style copyrighted so that no one can give you exactly the interface that you will find on the exam.

One possible source of information is to check the avayausers.com website to see what others are using to study for the exams you are pursuing. In searching for answers to your question, I found this link -https://www.ctpcertified.com/catalog/ctp2007-ccnt.asp as one possible source of information. I found other possibilities from websites such as TestKing and SelfExamEngine that claim to have "Actual" exam simulations. Without having taken one of the CTP/ACA exams and seen these products to compare, I cant say how accurate these claims are.

Expert's answer

Prior to getting your question, I had kept my lab computers on IE7 mostly because I didnt see a good reason to go to IE8. I have upgraded them to IE8 and havent been able to reproduce the problem you described. It would apprear that something didnt go right during the installation your performed.

Uninstalling and installing IE8 would have been my first thing to try based on what you described. It sounds like something either got corrupted or went awry when the install first happened. I dont think that either Spybot or Adaware are the culprits. My first suggestion is to disable AVG for Windows while you are uninstalling and reinstalling IE8. I have run into situations in the past where having the AV program caused some problems for program installation that were at time sporadic and hard to duplicate. While you are disabling AV, I would also suggest disabling both Spybot and Adaware and any other ancillary services they have such as Teatimer, etc.

If the problem still shows up after doing this, it would appear that you possibly have some type of corruption or other possible damage in the registry. The easiest way I know to deal with this is to install of copy of Norton Systemworks. The utility I have used in the past to deal with registry related problems that were resolved by other methods. Another option is to use the System Restore functionality of XP to roll your PC back to the point before you tried to install IE8 and repeat the steps you went through plus what I outlined in the first paragraph.

Expert's answer

I have Netbook in the lab right now testing this. This is not something that a novice should attempt. I have had some challenges with the wireless card. The support for the Netbook that I bought has been lacking from what I am used to seeing from the laptops I had purchased. The main thing I have run up against is that the wireless card doesnt support promiscuous mode that Wireshark and other sniffing packages need to see the traffic you are looking for. The wired card seems to work ok.

Most of the netbooks I have looked at are limited to 1 Gigabyte of ram. A few offered the ability to go to 2 Gigs of ram. For high traffic level situations, you may find that you may quickly run out of memory. To work around this, you may need to either use a capture filter or look at using tshark for capturing so that you avoid the overhead of the Wireshark gui to keep resources available for the capturing. You may also find that Netbooks in general may not have a wired network card capable of connecting at Gig speeds or capturing at anywhere near that line rate.

All in all, Netbooks are a possibility. As with a car, your success and mileage may very dependent on the manufacturer/model you choose and the environment that you choose.

Expert's answer

There would be quite a bit of complexity involved in building a reliable generator for certification exams although it could be done. There are textbook publishers that provide systems like that for generating course exams. Issues that would need to be addressed include developing the categories of concepts and tasks to be tested against and then building collections of equivalent exam questions for each category. From there the generator would need to be built to pull randomized questions from each category and build the exam. This may be an opportunity for someone to develop a product to offer multiple vendors who need to produce certification exams. But then it might be a tough sell since developing one test or a small set of equivalent tests is more straight forward than constructing a test generation system that will reliably produce random exams to effectively test the same concepts, capabilities and knowledge to the same standards. Developing reliable test items and then verifying the response norms across a set of collected answers to ensure grading standards that properly rank respondents can be a long arduous process.

Expert's answer

Expert's answer

Solar generators are certainly an option as a source of temporary power. During a disaster, any power is better than none. The solar systems that I have seen are only as good when they have direct access to sunlight. When the skies are overcast, you wont get as much power or if when the sun is totally obscure, you wont get any. To take full advantage of solar, you typically need a significant amount of batteries to store the power that you collect when conditions are good so that you will have something to use when normal power isnt available.

Something else to consider is that you will have to replace the batteries periodically because they wont last forever. You will need to have some type of charging regulator so that you wont overcharge the batteries and cause them to fail prematurely or have other problems. As you can see the power isnt as free as you were led to believe it is. There is a certain amount of cost to get the equipment to start getting power from solar and there is certain amount of ongoing cost that you will have in terms up replacing failed batteries/equipment and periodic maintenance.

While solar is one option, it should be just one source that should be looked at. Especially in a prolonged power outage, you may find that it may take additional source of power such as supplied by a generator powered by diesel or natural gas to help fill in the gaps when solar either isnt available or cant produce the amount of power needed for the situation.