Anyone that does work on networks will at least a little but understand subnets. In days gone by people would work out subnets on scientific calculators. Now there are a multitude of websites offering different ways to do it.
The website we use is subnet-calculator.com, not very pretty by does exactly what you want in a clear interface.
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In the last few days 2 fairly high profile companies have open sourced parts of their products; Facebook and Symbian. Why is this important? For the average person on the street they probably won’t care, but for other companies and individual nerds out there it can be a very good thing.
Facebook’s HipHop has the potential to lower infrastructure requirements for PHP based web applications, and Symbian being open sourced provides developers for mobile platforms the ability to more easily produce tools and improvements for Symbian. For Facebook and Symbian the benefit is that they can take these improvements and use them internally. There’s also the potential to find new hires from outsiders who may work on the project.
However, the thing that companies need to understand most is that you just can’t throw the source code over the metaphorical wall and wait for magical things to happen. Without building a community around the project it will never develop into anything other than a burden and potentially even a public relations nightmare. If you don’t understand why a community is important then you may well be open sourcing your product for the completely wrong reasons and I’d suggest that you take a long hard look at why you’re thinking it’s a good idea.
So how do you build a community? Its a hard thing to do right and is precisely why various companies that produce Open and Free products employ Community Managers. However, if you’re starting off small and want others to contribute we can suggest that you follow these golden rules:
If you intend to do all these things then you already understand why you want to open source your product. Get all these things right then theres a good chance your company will benefit, both in terms of code and in terms of public relations. Hadoop or Lucene, originally from Yahoo, are particularly good examples of how to do it right. They both now have large communities and both Yahoo and others have benefited massively as a result of the contributions.
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Not so long ago we at Glo Networks launched our online backup service, Glo Online Backup. We’ve implemented this backup solution successfully in various scenarios and we feel that it is versatile enough to suit a the majority of small to medium enterprises.
We’ve tried to answer some potential questions about the product below, should you have any other questions or for futher information please do not hesitate to contact us!
FAQ
If you want to get technical you can use a ’standard’ 448-bit Blowfish encryption key, or your own 256-bit AES key, for the data encryption. We’d suggest creating your own for piece of mind. Just don’t loose that key! Again it’s all something we’ll manage for you if you want.
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Licensing is a pain in the bottom (edited by Chris). There are whole companies full of people who can tell you that you’re doing it wrong. Personally I cannot stand licensing, and the only thing that I find more annoying (in this field) than the proliferation of Open Source and Free Software licenses (and figuring out what I’m allowed and not allowed to do and what is an “arms length” exactly – but thats another rant for another time), is the software licensing by Microsoft and other vendors who shall remain nameless for this article.
To try and make things easier at work two and a half years ago I put together a very small document/cheatsheet describing the licensing terms for various Microsoft products and virtualisation. Yesterday Microsoft released an updated document for Windows Server 2008 R2, and interestingly not much has changed for Window Server, with the exception of a few new products. The table below should help out a bit if you’re confused It should be noted that I’ve only gone so far back as Windows Server 2003 for this table. I suspect that there are no particular dos or don’ts for anything older and you should probably just treat any virtualised instances as you would physical machines. If you know any different I’d love to hear it..
| Instances | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Server Product | License Type | Physical | Virtual |
| Windows Server Foundation (2008 only) | OEM | 1 | 0 |
| Windows Server Standard | OEM, Retail, VL, SPLA | 1 | 1 |
| Windows Server Enterprise | OEM, Retail, VL, SPLA | 1 | 4 |
| Windows Server Datacenter | OEM, VL | 1 | Unlimited |
| Windows Server Web | OEM, Retail, VL, SPLA | 1 | 0 |
| Windows Server HPC | OEM, Retail, VL, SPLA | 1 | 1 |
I decided to check the licensing for other products, just incase I’d missed any changes. It doesn’t look like it, so here the run down (as I understand it).
As a general rule, for anything per processor licensed, if you’re running it in a virtual environment it will simply count the number of virtual processors you assign it.
It gets a bit complicated with SQL 2005 and newer. To quote Microsoft:
When licensed per Server or CAL Workgroup and Standard editions allow you to run any number of instances of the server software in one physical or virtual operating system environment on the licensed server at a time. Previously, only the Enterprise edition of the Server license allowed multi-instancing. When licensed per Processor Workgroup, Web, and Standard editions for each server you have assigned the required number of per processor licenses, you may run, at any one time, any number of instances of the server software in physical and virtual operating system environments on the licensed server. However, the total number of physical and virtual processors used by those operating system environments cannot exceed the number of software licenses assigned to that server. For Enterprise if all physical processors in a machine have been licensed, then you may run unlimited instances of SQL server 2008 in one physical and an unlimited number of virtual operating environments on that same machine.
As far as I’m aware anything else licensed per server doesn’t currently have any special rules regarding virtualisation; so this includes Exchange, Sharepoint, and so on.
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For ages I’ve been running Office 2007 on Vista x64 and now Windows 7 x64. Both suffer from Outlook not being able to preview PDF files. Providing the following error -
This file cannot be previewed because of an error with the following previewer:
PDF Preview Handler for Vista
To open this file in it’s own program, double-click it.
People have been installing other 3rd party tools to fix this problem, however here’s the perfect fix (it doesn’t even need a reboot).
To enable the preview of PDF files in 64-bit OSs, do the following:
1. Start the Registry Editor (Start – Run – Regedit.exe).
2. Move to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Classes\CLSID\{DC6EFB56-9CFA-464D-8880-44885D7DC193}.
3. Change the AppID value to {534A1E02-D58F-44f0-B58B-36CBED287C7C}.
Or create a Registry file -
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Classes\CLSID\{DC6EFB56-9CFA-464D-8880-44885D7DC193}]
“AppID”=”{534A1E02-D58F-44f0-B58B-36CBED287C7C}”
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