Two Sides to Every Story
I read Jonathan Feldman's column "IT's Not About the Technology," and I have an important question: Where does a vital and growing business draw the line between "good old-fashioned business" and stifling the staff?
Unfortunately, there are as many IT Nazis as there are overly permissive IT heads. Some real-life examples [of IT Nazi thinking]: The engineering staff doesn't need Win2000 (instead of company-standard WinNT) -- despite the fact that it's their job to make sure customers who use Win2000 can install and use the company's products. The marketing staff doesn't need to install any non-company-standard software (whether purchased programs or downloaded freeware) -- despite the fact that it's their job to know what the competition is offering and what customers are using instead of their own company's products.
Feldman's column misses the other half of the point: Being an irrational extremist of any sort, whether permissive or dictatorial, has adverse effects on business.
Amy Heidner, PE
Business Development Manager
Fluke Networks
Amy.Heidner@FlukeNetworks.com
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Feldman's "IT's Not About the Technology" is a great piece. In fact, I enjoyed it so much I passed it on to our head IT manager for his information.
Ron Macklin
Manager, Training Services
Modular Mining Systems
macklin@mmsi.com
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I want to express my appreciation of Feldman's "IT's Not About the Technology" and the mention of gotomypc.com. I had heard of gotomypc.com but had not fully grasped the implications of its "firewall-friendly" operations. After reading Feldman's column, I investigated the gotomypc.com Web site, and it scared the living daylights out of me.
The FAQ part of the site, which extols the virtues of working through a firewall, was of interest, but the graphic showing access from a "cybercafe" truly reassured me: The picture of some wanna-be Eurotrash on his Linux box sitting in front of a bust of Mao trying to destroy the filthy minions of capitalism never really entered my mind.
I realize that the thrust of Feldman's article concerns professionalism in IT; however, the specific issue of gotomypc.com is an important one in and of itself. Napster was annoying but controllable. At the end of the day, one could simply scan for mp3s and be done with it. At worst, some bandwidth and hard-drive space would be wasted. We didn't have any trouble with Napster precisely because the people working for us were aware that this would be something for which they might get fired. On the other hand, remote access using a Web browser would appear almost helpful.
We are a smaller company (40 or so users), and I give my users some latitude in what they do subject to some general policies. This lets them fix minor problems and, by and large, has worked well and reduced our requirements for internal support to the point of manageability. Our users are well-educated engineers and must often install specialized pieces of software to do their jobs. It appears as if these days are numbered.
Hal Wiedeman, P.E.
Vice President
Wiedeman and Singleton Engineers
hfw@wiedeman.com
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Roxen Rocks
I just had to write this quick note in reference to Lori MacVittie's article "IPlanet Goes Where No Server's Gone Before." In the section about Roxen, MacVittie writes, "Cool? Yes. Proprietary? Yes." I agree with her on the first assertion. However, Roxen definitely is not proprietary. At download.roxen.com/, it clearly states: "Roxen WebServer is a free product and is released under the GPL." Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the GPL an open-source license?
Fawad Halim
Title and company name withheld on request
fawad@linuxpakistan.net
Lori MacVittie's response: Yes, Roxen is GPL. The context in which I was discussing Roxen's proprietary nature is the server-side scripting-language support. The product's language is proprietary in the sense that it is nonstandard. But it's still very cool.
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SSL Slowdown
I recently read Lori MacVittie's report ["Smashing the SSL Speed Trap"] on SSL accelerators.
I'm looking for advice on any SSL accelerator that has been tested with Lotus Domino R5 Web servers running on a Windows NT 4 server. Our problem is, the more SSL connections we get, the slower the response. Can MacVittie help? Where can I get this type of information? Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Jose Avila
Lotus Notes Engineer
Winston & Strawn
javila@winston.com
Lori MacVittie's response: Your problem is fairly common to all SSL-enabled sites. The more traffic the system gets, the harder it needs to work to generate keys and encrypt and decrypt traffic. Hence the response time slows down almost exponentially.
I have not seen any internal (PCI- or SCSI-based) SSL accelerator support for Lotus Domino R5 Web servers. I suggest contacting the vendors directly to inquire about support or looking at an external solution that can front any Web server.
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