Recently in Grad School Category

Intel introduced the low-power, affordable Atom chipset a couple years ago. The earlier models included the Atom 230 and 330, running single and dual-cores, respectively, at 1.6 GHz. Frugal with power at 8 watts, it could even run 64-bit. The first-gen Atom motherboards/chipset kits had two chief weaknesses: they maxed out at 2 GB of RAM, and they used RealTec network-interface cards (at least the Supermicro mboards did). RealTecs sometimes crash Linux when the incorrect driver loads, and the RT NICs don't do jumbo frames. The crashes are patchable but it adds a couple hours to your install. (Do not, repeat not, buy the old models no matter how cheap they are. Stick to the D510 series.)

Intel has since released the Atom D510. The processor is up to a 13-watt draw, runs at about the same speed, and still runs 64-bit. What makes these chipsets better is that they max out at 4 GB of RAM and use genuine Intel Gig NICs that are widely supported and can run jumbo frames. This is a big leap, because the configured price of a fully-built mini-server around the platform remains the same. Supermicro has some great Atom motherboards that can support a home or small office doing various things. (The D525 has since come out. Compare the two here.)

Newegg has some good deals on the Supermicro Atom Rack Server and the tower server for about $70 less. Or you can just buy a motherboard and roll your own. My tower server with D510 runs just under 40 watts with 4 GB of RAM, CD, and hard disk.

What can you do with it? There are a number of Linux and BSD appliances that are free.

1) Run your own telephone switch. FreePBX is an awesome, OS-included version of Asterisk that has a clean web GUI. PBX-In-a-flash is based on FreePBX but has a few extras (nonstandard enhancements like dial weather by airport code and dial your local tide schedule) thrown in. Why would you want to run your own PBX? You can do stupid phone tricks, like really cheap phone service at $.01/minute and $1.50/month per number with Vitelity, for one. Or your own conference line. Or your own trunks over VPNs to other offices. Or just blacklist phone numbers and send telemarketers to their own voice-mail hell.

Keep in mind that to light up your home phone lines, you may need an additional analog card from Sangoma or Digium. (FXS and FXO are different, but can run on the same card.) Once you figure out how cool SIP is, you'll want to replace your house phones with SIP phones. However, you can get started with SIP free using the Xlite soft phone. The iPhone/iPod/iPad version is $7.99. It's perfectly true that you can make phone calls cheap with a Linksys PAP2T or Vonage, but if you're a telephone control freak and want to wage war on telemarketers, Asterisk is for you.

2) Run a great firewall like pfSense. It's based on FreeBSD but has a great Web GUI so you can avoid learning the subtle differences between BSD and Linux. pfSense comes in embedded and full. For the Atom server, running the full version is no sweat. And I run SNORT inline on two interfaces with no issues. A full SNORT IPS signature subscription for home use is just $30/year. And pfSense does not just IPSEC point-to-point VPNs, but also WebVPN. Try that on your Cisco ASA 5505, and you'll be paying a couple grand for the equipment, licenses, and subscription. Check out the plugins for pfSense and you'll see how much you can do with one small box. pfSense 2.0 is almost out of beta and there's a 64-bit version. (Plugins include FreeSwitch, an open-source competitor to (open-source) Asterisk, so if you want, you can even run a PBX on your firewall.)

3) Storage: Run FreeNAS and you'll be able to scale reasonably out of the box. The Atom Motherboard has six SATA slots and two GB NICs that do jumbo frames. Hello iSCSI. With 2TB disks, that's 12 TB of storage. FreeNAS offers CIFS (Windows), Apple (AFP), iSCSI, and NFS mount points. Add a serious SATA RAID card to get even more disk IO performance out of your little Atom box. Obviously, I would recommend the tower server case for FreeNAS because it has room for more disks.

4) Run Apache/PHP/MySQL applications. Run Fedora, CentOS, whatever. You can run your own apps at home on top of your favorite flavor of Linux/BSD. One of my favorites is Gallery2. There's even semi-free apps (free for no enterprise features) like Movable Type (you're reading this on an MT platform), and even run more than one on the same mini-Server.

5) Collect data. Run a weather station. Run a log server. Run a crazy blog and see who hits it with which keywords. Collect IPS events from multiple firewalls and correlate them.

One week after my port order for my Comcast phone number transferred to Vitelity, Comcast shut down my Internet service. My Comcast voice port line had been dead for a week, and I got home to a dead Internet connection. My Cable modem could pick up an IP but Comcast wouldn't allow it to connect.

I called Comcast customer service and the generally polite customer service rep told me that a port order terminated phone service and Internet service, because it's not possible to activate a Cable modem with voice capabilities with the phone service off. Which is exactly what I had for a week. Customer service rep expressed that Comcast didn't like it when people ported "Comcast's" telephone numbers. Given that Comcast already sued Verizon over the porting telephone numbers difficulty, it's funny.

My only option was to get a new cable modem with no voice ports. After I hooked up the new modem, one call to an also-polite customer service rep got me connected again. I got a new IP, so a quick edit to sip_custom.conf got me connected to Vitelity again.

It was a positive experience, because I feel much freer to switch to whatever ISP I can find that's cheaper. Thus I'm looking at FIOS or DirecTV with a cheap landline for DSL. For those two shows I like to watch on Showtime and HBO, it costs us about $100 a month. Ouch.

What will next month's Comcast bill bring? Credit for terminated phone service? Extra service fees for termination? We'll find out in a month.

I graduated from Grad School with a Master's in Information Systems Technology, focusing on Management Information Systems.

It's official. George Washington University sent me my degree in the mail. They took three and a half months to get it out. Even the registrar didn't change my status until March after a couple of phone calls. A lot has happened since then: I moved into a new (old) house, started a new job, and am about to become a father.

What did I really learn in grad school anyway? I learned a lot, but every class covered, to some degree, entity-relationship diagrams (ERDs), data-flow diagrams (DFDs), and object-oriented diagrams, which can be state charts, class diagrams, and use cases, to name a few. Some classes went so far as to cover the theory behind them. Every class covered the relational database model, which hasn't changed much in thirty years and is still useful and relevant to just about every information system I've ever worked with.

Since IS grad school is part of the business school, we learned to work in teams. It's not about writing code -- it's about finishing projects on time. The funny part is the professors don't teach much about team projects -- they just expect you to manage yourselves.

What do we study in Information Systems Grad School? If there's a single topic that comes up in every class, it's databases. If we haven't memorized the first three normal forms by now, we haven't learned much. While few of us will bother going into Boyce-Codd Normal Form, 4NF and 5NF, every specification for a system we write that has a database needs an entity relationship diagram. An ERD is a visual representation of your data model, and your data model is probably the single most important part of any system you design. A good data model will survive several major versions of your software; a poor data model will make your system useless. Thus, we spend a lot of time doing data models and documenting them with ERDs.

As much as I love Visio, drawing the things from scratch is somewhat tedious. It's much easier to design and test in Access. (I have it on good authority that even elite Oracle DBAs who hand-tune Solaris for better performance will design and test in Access just because it's easy.) So what do you do when you have a decent test DB in Access and you don't want to diagram every little change in your masterful Visio ERD? Reverse engineer.

In Visio, it's fairly easy, but there are a couple of spots where it doesn't behave as nicely as it should. I'm going to refer to Visio 2007, still in Beta and free for the download and registration. Visio 2003 is almost the same. Visio 2003 Enterprise Architect Edition will create the database from your diagram, in case you can design an enterprise DB but don't know how to create the tables in SQL. (Not really someone you'd want touching your SQL server.)

1. Open Visio and select New | Software & Database | Database Model Diagram with the units of your choice.
2. Now that you have a database model diagram open, the database menu will appear. Select "Reverse Engineer" off of the database diagram.
3. A confusing dialog box will appear. Use it to verify you have the right drivers installed.
4. For Microsoft Access, choose Microsoft Access as your driver, and hit Next.
5. A username and password dialog box will pop up. Unless you've assigned a username and pw to the database, leave it blank and hit OK.
6. Navigate your filesystem and select your database. Ignore the clunkiness and be grateful that you can see filenames longer than 8.3.
7. When you have found your .MDB file, choose it and hit OK.
8. Select the types of objects you would like to import and hit Next. (No, you don't get stored procedures and triggers in Access, but you would in SQL.)
9. Select the specific tables, queries, etc. you want to see in your diagram and hit Next.
10. Select Yes to add them to your current diagram, and hit Finish. (Select no you have a lot of tables, queries, etc.)
11. You should see your tables in the diagram.
12. To add the crow's feet and cardinality, select options on the database menu. (Database | Options | Document )
13. You get three sections to change here: The General tab covers symbol sets: IDEF1X or Relational, Conceptual, Physical, both, or names based on symbol set. The table tab lets you display keys, indexes, non keys, and the IDEF1X optionality 0. The relationship tab lets you display relationships (duh), crow's feet, cardinality, and referential actions. You must select cardinality before you select crow's feet. (caridinality gets greyed out when crow's feet is checked.)
14. To update your diagram, select "Refresh Model" on the Database menu...

Now that you can see your information model, you know why it's messed up. That database that your business/organization/department runs on -- it's not in any kind of normal form. Or it has about 100 tables more than you thought it should.

The database people in my office have a debate: were the software engineers just trying to make it impossible to wean your organization off of their support, or were they just bad at information modeling?

Given that I have a new job in education, I started doing a few entries about recent developments in education and technology. I use the framework of educational technology to answer President Bush's question, "Is our children learning?"

At least it explains the dearth of recent posts here.

Just when I thought I would stop experimenting with new Microsoft products and hunker down into my new job and my capstone project, I find a couple that will save me time and aggravation: Microsoft's Threat Analysis and Modeling Tool. This dot.Net 2.0 application has a wizard to create for us a CRUD matrix, that will can paste into our system security chapter. A CRUD matrix is simply a table of which users need what kind of access to which tables. It can get more complex if you have column-level security in your database. We don't, so it won't be overly detailed.

The other tool that can save me time, and possibly my group members, is Microsoft's Office Groove 2007 Beta. Like many cool Microsoft products, Groove did not originate at Microsoft. Most people I talk to about Groove don't really get what it does, but I blame that more on bad IT and IS metaphors than anything else. Groove is simply a shared workspace where a team can share documents, discussions, and contacts. When you set up Groove, you can set up one or more shared workspaces. You then add specific files to that workspace. Then all your invited and verified team members can access those documents whether you are online or off. No more uploading to Sharepoint or Blackboard, or whatever. You've got anywhere, anytime sharing, provided you have an Internet connection. I have it on my work computer and my home computer and share documents between them without having to email them back and forth. So far, I have no firewall issues either.

What if you want to secure your data and not have it stored on third-party servers? Use Groove Server, and give more money to Microsoft. Before the Office 2007 launch, both Groove and Groove server are free for the download, registration and product keys required. Try it and at least you'll know what people are talking about. The next big thing is enabling teamwork and collaboration and making the world "flat."

After tiring of redoing samba.conf files over and over again, I finally tried out Microsoft's (free) Services for Unix for simple file sharing between my Fedora Core 4 box and servers on my domain.

1. Copy over /etc/passwd and /etc/group to a secure folder on the windows machine where you are going to install SfU.
2. Download and install Microsoft's Services for Unix, and tell it to use password files during the installation process. (This is not a lesson on setting up a NIS domain -- just connecting one Linux box to your Windows server quickly and reliably. SfU installs several other items by default, like Unix Perl and grep; ActiveState Perl is optional. You want NFS Server.) Reboot.
3. In Windows, right click on the folder you'd like to share, click and NFS sharing tab, and select "share this folder."
4. On your linux box, as root, add a line like this to /etc/fstab:
myserver.com:/somefolder /somefolder nfs defaults 0 0
5. On linux, mount /pub
6. cd /pub and ls -la to your heart's content.

There are many security implications for Windows and Linux, like sharing your password and group files, and I'll sniff and trying cracking the passwords later.