The list price on this little sucker is a bit unrealistic at $79. But it’s often at half that at buy.com  ( Buy.com link ) and sign up for thier daily emails, and every so often (3 or 4 times a year maybe) it will go on sale. It was on sale a few weeks ago for $16.99 with free shipping.  If you want one decide beforehand and wait for the sale. Once you see it, don’t hesitate or it will sell out on you. It happened to me twice, once I “thought about it” and when I went back it was sold out, and the other by the time I read the email it was gone already. But as they say 3rd time’s the charm.

For anyone sending equipment to colo centers this can be a life saver. Label your equipment with hostname, main ip, contact name and phone number. It can really help them find you server in racks of dozens of servers… Also if you have multiple drives label each drive, for example, use /dev/sda1, /dev/sda2, etc.  This way if a drive fails, it makes them determining which drive to swap pretty painless. After all you’re paying for their time usually, you want them to be fast about it.  I also suggest using the brother “Extra Strength Adhesive” series of tapes. Be aware that there are multiple sizes (widths) of tape. The largest this will use is 1/2″, so the TZS231 gives you the largest printing area for black on white labels. I don’t recommend the TZS131 (black on clear) as they can be hard to read unless your surface is a light color.

Online education has been steadily growing. But you need to watch out… Many of the names you’ve heard are for profits (nothing wrong with that in itself), that worry more about selling courses. There’s the problem… a typical large name accredited (we’ll talk more about that in a minute) online school that’s not part of a state university system charges upwards of $40 to $50 thousand dollars for a undergrad degree.  Let’s take the University of Phoenix, most courses run 3 credits $ 530 per credit hour plus a $85 fee for online ‘resources’, or $1675 per course. To satisfy the 120 credit hour requirement (124 in Kansas), that means 40 course… or a grand total $67,000 assuming you came into it with no credits… That’s a chunk of change.  The value of a degree is substantial, but that’s a big hole to dig out of from the start.

And there’s the time requirements… Usually you can’t take more than 16 hours or so at a time. That will take years to complete the degree! And if you’re working at the same time, it’s even slower.

But there’s another way… the WGU way. I’m currently enrolled in their IT – Software Development program. I started last October 1st. To date I have completed 41 comptency units (their equivalent to the credit). I’m working on another 17 before the end of my term at the end of February. If you were paying attention, you noticed that’s a long term – 6 months. WGU is a continuous enrollment school. Terms start every month on the 1st and go for 6 months. Since you’re working on your courses individually with the help of others in the course as well as course mentors, you get to set the pace. WGU requires you take 16 credits and pass 12 of those every semester to maintain “Satisfactory Academic Progress” or “SAP”. You have to also pass 2/3rd of everything you take… Fortunately, you can add courses as you need. So you start out with the required 16 CU’s at the begining of the term (which figuring in breaks and such as almost twice as long as a normal semester), then as you complete courses you add others in.

Courses are divided up into ‘Objective’ and ‘Performance’  Assessments. For objective assessments, you will take a final exam after completing the course work (or are able to show you are ready). You will go to a testing facility  available at Prometric, most universities, and many libraries  for proctoring.  You will be given a certain amount of time to complete the exam and take it online under the supervision of the proctor. If you’ve ever taken an industry certification exam, that’s what these are like. Actually many of the IT courses use industry certifications as their assessment from known names like Microsoft, CompTIA, CIW, Sun, etc.  A quick word about industry certs at WGU… WGU has decided to place a limit of 4 attempts on an industry cert (1st 2 tries are included in tuition:) !) afterwards, you will need to choose another degree program. I support this move. It prevents people from going over and over until they pass, in something they apparently are prepared for…  but some others were upset about it.

Performance evaluations are another matter… it’s all about the work. You will be given a set of tasks to complete. For example, you may be asked to complete a slide presentation, write a paper, and perform an experiment complete with journals, etc. and submit that to graders. They will use a rubric to evaluate your work and tell you if any revisions need to occur. There are 2 types of tasks, the ‘required’ tasks are more like course-work and can be submitted multiple times. You’ll do this as you go through the course text. Then after you’ve completed those, the final task(s) will be opened for you. These are the what you’re actually evaluated on… You can only revise them once. So you have to pay attention to what you’re doing. Afterwards, a different task is used for the course.

One of the things you need to pay attention to in looking for online college degrees is the school’s accreditation. There are too many ‘degree mills’ out there, and you won’t be well served by them. Others, like the big names, do have accreditation from the DECT – a nationally recognized accreditation authority. There are also many other accreditation bodies, many of whom have no authority to do so see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unrecognized_accreditation_associations_of_higher_learning  … The “gold standard” though is “Regional accreditation” (the same you’re local state university uses) see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_accreditation. WGU is DETC AND regionally accredited through the Northwest Commission. Additionally for teachers and nurses, WGU holds NCATE and CCNE respectively. Actually WGU is the first and only exclusively online university to hold NCATE accreditation. The CCNE accreditation helped me getting approved for tuition reimbursement actually… Just be careful when choosing a school, get DETC at a minimum and preferably regional.

Lastly, let’s talk about cost… WGU has a fixed cost of just $2890 per 6 month term, plus a few fees for library, etc. So figure about $3000 a semester – it varies a little with lab fees, etc. To use me as an example, I’ve already completed 41 CUs, so my cost per CU (credit) is already down to ($3000/41)  under $75. And if I complete the others in time, it will drop to just over $50/credit. I’ve found no other university that even comes close…  Not to mention my goal is to go from zero credits (it’s all too old to count anymore really) to done in a year to a year and half. So my total cost will be $6 to 9 thousand, instead of $50 to $60 thousand! And I’ll have TEN industry certifications to boot!

If you decide you want to apply, email me at rob -at- lagniappeinternet.com and I can get you the application fee waived… Disclosure: I’d also get a Amazon credit for $50 or so (I forget the amount) as well towards books… BTW, most books are included or eBooks. If you want printed copies you have to buy them, and for a couple (2 I think in my case) you will have to buy books period. Those are not included in tuition, but that’s pretty normal.

Sorry it’s not a better picture… but you get the point. The type is small but even my aged eyes can see it well enough to be useful. I wouldn’t want to use it all day long though.

One of the cool undocumented features is the ability to use an alternate port for SSH to connect to… Like we discussed before, you want to run SSH on another port other than 22. While in most cases security through obscurity isn’t a great idea, changing your ssh port actually cuts the attempts to break in down drastically. It could be that I missed it in the docs, but I didn’t see the ability to use an alternate port. However, it’s easy to do. When you enter the details for a session, on the end of a hostname just add a colon and the port number, so it looks like  alpha.mydomain.com:12322  where alpha.mydomain.com is the hostname, and 12322 is the ssh port in this example. Of course, use your real hostname and port number.

And yes it can use key pairs for authentication. It took a little work to get them to the server. In my case I hooked up the blackberry to the pc to get the public key off of it and then put it into the auth file with cut and paste in PuTTY. Once that was done I was able to authenticate with them quite easily.

Remember about your data charges to your wireless provider and don’t go overboard. But this little gem of a program can get you out of a tight situation when nothing else is available. You can find it at: http://www.xk72.com/midpssh/

I’m sure you’ve all seen them. They’re all over the web, twitter, and every other imaginable outlet they can get into…  “10 Best Webhosts”. Every one I have looked at shows pretty much the same hosts over and over, or at least several of the same. But if you go do your research at an indepenent site, such as http://www.WebHostingTalk.com/, then you will find that several of these “best hosts” have absolutely horrendous reputations and wouldn’t be touched with a 10 foot pole by most people “in the know”.

So how did they get on a “10 Best” list? Simple, they paid for it. Not directly usually… No they offer affiliate programs where affiliate sites get paid to either send traffic their way, or if the traffic produces a sale.  Not very honest is it?  Oh don’t get me wrong… There’s nothing wrong with running an affiliate program. My problem is with the “10 Best” sites. What they’re doing is simply recommending hosts based on how much they are getting paid to say that they’re “best”. To me that equates to nothing but lying, plain and simple. By creating this “10 Best” site you are implying that you tested them, and that there’s some methodology to coming up with what is “best”… but the only methodology involved is how much money the affiliate program is putting into your pocket. To me you are nothing but bottom feeding scum… IF you are going to do one of these lists, at least be honest about it. Call it the “10 best paying webhosts”.

This handy little device is a Remotely Controlled Power Distribution Unit or PDU. Think of it as a smart power strip…  It has an ethernet connection and gets its own IP address. It has a total of 10 outlets, 8 of which are remotely controllable.  Once networking is established, you can remotely log in to an embedded web server and turn power outlets on and off without having to be there physically.

But it gets better!  The software built into the unit can also monitor ip addresses via ping and automatically cycle the power if the server stops responding. For safety sake, you can set how many times it needs to not respond before cycling. This means your downtime for a hung server goes from 10 to 15 minutes IF someone is at the datacenter, or possibly worse if someone isn’t or is busy with other issues… to a couple of minutes while the server reboots. This can definitely help your uptime SLA.

The only thing I wish this had that it doesn’t is the ability to have multiple logins and be able to limit those logins to controlling individual ports. That would come in handy for companies that colocate servers for others, or offer dedicated servers to their customers. It would let them offer the customer the ability to reboot their box (and only their box). When I asked about it, I was told it may be added in a future firmware upgrade. But I just checked the company’s website and the latest firmware doesn’t address this yet. This isn’t a major issue for us but I could see it being one for some, and it’s a nice selling point if they added it.

We’ve bought ours from http://www.datacenterhardware.com/ and wholeheartedly recommend them – tell Benjamin that Lagniappe Internet sent you if you do order from them (we get no commission or anything like that but a little good will never hurts).

At $24.95 a year for 8 years, Ping! Zine’s worth every cent!   Check it out (and subscribe) here: http://www.pingzine.com/

 Link to buy.com item: http://www.buy.com/retail/product.asp?sku=211190111  but check around you might even find it cheaper.