My network room is located in a very old building with small elevators and staircases. My problem is adding new server cabinets. I need a cabinet that is very sturdy but ships unassembled. Do you have any ideas?

There are a variety of solutions for situations like this. There are knock-down server cabinets and knock-down frames that can solve the problem of getting heavy components up into remote offices. Depending on your specific needs, one of these solutions should work for you. Two examples are the knock-down server cabinet that ships flat on a pallet, and the knock-down “anywhere rack� that ships in a series of boxes via UPS.

Great posting on malware, spyware, keylogger and more!

Understanding the Enemy: The Top 10 Nastiest Malware Trends

Five years ago, the term “malware”, if used at all, simply referred to viruses. Over the last few years, however, hackers and spammers have developed all sorts of new ways to invade your computer. Today, Malware, or malicious software, simply means any unwanted code or program that embeds itself on a computer without the user’s knowledge.

Malware is growing quickly. McAfee Avert Labs expected in 2006 to have recorded their 225,000th unique computer/ network threat, finding 50,000 threats between Jan and Nov of 2006 alone [2]. The motive for creating malware has been profit or spying in most cases, and as profits from creating malware have grown, paid professionals have begun to make new and ever more dangerous forms. The return on creating malware has been high in large part because so many victims do not know what to look out for; individuals often still think of malware in the same simplistic forms of five years ago. This guide covers some of the newest trends in malware, and it will give you a better understanding of what sorts of threats you and your computer face.

For the entire article, click here.

I am planning to put my home entertainment system on a rackmount frame. I have never used rackmount and do not understand the dimension listed. Particularly, is a 19� rackmount 19� wide? If not, what is the usable width?

The short answer to this question is nominally 17.5� of usable width. If you would like to know how this came about and have no fear of the unknown, then read on!

There are three standard rack widths related to Datacom and telecom. These are 19, 23 and 24 inches respectively. 19 inch is standard for Datacom. 23 inch is standard for telecom, and 24 inch is a combination broadcasting/telecom standard that is not that much in use today.

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If I were to invest in a temperature sensor for my rackmount server enclosure, at what temperature would you recommend that I should set the internal temperature threshold for?

There are a number of things you can do with the temperature sensor to make your life easier. The first is to recognize that there are two thresholds for high and low temperature that can be set by the administrator. Secondly, there is an adjustment feature with the sensor hub that allows you to put in a correction factor that will match the sensor hub reading to the room thermostat (if you desire).

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The short answer is no. The long answer is not so simple as it really depends on the building codes in your municipality. In general there are three issues related to bolting down a computer cabinet:

· Structure of the sub-floor and/or raised floor

· Anchor bolts

· Anchor brackets

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The most interesting part of this article is about how antiquated and almost useless the images are since all of the companies invoulved, including Home Depot, use such low grade equipment. The best quote is: “The experience appears to demonstrate just how poor information sharing is between law enforcement in different localities. Why would the police in one town need to rely on an outside tool such as YouTube to discover that similar crimes were occuring in neighboring towns? A good centralized crime database and some search and analytic tools could have made quick work of matching up similar crimes. Instead the three police organizations only discovered that they were looking for the same men by happenstance.”

And if law enforcment is so slow to adopt technology as evidenced in this story, how much good are they ever going to be in deterring identity theft, denial of service attacks, company firewall intrusions and the like.

NOT!

YouTube police video: What’s wrong with this picture?
By Robert L. Mitchell on Thu, 12/21/2006 - 10:04am

On December 14th the Franklin, Mass. police department posted a surveillance video of a local crime on YouTube in hopes that someone will come forward and identify the perpetrators, according to a report this morning on New England Cable News Network. At first blush the posting of the Franklin Police Suspect Video seems innovative. “The more people that see it, the more likely somebody is going to recognize the people that they see and give me a call,” patrolman Brian Johnson said in the NECN story.

Then he went on to say that members of other, nearby police departments who watched the video realized that they are looking for the same suspect for similar crimes in their municipalities. “Once the video was out there I got calls from two other law enforcement agencies in this area, that after they looked at my video and compared it against active investigations they already had, we were able to match up that we were all looking for the same two guys,” he said.

What’s wrong with this picture? The experience appears to demonstrate just how poor information sharing is between law enforcement in different localities. Why would the police in one town need to rely on an outside tool such as YouTube to discover that similar crimes were occuring in neighboring towns? A good centralized crime database and some search and analytic tools could have made quick work of matching up similar crimes. Instead the three police organizations only discovered that they were looking for the same men by happenstance.

As for the store video itself, the picture quality is so poor that one questions why Home Depot, the victim in this case, used the technology in the first place. Had the security camera taken these images in high definition the probability that someone could positively identify the culprit would increase greatly. High-definition video equipment is still fairly expensive, but the extra cost could bring a big payback by increasing the chance of catching the culprits. Once word got out that police were able to use high definition security camera images to identify more criminals and make more arrests, crimes in areas where those cameras are in use might just decline.