Running Hot and Cold

By Jerry Pournelle

August 18, 2003

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Column 277

SIGGRAPH, the ACM Special Interest Group on Graphics, had its conference and show in San Diego in late July. I'll have a few words on what I saw there later, but you'll want to read the report that David Em and my son Alex have put together for BYTE.com. They know more about graphics than I do anyway.

A Warning

If you own a domain and get a "bill" for domain registration from "Domain Registry of America," look at it closely. It may not be a bill, but a transfer from where you have it now to DROA. Send them money and when they do the transfer they may not get the information right, and then they may lock the account, and you may find you have trouble moving it elsewhere. I am in the process of transferring an account that got moved to DROA because I paid what looked like a bill. I want to put my registration with www.godaddy.com who are good guys with an odd name. I do not recommend Domain Registry of America. I can recommend GoDaddy.

A Failure of Communications

It all started when my network went down.

I don't really need a large and complex Windows 2000 Server (soon to be Windows Server 2003) network. In particular I don't need a network with three servers, distributed DNS service—that is, some workstations look to one and some to another server for DNS service—and a host of other complexities. I could make do nicely with Windows XP file sharing.

I could, for instance, do what many friends have done and set up a Linux server using Samba, and I'll probably do that, too, but I keep a full Windows 2000 Server network because part of my job is to do silly things so you don't have to, and many readers do have, or think they need, that kind of networking. It's also useful even if I can get much the same utility from less hardware.

And, in general, my internal network works quite well. Except for a couple of times when Microsoft Updates insisted on restarting the machines, neither of those servers was intentionally turned off for at least two years.

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