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  • Dell powerconnect 6224 vlan routing

    - by user1007727
    I have a small network and I need help with routing .. . My VLANs VLAN 1010 SALES VLAN 1020 HR I have assigned the above vlans to a tagged port and I have added a default route to send the traffic of to my firewall. ip route 0.0.0.0 0.0.0.0 10.10.10.10 I have added a new vlan VLAN 1030 Services and I would like its traffic to go to a different interface on the firewall, 10.10.10.20 how can I go about doing that? can someone give me an example? your help is highly appreciated. Thank you

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  • How to place SuperFetch cache on an SSD?

    - by Ian Boyd
    I'm thinking of adding a solid state drive (SSD) to my existing Windows 7 installation. I know I can (and should) move my paging file to the SSD: Should the pagefile be placed on SSDs? Yes. Most pagefile operations are small random reads or larger sequential writes, both of which are types of operations that SSDs handle well. In looking at telemetry data from thousands of traces and focusing on pagefile reads and writes, we find that Pagefile.sys reads outnumber pagefile.sys writes by about 40 to 1, Pagefile.sys read sizes are typically quite small, with 67% less than or equal to 4 KB, and 88% less than 16 KB. Pagefile.sys writes are relatively large, with 62% greater than or equal to 128 KB and 45% being exactly 1 MB in size. In fact, given typical pagefile reference patterns and the favorable performance characteristics SSDs have on those patterns, there are few files better than the pagefile to place on an SSD. What I don't know is if I even can put a SuperFetch cache (i.e. ReadyBoost cache) on the solid state drive. I want to get the benefit of Windows being able to cache gigabytes of frequently accessed data on a relativly small (e.g. 30GB) solid state drive. This is exactly what SuperFetch+ReadyBoost (or SuperFetch+ReadyDrive) was designed for. Will Windows offer (or let) me place a ReadyBoost cache on a solid state flash drive connected via SATA? A problem with the ReadyBoost cache over the ReadyDrive cache is that the ReadyBoost cache does not survive between reboots. The cache is encrypted with a per-session key, making its existing contents unusable during boot and SuperFetch pre-fetching during login. Update One I know that Windows Vista limited you to only one ReadyBoost.sfcache file (I do not know if Windows 7 removed that limitation): Q: Can use use multiple devices for EMDs? A: Nope. We've limited Vista to one ReadyBoost per machine Q: Why just one device? A: Time and quality. Since this is the first revision of the feature, we decided to focus on making the single device exceptional, without the difficulties of managing multiple caches. We like the idea, though, and it's under consideration for future versions. I also know that the 4GB limit on the cache file was a limitation of the FAT filesystem used on most USB sticks - an SSD drive would be formatted with NTFS: Q: What's the largest amount of flash that I can use for ReadyBoost? A: You can use up to 4GB of flash for ReadyBoost (which turns out to be 8GB of cache w/ the compression) Q: Why can't I use more than 4GB of flash? A: The FAT32 filesystem limits our ReadyBoost.sfcache file to 4GB Can a ReadyBoost cache on an NTFS volume be larger than 4GB? Update Two The ReadyBoost cache is encrypted with a per-boot session key. This means that the cache has to be re-built after each boot, and cannot be used to help speed boot times, or latency from login to usable. Windows ReadyDrive technology takes advantage of non-volatile (NV) memory (i.e. flash) that is incorporated with some hybrid hard drives. This flash cache can be used to help Windows boot, or resume from hibernate faster. Will Windows 7 use an internal SSD drive as a ReadyBoost/*ReadyDrive*/SuperFetch cache? Is it possible to make Windows store a SuperFetch cache (i.e. ReadyBoost) on a non-removable SSD? Is it possible to not encrypt the ReadyBoost cache, and if so will Windows 7 use the cache at boot time? See also SuperUser.com: ReadyBoost + SSD = ? Windows 7 - ReadyBoost & SSD drives? Support and Q&A for Solid-State Drives Using SDD as a cache for HDD, is there a solution? Performance increase using SSD for paging/fetch/cache or ReadyBoost? (Win7) Windows 7 To Boost SSD Performance How to Disable Nonvolatile Caching

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  • Is there a rule of thumb for RAM upgrades?

    - by Retrosaur
    I'm having a hard time figuring out whether or not a certain laptop/computer's RAM can be upgraded or not. Is there a rule of thumb that determines how much max RAM one could add to a system without looking it up via external websites? A little bit of a background information: I work in computer sales at a computer electronics store, so it is virtually impossible for me to install any sort of software that would detect computer specs, and I get a lot of customers who wonder what laptop/desktop RAM upgrades usually are. Is there a certain rule that adding more RAM entails? Does it make a difference if it's a 32-bit or 64-bit machine? OS?

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  • Star schema [fact 1:n dimension]...how?

    - by Mike Gates
    I am a newcomer to data warehouses and have what I hope is an easy question about building a star schema: If I have a fact table where a fact record naturally has a one-to-many relationship with a single dimension, how can a star schema be modeled to support this? For example: Fact Table: Point of Sale entry (the measurement is DollarAmount) Dimension Table: Promotions (these are sales promotions in effect when a sale was made) The situation is that I want a single Point Of Sale entry to be associated with multiple different Promotions. These Promotions cannot be their own dimensions as there are many many many promotions. How do I do this?

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  • portal/forum for small companies to get technology help

    - by thomas
    I understand this is an open ended question and not quite sure how to add this to community wiki, if that is appropriate. I am doing a little research on where small companies would go on the internet to get answers for technology related questions. Could be around sales, servers, programming, etc. Clearly superuser.com, serverfault.com, and stackoverflow.com are excellent starting points. I am just wondering if anyone has heard of any others. Think a "facebook" that links technology providers with small companies to help answer questions and potentially provide/offer solutions. Thanks!

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  • Excel: Plot order total in map coordinates

    - by Phliplip
    I have a set of data that looks like this: -X--Y----Amount- AE 24 $178,00 Y 27 $162,00 AD 34 $680,00 AK 35 $178,00 Y 25 $29,00 U 23 $178,00 X 38 $193,00 AC 30 $226,00 AK 39 $152,00 AJ 34 $217,00 AC 35 $183,00 AA 22 $211,00 Z 19 $172,00 AJ 32 $187,00 AF 26 $272,00 AI 27 $220,00 AJ 34 $320,00 AB 32 $183,00 AB 35 $272,00 AC 32 $207,00 AB 28 $178,00 AC 30 $168,00 AC 28 $178,00 AB 32 $310,00 AD 30 $188,00 AB 35 $188,00 The sample above is only an excerpt of the total dataset of 16K rows Each row represents a single delivery order, where the 2 first columns are the map coordinate and the third the purchase amount. Would it be possible to plot the above data in a chart or coordinate system. Where the each plot should be a summary of all sales in the same map coordinate. Also a similar chart of order count would be nice to have.

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  • SQL Server cluster performance baseline

    - by Dwight T
    Currently I'm tasked with getting a good performance baseline on a SQL 2005 cluster. The main db on the server is for Sharepoint, but I would like to add other dbs on the cluster. I do have access to Quest's Performance Analysis tool to help. What are key factors to look at to see if the cluster can handle additional dbs? Do you look at different performance indicators for a cluster vs a stand alone sql server? One db will be a low usage transactional db and a read only db that is used for sales data. Thanks Dwight

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  • Google Apps for Business on a separate infrastructure?

    - by dustin
    Does anyone know if Google Apps for Business edition hosts the apps (gmail, calendar, etc.) on a physically separate infrastructure than the Standard (free) infrastructure? We've been growing increasingly annoyed with the lost/severely delayed email messages, downtime, etc. of Google Apps (standard) over time, and we are wondering if moving to the paid version would bring any benefits. Specifically, if the Business edition is not in some way on a different physical infrastructure, and we are in essence paying for a few small perks but still run on the usual standard/free setup, then we would probably have the same (or just as many) issues with the Business version. I've emailed Google's sales team responsible for GApps, but haven't heard anything back in 4 days, which already doesn't speak well for the service. So, anyone have any insight into this? Thanks in advance for any and all help :)

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  • SonicWall HA "gotchas"?

    - by Mark Henderson
    We're looking to move away from PFSense and CARP to a pair of SonicWall NSA 24001 configured in Active/Passive for High Availability. I've never dealt with SonicWall before, so is there anything I should know that their sales guy won't tell me? I'm aware that they had an issue with a lot of their devices shutting down connectivity because of a licensing fault, and they have an overtly complex management GUI (on the older devices at least), but are there any other big "gotchas" that I need to be aware of before committing a not insubstantial amount of money towards these devices? 1If you're outside the US, the SonicWall global sites suck balls. Use the US site for all your product research, and then use your local site when you're after local information.

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  • How can I enable my users to view EPS, PSD, and AI files without the Adobe Creative Suite?

    - by ObligatoryMoniker
    I have many user's who work on a sales floor and need to be able to open these files just to view them so that they can confirm that the artwork they are getting from a customer is correct before passing it on. I do not want to purchase Adobe Creative Suite licenses for these users so that they can simply view these documents. What is the cheapest and best alternative to the Adobe Creative suite that will realistically open all (or at least some) of the files they are likely to receive? Currently I have tried to use XnView with Ghostscript, Inkscape, and Adobe Acrobat Reader but even with all these combined we still can't open many of the files that we receive.

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  • SQL server environment

    - by Olegas D
    Hello I'm considering a bit of changes in current sales environment. And trying to check all cons and pros. Current situation. SQL server (quite decent HP server - server1) + backup server (smaller Dell server - server2). all sql files and sql server itself are on the server1. If something goes wrong with server1 I will have to manually move to server2. Connecting to the sql server: 1 HQ (where server located) + 4 sites through VPN. Now I'm considering 2 scenarios: Buy some storage system + update existing servers (add ram, upgrade processors) and go for VMWare ESXI. Rent a server at a datacenter + rent virtual server in case real server goes down. Also rent some space at data storage to keep SQL files there. Have anyone considered these things and maybe found some good pros/cons list? ;) Thanks

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  • Setting up sendmail to perform mail routing

    - by Diden
    Is sendmail is able to do the following: Forward many user emails to office 365:- [email protected] -> [email protected] [email protected] -> [email protected] [email protected] -> [email protected] [email protected] -> [email protected] Forward the following to a separate server to run php scripts:- [email protected] [email protected] An autoresponder will be sent to the sender. Does anyone know of any sample configuration I could get this started on? Is there a good autoresponder for sendmail? Our emails are hosted on Office365 and it does not allow us to run scripts. Therefore I was considering this option. Is this viable? Please refer to the diagram for more information. Thank you.

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  • Excel SUM From Different Sheets IF Date Found

    - by user329005
    I have a workbook with separate sheets for each product (about 20 sheets, adding more on a regular basis). Each product is only available for a certain time frame, and has daily sales data recorded on that product's sheet. I want an overall snapshot across all products from any given date to be consolidated on a new sheet. This would sum from a particular column on each of the other sheets if a corresponding date exists. I have a moderately passable function right now that has a separate VLOOKUP for each product sheet like SUM(IF(ISERROR(VLOOKUP(DATECELL,SHEETNAME!ARRAY,COLUMN... next VLOOKUP, next VLOOKUP etc., but it's incredibly cumbersome to update each function when a new product is added. I'm thinking there's a much easier way utilizing a named group (sheet names), SUMIF, VLOOKUP etc. Then when a new product sheet is added, I can simply add the sheet name to the named group rather than editing all the functions. Any help would be much appreciated!

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  • iPad revocable vpn access

    - by carpat
    I'm a programmer at my organization, but somehow got drafted into looking into some server stuff so forgive me of my ignorance: They want to give our sales people secure access to our internal sites using their iPads. This must be secure (obviously) but also revocable from the company's side (if someone quits they can no longer access our network). I see from http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1288 that the iPad supports "RSA SecurID", "CRYPTOCard", and "Kerberos" authentication methods. Will one of these do what we need? Are there any major differences between them?

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  • Remote desktop Client versus Web based access to reports and limited data entry

    - by Voyager
    We have a requirement from management to give limited access of our Application to Distributors \ Dealers to look at their account statements in our books of account, enter their purchase requirements (sales order for us). We have given a few of them the RDC who connect to our terminal server and access the reports. This involves licensing of TS Client per each distributor. Is it more better, secure and less costly if a web based application is made to only enter the orders and retrive reports like pending orders, ledgers, receivables etc. Also which is more secure as far as database access is concerened...browser based access or RDC access. Please answer.

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  • why are CPUs so much more expensive in the UK than US?

    - by Nick Fortescue
    I'm looking at building my own PC. An Intel Core i7 960 3.2 Ghz is about £457 in the UK at various online retailers. In the US the price at newegg is $570 (this is about £380 at current exchange rates). 2 questions. 1) Why the difference (about 20%)? All I can think of is sales tax. 2) Am I right in assuming this is just a commodity part - if I ordered one from the US there is no reason it would be any different from one bought in the UK?

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  • Cloud hosting and single hardware point of failure?

    - by PeterB
    From talking to sales I thought Rackspace Cloud was running on a SAN and compute nodes (as VMWare's offerings do), only to find out it doesn't, so when the host server goes down for maintenance all cloud servers on the server go down (in our case for 2.5 hours). I understand Amazon EC2 also has this single-server point of failure. Which cloud hosting solutions don't rely on a single server? I've yet to find a list by architecture Is there a term that distinguishes between these types of 'cloud'? Is one of these 'grid computing' and the other 'virtualisation'? Can a SAN backed solution provide the same reliability as 2 mirrored cloud servers on (say) Rackspace Cloud? I am more familiar with the VMWare architecture and would like to understand the advantages and disadvantages of each approach. I understand the standard architecture is to have multiple cloud servers and mirrored data between them; until we need multiple database servers I'm wondering if a SAN/node hosting solution would provide the lack of downtime we need without the added complexity.

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  • Suggestions for hosted file sharing services

    - by Jon
    Before I pose my question, I will give some insight as per my scenario: I work for a small business (cost is an important factor) Our bandwidth is limited and would not support an in-house FTP server We need to share files (mostly pdf, inDesign, Illustrator documents) to our clients, and as we expand, we are finding that our current locally-hosted FTP solution is too slow and is becoming a detriment to our sales team. What we need is a remotely hosted solution to share files with our clients, specifically with the following features: Greater than 100gb of secure storage The Ability to distribute unique log in credentials to clients, granting access to a personalized directory or folder, while limiting access to other files on the server. A relatively simple web-based UI for clients with limited computer knowledge We have considered a dedicated remote server, and web-based services (box.net, yousendit.com, onehub.com, filesanywhere.com) but I am unsure as per the direction we should be taking - have I left another solution out? What would you suggest? Thanks in advance.

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  • very Slow machine when searching the network

    - by Adam
    Hi We are using a Dell desktop machine with 2 GB RRAM & Pentium D 3.00 GHz. The machine is very slow when using our Sales program and searching over the local network. We have this problem on 2 machine which are the same spec - This one and another. All of our other machine (10) run fast with no issues. Our server is SBS 2008 and AV is AVG. All of our client machines are WinXp Pro SP3 using the latest drivers. Any ideas?

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  • How to rotate attached monitor to notebook of Sony's Z-series?

    - by user67175
    Is it possible that Sony is selling a top of the line, hugely expensive computer that does not have the basic ability to rotate an attached monitor? Is it possible that the Z-series simply can't do this? The Windows control panel is missing the normal option for "rotation", as is the Nvidia control panel for "orientation" , no additional rotation software works. Sony sales says they do not know the answer to this. Sony technical supports says that the problem lies with Nvidia, Nvidia technical supports says the problem lies with Sony. Any advice for a fix for this short of returning the computer would be greatly appreciated. Also wondering if this problem is common to computers running Windows 7?

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  • Looking for a product configurator

    - by Netsrac
    I am looking for a product configurator for products with high complexity. The main goal is to allow a sales person to configure the product in a correct and working manner. The product is a combination of hard- and software options. The options for sure have dependecies (so option A needs B and C) and can also exclude each other. The performance requirements of the software related to the hardware need to be considered. So some rules need to be defineable. Does anybody know a tool (preferred open source) doing that job? Thanks for your help.

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  • Simple C# CSV Excel export class

    - by Chris
    Thought this might be handy for someone, this is an extremely simple CSV export class that I needed. Features: Extremely simple to use Escapes commas and quotes so excel handles them fine Exports date and datetimes in timezone-proof format Without further ado: using System; using System.Data.SqlTypes; using System.IO; using System.Text; using System.Collections.Generic; /// <summary> /// Simple CSV export /// Example: /// CsvExport myExport = new CsvExport(); /// /// myExport.AddRow(); /// myExport["Region"] = "New York, USA"; /// myExport["Sales"] = 100000; /// myExport["Date Opened"] = new DateTime(2003, 12, 31); /// /// myExport.AddRow(); /// myExport["Region"] = "Sydney \"in\" Australia"; /// myExport["Sales"] = 50000; /// myExport["Date Opened"] = new DateTime(2005, 1, 1, 9, 30, 0); /// /// Then you can do any of the following three output options: /// string myCsv = myExport.Export(); /// myExport.ExportToFile("Somefile.csv"); /// byte[] myCsvData = myExport.ExportToBytes(); /// </summary> public class CsvExport { /// <summary> /// To keep the ordered list of column names /// </summary> List<string> fields = new List<string>(); /// <summary> /// The list of rows /// </summary> List<Dictionary<string, object>> rows = new List<Dictionary<string, object>>(); /// <summary> /// The current row /// </summary> Dictionary<string, object> currentRow { get { return rows[rows.Count - 1]; } } /// <summary> /// Set a value on this column /// </summary> public object this[string field] { set { // Keep track of the field names, because the dictionary loses the ordering if (!fields.Contains(field)) fields.Add(field); currentRow[field] = value; } } /// <summary> /// Call this before setting any fields on a row /// </summary> public void AddRow() { rows.Add(new Dictionary<string, object>()); } /// <summary> /// Converts a value to how it should output in a csv file /// If it has a comma, it needs surrounding with double quotes /// Eg Sydney, Australia -> "Sydney, Australia" /// Also if it contains any double quotes ("), then they need to be replaced with quad quotes[sic] ("") /// Eg "Dangerous Dan" McGrew -> """Dangerous Dan"" McGrew" /// </summary> string MakeValueCsvFriendly(object value) { if (value == null) return ""; if (value is INullable && ((INullable)value).IsNull) return ""; if (value is DateTime) { if (((DateTime)value).TimeOfDay.TotalSeconds==0) return ((DateTime)value).ToString("yyyy-MM-dd"); return ((DateTime)value).ToString("yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss"); } string output = value.ToString(); if (output.Contains(",") || output.Contains("\"")) output = '"' + output.Replace("\"", "\"\"") + '"'; return output; } /// <summary> /// Output all rows as a CSV returning a string /// </summary> public string Export() { StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder(); // The header foreach (string field in fields) sb.Append(field).Append(","); sb.AppendLine(); // The rows foreach (Dictionary<string, object> row in rows) { foreach (string field in fields) sb.Append(MakeValueCsvFriendly(row[field])).Append(","); sb.AppendLine(); } return sb.ToString(); } /// <summary> /// Exports to a file /// </summary> public void ExportToFile(string path) { File.WriteAllText(path, Export()); } /// <summary> /// Exports as raw UTF8 bytes /// </summary> public byte[] ExportToBytes() { return Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(Export()); } }

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  • Selected value from drop-down list doesn't post from jquery dialog

    - by RememberME
    I have a jQuery dialog. All of the fields are posting correctly except for the drop-downs, the value is getting passed as null rather than the selected value. <div id="popupCreateCompany" title="Create a new company"> <form> <fieldset> <p> <label for="company_name">Company Name:</label> <%= Html.TextBox("company_name") %> </p> <p> <label for="company_desc">Company Description:</label> <%= Html.TextBox("company_desc") %> </p> <p> <label for="address">Address:</label> <%= Html.TextBox("address") %> </p> <p> <label for="city">City:</label> <%= Html.TextBox("city") %> </p> <p> <label for="state">State:</label> <%= Html.TextBox("state") %> </p> <p> <label for="zip">Zip:</label> <%= Html.TextBox("zip") %> </p> <p> <label for="website">Website:</label> <%= Html.TextBox("website", "http:/") %> </p> <p> <label for="sales_contact">Sales Contact:</label> <%= Html.DropDownList("sales_contact", Model.SelectSalesContacts, "** Select Sales Contact **") %> </p> <p> <label for="primary_company">Primary Company:</label> <%= Html.DropDownList("primary_company", Model.SelectPrimaryCompanies, "** Select Primary Company **") %> </p> </fieldset> </form> jQuery: $('#popupCreateCompany').dialog( { autoOpen: false, modal: true, buttons: { 'Add': function() { var dialog = $(this); var form = dialog.find('input:text'); $.post('/company/create', $(form).serialize(), function() { dialog.dialog('close'); }) }, 'Cancel': function() { $(this).dialog('close'); } } }); $("#create-company").click(function() { $('#popupCreateCompany').dialog('open'); }); My SelectList definitions: public class SubcontractFormViewModel { public subcontract Subcontract { get; private set; } public SelectList SelectPrimaryCompanies { get; set; } public MultiSelectList SelectService_Lines { get; private set; } public SelectList SelectSalesContacts { get; private set; } public SubcontractFormViewModel(subcontract subcontract) { SubcontractRepository subcontractRepository = new SubcontractRepository(); Subcontract = subcontract; SelectPrimaryCompanies = new SelectList(subcontractRepository.GetPrimaryCompanies(), "company_id", "company_name"); SelectService_Lines = new MultiSelectList(subcontractRepository.GetService_Lines(), "service_line_id", "service_line_name", subcontractRepository.GetSubcontractService_Lines(Subcontract.subcontract_id)); SelectSalesContacts = new SelectList(subcontractRepository.GetContacts(), "contact_id", "contact_name"); } }

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  • How do I explain this to potential employers?

    - by ReferencelessBob
    Backstory: TL;DR: I've gained a lot of experience working for 5 years at one startup company, but it eventually failed. The company is gone and the owner MIA. When I left sixth-form college I didn't want to start a degree straight away, so when I met this guy who knew a guy who was setting up a publishing company and needed a 'Techie' I thought why not. It was a very small operation, he sent mailings to schools, waited for orders to start arriving, then ordered a short run of the textbooks to be printed, stuck them in an envelope posted them out. I was initially going to help him set up a computerized system for recording orders and payments, printing labels, really basic stuff and I threw it together in Access in a couple of weeks. He also wanted to start taking orders online, so I set up a website and a paypal business account. While I was doing this, I was also helping to do the day-to-day running of things, taking phone orders, posting products, banking cheques, ordering textbooks, designing mailings, filing end of year accounts, hiring extra staff, putting stamps on envelopes. I learned so much about things I didn't even know I needed to learn about. Things were pretty good, when I started we sold about £10,000 worth of textbooks and by my 4th year there we sold £250,000 worth of text books. Things were looking good, but we had a problem. Our best selling product had peaked and sales started to fall sharply, we introduced add on products through the website to boost sales which helped for a while, but we had simply saturated the market. Our plan was to enter the US with our star product and follow the same, slightly modified, plan as before. We setup a 1-866 number and had the calls forwarded to our UK offices. We contracted a fulfillment company, shipped over a few thousand textbooks, had a mailing printed and mailed, then sat by the phones and waited. Needless to say, it didn't work. We tried a few other things, at home and in the US, but nothing helped. We expanded in the good times, moving into bigger offices, taking on staff to do administrative and dispatch work, but now cashflow was becoming a problem and things got tougher. We did the only thing we could and scaled things right back, the offices went, the admin staff went, I stopped taking a wage and started working from home. Nothing helped. The business was wound up about about 2 years ago. In the end it turned out that the owner had built up considerable debt at the start of business and had not paid them off during good years, which left him in a difficult position when cashflow had started to dry up. I haven't been able to contact the owner since I found out. It took me a while to get back on my feet after that, but I'm now at University and doing a Computer Science degree. How do I show the experience I have without having to get into all the gory details of what happened?

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  • How do you stop scripters from slamming your website hundreds of times a second?

    - by davebug
    [update] I've accepted an answer, as lc deserves the bounty due to the well thought-out answer, but sadly, I believe we're stuck with our original worst case scenario: CAPTCHA everyone on purchase attempts of the crap. Short explanation: caching / web farms make it impossible for us to actually track hits, and any workaround (sending a non-cached web-beacon, writing to a unified table, etc.) slows the site down worse than the bots would. There is likely some pricey bit of hardware from Cisco or the like that can help at a high level, but it's hard to justify the cost if CAPTCHAing everyone is an alternative. I'll attempt to do a more full explanation in here later, as well as cleaning this up for future searchers (though others are welcome to try, as it's community wiki). I've added bounty to this question and attempted to explain why the current answers don't fit our needs. First, though, thanks to all of you who have thought about this, it's amazing to have this collective intelligence to help work through seemingly impossible problems. I'll be a little more clear than I was before: This is about the bag o' crap sales on woot.com. I'm the president of Woot Workshop, the subsidiary of Woot that does the design, writes the product descriptions, podcasts, blog posts, and moderates the forums. I work in the css/html world and am only barely familiar with the rest of the developer world. I work closely with the developers and have talked through all of the answers here (and many other ideas we've had). Usability of the site is a massive part of my job, and making the site exciting and fun is most of the rest of it. That's where the three goals below derive. CAPTCHA harms usability, and bots steal the fun and excitement out of our crap sales. To set up the scenario a little more, bots are slamming our front page tens of times a second screenscraping (and/or scanning our rss) for the Random Crap sale. The moment they see that, it triggers a second stage of the program that logs in, clicks I want One, fills out the form, and buys the crap. In current (2/6/2009) order of votes: lc: On stackoverflow and other sites that use this method, they're almost always dealing with authenticated (logged in) users, because the task being attempted requires that. On Woot, anonymous (non-logged) users can view our home page. In other words, the slamming bots can be non-authenticated (and essentially non-trackable except by IP address). So we're back to scanning for IPs, which a) is fairly useless in this age of cloud networking and spambot zombies and b) catches too many innocents given the number of businesses that come from one IP address (not to mention the issues with non-static IP ISPs and potential performance hits to trying to track this). Oh, and having people call us would be the worst possible scenario. Can we have them call you? BradC Ned Batchelder's methods look pretty cool, but they're pretty firmly designed to defeat bots built for a network of sites. Our problem is bots are built specifically to defeat our site. Some of these methods could likely work for a short time until the scripters evolved their bots to ignore the honeypot, screenscrape for nearby label names instead of form ids, and use a javascript-capable browser control. lc again "Unless, of course, the hype is part of you

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