Now this is pretty funny. I found a reference to this video in a post on another retro forum. The new software here allows me to embed the video in this post.

It turns out that if you look around YouTube, there are lots, and I mean lots of interesting videos, including quite a few about retro-computing subjects. Over time I'll try to find some more interesting ones.

In the meantime, enjoy this one!

I spent an hour this evening getting the firewall in order. I was getting  a lot of intrusion attempts on the ssh port (22), so I restricted the port by IP address and now I bet my secure log will be very cle an.

If you run a web server (or mail server or ...), you really  need to insure that all unessential services are turned off, and that your firewall is set to reject or drop everything unwanted.

There are lots of good iptables references out there. Just search for "iptables howto" or "iptables tutorial". One that might get you started if you don't already know what you're doing is at the Fedora project. It is relevant to most Linux distributions, not just Fedora.

I would post mine here verbatim, but it has a lot of trusted IP information that I don't want to expose. If anyone is really interested, I'd be happy to sanitize it and post it.

I was never a mainframe guy, except for doing a lot of programming on them in fortran and pascal back in the old days at college and graduate school.

My brother now... he was a mainframe guy. Ken worked for several large banks in the Boston/Cambridge, MA area, programming in everything from JCL to Cobol to RPG. He was a wiz at managing large IBM computers and loved that whole environment.

For Christmas last year, gave him a complete implementation of an IBM mainframe in emulation, including the MVS operating system. It's called Hercules.

Who knew!

Unfortunately, his health has been poor, and I can't report on installing and using this stuff, but that's a different story. I had hoped to playaround and learn a bit of it myself, but may never get around to it.

The package I put together for him has lots of documentation plus complete binaries for running your own mainframe under WinDoze. It even includes the letter I wrote to Ken as part of the Christmas present :)

The coolness factor in this package is huge, and if I were a mainframe guy, I'd be all over it.

So I just uploaded it here and encourage anyone who understands or wants to play with mainframes to give it a go! And please let us know how it turns out.

-Tom