I grew up in the western panhandle of Nebraska, and I would agree that development is sorely needed. Sure, some folks like the small town feel, but when half the town is a ghost town due to families and business leaving they could stand to have some growth to bring it back to baseline.

There were three main booms the panhandle went through. First was the railroad/homestead boom in the middle 1800's. Next was the oil boom when deposits were found (and now nearly completely dry). Finally there was the missile boom during the cold war era when several ICBM silo's were constructed (they still are there and active, but just without the huge influx of construction jobs).

No new boom is in sight. Side note... Elk Creek is in the eastern side of the state. So I don't think this will help out on the panhandle's lack of industrial diversity. This mine if it does open will only strengthen the hold Lincoln/Omaha has on the Nebraska economy.

Today it's just farming and the few industrials and corporates the locals have been able to coax in because nobody else wants them in their back yard (such as toxic waste incineration plants). Kimball has the Clean Harbors plant, and Sidney was fortunate to bring in Cabella's corporate. If those left, those community's populations would fall greatly, and possibly impact further the area's other sectors like the main community college (Western Nebraska Community College) in Scottsbluff and Sidney simply because there wouldn't be enough to sustain it.

I offered public wifi in my apartment complex on a limited pipe. First, I setup a linux firewall with three nics - one for outside, one for my inside stuff+personal wireless, one for the public. On the public wireless side, everything except port 80 was blocked. I included 443 in the blocks because I wanted to limit where people went, so I could mitigate potential trouble like pedo browsers. On port 80, I sent all traffic to a transparent squid proxy. The proxy then checked which URLs were being requested and if they were in my allowed list. If not allowed, I rewrote the URL and sent people to kittenwars.com (I'm sure you could find an equally evil site to send if that isn't your preference). I did add in an html frame on the left side (right side was kittenwars) when people tried going to a site that explained here are all the sites you can go to, and the dangers of using someone else's unencrypted access point. Allowed URLs were fairly small, but from the usage the access point was still popular. wikipedia, Microsoft patches, PBS, weather.com, local government sites. I'm sure you could find more, but I wanted a very limited set that probably won't attract trouble. Then finally I limited people from soaking up my pipe using linux traffic shaping on the transparent proxy.

I did purposely open up a wireless point for some time, but restricted where it could go. Places such as wikipedia, weather.com, youtube, PBS, Microsoft patch sites, and some of the local government websites.

Outside of those websites, I used a transparent proxy with a url rewriter to redirect users to kittenwars.com with a side html frame informing users to be careful, not to expect any privacy on an unencrypted connection when using wireless points that aren't their own and to properly secure their laptops.

With so many files, I don't treat my system as a filesystem, and more like a Google-type search. I imported all my media into Drupal as page nodes and hotlinked to the backend files. Where possible, I had has much metadata as possible included about each file. Time/date, subject, type of media, keywords, where, descriptions if they were entered, and searchable text. Navigating is then done by media type, searching, and browsing through various keywords. Drupal then presents the media in the browser. If you wanted to get fancy you can reuse the metadata to present lists using the views module. For direct access via the application (like the audio player), that is when I go to the backend, but generally at that point I know what I want after going through the website.

When it migrates between hosts, it doesn't move the virtual disks, just the memory and the cpu contents. Suppose you have two physical hosts with a virtual machine running on one host. The two hosts both see the virtual disks at the same time on some sort of shared storage - be it a fiber attached SAN, NFS share from a NAS device, or or iSCSI over the network. When you tell it to migrate from one host to another, the memory is copied from one host to another over the network.

As it is copying, the virtual machine is still running. Changes that are made in the virtual machine's memory are kept track of and sent back over the wire. When the memory is fully copied, it snapshots the cpu and temporarily pauses the virtual machine. During that pause, it sends the cpu state over the network then the other physical host unpauses the virtual machine and sends out a mac broadcast so the network switches realize where the virtual machine is. That cpu snapshot period is about 1-2 seconds.

If the network can't keep up with the memory copy and delta change copies, it will never be flopped over to the other physical host.

What I would like to see in future versions of ESX is for it to also be able to migrate the virtual disks. That would need more network traffic though, but would be really good for DR. In the meantime though I am content with pausing virtual machines, then copying that paused state over the WAN link for DR. Other possible solutions if you can't pause machines would be to look at SAN replication over the WAN, such as with Xiotech's georep. Then on the other end of the SAN replication have the systems ready to go to bring the virtual machines online.