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I'd suggest that you take a look at Caldera's (now SCO, again) Volution Manager. It offers the same features for Unix systems, that M$ SMS offers for Windows. Plus, it can be integrated into larger enterprise management platforms like Unicenter and Tivoli should your needs grow so large. Also, if you are a Compaq/HP shop, Volution Manager integrates with Compaq's Insight Manager which is fabulous for hardware management.

There must be some fairly credible requests coming in for this to happen.

All it takes is one request from someone who will purchase enough seats.

IBM's Tivoli TME10 enterprise management suite (for all I know it's called something else now, but I'm too lazy to check) is supported on OS/2 primarily because of a single customer, the UK postal system. Everyone knew it would have to happen eventually, since IBM bought Tivoli and still had a strong commitment to OS/2 back in those days -- except, of course, for making it not suck. They didn't have that strong a commitment.

Incidentally, the linux port of tivoli was originally done by a support engineer with too much time on his hands. Ah, the wonders of using CORBA and perl.

DataDirect Networks for the S2A 6200 or 3000, as much storage as you want with 8 (4 on a 3000) Fibre Channel ports going to hosts or switches.
Then SANergy for file system sharing software.

I used to work for Tivoli before they shut down the Indianapolis site. They would certainly listen to people who hadn't finished college degrees [yet], but would give them indefinite-length internships until they actually earned their degree. Then they'd get the "real" job offer. Maybe you could find something like that? My (Fortune 500) employer before Tivoli simply made low-ball offers to people with only a high school diploma. Watch out for that - college may be expensive, but if it can land you an extra $10k/year, it's worth it many times over the course of a career. Best of luck to you!

Imagine, recommending to the boss that you could save the company thousands of dollars by not buying that enterprise tape library, but instead buy a Lego MindStorm kit and an extra box of Legos!

Actually, this is the exact thing I'll be suggesting to my boss tomorrow after I do some more investigation! This is perfect for use with enterprise products such as Tivoli Storage Manager.

Actually, you could quite easily scale this up; simply add more single tape devices to your server, each with its own Lego tape loader.

Way cool!

OK, we are not a big company, so your "bigwigs" won't care too much for this story, but...

We are using Samba and cups to provide all of our file/print services, and they are both authenticating back to LDAP. Here is best source that I have found so far for samba and LDAP integration. It works very nicely, and with Samba 2.2 you can even do automatic NT/2000 printer driver installation as well.

For backup we use a Tivoli storage manager, which has native linux support, and so far has proved to be pretty reliable. We also run this thing in a very heterogenous environment (Linux, AIX, Solaris, NT and 2000!) with very few problems.

TSM is an _excellent_ backup product, and works great with SAN's...

http://www.tivoli.com/products/solutions/storage/c omplex_storage_net.html

Give it a try... works great! The downloadable server code comes with 30-day demo licenses...

Rather, the needs of the Linux user is secondary to the needs of IBM's R&D. File systems that most Linux users have never heard of such as GPFS and Episode are accepted as valid file systems for IBM backup while more frequently used file systems such as Ext3 and xfs are ignored. Even more common true blue file systems such as jfs and AFS are skipped by the IBM backup "solution."

So... IBM is now enlisting the help of Red hat? So what?! At the end of the day, will I be able to restore the latest files from my Red hat v7.2 Ext3 fs which *should* have been backed up to TSM? Will Red hat be able to assist me in getting TSM running on a pSeries F50 running Linux?

The bottom line is that several departments of IBM such as Tivoli are still treating Linux as an expiermental operating system (not production) and treating IBM R&D as the only supported users. Real users, production users of ext3, xfs, jfs and afs as opposed to users of expiermental file systems are finding that True Blue does not care about the integratity of their daily incremental backups. Those that listen to Red hat about the advantages for a non-destructive upgrade to Ext3 during an upgrade to v7.2 will still find that the same file systems that used to back up fine before the upgrade are now being purposily ignored. Users that listen to IBM DeveloperWorks that JFS is now at v1.0 and is production ready are also stuck in the same sinking ship. And while YellowDog Linux runs fine on some pSeries RS/6000s, Tivoli has yet to provide a single client for Linux PPC.

So, now that Red hat is contracted with IBM, what type of improvement in support for IBM departments such as Tivoli should we expect? NONE. True Blue PATHETIC support. It isn't up to Red hat to get Tivoli support into shape, it is up to IBM and they continue to do a half ass job of it. I'm putting in just as much work, if not more, in monitoring TSM failling backups as I did when running ADSM v2 under Linux emulation of SCO. Nothing has changed and it is still up to the individual Linux users to make choosen true blue "solutions" truely "work."

Give me the source code to the TSM client. Then we can discuss your "support" options. Until then, IBM is the last company you want to do business with for Linux. "LOVE-PIECE-LINUX" isn't going to get your files back when you figure out that your Red hat v7.2 server was never backed up since you upgraded! "eServers from IBM running Linux" will NOT save you a bundle of money when you need to recreate all your lost work that wasn't backed up since you upgraded to Red hat v7.2.

Backups are a *BASIC* part of supporting a Linux server. Until you get that part right, all that is being done is hot-word compliant marketting, not *support*.

Isn't this article more about Tivoli on linux and less about clustering?

Keep in mind it's IBM software on linux that IBM promotes more than linux (partly because AIX is so lame and was never that widely adopted) ..

hey.

i have a friend who works for an ibm company called tivoli. they have alot of products but one of the cool things they do is push applications to workstations. so if you have 7k workstations and a couple servers. you install the client on the workstations and your server can push software to them. this is expensive but possible in windows.

btw tivoli also works under linux. i've never used it but my friend says they do alot of their development under linux.

Think of it this way: Users should have the ability to maximize performance and reduce overhead, just like admins.

Do a search for Linux at www.tivoli.com to learn more about Tivoli's Linux offerings.

In the interests of full disclosure, I will add that I do own IBM stock, and I work for IBM.

Tivoli for Linux (yes, it exists The Red Hat Update Agent (up2date) (when it works).

A clueful admin.

A clueful CIO.
---

If you are looking for software to create a cluster, there are several, depending upong what type of cluster you are trying to create. If you are creating a service-based cluster, check out TurboLinux Cluster Server, Linux Virtual Servers, PolyServe Understudy, and Legato. There are many others available, including hardware solutions from Cisco, F5, and Alteon. I'm not too familiar with Beowulf-type clusters.

If you are looking for software to manage groups of systems, that's a whole different story. You might look into Enlighten DSM, Tivoli, or OpenNMS. I'm sure there's a lot of competition in that field as well, but I don't have any experience with those products.

That evening, your service recommends a great restaurant near the hotel and allows you to book a ticket for a concert at Tivoli. Such services exist today for computer users, but combining this with mobile devices opens up new possibilities.

my first thought on reading this was "Tivoli do concerts as well as software?".

My second was "great, more advertising pushed on me". Seriously, why use a mobile phone to look for a restaurant in a street when you can just walk down the street and see what you find? Any restaurant that needs to advertise in tourist guides is a restaurant not worth going to (imho), especially when there are shedloads of fantastic places to eat in all major cities if you look more than ten meters away from the beaten track. If you're in your home town, why rely on an advertising service when you can use the same phone to speak to your friends and ask for recommendations?

The same is true of every other use for WAP. People often joke that there is no point using a WAP website to check something, when it is cheaper and faster to phone the company directly and ask the person at the other end. It's also a hell of a lot more flexible.

Even the next big thing in wap, the idea of location specific content, is already available over SMS or Audio to users of Vodafones traffic system in the UK. And nobody uses it.

The idea of inventing a technology, then working out what it is useful for creates things that aren't useful for anything. Creating technology that there is a demand for creates things that people use. It's the difference between WAP and the internet.

The very fact that this question is being asked says more about WAP than any answers ever could

It's all about offices. Not only does this allow you to surf pr0n, but it cuts down on noise dramatically. It's best to be paired up in an office with the coworker that you work with the most. Face time is dramatically important, and you can convey a lot more information that way. You (me) also tend to slack off less when there is a human nearby who is also working.

The next factor is furniture ergonomics, a word vastly overused but also a concept dramatically underapplied. I am a BIG MOFO (6'7", 350 lbs) and my office furniture is never the right size. An office willing to buy you furniture that fits you is a must.

Finally, I come up upon the topic of lighting. When I worked for Tivoli Systems I shared an office with two people, then with one person, then had my own. In the latter two circumstances the lighting was to my specs; A desk lamp for close lighting and a halogen torchiere for room lighting. One of them is enough to cast a good, broad-spectrum light (or so it seems) with enough light to find your way around the office without falling over things, but not enough to make your eyes tired. The desk lamp is a necessity to provide enough light to see documents by and to provide enough light to where staring at your monitor isn't too high-contrast, but not enough to where you have to crank the brightness beyond the point where black is no longer black, but a dark grey. Having proper contrast is a must.

You also need a bookshelf, in my ever so humble opinion. While I am constantly using digital documents (you can search them, after all) I frequently turn to books from ORA or Microsoft Press (I work in a Microsoft-centric shop at the moment) for in-depth information. You need a place to keep these books that isn't your desk. Avoid clutter when possible, but when you need to lay out a lot of docs at once, nothing beats a desk.

OT Side note: The thinkgeek ad I'm looking at right now spells "movie premiere" without the trailing "E". Give me a break, folks.

IBM (now Tivoli) has a wonderful product called ADSM (now TSM). It backs up data from the client to a disk storage pool. It then migrates that information from disk to tape while, optionally, leaving a copy on disk.

This gives you the advantages of doing fast backups and restores (from disk) while giving you the off site options of tape.

It ain't cheaper than just writing it to disk, of course, but if the data is worth backing up, it's worth keeping safe, right?

InitZero

During the last year IBM has redistributed ADSM statically linked with the Linux C Library (including LGPL works) without providing the object files for relinking against newer revisions of the library or crediting the copyright/licensing in the ADSM start-up banner. A week ago IBM claimed they would fix it. Since then, IBM has continued to fail to produce the object files for relinking or offer a correction in the start-up banner. In fact, the link for ADSM for Linux from the ADSM clients web page has gone dead. The offering of the object files required to be available by the LGPL still can not be found in IBM ADSM non-supported section, the ADSM v3r1 section or the v3r7 section of their ftp site. Rather than actually offering the object files as required, International Business Machines appears to just be sweeping their responsiblities to the Linux community under the rug and make the non-support ADSM offering just disappear complettely.

At the present time, it appears that the Linux community is putting more effort into supporting IBM than IBM is "committed" to supporting Linux. I call for a boycott of the Linux community's assistance in the RS/6000 and S/390 ports until IBM lives up to their claims of supporting the LGPL by releasing the ADSM object files for relinking against modified versions of the Linux C library as well as live up to the "commitment" of extending IBM support to Linux by actually *supporting* Linux back-up software (ADSM/Tivoli) and system administrator (dsmit).

How exactly would IBM like the Open Source community to work with them. In the case of ADSM, I assumed that contacting Tivoli was the right thing to do. But emails get left unanswered and a phone call results in being asked why I don't use a client for another operating system because as Derik so kindly pointed out "[they] provide support for many other operating systems." Statements like that paint a grim picture of reality which contradicts the marketing fluff of IBM's Linux web page. And explaining that a statement of non-support means that we should expect the illegal activity to remain uncorrected pritty much kills a "working" relationship. But lets say that IBM is serious about actually working with the Open Source community, where would we find contact information on that. Would it be on the IBM Linux main page or on the IBM Linux Open Source page or a different page all together. I ended up posting to Slashdot because I ran out of places to find who to contact at IBM and it appeared that Derik had told me the final word on the subject.

• Fetch the IBM unsupported ADSM client
• Uncompress and untar the package
• Then run: strings dsmc | grep "C lib"
• You should get some like follows:

  $ strings dsmc | grep "C lib" @(#) The Linux C library 5.4.32

• Download the source code to the Linux C library and take note on how much of the code is covered by LGPL
• Read the requirements for statically linking with LGPL material in the LGPL section 6
• • Notice that, unlike the SCSL which does not require any acknowledgement of Blackdown's work, that the LGPL requires "prominent notice" of the use of the library
  • Also, notice that by statically linking with the LGPL the distributor is required to provide a method in which the LGPL material can remain modifiable (an object files for relinking should be made available
• Try locating any prominent notice of the use of the Linux C Library in the ADSM README file - not there?
• Try locating any prominent notice of the use of the Linux C Library in the ADSM INSTALL file - nada?
• Try locating any prominent notice in the ADSM start-up banner and you get:

• $ ./dsmc ADSTAR Distributed Storage Manager Command Line Backup Client Interface - Version 3, Release 1, Level 0.1 (C) Copyright IBM Corporation, 1990, 1997, All Rights Reserved.

• Note that not only do they fail to acknowledge use of the Linux C library, they claim copyright on the material they aren't legally entitled to claim copyright on!
• Try Contacting IBM/Tivoli about the availablity of the object files for relinking as required for statically linking with LGPL
• • Do they even acknowledge use of the Linux C library or do they just explain that no modifications to how they distribute can be made since the Linux client is not supported?
  • Do they acknowledge that lack of support is not a valid excuse to violate licensing/copyright of material?

By the way, IBM/Tivoli has been informed of the LGPL violation by both email and phone. They have not given any indication they plan to correct their actions.

I have never used a more incompentently designed piece of software in my life.

It may well be all that and a bag of chips for NT, but do not under any circumstances use this bloated piece of crap on Unix. I spent months and months trying to make it work at a previous job on Solaris, HP/UX and AIX, and it never did, even when I followed all of the published documents to the letter -- CA's Unix support is a joke, an absolute joke.

Boycott Computer Associates.

Use something that's worthwhile: BMC Patrol or Tivoli rock Unicenter's world.