Slashdot Mirror
CA Announces Program Ports to Linux
December writes "CA has announced that they will port ARCserveIT, InnoculateIT, MasterIT and NetworkIT to Linux.
The full press release is available online. " Computer Associates and Red Hat are teaming up, according to the press release. They'll be making a package aimed at "mid-market" customers.
If RedHat keeps this up, they'll have more closed source software in their box then open. I'm not sure if that's a bad thing or a good thing, but I wonder if that's the only way for a distro to 'stand out'. I guess I got the wrong idea, and thought RH would of wanted more to push the software as OSS. Again I'm not passing judment and saying this is bad or good. But it does make me wonder. Oh well, just my two pence.
The last time you downloaded an open-source program, did you read ALL the code? Even the boring stuff? Hmm?
Posted by NJViking:
I hope they clean up the ArcServe interface up first before they port it. I had to support ArcServe on 8 NT servers at my last job and it was not a pretty picture.
Arcserve appears to have horrible support for library tape devices, and their instructions for installing patches (as well as figuring out which patches are pre-requisites to others is a nightmare.)
The tape device I was using was a Magstar B10. It had support for 20 tape cartidges and was a fast little machine, however, Arcserve would often leave the tape device in an unwritable state.
When I left that job in June, I had found out from a colleague in November that they hadn't had a full backup since August.
NJV
was the biggest waste of cash. No CLI, and it was software that tried to be smarter than me ... ugly mess. Virus scanning software would rock but not ArcServe! I'll be excited when Legato Networker server runs on FreeBSD.
I think the next slashdot poll should be 'your fav backup software'
o Bru
o Networker
o Tar
o dump
o pen & paper
Arcserve is HORRIBLE.
I was using the version just before it changed to ArcServeIT, though we did get the first version of ArcServeIT. It is poorly programmed and unstable as hell. I nevercould rely on it. Restores were always a scary experience. It wouldn't recover crashed machines at all (apparently you were supposed to pay extra for this very basic capability, and my predecessor hadn't bought this feature). I could get back data files USUALLY. However, I had endless trouble with the catalog. Doing restores on that system was a constant series of barely-dodged bullets. I have never, in my life, dealt with software that was so horrible. I fought it for MONTHS. I almost always managed to do restores when I needed them, but that was mostly due to ingenuity on my part.
Eventually, in desperation, I called up support (which is actually decent) and complained at them about the endless trouble we were having with it. Turns out that the Raima database that they use internally can only support 16 million records. I had over a million files on one server ALONE, and I was backing up over fifty machines to DLT tape. The catalogs were silently corrupting themselves within a few days of being rebuilt. This is NOT DOCUMENTED ANYWHERE in the manuals. And I asked them about this. "Oh, Arcserve isn't meant to handle that much data." Excuse me? This is a multi-thousand dollar package, and I don't remember seeing anything on the box about how much data I could back up with it???
They did tell me I could use SQL Server to store the database files. I went through the whole process of buying a new drive, setting up SQL Server, and configuring ARCServe to talk to it. It did work, and it didn't lose catalog data. However, after a backup, it would take somewhere around TWENTY HOURS to update the catalog in the database. When it was time for the next daily backup, it often wouldn't be finished updating the catalog from the PRIOR one 24 hours before! And if I wanted a restore, even a simple query would take twenty minutes to run (as in, browsing the files that had been backed up the night before from a specific server).
At that point, we just dumped it and bought a real solution, Legato Networker. Networker on NT has a few odd wrinkles but it is mostly solid, and it has saved my rear end several times. When I do a restore with Networker, I get back a perfect machine. Users can actually restore their own recent files without any intervention on my part. And it works. Every time.
Caveat re: Legato: An earlier build of Networker totally ate itself and destroyed the server installation. I was able to rebuild the server from its 'bootstrap' tapes, but bugs in the restore process make it very slow and tedious to recover the catalogs from multiple machines. I don't know if this has been fixed yet. It has not crashed since I went to a more recent patch rev, and has been almost painless. Light years difference from ArcServe, which was a constant, constant hassle.
Conclusion: Don't touch this software with a ten-meter pole. It won't be any better on Linux than it was on NT. Go with something you can trust; both BRU and Arkeia have pretty good reputations.
ArcServe SUCKS.
At my previous company, a large-scale NSP, Unicenter and other CA products were brought in by upper management. The product had multiple bugs, and event the agents could poll properly on CPU load without maxing out the cpu. All of their interfaces, which were supposed to be configurable and intuitive were anything but that - no support for importing data, and obscure and deeply nested access via the GUI (checking a simple outage involved going through no less than 5 clickthrus, plus entering plenty of text). Demand on the management stations was VERY high, and the software did not share well with other processes - though orignally designed for NT, their servers ran Unix (as an option) but their management stations wanted win95. I know that this model may have been changed somewhat with the new features, but think of where they were at just 2 years ago...
Their support consisted of nothing at first, but then was scaled to 4 programmers living in our eng area. This was not because they wanted to do this- they had wanted to charge us ungodly amounts of cash for this privelige. The only reason we got them at all was because it would have violated a prior arrangement they made with us. The programmers, however, were uncooperative and generally did not want to work on anything but a very narrow set of parameters on the server side only. Getting anything done with them was about impossible, but we finally got them to compile a Unix client, which we could eventually compile under linux- neither were stable.
Bottom line is this- they did not have product or plan for product under Linux 2 years ago. Even under other platforms, they did not meet the "enterprise" standard of support (everything works, is fully interoperable, 99.9% of the time w/ comprable uptime). Considering how bad their previous "flagship enterprise" products were before, I can't begin to imagine all the hassles of dealing with their product on *nix, plus the added hassles of having to put up with their exhorbitant and lousy support (and VERY obtuse documentation). Maybe if you have only one person assigned for support it *might* work out, but it didn't work well in a multi-staff multi-hat environment.
They are excellent business people. They can sell to management like nobody else- strategic partnerships to increase their stocks has apparently been what they are best at. And they ALWAYS sell with binding, multi-year contracts that tie your hands while leaving them free to do as little as they wish...so I have to wonder if, beyond marketing hype, this is something I would really want associated with a quality product like Redhat, which is THE LINUX in the minds of most business-people and consumers.
'Hail Eris, baby, hail Eris...pfffffffttt.' *cough* 'Yeah.'
It is precisely because of the fact that there is no virus-scanning software for Linux (for DOS/Win16/Win32 viruses) that many otherwise clueful PHBs will not adopt it.
Except that's *NOT* a fact:
Sophos Anti-virus
Datafellow's F-Secure for Linux
And that's just the two *I* know of.
Let me tell you *WHY* it's a Good Thing...
Many shops are forced to keep an NT server around to provide virus-scanning services for the Windows desktops in the company. Because "Linux doesn't have viruses", the Linux boxen tend to act as a Typhoid Mary during a Windows virus infection.
It is precisely because of the fact that there is no virus-scanning software for Linux (for DOS/Win16/Win32 viruses) that many otherwise clueful PHBs will not adopt it. Software to scan for alien viruses on email attachments, etc, can only broaden the appeal of Linux.
It's also not a bad thing if they provide scanners for native viruses.
"What?!!?" you say. "Sure there is concept, but for all practical purposes, there are no Linux viruses. Besides, permissions protect us!"
True, my friend. Permissions protect the system from getting hosed. A virus can only affect your own files, or files that you have write permission to. Consider, though: the system, aside from configuration (which, I realize, is not insignificant), is on the original install media. What do you have under your account?
That's right. Your data, which is far more valuable.
It's true, any non-half-assed shop keeps backups... but let's face it, it's a real pain in the ass to restore. And managers hate to be inconvenienced. :)
Reserve some judgment on this, and try to be somewhat open-minded whilst reaching your own conclusions.
--
We have fought the AC's, and they have won.
delivering a seamless out-of-the-box management solution tightly packaged for the midmarket customer
This, I know is rah rah marketing talk, but I work with CA products every day and I have never seen a seamless out-of-the-box solution come from them yet. I'm sort of surprised that HP and Harris or even BMC got in on this instread of CA.
On a more positive note, A recent MERIT survey revealed that 48 percent of enterprise customers view Linux as an important component to their enterprise IT strategy for 2000..
I hadn't heard of this survey yet, this is good news.
Never knock on Death's door:
More race stuff in one place,
than any one place on the net.
Whoa! Every Linux fileserver that has Windows clients needs to be scanned! Just because the server can't get knocked-up doesn't mean it won't keep handing out copies of 'Win-CIM' or 'Spiro-2' to the clients from a shared executable. This just means we can scan locally now instead of keeping around a low-power NT box to do it.
I just hope someone else comes out with a better product than CA's, and fast. I have never touched a bit of CA-*IT ware I could tolerate..
.sig: Now legally binding!
In my experiences using Arcserve, Inoculan, and Remotely Possible (now ArcserveIT, InoculateIT and ControlIT) CA had the worst technical support I have ever seen. We had many problems with Arcserve (a buggy product) and tech support for us (supposedly with a "Platinum" type service contract) would take days to get a callback. It should have been four hours. Sometimes the callbacks never came. The other issue was with sales. We had unlimited licenses for a lot of things, and bought an upgrade license for Arcserve and they still hadn't delivered the product after four months. CA, in my opinion, has the worst customer service in the industry, and I know a lot of Windows administrators that agree.
Can't remember what the name of the product was, but CA had some marketoid-type ad in a computer magazene for some product that asked something to the effect of "Imagine if you could fly around the office to fix computer problems". What's wrong with telnet, or some windows equiv? What if the ethernet is unplugged? This looked like a lot of fluff and no substance.
Now Arcserve, when I used it maybe 3-4 years back was horrible. I had to recover 20 some odd files that were spread across several backup tapes. The UI made you click on each cute little backup tape icon and after 45 minutes (no I'm not exagerating), a list of files would come up, and if I wanted one, I had to click on it, then tell the program I wanted to restore from tape, insert that tape, wait for it to finish, then do it all over again. Why no command line? Why no ability to give it a list of files and have it tell me which tapes to put in? Given CLI primitives to list files on a tape and restore, I could have written the whole thing in PERL in an hour.
I find this to be a huge problem, especially with admin tools. If something is sufficiently messed up, you might need to use a command line. If the developer invests all its time in the GUI, then the command line version will be poor, or non exisitant. That's what I like about Linux. Many of the GUIs are just fancy ways of getting at underlying CLI tools. This gives the user True flexibility.
JET Program: see Japan, meet intere