How many exchange admins do you have that it would cost "several hundred thousand dollars"? We have tens of thousands of users around the world and a single exchange admin that keeps up just fine (plus a few on/off folks that pitch in when he's out).
Would this transition require anymore testing than upgrading to a new version of Exchange? For us, upgrading exchange meant setting up new VMs in a test environment, testing everything, new VMs in production, and then make it start seamlessly migrating users to the new cluster.
Assuming that OpenChange works as well out of the box as a stable version of Samba, the process should be pretty much the same as an Exchange upgrade.
SAMBA does not yet support basic aspects of the SMB protocol, like multiplexing.
Umm... yes it does.
I have integrated SAMBA in enterprise products and this was a serious downfall. This has been a constant issue that has never been addressed.
Stubborness on the SAMBA teams behalf, not to use a thread pool, has prevented this from happening.
How many times have you seen ERROR_NETWOR_NAME_NOT_FOUND while copying a file to a SAMBA server while trying to access another resource on the same server?
Like sibling, never since I've started using Samba in production deployments 4 years ago. How exactly does a thread pool help anything?
The real secret is to keep a sealed bottle of liquor in your car. If your a dumb ass and drive drunk and you get pulled over, pull out the bottle and wait for the officer to come up to your window. When the officer can see you, open the bottle and take a few swigs.
At that point you'll have a good chance of getting away with an open container charge since they'll be unable to prove your BAC when you were actually driving.
That's only if you need features from the latest versions of MS.NET, mostly in the cases of porting existing applications. Mono is a strong platform in its own right and perfectly suitable for developing Linux applications.
And you do NOT need to use an old version of C#. The compiler is C# 3.0 compliant and they plan on adding C# 4.0 support shortly after it is released.
Real coding is what I can get on with doing having first created an unmaintainable, poorly designed, basic app for someone in 30 mins using (largely) drag and drop.
There, fixed that for you.
In all seriousness, clicky pointy tools like VS are fine and dandy but they tend to be more limited in their functionality compared to hand coding. And yes, you can get these sorts of tools for various Java web frameworks as well (you never mentioned which one you looked at).
Personally I prefer to have complete control over the HTML and CSS output when I'm doing anything that will have a life of more than a few months.
Some database driven mail servers like Citadel, Exchange, Zimbra and probably Domino support only storing the message and attachments once no matter how many people it was sent to.
It goes a long way in preventing the attachment * user mess.
Microsoft is trying to put all its weight behind the.NET platform..NET is already in wide use in Windows server and Windows client applications, now Silverlight is trying to extend.NET into the browser. Buying Adobe wouldn't really help this point.
I can't imagine Apple is very happy about this. If Silverlight kills or severely wounds Flash this will compromise part of Apple's key niche in the business desktop world, content creation.
We have 45 1TB Seagate drives spinning in a few high traffic RAID6 arrays purchased about 1.5 years ago when they first came out. One of them was DOA, but we haven't had any other failures so far.
We also have ~300 500GB WD drives purchased over the past 3 years or so. We've had about 5 fail, which isn't too bad in my book.
I think that hard drives are much more reliable than many people give them credit for, even the high capacity ones.
Spreading free and open access to information is a bit nicer goal than getting the kids young so we can rape them with licensing fees when they get older.
Cripples in the same way that my internet radio idea is crippled by the RIAA. If you want to use the copyrighted content, you have to comply with the license - until we do away with this stupid software copyright idea anyway.
GPL does NOT dictate use, only redistribution. Bad analogy. Also software copyright is not the enemy, patents are.
Power consumption in suspend has very little to do with the OS. When the computer is in S3 sleep, its in S3 sleep regardless of what OS it may be running. The only exception being that the OS gets to decide if certain devices remain powered or not.
Power consumption during suspend does have a lot to do with the power supply and main board however. My (Ubuntu) desktop for instance takes 8 watts when completely off (S4, S5) and 9 watts in S3. Personally I think this is kind of crappy, so if I'm going to be away from the computer for more than a day I usually flip the hard power switch to bring the number down to a nice 0.
AD has certainly caused interop issues, but I don't think the PAC has much to do with it. There were some initial issues where programs would freak out when the saw the oversized Kerberos ticket, but they weren't a huge obstacle in most cases. I can get a ticket from a Heimdal realm with Windows and I can kinit my way to a ticket from AD on my Linux box (granted I don't get a PAC).
The thing that has kept AD dominant for so long is a rather nonstandard schema and more importantly a great big mass of proprietary RPCs that are used for everything from replication to group policy.
CIFS is just a marketing name for SMB. They have made numerous additions to it over the years of course but at the core its the same. SMBv2 has landed in Vista and Server 08 and adds a few doodads but its mostly the same old not so great protocol (especially when high latency is involved).
The CIFS vs NFS performance depends on versions, clients and servers. Personally, I've seen the better performance in Linux NFSv4 than on any combo of CIFS.
Samba however is no slouch. I don't have a problem saturating my two 1GB Ethernet ports on a semi-regular basis.
Microsoft has complete and total control over both the clients and the servers for all the things you just mentioned which gives them just a tad of an advantage. They also have a monopoly on the desktop market. The only way to really join the game is to play by their rules. Thanks to Open Source software that interoperates with the Microsoft products, this barrier of entry is much lower allowing more companies to compete in a given market.
You might be fine with a Windows file server and NTFS, unfortunately I manage large, high traffic storage volumes with a small budget. NTFS simply will not scale to my needs and I don't have the money to buy a SAN or NAS appliance (I've priced them, and demoed one and they are really, really expensive!). For me open source software provides an alternative solution that gives me the performance I need at a price my company can afford.
Not so. AD, CIFS and Exchange are very tightly related. Which explains how OpenChange got a mostly working Exchange server off the ground so quickly by using the Samba4 libraries.
Uhm, that's exactly what they are doing. Samba4 can (mostly) act as a domain controller in an AD environment. This even includes replicating to Windows AD controllers.
Slashdot Mirror
How many exchange admins do you have that it would cost "several hundred thousand dollars"? We have tens of thousands of users around the world and a single exchange admin that keeps up just fine (plus a few on/off folks that pitch in when he's out).
Would this transition require anymore testing than upgrading to a new version of Exchange? For us, upgrading exchange meant setting up new VMs in a test environment, testing everything, new VMs in production, and then make it start seamlessly migrating users to the new cluster.
Assuming that OpenChange works as well out of the box as a stable version of Samba, the process should be pretty much the same as an Exchange upgrade.
Since they are provably wrong, would you mind demonstrating this proof for the audience?
SAMBA does not yet support basic aspects of the SMB protocol, like multiplexing.
Umm... yes it does.
I have integrated SAMBA in enterprise products and this was a serious downfall. This has been a constant issue that has never been addressed.
Stubborness on the SAMBA teams behalf, not to use a thread pool, has prevented this from happening.
How many times have you seen ERROR_NETWOR_NAME_NOT_FOUND while copying a file to a SAMBA server while trying to access another resource on the same server?
Like sibling, never since I've started using Samba in production deployments 4 years ago. How exactly does a thread pool help anything?
The real secret is to keep a sealed bottle of liquor in your car. If your a dumb ass and drive drunk and you get pulled over, pull out the bottle and wait for the officer to come up to your window. When the officer can see you, open the bottle and take a few swigs.
At that point you'll have a good chance of getting away with an open container charge since they'll be unable to prove your BAC when you were actually driving.
That's only if you need features from the latest versions of MS.NET, mostly in the cases of porting existing applications. Mono is a strong platform in its own right and perfectly suitable for developing Linux applications.
And you do NOT need to use an old version of C#. The compiler is C# 3.0 compliant and they plan on adding C# 4.0 support shortly after it is released.
Thanks for playing.
So if I replace the pipes in my house I need a license to recycle them?
Maybe if you needed a license to post on Slashdot, there would be less stupid comments.
That's VB.NET, sharing almost nothing but a syntax similarity with previous versions of VB.
Real coding is what I can get on with doing having first created an unmaintainable, poorly designed, basic app for someone in 30 mins using (largely) drag and drop.
There, fixed that for you.
In all seriousness, clicky pointy tools like VS are fine and dandy but they tend to be more limited in their functionality compared to hand coding. And yes, you can get these sorts of tools for various Java web frameworks as well (you never mentioned which one you looked at).
Personally I prefer to have complete control over the HTML and CSS output when I'm doing anything that will have a life of more than a few months.
Some database driven mail servers like Citadel, Exchange, Zimbra and probably Domino support only storing the message and attachments once no matter how many people it was sent to.
It goes a long way in preventing the attachment * user mess.
Microsoft is trying to put all its weight behind the .NET platform. .NET is already in wide use in Windows server and Windows client applications, now Silverlight is trying to extend .NET into the browser. Buying Adobe wouldn't really help this point.
I can't imagine Apple is very happy about this. If Silverlight kills or severely wounds Flash this will compromise part of Apple's key niche in the business desktop world, content creation.
We have 45 1TB Seagate drives spinning in a few high traffic RAID6 arrays purchased about 1.5 years ago when they first came out. One of them was DOA, but we haven't had any other failures so far.
We also have ~300 500GB WD drives purchased over the past 3 years or so. We've had about 5 fail, which isn't too bad in my book.
I think that hard drives are much more reliable than many people give them credit for, even the high capacity ones.
When I peered into it, I noticed "Hitachi" written on the little disk-drive inside it.
BTW... where's the IBM disk division these days? Aren't they just down the road from Chrysler, GM and Ford plants? LOL!
They sold it to Hitachi. Not that it didn't make money, it just didn't make a high enough percentage and looked bad on the financial reports.
Spreading free and open access to information is a bit nicer goal than getting the kids young so we can rape them with licensing fees when they get older.
Cripples in the same way that my internet radio idea is crippled by the RIAA. If you want to use the copyrighted content, you have to comply with the license - until we do away with this stupid software copyright idea anyway.
GPL does NOT dictate use, only redistribution. Bad analogy. Also software copyright is not the enemy, patents are.
Which is why you use a configuration management system that doesn't suck balls. A 20 line bash script just doesn't cut it sometimes.
Semi-offical PPA for intrepid: https://launchpad.net/~openoffice-pkgs/+archive
Power consumption in suspend has very little to do with the OS. When the computer is in S3 sleep, its in S3 sleep regardless of what OS it may be running. The only exception being that the OS gets to decide if certain devices remain powered or not.
Power consumption during suspend does have a lot to do with the power supply and main board however. My (Ubuntu) desktop for instance takes 8 watts when completely off (S4, S5) and 9 watts in S3. Personally I think this is kind of crappy, so if I'm going to be away from the computer for more than a day I usually flip the hard power switch to bring the number down to a nice 0.
AD has certainly caused interop issues, but I don't think the PAC has much to do with it. There were some initial issues where programs would freak out when the saw the oversized Kerberos ticket, but they weren't a huge obstacle in most cases. I can get a ticket from a Heimdal realm with Windows and I can kinit my way to a ticket from AD on my Linux box (granted I don't get a PAC).
The thing that has kept AD dominant for so long is a rather nonstandard schema and more importantly a great big mass of proprietary RPCs that are used for everything from replication to group policy.
CIFS is just a marketing name for SMB. They have made numerous additions to it over the years of course but at the core its the same. SMBv2 has landed in Vista and Server 08 and adds a few doodads but its mostly the same old not so great protocol (especially when high latency is involved).
The CIFS vs NFS performance depends on versions, clients and servers. Personally, I've seen the better performance in Linux NFSv4 than on any combo of CIFS.
Samba however is no slouch. I don't have a problem saturating my two 1GB Ethernet ports on a semi-regular basis.
The OpenChange evolution plugin is expected to land in Gnome 2.26. This plugin uses MAPI.
Right now it does use OWA as you mentioned which is hideously slow and unstable in my experiences.
Microsoft has complete and total control over both the clients and the servers for all the things you just mentioned which gives them just a tad of an advantage. They also have a monopoly on the desktop market. The only way to really join the game is to play by their rules. Thanks to Open Source software that interoperates with the Microsoft products, this barrier of entry is much lower allowing more companies to compete in a given market.
You might be fine with a Windows file server and NTFS, unfortunately I manage large, high traffic storage volumes with a small budget. NTFS simply will not scale to my needs and I don't have the money to buy a SAN or NAS appliance (I've priced them, and demoed one and they are really, really expensive!). For me open source software provides an alternative solution that gives me the performance I need at a price my company can afford.
Not so. AD, CIFS and Exchange are very tightly related. Which explains how OpenChange got a mostly working Exchange server off the ground so quickly by using the Samba4 libraries.
Uhm, that's exactly what they are doing. Samba4 can (mostly) act as a domain controller in an AD environment. This even includes replicating to Windows AD controllers.
Unfortunately very few file systems actually implement them in a form that's usable under heavy loads.
Or you could just buy the Cray for the same price and forget about the extra overhead of 8 separate boxes.
BTW, you can also order these from the factory with RHEL.