Horseshit. "Setting up paths, shells and patches" is the idiot work of system administration. It is the stuff you learn on the first day or two of the job.
I'll be sure to let my co-workers they are doing "idiot work", I'm sure they will appreciate it.
Redefining system administration to even include trivial crap like figuring out $PATH dumbs down the profession.
Then who do you suggest does this? Have you ever told your boss (if you are a sysadmin) that you won't do something because it's "trivial crap"?
Too bad you think you are somehow above things of this nature. Unfortunately they are everyday occurances and you need to deal with them.
(the latter cause most linux/unix sysadmins know networking a lot better than most MCSE types since they are network-centric OSs from the get-go).
Sorry, this logic doesn't fly. It's the usual "MCSEs are dumb" but somewhat obfuscated.
Microsoft supported TCP/IP networking all the way back in Windows for Workgroups (essentially Windows 3.1 with networking) and their MCSE all the way back to 4.0 requried a TCP/IP test.
Sure, UNIXes have supported TCP/IP longer than Microsoft's products but TCP/IP support is standard these days, and has been in both Microsft and UNIX products for at least for the last 10 years.
This brings up a good point, and if you simply filter by the number of punctuation marks you filter the following types of messages:
1: Long stuff. I'm too lazy, err, busy to read all that!! Summarize it for me!
2: People who use a ton of things like ??????????? and !!!!!!!!!!!!. Those people tend to be stupid and I probably don't need to talk to them anyway.
3: Possibly some of they stuff they're talking about in the article. Looking at what's there e-mails containing long directory listings would probably get nuked (periods), or the underscores for numbers of the same file (read: MP3s, source). As for the commas, well, I don't like having to pause a ton when I read but that's just me.
Some would argue those things should not be communicated via e-mail but that's something you all can discuss if you would like.
Do you think there might be a problem with your hardware if it can be destroyed solely with software?
Probably not.
I can tell my monitor to use a refresh rate that will physically damage it. I can tell my hard drive to move it's heads off the platter to find cylinders that don't exist. I can overclock various parts of my computer until they start smoking.
Although there may be a problem with the hardware, software certainly can be used to destry many types of hardware.
Sun Microsystems is indifferent to the x86 Solaris.
As you can see from the PR, and even the stories on Slashdot they seem serious about it again.
Sun just posted a loss of $290 million for the last quarter. On an annual basis, the loss amounts to $1.2 billion.
We're all familiar with basic math. So that means with their 5.5 billion in the bank they can last another what, 4 years? With articles starting to pop up about increased IT spending in 2004 who knows. Oh, and they still had revenue of 11 billion in FY03.
The managers at Sun have seen the writing on the wall: the future is Linux.
Where did this come from? Source or more information please.
There may be some optimization work at Sun's R&D center in India, but basically in the USA, Sun is conceding to Linux.
Great India bashing, looks like along with Sun bashing you've got a history.
Please elaborate on the "Sun is conceding to Linux" statement. What do you have to back this up?
Linux is backed by IBM, and IBM and Linus are cooperating to make Linux a rock-solid product that meets 6-sigma reliability.
Woah, 6 Stigma? Do you have more information about this or is it just a figure of speech?
Right now, Linus is concentrating on making Linux as stable as possible instead of adding more widgets and gadgets.
Yeah, working on getting the final 2.6 out will do that to a person. I think every Slashdotter knows that's what he's up to.
I've seen venomous diatribes directed at "sucky" Sun and its "sucky" OS for not having video drivers for whatever the most expensive game-playing graphics board is these days. And if they actually get the system to install and they see CDE...oh man.
Solaris works for consistency and having a plane jane vi might be a good thing even if vim is better.
The awk/nawk are ancient
I don't use awk often, what's up with them?
and it doesn't ship with perl (last time I checked). Ditto for most of the Unix shell programs.
Yeah it ships with perl since Solaris 8, same with bash, tcsh and zsh.
The first thing I do when I get a Solaris system is to install a whole heap of GNU utilities, all of which come with any of the Linux distribution.
Yep, they're nice to have and don't take up much space if you pick and choose correctly. Here is everything you'll need as far as OSS utilities on SPARC/Solaris are concerned. They can be downloaded as a CD image or individually and are in Sun's package format.
Very true, it's because damn near everything is threaded. Threading is highly encouraged by Sun when programming for Solaris on SPARC.
Each process has threads, if it's a single threaded application it counts as one thread. Each thread is attached to a LWP or Light Weight Processor. The kernel then schedules the LWP time to run on the real CPU.
What's the end result of this? Solaris scales very well on boxes with tons of CPUs because everything is threaded, and some processes have tons.
On and off, evidently back on again. I've heard that back in the mid 90's a decent amount of customers used Solaris x86 on Compaq's. After a while they dropped support and over the next few years. Anyone confirm or deny (I know the second part is true)?
Here is a recent press release about Solaris x86. Disregard the marketing garbage, there's a lot of it.
They name a decent amount of customers, a biomedical place is one of them. Perhaps a transition from SPARC to x86 for sheer speed would be cheaping going from Solaris to Solaris instead of Solaris to Linux, that is assuming Solaris on x86 meets their needs.
Also, according to this article they have Solaris x86 for Opteron. Perhaps this would help convince big graphics apps such as Photoshop make a port to Opteron since Linux and the BSD's are already there.
They also have a POWER4+'esqe chip coming out in the first half of the new year. Two UltraSPARC III cores with 8 megs of cache and each running at 1.2 GHz each.
Sun has good things going for them but they need to expand into new areas and take another look at the current situation.
Re:Like Most Other Hacking Competitions
on
Get Paid To Crack?
·
· Score: 4, Funny
They have a firewall in which they will allow only one IP address at a time to make the attempt. Thus, you sign up for a set time period and they watch you as you hack away...
Sorry son, a firewall won't help when your network connection(s) are saturated.
Maybe I didn't RTFA, but you didn't RTFM.;)
Like Most Other Hacking Competitions
on
Get Paid To Crack?
·
· Score: 4, Funny
Great... Just what we need, processors that can perform an instruction, then wait 40000 cycles for the next instruction to be read from memory. I wish we could see some memory improvements to go along with these.
Sun is working on something along those lines, check it out
It is really amusing how Sun goes on to spread FUD about Linux in enterprise in light of the SCO lawsuit, yet they go on to employ Linux related solutions whenever it cuts the operating costs and overhead.
You call it FUD, some call it one possible outcome.
Think about this for a moment. What if SCO does win? That would mean AIX would be in trouble and so would Linux. However, Solaris would be in the clear. What about Sun and their sales of Linux? Couldn't SCO sue Sun too? Even though Scott is saying Sun won't have any problems I don't think it will be true.
Nobody knows how this will turn out. Everyone has their own opinion but we won't know until the case is over. Until then, it's all speculation. Scott is simply talking from the point of view of one potential outcome.
Is this or is this not the case?
Sun is stabbing Linux in a back when releasing press releases by pushing their queer Solaris/Unix in news reports how Linux might be dangerious in terms of IP infringment...
First off, great name calling there. By calling Solaris "queer" I can tell you've never worked with it. You want to see "queer"? Work with AIX. It's sexy in it's own way but nothing is intiutive until you learn how to think in AIX'isms. They don't even use useradd for cryin out loud.
See my point above. What if SCO wins? It's strange how some people don't even consider it a possibility.
...yet you see them deploy Gnome and praise it for own gain.
Ok, what has Dell given back? Or any of Red Hat's partners?
I find it entertaining how in this whole mess Sun, SCO and Microsoft are the bad guys. Linux companies and IBM are the good guys. But other companies who claim to support Linux (Dell, HP, Veritas, BEA and Oracle) are staying strangely quiet. For some reason the anti-SCO crowd doesn't jump all over them even though they're using Linux to increase their software and hardware sales yet giving little or nothing in return. Why is that?
Can't you see IBM is doing the same thing? They may be a large adopter of Linux but in the end it's to increase their hardware sales.
and lets not forget, Linux is Unix, by Sun.
That quote is 3 years old. You're really reaching.
First, a friend purchased (completely legal, nothing unkosher whatsoever, not even grey-market) a copy of Age of Empires - AoK. It has a rather annoying copy protection scheme, however, which annoys legitimate users (whereas pirates just run a cracked version with no hassles at all). So the solution? He uses a cracked copy of the game. A stupid software test for known program cracks would flag him as "stealing", yet he did no such thing.
All he needed was the CD key. Pretty standard, the only "annoyance" is once. At installation time. If you're alluding to having to have the CD in the drive when you play it too is pretty standard.
If you're friend is annoyed at entering a CD key once and then putting the CD in the drive when he wants to play I think he needs to mellow out or find something semi-important to worry about.
I get the feeling that most large desktop migrations happen from commercial UNIX to linux rather than from Windows to linux.
Actually Ellison (like McNealy) is a well know Microsoft hater. Althought Linux is one of the best developement environments available I wouldn't be suprised if the decision to swith to Linux was partially out of spite for Microsoft.
Hyperthreading uses unused parts of the processor to act as a second CPU is how it was explained to me by a friend who works at Intel. So if X is waiting on Y then X can be used for another task while it waits for Y.
What Sun is doing is putting multiple fully functional CPUs on a single die. Think of it as a single Pentium 3 Slot A cartridge that contains 10 Pentium 2 CPUs.
The revenue of Sun Microsystems in the quarter ended June 2003 fell sharply from the revenue in the same quarter of 2002
There is no mention of this in the article you posted.
The revenue fell far short of Wall Street expectations, and the stock promptly crashed.
"Crashed"? Come on, quit with the exaggerations. Look at this graph. Thus far they have sunk $1 per share or ~20%. When your stock value is that low it's easy to lose a large percentage over a small amount.
I find it strange that Red Hat's stock is higher than Sun's and yet Sun brings in billions every quarter and has 6.6 billion in the bank. I think it says a lot about the relavance of using stock prices as a note for discussion.
For years, Sun has hidden its performance-poor servers behind its Solaris operating system.
Please, tell us about your experience with Sun. Have you administered it and if so for how long? Are you a user and if so for how long?
They have one of the most stable OSes out there, superb hardware and some of the best support which I'm sure amounts to nothing.
The IBM machine and the Sun machine are running the same operating system, Linux. Then, the comparison of the two machines comes down to performance
Once again, you seem ill informed. The Linux offerings are on x86 servers, not SPARCs. With x86 hardware there aren't many ways to differentiate one box from another at a hardware level.
In other words, the customers will be forced to look at the quality of the basic hardware.
You forgot cost and what's most important to companies, support.
or the "TPC-C benchmark"
Sun hasn't submitted a TPC-C benchmark since late 2001, and it was on old hardware. This may or may not be a good thing, but you cannot tell.
Before you keep bashing Sun I would seriously consider doing two things: Getting out into the real world to see how many people trust and use Sun/Solaris and do some research.
Imagine if your LDAP tree were reflected as a tree in your file system
Ack, I dunno about this one. If you have a true file system (even in memory) imagine the resources it would consume. One directory for every container, one file for every attribute at the very least and perhaps space for it's value and on top of that it would be local to every system. It would also need to be sychronized with the LDAP server on every system. At most you would have an entire local copy of the LDIF(s) which could be *gigs*, at least it would be the resources to track hundereds if not thousands of files and directories.
You wouldn't need to embed LDAP calls in your application, it would just be data in your file system.
I'm not a programmer but I have a question about this one. Aren't name service lookups handled via name service indepenedent calls? I'm not a programmer so the only example I have is gethostbyaddr(). Does an application need to be written differently depending on the name service it will use (LDAP, NIS, NIS+, DNS, local files, FNS, etc)?
I've always wondered how these filesystems with metadata handle transferring files between different systems
Usually it doesn't. Take for example VxFS (Veritas File System); they support attributes like preallocating space for a file or forcing a file to be contiguous. When you move a file that uses these attributes to another type of file system (VxFS to UFS) you lose them since the target file system doesn't support those attributes.
Another example is ACLs. If they are in some way propriatary they won't transfer and sometimes won't work well together. The situation I ran into was a HP-UX NFS server's ACLs not working correctly with a Solaris client. The server used and enforced the ACLs however the client couldn't view or modify the ACLs on the files that were stored on the server.
If the implementation is truly at the file system level there's nothing you can do. However, as stated below, if there is a layer above the file system that handles metadata then you can more than likely keep the metadata intact.
Even the largest companies who need big iron systems rarely go to Sun anymore
What complete and total bullshit. If this is true then why is Sun #1? And tell that to the place where I work. We have ~1,100 Sun boxes with only about 10% being older ones. This also includes our 12 E15k systems.
Google has shown that even using thousands of 'white boxes' works
This is true, however this is one company out of millions. Also, can you imagine having to maintain all of those systems? Patching, hardware failures and general maintanance. They must have quite a team supporting those 1000s of servers.
but on the front end, they're sucking big time, IMHO, and I think they could be one of the next big technology fallers.
Not likely, they have 5 billion in the bank. They save that.com cash for rainy days like these.
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Horseshit. "Setting up paths, shells and patches" is the idiot work of system administration. It is the stuff you learn on the first day or two of the job.
I'll be sure to let my co-workers they are doing "idiot work", I'm sure they will appreciate it.
Redefining system administration to even include trivial crap like figuring out $PATH dumbs down the profession.
Then who do you suggest does this? Have you ever told your boss (if you are a sysadmin) that you won't do something because it's "trivial crap"?
Too bad you think you are somehow above things of this nature. Unfortunately they are everyday occurances and you need to deal with them.
(the latter cause most linux/unix sysadmins know networking a lot better than most MCSE types since they are network-centric OSs from the get-go).
Sorry, this logic doesn't fly. It's the usual "MCSEs are dumb" but somewhat obfuscated.
Microsoft supported TCP/IP networking all the way back in Windows for Workgroups (essentially Windows 3.1 with networking) and their MCSE all the way back to 4.0 requried a TCP/IP test.
Sure, UNIXes have supported TCP/IP longer than Microsoft's products but TCP/IP support is standard these days, and has been in both Microsft and UNIX products for at least for the last 10 years.
They don't really need the punctuation
This brings up a good point, and if you simply filter by the number of punctuation marks you filter the following types of messages:
1: Long stuff. I'm too lazy, err, busy to read all that!! Summarize it for me!
2: People who use a ton of things like ??????????? and !!!!!!!!!!!!. Those people tend to be stupid and I probably don't need to talk to them anyway.
3: Possibly some of they stuff they're talking about in the article. Looking at what's there e-mails containing long directory listings would probably get nuked (periods), or the underscores for numbers of the same file (read: MP3s, source). As for the commas, well, I don't like having to pause a ton when I read but that's just me.
Some would argue those things should not be communicated via e-mail but that's something you all can discuss if you would like.
Do you think there might be a problem with your hardware if it can be destroyed solely with software?
Probably not.
I can tell my monitor to use a refresh rate that will physically damage it. I can tell my hard drive to move it's heads off the platter to find cylinders that don't exist. I can overclock various parts of my computer until they start smoking.
Although there may be a problem with the hardware, software certainly can be used to destry many types of hardware.
Sun Microsystems is indifferent to the x86 Solaris.
As you can see from the PR, and even the stories on Slashdot they seem serious about it again.
Sun just posted a loss of $290 million for the last quarter. On an annual basis, the loss amounts to $1.2 billion.
We're all familiar with basic math. So that means with their 5.5 billion in the bank they can last another what, 4 years? With articles starting to pop up about increased IT spending in 2004 who knows. Oh, and they still had revenue of 11 billion in FY03.
The managers at Sun have seen the writing on the wall: the future is Linux.
Where did this come from? Source or more information please.
There may be some optimization work at Sun's R&D center in India, but basically in the USA, Sun is conceding to Linux.
Great India bashing, looks like along with Sun bashing you've got a history.
Please elaborate on the "Sun is conceding to Linux" statement. What do you have to back this up?
Linux is backed by IBM, and IBM and Linus are cooperating to make Linux a rock-solid product that meets 6-sigma reliability.
Woah, 6 Stigma? Do you have more information about this or is it just a figure of speech?
Right now, Linus is concentrating on making Linux as stable as possible instead of adding more widgets and gadgets.
Yeah, working on getting the final 2.6 out will do that to a person. I think every Slashdotter knows that's what he's up to.
I've seen venomous diatribes directed at "sucky" Sun and its "sucky" OS for not having video drivers for whatever the most expensive game-playing graphics board is these days. And if they actually get the system to install and they see CDE...oh man.
So true. Solaris is built for work, not for play.
it's got the ancient vi
Solaris works for consistency and having a plane jane vi might be a good thing even if vim is better.
The awk/nawk are ancient
I don't use awk often, what's up with them?
and it doesn't ship with perl (last time I checked). Ditto for most of the Unix shell programs.
Yeah it ships with perl since Solaris 8, same with bash, tcsh and zsh.
The first thing I do when I get a Solaris system is to install a whole heap of GNU utilities, all of which come with any of the Linux distribution.
Yep, they're nice to have and don't take up much space if you pick and choose correctly. Here is everything you'll need as far as OSS utilities on SPARC/Solaris are concerned. They can be downloaded as a CD image or individually and are in Sun's package format.
Who bothers to use Solaris on x86? Oh yeah, idiots who don't understand the 'right tool for the job' philosophy.
But what if Solaris x86 is the right tool for the job?
It may not be often but it is at times.
Solaris's strength lies in scalabilitly.
Very true, it's because damn near everything is threaded. Threading is highly encouraged by Sun when programming for Solaris on SPARC.
Each process has threads, if it's a single threaded application it counts as one thread. Each thread is attached to a LWP or Light Weight Processor. The kernel then schedules the LWP time to run on the real CPU.
What's the end result of this? Solaris scales very well on boxes with tons of CPUs because everything is threaded, and some processes have tons.
Was Sun really serious about Solaris on x86?
On and off, evidently back on again. I've heard that back in the mid 90's a decent amount of customers used Solaris x86 on Compaq's. After a while they dropped support and over the next few years. Anyone confirm or deny (I know the second part is true)?
Here is a recent press release about Solaris x86. Disregard the marketing garbage, there's a lot of it.
They name a decent amount of customers, a biomedical place is one of them. Perhaps a transition from SPARC to x86 for sheer speed would be cheaping going from Solaris to Solaris instead of Solaris to Linux, that is assuming Solaris on x86 meets their needs.
Also, according to this article they have Solaris x86 for Opteron. Perhaps this would help convince big graphics apps such as Photoshop make a port to Opteron since Linux and the BSD's are already there.
They also have a POWER4+'esqe chip coming out in the first half of the new year. Two UltraSPARC III cores with 8 megs of cache and each running at 1.2 GHz each.
Sun has good things going for them but they need to expand into new areas and take another look at the current situation.
They have a firewall in which they will allow only one IP address at a time to make the attempt. Thus, you sign up for a set time period and they watch you as you hack away...
;)
Sorry son, a firewall won't help when your network connection(s) are saturated.
Maybe I didn't RTFA, but you didn't RTFM.
Will this one just get DOSed into oblivion too?
And how long until the entire operating system, and all the Microsoft applications, are all just patches?
Interesting? Come on.
Linux was released. Then patched. Then patched again. And again until it became what it is today.
Apache web server anyone?
Great... Just what we need, processors that can perform an instruction, then wait 40000 cycles for the next instruction to be read from memory. I wish we could see some memory improvements to go along with these.
Sun is working on something along those lines, check it out
It is really amusing how Sun goes on to spread FUD about Linux in enterprise in light of the SCO lawsuit, yet they go on to employ Linux related solutions whenever it cuts the operating costs and overhead.
...yet you see them deploy Gnome and praise it for own gain.
You call it FUD, some call it one possible outcome.
Think about this for a moment. What if SCO does win? That would mean AIX would be in trouble and so would Linux. However, Solaris would be in the clear. What about Sun and their sales of Linux? Couldn't SCO sue Sun too? Even though Scott is saying Sun won't have any problems I don't think it will be true.
Nobody knows how this will turn out. Everyone has their own opinion but we won't know until the case is over. Until then, it's all speculation. Scott is simply talking from the point of view of one potential outcome.
Is this or is this not the case?
Sun is stabbing Linux in a back when releasing press releases by pushing their queer Solaris/Unix in news reports how Linux might be dangerious in terms of IP infringment...
First off, great name calling there. By calling Solaris "queer" I can tell you've never worked with it. You want to see "queer"? Work with AIX. It's sexy in it's own way but nothing is intiutive until you learn how to think in AIX'isms. They don't even use useradd for cryin out loud.
See my point above. What if SCO wins? It's strange how some people don't even consider it a possibility.
Ok, what has Dell given back? Or any of Red Hat's partners?
I find it entertaining how in this whole mess Sun, SCO and Microsoft are the bad guys. Linux companies and IBM are the good guys. But other companies who claim to support Linux (Dell, HP, Veritas, BEA and Oracle) are staying strangely quiet. For some reason the anti-SCO crowd doesn't jump all over them even though they're using Linux to increase their software and hardware sales yet giving little or nothing in return. Why is that?
Can't you see IBM is doing the same thing? They may be a large adopter of Linux but in the end it's to increase their hardware sales.
and lets not forget, Linux is Unix, by Sun.
That quote is 3 years old. You're really reaching.
First, a friend purchased (completely legal, nothing unkosher whatsoever, not even grey-market) a copy of Age of Empires - AoK. It has a rather annoying copy protection scheme, however, which annoys legitimate users (whereas pirates just run a cracked version with no hassles at all). So the solution? He uses a cracked copy of the game. A stupid software test for known program cracks would flag him as "stealing", yet he did no such thing.
All he needed was the CD key. Pretty standard, the only "annoyance" is once. At installation time. If you're alluding to having to have the CD in the drive when you play it too is pretty standard.
If you're friend is annoyed at entering a CD key once and then putting the CD in the drive when he wants to play I think he needs to mellow out or find something semi-important to worry about.
I get the feeling that most large desktop migrations happen from commercial UNIX to linux rather than from Windows to linux.
Actually Ellison (like McNealy) is a well know Microsoft hater. Althought Linux is one of the best developement environments available I wouldn't be suprised if the decision to swith to Linux was partially out of spite for Microsoft.
My bad.
In typical Slashdot fashion I didn't read the whole article.
In typical Slashdot fashion the story has been exaggerated:
We will prepare our legal response as required by your complaint
As anyone with the reading comprehension of a 3rd grader can tell, this does not say or even implies anything about counter-suing.
Hyperthreading uses unused parts of the processor to act as a second CPU is how it was explained to me by a friend who works at Intel. So if X is waiting on Y then X can be used for another task while it waits for Y.
What Sun is doing is putting multiple fully functional CPUs on a single die. Think of it as a single Pentium 3 Slot A cartridge that contains 10 Pentium 2 CPUs.
Check the source (Gartner).
Can you point me in the direction of any press releases from IBM, HP or SGI that say they're #1 in the UNIX server market?
Would you like me to provide other sources that say they're #1?
The revenue of Sun Microsystems in the quarter ended June 2003 fell sharply from the revenue in the same quarter of 2002
There is no mention of this in the article you posted.
The revenue fell far short of Wall Street expectations, and the stock promptly crashed.
"Crashed"? Come on, quit with the exaggerations. Look at this graph. Thus far they have sunk $1 per share or ~20%. When your stock value is that low it's easy to lose a large percentage over a small amount.
I find it strange that Red Hat's stock is higher than Sun's and yet Sun brings in billions every quarter and has 6.6 billion in the bank. I think it says a lot about the relavance of using stock prices as a note for discussion.
For years, Sun has hidden its performance-poor servers behind its Solaris operating system.
Please, tell us about your experience with Sun. Have you administered it and if so for how long? Are you a user and if so for how long?
They have one of the most stable OSes out there, superb hardware and some of the best support which I'm sure amounts to nothing.
The IBM machine and the Sun machine are running the same operating system, Linux. Then, the comparison of the two machines comes down to performance
Once again, you seem ill informed. The Linux offerings are on x86 servers, not SPARCs. With x86 hardware there aren't many ways to differentiate one box from another at a hardware level.
In other words, the customers will be forced to look at the quality of the basic hardware.
You forgot cost and what's most important to companies, support.
or the "TPC-C benchmark"
Sun hasn't submitted a TPC-C benchmark since late 2001, and it was on old hardware. This may or may not be a good thing, but you cannot tell.
Before you keep bashing Sun I would seriously consider doing two things: Getting out into the real world to see how many people trust and use Sun/Solaris and do some research.
Until Sun is unseated as #1 in the UNIX server market (as reported by Gartner) and has less than it's 6.6 billion in the bank along with 13 billion in total assets I don't think Sun is too concerned.
Your post is nothing more than the often repeated "Sun is dying" chant that is not backed up by any relavant facts.
Imagine if your LDAP tree were reflected as a tree in your file system
Ack, I dunno about this one. If you have a true file system (even in memory) imagine the resources it would consume. One directory for every container, one file for every attribute at the very least and perhaps space for it's value and on top of that it would be local to every system. It would also need to be sychronized with the LDAP server on every system. At most you would have an entire local copy of the LDIF(s) which could be *gigs*, at least it would be the resources to track hundereds if not thousands of files and directories.
You wouldn't need to embed LDAP calls in your application, it would just be data in your file system.
I'm not a programmer but I have a question about this one. Aren't name service lookups handled via name service indepenedent calls? I'm not a programmer so the only example I have is gethostbyaddr(). Does an application need to be written differently depending on the name service it will use (LDAP, NIS, NIS+, DNS, local files, FNS, etc)?
I've always wondered how these filesystems with metadata handle transferring files between different systems
Usually it doesn't. Take for example VxFS (Veritas File System); they support attributes like preallocating space for a file or forcing a file to be contiguous. When you move a file that uses these attributes to another type of file system (VxFS to UFS) you lose them since the target file system doesn't support those attributes.
Another example is ACLs. If they are in some way propriatary they won't transfer and sometimes won't work well together. The situation I ran into was a HP-UX NFS server's ACLs not working correctly with a Solaris client. The server used and enforced the ACLs however the client couldn't view or modify the ACLs on the files that were stored on the server.
If the implementation is truly at the file system level there's nothing you can do. However, as stated below, if there is a layer above the file system that handles metadata then you can more than likely keep the metadata intact.
Even the largest companies who need big iron systems rarely go to Sun anymore
.com cash for rainy days like these.
What complete and total bullshit. If this is true then why is Sun #1? And tell that to the place where I work. We have ~1,100 Sun boxes with only about 10% being older ones. This also includes our 12 E15k systems.
Google has shown that even using thousands of 'white boxes' works
This is true, however this is one company out of millions. Also, can you imagine having to maintain all of those systems? Patching, hardware failures and general maintanance. They must have quite a team supporting those 1000s of servers.
but on the front end, they're sucking big time, IMHO, and I think they could be one of the next big technology fallers.
Not likely, they have 5 billion in the bank. They save that