I work for a high tech startup. We have a compute farm with over 150 systems, 50 or so desktop workstations, and a dozen or so infrastructure systems, all running Linux. Right now these are all on RH8. Sooner or later, we'll probably have to switch to RHEL because that's what a lot of the software we use is migrating to.
But that's a whole lotta beans to suddenly pony up. I haven't checked in a few months, but when I did ask RH for pricing, I think we got a 25% discount for that many systems. That's still a lot of beans.
So more than likely, when it comes time to upgrade, we'll buy one each of ES and WS (and possibly AS, we'll see). And install Scientific Linux https://www.scientificlinux.org/ on all the rest.
I want to support RH, who (IMO) has done a great deal both to advance the public awareness of Linux and to improve Linux. But they're asking for absurd amounts of money. There's no way it's going to cost them anywhere near 200X (less 25%) the cost of supporting one system to support 200 systems here. There's a very short list (4) of people here who would contact them, and they wouldn't be contacted until we'd done everything possible. There have been only 3 times in the past two years we would have contacted them had we had support in place. They could charge somewhere between $10 and $50 for each additional system, and we would consider it. But right now they'd be charging us more than the hardware is worth.
They really need to rethink their pricing, especially for sites with more than a very few systems.
The purpose of enterprise support is not to fix your problem it's to convince your CIO to buy the product. It's to make sure the "is supported" box is checked off.
The purpose of enterprise support is to help assure the stuff stays up, and when it goes down, gets back up ASAP. It's about as close to 100% uptime with as few hassles as possible.
I've been interested in computer science since my mother taught me how to program in QBASIC when I was eleven
No you haven't. You may have been interested in computer programming since age 11, but you didn't even know what computer science was, let alone have any interest in it.
How do you know? I've known quite a few people who almost immediately after being introduced to programming became interested in computer science. They usually had no idea that's what it was called, but they were interested. This includes quite a few EEs at Georgia Tech who hadn't had a formal programming class, yet, as well as self-taught individuals who started programming well before high school.
I was interested in electronics and engineering long before I realized they were called such. I was interested in aerodynamics and the principles of aeronautical design long before I knew their names, either. In both cases, I'm talking about actively pursuing the interests-- researching and experimenting, asking questions, not just gazing at something and going, "Whoa! I wonder how that works!''
I try pretty hard not to do much in the way of solving friends' and relatives' computer problems. I'll listen politely to a short complaint, and 90% of the time recommend getting away from IE and/or Outlook, and/or getting Spybot and an AV program. Of the rest, I normally point them elsewhere, or just remind them that I am not really a Windows person. My brother takes care of my mom (he is a Windows jock, and lives a lot closer) or I'd help her out. Everyone else is self-sufficient, or goes elsewhere. I do try to help out at church on occasion, but it's such a horrid hodegpodge of randomly-hacked and duct taped Windows and Mac systems that usually I'm no help. If they ever switch to *nix, though... 8^)
I do have a couple of friends I trade services or things with. But generally even if I ask a friend such as a plumber to come work on something, I'd rather just pay him, and him have the option of saying, "Nah, just call the office, I wanna go see my family at night." I hate presuming on friendship.
BUT... I repair and build vacuum tube guitar amps on the side. I haven't actually made money in any given year, yet, but I'm close. Cranking out power chords and such at full volume can be very cathartic, too!
Yes, to be a real webmaster, you need some form of root access. Sooner or later you'll need to upgrade the web server, or at least restart it. The alternative to having root is generally having several sacoounts, with passwords - and some of them shouldn't be shell accounts, so that is a problem. There are scores of other reasons.
As others have said, sudo is the answer. Make up a list of the things you think you'll need root for, sit down with the system administrator, and work it out.
We have things divided up here. We have a pagemaster, who is responsible for all content. The rest of the webmaster functions ar egenerally performed by the SA staff. I can assure you that we (the SA staff) require root access from tim eto time in performance of those duties.
My son and I were thinking along the lines of a robot to fight fire ants. We thought something like a micro-terminator would be cool.
Then we realized that if it was remotely controllable via wireless connection from your computer, with a camera built in, you could virtually fight the fire ants yourself. Instant coolest video game around.
BUT! What if you had a LAN party, and you and friends (or competitors, whatever) had a whole squad or platoon of these guys in the fire ant mound?
If someone does this, they will get filthy rich. (If you do it, I'd like a little credit for the idea, and maybe a tiny %, or maybe a job there. 8^)
The robots can look and work any way you want, so long as on the screen they look and respond like the character you choose (Terminator, Werewolf, Atom Ant, whatever), and they actually kill the ants.
And, of course, if you just wanted the robot to do the work, the computer could run the program for you.
You could use this for any sort of pest - ants, roaches, termites, mice, spiders, snakes, rats, weiner dogs, smug cats, drug dealers, you name it.
I haven't found a new video game I really, really like in well over 10 years, but I would buy Fire Ant Terminator in a heartbeat! And I'd think really hard about springing for the "Vicious Stray Animal Bot", too.
A gratis version of RHEL would have all the downside of technology and engineering compromises with none of the benefit of long-term stability and supportability.
This was the one statement he made that sounded like Marketingspeak to me (even if he admitted their compromises). It doesn't have RH support, but Scientific Linux (and I assume White Hat and others) are exactly as stable and supportable as RHEL.
I'm wondering if they don't keem him awake at night.,..
The expensive stuff is the Enterprise stuff with support. You can also get them with RedHat 9 or equivalent much more cheaply. And then you know you get a functional system; there's no guarantee that any random version of Linux will work on a new system from Dell or anyone else.
[Theoretically it's functional; we never could get both built-in NICs to work with the installed RH9 on our 2650. Dell wasn't much help, either.]
You insensitive clod! I'm using smoke signals to communicate with the people doing the signal fires on the peaks to the drum relay in the desert to the guy at the fort with the tin can and string hookup to the shared,village phone through a 110 baud acoustic coupler, in a cardboard house where they only get power 4 hours a day and phone service 4 hours a day, with no overlap. And sometimes corrupt policia take the few bits that get through!
"x86 processors" is hardly a single model line. Nevermind that you can get the same PCI card to work on everything from a 1997 300MHz PC to the top of the line PC today, a dual Opteron system, and a Mac. Nevermind that the disk drives are interchangeable between all those and Sun, IBM and HP servers based on other CPU architectures. Nevermind that IE and Office are available for Windows and Mac, or that OpenOffice is available for PCs, Macs, Solaris, AIX, HPUX and everything else.
If we could [just follow the money], Nigerian scams, and old people loosing their life savings could be prevented.
Nope. Following the money does two things.
1) Lets you deal with those who already committed the crime. 2) Hopefully deter some folk from doing the same thing.
Following the money doesn't necessarily prevent anything, other than keeping the same people from repeating the crime while they're incarcerated-- if you catch them and get a conviction. Or simply deal with them some other way.
Nah, Mom finally ran across the rover. She's a compulsive neat freak, so naturally she dusts it. She's been trying to get it to come eat dinner and meet the family; she's a bit miffed that it won't respond...
I normally use elm, and I have dozens of mailboxes, some with thousands of old emails in them. ELm comes up very quickly, and moves around really fast. I use mutt for MIME stuff; it's almost as fast as elm. Firefox, while not having to deal with "all that data", at least comes up quickly and performs most actions rather speedily (until a couple of pages I have auto-updating have run for a while, anyway).
Thunderbird, OTOH, is much, much slower than elm or mutt, despite the fact that I haven't imported most of my emails into its directories. Data isn't the problem. It takes far more time to load than Firefox, an dthe GUI isn't as responsive in most cases.
What about theft? The total costs of spam are enormous, even without scams. Many, many millions of dollars per year.They suck up bandwidth and disk space, and waste millions of person-hours each year that could have bene used for something productive.
They steal bandwidth. They steal disk space. They steal our time, and time costs dearly. You can't replace it.
So until you can find a way to force them to pay restitution to everyone they've robbed, don't try to paint them as harmless.
Now add in scammers, pornographers, and all the other crap, and they deserve much, much worse than they're getting. What, you don't think porn matters? When it gets into my house, in front of me, or my wife, or my kids, it damn well matters. If you try to walk into my house and expose us to porn, you might very well leave in an ambulance if you aren't awfully quick on your feet.
"...when you give it your all and it isn't good enough, you're still a loser."
No. When you give it your all and it isn't good enough, and you think that makes you a loser, you're a fool. Your own candidate's speech to his supporters acknowledges that you don't have to be a loser just because you didn't win the race.
But I have to agree, you talk like a loser. You scoff at your grandmother because she believes in God and anything the TV says. [1] So you decide this makes her a fool, and the only other people you know who voted for Bush (or against Kerry) are racist bigots who fear change. Ah, yes, the "Anyone who disagrees with me is stupid or evil" approach to life.
Your religion (I'm not quite sure what it is... liberalism, the DNC, We Are The World, Might Makes Right, whatever) has failed you, and you're bitter. Perhaps that's more a sign that you need to reevaluate what you believe in than anything else.
You don't have to be a loser. You seem to have chosen to e one, anyway. Yeah, that's something to be depressed about. But maybe you should go have a long talk with your grandma (whether you agree with her or not, the perspective is good), reevaluate, and decide to get on with life. You'll be a much happier person. And you won't be a loser.
Being a loser is a choice.
[1] I know the major news media outlets are mostly crap, but the crap cuts both ways, and there is still actual news in there.
A very non-trivial part of the cost of living today is what I call the "evil perp tax". It's the hidden costs of things like computer viruses, spam, greedy people filing absurd and frivolous lawsuits, etc.
Even a sloppy IT shop spends 10% of its budget on spam, virus and security-related issues. A wise IT shop typically spends 20% to 30%. That cost gets passed on to the consumer. The high cost of medicine? Malpractice suits. class action suits, insane regulation, and insurance and lawyers out the wazoo. In the 80s, it was determined that something like 40% of the cost of the average motorcycle was directly or indirectly related to greed-motivated litigation. I can assure you that well in excess of 10% of internet access and use costs are related to spam and viruses, nevermind more traditional security issues.
So even if "your" money is safe, it's worth far less than it could be because of just the sorts of issues you are poopooing.
There's no way of knowing. The ideal answer is, "no". The correct answer is probably, "Some are, by virtue of bad choices and/or improper configuration of networking gear". The actual implications of this are unknown as we don't know the specifics.
But just remember this. If the ATMs are actually on a network, and an infected portable is attached anywhere on that network, or an infected floppy or CD is used anywhere on that network, the network and its systems are at risk. The risk depends on the nature of the infection, but it's there.
Even if the ATMs are on dedicated phone lines, someone with knowledge of how things work could (inadvertently or not) enable someone to write software that could eventually (potentially) cause problems.
Given how full of holes Windows has proved to be, I'd say that until proven otherwise, we have to assume that any Windows-based system (esp. on a network) is susceptible until proven otherwise.
Slashdot Mirror
...if they started bombing each others' offices, and wiped each other off the face of the earth.
Now *that* would be great.
I work for a high tech startup. We have a compute farm with over 150 systems, 50 or so desktop workstations, and a dozen or so infrastructure systems, all running Linux. Right now these are all on RH8. Sooner or later, we'll probably have to switch to RHEL because that's what a lot of the software we use is migrating to.
But that's a whole lotta beans to suddenly pony up. I haven't checked in a few months, but when I did ask RH for pricing, I think we got a 25% discount for that many systems. That's still a lot of beans.
So more than likely, when it comes time to upgrade, we'll buy one each of ES and WS (and possibly AS, we'll see). And install Scientific Linux https://www.scientificlinux.org/ on all the rest.
I want to support RH, who (IMO) has done a great deal both to advance the public awareness of Linux and to improve Linux. But they're asking for absurd amounts of money. There's no way it's going to cost them anywhere near 200X (less 25%) the cost of supporting one system to support 200 systems here. There's a very short list (4) of people here who would contact them, and they wouldn't be contacted until we'd done everything possible. There have been only 3 times in the past two years we would have contacted them had we had support in place. They could charge somewhere between $10 and $50 for each additional system, and we would consider it. But right now they'd be charging us more than the hardware is worth.
They really need to rethink their pricing, especially for sites with more than a very few systems.
The purpose of enterprise support is to help assure the stuff stays up, and when it goes down, gets back up ASAP. It's about as close to 100% uptime with as few hassles as possible.
At least, that's what we pay for.
I was interested in electronics and engineering long before I realized they were called such. I was interested in aerodynamics and the principles of aeronautical design long before I knew their names, either. In both cases, I'm talking about actively pursuing the interests-- researching and experimenting, asking questions, not just gazing at something and going, "Whoa! I wonder how that works!''
I try pretty hard not to do much in the way of solving friends' and relatives' computer problems. I'll listen politely to a short complaint, and 90% of the time recommend getting away from IE and/or Outlook, and/or getting Spybot and an AV program. Of the rest, I normally point them elsewhere, or just remind them that I am not really a Windows person. My brother takes care of my mom (he is a Windows jock, and lives a lot closer) or I'd help her out. Everyone else is self-sufficient, or goes elsewhere. I do try to help out at church on occasion, but it's such a horrid hodegpodge of randomly-hacked and duct taped Windows and Mac systems that usually I'm no help. If they ever switch to *nix, though... 8^)
I do have a couple of friends I trade services or things with. But generally even if I ask a friend such as a plumber to come work on something, I'd rather just pay him, and him have the option of saying, "Nah, just call the office, I wanna go see my family at night." I hate presuming on friendship.
BUT... I repair and build vacuum tube guitar amps on the side. I haven't actually made money in any given year, yet, but I'm close. Cranking out power chords and such at full volume can be very cathartic, too!
You can always find an idiot willing to say any old thing... It's better than statistics for "proving" random conclusions you want proven.
Why can't I label the post[er] "Jackass"?
Yes, to be a real webmaster, you need some form of root access. Sooner or later you'll need to upgrade the web server, or at least restart it. The alternative to having root is generally having several sacoounts, with passwords - and some of them shouldn't be shell accounts, so that is a problem. There are scores of other reasons.
As others have said, sudo is the answer. Make up a list of the things you think you'll need root for, sit down with the system administrator, and work it out.
We have things divided up here. We have a pagemaster, who is responsible for all content. The rest of the webmaster functions ar egenerally performed by the SA staff. I can assure you that we (the SA staff) require root access from tim eto time in performance of those duties.
My son and I were thinking along the lines of a robot to fight fire ants. We thought something like a micro-terminator would be cool.
Then we realized that if it was remotely controllable via wireless connection from your computer, with a camera built in, you could virtually fight the fire ants yourself. Instant coolest video game around.
BUT! What if you had a LAN party, and you and friends (or competitors, whatever) had a whole squad or platoon of these guys in the fire ant mound?
If someone does this, they will get filthy rich. (If you do it, I'd like a little credit for the idea, and maybe a tiny %, or maybe a job there. 8^)
The robots can look and work any way you want, so long as on the screen they look and respond like the character you choose (Terminator, Werewolf, Atom Ant, whatever), and they actually kill the ants.
And, of course, if you just wanted the robot to do the work, the computer could run the program for you.
You could use this for any sort of pest - ants, roaches, termites, mice, spiders, snakes, rats, weiner dogs, smug cats, drug dealers, you name it.
I haven't found a new video game I really, really like in well over 10 years, but I would buy Fire Ant Terminator in a heartbeat! And I'd think really hard about springing for the "Vicious Stray Animal Bot", too.
A gratis version of RHEL would have all the downside of technology and engineering compromises with none of the benefit of long-term stability and supportability.
This was the one statement he made that sounded like Marketingspeak to me (even if he admitted their compromises). It doesn't have RH support, but Scientific Linux (and I assume White Hat and others) are exactly as stable and supportable as RHEL.
I'm wondering if they don't keem him awake at night.,..
Well, he's a business guy, now. He's trying to get back to being a geek, but he's not there, yet. he probably pasy someone to name his systems!
Someone didn't do their homework!
The expensive stuff is the Enterprise stuff with support. You can also get them with RedHat 9 or equivalent much more cheaply. And then you know you get a functional system; there's no guarantee that any random version of Linux will work on a new system from Dell or anyone else.
[Theoretically it's functional; we never could get both built-in NICs to work with the installed RH9 on our 2650. Dell wasn't much help, either.]
You insensitive clod! I'm using smoke signals to communicate with the people doing the signal fires on the peaks to the drum relay in the desert to the guy at the fort with the tin can and string hookup to the shared,village phone through a 110 baud acoustic coupler, in a cardboard house where they only get power 4 hours a day and phone service 4 hours a day, with no overlap. And sometimes corrupt policia take the few bits that get through!
"x86 processors" is hardly a single model line. Nevermind that you can get the same PCI card to work on everything from a 1997 300MHz PC to the top of the line PC today, a dual Opteron system, and a Mac. Nevermind that the disk drives are interchangeable between all those and Sun, IBM and HP servers based on other CPU architectures. Nevermind that IE and Office are available for Windows and Mac, or that OpenOffice is available for PCs, Macs, Solaris, AIX, HPUX and everything else.
If we could [just follow the money], Nigerian scams, and old people loosing their life savings could be prevented.
Nope. Following the money does two things.
1) Lets you deal with those who already committed the crime.
2) Hopefully deter some folk from doing the same thing.
Following the money doesn't necessarily prevent anything, other than keeping the same people from repeating the crime while they're incarcerated-- if you catch them and get a conviction. Or simply deal with them some other way.
Nah, Mom finally ran across the rover. She's a compulsive neat freak, so naturally she dusts it.
She's been trying to get it to come eat dinner and meet the family; she's a bit miffed that it won't respond...
BT: 35% /.: 35%
Spam: 35%
No wonder my connection is so slow - it's
running at greater than 100%!
I normally use elm, and I have dozens of mailboxes, some with thousands of old emails in them. ELm comes up very quickly, and moves around really fast. I use mutt for MIME stuff; it's almost as fast as elm. Firefox, while not having to deal with "all that data", at least comes up quickly and performs most actions rather speedily (until a couple of pages I have auto-updating have run for a while, anyway).
Thunderbird, OTOH, is much, much slower than elm or mutt, despite the fact that I haven't imported most of my emails into its directories. Data isn't the problem. It takes far more time to load than Firefox, an dthe GUI isn't as responsive in most cases.
What about theft? The total costs of spam are enormous, even without scams. Many, many millions of dollars per year.They suck up bandwidth and disk space, and waste millions of person-hours each year that could have bene used for something productive.
They steal bandwidth. They steal disk space. They steal our time, and time costs dearly. You can't replace it.
So until you can find a way to force them to pay restitution to everyone they've robbed, don't try to paint them as harmless.
Now add in scammers, pornographers, and all the other crap, and they deserve much, much worse than they're getting. What, you don't think porn matters? When it gets into my house, in front of me, or my wife, or my kids, it damn well matters. If you try to walk into my house and expose us to porn, you might very well leave in an ambulance if you aren't awfully quick on your feet.
"...when you give it your all and it isn't good enough, you're still a loser."
No. When you give it your all and it isn't good enough, and you think that makes you a loser, you're a fool. Your own candidate's speech to his supporters acknowledges that you don't have to be a loser just because you didn't win the race.
But I have to agree, you talk like a loser. You scoff at your grandmother because she believes in God and anything the TV says. [1] So you decide this makes her a fool, and the only other people you know who voted for Bush (or against Kerry) are racist bigots who fear change. Ah, yes, the "Anyone who disagrees with me is stupid or evil" approach to life.
Your religion (I'm not quite sure what it is... liberalism, the DNC, We Are The World, Might Makes Right, whatever) has failed you, and you're bitter. Perhaps that's more a sign that you need to reevaluate what you believe in than anything else.
You don't have to be a loser. You seem to have chosen to e one, anyway. Yeah, that's something to be depressed about. But maybe you should go have a long talk with your grandma (whether you agree with her or not, the perspective is good), reevaluate, and decide to get on with life. You'll be a much happier person. And you won't be a loser.
Being a loser is a choice.
[1] I know the major news media outlets are mostly crap, but the crap cuts both ways, and there is still actual news in there.
A very non-trivial part of the cost of living today is what I call the "evil perp tax". It's the hidden costs of things like computer viruses, spam, greedy people filing absurd and frivolous lawsuits, etc.
Even a sloppy IT shop spends 10% of its budget on spam, virus and security-related issues. A wise IT shop typically spends 20% to 30%. That cost gets passed on to the consumer. The high cost of medicine? Malpractice suits. class action suits, insane regulation, and insurance and lawyers out the wazoo. In the 80s, it was determined that something like 40% of the cost of the average motorcycle was directly or indirectly related to greed-motivated litigation. I can assure you that well in excess of 10% of internet access and use costs are related to spam and viruses, nevermind more traditional security issues.
So even if "your" money is safe, it's worth far less than it could be because of just the sorts of issues you are poopooing.
Well, I have seen spiderwebs on ATMs.
But I assume you meant connected to the internet.
There's no way of knowing. The ideal answer is, "no". The correct answer is probably, "Some are, by virtue of bad choices and/or improper configuration of networking gear". The actual implications of this are unknown as we don't know the specifics.
But just remember this. If the ATMs are actually on a network, and an infected portable is attached anywhere on that network, or an infected floppy or CD is used anywhere on that network, the network and its systems are at risk. The risk depends on the nature of the infection, but it's there.
Even if the ATMs are on dedicated phone lines, someone with knowledge of how things work could (inadvertently or not) enable someone to write software that could eventually (potentially) cause problems.
Maybe it's because I'm young and new, but why would people trust a system that has a record of failing?
Maybe it's because I'm older and more jaded, but my honest answer is, ``because they're idiots''.
Given how full of holes Windows has proved to be, I'd say that until proven otherwise, we have to assume that any Windows-based system (esp. on a network) is susceptible until proven otherwise.