I've recently been looking into using Zenworks. Although desktop management isn't a big part of my job. We have a copy of Zenworks 7. I installed it, but for some reason I am finding it difficult to figure out exactly what it is supposed to DO. I know that sounds strange, but I am used to having that kind of thing fairly obvious once you get the software installed. I've seen the marketing information and I understand Zenworks on a high level, but thats it. I'm sure I can figure it out if I really take the time (which I haven't yet), but my point is that even though we've been "sold" on the idea of Zenworks, the software's real world application hasn't been obvious.
I find this happens a lot with Netware. The really cool features seem to be hopelessly hidden in some obscure TID or "Cool Solution" somewhere. LIke I never knew that this "protected memory" thing existed. It bothers me that this is not the default behavior of Netware. Every other modern OS in existence makes application memory protection transparent and manditory. Netware's use of it seem to be more of a hackish afterthought.
I agree with you, but in my situation it hasn't been an issue of salary or promotions. It's been an issue of getting bored. If you're good at your job, you get everything running pretty smoothly. You get to know all the systems and functions. Of course, there's always room for improvement, but unless the company is growing and changing quickly, that may be as much as you are going to experience and your best hope is to move into managment (yuck). To get something fresh and with new challenges, you need to move on to a new company and probably even a new industry. Of course, I'm not talking about the ship-jumping that was popular in the dot-com boom. LIke switching every year. I'm thinking more along the lines of every 5 years or so.
Hmm, I don't own a Porche, but I thought that part of the point of owning such a car was so that you could do things like shopping and show off. Who needs fuel economy if you're only going a couple miles? Perhaps a better example would be a long road trip where you need to save on gas and perhaps have a little more room. But even then, don't you want something that is fun to drive? And if you can afford a Porche, what's a little lost fuel economy to ya?
And as far as ganes go, that Mac Mini is going to be below par before you know it. You're goign to be wishing you had a dedicated gaming box.
Linux distributions have the unique problem of getting stale quickly because one usually relies on software packages built specifically for that distro release. After three years, it can be difficult to find current packages for your distribution. And if you choose to go with custom compiled programs, upgrading to the latest versions of software can become a chore when there are many dependencies. A 6 year old WIndows OS, on the other hand, can usually run the lastest software without any hassle. For this reason, Windows can easily afford to wait a long time between releases. LInux distributions cannot.
Why? from a development/query/dbgeek perspective, it's kind of like this: oracle:sql server:: legos technic:duplo.
Why? Because I'm not a DB geek. I have more of an engineer mentality. KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) is my motto. If I work with a database, I have very basic requirements and even something like MySQL will usually fit. Sometimes "duplo blocks" are the best tool for the job.
actually working with it is fun, if you can get past the "railroad tracks" documentation.
Another strike against Oracle in my book. Something that expensive should have fantastic documentation.
Um, well it sounds like Netmail is Groupwise MINUS all the features we want, so I'm not sure it is what we're looking for. And if Hula is Netmail minus the eDirectory support, well, that is pretty much ruled out also.:-/
Heh, never heard of it before. I'll have to give it a try with Groupwise. According to the Novell TID, there are a lot of restrictions on how and when it can be used. This only adds to the awkwardness of Netware. Kinda reminds me of my DOS days trying to free up "conventional" memory below 640K.:-P
They are winning on the technical front, they just couldn't market water to a dying man in the desert.
Most of Hula's desirable features are still in the "wishlist" phase, such as the eDirectory integration. And I am a little weary of making the primary interface for calendar a web page. Regarding Netmail, I don't know much about it. How does it compare to Groupwise? Is it just a stripped down version of Groupwise or something?
I think the ability to popup a message would have to be specifically programmed into whatever backdoor program they are using. AFAIK, the trojans/backdoors are configured to do very specific things such as send spam, install malware, DDoS, etc. I don't think a botnet owner really has full control over a zombie in most cases.
Just a guess, but if your PHBs are dead set on MS SQL/Win, then a F/OSS proposition will typically be a no/no. In such a case, all you can do is point to a different commercial one (and it'd better be a big enough one) since that's the language they'll understand.
Honestly, given a choice between Oracle and MS-SQL, I'd almost have to go with MSSQL. Oracle is a bloated beast. Of course, I've never been much of a DBA, so I'd have to defer to them. Fortunately, I'm not in an organizations where PHB's make technical decisions. A good organization leaves that kind of thing up to the senior sysadmin(s). Unless, of course, your senior sysadmins are incompetent. In which case, you're probably screwed no matter what you go with.
I did an eval of GW 7 and initially installed it on Linux just for the heck of it to check out the new features before upgrading the main server from GW 6.5. I can't really speak to its quality (on Linux) other than what I've read on various forums. I got the impression that it is somewhat flakey. For the most part, I'm just sticking with what I know, and that's Groupwise + Netware. For as annoying as Netware can be, it is stable enough. Also, I'm not too excited about running SuSE Linux. I'm a Debian guy.
But if you like SuSE and are not totally comfortable with Netware, I'd give Groupwise on LInux a go. The data files are all compatable if you ever decide to move to Netware.
Unfortunately, Netware lost a lot of momentum after 4.11. While NDS remains a champ, teh OS itself has steadily gone downhill. Netware 6 was plagued with horrible filesystem problems before SP1. The OS itself is terribly unstable because you have a million NLMs all running at the kernel level. Unload your backup software? Ooops, ABEND! Restart Groupwise the wrong way? Critical system error! Yeah, NT4 sucked and AD still sucks, but Windows as a NOS has come a long way. Win 2k and 2003 servers have much better uptime. Of course, you still get incompetent admins who think rebooting is a solution, but I gave up defending Netware years ago.
Mind if I ask: Why Oracle? In my experience, most people don't use 90% of the features that Oracle provides and could probably get by just fine with PosgreSQL or, *gasp* MySQL 5.
With the exception of NDS vs. AD, Novell did not win on a technical front. I've been admin'ing Netware servers on and off for 10 years and I must say that the OS itself is rather arcane. The interface (console) is awkward and the OS is built on obsolete computer science. It uses cooperative multi-tasking and almost all NLMs run at the kernel level. So that a bug in most NLMs can and will abend (BSOD for you Windows guys) the server. Personally, I'm sick of it. I currently maintain 2 Netware 6 servers and simply unloading a module can either hang the console (requiring a reboot to fully recover) or cause some kind of critical system fault (sometimes and abend).
That said, we're not about to migrate the servers to Windows. So we're kinda stuck until we can find a satisfactory Groupwise replacement. And I still like NDS. I am also a Linux admin, and so far I haven't found any good open or closed source groupware packages for Linux. Almost all of them that I have found maintain some proprietary user database. That just won't do. We need centralized directory authentication.
What annoys me about Groupwise is that it totally lacks group calendaring! You'd think that an integrated system like that would do groups. You can proxy into another's calendar, but there is no way to invite a whole department (and check conflicts) to a meeting. WTF? Is this not the primary function of an institutional calendar? Or do most people really just schedule personal events?
That's hardly the point; in fact, I'd call it purposely avoiding the point.
It is exactly the point. It isn't my problem. I have the right to filter, manipulate, and censor any and all of the content that I legally download. And that is all there is to it.
Humour the debate... what happens if/when a large enough majority of people are using ad-blockers?
They'll find a new way to make money or they'll close down. The internet got along just fine before ads became the norm, albeit with less content.
Will you be happy that no-one's viewing those nasty adverts anymore
Wouldn't make much difference to me one way or another because I'm hardly seeing ads as it is.
even though the new alternative is to pay $5 per month to each and every website whose content you'd like to view?
Heh, I hardly think that my eyeballs are worth $5 per month to any particular site. I'm not up on how much a site makes from advertising, but lets say they get $.05 per click-through. Lets say the average user clicks through 10 ads a month on a particular site (0 for me personally. I never click on ads). That's $.50 per user, per month. If it is a good site, I might pay that much. Maybe through some kind of micropayment system.
Who knows, maybe such a payment done on a large scale would actually have the benefit of encouraging richer, more original content. Right now, lots of sites can get away with putting up mostly worthless trash because there is no hurdle to getting visitors and ad revenue. If people had a vested interest in a site, they would demand better content or simply never come back again (because they stopped paying).
Do a Google search for any topic that interests you. You'll probably get hundreds of relevent results. So what if that is pared down to 20? Or 10? I imagine those remaining 20 or 10 would be pretty good. All the trash sites which couldn't get people to pay for the content would have closed up shop.
Also, have you ever noticed that the sites which have the most advertising tend to be the crappiest?
Insentive to whitelist their site. On sites where I like their content, I whitelist their pages (which is necessary with the filterset.g updater). I've got one, maybe two sites on the list. For me, however, I never click on any ad any time, and as most sites pay by the standard CPM (shouldn't it be CPT or CPK?) method, my view that leads to neither a click nor a sale shows the site they're advertising on as being less profitable. If I don't even view the ad, they're not wasting a showing on me.
I may be mistaken, but with adblock don't you still download the ad? Doesn't it just get pulled from the DOM tree?
Then what do you propose as a way the companies that deliver the websites you visit and block ads from should cover the costs they have for serving their content to you, plus a little profit ?
That's their problem, not ours. The consuming is not responsible for ensuring that a particular business model is viable.
The same is true of AJAX. Right now, everyone is programming at the lowest level. What AJAX needs is a higher level set of widgets that can accelerate development. Mozilla took the XUL path, but that won't work for cross-browser applications. We need a general-purpose widget library written using the standard HTML DOM. Then AJAX will become a quick and easy option.
Four counter points:
1) The difference between programming at the lowest level of X11 and the lowest level of AJAX is that X11 is fast. Widget libraries built on X11 are fast. AJAX is slow. JS widgets built on AJAX are even slower.
2) X11 was designed to support applications. HTML was not.
3) X11 has the ability to be extended as necessary to gain access to things like 3D hardware. HTML and Javascript are very static and still have problems with cross-browser compatability.
4) X11 is stateful. HTTP is stateless. It is MUCH easier to build an application on a stateful protocol because you don't need to poll the server constantly.
I agree with you that ajax applications will not supplant your average desktop app, but I think you ave this point wrong:
If instead you decide to have the server make all the UI decisions for you ("put this text here, that box there"), that's fine except you'll see lag anytime you do anything. Imagine trying to update an entire column of data in Ajax Spreadsheet. The server has to send down exactly what to put in each cell and do all the computations for you before you see anything. Google Maps has this problem - I often see white boxes, unrefreshed boxes, etc. and I'm using the latest Firefox!
I don't think a web based Ajax spreadsheet would be using the server to store the state of your spreadsheet such that you would h ave to to make an xml request for every cell action. It would probably do almost everything clientside (in javascript, yuck) and just use the server for storage. But either way, the whole model is messed up. What would be the poitn in running a browser based spreadsheet if the entire app ran in the browser with very little server logic? Why not just use the regular spreaksheet app and just save your documents to a network (or internet based) storage system?
What is so funny about this Ajax craze is that people are trying to reinvent Java applets... which for the most part failed to catch on for various reasons. These desktop killing ajax applications will only be slower and LESS compatable that applets.
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I've recently been looking into using Zenworks. Although desktop management isn't a big part of my job. We have a copy of Zenworks 7. I installed it, but for some reason I am finding it difficult to figure out exactly what it is supposed to DO. I know that sounds strange, but I am used to having that kind of thing fairly obvious once you get the software installed. I've seen the marketing information and I understand Zenworks on a high level, but thats it. I'm sure I can figure it out if I really take the time (which I haven't yet), but my point is that even though we've been "sold" on the idea of Zenworks, the software's real world application hasn't been obvious.
I find this happens a lot with Netware. The really cool features seem to be hopelessly hidden in some obscure TID or "Cool Solution" somewhere. LIke I never knew that this "protected memory" thing existed. It bothers me that this is not the default behavior of Netware. Every other modern OS in existence makes application memory protection transparent and manditory. Netware's use of it seem to be more of a hackish afterthought.
-matthew
I agree with you, but in my situation it hasn't been an issue of salary or promotions. It's been an issue of getting bored. If you're good at your job, you get everything running pretty smoothly. You get to know all the systems and functions. Of course, there's always room for improvement, but unless the company is growing and changing quickly, that may be as much as you are going to experience and your best hope is to move into managment (yuck). To get something fresh and with new challenges, you need to move on to a new company and probably even a new industry. Of course, I'm not talking about the ship-jumping that was popular in the dot-com boom. LIke switching every year. I'm thinking more along the lines of every 5 years or so.
-matthew
Hmm, I don't own a Porche, but I thought that part of the point of owning such a car was so that you could do things like shopping and show off. Who needs fuel economy if you're only going a couple miles? Perhaps a better example would be a long road trip where you need to save on gas and perhaps have a little more room. But even then, don't you want something that is fun to drive? And if you can afford a Porche, what's a little lost fuel economy to ya?
And as far as ganes go, that Mac Mini is going to be below par before you know it. You're goign to be wishing you had a dedicated gaming box.
-matthew
Linux distributions have the unique problem of getting stale quickly because one usually relies on software packages built specifically for that distro release. After three years, it can be difficult to find current packages for your distribution. And if you choose to go with custom compiled programs, upgrading to the latest versions of software can become a chore when there are many dependencies. A 6 year old WIndows OS, on the other hand, can usually run the lastest software without any hassle. For this reason, Windows can easily afford to wait a long time between releases. LInux distributions cannot.
-matthew
Weren't you complaining about stability as why you hated NetWare?
This particular server is stable enough and I can't guarantee that Groupwise on Linux would much better. In other words, it isn't worth the migration.
-matthew
Why? from a development/query/dbgeek perspective, it's kind of like this: oracle:sql server :: legos technic:duplo.
Why? Because I'm not a DB geek. I have more of an engineer mentality. KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) is my motto. If I work with a database, I have very basic requirements and even something like MySQL will usually fit. Sometimes "duplo blocks" are the best tool for the job.
actually working with it is fun, if you can get past the "railroad tracks" documentation.
Another strike against Oracle in my book. Something that expensive should have fantastic documentation.
-matthew
Um, well it sounds like Netmail is Groupwise MINUS all the features we want, so I'm not sure it is what we're looking for. And if Hula is Netmail minus the eDirectory support, well, that is pretty much ruled out also. :-/
-matthew
Protected memory not working for you?
:-P
Heh, never heard of it before. I'll have to give it a try with Groupwise. According to the Novell TID, there are a lot of restrictions on how and when it can be used. This only adds to the awkwardness of Netware. Kinda reminds me of my DOS days trying to free up "conventional" memory below 640K.
They are winning on the technical front, they just couldn't market water to a dying man in the desert.
Which technical front besides eDirectory?
-matthew
Most of Hula's desirable features are still in the "wishlist" phase, such as the eDirectory integration. And I am a little weary of making the primary interface for calendar a web page. Regarding Netmail, I don't know much about it. How does it compare to Groupwise? Is it just a stripped down version of Groupwise or something?
-matthew
I think the ability to popup a message would have to be specifically programmed into whatever backdoor program they are using. AFAIK, the trojans/backdoors are configured to do very specific things such as send spam, install malware, DDoS, etc. I don't think a botnet owner really has full control over a zombie in most cases.
-matthew
Just a guess, but if your PHBs are dead set on MS SQL/Win, then a F/OSS proposition will typically be a no/no. In such a case, all you can do is point to a different commercial one (and it'd better be a big enough one) since that's the language they'll understand.
Honestly, given a choice between Oracle and MS-SQL, I'd almost have to go with MSSQL. Oracle is a bloated beast. Of course, I've never been much of a DBA, so I'd have to defer to them. Fortunately, I'm not in an organizations where PHB's make technical decisions. A good organization leaves that kind of thing up to the senior sysadmin(s). Unless, of course, your senior sysadmins are incompetent. In which case, you're probably screwed no matter what you go with.
-matthew
I did an eval of GW 7 and initially installed it on Linux just for the heck of it to check out the new features before upgrading the main server from GW 6.5. I can't really speak to its quality (on Linux) other than what I've read on various forums. I got the impression that it is somewhat flakey. For the most part, I'm just sticking with what I know, and that's Groupwise + Netware. For as annoying as Netware can be, it is stable enough. Also, I'm not too excited about running SuSE Linux. I'm a Debian guy.
But if you like SuSE and are not totally comfortable with Netware, I'd give Groupwise on LInux a go. The data files are all compatable if you ever decide to move to Netware.
-matthew
How does it authenticate users? Does it actually require RedHat? I really don't want to run Redhat. I'm a Debian guy. How about OS X support?
-matthew
Unfortunately, Netware lost a lot of momentum after 4.11. While NDS remains a champ, teh OS itself has steadily gone downhill. Netware 6 was plagued with horrible filesystem problems before SP1. The OS itself is terribly unstable because you have a million NLMs all running at the kernel level. Unload your backup software? Ooops, ABEND! Restart Groupwise the wrong way? Critical system error! Yeah, NT4 sucked and AD still sucks, but Windows as a NOS has come a long way. Win 2k and 2003 servers have much better uptime. Of course, you still get incompetent admins who think rebooting is a solution, but I gave up defending Netware years ago.
-matthew
Mind if I ask: Why Oracle? In my experience, most people don't use 90% of the features that Oracle provides and could probably get by just fine with PosgreSQL or, *gasp* MySQL 5.
-matthew
With the exception of NDS vs. AD, Novell did not win on a technical front. I've been admin'ing Netware servers on and off for 10 years and I must say that the OS itself is rather arcane. The interface (console) is awkward and the OS is built on obsolete computer science. It uses cooperative multi-tasking and almost all NLMs run at the kernel level. So that a bug in most NLMs can and will abend (BSOD for you Windows guys) the server. Personally, I'm sick of it. I currently maintain 2 Netware 6 servers and simply unloading a module can either hang the console (requiring a reboot to fully recover) or cause some kind of critical system fault (sometimes and abend).
That said, we're not about to migrate the servers to Windows. So we're kinda stuck until we can find a satisfactory Groupwise replacement. And I still like NDS. I am also a Linux admin, and so far I haven't found any good open or closed source groupware packages for Linux. Almost all of them that I have found maintain some proprietary user database. That just won't do. We need centralized directory authentication.
-matthew
What annoys me about Groupwise is that it totally lacks group calendaring! You'd think that an integrated system like that would do groups. You can proxy into another's calendar, but there is no way to invite a whole department (and check conflicts) to a meeting. WTF? Is this not the primary function of an institutional calendar? Or do most people really just schedule personal events?
-matthew
Sicko.
That's hardly the point; in fact, I'd call it purposely avoiding the point.
It is exactly the point. It isn't my problem. I have the right to filter, manipulate, and censor any and all of the content that I legally download. And that is all there is to it.
Humour the debate... what happens if/when a large enough majority of people are using ad-blockers?
They'll find a new way to make money or they'll close down. The internet got along just fine before ads became the norm, albeit with less content.
Will you be happy that no-one's viewing those nasty adverts anymore
Wouldn't make much difference to me one way or another because I'm hardly seeing ads as it is.
even though the new alternative is to pay $5 per month to each and every website whose content you'd like to view?
Heh, I hardly think that my eyeballs are worth $5 per month to any particular site. I'm not up on how much a site makes from advertising, but lets say they get $.05 per click-through. Lets say the average user clicks through 10 ads a month on a particular site (0 for me personally. I never click on ads). That's $.50 per user, per month. If it is a good site, I might pay that much. Maybe through some kind of micropayment system.
Who knows, maybe such a payment done on a large scale would actually have the benefit of encouraging richer, more original content. Right now, lots of sites can get away with putting up mostly worthless trash because there is no hurdle to getting visitors and ad revenue. If people had a vested interest in a site, they would demand better content or simply never come back again (because they stopped paying).
Do a Google search for any topic that interests you. You'll probably get hundreds of relevent results. So what if that is pared down to 20? Or 10? I imagine those remaining 20 or 10 would be pretty good. All the trash sites which couldn't get people to pay for the content would have closed up shop.
Also, have you ever noticed that the sites which have the most advertising tend to be the crappiest?
-matthew
Insentive to whitelist their site. On sites where I like their content, I whitelist their pages (which is necessary with the filterset.g updater). I've got one, maybe two sites on the list. For me, however, I never click on any ad any time, and as most sites pay by the standard CPM (shouldn't it be CPT or CPK?) method, my view that leads to neither a click nor a sale shows the site they're advertising on as being less profitable. If I don't even view the ad, they're not wasting a showing on me.
I may be mistaken, but with adblock don't you still download the ad? Doesn't it just get pulled from the DOM tree?
-matthew
Then what do you propose as a way the companies that deliver the websites you visit and block ads from should cover the costs they have for serving their content to you, plus a little profit ?
That's their problem, not ours. The consuming is not responsible for ensuring that a particular business model is viable.
-matthew
The same is true of AJAX. Right now, everyone is programming at the lowest level. What AJAX needs is a higher level set of widgets that can accelerate development. Mozilla took the XUL path, but that won't work for cross-browser applications. We need a general-purpose widget library written using the standard HTML DOM. Then AJAX will become a quick and easy option.
Four counter points:
1) The difference between programming at the lowest level of X11 and the lowest level of AJAX is that X11 is fast. Widget libraries built on X11 are fast. AJAX is slow. JS widgets built on AJAX are even slower.
2) X11 was designed to support applications. HTML was not.
3) X11 has the ability to be extended as necessary to gain access to things like 3D hardware. HTML and Javascript are very static and still have problems with cross-browser compatability.
4) X11 is stateful. HTTP is stateless. It is MUCH easier to build an application on a stateful protocol because you don't need to poll the server constantly.
-matthew
Worse. Ajax is the new java applet! ;-)
Well, it doesn't have to be, but that's what some people are trying to make of it.
-matthew
I agree with you that ajax applications will not supplant your average desktop app, but I think you ave this point wrong:
If instead you decide to have the server make all the UI decisions for you ("put this text here, that box there"), that's fine except you'll see lag anytime you do anything. Imagine trying to update an entire column of data in Ajax Spreadsheet. The server has to send down exactly what to put in each cell and do all the computations for you before you see anything. Google Maps has this problem - I often see white boxes, unrefreshed boxes, etc. and I'm using the latest Firefox!
I don't think a web based Ajax spreadsheet would be using the server to store the state of your spreadsheet such that you would h ave to to make an xml request for every cell action. It would probably do almost everything clientside (in javascript, yuck) and just use the server for storage. But either way, the whole model is messed up. What would be the poitn in running a browser based spreadsheet if the entire app ran in the browser with very little server logic? Why not just use the regular spreaksheet app and just save your documents to a network (or internet based) storage system?
What is so funny about this Ajax craze is that people are trying to reinvent Java applets... which for the most part failed to catch on for various reasons. These desktop killing ajax applications will only be slower and LESS compatable that applets.
-matthew
If you think IT uses a lot of acronyms, aviation is 10x worse.
Want a weather report?
KPWK 202253Z 04015KT 10SM SKC 01/M06 A3018
-matthew