We were watching "so you think you can dance" the other night, and they had a little kid on doing a very impressive dance routine. I couldn't resist it, at the end I said:
"actually, they've got an ugly kid backstage doing the real routine, he was just miming"
So bloody true. When we finally got our machines their very own machine room, the office manager skimped on AC, and the stupid AC not only wasn't really powerful enough for the size of the racks (luckily we didn't fill them anywhere near capacity), but after a power failure the servers would start again, but the AC wouldn't. You needed to press a button. POS.
Seriously, the coward shitteth you not. If you can't afford $600 to cool the room, then consolidate your services onto fewer machines and shut the others off, because they're obviously not making you enough money to be worth running.
If, on the other hand, your boss is a cheapskate then do something like I did before - moved the servers out to my desk and stuck a honking big fan at one side to blow air past them. It had the very big plus side of being obvious to everyone that we had to keep the servers cool, and reminded them every day that the alternative was buying some aircon.
Now just imagine that ALL of the distros had released at the same time? There wouldn't have BEEN a fall-back position.
Woah there a minute. What was wrong with the previous release, that you have been running fine up until now? It doesn't just go away you know. Even in Ubuntu land it will be supported for another 2 releases.
They tend to have other senses which are more alert. I really don't know, I never pretended to be any more expert than the average slashdotter spouting off about shit.
The other thing is that a passenger in the car is going to be aware of what's going on around you, and see your body language. Chances are if the shit starts hitting the fan they know to shut the fuck up until you've got it under control.
A person on the other end of the cell phone is going to keep on yapping on, oblivious, until they have distracted you to your death. The person in the car, maybe the self preservation instinct will stop them yapping themselves to their own death as well.
this huge trove of data gathered over a short period of time indicates that the crimeware problem is far larger than most observers have been assuming.
Maybe so - but conversely they may not be able to use all of it (at least for time-limited things like credit cards) before it's expired, making me happy that they have lots of data, because when (not if) my data gets stolen from somewhere, I'm less likely to be one of those exploited. Whee.
Oh yes, and I object to the characterisation that to be a "real UNIX admin" you have to be willing and able to support any piece of shit that's passing itself off as a finished product, just because some company decided to ship it.
Nobody can know how to admin every piece of kit out there, and it's not a wise investment to spend your whole time learning everything.
If the great great grandparent poster looked at Solaris and said "the admin cost of (a) learning and (b) supporting this across multiple machines is more than it's worth, and the resources suck compared to this other system that's also compatible with my hardware" then more power to them. It sounds to me from reading that post that they're supporting their business' function better than someone stubbornly trying to learn the new tech - and in that shop Solaris is the new tech, regardless of the product line's pedigree.
An admin who recommends a system they already know how to use because they have experience and know they can get a solid working system within an outside imposed deadline is much more valuable to any company than one who spends months learning how to use a new technology just because it's theoretically "better" - especially if the "betterness" isn't actually required for the business to function.
I don't parse the bit before "this is bad" - but I assume you meant that recommending otherwise inferior technology (or changing to less superior technology) based purely on admin familiarity/comfort is bad. I disagree.
I see roughly three alternatives:
a) change to something your admin can support effectively.
b) have your admin spend work time (I'm assuming you're not having them give up the rest of their life to learn this piece of tech) leaning the technology,
c) hire someone else (depending on your local labour laws possibly firing the current admin in the process) and hope that the new person can integrate well into the company, spending time teaching them other aspects of the business they need to know, etc.
It turns out that changing the technology may actually be the cheapest and most efficient overall option for the business, even if you're not getting theoretical maximum performance from your hardware.
You really think "pkgadd -d" is comparable to aptitude or even just plain old apt-get?
I pulled in a bunch of patches for our only Solaris box the other day, and they took a good half hour _each_ to apply. Ok, so we had 10 processes streaming gzip files to a ZFS filesystem on that box, so the load was up a bit - but none of them touched the root filesystem where the patches were applying. It was on separate disks.
There's no reason IO should have been an issue - and a decent scheduler should make sure it wasn't being starved of CPU by long running tasks.
I started out running FreeBSD and moved to Linux a few years ago - I don't have heaps of Solaris mojo - much like the grandparent poster. But I can tell you that all the management tools and userland feel like a huge step backwards.
Not to be mean or anything, but seriously. If you can't handle Solaris, you shouldn't be in the sysadmin game.
"I'm such a real man I still use ed for all my editing needs. Besides, if sysadmin was easier then I wouldn't have job security any more"
I can _handle_ Solaris, even if I have the same issue of lack of background and harder to use google to get an understanding of an area I don't know yet. I just find it takes more work and time than the equivalent task on Linux. Sure the options on Linux might be less stable, less "mature" and sometimes even less reliable, but they get you up and running quicker. That matters too.
I'm reminded of how Oracle is finding the low end of their market being eaten up by smaller database engines that don't require a full time team of 5 DBAs to tune the bloody thing.
utilize its very expensive hardware to its fullest with modern OS features not yet available on Linux, your reasons are valid. Stupid, short-sighted, luddite and likely to get you fired at any other Unix shop of any size, but valid. I guess.
Ah, yeah. Big shop mentality. There will be a specialist to run each operating system. And then a specialist DBA to run the database server on that machine, and a specialist Java Sysadmin Tool person to manage the java toolchain that all the new tools depend on, and then a specialist backup manager to run the backup systems, and then...
Most small shops the sysadmins are developers too, and they probably don't need the fullest "modern OS features" for it - they need a more user-friendly userland that supports them in their jobs. If Linux is getting the job done quicker for them, then it's probably the right choice even if it doesn't have the latest filesystem.
Oh - btw. I signed a non-disclosure at the time which I think was for something insane like 5 years. It's probably expired by now. For that I got given the API names of a couple of functions that didn't advertise themselves via COM - not particularly complex to guess though.
And that was for READIRIS, which we didn't end up using anyway. ABBYY was more accurate and easier to drive.
It was an embedded copy of ABBYY that came with a scanner pen. It probably wasn't strictly within the terms of the licence, but it was only a proof of concept anyway unfortunately, the project died for unrelated reasons and I never had to scale it up.
It was receiving faxed images via email, detaching them, splitting them into individual pages, OCRing the pages and identifying them into separate "buckets" based on the form that was on the page, then using the OCRed text of some IDs to classify them further where possible (thankfully there was a crc32 in the data, so you could tell if it wasn't scanned correctly and send to a human for clarification).
Finally, a human would enter the hand-written text from the form fields, there wasn't much of it, and it was considered cheaper than trying to come up with a scanner that could read doctors' handwriting!
I've been paying for it for years - it's the only piece of software I am paying for on Linux in fact.
I find wine very much worthwhile as a "gateway drug" - in fact I was running Win32 perl driving a Windows OCR package under wine on one project - under linux.
So yeah, they have customers. I don't have a clue how many, but I'm planning to renew again next year.
I definitely think it's v2.0 - it shows all the hallmarks of second system syndrome - big, complicated, complete rewrite with all the lessons from the first one thrown out. Yep, v2.0 it is.
(maybe v2.1 now - there was a service pack applied a couple of thousand years ago according to some reports)
I had a bunch of ~200k record databases with about 8 simple tables in them. Indexing data for mail server backups in fact. I was doing lots of indexed queries on said tables, and once the sqlite database hit a certain size it went seek crazy.
By seek crazy I mean that per single _indexed_ query it would perform about 200 seeks on the database file. Multiply that by many thousands of index checks for your typical backup run and it was game over for sqlite.
The machine has 16Gb of memory and a maximum of 30 concurrent backup threads, so I wound up just slurping the entire database into hashes in memory (perl) at startup and doing hash lookups instead. Massively faster.
So yeah, not such a big sqlite fan as I once was. It didn't scale well for me.
Same to you. Two short weeks in a row here in Australia. Whee! Yay holidays. Not sure how that applies around the world.
I've given your userid the green tick of "might even be worth reading" - I'd say it's a rare commodity, but my friends list isn't all that exclusive. I saw it when I'd updated your details, and there's all sorts of suspicious looking characters on there. Um, I have no more joke. Oh well.
(stopping now before this drifts even further off topic)
OK - fair enough. That's not a troll - it's a well thought out response, and there are others. I accept your story now.
(but I liked the greater internet douchebag theory, oh well)
Welcome to the internet, the shitheads are here too, and you managed to tweak a bunch of them. Sucks to be you. I guess the new userid is probably a sane idea.
Slashdot Mirror
We were watching "so you think you can dance" the other night, and they had a little kid on doing a very impressive dance routine. I couldn't resist it, at the end I said:
"actually, they've got an ugly kid backstage doing the real routine, he was just miming"
I've got a picture of him right here.
So bloody true. When we finally got our machines their very own machine room, the office manager skimped on AC, and the stupid AC not only wasn't really powerful enough for the size of the racks (luckily we didn't fill them anywhere near capacity), but after a power failure the servers would start again, but the AC wouldn't. You needed to press a button. POS.
I'm glad I left that job.
Seriously, the coward shitteth you not. If you can't afford $600 to cool the room, then consolidate your services onto fewer machines and shut the others off, because they're obviously not making you enough money to be worth running.
If, on the other hand, your boss is a cheapskate then do something like I did before - moved the servers out to my desk and stuck a honking big fan at one side to blow air past them. It had the very big plus side of being obvious to everyone that we had to keep the servers cool, and reminded them every day that the alternative was buying some aircon.
I do like how your sig sets off the rest of that post so well...
That's OK, they've broken the encryption scheme your pissy little VPN is using, so they can read your traffic just fine. Enjoy.
And people running WINE like me which will run IE6 but not IE7 (at least until recently - I haven't checked 1.0 yet)
Now just imagine that ALL of the distros had released at the same time? There wouldn't have BEEN a fall-back position.
Woah there a minute. What was wrong with the previous release, that you have been running fine up until now? It doesn't just go away you know. Even in Ubuntu land it will be supported for another 2 releases.
Nice call, Captain Lightspeed
They tend to have other senses which are more alert. I really don't know, I never pretended to be any more expert than the average slashdotter spouting off about shit.
The other thing is that a passenger in the car is going to be aware of what's going on around you, and see your body language. Chances are if the shit starts hitting the fan they know to shut the fuck up until you've got it under control.
A person on the other end of the cell phone is going to keep on yapping on, oblivious, until they have distracted you to your death. The person in the car, maybe the self preservation instinct will stop them yapping themselves to their own death as well.
this huge trove of data gathered over a short period of time indicates that the crimeware problem is far larger than most observers have been assuming.
Maybe so - but conversely they may not be able to use all of it (at least for time-limited things like credit cards) before it's expired, making me happy that they have lots of data, because when (not if) my data gets stolen from somewhere, I'm less likely to be one of those exploited. Whee.
Oh yes, and I object to the characterisation that to be a "real UNIX admin" you have to be willing and able to support any piece of shit that's passing itself off as a finished product, just because some company decided to ship it.
Nobody can know how to admin every piece of kit out there, and it's not a wise investment to spend your whole time learning everything.
If the great great grandparent poster looked at Solaris and said "the admin cost of (a) learning and (b) supporting this across multiple machines is more than it's worth, and the resources suck compared to this other system that's also compatible with my hardware" then more power to them. It sounds to me from reading that post that they're supporting their business' function better than someone stubbornly trying to learn the new tech - and in that shop Solaris is the new tech, regardless of the product line's pedigree.
An admin who recommends a system they already know how to use because they have experience and know they can get a solid working system within an outside imposed deadline is much more valuable to any company than one who spends months learning how to use a new technology just because it's theoretically "better" - especially if the "betterness" isn't actually required for the business to function.
I don't parse the bit before "this is bad" - but I assume you meant that recommending otherwise inferior technology (or changing to less superior technology) based purely on admin familiarity/comfort is bad. I disagree.
I see roughly three alternatives:
a) change to something your admin can support effectively.
b) have your admin spend work time (I'm assuming you're not having them give up the rest of their life to learn this piece of tech) leaning the technology,
c) hire someone else (depending on your local labour laws possibly firing the current admin in the process) and hope that the new person can integrate well into the company, spending time teaching them other aspects of the business they need to know, etc.
It turns out that changing the technology may actually be the cheapest and most efficient overall option for the business, even if you're not getting theoretical maximum performance from your hardware.
You really think "pkgadd -d" is comparable to aptitude or even just plain old apt-get?
I pulled in a bunch of patches for our only Solaris box the other day, and they took a good half hour _each_ to apply. Ok, so we had 10 processes streaming gzip files to a ZFS filesystem on that box, so the load was up a bit - but none of them touched the root filesystem where the patches were applying. It was on separate disks.
There's no reason IO should have been an issue - and a decent scheduler should make sure it wasn't being starved of CPU by long running tasks.
I started out running FreeBSD and moved to Linux a few years ago - I don't have heaps of Solaris mojo - much like the grandparent poster. But I can tell you that all the management tools and userland feel like a huge step backwards.
Not to be mean or anything, but seriously. If you can't handle Solaris, you shouldn't be in the sysadmin game.
"I'm such a real man I still use ed for all my editing needs. Besides, if sysadmin was easier then I wouldn't have job security any more"
I can _handle_ Solaris, even if I have the same issue of lack of background and harder to use google to get an understanding of an area I don't know yet. I just find it takes more work and time than the equivalent task on Linux. Sure the options on Linux might be less stable, less "mature" and sometimes even less reliable, but they get you up and running quicker. That matters too.
I'm reminded of how Oracle is finding the low end of their market being eaten up by smaller database engines that don't require a full time team of 5 DBAs to tune the bloody thing.
utilize its very expensive hardware to its fullest with modern OS features not yet available on Linux, your reasons are valid. Stupid, short-sighted, luddite and likely to get you fired at any other Unix shop of any size, but valid. I guess.
Ah, yeah. Big shop mentality. There will be a specialist to run each operating system. And then a specialist DBA to run the database server on that machine, and a specialist Java Sysadmin Tool person to manage the java toolchain that all the new tools depend on, and then a specialist backup manager to run the backup systems, and then...
Most small shops the sysadmins are developers too, and they probably don't need the fullest "modern OS features" for it - they need a more user-friendly userland that supports them in their jobs. If Linux is getting the job done quicker for them, then it's probably the right choice even if it doesn't have the latest filesystem.
There's always one, isn't there. Some who just can't resist.
Oh - btw. I signed a non-disclosure at the time which I think was for something insane like 5 years. It's probably expired by now. For that I got given the API names of a couple of functions that didn't advertise themselves via COM - not particularly complex to guess though.
And that was for READIRIS, which we didn't end up using anyway. ABBYY was more accurate and easier to drive.
It was an embedded copy of ABBYY that came with a scanner pen. It probably wasn't strictly within the terms of the licence, but it was only a proof of concept anyway unfortunately, the project died for unrelated reasons and I never had to scale it up.
It was receiving faxed images via email, detaching them, splitting them into individual pages, OCRing the pages and identifying them into separate "buckets" based on the form that was on the page, then using the OCRed text of some IDs to classify them further where possible (thankfully there was a crc32 in the data, so you could tell if it wasn't scanned correctly and send to a human for clarification).
Finally, a human would enter the hand-written text from the form fields, there wasn't much of it, and it was considered cheaper than trying to come up with a scanner that could read doctors' handwriting!
I've been paying for it for years - it's the only piece of software I am paying for on Linux in fact.
I find wine very much worthwhile as a "gateway drug" - in fact I was running Win32 perl driving a Windows OCR package under wine on one project - under linux.
So yeah, they have customers. I don't have a clue how many, but I'm planning to renew again next year.
I definitely think it's v2.0 - it shows all the hallmarks of second system syndrome - big, complicated, complete rewrite with all the lessons from the first one thrown out. Yep, v2.0 it is.
(maybe v2.1 now - there was a service pack applied a couple of thousand years ago according to some reports)
they can keep planting the old garden variety ones
right until the modified crop contaminates their supply and they get sued for keeping the seeds.
I had a bunch of ~200k record databases with about 8 simple tables in them. Indexing data for mail server backups in fact. I was doing lots of indexed queries on said tables, and once the sqlite database hit a certain size it went seek crazy.
By seek crazy I mean that per single _indexed_ query it would perform about 200 seeks on the database file. Multiply that by many thousands of index checks for your typical backup run and it was game over for sqlite.
The machine has 16Gb of memory and a maximum of 30 concurrent backup threads, so I wound up just slurping the entire database into hashes in memory (perl) at startup and doing hash lookups instead. Massively faster.
So yeah, not such a big sqlite fan as I once was. It didn't scale well for me.
Specifically yahoo.co.uk is sending thousands of spams per day via their SMTP service, because the UK service provides SMTP for free accounts.
Seriously, it's a trickle of a couple per second to every one of our mx servers, all day every day. Quite impressive.
(and no, I don't have any answers. Outbound spam scanning is good though)
Same to you. Two short weeks in a row here in Australia. Whee! Yay holidays. Not sure how that applies around the world.
I've given your userid the green tick of "might even be worth reading" - I'd say it's a rare commodity, but my friends list isn't all that exclusive. I saw it when I'd updated your details, and there's all sorts of suspicious looking characters on there. Um, I have no more joke. Oh well.
(stopping now before this drifts even further off topic)
For example: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=189002&cid=15571746
OK - fair enough. That's not a troll - it's a well thought out response, and there are others. I accept your story now.
(but I liked the greater internet douchebag theory, oh well)
Welcome to the internet, the shitheads are here too, and you managed to tweak a bunch of them. Sucks to be you. I guess the new userid is probably a sane idea.