Excellent interview - thanks, Linux Planet.
On the last page, though, Sun get thrown in with MS again, for being "the other licensee".
This is not a particularly clear-thinking view:
Sun, as a Unix developer (unlike MS) have a legitimate reason for licensing UNIX from the current holders, and making sure they've got everything they need for their future plans.
Those plans, as claimed by Sun, is to improve Solaris on the x86 platform and beyond (yes, even getting to SCO's level of support for some hardware would be an improvement:( and for a big corp it's quicker to buy it than to write it). With big development around Opteron, wasting time working on a 3COM 3c5x9 driver would be stupidity. Buy the thing and be done with it. Given Sun's other (Linux) plans, this was not a smart move politically with the slashdot crowd, but this seems like a purely corporate move, without moving far enough down the ladder to check it out with techies first. Such decisions tend to be made by management, not techies. Then again, Sun's Linux strategy is currently aimed more at CEOs than geeks, too. They're the ones who make the big (500k desktop) type decisions which Linux needs.
Sun have made the biggest move of anyone out there (especially including IBM, who make money selling MS software) to kill Microsoft Windows - planning to reduce the software business from $20b to $3b, by actually pushing a Linux-based desktop out there to genuine enterprises and governments.
I'm not at all convinced that saying "MS and Sun licensed UNIX from SCO recently" leads to "MS and Sun have even remotely similar views on the industry".
The open source development model insures that Linux code is open to scrutiny at the most basic level
That should be "ensures" not "insures".
Shame this advocate can't apply the principles himself - getting a peer review of the article should have picked up that simple mistake (assuming that his peers, at least, lernt gramer at skuwl)
And while they're having me take it off and wanding me down for my trouble, I'll pass the time coming up with yet another dozen ways to bypass security and end up on the wrong side of the magic gate with a highly lethal object.
So you're saying you're planning a terroist attack, are you? That's the only rational explanation for such a statement.
Isn't everyone on/. 14-30, white and middle-class?
Caring that Mr. Singh missed his appointment because you took his ticket would be unAmerican, surely;)
America stands for "beating the infidels and creating an Empire of America", and anyone who stands in its way is a terrorist to be held without charge.
Unless I missed a press release, that seems to be the agenda for the past few years.
Okay then, mark me "offtopic" for saying something contraversial.
I will not dress up for vendors
I work for a vendor, and I always wear a suit onsite - I have no expectations of what you will wear, but you have certain expectations if you're paying 1000/day for me. Wearing a suit doesn't cost me much, and I'm happy to do it.
Once we meet, and start discussing things with the suits, you'll soon be able to tell the "suits" from the "geeks in suits" so it suits me fine to wear a suit, and you'll soon know the difference.
OTOH, in the office, I won't shave, will wear a shirt but no tie, and may not even bother going to the office at all.
Give some code monkey control over the entire corporate network.
Great idea.
Just let me check that I'm not your customer, and that I don't have any shares in your firm, first.
That might have worked in the 50s and 60s; companies actually depend on their IT infrastructure these days.
I've got a 14" LCD screen at 1400x1050, and had to increase the font size to read the page; nice layer tags, all the text starts to overwrite all the other text.
Remind me to hire these guys.
http://steve-parker.org/ - looks crap but it works.
I'll be nice and assume you're not trolling. The 7+-2 rule states that the average person can be assumed to hold 7 things in short-term memory at a time. That figure varies between individuals by up to 2, so some people can only hold 5 things; some can hold 9 things; the "-" is not a "minus", it's a range; maybe "5..9" would help, or even "5..7..9"
Even if it takes you a day to work out what's needed, saving 8 minutes of your time compared to 2x1000 minutes of your user's time shows arrogance and incompetence.
As a sysadmin, your job is to keep the systems running for the people who are using it.
If it's an email server, a 2-minute (wow! that's a fast estimate!) downtime will mean that users do not receive emails. If sendmail (or whatever your critical process is) doesn't need to be restarted, don't bring it down.
You spend your day working out how to best maintain your systems, so that everyone else in the company can spend their day doing the "productive" work.
If "the users" spend their time, in your perception, swapping jokes and watching movies, that's a problem for their manager, not for you.
Get a grip, and a sense of the role of IT in a company. That's the difference between a nerd and an IT professional.
Clusters allow you to control maintenance, but there is still an impact - if you shut down a clustered NFS server (for example) the clients will timeout before re-connecting to the standby node.
If users have telnet sessions open to a machine, the telnet protocol does not allow for any such flexibility.
I'm not aware of any cluster vendor who'll support a clustered telnetd, but even the NFS example affects end-users.
If you're using a failover Oracle cluster, you have to import the shared storage, start up Oracle on the standby node, and get the listeners started before clients can re-connect.
This could take half an hour with a huge database (in which case, you'd more likely use something like RAC) but let's clear up this confusion about most clustering solutions - it's more like a really-fast-reboot (maybe with an OS upgrade or patch install included!) than fault tolerance.
The Church is the Body of Christ; Christ at the head, and the Church is the people who make up the body - here to do the "legwork" on earth, through the Holy Spirit.
The Church is often bad. Politicians are often bad; Open-source advocates are often bad; <INSERT CATEGORY HERE> are often bad. That doesn't mean that Church, Politics, or anything else in themselves are inherently wrong, just badly done.
I'm really sorry if you've been done wrong to by some church; ask for guidance for a new church which is closer to the will of God; instilling fear and increasing the power of the church collective is not God's vision for the Church, so He will provide you with a better alternative than the one which has (I assume) hurt you.
Solaris and HPUX are both SysV-based, I believe, so/opt is a more likely place for optional software.
Interestingly, Veritas now install VxVM into/opt but put tons of links into/usr/bin and/usr/sbin
Unfortunately, this doesn't help with BIND on Solaris, as it's part of the SUNWcsu (Core Solaris) package.
I have a copy of in.named, and copy it back after any patching of the DNS servers.
These troubles can be applied to all sorts of things - patches will apply "best practice" to configuration files, etc; if you choose not to follow "best practice" then it's down to you to support yourself.
I'm not saying this is a good thing - I find it a pain that I have to replace files after a patch, but of course, sensible patch management requires that you know what you are doing - after all, can I really expect to earn a decent salary for "wget ftp://sunsolve.sun.com/pub/patches/9_Recommended.z ip ; unzip 9_Recommended.zip ; cd 9_Recommended ;./install_cluster" ? - I could be replaced by a cron job.
The role of the sysadmin is to know the systems I administrate, and to balance the business benefits of maintaining my own version of BIND against the hassles it creates.
Getting Sun to move BIND out of the SUNWcsu package wouldn't fix the overall problem - it would fix my problem, but not for someone who replaces/usr/bin/vi with VIM, etc...
I've always found the idea of rooms of schoolchildren pledging allegiance to their country every morning scary - as a Brit, I make no such pledge, and am not even requested to.
Be it "under God" or anything, the whole concept of "allegiance" is something I don't believe a 5-year-old, or 11-year-old, or even a 16-year-old can be expected to understand.
It feels so propagandistic
I won't go into the irony of "freeing" other countries when America is so controlling...
I know of a current exploit in explorer (mshta) that can be used to download and execute any application on your computer
Have you reported it to MS?
Seriously, if this was on your-fave-os, I'm sure you would have reported it to them as soon as you could replicate it... have you reported it to MS?
If not, like the recent SSL bugs reported, they won't be able to fix them.
I'm all in favour of allowing a vendor to fix their problems, but bashing them for a problem you know but haven't even bothered telling them about is something else!
If you had told them about it last month, and still got no answer, then fair enough, I'd say slag them off on/. and anywhere else. But to expect a vendor to "know" what your friend discovered is unrealistic.
Do you have the same standards for libssl?
What McNealy does not get about open source is that it lets us work on the "products" (kernel, gcc, apache, et cetera) and still let companies sell the integrated "solutions" (like IBM and Red Hat enterprise support). Sun's competition is not Dell; it is other complete "solution providers".
Sun's solution includes - is based around - the UltraSPARC series of processors. Okay, they'll flog you an x86 box if you insist on one, but that's a side-issue. Sun sell tin; the software exists to make the tin useful. You can't make yourself a F15k out of open source and industry standards.
Slashdot Mirror
On the last page, though, Sun get thrown in with MS again, for being "the other licensee".
This is not a particularly clear-thinking view:
- Sun, as a Unix developer (unlike MS) have a legitimate reason for licensing UNIX from the current holders, and making sure they've got everything they need for their future plans.
- Those plans, as claimed by Sun, is to improve Solaris on the x86 platform and beyond (yes, even getting to SCO's level of support for some hardware would be an improvement
:( and for a big corp it's quicker to buy it than to write it). With big development around Opteron, wasting time working on a 3COM 3c5x9 driver would be stupidity. Buy the thing and be done with it. Given Sun's other (Linux) plans, this was not a smart move politically with the slashdot crowd, but this seems like a purely corporate move, without moving far enough down the ladder to check it out with techies first. Such decisions tend to be made by management, not techies. Then again, Sun's Linux strategy is currently aimed more at CEOs than geeks, too. They're the ones who make the big (500k desktop) type decisions which Linux needs.
- Sun have made the biggest move of anyone out there (especially including IBM, who make money selling MS software) to kill Microsoft Windows - planning to reduce the software business from $20b to $3b, by actually pushing a Linux-based desktop out there to genuine enterprises and governments.
I'm not at all convinced that saying "MS and Sun licensed UNIX from SCO recently" leads to "MS and Sun have even remotely similar views on the industry".Sure, give me physical access to the machine, as you require, and I can do as much damage as I want - even install Windows!
The open source development model insures that Linux code is open to scrutiny at the most basic level
That should be "ensures" not "insures".
Shame this advocate can't apply the principles himself - getting a peer review of the article should have picked up that simple mistake (assuming that his peers, at least, lernt gramer at skuwl)
So you're saying you're planning a terroist attack, are you? That's the only rational explanation for such a statement.
Oh, I forgot... you aren't rational.
Isn't everyone on /. 14-30, white and middle-class?
;)
Caring that Mr. Singh missed his appointment because you took his ticket would be unAmerican, surely
America stands for "beating the infidels and creating an Empire of America", and anyone who stands in its way is a terrorist to be held without charge.
Unless I missed a press release, that seems to be the agenda for the past few years.
Okay then, mark me "offtopic" for saying something contraversial.
I work for a vendor, and I always wear a suit onsite - I have no expectations of what you will wear, but you have certain expectations if you're paying 1000/day for me. Wearing a suit doesn't cost me much, and I'm happy to do it.
Once we meet, and start discussing things with the suits, you'll soon be able to tell the "suits" from the "geeks in suits" so it suits me fine to wear a suit, and you'll soon know the difference.
OTOH, in the office, I won't shave, will wear a shirt but no tie, and may not even bother going to the office at all.
Suits me, suits you, suits all round!
... but this is "News for nerds, stuff that matters" how, exactly?
I prefered 3.51, but I agree with the point.
Great idea.
Just let me check that I'm not your customer, and that I don't have any shares in your firm, first.
That might have worked in the 50s and 60s; companies actually depend on their IT infrastructure these days.
Where do these tw*ts get off?
Summary of the site's postings (taken in the dot-com boom, of course):
Remind me to hire these guys.
http://steve-parker.org/ - looks crap but it works.
I'll be nice and assume you're not trolling. The 7+-2 rule states that the average person can be assumed to hold 7 things in short-term memory at a time. That figure varies between individuals by up to 2, so some people can only hold 5 things; some can hold 9 things; the "-" is not a "minus", it's a range; maybe "5..9" would help, or even "5..7..9"
As a sysadmin, your job is to keep the systems running for the people who are using it.
If it's an email server, a 2-minute (wow! that's a fast estimate!) downtime will mean that users do not receive emails. If sendmail (or whatever your critical process is) doesn't need to be restarted, don't bring it down.
You spend your day working out how to best maintain your systems, so that everyone else in the company can spend their day doing the "productive" work.
If "the users" spend their time, in your perception, swapping jokes and watching movies, that's a problem for their manager, not for you.
Get a grip, and a sense of the role of IT in a company. That's the difference between a nerd and an IT professional.
There are no copies in the filesystem of
Whether or not a file is in use does not change the RC.
Clusters allow you to control maintenance, but there is still an impact - if you shut down a clustered NFS server (for example) the clients will timeout before re-connecting to the standby node.
If users have telnet sessions open to a machine, the telnet protocol does not allow for any such flexibility.
I'm not aware of any cluster vendor who'll support a clustered telnetd, but even the NFS example affects end-users.
If you're using a failover Oracle cluster, you have to import the shared storage, start up Oracle on the standby node, and get the listeners started before clients can re-connect.
This could take half an hour with a huge database (in which case, you'd more likely use something like RAC) but let's clear up this confusion about most clustering solutions - it's more like a really-fast-reboot (maybe with an OS upgrade or patch install included!) than fault tolerance.
Depends if it's the one that's paying me to manage their systems, and it's me who's got to explain it to the CEO.
So that's one patch installed evey leap-year. ;-)
Are you safe from CodeRed yet?
The Church is often bad. Politicians are often bad; Open-source advocates are often bad; <INSERT CATEGORY HERE> are often bad. That doesn't mean that Church, Politics, or anything else in themselves are inherently wrong, just badly done.
I'm really sorry if you've been done wrong to by some church; ask for guidance for a new church which is closer to the will of God; instilling fear and increasing the power of the church collective is not God's vision for the Church, so He will provide you with a better alternative than the one which has (I assume) hurt you.
Watch out ... BIND is part of the Core Solaris (SUNWcsu) package.
Solaris and HPUX are both SysV-based, I believe, so /opt is a more likely place for optional software. /opt but put tons of links into /usr/bin and /usr/sbin
Interestingly, Veritas now install VxVM into
Unfortunately, this doesn't help with BIND on Solaris, as it's part of the SUNWcsu (Core Solaris) package.z ip ; unzip 9_Recommended.zip ; cd 9_Recommended ; ./install_cluster" ? - I could be replaced by a cron job. /usr/bin/vi with VIM, etc...
I have a copy of in.named, and copy it back after any patching of the DNS servers.
These troubles can be applied to all sorts of things - patches will apply "best practice" to configuration files, etc; if you choose not to follow "best practice" then it's down to you to support yourself.
I'm not saying this is a good thing - I find it a pain that I have to replace files after a patch, but of course, sensible patch management requires that you know what you are doing - after all, can I really expect to earn a decent salary for "wget ftp://sunsolve.sun.com/pub/patches/9_Recommended.
The role of the sysadmin is to know the systems I administrate, and to balance the business benefits of maintaining my own version of BIND against the hassles it creates.
Getting Sun to move BIND out of the SUNWcsu package wouldn't fix the overall problem - it would fix my problem, but not for someone who replaces
Be it "under God" or anything, the whole concept of "allegiance" is something I don't believe a 5-year-old, or 11-year-old, or even a 16-year-old can be expected to understand.
It feels so propagandistic
I won't go into the irony of "freeing" other countries when America is so controlling...
Have you reported it to MS?
Seriously, if this was on your-fave-os, I'm sure you would have reported it to them as soon as you could replicate it... have you reported it to MS?
If not, like the recent SSL bugs reported, they won't be able to fix them.
I'm all in favour of allowing a vendor to fix their problems, but bashing them for a problem you know but haven't even bothered telling them about is something else!
If you had told them about it last month, and still got no answer, then fair enough, I'd say slag them off on /. and anywhere else. But to expect a vendor to "know" what your friend discovered is unrealistic.
Do you have the same standards for libssl?
Sun's solution includes - is based around - the UltraSPARC series of processors. Okay, they'll flog you an x86 box if you insist on one, but that's a side-issue. Sun sell tin; the software exists to make the tin useful. You can't make yourself a F15k out of open source and industry standards.
Hmm - buy something just so you can sue someone else about it. Nice precedent.