Seriously, you need to work for yourself. If you've had 8 ideas that companies you've worked for have taken from concept to profitability, why don't you think of the 9th one and take it to profitability on your own? I wish I had the problem you do... My problem is that although I'm good technically, I can't think of a good business-worthy idea to save my life. Most entrepreneurs (sp?) wish they had your problem.
You really should take your next idea, max out a few credit cards, and make a business out of it. If worst comes to worst, you can always go back to the 9 to 5 programmer working for the large megacorp lifestyle.
So many computer manufacturers throw around "Mobile", "Centrino", and "Pentium M" randomly, which is really what causes confusion. It would be fine if everyone just described laptops like this:
Agreed... amazing... I seem to have made a freak out of you with only 1 post... That's a new record (sort of). Cheers.
Centrino is fine and dandy, but I still want a little bit more speed than that. I want a Pentium M, but I also want to know how it really is vs that desktop. I would really like to have the fastest thing for a new laptop, as judged by experienced people. So Intel, come on and test all your chips against that 'fast' desktop!
FYI, Centrino is the same thing as Pentium M. Centrino just means you bought a laptop with a Pentium M processor and Intel's wireless chipset. bundled together. Why, oh why does Intel insist on giving everything some crappy marketing name and confusing customers?
This is a simple question, but since I am completely Apple-illiterate I'd like to know for sure. Can I plug a nice USB audio card on the mini? Will it work? An Audigy NX would be a nice choice for games, a firewire m-audio would be nice for recording. Generally speaking, do PC USB peripherals work with apple computers or do I need "special" expensive Mac versions?
Yes, you can. I'm running a Tascam US-428 USB audio interface off of my PowerBook. I originally bought the US-428 to use with my Athlon XP homebrew box a few years ago, but when I "switched" I found it worked great with OS X Panther as well. The drivers are rock solid stable and I also found the G4 architecture lets me load more VST plugins than my Athlon ever did. Altivec on the G4 makes the Mac a monster for processing audio. Also, my brother just bought an M-Audio Firewire 410 interface for his iBook that is sweet! I'm jealous, but what can I say.
Definitely some interesting speculation by Cringely, but I don't think it will happen for one reason and one reason only: 5.1 Optical Output... The Mac mini has none. On the new iMac, they included an audio out that doubles as stereo analog or 5.1 Optical with the purchase of an adapter. They could have included this new type of output on the Mac mini, but obviously chose not to, probably for cost reasons. If the Mac mini was really intended to be a media box they would have included a digital surround sound output. Who wants to watch HiDef movies with crappy Dolby ProLogic surround?
Now, perhaps a rev. B of the Mac mini will be released when Tiger comes out that will have optical out, perhaps a component out dongle, Blu-Ray burner, and be called the Mac movie, but I wouldn't count on it.
That's one thing about Cringely. He makes some great predictions like "yeah, wouldn't that be cool if Apple released the Mac mini for $249..." Yeah, Robert, that would be really cool, but you know what? Apple is in business to make money, not to cater to all of the Mac fanboys out there.
Don't get me wrong, I love my G4 AlBook, but this prediction doesn't sound too realistic right now.
Not directly involving the iPod, but this week's I Cringely has a discussion of how the new Mac Mini may be a move by Apple to get into the movie distribution business, trying to repeat with video the success they've had with the iPod for audio. He has some interesting speculation on synergy from Pixar (which Jobs also controls) and Sony ("...you don't get the head of Sony at your event just to sell camcorders"). Well worth a read.
Definitely some interesting speculation by Cringely, but I don't think it will happen for one reason and one reason only: 5.1 Optical Output... The Mac mini has none. On the new iMac, they included an audio out that doubles as stereo analog or 5.1 Optical with the purchase of an adapter. They could have included this new type of output on the Mac mini, but obviously chose not to, probably for cost reasons. If the Mac mini was really intended to be a media box they would have included a digital surround sound output. Who wants to watch HiDef movies with crappy Dolby ProLogic surround?
Now, perhaps a rev. B of the Mac mini will be released when Tiger comes out that will have optical out, perhaps a component out dongle, Blu-Ray burner, and be called the Mac movie, but I wouldn't count on it.
That's one thing about Cringely. He makes some great predictions like "yeah, wouldn't that be cool if Apple released the Mac mini for $249..." Yeah, Robert, that would be really cool, but you know what? Apple is in business to make money, not to cater to all of the Mac fanboys out there.
Don't get me wrong, I love my G4 AlBook, but this prediction doesn't sound too realistic right now.
I have never had to que up or get lagged out on the Dalaran server.
Thanks... I have never had any problems and my level 30 rogue is on the Dalaran server... Until now... Thanks, dmauro, for telling all of the lagging PvP mofos out there where the good servers are...;-P I guess I'll just have to go back to Diablo I and II for my RPG fun. You've ruined WoW for me...
I have a 15" AlBook that has a card slot. I never use it personally, but I know why Apple still includes it:
Final Cut Pro users that need dual-channel FW800 RAID to their DV editing storage.
Also, any number of high end RAID adapters that allow power users to connect into high speed storage.
It's there for a reason. The PowerBook is used by a lot of Apple's high-end creative market and you wouldn't believe the furor that they would cause if Apple tried to take it out.
"Real" servers are not that expensive by the way, especially compared to the price of IP-KVM.
I agree with you completely. You know, Linux is nice and fast and all but I feel like I've gone back in time 15 years to my PC tech support days when I have to lug a full-size keyboard, monitor, and mouse around just to reboot a box that's borked and won't network properly. Unix had it right back in the 70s with serial ports, why can't any PC BIOS manufacturers make a decent BIOS that only uses serial output? Actually, we just got these Enterasys IDS boxes that run Linux and they output the BIOS to the serial port. The only problem is that the Linux install ISO that ships with them doesn't have the serial console kernel module so as soon as you try to boot to CD your serial console goes dead... Nice one... Take a nice hardware implementation and cripple it by a lame software implementation.
Damn Linux vendors never seem to get it right WRT manageability. A big part of the TCO of a system is the 2 hours or so of downtime every time a system borks and your admin has to track down a keyboard, monitor, and mouse, and truck them out to the data center just to reboot a box. On a real Unix box (Sun, HP, or IBM), I would just console in and reboot the damn thing. The newer Sun boxes even have LOM (lights out management) that lets me power cycle the box remotely right from the console. Try doing that on an Intel box (without using an APC masterswitch).
A "teensy litle fan" that will have to run at umpteen hundred RPM's and sound like a mini jet engine. Well, there goes my dream of the perfect home server:-(
From the page:
Best of all, Mac mini purrs along at a whisper-quiet sound level, so there's no reason to hide it under your desk like an old PC to save your ears. (Emphasis added)
I think the key word there is purred. I have a 1.25 PowerBook and the fan only comes on when the thing is really working (maxed out CPU). When it does come on, it sounds a bit like a kitty purring. I'm pretty sure this new notebook is using the same chipset as an iBook or PowerBook, so you could probably expect similar cooling. Of course I haven't seen one in person yet so I could be wrong.
3) Apple will take a big risk in 2005. This could be in the form of a major acquisition. With almost $6 billion in cash, Steve Jobs hinted to a group of employees not long ago that he might want to buy something big, though I am at a loss right now for what that might be. Or Apple might decide to throw some of that cash into the box along with new computers by deliberately losing some money on each unit in order to buy market share.
We might see that as early as next week with the rumored introduction of an el-cheapo Mac without a display. The price for that box is supposed to be $499, which would give customers a box with processor, disk, memory, and OS into which you plug your current display, keyboard, and mouse. Given that this sounds a lot like AMD's new Personal Internet Communicator, which will sell for $185, there is probably plenty of profit left for Apple in a $499 price. But what if they priced it at $399 or even $349? Now make it $249, where I calculate they'd be losing $100 per unit. At $100 per unit, how many little Macs could they sell if Jobs is willing to spend $1 billion? TEN MILLION and Apple suddenly becomes the world's number one PC company. Think of it as a non-mobile iPod with computing capability. Think of the music sales it could spawn. Think of the iPod sales it would hurt (zero, because of the lack of mobility). Think of the more expensive Mac sales it would hurt (zero, because a Mac loyalist would only be interested in using this box as an EXTRA computer they would otherwise not have bought). Think of the extra application sales it would generate and especially the OS upgrade sales, which alone could pay back that $100. Think of the impact it would have on Windows sales (minus 10 million units). And if it doesn't work, Steve will still have $5 billion in cash with no measurable negative impact on the company. I think he'll do it.
Just because you want it to happen doesn't mean it's going to happen. Bob Cringely seems to quite often second guess major industry players and try to predict what they're going to do, but let me just ask you this one question:
Has Apple ever sold a computer and taken a loss on it?
Also, if Apple were to sell 10 million of these things, that's a $1 billion loss, but what if people love the cheap price and they "accidentally" sell 50 million of them? That's a $5 billion loss and now he's almost bankrupted the company. Of course, they could make it up on iPod sales, but they can't run the company on only iPod sales profits.
This 'MUD' thing he speaks of is not WoW. It's one of a huge number of text-based online RPGs, the precursers to MMORPGS like EQ and WoW. Mud Connector is a good portal. Alternatively, telnet into hexonyx.com:7777 to see what it's about.
I know what a MUD is; I've been BBSing since before the days of PPP stacks when the only internet that existed was shell acounts on Uni servers. I was making a joke about a currently popular virtual game.
I see you've been playing World of Warcraft a little bit too much lately, eh, Taco?;-)
You know you have no life when every Slashdot story has a virtual world analogy.
Now to get back on topic, don't you wish Blizzard would develop a Skype-like protocol to allow secure in-game communication with headsets? My hands get tired of typing so much.
Normally I'd just pipe up with some nonsense and hope that someone would say RTFA!!! In this case there is no FA! Perhaps a linky or two would be appreciated by those of us that actually like to RTFA.
Are you using the latest RHEL package available though? RHEL3 ships with a version poor version of Samba (like 3.0.0rcXXX or something). I've had tons of problems with it. You can get pretty much the newest version from RedHat though.
Yes, I ran up2date and updated to the latest version.
Nope, we don't do that:-) We've taken bug reports that require mainframes, metaframe client, OS/2, or any number of weird setups. It's a large team with a lot of resources.
That is good to hear. I think I'll try compiling all of my information and creating a bug. The Redhat support guy was stumped as well. At first he thought it was an SSL thing (we use SSL of course for LDAP), but even disabling SSL and using standard port 389 the same problem existed.
IBM has a product called IBM Directory Integrator who's sole purpose in life is two syncronize two separate directories. You should check it out.
Any idea what the cost is? This might be a workable solution, but I'd like to reduce the complexity as much as possible. The ideal solution would be to get it working with iPlanet as the backend, since that was the original goal.
BTW, I should say that even though the solution we were trying to implement was not supported, the Redhat guy was nice enough to try and reproduce our setup and help us (for a week or two, until he got stumped and said "sorry, it's not supported").
Samba 3 does work with whatever Sun is calling their directory these days (I get confused;) ). Ive got it running myself actually, as a PDC. Granted, the directory is on the same box as the samba software, which is admittedly different than what you have (for one Im not even using Linux in this case) - but it works.
Excellent... Might I ask if you had to compile Samba linked against the Sun LDAP libraries? If so, what configure command did you use? This information would be very helpful. Also, what pre-requisite packages did you either compile/pkgadd to get it there? Also, are you using the Idealx perl scripts to add, modify, and delete users?
FYI, I was able to add the schema correctly. I was also able to run the smbldap-populate script and populated the correct information into the directory server. I'm also able to join a machine to the domain just fine, but it's just the authentication that fails. If I watch my directory server log, I see the Samba server do a bind and get the user account in question, but the authentication fails as if I had typed in an invalid password. Also, users that are added to LDAP can properly authenticate with Unix and Linux; nss_ldap and pam_ldap are working just fine.
If you'd be willing to help I'd be very appreciative.
Were you linking against iPlanet LDAP libs or OpenLDAP libs? It's quite possible that you're linking against the OpenLDAP libs and that they're not getting along with iPlanet.
Samba only uses the standard LDAP calls. Other than the schema extensions (which unfortunately aren't in a standardized format) there's no LDAP-platform dependence.
Well, you see, that's the problem... Management refuses to let me implement a solution that's not supported, and as soon as I go and compile Samba custom, I lose the ability to call Redhat for support. Also, Redhat doesn't support use of any LDAP server other than OpenLDAP, which really screws us, although I'm told this might change with RHEL 4, especially since Redhat just acquired Netscape Directory Server.
Even the Samba team has realized that OpenLDAP sucks and has started writing their own LDAP implementation for Samba 4 (look in the roadmap, you'll see it's in there, but not yet started or written yet).
Perhaps IBM Directory Server is the way to go... it sounds like you're getting good use out of it... My only problem is that we're mostly a Sun shop and Sun bundles iPlanet Directory Server free with Solaris (up to 200,000 entries), which makes the price right.
Also, did you have to compile Samba with IBM's LDAP libraries to make it work properly?
Again, I run into the problem of management wanting a single throat to choke if the system goes belly up and dies on us. It's really difficult, but every solution in our company has to be built with standard off-the-shelf components or else management won't green-light it. I think this is typical in the corporate world though. The thing is, I might be an uber-hacker and able to compile Samba and link three or four custom libraries into it, but suppose I quit and the next admin they bring in is a point-and-click Windows admin who doesn't know how to compile software? They want him to be able to support it, so I'm screwed.
In regards to your other question:
Why haven't you submitted this as a bug report at samba.org?
Because I know they'd probably throw it back in my face and say it's unreproduceable since who wants to install Iplanet Directory Server and set up a whole PDC + Windows XP client just to reproduce the bug? Also, if it turns out the problem is Samba was built linked against the OpenLDAP libs instead of iPlanet libs then it is considered a "configuration issue" anyway and is not their problem (even though MS should probably have a look at it, since XP shouldn't be blue-screening like that, no matter what packet a PDC sends it).
BTW, thanks for the info, you've given me some valuable help for 6 months or so down the road when I decide to give this project a second shot.
For now, our solution is probably going to be "roll OpenLDAP, keep it separate from the Unix LDAP (iPlanet on Solaris), and just maintain two separate directories..." (ugh... the Holy Grail of Single Sign On eludes us once again...)
It would be nice if they actually fixed their LDAP code so that it would work with any directory server other than OpenLDAP. The fact of the matter is, I spent the last month trying to get PDC functionality to work with iPlanet Directory Server, and even Netscape Directory Server, which coincidentally Redhat just purchased, and the buggy Samba implementation of LDAP as a storage mechanism for account information just doesn't work with anything other than OpenLDAP. Users on a Windows XP workstation can't authenticate, and sometimes they can authenticate by the XP client gets a BSOD right after authenticating. It's bizzare, it's actually as if Samba is sending the XP client a buffer overflow while authenticating. If someone can prove me wrong I would be happy to hear it.
I spent weeks working with RHEL technical support, and even had one of the Redhat support techs rebuild my environment, and sure enough, his users can't authenticate either (and experience the same BSOD).
I'd love to be able to replace my entire Windows NT 4 domain with Samba running on Linux, but until Samba can actually provide a backup domain controller functionality that works with our existing LDAP infrastructure, I'm sorry, but Samba is not ready for prime-time. Having a single point of failure in your Samba PDC is not acceptable for enterprise use.
Can you believe the only workable enterprise-level solution for Samba is to make the Samba server a domain member of an Active Directory domain? And then you still have to purchase Windows Client Access Licenses (CALs) for all of your workstations, saving you $0!!! (Not to mention your RHEL license and support fees which are more expensive than Windows 2003 Server)....
Fucking ridiculous... If I sound a little pissed off it's because I wasted a month of my time trying to get this buggy software to work properly and even Redhat enterprise support just threw up their hands and said: Sorry, it's not supported and doesn't work.
You know what looks disconcerting ot me, there is apparently no way to generate more lift. You pop a balloon, it's gone. You can't do a burn like in a hot air balloon.
RTFA, you release water or ballast to increase your lift, and pop or release balloons to decrease your lift. But since you can only carry a limited number of balloons or ballast, you can only ascend or descend a limited number of times.
This year, more companies are migrating to GroupWise from Exchange, than the other way around (which is a first). Correspondingly, the NGWList server is picking up newbies. Also, Novell has a Linux strategy, so if companies do start switching their mail servers away from Windows, the companies get use the Evolution client, and choose from GroupWise or OpenExchange as the backend. I'm biased, but I know that the fundamental architecture of GroupWise is good. So I think does have a decent chance.
Talk about getting a wrong first impression of somebody from reading a single post... It sounds like you definitely have been keeping your skills up to date. I may be a little out of touch with the email market as well since the Novell/Suse acquisition but it looks like Novell is making some steps in the right direction and shaking things up a little bit in the email market as well.
I wish you the best of luck in your job search as well. Your skillset still does sound a little Novell-centric. Not that that's a bad thing...:-) I was a CNE at one point in my career too, and Suse is doing some amazing things so we may just see the industry come full circle again and Novell might once again be on top... who knows... stranger things have happened.
I was laid off about a month ago. My primary duty was running a 1,800 user GroupWise system.
I hate to break it to you, but that's exactly the reason why you got laid off... Groupwise is an outdated product that has been dying for years now. Trust me, I used to work at Novell, and before that WordPerfect. I worked as a software quality engineer (glorified title for software tester) testing WordPerfect Office, and after they changed the name, Novell Groupwise administration.
Groupwise was a great product, and did extremely well back when most companies were not connected to the internet. But they really missed the boat when it came to SMTP. I used to do testing on the Groupwise SMTP gateway, and what a piece of shit that was around the 4.x version... I could routinely crash the entire SMTP gateway just by sending myself a message with a uuencoded attachment... Can you say buffer overflow? The developer that wrote that piece of shit hadn't even accounted for the fact that people might send messages that were larger than a few kilobytes, much less attach files that might be 50k... The mind boggles...
Anyway, I could sit here and list the ways that Novell (and WordPerfect) missed the boat with Groupwise, but that would take forever... Suffice it to say that MS provided a better product (maybe more full of security holes, but overall had more features) than Novell, and beat them to the market with internet mail support and that is why they are a has-been when it comes to corporate email.
If you wanted to stay employed, why didn't you spend the last 10 years learning new skills? I know I sure as hell did. I used to be an expert at Groupwise; I even learned the inner nuts and bolts of how messages flow through their server (basically as files copied from incoming directories to outgoing directories), but that information is worthless to me now... I've spent the last 8 years of my career as a Unix Sysadmin, working on Sun servers, and overall I'm pleased with my career path.
Want to know what skillsets I'm honing for the next round of IT layoff madness?
LDAP, Single-Sign-On, and security infrastructure (IDS, Host vulnerability scanning, central syslog servers, etc...)
Word to the wise: If you want to keep an IT career, you better do the same.
Right on! I feel the same way at my work. I work at a small company and you can definitely tell who is pulling their weight and who isn't. Ever since reading Ayn Rand I have to agree with what she says about the "moochers". There are too many people in this world that only do the bare minimum amount of work in order to keep from being fired. If you're one of those people you can expect to always be one inch away from losing your job. I figure the best approach is to distance myself from all the losers by excelling at what I do and let everyone else try to catch up. If you take this type of attitude and try to do your job to the best of your ability, others will notice and I predict that you'll be more likely to keep your job. Not only that, you will keep your skillset top notch and even if you end up getting laid off for some unpredictable reason (company goes out of business, etc), you'll be able to find another job easier.
Sorry, but this information is just blatantly incorrect. Mormon is a nickname that members of the LDS church use for each other. It's not the official name, but most members won't be too offended if you call them that.
Also, if you are a member of the LDS church then you don't practice polygamy at all. Polygamy is grounds for execution. There are a few "splinter groups" of crazies that split off from the LDS church and started their own polygamy cults, but they are not acknowledged by the church or it's members, and are generally considered to be wackos by most sane people.
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Seriously, you need to work for yourself. If you've had 8 ideas that companies you've worked for have taken from concept to profitability, why don't you think of the 9th one and take it to profitability on your own? I wish I had the problem you do... My problem is that although I'm good technically, I can't think of a good business-worthy idea to save my life. Most entrepreneurs (sp?) wish they had your problem.
You really should take your next idea, max out a few credit cards, and make a business out of it. If worst comes to worst, you can always go back to the 9 to 5 programmer working for the large megacorp lifestyle.
So many computer manufacturers throw around "Mobile", "Centrino", and "Pentium M" randomly, which is really what causes confusion. It would be fine if everyone just described laptops like this:
Agreed... amazing... I seem to have made a freak out of you with only 1 post... That's a new record (sort of). Cheers.
Centrino is fine and dandy, but I still want a little bit more speed than that. I want a Pentium M, but I also want to know how it really is vs that desktop. I would really like to have the fastest thing for a new laptop, as judged by experienced people. So Intel, come on and test all your chips against that 'fast' desktop!
FYI, Centrino is the same thing as Pentium M. Centrino just means you bought a laptop with a Pentium M processor and Intel's wireless chipset. bundled together. Why, oh why does Intel insist on giving everything some crappy marketing name and confusing customers?
This is a simple question, but since I am completely Apple-illiterate I'd like to know for sure. Can I plug a nice USB audio card on the mini? Will it work? An Audigy NX would be a nice choice for games, a firewire m-audio would be nice for recording. Generally speaking, do PC USB peripherals work with apple computers or do I need "special" expensive Mac versions?
Yes, you can. I'm running a Tascam US-428 USB audio interface off of my PowerBook. I originally bought the US-428 to use with my Athlon XP homebrew box a few years ago, but when I "switched" I found it worked great with OS X Panther as well. The drivers are rock solid stable and I also found the G4 architecture lets me load more VST plugins than my Athlon ever did. Altivec on the G4 makes the Mac a monster for processing audio. Also, my brother just bought an M-Audio Firewire 410 interface for his iBook that is sweet! I'm jealous, but what can I say.
Definitely some interesting speculation by Cringely, but I don't think it will happen for one reason and one reason only: 5.1 Optical Output... The Mac mini has none. On the new iMac, they included an audio out that doubles as stereo analog or 5.1 Optical with the purchase of an adapter. They could have included this new type of output on the Mac mini, but obviously chose not to, probably for cost reasons. If the Mac mini was really intended to be a media box they would have included a digital surround sound output. Who wants to watch HiDef movies with crappy Dolby ProLogic surround?
Now, perhaps a rev. B of the Mac mini will be released when Tiger comes out that will have optical out, perhaps a component out dongle, Blu-Ray burner, and be called the Mac movie, but I wouldn't count on it.
That's one thing about Cringely. He makes some great predictions like "yeah, wouldn't that be cool if Apple released the Mac mini for $249..." Yeah, Robert, that would be really cool, but you know what? Apple is in business to make money, not to cater to all of the Mac fanboys out there.
Don't get me wrong, I love my G4 AlBook, but this prediction doesn't sound too realistic right now.
Not directly involving the iPod, but this week's I Cringely has a discussion of how the new Mac Mini may be a move by Apple to get into the movie distribution business, trying to repeat with video the success they've had with the iPod for audio. He has some interesting speculation on synergy from Pixar (which Jobs also controls) and Sony ("...you don't get the head of Sony at your event just to sell camcorders"). Well worth a read.
Definitely some interesting speculation by Cringely, but I don't think it will happen for one reason and one reason only: 5.1 Optical Output... The Mac mini has none. On the new iMac, they included an audio out that doubles as stereo analog or 5.1 Optical with the purchase of an adapter. They could have included this new type of output on the Mac mini, but obviously chose not to, probably for cost reasons. If the Mac mini was really intended to be a media box they would have included a digital surround sound output. Who wants to watch HiDef movies with crappy Dolby ProLogic surround?
Now, perhaps a rev. B of the Mac mini will be released when Tiger comes out that will have optical out, perhaps a component out dongle, Blu-Ray burner, and be called the Mac movie, but I wouldn't count on it.
That's one thing about Cringely. He makes some great predictions like "yeah, wouldn't that be cool if Apple released the Mac mini for $249..." Yeah, Robert, that would be really cool, but you know what? Apple is in business to make money, not to cater to all of the Mac fanboys out there.
Don't get me wrong, I love my G4 AlBook, but this prediction doesn't sound too realistic right now.
I have never had to que up or get lagged out on the Dalaran server.
;-P I guess I'll just have to go back to Diablo I and II for my RPG fun. You've ruined WoW for me...
Thanks... I have never had any problems and my level 30 rogue is on the Dalaran server... Until now... Thanks, dmauro, for telling all of the lagging PvP mofos out there where the good servers are...
Hahaha... JK.
I'm hoping that mine is going to cost $589 less... :-)
I have a 15" AlBook that has a card slot. I never use it personally, but I know why Apple still includes it:
Final Cut Pro users that need dual-channel FW800 RAID to their DV editing storage.
Also, any number of high end RAID adapters that allow power users to connect into high speed storage.
It's there for a reason. The PowerBook is used by a lot of Apple's high-end creative market and you wouldn't believe the furor that they would cause if Apple tried to take it out.
"Real" servers are not that expensive by the way, especially compared to the price of IP-KVM.
I agree with you completely. You know, Linux is nice and fast and all but I feel like I've gone back in time 15 years to my PC tech support days when I have to lug a full-size keyboard, monitor, and mouse around just to reboot a box that's borked and won't network properly. Unix had it right back in the 70s with serial ports, why can't any PC BIOS manufacturers make a decent BIOS that only uses serial output? Actually, we just got these Enterasys IDS boxes that run Linux and they output the BIOS to the serial port. The only problem is that the Linux install ISO that ships with them doesn't have the serial console kernel module so as soon as you try to boot to CD your serial console goes dead... Nice one... Take a nice hardware implementation and cripple it by a lame software implementation.
Damn Linux vendors never seem to get it right WRT manageability. A big part of the TCO of a system is the 2 hours or so of downtime every time a system borks and your admin has to track down a keyboard, monitor, and mouse, and truck them out to the data center just to reboot a box. On a real Unix box (Sun, HP, or IBM), I would just console in and reboot the damn thing. The newer Sun boxes even have LOM (lights out management) that lets me power cycle the box remotely right from the console. Try doing that on an Intel box (without using an APC masterswitch).
You wrote:
:-(
A "teensy litle fan" that will have to run at umpteen hundred RPM's and sound like a mini jet engine. Well, there goes my dream of the perfect home server
From the page:
Best of all, Mac mini purrs along at a whisper-quiet sound level, so there's no reason to hide it under your desk like an old PC to save your ears. (Emphasis added)
I think the key word there is purred. I have a 1.25 PowerBook and the fan only comes on when the thing is really working (maxed out CPU). When it does come on, it sounds a bit like a kitty purring. I'm pretty sure this new notebook is using the same chipset as an iBook or PowerBook, so you could probably expect similar cooling. Of course I haven't seen one in person yet so I could be wrong.
Just because you want it to happen doesn't mean it's going to happen. Bob Cringely seems to quite often second guess major industry players and try to predict what they're going to do, but let me just ask you this one question:
Has Apple ever sold a computer and taken a loss on it?
Also, if Apple were to sell 10 million of these things, that's a $1 billion loss, but what if people love the cheap price and they "accidentally" sell 50 million of them? That's a $5 billion loss and now he's almost bankrupted the company. Of course, they could make it up on iPod sales, but they can't run the company on only iPod sales profits.
Good article, BTW.
This 'MUD' thing he speaks of is not WoW. It's one of a huge number of text-based online RPGs, the precursers to MMORPGS like EQ and WoW. Mud Connector is a good portal. Alternatively, telnet into hexonyx.com:7777 to see what it's about.
I know what a MUD is; I've been BBSing since before the days of PPP stacks when the only internet that existed was shell acounts on Uni servers. I was making a joke about a currently popular virtual game.
I see you've been playing World of Warcraft a little bit too much lately, eh, Taco? ;-)
You know you have no life when every Slashdot story has a virtual world analogy.
Now to get back on topic, don't you wish Blizzard would develop a Skype-like protocol to allow secure in-game communication with headsets? My hands get tired of typing so much.
Normally I'd just pipe up with some nonsense and hope that someone would say RTFA!!! In this case there is no FA! Perhaps a linky or two would be appreciated by those of us that actually like to RTFA.
Are you using the latest RHEL package available though? RHEL3 ships with a version poor version of Samba (like 3.0.0rcXXX or something). I've had tons of problems with it. You can get pretty much the newest version from RedHat though.
:-) We've taken bug reports that require mainframes, metaframe client, OS/2, or any number of weird setups. It's a large team with a lot of resources.
Yes, I ran up2date and updated to the latest version.
Nope, we don't do that
That is good to hear. I think I'll try compiling all of my information and creating a bug. The Redhat support guy was stumped as well. At first he thought it was an SSL thing (we use SSL of course for LDAP), but even disabling SSL and using standard port 389 the same problem existed.
IBM has a product called IBM Directory Integrator who's sole purpose in life is two syncronize two separate directories. You should check it out.
Any idea what the cost is? This might be a workable solution, but I'd like to reduce the complexity as much as possible. The ideal solution would be to get it working with iPlanet as the backend, since that was the original goal.
BTW, I should say that even though the solution we were trying to implement was not supported, the Redhat guy was nice enough to try and reproduce our setup and help us (for a week or two, until he got stumped and said "sorry, it's not supported").
Samba 3 does work with whatever Sun is calling their directory these days (I get confused ;) ). Ive got it running myself actually, as a PDC. Granted, the directory is on the same box as the samba software, which is admittedly different than what you have (for one Im not even using Linux in this case) - but it works.
Excellent... Might I ask if you had to compile Samba linked against the Sun LDAP libraries? If so, what configure command did you use? This information would be very helpful. Also, what pre-requisite packages did you either compile/pkgadd to get it there? Also, are you using the Idealx perl scripts to add, modify, and delete users?
FYI, I was able to add the schema correctly. I was also able to run the smbldap-populate script and populated the correct information into the directory server. I'm also able to join a machine to the domain just fine, but it's just the authentication that fails. If I watch my directory server log, I see the Samba server do a bind and get the user account in question, but the authentication fails as if I had typed in an invalid password. Also, users that are added to LDAP can properly authenticate with Unix and Linux; nss_ldap and pam_ldap are working just fine.
If you'd be willing to help I'd be very appreciative.
Were you linking against iPlanet LDAP libs or OpenLDAP libs? It's quite possible that you're linking against the OpenLDAP libs and that they're not getting along with iPlanet.
Samba only uses the standard LDAP calls. Other than the schema extensions (which unfortunately aren't in a standardized format) there's no LDAP-platform dependence.
Well, you see, that's the problem... Management refuses to let me implement a solution that's not supported, and as soon as I go and compile Samba custom, I lose the ability to call Redhat for support. Also, Redhat doesn't support use of any LDAP server other than OpenLDAP, which really screws us, although I'm told this might change with RHEL 4, especially since Redhat just acquired Netscape Directory Server.
Even the Samba team has realized that OpenLDAP sucks and has started writing their own LDAP implementation for Samba 4 (look in the roadmap, you'll see it's in there, but not yet started or written yet).
Perhaps IBM Directory Server is the way to go... it sounds like you're getting good use out of it... My only problem is that we're mostly a Sun shop and Sun bundles iPlanet Directory Server free with Solaris (up to 200,000 entries), which makes the price right.
Also, did you have to compile Samba with IBM's LDAP libraries to make it work properly?
Again, I run into the problem of management wanting a single throat to choke if the system goes belly up and dies on us. It's really difficult, but every solution in our company has to be built with standard off-the-shelf components or else management won't green-light it. I think this is typical in the corporate world though. The thing is, I might be an uber-hacker and able to compile Samba and link three or four custom libraries into it, but suppose I quit and the next admin they bring in is a point-and-click Windows admin who doesn't know how to compile software? They want him to be able to support it, so I'm screwed.
In regards to your other question:
Why haven't you submitted this as a bug report at samba.org?
Because I know they'd probably throw it back in my face and say it's unreproduceable since who wants to install Iplanet Directory Server and set up a whole PDC + Windows XP client just to reproduce the bug? Also, if it turns out the problem is Samba was built linked against the OpenLDAP libs instead of iPlanet libs then it is considered a "configuration issue" anyway and is not their problem (even though MS should probably have a look at it, since XP shouldn't be blue-screening like that, no matter what packet a PDC sends it).
BTW, thanks for the info, you've given me some valuable help for 6 months or so down the road when I decide to give this project a second shot.
For now, our solution is probably going to be "roll OpenLDAP, keep it separate from the Unix LDAP (iPlanet on Solaris), and just maintain two separate directories..." (ugh... the Holy Grail of Single Sign On eludes us once again...)
It would be nice if they actually fixed their LDAP code so that it would work with any directory server other than OpenLDAP. The fact of the matter is, I spent the last month trying to get PDC functionality to work with iPlanet Directory Server, and even Netscape Directory Server, which coincidentally Redhat just purchased, and the buggy Samba implementation of LDAP as a storage mechanism for account information just doesn't work with anything other than OpenLDAP. Users on a Windows XP workstation can't authenticate, and sometimes they can authenticate by the XP client gets a BSOD right after authenticating. It's bizzare, it's actually as if Samba is sending the XP client a buffer overflow while authenticating. If someone can prove me wrong I would be happy to hear it.
I spent weeks working with RHEL technical support, and even had one of the Redhat support techs rebuild my environment, and sure enough, his users can't authenticate either (and experience the same BSOD).
I'd love to be able to replace my entire Windows NT 4 domain with Samba running on Linux, but until Samba can actually provide a backup domain controller functionality that works with our existing LDAP infrastructure, I'm sorry, but Samba is not ready for prime-time. Having a single point of failure in your Samba PDC is not acceptable for enterprise use.
Can you believe the only workable enterprise-level solution for Samba is to make the Samba server a domain member of an Active Directory domain? And then you still have to purchase Windows Client Access Licenses (CALs) for all of your workstations, saving you $0!!! (Not to mention your RHEL license and support fees which are more expensive than Windows 2003 Server)....
Fucking ridiculous... If I sound a little pissed off it's because I wasted a month of my time trying to get this buggy software to work properly and even Redhat enterprise support just threw up their hands and said: Sorry, it's not supported and doesn't work.
You know what looks disconcerting ot me, there is apparently no way to generate more lift. You pop a balloon, it's gone. You can't do a burn like in a hot air balloon.
RTFA, you release water or ballast to increase your lift, and pop or release balloons to decrease your lift. But since you can only carry a limited number of balloons or ballast, you can only ascend or descend a limited number of times.
This year, more companies are migrating to GroupWise from Exchange, than the other way around (which is a first). Correspondingly, the NGWList server is picking up newbies. Also, Novell has a Linux strategy, so if companies do start switching their mail servers away from Windows, the companies get use the Evolution client, and choose from GroupWise or OpenExchange as the backend. I'm biased, but I know that the fundamental architecture of GroupWise is good. So I think does have a decent chance.
:-) I was a CNE at one point in my career too, and Suse is doing some amazing things so we may just see the industry come full circle again and Novell might once again be on top... who knows... stranger things have happened.
Talk about getting a wrong first impression of somebody from reading a single post... It sounds like you definitely have been keeping your skills up to date. I may be a little out of touch with the email market as well since the Novell/Suse acquisition but it looks like Novell is making some steps in the right direction and shaking things up a little bit in the email market as well.
I wish you the best of luck in your job search as well. Your skillset still does sound a little Novell-centric. Not that that's a bad thing...
I was laid off about a month ago. My primary duty was running a 1,800 user GroupWise system.
I hate to break it to you, but that's exactly the reason why you got laid off... Groupwise is an outdated product that has been dying for years now. Trust me, I used to work at Novell, and before that WordPerfect. I worked as a software quality engineer (glorified title for software tester) testing WordPerfect Office, and after they changed the name, Novell Groupwise administration.
Groupwise was a great product, and did extremely well back when most companies were not connected to the internet. But they really missed the boat when it came to SMTP. I used to do testing on the Groupwise SMTP gateway, and what a piece of shit that was around the 4.x version... I could routinely crash the entire SMTP gateway just by sending myself a message with a uuencoded attachment... Can you say buffer overflow? The developer that wrote that piece of shit hadn't even accounted for the fact that people might send messages that were larger than a few kilobytes, much less attach files that might be 50k... The mind boggles...
Anyway, I could sit here and list the ways that Novell (and WordPerfect) missed the boat with Groupwise, but that would take forever... Suffice it to say that MS provided a better product (maybe more full of security holes, but overall had more features) than Novell, and beat them to the market with internet mail support and that is why they are a has-been when it comes to corporate email.
If you wanted to stay employed, why didn't you spend the last 10 years learning new skills? I know I sure as hell did. I used to be an expert at Groupwise; I even learned the inner nuts and bolts of how messages flow through their server (basically as files copied from incoming directories to outgoing directories), but that information is worthless to me now... I've spent the last 8 years of my career as a Unix Sysadmin, working on Sun servers, and overall I'm pleased with my career path.
Want to know what skillsets I'm honing for the next round of IT layoff madness?
LDAP, Single-Sign-On, and security infrastructure (IDS, Host vulnerability scanning, central syslog servers, etc...)
Word to the wise: If you want to keep an IT career, you better do the same.
Right on! I feel the same way at my work. I work at a small company and you can definitely tell who is pulling their weight and who isn't. Ever since reading Ayn Rand I have to agree with what she says about the "moochers". There are too many people in this world that only do the bare minimum amount of work in order to keep from being fired. If you're one of those people you can expect to always be one inch away from losing your job. I figure the best approach is to distance myself from all the losers by excelling at what I do and let everyone else try to catch up. If you take this type of attitude and try to do your job to the best of your ability, others will notice and I predict that you'll be more likely to keep your job. Not only that, you will keep your skillset top notch and even if you end up getting laid off for some unpredictable reason (company goes out of business, etc), you'll be able to find another job easier.
OOPS! Not execution, I meant EXCOMMUNICATION... big difference... :-)
(It's late)
Sorry, but this information is just blatantly incorrect. Mormon is a nickname that members of the LDS church use for each other. It's not the official name, but most members won't be too offended if you call them that.
Also, if you are a member of the LDS church then you don't practice polygamy at all. Polygamy is grounds for execution. There are a few "splinter groups" of crazies that split off from the LDS church and started their own polygamy cults, but they are not acknowledged by the church or it's members, and are generally considered to be wackos by most sane people.