At least up until I left IBM last May, they still issued pagers as standard equipment to any system administrator that worked at an IBM site or outsourced hosting center.
As an 'on site' admin, meaning I worked at the local IBM campus, I had a pager. I asked my manager if I could switch to cell-phone only so I didn't have to carry additional devices around. Here's the reasons he gave for why I would have a pager only.
Cost. The pager was $25/mo for unlimited messages and the device itself was $50 (I had two the entire 8 years I was there). To get an equivalent cell phone plan, it would cost at least twice that. Multiply that by 20 people per department, or 150 people in the organization. It adds up fast.
Reception. Pagers get messages in places where cell phones can't. The data centers weren't in some underground bunker, but there was enough interference to prevent most cell phones from getting more than 2 bars (usually none).
Two-way transmitting devices not allowed. One of the data center policies was actually that a two-way transmitting device could not be brought in because it could cause interference with the equipment already interfering with its signal. Rules is rules.
Reliability. Others have stated that SMS messages simply don't get received, and while pagers aren't perfect, reliability of getting messages is one of the reasons Doctors carry them (others have commented more reasons too).
The pager providers IBM uses are Arch Wireless and Skytel. Google 'em.
Nowadays I carry a cell phone, I work from home, and I haven't been to a data center since I took this job four months ago.
I just finished reading Jim Collins' book, Good to Great, and Circuit City is one of the companies that went from Good to Great in the timeframe they researched.
That book came out in 2000 or 2001. Since then, Amazon.com has certainly increased their retail markets to more than just books and music. Personally, I bought a lot of my home theater equipment from Amazon, rather than CC simply because the prices were at least 20% better. I went to CC stores to physically compare the products I was planning to buy from Amazon.
With CompUSA's failure, and now Circuit City, I expect Best Buy to fall victim to online retailers.
$ uname
Darwin
$ which dtrace /usr/sbin/dtrace
Apparently Linux has no equal, but I've been a Linux sysadmin for many years and didn't have dtrace before, and even now that I have it on my Macbook, I still haven't even learned how to use it, but I understand it can require programming in a C-like language. No thanks. I do programming in Shell, Ruby and Perl, usually in that order. I don't want to relearn C, since I never really liked it to begin with.
ZFS and DTrace aren't compelling reasons to use a particular OS on a workstation (laptop OR desktop) anyway. Userland utility is what uh, users want. Mac OS certainly delivers for both the typical user that wants their browser, IM and music, but they're never going to install Solaris anyway. So your target audience can either pick the "newcomer" who isn't that new, or stick with what they're already using, and use it to get some actual work done, instead of screwing around with other OS's.
Or, to turn your question around, what is the compelling reason for choosing Linux over OpenSolaris or, say, PC-BSD, on a laptop?
On a purely professional level, I don't like Solaris. I supported Solaris systems at a megacorporation for 3.5 years, and the whole time I wished they were Linux. Then my wish came true and I was moved over to a Linux support team when Red Hat was offered to customers we supported. That was 2004 and I haven't looked back. With any luck (and I don't actually believe in luck) I will never use Solaris again.
Maybe this is different for OpenSolaris. I haven't looked since frankly, I don't care. Here's some of the issues I had with it last time I touched a Solaris box (version 9).
Ridiculous 'native' storage support. The Solstice Disk Suite and Solaris Disk Admin stuff drove me nuts. I wanted to cut myself. Veritas Volume Manager was generally deployed instead, but that wasn't much better.
Open Source Software + Solaris didn't mix well. It took an inordinate amount of time to get something as simple as an Apache/MySQL setup actually running properly. I'm sure this is better, but it works *perfectly* out of the box on Debian and Red Hat style distributions.
Patch and package management. This leads to horrors of which I don't have the time to describe. Having the patch management system completely separate from the package management system is nonsensical, and having to download a patch bundle rather than simply install directly over the Internet (see also yum, apt, ports, emerge, etc) makes for a frustrating time administering more than a handful of servers.
Lack of SSH (particularly, OpenSSH) installed and configured sanely (ie, securely, ie, proto2) by default.
If I could install MacOS on any random hardware
including a $300 mini laptop, I would be doing
back flips for the rest of the month.
I've used Solaris as a workstation OS, both on Sun and Intel hardware. In my experience of installing it (v2.6 to 9), hardware support is *very* spotty on Intel systems. OpenSolaris might be better, but the rest of the user experience leaves a lot to be desired. Unfortunately for Solaris, Linux wins in the "installs on the most diverse hardware and isn't Windows" area. ZFS and DTrace might be the coolest techs ever, but I have yet to fire up DTrace (work gave me a Mac), and I am not yet compelled to jump on the ZFS will end world hunger bandwagon.
If you truly are a Linux fan - isn't your first phrase answer enough? I've asked this sort of question about Linux enough times (e.g. "Do we really need another distro?" or "Do we really need yet another window manager?"), and Linux fanboys all think that "because we can" is a good enough answer in and of itself. That's fine; but if it's true when we talk about Linux, it's also true when we're discussing other operating systems.
I've been using Linux as a desktop/workstation OS for 14 years. I've tried all sorts of distribution flavors. I've run most of them as file and web servers, workstations and media machiens, firewalls and monitoring systems. I'm at the point now where I've 'been there, done that' to the degree that I really don't want to screw around with the OS when it comes to my workstation. I am fortunate that my company-issued system is a Mac, and I don't have to think about what flavor of the week Unix or Linux variant I'm going to install.
The flavor here is Apple, and I drank all the koolaid.
Here's some very handy commands. I use most, if not all, of these on a regular basis.
$ namei -m/var/log/httpd/error.log
f:/var/log/httpd/error.log
drwxr-xr-x /
drwxr-xr-x var
drwxr-xr-x log
drwxr-xr-x httpd
-rw-r--r-- error.log
Substitute a string in a variable in bash.
$ version="6.4.4-5"
$ echo ${version%%-[0-9]*}
6.4.4
Exclude all the.svn files in a find, and look for a pattern in the results.
Perl oneliner to convert an epoch to the current date/time.
perl -le 'print scalar(localtime("1223234245"))'
I also started doing a lot of work in Ruby last year after hearing about, and deploying at the company I worked for, a configuration management tool called Puppet. Along with Ruby scripting, I've come to love two excellent tools: rake and capistrano. The quick version, rake is a "make" for Ruby. It will execute shell commands and can do all kinds of awesome. Capistrano was originally written to aid in deploying Rails applications on multiple systems, and has also become a sort of glorified "ssh for loop" since it uses Ruby's Net::SSH class.
Don't set up ssh keys without passphrases unless absolutely necessary*. Use an ssh-agent to store the private keys. There's automated methods for this on every major platform.
Linux, ssh-agent and ssh-add. The man pages are complete, and automating this is easy in the shell. Alternately GNOME users can use Seahorse to tie the ssh keys into the login keychain.
Mac OS X, ditto ssh-agent/ssh-add, or use SSHKeychain.app, which will add the keys and passphrase to the login keychain as well.
Windows, if you're using SSH on Windows, its puTTY, and you should already have the putty agent installed from the installer. You used the installer right?
*Necessary would be for automated application processes that need to ssh to systems without user intervention.
I'm frugal. This is not a good use of my money right now. We'll leave out the part where my company pays my monthly bill - they won't pay for a new phone though.
I have Sprint. Not T-Mobile. Not AT&T. Not Verizon. Sprint has the best coverage at my house, and the coverage when I'm not at home is "good enough" in my area. I don't know the last time I had a dropped call.
Most of my non-work computing is on Vista. My home PC and laptop both run Vista. Why is that relevant? Well, I hear that Vista works pretty well with Windows Mobile devices, so I'm considering one of those instead. Since there isn't an Android phone available on the Sprint network, but plenty of WM6 options, that seems more reasonable for my dollars.
This really isn't that difficult. The "standard" or "rule of thumb" is highly outdated. If you must have a formula, then here's what I would do.
Linux workstations: swap equal to half installed physical memory, up to 2G.
Linux servers: swap equal to installed physical memory.
Windows workstations: swap equal to installed physical memory.
But really, if you're swapping a lot, you probably need more memory. If you have a reasonably modern system, you should have about 1G - I don't care what OS you're using. If you have a laptop or similar system that you need to suspend RAM to disk, you can do this to a swap file, or to a hibernation file. YMMV on Linux as suspend/hibernate is hit or miss with various laptop vendors.
I have a decent home theater. However, I do not have a Blu-Ray player and I don't intend to get one anytime soon.
50" DLP HDTV
Good Onkyo receiver
Mid-range 5.1 speakers
High end Home Theater PC
The cost is just too high. I can already play upscaled to 1080p DVDs on my HTPC. Blu-Ray really doesn't offer anything that compels me to spend another $200+. Each disc contains more of the same crap I don't watch on my DVDs - special features, deleted scenes, interviews, whatever. The format itself is certainly higher quality and I can tell the difference in picture quality, I don't hear a difference. Of course, most in-store demo centers aren't configured properly anyway. Regardless of that, upscaled DVD looks "good enough" for most movies.
Maybe if I could buy a single disc with *all* the movies in a series, like all three Indiana Jones, or all six Star Wars, Matrix, LOTR, etc, Blu-Ray might be compelling.
Someone else said it quite well. Blu-Ray is a solution that is missing a problem.
Why is DRM such a big problem for gaming? Maybe my usage is different than other people. I buy a game. I install it on the system I have built specifically for entertainment (HTPC+Gaming, as it were). I play it until I'm bored. I uninstall it. Or, I don't uninstall it because disk space is cheap.
I do about 3-6 months research, pick out the right parts for my needs, and then I hit the following online vendors in order for parts:
newegg.com - great prices, reasonable shipping, broad selection and a good return policy if things don't work out.
zipzoomfly.com - sometimes has parts that I want that newegg doesn't. The prices are comparable.
mwave.com - again, sometimes has parts that the previous two don't. Generally runs pretty good deals too.
I'll price compare between the three and factor in shipping costs. It's nice having a single vendor to deal with sometimes, but I'll poke around for a deal;-).
Facebook has compulsory registration to view anything on the site, so it makes sense that they would block people from using something that (potentially) gets around it.
That said, how about not using sites that have compulsory registration to view content, like the NY Times? I don't read articles on that site because I refuse to register, despite it being free. Same goes for any other site that requires registration. I have plenty of choices to get information which do not require a special account to view said information.
So why not use the alternative, and go elsewhere? If a store has a policy you don't like, don't you stop shopping at that store? Same goes for NY Times, Facebook and others. If your friends won't follow you to another site in order to keep in touch (or God forbid, use email/IM), did you really want to be friends with them?
I'm using Firefox 3.0 and Windows Vista. After installing the Move Networks Fx3 plugin and Silverlight, the streaming video is working fine for me.
Fwiw, my Linux workstation is for *work*, not for watching videos/movies. This Vista system is a media center HTPC and is ideal for watching videos. The DNC stream looks *great* on my TV:).
Is the location of IBM's Managed Storage Services (MSS) division, which deploys SAN for customers in Boulder (including IBM internal) and other locations (over high speed fibre links) on IBM "Shark" (ESS) and DS6000/DS8000 devices. When I worked at IBM their marketing materials stated they were managing over 4 petabytes of data for enterprise customers out of that location alone - that was four years ago! That doesn't count for other MSS locations either, nor all the other areas where IBM implements large amounts of storage for customers. Remember, many if not most of IBM's customers are governments and Fortune 100 companies, particularly high finance. I think they've got some data.
So you want to talk about high levels of storage - IBM has the game covered, considering they invented the HDD.
I just don't get it, why managers don't "get it." This isn't rocket science.
You don't work for a Fortune 100 company. You don't have any comprehension of the levels of political struggle that go into internal purchasing. I worked for a Fortune 100 company - IBM. We provided web services to other Fortune 100-500 companies. Often, we waited weeks or even months while customers we supported had to go through their own political struggles to get funding for projects such as adding something inexpensive (relatively) like a new server, or even disk or memory upgrades.
Enterprise IT is a completely different world from small/medium business IT. People that have only worked for companies with less than 200 people don't understand the scope of these megabehemoths. I worked in a system administration organization with 150 people. Consider that is actually larger than *most* companies in the United States.
For 7 years, I worked at IBM, which certainly has a high ratio of IT staff to "normal" staff:-). I specifically worked in ebusiness hosting as a Unix system administrator.
Yet she mentioned even simple changes to systems/software take over six months.
That surprised me at first when I worked at IBM. It didn't take six months, necessarily, but a lot of planning and team effort went into doing system changes. Even growing a filesystem could take weeks to get all the approvals, despite that being a non-impacting change. It sounds ridiculous to anyone who has worked for a small company, but realize that the margin for error is much smaller. If we caused a system outage for a customer, they might literally be losing thousands of dollars every minute the system is down, because many of the customers were other Fortune 100 (and 500) companies.
Contrast to my current employer where we support website operations for some small companies (less than 20 people total). If one of their servers is down for an hour, it might delay a code deployment and cost them *some* money, but not anywhere near the scale of the companies I supported at IBM.
There's a *lot* of mainframes at IBM-Boulder. They were deploying brand new (at the time) z9's to replace old 360/390 and earlier zSeries. If I recall the conversation with the facility manager for that project, it was a 5 to 1 ratio of old systems to the z9's, most of which would be running Linux VM's for WebSphere deployments of various types.
Slashdot Mirror
At least up until I left IBM last May, they still issued pagers as standard equipment to any system administrator that worked at an IBM site or outsourced hosting center.
As an 'on site' admin, meaning I worked at the local IBM campus, I had a pager. I asked my manager if I could switch to cell-phone only so I didn't have to carry additional devices around. Here's the reasons he gave for why I would have a pager only.
The pager providers IBM uses are Arch Wireless and Skytel. Google 'em.
Nowadays I carry a cell phone, I work from home, and I haven't been to a data center since I took this job four months ago.
I just finished reading Jim Collins' book, Good to Great, and Circuit City is one of the companies that went from Good to Great in the timeframe they researched.
That book came out in 2000 or 2001. Since then, Amazon.com has certainly increased their retail markets to more than just books and music. Personally, I bought a lot of my home theater equipment from Amazon, rather than CC simply because the prices were at least 20% better. I went to CC stores to physically compare the products I was planning to buy from Amazon.
With CompUSA's failure, and now Circuit City, I expect Best Buy to fall victim to online retailers.
"Is Linux getting too old for you?
Someone else pointed this out..
Are you interested to see what other systems such as OpenSolaris have to offer?
Oooh, what features might those be?
OpenSolaris has some great features, such as ZFS and dtrace, which make it a great server OS â" but how do you think it will fare on a laptop?
ZFS? How about for Linux, or Mac OS X
DTrace? How about:
$ uname
/usr/sbin/dtrace
Darwin
$ which dtrace
Apparently Linux has no equal, but I've been a Linux sysadmin for many years and didn't have dtrace before, and even now that I have it on my Macbook, I still haven't even learned how to use it, but I understand it can require programming in a C-like language. No thanks. I do programming in Shell, Ruby and Perl, usually in that order. I don't want to relearn C, since I never really liked it to begin with.
ZFS and DTrace aren't compelling reasons to use a particular OS on a workstation (laptop OR desktop) anyway. Userland utility is what uh, users want. Mac OS certainly delivers for both the typical user that wants their browser, IM and music, but they're never going to install Solaris anyway. So your target audience can either pick the "newcomer" who isn't that new, or stick with what they're already using, and use it to get some actual work done, instead of screwing around with other OS's.
NeXTSTEP didn't sell laptops, iirc. And that's a strangely named fruit.
Or, to turn your question around, what is the compelling reason for choosing Linux over OpenSolaris or, say, PC-BSD, on a laptop?
On a purely professional level, I don't like Solaris. I supported Solaris systems at a megacorporation for 3.5 years, and the whole time I wished they were Linux. Then my wish came true and I was moved over to a Linux support team when Red Hat was offered to customers we supported. That was 2004 and I haven't looked back. With any luck (and I don't actually believe in luck) I will never use Solaris again.
Maybe this is different for OpenSolaris. I haven't looked since frankly, I don't care. Here's some of the issues I had with it last time I touched a Solaris box (version 9).
If I could install MacOS on any random hardware including a $300 mini laptop, I would be doing back flips for the rest of the month.
I've used Solaris as a workstation OS, both on Sun and Intel hardware. In my experience of installing it (v2.6 to 9), hardware support is *very* spotty on Intel systems. OpenSolaris might be better, but the rest of the user experience leaves a lot to be desired. Unfortunately for Solaris, Linux wins in the "installs on the most diverse hardware and isn't Windows" area. ZFS and DTrace might be the coolest techs ever, but I have yet to fire up DTrace (work gave me a Mac), and I am not yet compelled to jump on the ZFS will end world hunger bandwagon.
If you truly are a Linux fan - isn't your first phrase answer enough? I've asked this sort of question about Linux enough times (e.g. "Do we really need another distro?" or "Do we really need yet another window manager?"), and Linux fanboys all think that "because we can" is a good enough answer in and of itself. That's fine; but if it's true when we talk about Linux, it's also true when we're discussing other operating systems.
I've been using Linux as a desktop/workstation OS for 14 years. I've tried all sorts of distribution flavors. I've run most of them as file and web servers, workstations and media machiens, firewalls and monitoring systems. I'm at the point now where I've 'been there, done that' to the degree that I really don't want to screw around with the OS when it comes to my workstation. I am fortunate that my company-issued system is a Mac, and I don't have to think about what flavor of the week Unix or Linux variant I'm going to install.
The flavor here is Apple, and I drank all the koolaid.
Here's some very handy commands. I use most, if not all, of these on a regular basis. /var/log/httpd/error.log
/var/log/httpd/error.log
$ namei -m
f:
drwxr-xr-x /
drwxr-xr-x var
drwxr-xr-x log
drwxr-xr-x httpd
-rw-r--r-- error.log
Substitute a string in a variable in bash.
$ version="6.4.4-5"
$ echo ${version%%-[0-9]*}
6.4.4
Exclude all the .svn files in a find, and look for a pattern in the results.
find $1 -name '.svn' -prune -o -print | xargs grep -l "$2"
Perl oneliner to convert an epoch to the current date/time.
perl -le 'print scalar(localtime("1223234245"))'
I also started doing a lot of work in Ruby last year after hearing about, and deploying at the company I worked for, a configuration management tool called Puppet. Along with Ruby scripting, I've come to love two excellent tools: rake and capistrano. The quick version, rake is a "make" for Ruby. It will execute shell commands and can do all kinds of awesome. Capistrano was originally written to aid in deploying Rails applications on multiple systems, and has also become a sort of glorified "ssh for loop" since it uses Ruby's Net::SSH class.
Don't set up ssh keys without passphrases unless absolutely necessary*. Use an ssh-agent to store the private keys. There's automated methods for this on every major platform.
*Necessary would be for automated application processes that need to ssh to systems without user intervention.
Diff works fine with ssh.
ssh $remote_system cat remotefile | diff - localfile
cat localfile | ssh $remote_system diff - remotefile
I heard PalmOS works pretty well on outdated portable devices. Maybe you can hack it to run on that netbook?
I'm frugal. This is not a good use of my money right now. We'll leave out the part where my company pays my monthly bill - they won't pay for a new phone though.
I have Sprint. Not T-Mobile. Not AT&T. Not Verizon. Sprint has the best coverage at my house, and the coverage when I'm not at home is "good enough" in my area. I don't know the last time I had a dropped call.
Most of my non-work computing is on Vista. My home PC and laptop both run Vista. Why is that relevant? Well, I hear that Vista works pretty well with Windows Mobile devices, so I'm considering one of those instead. Since there isn't an Android phone available on the Sprint network, but plenty of WM6 options, that seems more reasonable for my dollars.
But really, if you're swapping a lot, you probably need more memory. If you have a reasonably modern system, you should have about 1G - I don't care what OS you're using. If you have a laptop or similar system that you need to suspend RAM to disk, you can do this to a swap file, or to a hibernation file. YMMV on Linux as suspend/hibernate is hit or miss with various laptop vendors.
I have a decent home theater. However, I do not have a Blu-Ray player and I don't intend to get one anytime soon.
The cost is just too high. I can already play upscaled to 1080p DVDs on my HTPC. Blu-Ray really doesn't offer anything that compels me to spend another $200+. Each disc contains more of the same crap I don't watch on my DVDs - special features, deleted scenes, interviews, whatever. The format itself is certainly higher quality and I can tell the difference in picture quality, I don't hear a difference. Of course, most in-store demo centers aren't configured properly anyway. Regardless of that, upscaled DVD looks "good enough" for most movies.
Maybe if I could buy a single disc with *all* the movies in a series, like all three Indiana Jones, or all six Star Wars, Matrix, LOTR, etc, Blu-Ray might be compelling.
Someone else said it quite well. Blu-Ray is a solution that is missing a problem.
Stack Overflow by Jeff Atwood.
Why is DRM such a big problem for gaming? Maybe my usage is different than other people. I buy a game. I install it on the system I have built specifically for entertainment (HTPC+Gaming, as it were). I play it until I'm bored. I uninstall it. Or, I don't uninstall it because disk space is cheap.
I do about 3-6 months research, pick out the right parts for my needs, and then I hit the following online vendors in order for parts:
newegg.com - great prices, reasonable shipping, broad selection and a good return policy if things don't work out.
zipzoomfly.com - sometimes has parts that I want that newegg doesn't. The prices are comparable.
mwave.com - again, sometimes has parts that the previous two don't. Generally runs pretty good deals too.
I'll price compare between the three and factor in shipping costs. It's nice having a single vendor to deal with sometimes, but I'll poke around for a deal ;-).
Facebook has compulsory registration to view anything on the site, so it makes sense that they would block people from using something that (potentially) gets around it.
That said, how about not using sites that have compulsory registration to view content, like the NY Times? I don't read articles on that site because I refuse to register, despite it being free. Same goes for any other site that requires registration. I have plenty of choices to get information which do not require a special account to view said information.
So why not use the alternative, and go elsewhere? If a store has a policy you don't like, don't you stop shopping at that store? Same goes for NY Times, Facebook and others. If your friends won't follow you to another site in order to keep in touch (or God forbid, use email/IM), did you really want to be friends with them?
League of Professional System Administrators Code of Ethics. I have a copy hanging on the wall by my desk and I refer to it regularly to keep me honest. Integrity is the biggest asset for any system administrator.
I'm using Firefox 3.0 and Windows Vista. After installing the Move Networks Fx3 plugin and Silverlight, the streaming video is working fine for me.
Fwiw, my Linux workstation is for *work*, not for watching videos/movies. This Vista system is a media center HTPC and is ideal for watching videos. The DNC stream looks *great* on my TV :).
Is the location of IBM's Managed Storage Services (MSS) division, which deploys SAN for customers in Boulder (including IBM internal) and other locations (over high speed fibre links) on IBM "Shark" (ESS) and DS6000/DS8000 devices. When I worked at IBM their marketing materials stated they were managing over 4 petabytes of data for enterprise customers out of that location alone - that was four years ago! That doesn't count for other MSS locations either, nor all the other areas where IBM implements large amounts of storage for customers. Remember, many if not most of IBM's customers are governments and Fortune 100 companies, particularly high finance. I think they've got some data.
So you want to talk about high levels of storage - IBM has the game covered, considering they invented the HDD.
I just don't get it, why managers don't "get it." This isn't rocket science.
You don't work for a Fortune 100 company. You don't have any comprehension of the levels of political struggle that go into internal purchasing. I worked for a Fortune 100 company - IBM. We provided web services to other Fortune 100-500 companies. Often, we waited weeks or even months while customers we supported had to go through their own political struggles to get funding for projects such as adding something inexpensive (relatively) like a new server, or even disk or memory upgrades.
Enterprise IT is a completely different world from small/medium business IT. People that have only worked for companies with less than 200 people don't understand the scope of these megabehemoths. I worked in a system administration organization with 150 people. Consider that is actually larger than *most* companies in the United States.
For 7 years, I worked at IBM, which certainly has a high ratio of IT staff to "normal" staff :-). I specifically worked in ebusiness hosting as a Unix system administrator.
Yet she mentioned even simple changes to systems/software take over six months.
That surprised me at first when I worked at IBM. It didn't take six months, necessarily, but a lot of planning and team effort went into doing system changes. Even growing a filesystem could take weeks to get all the approvals, despite that being a non-impacting change. It sounds ridiculous to anyone who has worked for a small company, but realize that the margin for error is much smaller. If we caused a system outage for a customer, they might literally be losing thousands of dollars every minute the system is down, because many of the customers were other Fortune 100 (and 500) companies.
Contrast to my current employer where we support website operations for some small companies (less than 20 people total). If one of their servers is down for an hour, it might delay a code deployment and cost them *some* money, but not anywhere near the scale of the companies I supported at IBM.
There's a *lot* of mainframes at IBM-Boulder. They were deploying brand new (at the time) z9's to replace old 360/390 and earlier zSeries. If I recall the conversation with the facility manager for that project, it was a 5 to 1 ratio of old systems to the z9's, most of which would be running Linux VM's for WebSphere deployments of various types.
Your comments about perl are exactly what I don't like about the language. Thank you.