1) It's a review, not the user manual. Yes he was slightly factually incorrect, but so what?
2) Its a review, not a strategy guide. I figured some of the Colossi had more than one weak spot, its a natural direction for the design to go, but it wouldn't contribute much of anything to the review to mention this.
3) You mean half a second? Didn't you learn to reduce all fractions in grade school?
4) I'm willing to bet the camera occasionally moves on its own, or Zonk wouldn'tve had the problems he had. This is a common failing of games, even those which allow camera control, and I'm glad he mentioned it.
Sun may be irrelevant in the larger picture (Sparc is a dead end, Sun kit is still absurdly expensive) but in the narrow OS world Sun is still highly relevant. Solaris 10 has really changed a lot of peoples minds on what they can expect from a proprietary UNIX, and should be reminding the Linux world why serious enterprises still don't take them entirely seriously. DTrace, ZFS, Zones, all of these are really excellent implementations of really cool ideas.
I know they're late to the party, but the FAS3000 line supports the new shelves with SATA drives. This drops their cost down dramatically (over 50% reduction), with the same unusually high NetApp standards. We're upgrading our F820c cluster with FAS3050c heads, and adding some SATA storage for new projects. I'd have to agree with the parent that NetApp is definitely a good solution, though none of their individual filer heads, or even two head clusters, can scale this far up. Their single volume limitation is still at 17.6TB.
Yes, there is certainly a share of blame for everyone involved, however to call the lockout a device purely of the creation of the owners, and to act as if the players weren't going to strike is absurd. The owners shouldn't have caved in the 90s, but instead gotten their salary cap then. If that had happened this lockout never would've been necessary, and everybody would be better off.
I agree with many of your points, with the caveat that I think you're getting hung up too much on objective reality and ignoring perceptive reality. What I mean is that while for most entrepreneurs the feeling of control is in fact an illusion, that illusion contributes significantly to perceived quality of life. In this particular case perception is much more important than objective reality, because quality of life isn't a hard measurable criteria, but instead a feeling one gets about their own life.
Conversely to your examples, there are some pursuits that are really only open as entrepreneurial ones. I'm not going to ponder what they are, but I know they are out there.
Being an entrepreneur is virtually never about building wealth, but instead about building quality of life. Not through working less, but through working more on that which gives you pleasure and satisfaction.
Seriously, if you're going to be absurd, at least make the result worthwhile in case it happens. Why not hookers from the bosoms of whom you can do lines of coke?
How about a cadre of Asian Relaxation Specialists? Why not train monkeys to do the employee jobs, and pay the employees to throw a non-stop party?
But dear lord, paintball is all you can think of? You need to get laid.
Thats an absurdly narrow minded view, and ignores the onerous demands the players were putting on the owners. It even further ignores the fact that the league, and most of the individual teams, were losing money due to these demands.
The real reason it was termed a lockout and not a strike is that the owners moved first in order to set the terms of the debate. The players union was set to strike, the owners just scheduled their press conference first.
SAGE (the System Administrators Guild) has published 4 levels of system administration, which is probably a good start for developing a track system. We use it here to quantify jr/admin/sr type levels. They also have some good documents on hiring practices, interviewing, along with their comprehensive salary surveys.
Other than that its also important to distinguish management and supervisory positions that make sense for the size of the group. Then you can chart a course for both the folks who want to head towards leadership roles, versus the pure techs who never want a single soul reporting to them.
Level(3) is telling their customers that this was due to an unfair business arrangement between Cogent and Level(3), and that Level(3) tried everything they could to renegotiate to make things fair and avoid disrupting service. Further they claim they're doing nothing to prevent Cogent originating or transiting traffic from entering their network through other peering points.
As upset as I was with Level(3) when I spoke to my rep, this answer makes sense to me and I'm beginning to think this is more of a publicity stunt by Cogent, particularly with them offering "free" bandwidth to Level(3) customers, than anything nefarious that Level(3) did.
I doubt the ServerIron gear, for example, has any significant advantages over a well run LVS cluster, which it sounds like you've got. There are some higher end LBs out there that I've looked at to do things like SSL acceleration, caching, etc. Stuff that LVS doesn't really hook into very well, though you could easily build from open source components should you want those features. For my environment SSL acceleration is a big deal, because I'm running 30+ sites with different certs, and therefor stuck doing IP based virtual hosting. SSL acceleration would let me switch to name based hosting on my apache boxes, greatly simplifying their config, while still offering separate certs for each site.
The Windows iSCSI initiator is actually halfway decent, and the NetApp iSCSI implementation is seemingly bulletproof. I've only played a bit with the one for linux (which was jointly written by Cisco and NetApp), but so far it appears pretty solid. Its not a protocol I'd build large parts of my network around just yet, but its emerging as a pretty cool alternative to FC and the whole fiber router/switch/etc mess.
Veritas to me is in the same camp as Sun. They used to have market leading technology, and they still have market leading high prices, but the bean counters have all heard of them so they think this is a good reason to pay top dollar. In a year or two the bean counters should start hearing the negatives about Veritas and then maybe they'll see the decline they so richly deserve.
You can save quite a few more since virtually every linux system today supports halt and reboot as aliases to the relevant shutdown strings. I myself find it significantly more meaningful to type halt rather than shutdown -h, and especially so with reboot versus shutdown -r.
Overall I think the foundries are excellent devices. They balance my mail cluster exceptionally well. The site here has a number of ip based virtual hosts on a cluster of 7 servers, and the foundries balance each virtual host separately which means that on a server load basis the balancing is uneven. For a single host to a group of machines though they're really quite good. The failover and failback works quite well also.
I strongly recommend NetApp to everyone I encounter professional who needs HA NAS. They also support iSCSI (for the last 2 years they've been giving the licenses away for free with the purchase of the filers to drive adoption, and I believe they're still doing so). We've used that for our windows ms-sql servers since they don't support storing databases on a CIFS share. There is some delay when they give back after a head failure, but its clearly documented exactly what the delay is, and my testing validated that their docs were 100% accurate.
I have to agree that Veritas is just crap. Everything I did with VCS was incredibly painful, and the failover/giveback was shite. Even worse, when both sides failed and came back they couldn't properly arbitrate which side was master, despite the config file specifically stating which head was the default master, and they ended up eating 500G of mailboxes. That turned into a 32 hour support call, which in turn woke up a senior engineer who dug deep into his cvs tree and found a mysteriously hacked up version of fsck that knew how to deal with the fall out of this specific situation. While on the one hand that was great because it recovered the vast majority (probably 95%+) of the data, it also scared me that they had this lying around, because that really indicated to me that this was a recurring problem for them and that's pretty bad for a clustering product.
I can speak from experience that active/passive versus active/active is not the determining factor for single point of failure with load balancers (or anything else for that matter). It merely determines whether both nodes are providing services or if one is in standby.
Some examples of services I've run in active/passive with full stateful failover include Cisco PIX firewalls, Foundry ServerIron load balancers, NetApp filers, a pair of LVS directors (there was an app you ran which passed state data from the active node to the passive in near real time so that a failure didn't kill stateful connections) and Cisco LocalDirectors. All of these except the LVS nodes required a direct physical connection (Cisco, Foundry and NetApp all use proprietary hardware cabling for this purpose).
I definitely agree though that LVS is untouchable for price/performance in virtually every situation. And definitely look into NetApp. Their pricing is a lot more aggressive than EMC, and they're a much better NAS solution. The only downside is that until you get to near the top of their model line at the moment, you can't use anything except FCAL drives, which are pricy. We're taking delivery on a pair of FAS3050s in a couple weeks, which will allow us to start deploying some SATA storage for stuff that doesn't demand quite as much performance as the FCAL provides. The other cool thing about NetApp is their support for trunking ethernet connections (it may only work with Cisco switches though). Our filers have 6 ethernet interfaces, 3 into each of our core switches, trunked for 300Mbit and then trunked for failover. NetApp really does understand HA, and has support for it built into their product at just about every level. The coolest thing I've experienced with them was them calling me while I was out at lunch to notify me that not only had a drive failed, but the replacement would arrive in about 3 hours. What truly blew my mind was the tech trying to convince me to let them send a field service person out to swap the drives, since I paid for it they felt they should provide it. Find me another vendor who'll insist upon incurring cost to themselves for no reason other than that they feel you deserve the service. Oh yeah, and they let you pick from 6 different genres of hold music when calling tech support. I don't know why, but that just kills me.
You don't actually need active/active to avoid the single point of failure, though I do see some advantages in terms of resource costs to going active/active. No matter what you won't pick up a huge amount of savings, since you can't load active/active boxes as heavily as active/passive but it does look a little better when presenting to a cost-conscious management team.
I've seen the ultramonkey stuff before, and even deployed a fairly complex LVS balanced cluster (the pair of lvs directors actually had a single transaction balanced through them 5 different times as different resources talked to each other) with heartbeat and so forth. For F/OSS its pretty slick. Not as easy or nice as, for example, the Foundry ServerIron's I use in my current environment, but still damn nifty considering the price.
NetApps don't have to be a single point of failure, they have supported real clustering for an awfully long time. I use a pair to serve the message store for my mail cluster, and while I've never actually suffered a head failure (my head uptime is 650 days 21 hours as of just now, that being the exact amount of time since they were installed), I've thoroughly tested failover and giveback and it all works seamlessly.
I think ultimately we're in agreement that there are a number of good, low cost solutions to solve various aspects of availability, we've just worked with different pieces of them in different respects. Thanks for repointing me to the LVS stuff, because I'd not kept up and they've done some amazing maturing in the couple years since I last looked at it.
I'm going to say that you're right, and you're wrong. Desktop hardware, things like scanners and printers and other nifty doodads, does tend to drag behind with regards to linux drivers. Since windows is 98% of the desktop market, this is hardly surprising.
The world of servers is completely different in my experience. Virtually every SCSI card, network card, HBA, etc is supported under Linux (RedHat is usually stipulated), and supported fairly well since the Linux server market is actually large enough to justify this level of support.
I'm not sure why you mentioned Apple/OSX, particularly in light of a server discussion, since they're relatively new to the market. If you want to talk about out of the box just works unix solutions look at Sun or IBM. They'll sell you fully integrated solutions, using 100% their certified hardware, and it'll all autodetect and just work right out of the box.
I'd disagree on the cost of the shared storage, especially depending on how its done. I'd also disagree that whether the content is static or not really makes a difference. If he's running a bunch of CGIs (as an example), which all pull data from a database then simply doing a heartbeat/ip-takeover pair of whitebox DB servers isn't that expensive. The shared storage there could be expensive, but depending on the DB engine may not be necessary.
We've bought some really large storage solutions at really cut-throat pricing by finding small vendors with decent/good tech. Area Systems is one vendor we used to use who provides SATA->SCSI solutions at very competitive prices. We bought a 1.2TB enclosure from them for around $5k, and it performed pretty darn well. The only hesitation I have is doing shared storage with SCSI, due to the lack of hardware level arbitration on access. I'm sure there're some boxes that do provide this, but its not the norm. I've been burned on clusters doing this when both heads bounced at the same time (idiot predecessor plugged them into the same circuit in the colo), and since they booted at the same rate, they both tried to fsck the file system at the same time. Thanks Veritas for that bug! If you want to do it right, then you're absolutely correct that it costs money, cuz FCAL just ain't gettin' cheaper.
Another option would be to buy a used NetApp or similar device from Ebay for a couple grand and just mount the entire content tree for the webservers via NFS. Then you can push content to one place, the sites all automagically pick it up, and you've got a highly available filer managing the data.
The cost of this stuff just keeps coming down, which is why we're all expected as sysadmins/netadmins/etc to keep driving availability up. Thankfully there's also some really good F/OSS packages out there which are maturing rapidly to provide some of these HA services.
I've never actually heard of Saru, got a link and maybe some info? I'm always interested in new technologies, particularly ones related to clustering/HA.
Yes, I'm fully aware. And like I said, its not that hard to achieve. You have to be talking about service availability though, not component availability.
I fully agree that keeping any individual server to 5 nines availability is generally an unattainable goal, in my environment we strive for 3 nines on individual components, and 5 nines on the overall service. With that goal we build HA into everything we design, whether its through load balancing, heartbeat/ip take over, or building the failover logic into our custom applications. We pick the setup that we'll use for each component when we're architecting the platform, since each piece has different limitations, etc.
Nope, getting a gold adds a star, getting a bronze removes one, and a silver leaves it alone. All the events have 5 stars possible, but the only way to get 5 is to get the highest rating _and_ score a gold in the event.
I'll have to play again tonight, but I'm almost positive this hasn't been my experience with the game.
In B3, Crash mode was like a puzzle on speed. Finding those x3 and x4 tags and figuring how to hit them while still causing a pileup was the goal. Now the goal is more like Dance Dance Revolution (time that start correctly) followed by Microsoft Olympics (mash that B button like a monkey on meth to make the explosion happen) Driving? not really that important. Placement of wreck? important, but if you fail on the other two "skill" tests, it won't matter.
I don't entirely agree. The challenges are definitely different, however I've found I have to think significantly more about how to trigger the wrecks and pileups I want so I can achieve gold. I found the crash mode levels in B3 ridiculously easy until the last couple which were much more difficult, B:R has much better pacing and the difficulty steadily elevates.
I also really like the addition of wind drift, and the weight factor of various vehicles, something I really don't remember from B3.
I agree the glitches with sometimes checking not working quite as expected oughta be fixed, but overall I find that element to be a lot more fun than the way it was in B3. Games like this aren't about weaving through traffic, and the developers recognized that and heightened the smash-shit-up quotient. I personally play B:R to relax, and nothing relaxes me like checking traffic all over the place.
Finally, it's no longer good enough to just get a gold medal on each event in the game, you also have to get a gold medal while being "stylish" enough doing it.
Thats just not true. Winning a gold on an event gives you an automatic five star rating, thats the beauty of it. Just like winning a bronze automatically deducts a star.
Why? What makes 5 nines unachievable, especially for such a simple setup as described in TFQ?
HA for web applications isn't very difficult, it just requires doing a little architecture up front, and spending the appropriate amount of money. Load balanced N+1 clusters, multiple redundant Internet links and their associated hardware, none of this is difficult or even that expensive today.
There are very few places in the computing world where real HA is even remotely difficult, and even in those places there are workable, if not actually good, solutions available.
I'm torn on whether a bad standard is actually better than none. I don't think the problems lie so much in the LSBv3 standard itself, as in the poor management of the standard that such a young standards body is having.
RedHat is really the company which needs to drive this standard, and while so far they've been doing a lot to do so, its not really in their best competitive interests. Consider that all the major "enterprise" products that folks would want on Linux (WebSphere, Oracle, WebLogic, etc) all specify RedHat as their supported distro.
I think we need to heap scorn on the crappy test suite now, to try and force them to clean up their act before they engender too much negative press and reputation. Once we hit a certain point where the negative reputation builds up, the standard will be doomed forever.
Don't get your hopes up. While the LSB appears like a very useful standard, as many have noted there are some real holes, and the test suite is by all accounts utterly useless. Further, there's not as tight of control of the testing so it appears at least some vendors are doing bizarre things to be compliant without waivers, despite tests that don't run in real world situations.
One example that Ulrich Drepper of RedHat pointed out is the thread test, which won't run on an SMP box. The LSB people's response? Run it on a slow uniprocessor. What's the point of this again?
I'm surprised you ignored the meaninglessness of his "half of all living species" garbage. Most reports put the total number of species which are insects at ~75% of all species. While extinction sucks for the extinct, its a part of the natural evolutionary cycle.
I'm not one to claim that any species which can't survive us doesn't deserve to survive, however really broad statements about "mass extinction" leave me unmoved.
Re:skeptical...
on
Pornified
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· Score: 2, Interesting
It's hard enough to get some suburban dad to admit to digital pornography use, esp. to a stranger. If you interview weirdos, of course you will get a biased sample.
The first part of that statement is generally way off base. Its utterly shocking how much people will tell interviewers if they're assured of anonymity. The really interesting thing is that the patterns don't tend to change a ton when you survey more people (as long as your sample is well selected), its just that when 10K people tell you the same stuff that you have the perspective to actually understand the results.
Consider the original Kinsey study, as an example. In a time pervaded by rigid ideas of "normal" and "deviant", the study shattered all of those ideals through an anonymous interview process. While there are definitely some rough edges to his data, even when "scrubbed" to remove the biases that people claimed came from the ~5% of the sample data which came from homosexual prositutes, and the ~25% of current or previous penal inmates, the numbers stayed essentially static.
If people think they're contributing to science, they'll talk about just about any aspect of their lives.
There is of course evidence to suggest they'll tell interviewers what they think they expect to hear. I read about a study in which people headed into a washroom were interviewed about handwashing, and a shockingly large number lied, despite knowing they would be videotaped shortly thereafter, and thus they would be caught.
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1) It's a review, not the user manual. Yes he was slightly factually incorrect, but so what? 2) Its a review, not a strategy guide. I figured some of the Colossi had more than one weak spot, its a natural direction for the design to go, but it wouldn't contribute much of anything to the review to mention this. 3) You mean half a second? Didn't you learn to reduce all fractions in grade school? 4) I'm willing to bet the camera occasionally moves on its own, or Zonk wouldn'tve had the problems he had. This is a common failing of games, even those which allow camera control, and I'm glad he mentioned it.
Sun may be irrelevant in the larger picture (Sparc is a dead end, Sun kit is still absurdly expensive) but in the narrow OS world Sun is still highly relevant. Solaris 10 has really changed a lot of peoples minds on what they can expect from a proprietary UNIX, and should be reminding the Linux world why serious enterprises still don't take them entirely seriously. DTrace, ZFS, Zones, all of these are really excellent implementations of really cool ideas.
I know they're late to the party, but the FAS3000 line supports the new shelves with SATA drives. This drops their cost down dramatically (over 50% reduction), with the same unusually high NetApp standards. We're upgrading our F820c cluster with FAS3050c heads, and adding some SATA storage for new projects. I'd have to agree with the parent that NetApp is definitely a good solution, though none of their individual filer heads, or even two head clusters, can scale this far up. Their single volume limitation is still at 17.6TB.
Yes, there is certainly a share of blame for everyone involved, however to call the lockout a device purely of the creation of the owners, and to act as if the players weren't going to strike is absurd. The owners shouldn't have caved in the 90s, but instead gotten their salary cap then. If that had happened this lockout never would've been necessary, and everybody would be better off.
Conversely to your examples, there are some pursuits that are really only open as entrepreneurial ones. I'm not going to ponder what they are, but I know they are out there.
Being an entrepreneur is virtually never about building wealth, but instead about building quality of life. Not through working less, but through working more on that which gives you pleasure and satisfaction.
How about a cadre of Asian Relaxation Specialists? Why not train monkeys to do the employee jobs, and pay the employees to throw a non-stop party?
But dear lord, paintball is all you can think of? You need to get laid.
Thats an absurdly narrow minded view, and ignores the onerous demands the players were putting on the owners. It even further ignores the fact that the league, and most of the individual teams, were losing money due to these demands.
The real reason it was termed a lockout and not a strike is that the owners moved first in order to set the terms of the debate. The players union was set to strike, the owners just scheduled their press conference first.
SAGE (the System Administrators Guild) has published 4 levels of system administration, which is probably a good start for developing a track system. We use it here to quantify jr/admin/sr type levels. They also have some good documents on hiring practices, interviewing, along with their comprehensive salary surveys.
Other than that its also important to distinguish management and supervisory positions that make sense for the size of the group. Then you can chart a course for both the folks who want to head towards leadership roles, versus the pure techs who never want a single soul reporting to them.
As upset as I was with Level(3) when I spoke to my rep, this answer makes sense to me and I'm beginning to think this is more of a publicity stunt by Cogent, particularly with them offering "free" bandwidth to Level(3) customers, than anything nefarious that Level(3) did.
The Windows iSCSI initiator is actually halfway decent, and the NetApp iSCSI implementation is seemingly bulletproof. I've only played a bit with the one for linux (which was jointly written by Cisco and NetApp), but so far it appears pretty solid. Its not a protocol I'd build large parts of my network around just yet, but its emerging as a pretty cool alternative to FC and the whole fiber router/switch/etc mess.
Veritas to me is in the same camp as Sun. They used to have market leading technology, and they still have market leading high prices, but the bean counters have all heard of them so they think this is a good reason to pay top dollar. In a year or two the bean counters should start hearing the negatives about Veritas and then maybe they'll see the decline they so richly deserve.
You can save quite a few more since virtually every linux system today supports halt and reboot as aliases to the relevant shutdown strings. I myself find it significantly more meaningful to type halt rather than shutdown -h, and especially so with reboot versus shutdown -r.
I strongly recommend NetApp to everyone I encounter professional who needs HA NAS. They also support iSCSI (for the last 2 years they've been giving the licenses away for free with the purchase of the filers to drive adoption, and I believe they're still doing so). We've used that for our windows ms-sql servers since they don't support storing databases on a CIFS share. There is some delay when they give back after a head failure, but its clearly documented exactly what the delay is, and my testing validated that their docs were 100% accurate.
I have to agree that Veritas is just crap. Everything I did with VCS was incredibly painful, and the failover/giveback was shite. Even worse, when both sides failed and came back they couldn't properly arbitrate which side was master, despite the config file specifically stating which head was the default master, and they ended up eating 500G of mailboxes. That turned into a 32 hour support call, which in turn woke up a senior engineer who dug deep into his cvs tree and found a mysteriously hacked up version of fsck that knew how to deal with the fall out of this specific situation. While on the one hand that was great because it recovered the vast majority (probably 95%+) of the data, it also scared me that they had this lying around, because that really indicated to me that this was a recurring problem for them and that's pretty bad for a clustering product.
Some examples of services I've run in active/passive with full stateful failover include Cisco PIX firewalls, Foundry ServerIron load balancers, NetApp filers, a pair of LVS directors (there was an app you ran which passed state data from the active node to the passive in near real time so that a failure didn't kill stateful connections) and Cisco LocalDirectors. All of these except the LVS nodes required a direct physical connection (Cisco, Foundry and NetApp all use proprietary hardware cabling for this purpose).
I definitely agree though that LVS is untouchable for price/performance in virtually every situation. And definitely look into NetApp. Their pricing is a lot more aggressive than EMC, and they're a much better NAS solution. The only downside is that until you get to near the top of their model line at the moment, you can't use anything except FCAL drives, which are pricy. We're taking delivery on a pair of FAS3050s in a couple weeks, which will allow us to start deploying some SATA storage for stuff that doesn't demand quite as much performance as the FCAL provides. The other cool thing about NetApp is their support for trunking ethernet connections (it may only work with Cisco switches though). Our filers have 6 ethernet interfaces, 3 into each of our core switches, trunked for 300Mbit and then trunked for failover. NetApp really does understand HA, and has support for it built into their product at just about every level. The coolest thing I've experienced with them was them calling me while I was out at lunch to notify me that not only had a drive failed, but the replacement would arrive in about 3 hours. What truly blew my mind was the tech trying to convince me to let them send a field service person out to swap the drives, since I paid for it they felt they should provide it. Find me another vendor who'll insist upon incurring cost to themselves for no reason other than that they feel you deserve the service. Oh yeah, and they let you pick from 6 different genres of hold music when calling tech support. I don't know why, but that just kills me.
I've seen the ultramonkey stuff before, and even deployed a fairly complex LVS balanced cluster (the pair of lvs directors actually had a single transaction balanced through them 5 different times as different resources talked to each other) with heartbeat and so forth. For F/OSS its pretty slick. Not as easy or nice as, for example, the Foundry ServerIron's I use in my current environment, but still damn nifty considering the price.
NetApps don't have to be a single point of failure, they have supported real clustering for an awfully long time. I use a pair to serve the message store for my mail cluster, and while I've never actually suffered a head failure (my head uptime is 650 days 21 hours as of just now, that being the exact amount of time since they were installed), I've thoroughly tested failover and giveback and it all works seamlessly.
I think ultimately we're in agreement that there are a number of good, low cost solutions to solve various aspects of availability, we've just worked with different pieces of them in different respects. Thanks for repointing me to the LVS stuff, because I'd not kept up and they've done some amazing maturing in the couple years since I last looked at it.
The world of servers is completely different in my experience. Virtually every SCSI card, network card, HBA, etc is supported under Linux (RedHat is usually stipulated), and supported fairly well since the Linux server market is actually large enough to justify this level of support.
I'm not sure why you mentioned Apple/OSX, particularly in light of a server discussion, since they're relatively new to the market. If you want to talk about out of the box just works unix solutions look at Sun or IBM. They'll sell you fully integrated solutions, using 100% their certified hardware, and it'll all autodetect and just work right out of the box.
We've bought some really large storage solutions at really cut-throat pricing by finding small vendors with decent/good tech. Area Systems is one vendor we used to use who provides SATA->SCSI solutions at very competitive prices. We bought a 1.2TB enclosure from them for around $5k, and it performed pretty darn well. The only hesitation I have is doing shared storage with SCSI, due to the lack of hardware level arbitration on access. I'm sure there're some boxes that do provide this, but its not the norm. I've been burned on clusters doing this when both heads bounced at the same time (idiot predecessor plugged them into the same circuit in the colo), and since they booted at the same rate, they both tried to fsck the file system at the same time. Thanks Veritas for that bug! If you want to do it right, then you're absolutely correct that it costs money, cuz FCAL just ain't gettin' cheaper.
Another option would be to buy a used NetApp or similar device from Ebay for a couple grand and just mount the entire content tree for the webservers via NFS. Then you can push content to one place, the sites all automagically pick it up, and you've got a highly available filer managing the data.
The cost of this stuff just keeps coming down, which is why we're all expected as sysadmins/netadmins/etc to keep driving availability up. Thankfully there's also some really good F/OSS packages out there which are maturing rapidly to provide some of these HA services.
I've never actually heard of Saru, got a link and maybe some info? I'm always interested in new technologies, particularly ones related to clustering/HA.
I fully agree that keeping any individual server to 5 nines availability is generally an unattainable goal, in my environment we strive for 3 nines on individual components, and 5 nines on the overall service. With that goal we build HA into everything we design, whether its through load balancing, heartbeat/ip take over, or building the failover logic into our custom applications. We pick the setup that we'll use for each component when we're architecting the platform, since each piece has different limitations, etc.
I also really like the addition of wind drift, and the weight factor of various vehicles, something I really don't remember from B3.
I agree the glitches with sometimes checking not working quite as expected oughta be fixed, but overall I find that element to be a lot more fun than the way it was in B3. Games like this aren't about weaving through traffic, and the developers recognized that and heightened the smash-shit-up quotient. I personally play B:R to relax, and nothing relaxes me like checking traffic all over the place.
Thats just not true. Winning a gold on an event gives you an automatic five star rating, thats the beauty of it. Just like winning a bronze automatically deducts a star.HA for web applications isn't very difficult, it just requires doing a little architecture up front, and spending the appropriate amount of money. Load balanced N+1 clusters, multiple redundant Internet links and their associated hardware, none of this is difficult or even that expensive today.
There are very few places in the computing world where real HA is even remotely difficult, and even in those places there are workable, if not actually good, solutions available.
I'm torn on whether a bad standard is actually better than none. I don't think the problems lie so much in the LSBv3 standard itself, as in the poor management of the standard that such a young standards body is having.
RedHat is really the company which needs to drive this standard, and while so far they've been doing a lot to do so, its not really in their best competitive interests. Consider that all the major "enterprise" products that folks would want on Linux (WebSphere, Oracle, WebLogic, etc) all specify RedHat as their supported distro.
I think we need to heap scorn on the crappy test suite now, to try and force them to clean up their act before they engender too much negative press and reputation. Once we hit a certain point where the negative reputation builds up, the standard will be doomed forever.
Don't get your hopes up. While the LSB appears like a very useful standard, as many have noted there are some real holes, and the test suite is by all accounts utterly useless. Further, there's not as tight of control of the testing so it appears at least some vendors are doing bizarre things to be compliant without waivers, despite tests that don't run in real world situations.
One example that Ulrich Drepper of RedHat pointed out is the thread test, which won't run on an SMP box. The LSB people's response? Run it on a slow uniprocessor. What's the point of this again?
I'm not one to claim that any species which can't survive us doesn't deserve to survive, however really broad statements about "mass extinction" leave me unmoved.
Consider the original Kinsey study, as an example. In a time pervaded by rigid ideas of "normal" and "deviant", the study shattered all of those ideals through an anonymous interview process. While there are definitely some rough edges to his data, even when "scrubbed" to remove the biases that people claimed came from the ~5% of the sample data which came from homosexual prositutes, and the ~25% of current or previous penal inmates, the numbers stayed essentially static.
If people think they're contributing to science, they'll talk about just about any aspect of their lives.
There is of course evidence to suggest they'll tell interviewers what they think they expect to hear. I read about a study in which people headed into a washroom were interviewed about handwashing, and a shockingly large number lied, despite knowing they would be videotaped shortly thereafter, and thus they would be caught.