I think that's what I was getting at in my prior post. If the controller can cache my commonly accessed sectors at boot-time, that's fine. But as for "M cylinders for a partition", for traditional partitions, that's fine. For things like UnixWare, Openserver and *BSD, it'd have to know about the sub-filesystem partitions they use, would they not?
Many RAID cards have onboard RAM. I have an AMI 1500 controller sitting next to me that takes a standard PC SDRAM DIMM as a cache chip. It has a rechargeable Li-Ion battery to keep the info on the chip persistent. It does read-ahead as well as write-back caching.
As far as I can tell it does do what it is supposed to. In the event of a power failure, it contains the last bits of info that were sent by the OS in RAM, and will reconcile what actually had been written to disk before the machine went down.
The problem with this, of course, is that the OS (in this case SCO openserver, not my choice, need to support legacy app) has this nasty habit, like all Unices, of caching data in system RAM by default. I've turned down or off as many cache settings as I can in the SCO kernel parameters, but there's still a little bit still going on.
Performance is a little poorer than "normal" but the crash-reboot-fsck time is better than it was, and I've lost virtually no data with the RAID configuration, which was my goal.
However:
"With enough memory, it could also be configured to permanently cache the MBR, boot loader, kernel, init
scripts, daemons... Make it big enough and the whole swap partition is in there, too. Think how fast
something like this could boot."
Yes, but doesn't that contradict what you said about a "entirely OS-independent disk controller card"? Seriously. Wouldn't the card have to understand whatever filesystem you were dealing with, and hence the operating system (somewhat)? The only way I can see around it is having the card remember what sectors it commonly read during the first X seconds after the first disk read. I'm not saying it's a bad idea, as I like the thought of having 20 second boots, but how would you do something like that and stay "OS independent"?
Well, for the truly "Mission Critical" you get a UPS that's directly wired into the computer room wall outlets, with hot-swap components and dual parallel inverters.
"I don't recall the Morris worm attacking Exchange servers and thereby crashing the entire net either. Sendmail
at fault again! Not a slam against Unix here, but a slam against sendmail. "
"Cobalt's [devices] are true appliances," Ingram said. "You do not
care about the operating system. If we were to convert these over
to Solaris, the end-user wouldn't care. We don't have the energy
to drive two operating systems."
Right. One of the reasons that I bought into Cobalt's products is was that I COULD buy them and set them up without a fuss, but the option was there to modify the OS and software even though it wasn't supported.
I fear that if they port Solaris to the product, I won't have that kind of access anymore.
As for porting it to MIPS, that's only for the Qube series. The RAQ line of servers runs AMD processors. Solaris x/86 will fit, I think (though I've never run it on anything other than Intel chips).
The best line I've seen so far (seems to have been writeen by an HR staffer) read:
Must have 4 years UNIX experience and have 5 years experience with Linus.
Talk about your high standards... I think his wife would only qualify for this one...
One of the Discovery channels was showing it in the US earlier this summer under the title "Junkyard Wars". That was a great show. Personally, the floating Land Rover was the best IMHO.
"All those tubes and wires and careful notes!"
Re:SCO isn't lying about Y2K
on
Endgame For SCO
·
· Score: 1
Are you sure it wasn't your app?
I've three OSR5.0.5 boxes here that had no problem with Y2K/Feb 29th. Ticked over in test, and on the actual day.
OTOH, the accounting/billing app we are running here is ported from a Tiger Minicomputer (anyone heard of a language called CADOL?, (basic on steriods )), running on an emulator for that particular platform. I'm eventually porting it to Linux, as there's no hope if it being replaced anytime soon. So I'd end up with: IBCS ->> Emulator binary ->> tokenized object code.
"All this extra complexity is not good. Why not simply use unix filesystem for the unix machines, and NTFS for the Windows ones ? Any sharing can be done via NFS. There is no reason to use SAMBA. Also you are at the mercy of Microsoft changing the spec on you."
I guess then you've never had to interface multiple machines without a large budget. Or understand exactly what this product does. The native filesystems are the same, all it does is make a UNIX box look like SMB fileservers (a.k.a Win9X, NT).
Prime example of this is what I had to do a year ago to interface a new accounting system to the old one. The old system runs on SCO OSR5, and the new one is a client-server SQLserver based application. Problem was, some of the old system's modules were in use, and had to export to the new one. Dug around for usable tools, found samba, and *presto*, instant interface. Configuration took me all of twenty minutes (first time okay?) and I never have to monitor the thing.
I tend to be pretty cynical about software, and this is one of the few packages that I have respect for.
"Nobody uses GPS to target their nukes. US missiles use inertial/celestial navigation. As the warhead is in its ballistic arc, it takes images of the stars to determine if it's on target (stars are difficult to jam). "
However, AFAIK, missle subs use it to determine where THEY are in order to give launching coordinates to the missles. This number is important for hard target kills.
Novell does not need a second processor, it does just fine with one.
At work, I have two poweredge 1300 servers. This is a dual-processor box. One has Novell 3.2 loaded on it (100 users), the other is NT4.0 (25 users). Both have the same disk and memory loads, the difference being that the Novell box has only one processor (PII 400). Every few weeks, we find that we have to move an application from the NT4.0 box to the novell box, simply because NT can't handle the load of 25 users, while the 3.2NW box is working serving files and offering print services to more users.
Novell's been doing this a lot longer than MS, if Netware needed two processors to do what it needed to do, they would have added it by now.
And as another amateur radio operator, I tend to think that you didn't do much more than memorize the question pools to get your license.
The Yagi will be directional. This much is true. HOWEVER, depending on the exact design, the beamwidth will not be that wide, as narrow as 4-5 degrees wide. You might push 50-100 miles out, but in a VERY narrow pattern. This is not without uses, many broadcast stations have nulls designed into their pattern to account for other stations near their transmitting radius. You would be missing half your listening area by going with such an antenna.
>>And you waste an IRQ and PCI slot for each one of them. And you still >get two devices per channel, instead of 15. There's a big difference >between 2 and 15.
> Not actually. Most of the IDE soundcards like mine had IDE drive controllers built into the card.
Umm, yes. Look at the resource allocations for the soundcard (if you happen to run windows).
SB16s and AWE32s are notorious resource hogs. The built in IDE controller does suck up one IRQ and I/O block. Been there, done that. And you still have two devices you can add to the channel.
I can't remember if it was the Palm 4 or the Palm 6 but one of those numbers stands for death in an Asian country (I don't know which one) and Palm didn't want death associated with their handheld... In the words of David Pogue: "Here, take a look at my Palm Death!".
Umm, Japan, I think, and the number is four. There are two/three ways to say four, and one is associated with death. Can't remember which one it is though.
"Correct me if I'm wrong, but you would need a straight line that long in order for it to be an antenna, and I doubt any CPU is going to have a circuit from one side to the next.(I am assuming you are talking about the CPU die traces and not the mainboard.) "
I beleive that he was talking about the mainboard. While the most common antennas are verticals, the impression that all antennas have to be such are false. Optimally, a dipole SHOULD run in a straight line, but isn't required of it. I'm not going to mention what it will do to transmit impedeance, or radiation pattern, but it can be done. Those board traces could be enough to act like reflector and director elements in a Yagi antenna, causing the radiation to propagate in specific directions.
Personally, I don't think that this will be a problem, as those chips should not radiate that much. If they did, induced currents in motherboard componentry would be an issue.
Dell will sell it bare if you have a business account with them. I've got a 4300 due any day now that is showing up bare, because they won't install it the way I want it without making it a special project.
But beware, their so-called "server specialists" are nothing more than glorified salesmen, and don't understand any flavor of UNIX.
Re:"boys and girls" appears 17 times
on
One for the Kids
·
· Score: 1
"Remember when Brock found a student to reverse-engineer the block list of some crummy censorware, and (surprise surprise!) found sites blocked for pretty obviously political reasons? "
Wow, it has been almost 3 years since that. Been a while. Any Slashdotters that were on Peacefire-L?
Actually Brock didn't ask for the reverse-engineer, the guy did it himself. The package in question was CyberSitter by Solid Oak.
If I recall, the "encryption" was nothing more than the text file bytes XORed with 04(? I think). A few lines of C code took care of that, and I do remember writing my own program to verify his work with others on the same mailing list. The software company had been butting heads with the guy who figured it out, and amazingly enough, his site and various related sites were listed in the text file.
That was kind of fun. Reminds me of how long I've been online.
As someone else in this discussion mentioned, Jane's isn't about news, but about information.
I fail to see the censorship Cringely seems to be perceiving ("...You have to do it the best that you can then take the heat, because the censorship of the nerderati is still censorship...."). Who said anything about censorship? I took the process that Jane's used to be more of a "peer review" process, (not that I'm *accusing* Slashdot of being quite up to that standard yet) whereby they verifed their results against the potentially more knowledgeable community. I have to ask, what is wrong with getting it right the first time you publish an article not "...That's why newspapers make corrections..."?
I cannot say that I agree with Katz's vison of digital direct democracy. As someone once said, "...The problem with the common man is that he was created so damned common..." It is my belief that given the chance, bread and circuses would rule the nation and we would see the so-called pork and special interest infighting that compares to nothing that exists in Congress today. People will always act in their own best interest, and I do not think that the will be enough collective common sense for this to work.
This is not to say that I do not think that the advance of technology can contribute to the democratic process. I have long believed that the electoral college process is archaic and needs to be abolished, as we tabulate the votes electronicaly, and a purely popular vote could be taken, as the bars to communication that existed 200 years ago are no longer in the way. But I do not think that Congress will ever not have a need.
This has to be a freakin' troll (yeah, I know I'm feeding it).
I've got Novell 3.12 at sites that have uptimes measured in years. Novell generally doesn't dgo down unless you are running it on nonstandard/generic hardware. It is those who half-ass their hardware who have unstable systems (in any environment).
Slashdot Mirror
I think that's what I was getting at in my prior post. If the controller can cache my commonly accessed sectors at boot-time, that's fine. But as for "M cylinders for a partition", for traditional partitions, that's fine. For things like UnixWare, Openserver and *BSD, it'd have to know about the sub-filesystem partitions they use, would they not?
"All those tubes and wires and careful notes!"
Many RAID cards have onboard RAM. I have an AMI 1500 controller sitting next to me that takes a standard PC SDRAM DIMM as a cache chip. It has a rechargeable Li-Ion battery to keep the info on the chip persistent. It does read-ahead as well as write-back caching.
As far as I can tell it does do what it is supposed to. In the event of a power failure, it contains the last bits of info that were sent by the OS in RAM, and will reconcile what actually had been written to disk before the machine went down.
The problem with this, of course, is that the OS (in this case SCO openserver, not my choice, need to support legacy app) has this nasty habit, like all Unices, of caching data in system RAM by default. I've turned down or off as many cache settings as I can in the SCO kernel parameters, but there's still a little bit still going on.
Performance is a little poorer than "normal" but the crash-reboot-fsck time is better than it was, and I've lost virtually no data with the RAID configuration, which was my goal.
However:
"With enough memory, it could also be configured to permanently cache the MBR, boot loader, kernel, init scripts, daemons... Make it big enough and the whole swap partition is in there, too. Think how fast something like this could boot."
Yes, but doesn't that contradict what you said about a "entirely OS-independent disk controller card"? Seriously. Wouldn't the card have to understand whatever filesystem you were dealing with, and hence the operating system (somewhat)? The only way I can see around it is having the card remember what sectors it commonly read during the first X seconds after the first disk read. I'm not saying it's a bad idea, as I like the thought of having 20 second boots, but how would you do something like that and stay "OS independent"?
"All those tubes and wires and careful notes!"
Well, for the truly "Mission Critical" you get a UPS that's directly wired into the computer room wall outlets, with hot-swap components and dual parallel inverters.
They make those, you know.
"All those tubes and wires and careful notes!"
"I don't recall the Morris worm attacking Exchange servers and thereby crashing the entire net either. Sendmail at fault again! Not a slam against Unix here, but a slam against sendmail. "
Idiot. Exchange didn't even exist back then.
"All those tubes and wires and careful notes!"
From the article:
"Cobalt's [devices] are true appliances," Ingram said. "You do not care about the operating system. If we were to convert these over to Solaris, the end-user wouldn't care. We don't have the energy to drive two operating systems."
Right. One of the reasons that I bought into Cobalt's products is was that I COULD buy them and set them up without a fuss, but the option was there to modify the OS and software even though it wasn't supported.
I fear that if they port Solaris to the product, I won't have that kind of access anymore.
As for porting it to MIPS, that's only for the Qube series. The RAQ line of servers runs AMD processors. Solaris x/86 will fit, I think (though I've never run it on anything other than Intel chips).
"All those tubes and wires and careful notes!"
Must have 4 years UNIX experience and have 5 years experience with Linus.
Talk about your high standards... I think his wife would only qualify for this one...
"All those tubes and wires and careful notes!"
One of the Discovery channels was showing it in the US earlier this summer under the title "Junkyard Wars". That was a great show. Personally, the floating Land Rover was the best IMHO.
"All those tubes and wires and careful notes!"
Are you sure it wasn't your app?
I've three OSR5.0.5 boxes here that had no problem with Y2K/Feb 29th. Ticked over in test, and on the actual day.
OTOH, the accounting/billing app we are running here is ported from a Tiger Minicomputer (anyone heard of a language called CADOL?, (basic on steriods )), running on an emulator for that particular platform. I'm eventually porting it to Linux, as there's no hope if it being replaced anytime soon. So I'd end up with:
IBCS ->> Emulator binary ->> tokenized object code.
This will suck, no doubt about it.
"All those tubes and wires and careful notes!"
Quoted:
"All this extra complexity is not good. Why not simply use unix filesystem for the unix machines, and NTFS for the Windows ones ? Any sharing can be done via NFS. There is no reason to use SAMBA. Also you are at the mercy of Microsoft changing the spec on you."
I guess then you've never had to interface multiple machines without a large budget. Or understand exactly what this product does. The native filesystems are the same, all it does is make a UNIX box look like SMB fileservers (a.k.a Win9X, NT).
Prime example of this is what I had to do a year ago to interface a new accounting system to the old one. The old system runs on SCO OSR5, and the new one is a client-server SQLserver based application. Problem was, some of the old system's modules were in use, and had to export to the new one. Dug around for usable tools, found samba, and *presto*, instant interface. Configuration took me all of twenty minutes (first time okay?) and I never have to monitor the thing.
I tend to be pretty cynical about software, and this is one of the few packages that I have respect for.
"All those tubes and wires and careful notes!"
"Nobody uses GPS to target their nukes. US missiles use inertial/celestial navigation. As the warhead is in its ballistic arc, it takes images of the stars to determine if it's on target (stars are difficult to jam). "
However, AFAIK, missle subs use it to determine where THEY are in order to give launching coordinates to the missles. This number is important for hard target kills.
"All those tubes and wires and careful notes!"
*yawn* I can't speak for gateway, but the last three servers I ordered from Dell came without an OS. It helps if you actually talk to a person.
Oh, also take a look at this. I can get Novell and Red Hat too! (check the OS section.)
Try checking some facts next time.
There is a simple answer to this one.
Novell does not need a second processor, it does just fine with one.
At work, I have two poweredge 1300 servers. This is a dual-processor box. One has Novell 3.2 loaded on it (100 users), the other is NT4.0 (25 users). Both have the same disk and memory loads, the difference being that the Novell box has only one processor (PII 400). Every few weeks, we find that we have to move an application from the NT4.0 box to the novell box, simply because NT can't handle the load of 25 users, while the 3.2NW box is working serving files and offering print services to more users.
Novell's been doing this a lot longer than MS, if Netware needed two processors to do what it needed to do, they would have added it by now.
The Yagi will be directional. This much is true. HOWEVER, depending on the exact design, the beamwidth will not be that wide, as narrow as 4-5 degrees wide. You might push 50-100 miles out, but in a VERY narrow pattern. This is not without uses, many broadcast stations have nulls designed into their pattern to account for other stations near their transmitting radius. You would be missing half your listening area by going with such an antenna.
>>And you waste an IRQ and PCI slot for each one of them. And you still >get two devices per channel, instead of 15. There's a big difference >between 2 and 15.
> Not actually. Most of the IDE soundcards like mine had IDE drive controllers built into the card.
Umm, yes. Look at the resource allocations for the soundcard (if you happen to run windows).
SB16s and AWE32s are notorious resource hogs. The built in IDE controller does suck up one IRQ and I/O block. Been there, done that. And you still have two devices you can add to the channel.
Umm, Japan, I think, and the number is four. There are two/three ways to say four, and one is associated with death. Can't remember which one it is though.
Jeez, spot the hidded TMBG reference in there...
SUUUUURE there is.
*ROTFLMAO*
Just wondering, what is this "poll tax" you refer to?
"Correct me if I'm wrong, but you would need a straight line that long in order for it to be an antenna, and I doubt any CPU is going to have a circuit from one side to the next.(I am assuming you are talking about the CPU die traces and not the mainboard.) "
I beleive that he was talking about the mainboard. While the most common antennas are verticals, the impression that all antennas have to be such are false. Optimally, a dipole SHOULD run in a straight line, but isn't required of it. I'm not going to mention what it will do to transmit impedeance, or radiation pattern, but it can be done. Those board traces could be enough to act like reflector and director elements in a Yagi antenna, causing the radiation to propagate in specific directions.
Personally, I don't think that this will be a problem, as those chips should not radiate that much. If they did, induced currents in motherboard componentry would be an issue.
It also helps to not leave it in the cradle all the time. Something about the DTR line draining the juice (supposedly it is always on).
But beware, their so-called "server specialists" are nothing more than glorified salesmen, and don't understand any flavor of UNIX.
"Remember when Brock found a student to reverse-engineer the block list of some crummy censorware, and (surprise surprise!) found sites blocked for pretty obviously political reasons? "
Wow, it has been almost 3 years since that. Been a while. Any Slashdotters that were on Peacefire-L?
Actually Brock didn't ask for the reverse-engineer, the guy did it himself. The package in question was CyberSitter by Solid Oak.
If I recall, the "encryption" was nothing more than the text file bytes XORed with 04(? I think). A few lines of C code took care of that, and I do remember writing my own program to verify his work with others on the same mailing list. The software company had been butting heads with the guy who figured it out, and amazingly enough, his site and various related sites were listed in the text file.
That was kind of fun. Reminds me of how long I've been online.
As someone else in this discussion mentioned, Jane's isn't about news, but about information.
I fail to see the censorship Cringely seems to be perceiving ("...You have to do it the best that you can then take the heat, because the censorship of the nerderati is still censorship. ..."). Who said anything about censorship? I took the process that Jane's used to be more of a "peer review" process, (not that I'm *accusing* Slashdot of being quite up to that standard yet) whereby they verifed their results against the potentially more knowledgeable community. I have to ask, what is wrong with getting it right the first time you publish an article not "...That's why newspapers make corrections..."?
I cannot say that I agree with Katz's vison of digital direct democracy. As someone once said, "...The problem with the common man is that he was created so damned common..." It is my belief that given the chance, bread and circuses would rule the nation and we would see the so-called pork and special interest infighting that compares to nothing that exists in Congress today. People will always act in their own best interest, and I do not think that the will be enough collective common sense for this to work.
This is not to say that I do not think that the advance of technology can contribute to the democratic process. I have long believed that the electoral college process is archaic and needs to be abolished, as we tabulate the votes electronicaly, and a purely popular vote could be taken, as the bars to communication that existed 200 years ago are no longer in the way. But I do not think that Congress will ever not have a need.
This has to be a freakin' troll (yeah, I know I'm feeding it).
I've got Novell 3.12 at sites that have uptimes measured in years. Novell generally doesn't dgo down unless you are running it on nonstandard/generic hardware. It is those who half-ass their hardware who have unstable systems (in any environment).