For this reason I use FreeBSD, which at the very least, will automatically install any depenency needed. And if it starts installing X windows or some other huge bit of stupidity, I can cancel the install.
Apparently, I'm not alone in not wanting to bother with this because that's why the ports collection was created oh, 10 years ago.
the humour of you slamming all those other solutions and then plugging for someone to even CONTEMPLATE enterprise management with Cygwin and Perl is just beyond belief.
I don't care of you have 50 machines or 50,000 - planning things well with solutions that scale is important.
I wish I could say that your post surprises me, but the typical slashdot user tends to view cobbling together a solution with duct tape, twine, and used chewing gum to be a equal if not superior solution to actual planning.
Have you ever worked in an environment when you've been called upon to manage an infrastructure for a large number of platforms? how big was it? because the real world is full of nasty crap you have to deal with, and the last thing I want to do is spend my evenings and weekends fucking around with my custom perl scripts on 4000 windows boxes.
I'm a huge open source zealot, but come on- some of us like to actually get home in time for dinner. there's other things besides computers, you know.
The french have no word for victory, so we all expect it from them. I still believe a stronger US isolationist policy that kept us out of WWII and no FDR might have made the world a more interesting place.
if you can say any one good thing about americans, which is difficult to do, it's that we will finish what we start (and more than likely provoked to begin with...)
Somehow it just seems appropriate for slashdot that someone would have no clue how to use basic system tools, but would be well versed in leet speak and lamer colloquialisms. Congratulations, you've made my day.
All major OEMs do this. Dell, Compaq, HP, Gateway, Sony, Samsung, Micron, IBM... that good for a start?
Their licensing arrangements with MS dictate that the majority (or all) of their x86 machines be sold with a MS license; if you wanted to buy a desktop with Linux, you're going to buy it with a MS license which you paid for. if they changed this arrangement, they would pay a much higher per-license fee to MS.
I realise a few vendors like IBM and Dell will sell some pre-installed linux distros on server gear and whatnot, but that's usually on selected models and is mostly irrelevant to this discussion.
If you bought PCs in large quantities for a living you'd understand!
Bullshit stories? Fraudulent action? trying to divert attention from misdoings? sounds more like the Shrub administration than Iraq. At least their leader has some military experience, rather than avoiding a war by having his family protect him from service.
Umm, anyone who would use a LocalDirector for serious applications should be shot. seriously.
and Dell? excuse me? you're saying the cheapest hardware on the planet is a good choice for required uptime? blah. maybe you're one of those people with the rack full of 1U boxen, and if so, then you can afford to lose systems all the time. and that's great if it works for you.
I don't use Java, I'm sorry of my obviously blatant ignorance. the last people I knew who talked to me about EJBs are all mopping floors now, and I say that in a sad way because they were cool people. oh well.
I think you and I work in different environments completely... if I tried to pass of a pile of dells and some cisco crapware as good infrastructure, I'd get laughed at. but if you're scraping those pennies together, then I understand. the cost between 99% uptime and 99.9% uptime is a huge one.
I hate Sun btw, so don't think I'm pushing them... there's just a point when enough money is at stake (I work for a brokerage firm) that you don't fuck around. when your linux boxen start handling billions of dollars of other people's money daily, you'll understand.
and my last line was just a crack at your LimeWire needs. I prefer Kazaa but that's just me:)
While I cannot defend myself from being guilty of drunken ranting, I'll point out a few things...
"Linux filesystem arrangements do not mutate any more than FreeBSD systems."
This would be true, except there are way too many distros of linux out there, and people put things in different places. I know there are several good projects out there to make this standardised, but it's still a mess.
If you're a wonky person who puts shit in a weird place (which, btw, sane usage of the ports tree etc will fix) then that's your fate. I find there are more of those wonky people in the linux world than elsewhere. (rasterman? anyone?)
SoftUpdates is a goodness. journalling file systems are a goodness, as well. if I was going to implement something that actually required a journalling file system, REALLY required it, I wouldn't be using a linux box, as I would have additional uptime requirements that generic hardware could not satisfy. This is another one of those dividing lines.
"FreeBSD maintainers and developers do not possess 31337 powers that the mere Linux contributors do not. They're merely a little pickier and cagier about the QA and release process."
FreeBSD maintainers and developers tend to be significantly older and sometimes(!) wiser people. This for whatever reason tends to impart a different view of what is good and what is not. being pickier and cagier about the QA and release process is, in my mind, vital. if you use an OS for real work, it's nice to know the people developing it are intending to use it for the same thing and just like you they don't want things to just randomly break. if this is a turn off for you, then so be it.
"Some people live in the real world, where they don't have the luxury of increasing the expense of their PC"
these people, who I hope you mean to say are using home systems and not anything in a production environment, most certainly should use linux. something nifty like mandrake would work well. it installs on most anything and will support even the crappiest of winmodem/onboardVGA/whatever hardware.
If your intent by that comment was to say that people building production equipment should ignore common sense and use COTS hardware without any regard to uptime and sanity, then you're in no position to criticise anything, are you?:)
"People go to software raid when they can't afford hardware raid and want more reliability than NO raid."
see the above comment. same situation. real raid isn't that costly. if a few hundred bucks are a huge deal for your server project, then WTF are you doing anyway? you may think this is an "Ivory Tower" approach, and I'll be honest- it is. but that's part of what I'm saying- there's a different user base for a reason. if you're not using your hardware and your OS for serious workhorse tasks, then use whatever. my desktop is a win2k box, because i like pretty colors. none of my servers have anything other than consoles, because windowing software really doesn't belong on a server. that's another ivory tower thing, I guess.
"The only thing your post has told me is if you want to be an elitist compusnob, you're little weak in the the reasoning department and wish to mask it by advocating an elitist OS, you have more time to twiddle with your OS (than just plug-in the working product), you have more money to spend for a component FreeBSD supports, and need to replace your religious faith with a OS distribution, give FreeBSD a spin."
I don't want to be an elitist compusnob. I spend a large amount of time volunteering for an inner-city nonprofit teaching kids how to read, spell, and do homework while avoiding the shit their world is full of. they also run all their infrastructure on FreeBSD, and I don't hassle them about it:)
I have absolutely NO TIME to fiddle around with my OS, at all. I wish I did, but I'm not a college kid/teenager/whatever it is that your standard linux user is. that's why I use freebsd- because it just works without me having to worry about having huge security holes, and installing software is a snap. maybe you missed that.
As far as spending more money on hardware- I'll listen to your comments when I stop hearing people bitch about not having good linux support for $400 video cards. that's a crock, and we both know it. those video cards belong in your home pc to play games on and if that's what your UNIX disto is for, then by all means make that your priority.
I think if you and I had a real face to face conversation we'd probably realize we have the same opinions on things, but we're just approaching them from a different angle here. thanks for the great roast, I enjoyed it:)
if i had to use linux, I would use debian. it's pretty spiffy. there's still too many libs and other crap all over the place, but that's not debian's fault, it's linux.
one of the reasons that debian is more homogeneous is because of the whole apt-get thing. that's good, and I think that's one reason why many sysadmins choose debian. that, and you really want to be able to pick which core elements go into any server- I'm sure it's nice for that as well.
for my hundreds of BSD boxes from over the years, the only problems I run into are variances in config files due to upgrades in core OS apps. there is, however, a tool in freebsd to fix those, and it works quite well (although we use something else we cooked up internally.)
as I said to another poster, use whatever works for you- if you aren't constrained by actually having to use the systems for work, then by all means go wild and do what you want. for people who spend enough time in the datacenter that the last thing they ever want to see is another raised tile floor, FreeBSD is a great option.
exactly as I said- how many people would group running a serious application (weblogix) and running an application for piracy (LimeWire, a Gnutella P2P client) ? if you're so concerned about having quality java support for a commercial app, you would run it on a Sun box. I know that JDK support and app support for linux are better now, but would you risk your job and reputation on it? I hope not. that's why we have budgets, and if yours isn't enough to truly build a good infrastructure for whatever applications you have then you shouldn't be building them to start with.
that being said, I'm running serious enterprise java apps on a freebsd box using the JDK right now (OpenNMS, available at www.opennms.org - great enterprise SNMP monitoring system.)
use whatever trips your trigger. if pirating mp3s and movies is that important to you, then I guess linux is your platform of choice!
I know- I always pull my binaries from mango.firepipe.net (the kde3 freebsd build mirror). I was just using an arbitrary example of some huge package that you usually wouldn't want to build. XFree is another good example.
Freebsd has had SoftUpdates for UFS (disk file system) for quite a while. this does a more or less journaling type feature, although as far as I understand it's not quite a full JFS. it works nicely though, and no more FSCK. that's a bonus in my book.
and as far as hardware support, it's not really a matter of HOW much stuff is supported but how WELL it's supported. this is important when you actually want to do work, like have production servers tick along forever without randomly crashing. I wouldn't even begin to pretend that Free supports as much hardware as linux does, but that's mostly because there isn't a legion of 13 year old kids writing a slew of crap drivers for things like usb webcams and cheap ass network cards and god knowsw what else they bought at CompUSA. that sounds bad, but it's what it seems like much of the time. who gives a crap whether you can do "good performance IDE software RAID" ? who does that? seriously. if you wanted good RAID performance, you'd build a box using a serious hardware raid controller, with good scsi disks... and if you're someone who wants to argue with me here, then you're really not someone who gets it, and should stick to your linux distro of choice. pretty IRC interfaces aren't all what it's about, you know.
As far as compatibility with linux "software" goes, FreeBSD is a POSIX beast, and works just fine in that arena. it also has an optional linux compatibility layer where (sadly!) it will emulate the insane mess of libs and dependencies (glibc? hello? pick a version already) and run the software as if it was a linux ELF binary. this is handy when vendors do stupid things like distribute apps for hardware as linux binaries... I've run into this with Mitsubishi high-end UPS systems, and linux compatibility mode worked out A-OK. all done, QED. no need to compromise my network with a exploit prone system (besides the windows servers, of course!)
but really, as a former linux user from the days when slackware was new and really damn cool, I have to say that I like FreeBSD more. one of my coworkers forced me to use it, and once I sussed it out a bit it made so much more sense. things are ALWAYS IN THE SAME PLACE. this is important, so important I'll say it again. THINGS ARE ALWAYS IN THE SAME PLACE. this makes administration easy. installing applications is much simpler. cleaning things up is easier. restoring from backup is easier. it's great that your home linux box has some weird ass setup that makes sense to you, but start administrating hundreds of boxes built by a team of different people over the years. weird ass file system nonsense doesn't scale. move on.
Ports and the source tree- these clinched it for me. it's spiffy. you go into the directory, use the built in search tool to find an app to do what you want, and then install it from source. you can snarf the binary if you wanted, but why bother? we're using servers here, they have power, and we're not building KDE3 or something. (except of course when we are, of course.) I can't begin to say how spoiled I am by using the ports tree.
And building from source- what's easier about keeping your system up to date than syncing your source tree with one command? and then rebuilding your entire core system with another? poof! it's like magic. go figure. it's been there forever.
anyway, if you're a geek who needs to do server stuff and you'd like to cut down on the headaches, give freebsd a spin. we're not bad people and most of us work for a living. you get to avoid a lot of clueless brats and silly script kiddies. if we say "H4X0r" it's in jest. maybe it sounds bad, and if so, that's fine. either it appeals to you or it doesn't. thanks for listening.
I'm waiting for Linux to get where FreeBSD is for ease of building... you linux folks seem to think this whole "building from source" thing is some kind of big deal. sheesh.
an hour of downtime might have saved you the hassle there...
I know that I was watching all the silly hits, but security holes that allow arbitrary execution of code on a target are bad... that is, in fact, what patches are for, and the MS security mailing list helps:)
I managed to implement quite a lot of public folder functionality into IMAP4 folders that different kerberos user groups could subscribe to... it's not undoable, maybe not as easy though.
we do that by creating a resource, named something like... "7th Floor small conference room".
Then it's just as simple as inviting that item as a resource, and voila, it's booked. this seems to work well with little to no intervention required by any receptionist, who used to have to juggle scheduling.
the constitution and the bill of rights do not delineate the only specific rights that you have- they are merely a list of rights that the founders felt needed to be enumerated for clarity. you are given the right to more or less EVERYTHING barring items that conflict with existing laws (and even that is arguable- you can claim, for example, that the DMCA and other 'corporate laws' violate many rights.)
don't assume you are only given what is listed- that's not how it was intended, and now how you should perceive it.
it's actually surprisingly affordable these days, with the dotcom fallout and manufacturers heavily over-manufacturing (they were expecting the bubble to never pop?)
In a realistic world, I would say that for your heavy bandwidth needs you could pick up a decent ~24 port gigabit switch for under 10k, if you shopped well. that could host all your servers for that matter, as it would have full wire speed capacity. for a lesser port density (say 8 gig ports) you can even get down under maybe 3 or 4k for a real hardware device (foundry, juniper, xtreme, etc.)
there is always a cost/performance point, but when you're buying macintosh hardware you've already made the decision that cost/performance is irrelevant, to a certain extent.
maybe you should consider real network hardware. we have a large installation of Foundry Networks gear and we happily throw around terabytes of data daily.
nothing churns more happily than servers with fast storage abilities, multi-gigabit interfaces, and no network latency.
Slashdot Mirror
For this reason I use FreeBSD, which at the very least, will automatically install any depenency needed. And if it starts installing X windows or some other huge bit of stupidity, I can cancel the install.
Apparently, I'm not alone in not wanting to bother with this because that's why the ports collection was created oh, 10 years ago.
HEAR HEAR!
a voice of reason amidst the darkness... thanks!
the humour of you slamming all those other solutions and then plugging for someone to even CONTEMPLATE enterprise management with Cygwin and Perl is just beyond belief.
I don't care of you have 50 machines or 50,000 - planning things well with solutions that scale is important.
I wish I could say that your post surprises me, but the typical slashdot user tends to view cobbling together a solution with duct tape, twine, and used chewing gum to be a equal if not superior solution to actual planning.
Have you ever worked in an environment when you've been called upon to manage an infrastructure for a large number of platforms? how big was it? because the real world is full of nasty crap you have to deal with, and the last thing I want to do is spend my evenings and weekends fucking around with my custom perl scripts on 4000 windows boxes.
I'm a huge open source zealot, but come on- some of us like to actually get home in time for dinner. there's other things besides computers, you know.
But I am a toaster! I toast, therefore I am... it is my raison D'etre.
Would anyone like a toasted teacake?
Speaking of lackluster performances...
The french have no word for victory, so we all expect it from them. I still believe a stronger US isolationist policy that kept us out of WWII and no FDR might have made the world a more interesting place.
if you can say any one good thing about americans, which is difficult to do, it's that we will finish what we start (and more than likely provoked to begin with...)
Somehow it just seems appropriate for slashdot that someone would have no clue how to use basic system tools, but would be well versed in leet speak and lamer colloquialisms. Congratulations, you've made my day.
my god, someone who knows who mr flibble is AND who dug song is. that's so frickin cool.
All major OEMs do this. Dell, Compaq, HP, Gateway, Sony, Samsung, Micron, IBM... that good for a start?
Their licensing arrangements with MS dictate that the majority (or all) of their x86 machines be sold with a MS license; if you wanted to buy a desktop with Linux, you're going to buy it with a MS license which you paid for. if they changed this arrangement, they would pay a much higher per-license fee to MS.
I realise a few vendors like IBM and Dell will sell some pre-installed linux distros on server gear and whatnot, but that's usually on selected models and is mostly irrelevant to this discussion.
If you bought PCs in large quantities for a living you'd understand!
Bullshit stories? Fraudulent action? trying to divert attention from misdoings? sounds more like the Shrub administration than Iraq. At least their leader has some military experience, rather than avoiding a war by having his family protect him from service.
You can't say I'm trolling because it's TRUE!
Umm, anyone who would use a LocalDirector for serious applications should be shot. seriously.
and Dell? excuse me? you're saying the cheapest hardware on the planet is a good choice for required uptime? blah. maybe you're one of those people with the rack full of 1U boxen, and if so, then you can afford to lose systems all the time. and that's great if it works for you.
I don't use Java, I'm sorry of my obviously blatant ignorance. the last people I knew who talked to me about EJBs are all mopping floors now, and I say that in a sad way because they were cool people. oh well.
I think you and I work in different environments completely... if I tried to pass of a pile of dells and some cisco crapware as good infrastructure, I'd get laughed at. but if you're scraping those pennies together, then I understand. the cost between 99% uptime and 99.9% uptime is a huge one.
I hate Sun btw, so don't think I'm pushing them... there's just a point when enough money is at stake (I work for a brokerage firm) that you don't fuck around. when your linux boxen start handling billions of dollars of other people's money daily, you'll understand.
and my last line was just a crack at your LimeWire needs. I prefer Kazaa but that's just me:)
While I cannot defend myself from being guilty of drunken ranting, I'll point out a few things...
:)
:)
:)
"Linux filesystem arrangements do not mutate any more than FreeBSD systems."
This would be true, except there are way too many distros of linux out there, and people put things in different places. I know there are several good projects out there to make this standardised, but it's still a mess.
If you're a wonky person who puts shit in a weird place (which, btw, sane usage of the ports tree etc will fix) then that's your fate. I find there are more of those wonky people in the linux world than elsewhere. (rasterman? anyone?)
SoftUpdates is a goodness. journalling file systems are a goodness, as well. if I was going to implement something that actually required a journalling file system, REALLY required it, I wouldn't be using a linux box, as I would have additional uptime requirements that generic hardware could not satisfy. This is another one of those dividing lines.
"FreeBSD maintainers and developers do not possess 31337 powers that the mere Linux contributors do not. They're merely a little pickier and cagier about the QA and release process."
FreeBSD maintainers and developers tend to be significantly older and sometimes(!) wiser people. This for whatever reason tends to impart a different view of what is good and what is not. being pickier and cagier about the QA and release process is, in my mind, vital. if you use an OS for real work, it's nice to know the people developing it are intending to use it for the same thing and just like you they don't want things to just randomly break. if this is a turn off for you, then so be it.
"Some people live in the real world, where they don't have the luxury of increasing the expense of their PC"
these people, who I hope you mean to say are using home systems and not anything in a production environment, most certainly should use linux. something nifty like mandrake would work well. it installs on most anything and will support even the crappiest of winmodem/onboardVGA/whatever hardware.
If your intent by that comment was to say that people building production equipment should ignore common sense and use COTS hardware without any regard to uptime and sanity, then you're in no position to criticise anything, are you?
"People go to software raid when they can't afford hardware raid and want more reliability than NO raid."
see the above comment. same situation. real raid isn't that costly. if a few hundred bucks are a huge deal for your server project, then WTF are you doing anyway? you may think this is an "Ivory Tower" approach, and I'll be honest- it is. but that's part of what I'm saying- there's a different user base for a reason. if you're not using your hardware and your OS for serious workhorse tasks, then use whatever. my desktop is a win2k box, because i like pretty colors. none of my servers have anything other than consoles, because windowing software really doesn't belong on a server. that's another ivory tower thing, I guess.
"The only thing your post has told me is if you want to be an elitist compusnob, you're little weak in the the reasoning department and wish to mask it by advocating an elitist OS, you have more time to twiddle with your OS (than just plug-in the working product), you have more money to spend for a component FreeBSD supports, and need to replace your religious faith with a OS distribution, give FreeBSD a spin."
I don't want to be an elitist compusnob. I spend a large amount of time volunteering for an inner-city nonprofit teaching kids how to read, spell, and do homework while avoiding the shit their world is full of. they also run all their infrastructure on FreeBSD, and I don't hassle them about it
I have absolutely NO TIME to fiddle around with my OS, at all. I wish I did, but I'm not a college kid/teenager/whatever it is that your standard linux user is. that's why I use freebsd- because it just works without me having to worry about having huge security holes, and installing software is a snap. maybe you missed that.
As far as spending more money on hardware- I'll listen to your comments when I stop hearing people bitch about not having good linux support for $400 video cards. that's a crock, and we both know it. those video cards belong in your home pc to play games on and if that's what your UNIX disto is for, then by all means make that your priority.
I think if you and I had a real face to face conversation we'd probably realize we have the same opinions on things, but we're just approaching them from a different angle here. thanks for the great roast, I enjoyed it
if i had to use linux, I would use debian. it's pretty spiffy. there's still too many libs and other crap all over the place, but that's not debian's fault, it's linux.
one of the reasons that debian is more homogeneous is because of the whole apt-get thing. that's good, and I think that's one reason why many sysadmins choose debian. that, and you really want to be able to pick which core elements go into any server- I'm sure it's nice for that as well.
for my hundreds of BSD boxes from over the years, the only problems I run into are variances in config files due to upgrades in core OS apps. there is, however, a tool in freebsd to fix those, and it works quite well (although we use something else we cooked up internally.)
as I said to another poster, use whatever works for you- if you aren't constrained by actually having to use the systems for work, then by all means go wild and do what you want. for people who spend enough time in the datacenter that the last thing they ever want to see is another raised tile floor, FreeBSD is a great option.
exactly as I said- how many people would group running a serious application (weblogix) and running an application for piracy (LimeWire, a Gnutella P2P client) ? if you're so concerned about having quality java support for a commercial app, you would run it on a Sun box. I know that JDK support and app support for linux are better now, but would you risk your job and reputation on it? I hope not. that's why we have budgets, and if yours isn't enough to truly build a good infrastructure for whatever applications you have then you shouldn't be building them to start with.
that being said, I'm running serious enterprise java apps on a freebsd box using the JDK right now (OpenNMS, available at www.opennms.org - great enterprise SNMP monitoring system.)
use whatever trips your trigger. if pirating mp3s and movies is that important to you, then I guess linux is your platform of choice!
I know- I always pull my binaries from mango.firepipe.net (the kde3 freebsd build mirror). I was just using an arbitrary example of some huge package that you usually wouldn't want to build. XFree is another good example.
but it's still linux...
eh. whatever twiddles your nipplenuts.
Freebsd has had SoftUpdates for UFS (disk file system) for quite a while. this does a more or less journaling type feature, although as far as I understand it's not quite a full JFS. it works nicely though, and no more FSCK. that's a bonus in my book.
and as far as hardware support, it's not really a matter of HOW much stuff is supported but how WELL it's supported. this is important when you actually want to do work, like have production servers tick along forever without randomly crashing. I wouldn't even begin to pretend that Free supports as much hardware as linux does, but that's mostly because there isn't a legion of 13 year old kids writing a slew of crap drivers for things like usb webcams and cheap ass network cards and god knowsw what else they bought at CompUSA. that sounds bad, but it's what it seems like much of the time. who gives a crap whether you can do "good performance IDE software RAID" ? who does that? seriously. if you wanted good RAID performance, you'd build a box using a serious hardware raid controller, with good scsi disks... and if you're someone who wants to argue with me here, then you're really not someone who gets it, and should stick to your linux distro of choice. pretty IRC interfaces aren't all what it's about, you know.
As far as compatibility with linux "software" goes, FreeBSD is a POSIX beast, and works just fine in that arena. it also has an optional linux compatibility layer where (sadly!) it will emulate the insane mess of libs and dependencies (glibc? hello? pick a version already) and run the software as if it was a linux ELF binary. this is handy when vendors do stupid things like distribute apps for hardware as linux binaries... I've run into this with Mitsubishi high-end UPS systems, and linux compatibility mode worked out A-OK. all done, QED. no need to compromise my network with a exploit prone system (besides the windows servers, of course!)
but really, as a former linux user from the days when slackware was new and really damn cool, I have to say that I like FreeBSD more. one of my coworkers forced me to use it, and once I sussed it out a bit it made so much more sense. things are ALWAYS IN THE SAME PLACE. this is important, so important I'll say it again. THINGS ARE ALWAYS IN THE SAME PLACE. this makes administration easy. installing applications is much simpler. cleaning things up is easier. restoring from backup is easier. it's great that your home linux box has some weird ass setup that makes sense to you, but start administrating hundreds of boxes built by a team of different people over the years. weird ass file system nonsense doesn't scale. move on.
Ports and the source tree- these clinched it for me. it's spiffy. you go into the directory, use the built in search tool to find an app to do what you want, and then install it from source. you can snarf the binary if you wanted, but why bother? we're using servers here, they have power, and we're not building KDE3 or something. (except of course when we are, of course.) I can't begin to say how spoiled I am by using the ports tree.
And building from source- what's easier about keeping your system up to date than syncing your source tree with one command? and then rebuilding your entire core system with another? poof! it's like magic. go figure. it's been there forever.
anyway, if you're a geek who needs to do server stuff and you'd like to cut down on the headaches, give freebsd a spin. we're not bad people and most of us work for a living. you get to avoid a lot of clueless brats and silly script kiddies. if we say "H4X0r" it's in jest. maybe it sounds bad, and if so, that's fine. either it appeals to you or it doesn't. thanks for listening.
I'm waiting for Linux to get where FreeBSD is for ease of building... you linux folks seem to think this whole "building from source" thing is some kind of big deal. sheesh.
put down the kool-aid, jim...
kinda makes you feel good that all our hard work in those times was recognized, right?
"But how can it be a virus when it says it LOVES me?!?!?"
pull the network cable out ?
:)
an hour of downtime might have saved you the hassle there...
I know that I was watching all the silly hits, but security holes that allow arbitrary execution of code on a target are bad... that is, in fact, what patches are for, and the MS security mailing list helps
I managed to implement quite a lot of public folder functionality into IMAP4 folders that different kerberos user groups could subscribe to... it's not undoable, maybe not as easy though.
we do that by creating a resource, named something like... "7th Floor small conference room".
Then it's just as simple as inviting that item as a resource, and voila, it's booked. this seems to work well with little to no intervention required by any receptionist, who used to have to juggle scheduling.
the constitution and the bill of rights do not delineate the only specific rights that you have- they are merely a list of rights that the founders felt needed to be enumerated for clarity. you are given the right to more or less EVERYTHING barring items that conflict with existing laws (and even that is arguable- you can claim, for example, that the DMCA and other 'corporate laws' violate many rights.)
don't assume you are only given what is listed- that's not how it was intended, and now how you should perceive it.
it's actually surprisingly affordable these days, with the dotcom fallout and manufacturers heavily over-manufacturing (they were expecting the bubble to never pop?)
In a realistic world, I would say that for your heavy bandwidth needs you could pick up a decent ~24 port gigabit switch for under 10k, if you shopped well. that could host all your servers for that matter, as it would have full wire speed capacity. for a lesser port density (say 8 gig ports) you can even get down under maybe 3 or 4k for a real hardware device (foundry, juniper, xtreme, etc.)
there is always a cost/performance point, but when you're buying macintosh hardware you've already made the decision that cost/performance is irrelevant, to a certain extent.
maybe you should consider real network hardware. we have a large installation of Foundry Networks gear and we happily throw around terabytes of data daily.
nothing churns more happily than servers with fast storage abilities, multi-gigabit interfaces, and no network latency.
that and your mac has 64bit PCI slots- use them!
If you don't trust your governement, maybe is it a sign that you need another one...
we're especially serious since those damn new yorkers infested this country with the west nile virus. thanks guys!