We had a 5 to 1 ration of Dell to Sun gear at my last job. And Sun still managed to have 3x as much hear spectacularly fail. We had no less then eight Sun 6500 machines blackbirded in 6 months. That means three Sun dudes come and live in your data center while they make sure everything is *exactly* as it should be. Net result: no change in the rate chip were blown.
Same thing at my new job. One of the two Sun V880s blows something once every other month. The fifty odd Dell servers just sit there doing their job. Other than two blown motherboards over the past two years. And those weren't even major outages since I just dropped the harddrives into the spare chassis... hell of lot cheaper than Sun maintenance.
Most of these answers sound like they've been written by first year admins. Welcome to the admin world kids, you're going to break things no matter which OS you use.
1. Gentoo has some problems. Reverse dependencies being the big one. Gentoo is working on this type of problem and it can't come soon enough.
2. Important info getting lost in the emerge. This is a gimme as well and should have been fixed long ago.
3. That PHP problem was probably turck-mmcache, or possibly another module, which does need to be recompiled each time you change PHP versions. And yes if your modules are broken on any distro Apache will bomb out. Gentoo does bump your version up pretty often 4.3.8 to 4.3.9 to 4.3.10 etc since they don't tend to do much back porting. Again #1 affects this, but I'll take a 2 minute inconvenience over having to screw with php 4.2.1 or 4.3.6 or whatever nonsense pakcage that I'd have to compile by hand since they don't support the functions I need.
4. Your Postfix problem was probably the update from 2.0.16|19 to 2.1.x. That was a major update and the release notes talked about Postfix changing its internal structure so they could filter email better among other things. The ebuild would instruct you to clear your queue, stop Postfix, and then do the update. If you didn't do this, it broke. This would have been a problem on any system as Postfix 2.1 offered significant improvements over 2.0 and God forbid 1.1. I still don't think anyone is shipping Postfix 2.1 as part of their OS, but I only use Gentoo and Redhat.
Being an admin of a Gentoo system requires less work, but more thought. It takes me less work to get Postfix 2.1 installed or mod_php with xml, Oracle, and sablot support, but I have to think about what's going on in my software. I agree that Gentoo shouldn't make it quite so easy to shoot myself in the foot and I have shot myself quite good a few times.
On the other hand I can do things with Gentoo, like support recent software, lock packages to particular versions, never have to build RPMs by hand, and other nonsense. I can can also tell mod_php to use Mysql and tell mod_perl not to. And they will continue to do this as the packages get updated. Redhat, Debian, Suse all make great products, but once you get off the beaten path you're in for a world of hurt. If you never need any special options, builds, support for odd things, etc. then by all means use another distro. But if you have to support customers, programmers who want to test mod_php with Postgres, Mysql, and Oracle, and all the other fun that comes with being an admin, you could do much worse then Gentoo.
Can't agree more with you. If it takes you more than 3 hours with a canidate to figure things out, you don't know what you're doing.
I used to hire tech support people for an ISP. We'd go through the resumes and call those who had some idea of how a computer worked, this was 1997. Run them through a brutal tech test which would take you an hour. No one we hired ever scored better than 45% correct, but the point of the test was to see what you'd come up with if you had no idea what we were talking about since that was going to be your job. If your answers were reasonable... not correct, but reasonable, we'd call you in for an interview. Peer interview, tech lead interview, and manager interview followed. Total time with test about 2 hours. We only had to fire 2 people out of the 45 we hired over the two years I was there.
kashani
Re:14 interviews is unnecessary
on
Defining Google
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
That's complete crap and you're an idiot for even arguing it. If you as a company can't hire a $7/h stock person in 15 minutes, I don't want to work for you. I mean what's really going to happen? They screw up a few times the first month and you decide to fire them. And most of the time you're going to hire a person who does well enough. So out of the total 20 stock guys you've got, you saved 2 hours each against some manager who makes $20/h. And we're not even taking about the time you've wasted by having to schedule the meeting, clear some time before and after, etc. 40 hours * $20 = $800 or 130 stock guy hours. That's your margin of error for screwups. And no you don't have to pay unemployment if you fire for cause.
1. Pitifully slow on a machine that plays CoH flawlessly. 2. Charged you for more content in the form of expansions. 3. UI was one of the worst. 4. Unstable clients and servers.
kashani
Re:I do not pay much attention to Joel Spolsky
on
Joel On Software
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Yes asking someone how long they have gone to school is the same as asking someone what they have DONE at school. I've got 5 years of major ISP exp, that trumps 10 years of screwing around with a single PC in your basement.
circa 1996 here. Gentoo is not without minor pain on the install, but it's hardly a time waster. Use GRP which includes precompiled packages, add a few use variables, add the packages you need (postfix, apache, mysql, etc) come back in an hour, and you're done. And it stays that way going forward. It's not like you have to sit there and stare at it while compiles.
Figuring out how to use Redhat's moronic RPM syntax, now that's a time waste. echo "/dev-php/mod_php oracle" >>/etc/portage/package.use emerge mod_php and reading slashdot while it compiles is not.
Nice job explaining the resources per connection stuff.
There are some interesting ways to connection pool with PHP, but they require you to jump through some hoops. I do wish they'd get proper pooling though.
1. apache2, threading, php. Still pretty beta if you need to support anything other than the basics. Apache handles the threading and you have less db connections. At least that's how I understand it.
2. proxypass to a php enable Apache. Run mutiple instances of Apache and pass php requests to a dedicated Apache. Let your frontend Apache do the serving the backend do the db connections.
Haven't tested either fo thise and they reuqire to do some planning or accept a much lower subset of the usual functionality.
I don't agree with much the original poster of this thread said, but having many persistent connections to your db can be an issue. Mysql tends to get extremely unhappy at the 1000+ connections range. That's on a Dell 2650, dual PIII, 4GB ram machine, ymmv.
I've been thinking about doing some writting on how to be a system admin. More of why we do things than a how to set your system up sort of thing. Doing it under rabidzealot would be funny as I could expound on why I hate all software, hardware, methods, other system admins, etc.
Either that or I could move all my Gentoo how-to's over.:-)
The only people who care what degree you have are people with degrees. What's funnier is this rubber stamp approval extends to everything else. I submit the following story as evidence.
I starting working in the food service business at fifteen. The money was good and you met so many people. Around twenty-three I was bar tending and had been doing it since I turned twenty-one. We had hired a guy out of some bar tending school. I had never taken a bar tending class, but assumed that people must learn something in a two week $1500 course.
The new guy had just graduated from law school. His plan was to bartend and study for the bar exam coming up in the fall. I asked him about his class since none of the bartenders I knew had ever been to one. After a few stories about it he asked me which one I had gone to. I told him I had moved up from waiting tables, though I still did that to get extra hours. Immediately his attitude towards me changed to seeing me as some chump he'd have to show the ropes to and generally started ignoring anything I said about getting ready for the night.
Naturally I was a bit pissed, but figured things would sort them out in a few hours. It was a Friday night which I can usually run on my own, but with server drinks and having to change the occasional keg it really takes two people. I offered to let him run the bar, the more glamorous position in his mind, and I'd take care of the server drinks. Forty-five minutes later he's freaking out. Half the people are pissed, he's making drinks out of order, and the drawer is probably short a few bucks. Five minutes later I ask him if he needs help. After he says yes I tell him to get me some ice and clear some dishes. By the time he gets back everyone has a drink, the tabs have been straightened out, and to add insult I had caught up enough to start chatting up a few of the women that he'd been eying. Needless to say he tended to listen to what I had to say after that.
While I don't imagine the above applies to everyone I do think that people take the degree requirements a bit too far and often discount someone before checking out their exp.
Your problem isn't that simple. Relaying a significant amount of email in unfortunately I/O bound, not CPU bound. Additionally your average email is roughly 10-20k, which is known for beating down file systems. All you will be doing is concentrating all your I/O in one place and adding CPU's to the cluster. I can't see how this will make relaying faster.
Honestly you're going to be much better off getting three Intel servers, with a nice raid cards w/128MB cache to buffer all those short reads and writes. Also use ResierFS which is faster for small files and watch your problems go away.
Also you can adjust the amount of mail Postfix can attempts to send at one time. Search the main.cf file for concurrency settings.
Running mutiple instances of any MTA tied to its own local drive will be faster than NFS mounted stangeness. I built a qmail server with 6 drives and a 128MB RAID card, 5 qmail instances with a drive left over for the OS and logging, that can relay around 2-3 million messages a day on standard Intel hardware.
iwon stuff tends to break normal interactions with websites in a few cases. I recently had to look into a problem where IE 5.5 couldn't do SSL right because of iwon. Granted IE 5.5 has it's own issues with SSL, but iwon was the culprit it breaking thigns outright. It's crapware and deserves to be deleted on sight IMO.
Too right, though I've seen it work a bit oddly and it would be nice if portage warned a bit or just took care of it for you when you were updating the problematic package. All in all I'm pretty happy with Gentoo, but it does require a bit more thinking to upgrade than the average distro.
On the other hand when was the last time you saw a Redhat user do an upgrade from 7.2 to 8.0 on a live system? Or NT 4.0 to 2k. Even BSD 4.x to 5.x has been problematic for a number of users. Usually people wipe and resinstall their operating systems these days which puts Gentoo in an interesting spot if they can handle dependencies correctly.
You can with etcat, but you'll need to emerge gentoolkit to get that command. I'm not sure if they added it to the base install yet.
In general you have very few problems with this. Obviously removing glibc, pam, etc would break things and Gentoo doesn't protect you from that, yet. But how often do people start removing libs from a *nix box? I'd put people that do in the same category as those who like to "clean up all those little files in my C drive that are just sitting there."
The more likely scenario is upgrading something fairly important. The big one was the upgrade mysql from 3.x to 4.x which broke postfix, proftpd, php, and half a dozen other things if you have mysql support compiled in. portage doesn't re-emerge all the packages automatically though it does provide tools to help you fix it after you've broken it. Once they finish the reverse dependency which has been in the works for awhile this problem goes away.
Read it when it was first released so I don't remember the exact details of why it pissed me off so much other than the plot was complete crap, the crypto 'science' anything but, and the lame ending. Hell call it Swordfish the Book. Okay maybe it wasn't that bad.
"Oh they're almost through the 4th firewall" (probably paraphrased) was one of my "favorite" moments.
Slashdot Mirror
Gah!
We had a 5 to 1 ration of Dell to Sun gear at my last job. And Sun still managed to have 3x as much hear spectacularly fail. We had no less then eight Sun 6500 machines blackbirded in 6 months. That means three Sun dudes come and live in your data center while they make sure everything is *exactly* as it should be. Net result: no change in the rate chip were blown.
Same thing at my new job. One of the two Sun V880s blows something once every other month. The fifty odd Dell servers just sit there doing their job. Other than two blown motherboards over the past two years. And those weren't even major outages since I just dropped the harddrives into the spare chassis... hell of lot cheaper than Sun maintenance.
Sun can go suck it.
kashani
Most of these answers sound like they've been written by first year admins. Welcome to the admin world kids, you're going to break things no matter which OS you use.
1. Gentoo has some problems. Reverse dependencies being the big one. Gentoo is working on this type of problem and it can't come soon enough.
2. Important info getting lost in the emerge. This is a gimme as well and should have been fixed long ago.
3. That PHP problem was probably turck-mmcache, or possibly another module, which does need to be recompiled each time you change PHP versions. And yes if your modules are broken on any distro Apache will bomb out. Gentoo does bump your version up pretty often 4.3.8 to 4.3.9 to 4.3.10 etc since they don't tend to do much back porting. Again #1 affects this, but I'll take a 2 minute inconvenience over having to screw with php 4.2.1 or 4.3.6 or whatever nonsense pakcage that I'd have to compile by hand since they don't support the functions I need.
4. Your Postfix problem was probably the update from 2.0.16|19 to 2.1.x. That was a major update and the release notes talked about Postfix changing its internal structure so they could filter email better among other things. The ebuild would instruct you to clear your queue, stop Postfix, and then do the update. If you didn't do this, it broke. This would have been a problem on any system as Postfix 2.1 offered significant improvements over 2.0 and God forbid 1.1. I still don't think anyone is shipping Postfix 2.1 as part of their OS, but I only use Gentoo and Redhat.
Being an admin of a Gentoo system requires less work, but more thought. It takes me less work to get Postfix 2.1 installed or mod_php with xml, Oracle, and sablot support, but I have to think about what's going on in my software. I agree that Gentoo shouldn't make it quite so easy to shoot myself in the foot and I have shot myself quite good a few times.
On the other hand I can do things with Gentoo, like support recent software, lock packages to particular versions, never have to build RPMs by hand, and other nonsense. I can can also tell mod_php to use Mysql and tell mod_perl not to. And they will continue to do this as the packages get updated. Redhat, Debian, Suse all make great products, but once you get off the beaten path you're in for a world of hurt. If you never need any special options, builds, support for odd things, etc. then by all means use another distro. But if you have to support customers, programmers who want to test mod_php with Postgres, Mysql, and Oracle, and all the other fun that comes with being an admin, you could do much worse then Gentoo.
kashani
According to slony's website, they only support Postgres 7.3.x and up. The original poster is using 7.2.4.
kashani
Can't agree more with you. If it takes you more than 3 hours with a canidate to figure things out, you don't know what you're doing.
I used to hire tech support people for an ISP. We'd go through the resumes and call those who had some idea of how a computer worked, this was 1997. Run them through a brutal tech test which would take you an hour. No one we hired ever scored better than 45% correct, but the point of the test was to see what you'd come up with if you had no idea what we were talking about since that was going to be your job. If your answers were reasonable... not correct, but reasonable, we'd call you in for an interview. Peer interview, tech lead interview, and manager interview followed. Total time with test about 2 hours. We only had to fire 2 people out of the 45 we hired over the two years I was there.
kashani
That's complete crap and you're an idiot for even arguing it. If you as a company can't hire a $7/h stock person in 15 minutes, I don't want to work for you. I mean what's really going to happen? They screw up a few times the first month and you decide to fire them. And most of the time you're going to hire a person who does well enough. So out of the total 20 stock guys you've got, you saved 2 hours each against some manager who makes $20/h. And we're not even taking about the time you've wasted by having to schedule the meeting, clear some time before and after, etc. 40 hours * $20 = $800 or 130 stock guy hours. That's your margin of error for screwups. And no you don't have to pay unemployment if you fire for cause.
kashani
Because it sucked.
1. Pitifully slow on a machine that plays CoH flawlessly.
2. Charged you for more content in the form of expansions.
3. UI was one of the worst.
4. Unstable clients and servers.
kashani
Yes asking someone how long they have gone to school is the same as asking someone what they have DONE at school. I've got 5 years of major ISP exp, that trumps 10 years of screwing around with a single PC in your basement.
kashani
circa 1996 here. Gentoo is not without minor pain on the install, but it's hardly a time waster. Use GRP which includes precompiled packages, add a few use variables, add the packages you need (postfix, apache, mysql, etc) come back in an hour, and you're done. And it stays that way going forward. It's not like you have to sit there and stare at it while compiles.
/etc/portage/package.use
Figuring out how to use Redhat's moronic RPM syntax, now that's a time waste.
echo "/dev-php/mod_php oracle" >>
emerge mod_php
and reading slashdot while it compiles is not.
kashani
Nice job explaining the resources per connection stuff.
There are some interesting ways to connection pool with PHP, but they require you to jump through some hoops. I do wish they'd get proper pooling though.
1. apache2, threading, php. Still pretty beta if you need to support anything other than the basics. Apache handles the threading and you have less db connections. At least that's how I understand it.
2. proxypass to a php enable Apache. Run mutiple instances of Apache and pass php requests to a dedicated Apache. Let your frontend Apache do the serving the backend do the db connections.
Haven't tested either fo thise and they reuqire to do some planning or accept a much lower subset of the usual functionality.
kashani
I don't agree with much the original poster of this thread said, but having many persistent connections to your db can be an issue. Mysql tends to get extremely unhappy at the 1000+ connections range. That's on a Dell 2650, dual PIII, 4GB ram machine, ymmv.
kashani
You paid list price? Sucker.
kashani
Damn future. I want to be cruising for chicks in my flying car while chatting on my video phone in Esperanto. What the hell happened?
kashani
I've been thinking about doing some writting on how to be a system admin. More of why we do things than a how to set your system up sort of thing. Doing it under rabidzealot would be funny as I could expound on why I hate all software, hardware, methods, other system admins, etc.
:-)
Either that or I could move all my Gentoo how-to's over.
kashani
I just registered it. Shoot me an email of the address you want and I'll get it setup for you this week.
kashani
IIRC Thunderbird for Windows can import from just about anything and all other platforms had issues doing this. At least that was the case in .5
kashani
The only people who care what degree you have are people with degrees. What's funnier is this rubber stamp approval extends to everything else. I submit the following story as evidence.
I starting working in the food service business at fifteen. The money was good and you met so many people. Around twenty-three I was bar tending and had been doing it since I turned twenty-one. We had hired a guy out of some bar tending school. I had never taken a bar tending class, but assumed that people must learn something in a two week $1500 course.
The new guy had just graduated from law school. His plan was to bartend and study for the bar exam coming up in the fall. I asked him about his class since none of the bartenders I knew had ever been to one. After a few stories about it he asked me which one I had gone to. I told him I had moved up from waiting tables, though I still did that to get extra hours. Immediately his attitude towards me changed to seeing me as some chump he'd have to show the ropes to and generally started ignoring anything I said about getting ready for the night.
Naturally I was a bit pissed, but figured things would sort them out in a few hours. It was a Friday night which I can usually run on my own, but with server drinks and having to change the occasional keg it really takes two people. I offered to let him run the bar, the more glamorous position in his mind, and I'd take care of the server drinks. Forty-five minutes later he's freaking out. Half the people are pissed, he's making drinks out of order, and the drawer is probably short a few bucks. Five minutes later I ask him if he needs help. After he says yes I tell him to get me some ice and clear some dishes. By the time he gets back everyone has a drink, the tabs have been straightened out, and to add insult I had caught up enough to start chatting up a few of the women that he'd been eying. Needless to say he tended to listen to what I had to say after that.
While I don't imagine the above applies to everyone I do think that people take the degree requirements a bit too far and often discount someone before checking out their exp.
kashani
Your problem isn't that simple. Relaying a significant amount of email in unfortunately I/O bound, not CPU bound. Additionally your average email is roughly 10-20k, which is known for beating down file systems. All you will be doing is concentrating all your I/O in one place and adding CPU's to the cluster. I can't see how this will make relaying faster.
Honestly you're going to be much better off getting three Intel servers, with a nice raid cards w/128MB cache to buffer all those short reads and writes. Also use ResierFS which is faster for small files and watch your problems go away.
Also you can adjust the amount of mail Postfix can attempts to send at one time. Search the main.cf file for concurrency settings.
kashani
Running mutiple instances of any MTA tied to its own local drive will be faster than NFS mounted stangeness. I built a qmail server with 6 drives and a 128MB RAID card, 5 qmail instances with a drive left over for the OS and logging, that can relay around 2-3 million messages a day on standard Intel hardware.
kashani
When you drag the Safari shortcut off to the disk it automatically saves your bookmarks? If so, then yes you have a point.
kashani
Yes but he was dragging the desktop shortcut to the disk not the file which is this case would outlook.pst.
kashani
iwon stuff tends to break normal interactions with websites in a few cases. I recently had to look into a problem where IE 5.5 couldn't do SSL right because of iwon. Granted IE 5.5 has it's own issues with SSL, but iwon was the culprit it breaking thigns outright. It's crapware and deserves to be deleted on sight IMO.
kashani
Too right, though I've seen it work a bit oddly and it would be nice if portage warned a bit or just took care of it for you when you were updating the problematic package. All in all I'm pretty happy with Gentoo, but it does require a bit more thinking to upgrade than the average distro.
On the other hand when was the last time you saw a Redhat user do an upgrade from 7.2 to 8.0 on a live system? Or NT 4.0 to 2k. Even BSD 4.x to 5.x has been problematic for a number of users. Usually people wipe and resinstall their operating systems these days which puts Gentoo in an interesting spot if they can handle dependencies correctly.
kashani
You can with etcat, but you'll need to emerge gentoolkit to get that command. I'm not sure if they added it to the base install yet.
In general you have very few problems with this. Obviously removing glibc, pam, etc would break things and Gentoo doesn't protect you from that, yet. But how often do people start removing libs from a *nix box? I'd put people that do in the same category as those who like to "clean up all those little files in my C drive that are just sitting there."
The more likely scenario is upgrading something fairly important. The big one was the upgrade mysql from 3.x to 4.x which broke postfix, proftpd, php, and half a dozen other things if you have mysql support compiled in. portage doesn't re-emerge all the packages automatically though it does provide tools to help you fix it after you've broken it. Once they finish the reverse dependency which has been in the works for awhile this problem goes away.
kashani
Read it when it was first released so I don't remember the exact details of why it pissed me off so much other than the plot was complete crap, the crypto 'science' anything but, and the lame ending. Hell call it Swordfish the Book. Okay maybe it wasn't that bad.
"Oh they're almost through the 4th firewall" (probably paraphrased) was one of my "favorite" moments.
kashani
crap, I've got 4 in my UID making be a mere Slash-cardinal.
kashani