A third and deeper lesson shows through these experiences. The project was large enough and management communication poor enough to prompt many members of the team to see themselves as contestants making brownie points, rather then as builders making programming products. Each suboptimized his piece to meet his targets; few stopped to think about the total effect on the customer. This breakdown in orientation and communication is a major hazard in large projects. [...] Fostering a total-system, user-oriented attitude may well be the most important function of the programming manager.
Fred Brooks, The Mythical Man Month: Essays on Software Engineering, Twentieth Anniversary Edition, Addison Wesley, 1975
>this might be one of the cruelest ways to enable >job insuarance...
Once upon a time, there was a network.
One of the patch closets had a very confusing, completely lunatic wiring layout, i.e. what was labelled as jack 80 upstairs actually corresponded to jack 53 downstairs, etc. etc. (At some point a couple of trunks had been crushed or something, so a few wires had been cut. There was no money to buy more CAT5 trunk cable, so things had been sort of jury-rigged.)
The config was fairly stable, it was quite rare for anyone to deal with that mess.
There was a single copy of the "map" stapled to the patch panel wall to help people to figure out which connection went where.
OK, getting to the point, a rather serious personality conflict developed between the guy who managed the network team and his boss.
The fight raged for months, and the network team could see the writing on the wall. The only copy of the map was moved to the network manager's briefcase, and went home with him every night. (Of course he let his own team use it. No-one else even realized what a clusterfuck that closet was.)
A few months later, the entire network team had moved on to greener pastures, and the wiring moved on with the last fellow out, a bitter little souvenir.
"sticker shock" isn't really a technical term, it refers to getting a nasty surprise about the cost of something, in this case huge quantities of toner and paper.
I wasn't able to find a precise definition, or the origin of the phrase. I've usually heard it in the context of buyng a car, i.e. once you've added in freight+tax+rust treatment etc. etc. etc.
>I work at a school... they still have a DOT-Matrix >or two in use
Dot matrix printers are great for schools. They're so slow/loud/annoying that people only print what they need, instead of using the school as their personal print shop.
A lot of places got "sticker shock" when they first introduced laser printers to student labs... Labs that had never bothered with printer quotas suddenly needed them.
Heh heh, the U of Alberta hosts the web and ftp space for OpenSSH and OpenBSD.
$ ftp ftp.openbsd.org Connected to openbsd.sunsite.ualberta.ca. 220- 220- Welcome to SunSITE Alberta 220- 220- at the University of Alberta, in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
>While I am all "grown", I feel no need to migrate >to a less polished/harder to use distro. I can >install and use literally any distro and I >certainly don't need a a GUI to get my work done, >but why stay in the stone age? > >Advances in installs and config tools happen for >a reason. There is nothing "better" about >something being harder to use or master period. >All products should be user friendly. Your >forgetting that Computers are here to serve us, >not make our lives more complicated.
Did you read the post you were replying to?
miffo.swe sez:
>>Often when you do all things by hand you end up >>with a much better system than if everything is >>done automagically.
[SNIP]
>>I like the control and system-knowledge it gives me >>when i build my own system from scratch.
>I think that this is fantastic and has lots and >lots of world applications. But why do I get the >sense that what these people really need isnt >wireless email to their laptops. How many africans >benifit from this? Do they now when hungry email >their american counterpart and ask him to describe >the BigMac?
(I really wanted to let this one go, but when I saw the +1 insightful mod I just couldn't help myself)
What did your post do to help African refugees today?
Obviously you shouldn't have sent that post because it didn't help African refugees!
Re:What I would like to know is...
on
The End Of Minix?
·
· Score: 3, Funny
>Well, you never know when all hell could break >loose. That's why you should keep an old vt100 >behind a glass case for when the shit hits the fan, >and you need a terminal, pronto!
I know you're joking, but There Was This One Site...
We got a call from another office in our organization asking if we still had any VT100s, their last terminal had just died. We did not have any, and we asked them why they wanted one...
The were using them to configure hubs/switches etc, and didn't realize that any old PC running Procomm or Telix etc. would be an acceptable VT100 replacement.
I can just imagine those guys lugging around VT100s to set up new hubs, heh heh.
Our solution wasn't sexy, we had a 286 monochrome laptop with Procomm, but it sure was portable.
>Fair enough--I just felt like I was replying in the >same spirit as your message.
My original message wasn't intended to be pissy.
However, I often find that people who haven't managed large numbers of computers don't understand the issues as well as they'd like to think.
>"Structure" is not the same as intrusive, >bureaucratic controls that get in the way of the >machines actually being used--structure is good, >and can be accomplished without excessive control. > However, once IT sees an opportunity to gain >power, it often uses a TCO argument to control >everything.
That will depend on where you work, i.e. the culture of the company and the personalities involved.
I've had a lot of jobs, and I've seen everything from concentration-camp style lockdown to utter anarchy.
Ridiculous amounts of central control- You couldn't install any software on the machines unless it was in the "magic install program". To get a piece of software into the "magic install program" took weeks or even months. (Oh, and the keepers of the install program might just tell you to fuck off, that technology wasn't "approved", and you'd have to find another way to get the task accomplished.) It took me over a month to find a politically correct way to get AS/400 connectivity for local users.
Complete anarchy- supporting University profs and their labs. Profs had their own research budgets, so they bought whatever they wanted. One gentleman had 3 computers on his desk - a PC, a Mac, and an Irix workstation. Some people used MSWord, some used WordPerfect (a couple of different versions, naturally) and some used good old vi+TEX. We had SunOS, Solaris, AIX, and Irix. We had NT, NetWare, and OS/2 file servers. The PCs ran DOS+Win3.1, OS/2, WinNT, or maybe NEXT/Step. We made one baby step towards reducing the variety - I finally pried the last dumb terminal away from a particularly stubborn prof.
Both of these are batshit crazy situations that you never, ever, want to work in.
If the "lets standardize EVERYTHING" people have complete control, then IT support becomes much easier. However, the whole point to having computers is to help people do their job - if the standards interfere with that, users suffer.
In an anarchy situation,support is almost impossible, and you have IT problems that just never get solved. In that case, users suffer.
A middle ground exists.
Calling someone a Nazi everytime they want to impose a little bit of organization or structure or standards doesn't change the fact that standardization makes things easier to support. Conversely, the people deciding on standards have to remember that the whole point of giving people computers is to help them do their job.
Since you're a programmer, you realize that working on real projects with other people requires more structure then just noodling around with toy programming projects at home.
It also takes more structure to keep a company full of machines working then it does to keep a home machine or two running.
BTW, if you don't like dick-size-wars, what's with the "those insufficiently intelligent to program computers who end up "administering" or "managing" them" crack? I've seen a wide range of clue and experience among both programmers and sysadmins.
>copying 500+ meg.pst files for users moving to new >locations (yes, I really need EVERY email I've sent >AND received during the last 3 years, even the >Powerpoint-attachment birthday announcements)
LOL.
We had a guy who had several 1GB+ PST files, including messages that were migrated from the old mainframe email system All Those Years Ago.
>This kind of attitude really bugs me. I work in an >IT department, and the attitude here is that the >average worker's data is worthless. If the user >messes up one little thing they just do a restore >and wipe out everything. Thanks but no thanks.
That's why the IT department provides a server that users are supposed to save their data to.
Saving data to the server has several advantages, i.e. the data is backed up, and nothing is lost when something (inevitably) happens to the workstations.
You work in the IT department? Are you doing desktop support? Do you realize that troubleshooting a workstation can take days, but you could Ghost the same workstation and have the user back to work in less then an hour?
>That $1k per month is the only revenue for the IT >department. it pays for the server, the staff, >management, overhead etc.
It also helps pay the rent for the extra space in the building, aircon, power. It goes towards the initial money sunk on building the server room, raised floors, wiring closets, cabling etc.
The above are expensive, and have to be payed if you outsource the management or not.
>It costs over $1000/month to have a server hosted >internally. And that does not include the price of >the server! These are all internal chargebacks. If >I was a stockholder I would be pissed that they >didn't outsource, or at least get rid of half of >their IT staff.
That $1K/month is monopoly money, i.e. it does not leave the company.
If they outsource that function, the money they pay actually leaves the company.
I read the dump/restore man pages, and have always meant to try it out. But my ugly little kludge is in place and working, so I lack motivation to improve things:)
>If you're throwing a second drive in there anyway, >why not just spend the 5 minutes required to create >a mirror of the first disk?
When I set this up I was unemployed and broke. I used a couple of drives I had laying around, I didn't have 2 spare HDs of the same size.
If you're willing to spend money, a mirrored drive makes sense, but I'm sure most people have a wee HD gathering dust somewhere, might as well make use of it.
I use GZIPped tar files to save space, that second disk isn't very big.
I didn't bother to post my monthly script, I do a monthly backup too. The smaller the tarballs are, the more monthly backups I can keep before I have to burn 'em off to CD.
This is speedy enough for my purposes, i.e. it runs after midnight.
I tried BZIP2 but took too long for my poor 486DX25 to complete overnight:)
As far as restoring, I've never had to do that, other then to test my scripts. Of course if I stopped backing up, the primary HD would probably fail the next day.
As most other posters have commented, an old P90 or something will do what you need.
Don't bother with RAID, just stick in a second hard drive and tar up any important files to the second HD every night.
$ uname OpenBSD $ mount /dev/wd0a on / type ffs (local) /dev/wd0g on/home type ffs (NFS exported, local) /dev/wd0e on/tmp type ffs (local) /dev/wd0f on/usr type ffs (local) /dev/wd0d on/var type ffs (local) /dev/wd1b on/mnt/backup type ffs (local) $ cat/etc/daily.local #!/bin/sh # daily backup
rm/mnt/backup/`date "+%a"`.tgz
#backup kernel config,/etc and/home #do not backup the MP3s or pr0n #only generate a list of files to feed to tar tar cfz/mnt/backup/`date "+%a"`.tgz \ ` find/home/etc/var/usr/src/sys/arch/i386/conf/ -type f -print \ | egrep -v "^(/home/samba/mp3|/home/clover/pr0n)"`
>I wish we could go by with firewire only. >Everything on firewire. HDs, modem, joystick, keyboard...
As long as someone makes an adapter so I can keep my genuine IBM PS/2 keyboard. Made in 1984, weighs a ton, and has a lovely "feel" to it that I haven't found in modern keyboards, which are mushy crap.
clicka clicka clicka....
Also, sometimes it's nice to plug a console into a serial port.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's someone who agrees with you...
>this might be one of the cruelest ways to enable
>job insuarance...
Once upon a time, there was a network.
One of the patch closets had a very confusing, completely lunatic wiring layout, i.e. what was labelled as jack 80 upstairs actually corresponded to jack 53 downstairs, etc. etc. (At some point a couple of trunks had been crushed or something, so a few wires had been cut. There was no money to buy more CAT5 trunk cable, so things had been sort of jury-rigged.)
The config was fairly stable, it was quite rare for anyone to deal with that mess.
There was a single copy of the "map" stapled to the patch panel wall to help people to figure out which connection went where.
OK, getting to the point, a rather serious personality conflict developed between the guy who managed the network team and his boss.
The fight raged for months, and the network team could see the writing on the wall. The only copy of the map was moved to the network manager's briefcase, and went home with him every night. (Of course he let his own team use it. No-one else even realized what a clusterfuck that closet was.)
A few months later, the entire network team had moved on to greener pastures, and the wiring moved on with the last fellow out, a bitter little souvenir.
"sticker shock" isn't really a technical term, it refers to getting a nasty surprise about the cost of something, in this case huge quantities of toner and paper.
I wasn't able to find a precise definition, or the origin of the phrase. I've usually heard it in the context of buyng a car, i.e. once you've added in freight+tax+rust treatment etc. etc. etc.
>I work at a school... they still have a DOT-Matrix
>or two in use
Dot matrix printers are great for schools. They're so slow/loud/annoying that people only print what they need, instead of using the school as their personal print shop.
A lot of places got "sticker shock" when they first introduced laser printers to student labs... Labs that had never bothered with printer quotas suddenly needed them.
Heh heh, the U of Alberta hosts the web and ftp space for OpenSSH and OpenBSD.Also, Bob Beck works at U of A. Bob helped develop the first OpenSSH release, not sure how active he is these days.
For U of A, that all adds up to "premium class" tech support for anything to do with SSH.
Bogie sez:
>While I am all "grown", I feel no need to migrate
>to a less polished/harder to use distro. I can
>install and use literally any distro and I
>certainly don't need a a GUI to get my work done,
>but why stay in the stone age?
>
>Advances in installs and config tools happen for
>a reason. There is nothing "better" about
>something being harder to use or master period.
>All products should be user friendly. Your
>forgetting that Computers are here to serve us,
>not make our lives more complicated.
Did you read the post you were replying to?
miffo.swe sez:
>>Often when you do all things by hand you end up
>>with a much better system than if everything is
>>done automagically.
[SNIP]
>>I like the control and system-knowledge it gives me
>>when i build my own system from scratch.
>I remmeber OpenBSD install. . . over ftp. Half an
:)
>hour finding documentation on partitioning info.
You should have bought the CDs
The CD comes with an annotated transcript of a typical i386 install. That may not sound helpful, but it makes the install very easy.
>Please suggest a better way for me to map a drive
>letter on my Windows XP machine to my Linux web
>server in a colocation center.
Use scp to copy the files.
Putty is a nice SSH client, and includes a Win32 version of scp called PSCP.EXE.
>I think that this is fantastic and has lots and
>lots of world applications. But why do I get the
>sense that what these people really need isnt
>wireless email to their laptops. How many africans
>benifit from this? Do they now when hungry email
>their american counterpart and ask him to describe
>the BigMac?
(I really wanted to let this one go, but when I saw the +1 insightful mod I just couldn't help myself)
What did your post do to help African refugees today?
Obviously you shouldn't have sent that post because it didn't help African refugees!
>Well, you never know when all hell could break
>loose. That's why you should keep an old vt100
>behind a glass case for when the shit hits the fan,
>and you need a terminal, pronto!
I know you're joking, but There Was This One Site...
We got a call from another office in our organization asking if we still had any VT100s, their last terminal had just died. We did not have any, and we asked them why they wanted one...
The were using them to configure hubs/switches etc, and didn't realize that any old PC running Procomm or Telix etc. would be an acceptable VT100 replacement.
I can just imagine those guys lugging around VT100s to set up new hubs, heh heh.
Our solution wasn't sexy, we had a 286 monochrome laptop with Procomm, but it sure was portable.
>OpenSSH was ported to Linux??? Since when!?!?!?!?
Very soon after the initial release for OpenBSD.
There's a brief history of the project on the OpenSSH web site.
>What does this have to do with BSD, as opposed to
>other Unixen?
OpenSSH was written by folks who also work on OpenBSD.
Of course, OpenSSH runs on many different *nix flavours.
>Fair enough--I just felt like I was replying in the
>same spirit as your message.
My original message wasn't intended to be pissy.
However, I often find that people who haven't managed large numbers of computers don't understand the issues as well as they'd like to think.
>"Structure" is not the same as intrusive,
>bureaucratic controls that get in the way of the
>machines actually being used--structure is good,
>and can be accomplished without excessive control.
> However, once IT sees an opportunity to gain
>power, it often uses a TCO argument to control
>everything.
That will depend on where you work, i.e. the culture of the company and the personalities involved.
I've had a lot of jobs, and I've seen everything from concentration-camp style lockdown to utter anarchy.
Ridiculous amounts of central control- You couldn't install any software on the machines unless it was in the "magic install program". To get a piece of software into the "magic install program" took weeks or even months. (Oh, and the keepers of the install program might just tell you to fuck off, that technology wasn't "approved", and you'd have to find another way to get the task accomplished.) It took me over a month to find a politically correct way to get AS/400 connectivity for local users.
Complete anarchy- supporting University profs and their labs. Profs had their own research budgets, so they bought whatever they wanted. One gentleman had 3 computers on his desk - a PC, a Mac, and an Irix workstation. Some people used MSWord, some used WordPerfect (a couple of different versions, naturally) and some used good old vi+TEX. We had SunOS, Solaris, AIX, and Irix. We had NT, NetWare, and OS/2 file servers. The PCs ran DOS+Win3.1, OS/2, WinNT, or maybe NEXT/Step. We made one baby step towards reducing the variety - I finally pried the last dumb terminal away from a particularly stubborn prof.
Both of these are batshit crazy situations that you never, ever, want to work in.
If the "lets standardize EVERYTHING" people have complete control, then IT support becomes much easier. However, the whole point to having computers is to help people do their job - if the standards interfere with that, users suffer.
In an anarchy situation,support is almost impossible, and you have IT problems that just never get solved. In that case, users suffer.
A middle ground exists.
Calling someone a Nazi everytime they want to impose a little bit of organization or structure or standards doesn't change the fact that standardization makes things easier to support. Conversely, the people deciding on standards have to remember that the whole point of giving people computers is to help them do their job.
I take it you're a programmer, then.
Since you're a programmer, you realize that working on real projects with other people requires more structure then just noodling around with toy programming projects at home.
It also takes more structure to keep a company full of machines working then it does to keep a home machine or two running.
BTW, if you don't like dick-size-wars, what's with the "those insufficiently intelligent to program computers who end up "administering" or "managing" them" crack? I've seen a wide range of clue and experience among both programmers and sysadmins.
What's the biggest network you've ever managed?
>copying 500+ meg .pst files for users moving to new
>locations (yes, I really need EVERY email I've sent
>AND received during the last 3 years, even the
>Powerpoint-attachment birthday announcements)
LOL.
We had a guy who had several 1GB+ PST files, including messages that were migrated from the old mainframe email system All Those Years Ago.
>This kind of attitude really bugs me. I work in an
>IT department, and the attitude here is that the
>average worker's data is worthless. If the user
>messes up one little thing they just do a restore
>and wipe out everything. Thanks but no thanks.
That's why the IT department provides a server that users are supposed to save their data to.
Saving data to the server has several advantages, i.e. the data is backed up, and nothing is lost when something (inevitably) happens to the workstations.
You work in the IT department? Are you doing desktop support? Do you realize that troubleshooting a workstation can take days, but you could Ghost the same workstation and have the user back to work in less then an hour?
>That $1k per month is the only revenue for the IT
>department. it pays for the server, the staff,
>management, overhead etc.
It also helps pay the rent for the extra space in the building, aircon, power. It goes towards the initial money sunk on building the server room, raised floors, wiring closets, cabling etc.
The above are expensive, and have to be payed if you outsource the management or not.
>It costs over $1000/month to have a server hosted
>internally. And that does not include the price of
>the server! These are all internal chargebacks. If
>I was a stockholder I would be pissed that they
>didn't outsource, or at least get rid of half of
>their IT staff.
That $1K/month is monopoly money, i.e. it does not leave the company.
If they outsource that function, the money they pay actually leaves the company.
I read the dump/restore man pages, and have always meant to try it out. But my ugly little kludge is in place and working, so I lack motivation to improve things :)
>If you're throwing a second drive in there anyway,
>why not just spend the 5 minutes required to create
>a mirror of the first disk?
When I set this up I was unemployed and broke. I used a couple of drives I had laying around, I didn't have 2 spare HDs of the same size.
If you're willing to spend money, a mirrored drive makes sense, but I'm sure most people have a wee HD gathering dust somewhere, might as well make use of it.
I use GZIPped tar files to save space, that second disk isn't very big.
:)
I didn't bother to post my monthly script, I do a monthly backup too. The smaller the tarballs are, the more monthly backups I can keep before I have to burn 'em off to CD.
This is speedy enough for my purposes, i.e. it runs after midnight.
I tried BZIP2 but took too long for my poor 486DX25 to complete overnight
As far as restoring, I've never had to do that, other then to test my scripts. Of course if I stopped backing up, the primary HD would probably fail the next day.
You know you're in trouble when the first post is to saw you've been slashdotted...
>I wish we could go by with firewire only.
>Everything on firewire. HDs, modem, joystick, keyboard...
As long as someone makes an adapter so I can keep my genuine IBM PS/2 keyboard. Made in 1984, weighs a ton, and has a lovely "feel" to it that I haven't found in modern keyboards, which are mushy crap.
clicka clicka clicka....
Also, sometimes it's nice to plug a console into a serial port.