Three days after release of a patch or other software update, our entire 20,000+ client network is 85% or more patched. With about 20 man hours of work across three staff. Linux absolutely can not touch that.
You, sir, should check out radmind when you're ready to switch to Linux. You're right about Linux not touching 20 man hours for a patch or software update. Not with a 10 foot pole! What stinky turn-around time! We turn our updates around in fewer than 4 hours, and only that long if we need to babysit a critical server or two while they update.
For our desktops, it's more like 45 minutes to capture and test the change, and you're done. 20 hour? Oh man!
Here are some open source projects that I've been involved with. Fugu is a graphical wrapper for SFTP & SCP on Mac OS X. I consider it successful because many universities (my peer group) recommend it to their users. Also, one of our success "feathers" is the number of localizations that people have contributed: Spanish, Japanese, German, and Dutch.
radmind is a combination filesystem integrity checker (tripwire) and manager in one package. Again, many (a couple hundred) universities use it. It's important to note that it's less important to me that other groups also use it. It's my peer group that interests me.
I'm also the original author of netatalk. I consider it a success for a couple of reasons. First, it's old. Second, I no longer work on it at all, but there's an active group that continues to make releases. Those are both success "feathers".
Finally, my group wrote the reference implementation of LDAP, and our software is the basis of openldap. The "feather" in this case is having been part of the group defining the LDAP standard, something that many vendors and many packages now use.
This is all the more vicious since the user is not warned that certain sites are censored.
Nonsense. Search Google for "scientology+leaflet". Scroll to the bottom of the page. Note the warning. Note that the warning links to the list of removed links.
Concentration of power is worrisome. But complaints should follow a problem, not a concern.
Maybe one of the anti-SPAM hausen can start issuing certificates to legitimate MTAs. Subscribers to anti-SPAM lists could honor the certificates by not applying SPAM filters. Subscribers could get certificate revokation lists on whatever schedule they thought was reasonable. E-Mail from uncertified sources would also be accepted, but would by filtered for SPAM, either by whitelisting or some other filtering mechanism.
Of course, none of the apps people have mentioned here are particularly pedagogical. The best listed are collaborative discussion systems. Big whoop. So's Slashdot, and we're not learning much here.
There are, however, many applications built for learners. They just all happen to focus on teaching a small number of specific ideas. Good examples are World Watcher for teaching climatology and SimCalc for teaching Calculus to middle schoolers.
Writing small applications for teaching in a limited domain is just not sexy enough to get headlines or grants.
First, the Justice Department guy only said "We are constantly examining possible links between traditional crimes and terrorism, and we will continue to do so. All components of the Justice Department, including CCIPS, the Counterterrorism Section, and the Organized Crime and Racketeering Section, will do everything within their power to make sure that intellectual property piracy does not become a vehicle for financing or supporting acts of terror." Nothing else about terrorism. The MicroSoft guy doesn't mention terrorism at all. The chick says "So as you can see, I have a number of issues to discuss, but here at the outset let me make clear that my comments do not purport to make any linkage between piracy and organized crime and terrorism."
This is just Jack wankying away. His big proof is that a bunch of other IP nutters all agree that piracy and terrorism go hand in hand. Especially the IRA.
There doesn't seem to be a transcript of the questioning...
He's a know leader of a network of individuals who are dedicated to causing harm to untold millions of people whose biggest crime is living in a country whose ideals he disagrees with.
Oh! I thought the biggest crime was not keeping our errant gov'ment in check, letting it install and support a bunch of nasty repressive dictators in countries this guy considers his homeland. My mistake.
Did you get a load of the CIA reports that those damn Iraqis are planning to use Terrorist Methods against our beloved soldiers when we attack them? The nerve. I mean, what, they think they have the right to defend their borders from an extra-national aggressor? Who do they think they are, the Founding Fathers?
ya in the meantime the system was frozen.. ever had someone pull out a console cable and have it send a break to a e4500 ? eeek.. to the DB;P
Sure I have. I've also had someone pull our SCSI terminal concentrator out, taking down 48 machines in one go. That's a problem. Ever have someone trip a circuit breaker? Or push the big red button? These are also major problems. What's your point?
devfs: Please, when are we going to finally transition away from static device nodes to devfs? Solaris had it right, dynamically name the device on detection after its physical properties. This is really important and hasn't been implemented for anything more than testing.
Um, you're totally right about how cool devfs is. I'm quite fond of it on Mac OS X. What Solaris does, however, is not at all devfs. devfsadm on Solaris is the devil. Ever have your drives dynamically renumbered out from beneath your vfstab? Try it some time.
As long as the machine has got a serial port and BIOS support for console redirection, then you don't even need the machine on a network to administrate it remotely. [...] And, if you've got remotely controllable power strips (which you should if you're serious about remotely administering any number of servers), then your power needs are taken care of as well!
The need for the additional remote control power strips annoys me. It's an extra point of failure that my Suns don't have. I can get 90% of them back with a break and a sync, thus flushing the cached filesystem.
..ever accidentally send a break over a serial connection to a Solaris box??
Said Schwartz, I don't think businesses are really prepared to trust their mission critical systems to technologies where, if something goes wrong with the open source, nobody is responsible for fixing it and doing all the testing on a timely basis. With Sun, you've got a single throat to choke and we can respond instantly.
Wow, this sounds just like MS FUD! I must say, I'm a whole lot more comfortable fixing my large Linux systems myself, and contributing my fixes back to the community than I am with waiting for Sun to get back to me.
I can't remember a time when Sun responded at all, let alone on a timely basis. What a giant load of crap!
So, I think the answer is: lobby congress to reverse the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act. I have no problem with that. I'm writing my congress critters, right now.
I have a suggestion. LOTR:ROTK will probably be at least as huge as LOTR:TTT. How about not seeing it for the first weekend? One of the big statistics that movie companies like to tout is their opening weekend revenue. ROTK happens to appeal strongly to the slashdot-set. If these same people pledged not to see it, just for the first week, that would make headlines.
Which goes another step further, and stores not only the checksums, but also copies of the file data centrally, so you can undo changes that have been made. OR you can change the data on the central server, and effectively push out updates to hundreds of machines. That's RadMind
So, my Mac friend hauls his Mac over, and they go out and buy iDVD.
Really? Where did they "buy" iDVD? I have a friend who steals shit. May this is the same guy?
:w
Re:Why negative attacks DO work for OSS
on
Halloween VII
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Almost anyone who has ever used MS products has had at least one nightmarish experience with their products.
So, who's making Switch Ads from MS to Linux? Instead of Apple's wimpy "MS is hard" pitch, you could really go for the jugular: like "I just got tired of the viruses, everyone in my address book emailing me asking me why I sent the wierd message."
If you can't figure out the "start" button good luck trying to interface with OSX... (how is clicking start -> programs -> microsoft word harder than clicking Macintosh HD then searching around for your software? hm...)
I guess you just don't know what you're talking about.
UMich had 35.x.x.x. We gave it back. UMich was the home of the NSFnet NOC at the time, if that gives you an idea of how far the Internet had penetrated. We also have "over 51,000 students and 5,600 faculty at three campuses" while MIT boasts "more than 900 faculty and nearly 10,000 undergraduate and graduate students".
Since I was there, I know what a giant pain it was to re-number. "Several hundred workstations" is not impressing me.
I've been going to these sorts of meetings & conferences for years. Everyone brings a laptop. Until recently, they were all x86 machines. A few were running Linux of *BSD, most running Windows. Since iBooks, TiBooks and Mac OS X, the majority of the "Internet Leaders" attending IETF, Internet2, etc, are sporting Macs. Interesting.:w
I have to configure hundreds of desktops in Linux, and many of the time the configurations are the same.
You should checkout radmind, it's a combination tripwire/software update tool. It's being used all over the place to deploy large Mac OS X clusters. It runs on Linux, Solaris, and *BSD.
Slashdot Mirror
You, sir, should check out radmind when you're ready to switch to Linux. You're right about Linux not touching 20 man hours for a patch or software update. Not with a 10 foot pole! What stinky turn-around time! We turn our updates around in fewer than 4 hours, and only that long if we need to babysit a critical server or two while they update.
For our desktops, it's more like 45 minutes to capture and test the change, and you're done. 20 hour? Oh man!
Here are some open source projects that I've been involved with. Fugu is a graphical wrapper for SFTP & SCP on Mac OS X. I consider it successful because many universities (my peer group) recommend it to their users. Also, one of our success "feathers" is the number of localizations that people have contributed: Spanish, Japanese, German, and Dutch.
:w
radmind is a combination filesystem integrity checker (tripwire) and manager in one package. Again, many (a couple hundred) universities use it. It's important to note that it's less important to me that other groups also use it. It's my peer group that interests me.
I'm also the original author of netatalk. I consider it a success for a couple of reasons. First, it's old. Second, I no longer work on it at all, but there's an active group that continues to make releases. Those are both success "feathers".
Finally, my group wrote the reference implementation of LDAP, and our software is the basis of openldap. The "feather" in this case is having been part of the group defining the LDAP standard, something that many vendors and many packages now use.
Concentration of power is worrisome. But complaints should follow a problem, not a concern.
So, C on Unix forever?
Maybe one of the anti-SPAM hausen can start issuing certificates to legitimate MTAs. Subscribers to anti-SPAM lists could honor the certificates by not applying SPAM filters. Subscribers could get certificate revokation lists on whatever schedule they thought was reasonable. E-Mail from uncertified sources would also be accepted, but would by filtered for SPAM, either by whitelisting or some other filtering mechanism.
:w
Of course, none of the apps people have mentioned here are particularly pedagogical. The best listed are collaborative discussion systems. Big whoop. So's Slashdot, and we're not learning much here.
:w
There are, however, many applications built for learners. They just all happen to focus on teaching a small number of specific ideas. Good examples are World Watcher for teaching climatology and SimCalc for teaching Calculus to middle schoolers.
Writing small applications for teaching in a limited domain is just not sexy enough to get headlines or grants.
First, the Justice Department guy only said "We are constantly examining possible links between traditional crimes and terrorism, and we will continue to do so. All components of the Justice Department, including CCIPS, the Counterterrorism Section, and the Organized Crime and Racketeering Section, will do everything within their power to make sure that intellectual property piracy does not become a vehicle for financing or supporting acts of terror." Nothing else about terrorism. The MicroSoft guy doesn't mention terrorism at all. The chick says "So as you can see, I have a number of issues to discuss, but here at the outset let me make clear that my comments do not purport to make any linkage between piracy and organized crime and terrorism."
:w
This is just Jack wankying away. His big proof is that a bunch of other IP nutters all agree that piracy and terrorism go hand in hand. Especially the IRA.
There doesn't seem to be a transcript of the questioning...
Oh! I thought the biggest crime was not keeping our errant gov'ment in check, letting it install and support a bunch of nasty repressive dictators in countries this guy considers his homeland. My mistake.
Did you get a load of the CIA reports that those damn Iraqis are planning to use Terrorist Methods against our beloved soldiers when we attack them? The nerve. I mean, what, they think they have the right to defend their borders from an extra-national aggressor? Who do they think they are, the Founding Fathers?
Sure I have. I've also had someone pull our SCSI terminal concentrator out, taking down 48 machines in one go. That's a problem. Ever have someone trip a circuit breaker? Or push the big red button? These are also major problems. What's your point?
Um, you're totally right about how cool devfs is. I'm quite fond of it on Mac OS X. What Solaris does, however, is not at all devfs. devfsadm on Solaris is the devil. Ever have your drives dynamically renumbered out from beneath your vfstab? Try it some time.
The need for the additional remote control power strips annoys me. It's an extra point of failure that my Suns don't have. I can get 90% of them back with a break and a sync, thus flushing the cached filesystem.
Sure, then I typed "go". No problem...
Wow, this sounds just like MS FUD! I must say, I'm a whole lot more comfortable fixing my large Linux systems myself, and contributing my fixes back to the community than I am with waiting for Sun to get back to me.
I can't remember a time when Sun responded at all, let alone on a timely basis. What a giant load of crap!
So, I think the answer is: lobby congress to reverse the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act. I have no problem with that. I'm writing my congress critters, right now.
:w
I have a suggestion. LOTR:ROTK will probably be at least as huge as LOTR:TTT. How about not seeing it for the first weekend? One of the big statistics that movie companies like to tout is their opening weekend revenue. ROTK happens to appeal strongly to the slashdot-set. If these same people pledged not to see it, just for the first week, that would make headlines.
:w
Which goes another step further, and stores not only the checksums, but also copies of the file data centrally, so you can undo changes that have been made. OR you can change the data on the central server, and effectively push out updates to hundreds of machines. That's RadMind
:wes
Extra solar escape velocity?
:w
Really? Where did they "buy" iDVD? I have a friend who steals shit. May this is the same guy?
So, who's making Switch Ads from MS to Linux? Instead of Apple's wimpy "MS is hard" pitch, you could really go for the jugular: like "I just got tired of the viruses, everyone in my address book emailing me asking me why I sent the wierd message."
It can't be that this article is posted on apple.slashdot.org , could it? Nah...
:wes
I guess you just don't know what you're talking about.
How about pressing the big colorful button marked "Applications"? That's hard. You use an iBook?
Since I was there, I know what a giant pain it was to re-number. "Several hundred workstations" is not impressing me.
I've been going to these sorts of meetings & conferences for years. Everyone brings a laptop. Until recently, they were all x86 machines. A few were running Linux of *BSD, most running Windows. Since iBooks, TiBooks and Mac OS X, the majority of the "Internet Leaders" attending IETF, Internet2, etc, are sporting Macs. Interesting. :w
You should checkout radmind, it's a combination tripwire/software update tool. It's being used all over the place to deploy large Mac OS X clusters. It runs on Linux, Solaris, and *BSD.