Hahaha. As the other fellow said, this is hardly a "painful investment in nagios". And just FYI, Nagios doesn't monitor with SNMP, it provides a framework for monitoring and this company built on that - poorly. They didn't get the results they wanted. Again, not Nagios' fault. What they really needed was to make a better interface for monitoring their App than SNMP. Instead, they switched to Hyperic and it worked for them.
This article is a prime example of the absurd war against Nagios currently being waged by these commercial companies. Right in the article the guy states that it wasn't nagois' fault, it was the SNMP tool/JVM that was the problem. Yet look at the headline. And read the quote from the ZenOSS CEO:
"The maintainers never thought of it as a project that an IT manager would use to monitor an entire enterprise environment," What? Yes they did. I used it to monitor systems in one of the largest companies in the US, with 400 offices around the world and 4 datacenters. It's more than capable if you use it right. When I read that article, this is the impression I get of what really happened. The guys were given no money to setup monitoring. They put Nagios up because it's the default, and worked within timeline limits to get it working. They tried the obvious first. Expose SNMP interfaces and query them. They wrestled with the impacts, and upper management got tired of waiting and started looking commercial.
He looked big dog first "Whoa, I'm not going to spend that kind of money". Someone stumbles on Resin support in Hyperic, and they avoid the near catastrophe that is OpenView. It works, the IT guys are (probably) happy. (At least some of them). Upper Management is ecstatic and in their ignorance blames Nagios, and (possibly) works out a deal to promote Hyperic in the media and slander Nagios. Note too that in the article they're *still* using some of the Nagios components. I wonder why. (Honestly, not sarcastically. Can it not monitor all that the Nagios plugins can? Was it too much effort to rewrite the Nagios plugins for Hyperic? Did they not want to run the agent on their Linux systems?)
What do I base this on? Experience. Experience with this sort of sequence of events lets you read between the lines. Plus, they're running Strongmail, which provides a lot of support for ignorant and overbearing upper management. It is possible they have Linux admins there who are ignorant enough about what is out there to want to run Strongmail, or to have been taken in by their sales guys - but it's unlikely.
The Nagios codebase is considerably older. It was written before mod_perl and PHP were in broad use, when binaries in a webpage meant using cgi-bin.
And you think cgi-bin binaries are a thing of the past? I can assure you they are not. And new != better. The code in nagios is very good, and there's no reason to abandon it for a rewrite in PHP just because it's the latest fad. Nothing against PHP, but there's no compelling argument for moving to that just because. (Not that you were necessarily advocating that, but it is a common argument)
If you control all the servers you might be able to get away with that. Try working in a company where there are so many servers responsibilities are distributed between groups, then convince them they need to install python/pywin32 so you can monitor their systems. Good luck with that.
If your attitude towards Java is anything to go by then I doubt you are in an important decision making position anyway, but if you are, then I definitely wouldn't want to rely on you to look into possible solutions for systems that I develop. Let me guess you're a PHP guy. Heh. Thankfully, being an adoring fan of Java isn't a requirement for "important decision making positions". I'm not sure where you got the idea that it was.
That being said, my "attitude" wasn't towards Java, it was towards using Java for the wrong things. I run Java apps. In fact, one of my favorite apps is Zoe which is a Java app. My phone is Java based, and I even learned Java so I could write some stuff for it. My primary issue is with using it as an agent. Secondarily I would have a hard time trusting it for a mission critical piece like Systems Monitoring. That is probably prejudice based on my long experience with Java, and could be overcome if the product was worth it. But in this case, it is not.
I'm not a "PHP" guy. I know PHP, but I also know (some) ruby/python, shell, perl, C, C++, D, etc. It's not my primary focus however and the language itself is really not the point of this discussion.
You'd better tell the developers who are sat next to me that one. They think they're using a toolkit which practically gives them a web-based interface for free when they develop the command-line interface. Er - that has absolutely nothing to do with what I just said. Command line interface != Config File.
You know, rather than just tell me that I'm asking for the moon, you could try ZenOSS. You get a heck of a lot of flexibility and power with substantially less complexity. I've looked at ZenOSS. I'm sure that with your (apparently) limited experience and use of network monitoring that it seems like a lot of flexibility and power. That's not meant to be insulting, just an observation.
There seems to be a certain idea in the Linux community that just because "it's a community-developed Unix" it has to be bloody awkward to get basic things to work. Well, again, I deny that it's "bloody awkward" to get basic things to work in Nagios. I can have nagios up and running for basic needs in minutes.
I think the real problem here is this attitude that has been growing steadily within our side of the IT industry that somehow things should be "push a button easy". It's not just in monitoring, it's cropping up all over the place. If people actually have to spend some time learning something to use it, or have to put forward some brain power to get the most out of it then it's just too hard.
I utterly reject that.
I don't know for sure where it's coming from, but I have a suspicion that it comes from too many unskilled users flooding into the various *nix camps. For years people who should've known better advocated how we needed to win the war on the desktop and so we have to make it *easy*. So lots of people focused on making it easy. Now many of the people who took advantage of the inroads we did make are now looking at more advanced areas of the platform and complaining that it's too hard. They've been using LinSpire, or Xandros on the desktop long enough that they've decided they're unix admins.
I'm not saying you necessarily fall into this category, but even if you haven't, I believe these people and their complaints have infected many of the rest of the camp much like the media and others who complained about the difficulty of installing linux in prior years did.
If we don't wake up at some point we're going to have dumbed down our OS so much it'll be OS-X. I'm not dogging OS-X, I use it myself for certain things. But you have to admit that it has a *lot* less flexibility and power than BSD/Linux/Solaris/etc platforms do. And that's by design because of the people they want to use it. The unix guys there barely convinced them to leave the terminal in.
That's not where I want my apps and systems to go. I'm not saying there aren't poorly developed apps out there. There certainly are. I'm saying that some people obviously can't tell the difference between a poorly developed app, and an app they don't understand. Here's a hint - if it's been the lead product in the space for years and years and has huge community support around it - it's probably *not* a poorly developed application.
There's plenty of room in the space for apps like ZenOSS, Hyperic, etc. They're welcome to compete. Just don't try to tear down Nagios to do it. Use what you want, what meets your needs, and stop with this absurd war against Nagios.
I'm glad you like it, and that it works for you. You presented actual positive feedback about a product that did what you needed, which I think is valid. What isn't valid is going onto a web forum and trying to make your product look better by denigrating a product you don't really understand (as the gentleman from Hyperic did). (And yes, I feel perfectly safe saying that. I've been using Nagios since the NetSaint days, and it has never failed me. It works like a charm.) I've tried most other monitoring products out there, including commercial ones, and none of them even comes close to what I can make happen with Nagios. I trust Nagios with my systems, with my career. I can't say that about any other monitoring system. If I have a monitoring need, I know I can apply Nagios to solve it.
Oh, and I don't have a Phd. I just know that sometimes, if you want to do things right, it's going to require a little effort on your part. There will always be shortcuts and "easier" ways of doing things if you're willing to sacrifice something. I'm usually not.
Personally, I would hate to work for anybody with such a strong prejudice, so don't look for my resume anytime soon.
I don't recall asking for it.
Yes, some Java code can have issues when people take short-cuts or just write sloppy, improper code, but Hyperic's memory use and CPU utilization are minimal compared to everything else running on these systems.
Of course...you're running tomcat.;-)
Folks, give Hyperic a try. I guarantee you'll get a better feel for this product with, say, 1 hour of investment than you will with a week's worth in most others.
Or, invest in yourself. Instead of learning to build Sauder furniture with a screwdriver, learn to use a table saw, a router, etc and build fine furniture.
I'm not sure what the deal is, but lately I've noticed there seems to be almost a hatred of Nagios coming out of the Hyperic people. I think it's probably fear...
Anyway, you said...
At the risk of getting off-topic, I'm tired of stuff that doesn't quite work. (can't comment on the actual book because I haven't read it) However, I can't see how Nagios can even begin to satisfy the needs of most modern IT operations folks.
Well, maybe you need to spend some time as an actual modern IT Operations "folk". Perhaps in a company that does serious monitoring rather than making sure their exchange server is pingable. I can assure you it far more than satisfies our needs.
These days, most people need to know a lot more than whether machine X is up. They need to know which part(s) of their web apps are not functioning correctly.
And? Are you suggesting that's all nagios can do? If so, it's quite clear that Nagios is way out of your league. If so, that's fine. Use your whats up/hyperic/whatever and be happy. I'm glad it gives you what you need. But don't criticize what you don't understand. "I don't see how a Ferarri can meet the needs of todays driver. People need more than a car that drives. They need to make it go fast. There's only one car for me, a Kia. With a spoiler and flames on the side."
They need a lot more intricate detail than is possible with Nagios or SNMP-based monitoring tools. Really, the only monitoring tool that does it for me is Hyperic.
More intricate detail than is possible....again, you obviously just aren't familiar with it's real capabilities. Installing an rpm, starting the service and looking at the web page doesn't qualify as an evaluation. If you like Hyperic, fine. Use it. Extol the things you like about it. Be my guest. But don't try to paint Nagios as something it isn't to make your tool look better.
While it's a fantastic tool, my biggest beef with it by a LONG way is that configuring a new server to monitor is always a case of "hand-edit this config file and that,
What is the deal with people being afraid of config files?
figure out what's important to monitor and what isn't
What? You're complaining because Nagios makes you figure out what is important to monitor?
realise 3 months later that you missed out something you really should be monitoring
So...your lack of planning is somehow nagios' fault?
If you're going to make monitoring easy with a pretty-pretty web-based user interface, then why on Earth can't what the monitor itself does be configured through the same web-based interface?
Because web based interfaces are notoriously inflexible. I don't get why people have such an aversion to config files these days. It's a unix system. Nagios is just not that hard to configure. If you had a web front end, then every time a change to the capabilities was made you'd have to go back through and update the front end to make it support it, which means more time between releases, longer turnarounds for new features, and likely less flexibility in the system in general.
Nagios is extremely flexible. This is a great thing, but it makes developing any kind of gui front end to the config files limiting by nature. There's all kinds of things you can do with the config files that would be almost impossible to predict when designing a web UI. If you don't care about having a great monitoring system, and just want to throw something together and vomit it onto the problem then use one of the many other inferior tools. Don't dumb down a great tool and ruin it for those of us who need and/or appreciate the power it offers.
But it's not as easy to hack as Nagios, mainly because it doesn't have such a strong community surrounding it
Hrm. Those two things don't go together. Not being easy to hack is a function of its design, not a function of its community. Now, it may not be as easy to monitor things that it doesn't already have support for - because there aren't a lot of people writing monitors for it. That's not the same thing as 'not being easy to hack'. Downloading someone else's work and installing it in your monitoring system doesn't qualify as 'hacking'.
Ah, for something with the out-of-the-box functionality (and "out of the box" means "out of the box", not "out of the box provided you spend another 2 hours setting up a bunch of config files to support it") and ease of use of ZenOSS, but the hackability and community of Nagios. Never gonna happen.
No, it's not. And why? Because you simply can't have your cake and eat it too. If you want flexibility and power you're going to have complexity. If you want simplicity, you're going to have a limiting system that is made for a certain spectrum of use and you'll have a hard time applying it outside of that problem set.
Why is Java bad? This isn't 1996 anymore. Have you ever run HQ? It would be shame to throw someone out of your interview over that!;-) If you want to argue about objective features, then point them out.
Java is bad because it's a huge runtime environment for something as simple as an agent. Linux could probably handle it, but *why*? On windows I would never dream of installing Java + anything else and still expect it to perform, anymore than I would any other two apps on the same server. You're just asking for trouble.
If I'm going to install an agent, I want it to be small, non-intrusive, have little or no dependencies and be reliable. I don't ascribe any of those things to a java based agent.
Oh, and you're the one who wanted to talk about objective truth. You presented the positive case, so the onus is on you to defend it. If Hyperic is "objectively better" then start proving it. What does it have that Nagios doesn't? Why is it better? And no, "My grandma can install it" isn't a valid argument.
Look at the installation procedure: Nagios documentation starts out with telling you that you'll need root access, a compiler, libGD, etc. Hyperic HQ comes with an installer that does all the work for you.
Well, I guess if your target market is my grandmother that might mean a hill of beans to me. But see I'm a unix sysadmin. Root access, compilers, and libraries don't scare me. Not to mention the bogus presentation. Hey, guess what, I can do 'rpm --enable-repo=dag install nagios' on my RHEL boxes. Done. "easy" install procedures don't make a good product.
Where do the 'light years' come into play? Feature for Feature, Nagios and HQ have a lot of the same features.
Really? Cause when I talked to your reps at LISA last year it was quite clear they weren't even close. Did you rewrite the whole thing in the last four and a half months? Again, if you're an ignorant user, or a grandma who for some bizzare reason needs a monitoring tool then I suppose a java app you can install on your servers and point at your network and have it get a rough approximation of a generic monitoring setup might be useful to you.
For those of us who have real problems to solve, it isn't.
With such a low barrier to try it, it's worth it for people to take the 30 minutes and see for themselves how easy monitoring and managing your infrastructure can be.
Hell, if easy is what you're going for, why not install what's up? It'll scan your network setup network maps, and it's a windows app. It's crap, but hey, it's easy.
You have to be kidding. Objectively better? Perhaps you'd care to quantify that?
Maybe you can start with the fact that it runs in Java. Including the agent. Nagios is light years ahead of Hyperic, but this one fact alone is enough to disqualify Hyperic from ever showing up in my production environment. In fact, I might make this a new interview question for disqualifying candidates. "Would you run Hyperic as a monitoring system?"
Anything other than "Hell no!" and the interview is over.
I don't disagree...but that's also the way it is worded. "right to keep and bear arms". That doesn't necessarily restrict it to firearms, or muskets, but to anything used in that fashion to defend life liberty and property.
Is it your suggestion that all criminals are big and strong, and all victims are tiny and weak?
Uh..no, that doesn't follow logically from what I said at all. However, when was the last time you know of that a criminal knowingly picked a target that was capable of fending him off? Honestly, even the dumbest criminals don't pick targets that can beat them senseless.
I am sorry, could you please bring up the plans for the last house you built using a gun? Guns kill. That is what they are for. They don't have any alternate use.
All those facts, and no point. What a waste. I never suggested they did. My point is they are a tool, and good or evil use of a tool is not attached to the tool itself, but the person who uses it.
All of this overwhelming evidence, and yet you didn't link any examples.
No, I didn't. And guess what, I'm not going to now either. I didn't write my post to convince anyone of anything, cause frankly, anyone smart enough, and well-reasoned enough to appreciate what I have to say is also capable of looking it up themselves. I'm not going to bother throwing "pearls before swine" as it were.
If you want to know, go look. Find some credible sources, do some objective reading. Think for yourself.
guess what, we are still number 1
The numbers here go down, then back up. Curious. I wonder, how many people use the law? How good is it? Is it pre-emptible? Where in your state are the murders at? Do they occur more or less where concealed carry is higher? What kind of murders are they? Do you have a high incidence of gang related violence?
Lets look at some other information. These are the crime index rates for your state since 1996 when your state enacted its law, along with population. Rates are per/100,000
Wow, look at that, down across almost all categories since 1996. It went back up a bit in 2k, and presumably continued to assuming the statistics you posted are correct. However, note the continuing increase in population. So population has gone up, and crime has gone down since 1996.
Again, I think this brings us back to asking questions about where, when, and why when it comes to certain types of crime. What are they calling "murder"? Do they include gang activity? Drug deals gone bad? etc. This is not the type of crime I'm talking about detering. My carrying a concealed weapon is not going to protect a gangbanger.
I highly doubt there's many legitimate reasons to fire hundreds of rounds per minute
Because it's fun.
Because I want to
Because doing so in no way harms or violates the rights of others without violating other laws and statutes already on the books.
Because unless the government has good reason to fear the people, they will have no reason to respect their rights and liberties
In Australia, we automatically exclude the possibility of using a gun against a human. Writing "Self-defence" on the application form to obtain a gun license will guarantee you won't get to own one (legally).
It's mind-boggling to me the way someone can write a post like this and still believe their country is in any way free. As Johann Goethe said, Nobody is more hopelessly enslaved than the one who falsely believes he is free.
Honestly...do no criminals own guns over there? Do they all beat you with sacks of wet noodles? No knives? No clubs? No sticks with a nail in it? Nobody bigger and stronger preys on those who are smaller and weaker?
Yet somehow, you, as a law-abiding citizen should not have the right to own the means to defend yourself agains an aggressor who has no qualms about equipping himself (legally or no) in whatever fashion to accomplish his nefarious objectives. And people call this liberty.
Unlike Americans, we don't believe guns are useful just because it's a gun.
Er...then what makes it useful? "It also has to make a nice vase." "It must go with the decor."
Honestly, do you say such things about hammers? "We don't think a hammer is useful just because it's a hammer. Just cause you can hammer nails in doesn't mean you should get to use one. After all, you might hit someone in the head with it. Maybe even in self defense! The horror!"
It is a priveledge, not a right
You may have chosen to abdicate your natural rights but some of us, you know those of us who cherish what little freedom we have left and are willing to do what it takes to keep it, have not.
We acknowledge that not every random bastard on the street is going to be responsible and rational enough to engage in safe gun ownership. You must have a legitimate reason to own one,
Despite all evidence to the contrary. Despite mountains of statistics that demonstrate that daily, yes, in fact, those who make the effort to purchase and carry firearms for self defense use them millions of times for self defense every year, nearly all of which never even involve firing a shot. With a
And of course, it's always safe to let the government determine who can have the means to keep them in check. I'm guessing you have foxes guarding your henhouse too.
this includes agricultural and sporting applications. Letting people own a gun purely because "it's teh c00l" or "self protection" does not benefit society at all.
Again, don't let the facts get in the way of your wild speculation there. In fact, in every state in the US where Gun laws are relaxed or where concealed carry (or open carry) are available as options crime goes down. More than that, statistically, the fear such laws put in criminals means that for every one of us that carries a gun, 12 other people who live near them will not become a victim of a crime. Yes, no benefit to society there.
But again, I'm just talking into the wind here. After all, you've spent years reading about this stuff and developing a solid opinion based on the facts right? Or, better yet, you went to a public school and watch the news and listen to the politicians and on the news! What more could you need to form an unbiased accurate position on such a critical issue. Right?
In America, the 2nd amendment to the Constitution guarantees us the right to bear arms. So, for us, it is a right. You could see how we would have a different take on gun ownership than our Aussie friends.
Close, but no cigar.
The 2nd amendment recognizes our right to bear arms, it does not grant or guarantee it. It is not a right just for us. It is a right for all human beings in every country in every corner of the globe. Our constitution just puts it in words by specifically restricting the government from infringing on it.
And the only thing that guarantees our government does not infringe is not the amendment itself, but the vigilence of our citizens.
Our Aussie friends have this right too, whether their government, or even their people, recognize it or not.
Microsoft is the bad guys, but microsoft pails in comparison to the "bad corporate netizen" that the soney behemouth is and has become. ...
Sony's products are cheap, break, lousy construction and the most properietary of anything i've ever seen. This comes from everything in PDA's to car stereo's and home theaters. ...
PS2 was a hype, PS3 no don't will be..cheap receivers that never meat rates wattage
How did this get modded up to +3 interesting? It's not even readable!
Good grief man, take an english class! How do you expect people to take your argument seriously when you can barely even communicate it?
It's a nice post, but really kind of irrelevant to the real issue under discussion here. The question is valid, but simply not worth arguing here. The real issue here is whether the government can compel you to do anything and everything in the open where they can observe you.
Should it be illegal for you to hold meetings in a room away from others? Should whispered conversatiosn be legal? Should you be allowed to send mail in a tamper-proof envelope? What about https? Will that now have to have the ability for others to sniff the stream?
The issue here, as I see it, is whether or not you have to make it easy for law enforcement to snoop you and your life, and I fail to see any constitutional warrant for them requiring that of us.
Incidentally, I wonder if the FCC considered lan2lan. If my corporation goes to VoIP, does the government have to be able to sniff inter-office calls?
Come on, the only people that are thinking Google is evil are other companies that have to compete with them.
I am not a company. Neither I nor my company compete with them. (Yet. I'm sure it's only a matter of time.) Yet I am wary and suspect them of being evil.
Consider their current power. They are the> primary search point online. People don't say "search for it" anymore, they say 'google it'. If it's not on google, for many people it doesn't exist. So if they want to control access to information, to a limited extent they are fully capable of doing so.
They have Gigabytes worth of private email at their fingertips. Sure, they say they won't ever publish or publicly index it. Now we have the same for IM.
Google desktop is supposedly secure. Yet what is our guarantee? Have any of you seen the source code? Even if it is now, can you guarantee that'll always be the case?
Companies change, owners change. As they continue to absorb large quantities of internet functionality and do it well the risk of them being corrupted by what they've accomplished becomes greater.
"Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end...liberty is the only object which benefits all alike, and provokes no sincere opposition...The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to to govern. Every class is unfit to govern...Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely."
--Lord Acton
Obviously, from a different context, but it is an appropriate exposition on the nature of power generally and its effect upon people. While Google's power is limited by its being a corporation, and not a government, it is still something we should at least be aware of. I do not advocate some sort of wholesale rejection of google, they've done nothing to warrant that. Yet I certainly think caution and awareness are called for.
There is NO WAY IN HELL NeoOffice/J or OpenOffice replace the MS office suite. No matter what people claim, they still break plenty of office docs that get emailed to me,
You do realize this is not because of the alternate apps but is a consequence of MS' business practices? That they refuse to interoperate with anyone else? There used to be other alternatives, like wordperfect office and lotus suite. Everyone had to have their own proprietary formats, and even then in the world of closed source software they couldn't open each other and documents, spreadsheets, etc all would break.
If these people would've just used open formats that they all could share, we'd still have a wide variety of choice in what we use, and these free alternatives would work a lot better. Instead we have to deal with the constant headaches of trying to make different apps, versions, and platforms work with each other.
And note that in this, it is the OSS guys trying desperately to reach out and make things work better with MS, with absolutely zero desire on MS's part to make things easier for us all to co-exist. So instead, you find lots of people getting angry, and pushing to replace MS instead of just co-exist with it.
The reality is that as time passes, the usefulness of microsoft servers shrink. Especially when you factor in TCO. Before long, desktops will follow suit. Why? Because they have forced OSS guys to write replacements of their software, instead of working/with/ their software. Honestly, many of us would rather use the wheel that already exists and works for various things, but we're forced to write a new one because they just won't play nice.
Which christians? That would be biblical christians. And yes, there are quite a few who claim the name of Christian who are not, many of whom are not even close. There's no "certification" or anything to be able to use the name. You could call it if you wanted, and that's why people think Christianity is varied. It's not. Not much that can be done about that.
It's hard to tell from this whether this is an accusation or not, but given the context I have to assume it is. Well, I take the bible literally wherever it was meant to be taken literally.
And in which parts of the Bible did God say "you can ignore this" or "take careful notes on this"? I rest my case. You can't bank on the infallibility of parts of the Bible when fallible people are deciding what is to be taken literally.
I note that you snipped an important part of what I said, and then proceeded to miscontrue it entirely. I never said any part of scripture was fallible. All of scripture is infallible and inerrant (in its original autographs), it is god-breathed and usefull for teaching, instruction, etc.
However, some of it uses poetic language, some is irony and some is symbolism. There is no actual beast which is going to arise, it symbolicly represents something else.
I wonder...if you were given a book collection that had some poetry, some science, and some biography, would you read those the same? Believing that all of them should be read and interpreted in the same manner as say, the science portion?
I certainly hope not, but yet people feel they can do the same with scripture. This is not an issue of figuring out which portions you can ignore, there are none of those. Every part of scripture is important or it wouldn't be there. The issue is understanding what it is saying, and reading it within its own context. Each book is written by different people (sometimes multiple authors in the same book) to different people, for different purposes, and often in differing styles. This is all part of the context, as well as the immediate context of paragraph, then chapter, then book, then all of scripture.
As for your "bible contradictions" these are again, only so because of a failure to read in context, or to consider the intent within the context of original languages rather than tryign to twist a lack of clarity in translation into a contradiction.
This is my last post on this subject. I have attempted to bring some clarity, but your proclivity to twisting my words makes it apparent you are not interested in a reasonable discussion.
Obvious, and well done, sarcasm aside, when I read this I heard the echoes of another british apology ringing in my ears...
I do, I offer a complete and utter retraction. The imputation was totally without basis in fact, and was in no way fair comment, and was motivated purely by malice, and I deeply regret any distress that my comments may have caused you, or your family, and I hereby undertake not to repeat any such slander at any time in the future.
More than that, nobody in their right mind would choose SCO as an internet server, router, or firewall base.
So, what exactly is their exposure here? And seriously, while many of us run the UNIX we run at work at home, how many who run SCO actually want to come home and use it too?
I own a large number of Loki-ported titles, Jagged Alliance, Quake 3 Arena, Majesty, and NWN. The *only* game that works properly out-of-box on a Fedora Core 4 system is NWN. I have put extensive work into troubleshooting my games, I am running the most mainstream Linux distro around, and I would like to hear what your explanation for this state of affairs is.
Old Loki games actually install without binary compatibility problems, unlike what you say.
Nope. As a matter of fact, not only do they generally not work, but the patch binary crashes and has crashed for some time on at least Red-Hat based systems when attempting to update a current game.
NWN isn't a loki game. And while I don't own any of those loki games, I have been able to get Descent 3 and HGII to work on my Gentoo 2.6 system, with only about 15 minutes effort. Updates likewise were not an issue.
Agreed. I didn't sign a waiver, but I don't think it said anything about suing in mine. I was in the first group, and it was sign it or get no severance.
Still, it'd be a shame if some source code someone I know has that sufficiently demonstrats some GPL violations just happened to get leaked onto the web.
Slashdot Mirror
This article is a prime example of the absurd war against Nagios currently being waged by these commercial companies. Right in the article the guy states that it wasn't nagois' fault, it was the SNMP tool/JVM that was the problem. Yet look at the headline. And read the quote from the ZenOSS CEO:
"The maintainers never thought of it as a project that an IT manager would use to monitor an entire enterprise environment," What? Yes they did. I used it to monitor systems in one of the largest companies in the US, with 400 offices around the world and 4 datacenters. It's more than capable if you use it right. When I read that article, this is the impression I get of what really happened. The guys were given no money to setup monitoring. They put Nagios up because it's the default, and worked within timeline limits to get it working. They tried the obvious first. Expose SNMP interfaces and query them. They wrestled with the impacts, and upper management got tired of waiting and started looking commercial.He looked big dog first "Whoa, I'm not going to spend that kind of money". Someone stumbles on Resin support in Hyperic, and they avoid the near catastrophe that is OpenView. It works, the IT guys are (probably) happy. (At least some of them). Upper Management is ecstatic and in their ignorance blames Nagios, and (possibly) works out a deal to promote Hyperic in the media and slander Nagios. Note too that in the article they're *still* using some of the Nagios components. I wonder why. (Honestly, not sarcastically. Can it not monitor all that the Nagios plugins can? Was it too much effort to rewrite the Nagios plugins for Hyperic? Did they not want to run the agent on their Linux systems?)
What do I base this on? Experience. Experience with this sort of sequence of events lets you read between the lines. Plus, they're running Strongmail, which provides a lot of support for ignorant and overbearing upper management. It is possible they have Linux admins there who are ignorant enough about what is out there to want to run Strongmail, or to have been taken in by their sales guys - but it's unlikely.
And you think cgi-bin binaries are a thing of the past? I can assure you they are not. And new != better. The code in nagios is very good, and there's no reason to abandon it for a rewrite in PHP just because it's the latest fad. Nothing against PHP, but there's no compelling argument for moving to that just because. (Not that you were necessarily advocating that, but it is a common argument)
If you control all the servers you might be able to get away with that. Try working in a company where there are so many servers responsibilities are distributed between groups, then convince them they need to install python/pywin32 so you can monitor their systems. Good luck with that.
That being said, my "attitude" wasn't towards Java, it was towards using Java for the wrong things. I run Java apps. In fact, one of my favorite apps is Zoe which is a Java app. My phone is Java based, and I even learned Java so I could write some stuff for it. My primary issue is with using it as an agent. Secondarily I would have a hard time trusting it for a mission critical piece like Systems Monitoring. That is probably prejudice based on my long experience with Java, and could be overcome if the product was worth it. But in this case, it is not.
I'm not a "PHP" guy. I know PHP, but I also know (some) ruby/python, shell, perl, C, C++, D, etc. It's not my primary focus however and the language itself is really not the point of this discussion.
I think the real problem here is this attitude that has been growing steadily within our side of the IT industry that somehow things should be "push a button easy". It's not just in monitoring, it's cropping up all over the place. If people actually have to spend some time learning something to use it, or have to put forward some brain power to get the most out of it then it's just too hard.
I utterly reject that.
I don't know for sure where it's coming from, but I have a suspicion that it comes from too many unskilled users flooding into the various *nix camps. For years people who should've known better advocated how we needed to win the war on the desktop and so we have to make it *easy*. So lots of people focused on making it easy. Now many of the people who took advantage of the inroads we did make are now looking at more advanced areas of the platform and complaining that it's too hard. They've been using LinSpire, or Xandros on the desktop long enough that they've decided they're unix admins.
I'm not saying you necessarily fall into this category, but even if you haven't, I believe these people and their complaints have infected many of the rest of the camp much like the media and others who complained about the difficulty of installing linux in prior years did.
If we don't wake up at some point we're going to have dumbed down our OS so much it'll be OS-X. I'm not dogging OS-X, I use it myself for certain things. But you have to admit that it has a *lot* less flexibility and power than BSD/Linux/Solaris/etc platforms do. And that's by design because of the people they want to use it. The unix guys there barely convinced them to leave the terminal in.
That's not where I want my apps and systems to go. I'm not saying there aren't poorly developed apps out there. There certainly are. I'm saying that some people obviously can't tell the difference between a poorly developed app, and an app they don't understand. Here's a hint - if it's been the lead product in the space for years and years and has huge community support around it - it's probably *not* a poorly developed application.
There's plenty of room in the space for apps like ZenOSS, Hyperic, etc. They're welcome to compete. Just don't try to tear down Nagios to do it. Use what you want, what meets your needs, and stop with this absurd war against Nagios.
Personally, I would hate to work for anybody with such a strong prejudice, so don't look for my resume anytime soon.
I don't recall asking for it.
Yes, some Java code can have issues when people take short-cuts or just write sloppy, improper code, but Hyperic's memory use and CPU utilization are minimal compared to everything else running on these systems.
Of course...you're running tomcat. ;-)
Folks, give Hyperic a try. I guarantee you'll get a better feel for this product with, say, 1 hour of investment than you will with a week's worth in most others. Or, invest in yourself. Instead of learning to build Sauder furniture with a screwdriver, learn to use a table saw, a router, etc and build fine furniture.
Anyway, you said... At the risk of getting off-topic, I'm tired of stuff that doesn't quite work. (can't comment on the actual book because I haven't read it) However, I can't see how Nagios can even begin to satisfy the needs of most modern IT operations folks.
Well, maybe you need to spend some time as an actual modern IT Operations "folk". Perhaps in a company that does serious monitoring rather than making sure their exchange server is pingable. I can assure you it far more than satisfies our needs.
These days, most people need to know a lot more than whether machine X is up. They need to know which part(s) of their web apps are not functioning correctly.
And? Are you suggesting that's all nagios can do? If so, it's quite clear that Nagios is way out of your league. If so, that's fine. Use your whats up/hyperic/whatever and be happy. I'm glad it gives you what you need. But don't criticize what you don't understand. "I don't see how a Ferarri can meet the needs of todays driver. People need more than a car that drives. They need to make it go fast. There's only one car for me, a Kia. With a spoiler and flames on the side."
They need a lot more intricate detail than is possible with Nagios or SNMP-based monitoring tools. Really, the only monitoring tool that does it for me is Hyperic.
More intricate detail than is possible....again, you obviously just aren't familiar with it's real capabilities. Installing an rpm, starting the service and looking at the web page doesn't qualify as an evaluation. If you like Hyperic, fine. Use it. Extol the things you like about it. Be my guest. But don't try to paint Nagios as something it isn't to make your tool look better.
What is the deal with people being afraid of config files?
figure out what's important to monitor and what isn't
What? You're complaining because Nagios makes you figure out what is important to monitor?
realise 3 months later that you missed out something you really should be monitoring
So...your lack of planning is somehow nagios' fault?
If you're going to make monitoring easy with a pretty-pretty web-based user interface, then why on Earth can't what the monitor itself does be configured through the same web-based interface?
Because web based interfaces are notoriously inflexible. I don't get why people have such an aversion to config files these days. It's a unix system. Nagios is just not that hard to configure. If you had a web front end, then every time a change to the capabilities was made you'd have to go back through and update the front end to make it support it, which means more time between releases, longer turnarounds for new features, and likely less flexibility in the system in general.
Nagios is extremely flexible. This is a great thing, but it makes developing any kind of gui front end to the config files limiting by nature. There's all kinds of things you can do with the config files that would be almost impossible to predict when designing a web UI. If you don't care about having a great monitoring system, and just want to throw something together and vomit it onto the problem then use one of the many other inferior tools. Don't dumb down a great tool and ruin it for those of us who need and/or appreciate the power it offers.
But it's not as easy to hack as Nagios, mainly because it doesn't have such a strong community surrounding it
Hrm. Those two things don't go together. Not being easy to hack is a function of its design, not a function of its community. Now, it may not be as easy to monitor things that it doesn't already have support for - because there aren't a lot of people writing monitors for it. That's not the same thing as 'not being easy to hack'. Downloading someone else's work and installing it in your monitoring system doesn't qualify as 'hacking'.
Ah, for something with the out-of-the-box functionality (and "out of the box" means "out of the box", not "out of the box provided you spend another 2 hours setting up a bunch of config files to support it") and ease of use of ZenOSS, but the hackability and community of Nagios. Never gonna happen.
No, it's not. And why? Because you simply can't have your cake and eat it too. If you want flexibility and power you're going to have complexity. If you want simplicity, you're going to have a limiting system that is made for a certain spectrum of use and you'll have a hard time applying it outside of that problem set.
I see the Hyperic fanboys (aka marketing team) is out in full force.
Java is bad because it's a huge runtime environment for something as simple as an agent. Linux could probably handle it, but *why*? On windows I would never dream of installing Java + anything else and still expect it to perform, anymore than I would any other two apps on the same server. You're just asking for trouble.
If I'm going to install an agent, I want it to be small, non-intrusive, have little or no dependencies and be reliable. I don't ascribe any of those things to a java based agent.
Oh, and you're the one who wanted to talk about objective truth. You presented the positive case, so the onus is on you to defend it. If Hyperic is "objectively better" then start proving it. What does it have that Nagios doesn't? Why is it better? And no, "My grandma can install it" isn't a valid argument.
Look at the installation procedure: Nagios documentation starts out with telling you that you'll need root access, a compiler, libGD, etc. Hyperic HQ comes with an installer that does all the work for you.
Well, I guess if your target market is my grandmother that might mean a hill of beans to me. But see I'm a unix sysadmin. Root access, compilers, and libraries don't scare me. Not to mention the bogus presentation. Hey, guess what, I can do 'rpm --enable-repo=dag install nagios' on my RHEL boxes. Done. "easy" install procedures don't make a good product.
Where do the 'light years' come into play? Feature for Feature, Nagios and HQ have a lot of the same features.
Really? Cause when I talked to your reps at LISA last year it was quite clear they weren't even close. Did you rewrite the whole thing in the last four and a half months? Again, if you're an ignorant user, or a grandma who for some bizzare reason needs a monitoring tool then I suppose a java app you can install on your servers and point at your network and have it get a rough approximation of a generic monitoring setup might be useful to you.
For those of us who have real problems to solve, it isn't.
With such a low barrier to try it, it's worth it for people to take the 30 minutes and see for themselves how easy monitoring and managing your infrastructure can be.
Hell, if easy is what you're going for, why not install what's up? It'll scan your network setup network maps, and it's a windows app. It's crap, but hey, it's easy.
You have to be kidding. Objectively better? Perhaps you'd care to quantify that?
Maybe you can start with the fact that it runs in Java. Including the agent. Nagios is light years ahead of Hyperic, but this one fact alone is enough to disqualify Hyperic from ever showing up in my production environment. In fact, I might make this a new interview question for disqualifying candidates. "Would you run Hyperic as a monitoring system?"
Anything other than "Hell no!" and the interview is over.
I don't disagree...but that's also the way it is worded. "right to keep and bear arms". That doesn't necessarily restrict it to firearms, or muskets, but to anything used in that fashion to defend life liberty and property.
Uh..no, that doesn't follow logically from what I said at all. However, when was the last time you know of that a criminal knowingly picked a target that was capable of fending him off? Honestly, even the dumbest criminals don't pick targets that can beat them senseless.
I am sorry, could you please bring up the plans for the last house you built using a gun? Guns kill. That is what they are for. They don't have any alternate use.
All those facts, and no point. What a waste. I never suggested they did. My point is they are a tool, and good or evil use of a tool is not attached to the tool itself, but the person who uses it.
All of this overwhelming evidence, and yet you didn't link any examples.
No, I didn't. And guess what, I'm not going to now either. I didn't write my post to convince anyone of anything, cause frankly, anyone smart enough, and well-reasoned enough to appreciate what I have to say is also capable of looking it up themselves. I'm not going to bother throwing "pearls before swine" as it were.
If you want to know, go look. Find some credible sources, do some objective reading. Think for yourself.
guess what, we are still number 1
The numbers here go down, then back up. Curious. I wonder, how many people use the law? How good is it? Is it pre-emptible? Where in your state are the murders at? Do they occur more or less where concealed carry is higher? What kind of murders are they? Do you have a high incidence of gang related violence?
Lets look at some other information. These are the crime index rates for your state since 1996 when your state enacted its law, along with population. Rates are per/100,000
Wow, look at that, down across almost all categories since 1996. It went back up a bit in 2k, and presumably continued to assuming the statistics you posted are correct. However, note the continuing increase in population. So population has gone up, and crime has gone down since 1996. Again, I think this brings us back to asking questions about where, when, and why when it comes to certain types of crime. What are they calling "murder"? Do they include gang activity? Drug deals gone bad? etc. This is not the type of crime I'm talking about detering. My carrying a concealed weapon is not going to protect a gangbanger.In Australia, we automatically exclude the possibility of using a gun against a human. Writing "Self-defence" on the application form to obtain a gun license will guarantee you won't get to own one (legally).
It's mind-boggling to me the way someone can write a post like this and still believe their country is in any way free. As Johann Goethe said, Nobody is more hopelessly enslaved than the one who falsely believes he is free.
Honestly...do no criminals own guns over there? Do they all beat you with sacks of wet noodles? No knives? No clubs? No sticks with a nail in it? Nobody bigger and stronger preys on those who are smaller and weaker?
Yet somehow, you, as a law-abiding citizen should not have the right to own the means to defend yourself agains an aggressor who has no qualms about equipping himself (legally or no) in whatever fashion to accomplish his nefarious objectives. And people call this liberty.
Unlike Americans, we don't believe guns are useful just because it's a gun.
Er...then what makes it useful? "It also has to make a nice vase." "It must go with the decor."
Honestly, do you say such things about hammers? "We don't think a hammer is useful just because it's a hammer. Just cause you can hammer nails in doesn't mean you should get to use one. After all, you might hit someone in the head with it. Maybe even in self defense! The horror!"
It is a priveledge, not a right
You may have chosen to abdicate your natural rights but some of us, you know those of us who cherish what little freedom we have left and are willing to do what it takes to keep it, have not.
We acknowledge that not every random bastard on the street is going to be responsible and rational enough to engage in safe gun ownership. You must have a legitimate reason to own one,
Despite all evidence to the contrary. Despite mountains of statistics that demonstrate that daily, yes, in fact, those who make the effort to purchase and carry firearms for self defense use them millions of times for self defense every year, nearly all of which never even involve firing a shot. With a And of course, it's always safe to let the government determine who can have the means to keep them in check. I'm guessing you have foxes guarding your henhouse too.
this includes agricultural and sporting applications. Letting people own a gun purely because "it's teh c00l" or "self protection" does not benefit society at all.
Again, don't let the facts get in the way of your wild speculation there. In fact, in every state in the US where Gun laws are relaxed or where concealed carry (or open carry) are available as options crime goes down. More than that, statistically, the fear such laws put in criminals means that for every one of us that carries a gun, 12 other people who live near them will not become a victim of a crime. Yes, no benefit to society there.
But again, I'm just talking into the wind here. After all, you've spent years reading about this stuff and developing a solid opinion based on the facts right? Or, better yet, you went to a public school and watch the news and listen to the politicians and on the news! What more could you need to form an unbiased accurate position on such a critical issue. Right?
Close, but no cigar.
The 2nd amendment recognizes our right to bear arms, it does not grant or guarantee it. It is not a right just for us. It is a right for all human beings in every country in every corner of the globe. Our constitution just puts it in words by specifically restricting the government from infringing on it.
And the only thing that guarantees our government does not infringe is not the amendment itself, but the vigilence of our citizens. Our Aussie friends have this right too, whether their government, or even their people, recognize it or not.
Unless they have other evidence pointing to you, and being able to connect what you printed with your printer makes a nice tidy bow for the case file.
Sony's products are cheap, break, lousy construction and the most properietary of anything i've ever seen. This comes from everything in PDA's to car stereo's and home theaters.
PS2 was a hype, PS3 no don't will be..cheap receivers that never meat rates wattage
How did this get modded up to +3 interesting? It's not even readable!
Good grief man, take an english class! How do you expect people to take your argument seriously when you can barely even communicate it?
It's a nice post, but really kind of irrelevant to the real issue under discussion here. The question is valid, but simply not worth arguing here. The real issue here is whether the government can compel you to do anything and everything in the open where they can observe you.
Should it be illegal for you to hold meetings in a room away from others? Should whispered conversatiosn be legal? Should you be allowed to send mail in a tamper-proof envelope? What about https? Will that now have to have the ability for others to sniff the stream?
The issue here, as I see it, is whether or not you have to make it easy for law enforcement to snoop you and your life, and I fail to see any constitutional warrant for them requiring that of us.
Incidentally, I wonder if the FCC considered lan2lan. If my corporation goes to VoIP, does the government have to be able to sniff inter-office calls?
I am not a company. Neither I nor my company compete with them. (Yet. I'm sure it's only a matter of time.) Yet I am wary and suspect them of being evil.
Consider their current power. They are the> primary search point online. People don't say "search for it" anymore, they say 'google it'. If it's not on google, for many people it doesn't exist. So if they want to control access to information, to a limited extent they are fully capable of doing so.
They have Gigabytes worth of private email at their fingertips. Sure, they say they won't ever publish or publicly index it. Now we have the same for IM.
Google desktop is supposedly secure. Yet what is our guarantee? Have any of you seen the source code? Even if it is now, can you guarantee that'll always be the case?
Companies change, owners change. As they continue to absorb large quantities of internet functionality and do it well the risk of them being corrupted by what they've accomplished becomes greater.
Obviously, from a different context, but it is an appropriate exposition on the nature of power generally and its effect upon people. While Google's power is limited by its being a corporation, and not a government, it is still something we should at least be aware of. I do not advocate some sort of wholesale rejection of google, they've done nothing to warrant that. Yet I certainly think caution and awareness are called for.You do realize this is not because of the alternate apps but is a consequence of MS' business practices? That they refuse to interoperate with anyone else? There used to be other alternatives, like wordperfect office and lotus suite. Everyone had to have their own proprietary formats, and even then in the world of closed source software they couldn't open each other and documents, spreadsheets, etc all would break.
If these people would've just used open formats that they all could share, we'd still have a wide variety of choice in what we use, and these free alternatives would work a lot better. Instead we have to deal with the constant headaches of trying to make different apps, versions, and platforms work with each other.
And note that in this, it is the OSS guys trying desperately to reach out and make things work better with MS, with absolutely zero desire on MS's part to make things easier for us all to co-exist. So instead, you find lots of people getting angry, and pushing to replace MS instead of just co-exist with it.
The reality is that as time passes, the usefulness of microsoft servers shrink. Especially when you factor in TCO. Before long, desktops will follow suit. Why? Because they have forced OSS guys to write replacements of their software, instead of working /with/ their software. Honestly, many of us would rather use the wheel that already exists and works for various things, but we're forced to write a new one because they just won't play nice.
It's hard to tell from this whether this is an accusation or not, but given the context I have to assume it is. Well, I take the bible literally wherever it was meant to be taken literally.
And in which parts of the Bible did God say "you can ignore this" or "take careful notes on this"? I rest my case. You can't bank on the infallibility of parts of the Bible when fallible people are deciding what is to be taken literally.
I note that you snipped an important part of what I said, and then proceeded to miscontrue it entirely. I never said any part of scripture was fallible. All of scripture is infallible and inerrant (in its original autographs), it is god-breathed and usefull for teaching, instruction, etc.
However, some of it uses poetic language, some is irony and some is symbolism. There is no actual beast which is going to arise, it symbolicly represents something else.
I wonder...if you were given a book collection that had some poetry, some science, and some biography, would you read those the same? Believing that all of them should be read and interpreted in the same manner as say, the science portion?
I certainly hope not, but yet people feel they can do the same with scripture. This is not an issue of figuring out which portions you can ignore, there are none of those. Every part of scripture is important or it wouldn't be there. The issue is understanding what it is saying, and reading it within its own context. Each book is written by different people (sometimes multiple authors in the same book) to different people, for different purposes, and often in differing styles. This is all part of the context, as well as the immediate context of paragraph, then chapter, then book, then all of scripture.
As for your "bible contradictions" these are again, only so because of a failure to read in context, or to consider the intent within the context of original languages rather than tryign to twist a lack of clarity in translation into a contradiction.
This is my last post on this subject. I have attempted to bring some clarity, but your proclivity to twisting my words makes it apparent you are not interested in a reasonable discussion.
I do, I offer a complete and utter retraction. The imputation was totally without basis in fact, and was in no way fair comment, and was motivated purely by malice, and I deeply regret any distress that my comments may have caused you, or your family, and I hereby undertake not to repeat any such slander at any time in the future.
More than that, nobody in their right mind would choose SCO as an internet server, router, or firewall base.
So, what exactly is their exposure here? And seriously, while many of us run the UNIX we run at work at home, how many who run SCO actually want to come home and use it too?
Other than sado-masochists of course.
Old Loki games actually install without binary compatibility problems, unlike what you say.
Nope. As a matter of fact, not only do they generally not work, but the patch binary crashes and has crashed for some time on at least Red-Hat based systems when attempting to update a current game.
NWN isn't a loki game. And while I don't own any of those loki games, I have been able to get Descent 3 and HGII to work on my Gentoo 2.6 system, with only about 15 minutes effort. Updates likewise were not an issue.
Agreed. I didn't sign a waiver, but I don't think it said anything about suing in mine. I was in the first group, and it was sign it or get no severance.
Still, it'd be a shame if some source code someone I know has that sufficiently demonstrats some GPL violations just happened to get leaked onto the web.