It sounds like either your sysadmin wasn't good enough or you overestimate the capabilities of puppet &co. The only way to get two servers exactly the same is to buy same hardware from the same batches then image the drives.
My experience with these tools is that they work "well enough", giving you reasonably similar configurations across servers... providing you have fairly routine needs on mainstream platforms. But there are SO MANY niggly differences between platforms and builds that almost all your work is going to go into identifying and accommodating for those differences. For security-conscious deployments, in particular, you want to do nothing less than study each individual platform's quirks.
A senior sysadmin will have been maintaining automation tools for longer than most of the tools mentioned in this article have existed. The problem is not the guy who has built and maintained a working system, but the upstart who whines that he actually has to learn something new and won't get a new buzzword to put on his CV. If your in-house system isn't 100% perfect, don't use that as an excuse to throw the baby out with the bathwater. If you're building something from scratch, DO evaluate ALL these options, but be prepared to have to consider EVERYTHING they do behind the scenes in order to understand whether they're behaving exactly as you want them to.
Lastly - and this advice for puppet users in particular - try not to get a hard-on for the word "idempotence". It's not that complex or unique a concept.
I wouldn't describe "number of years you've dablled in [package]" as a skill. I've dabbled in loads of things for 20+ years, but it says very little about my skill with them. What is more, anyone who sees "10+ years experience with [package]" is going to edit their CV to emphasise their experience with [package].
OTOH, I am quite competent with tools I've spent far less time with, because I've had to apply my skills to producing clever shit.
And it works, because many geeks are antisocial sorts who rather than organising their labour will happily walk over each other just to get that little bit of green. Then, when the race to the bottom has been reached, they'll bitch about everyone else being better treated, rather than stopping to ask why it happened and striving to improve their collective lot.
Every sufficiently old once secure job is now tenuous or non-existent. What is secure today will be tenuous in a decade's time.
You are right that phrenology, IQ tests, generic aptitude tests, etc. are inappropriate measures of ability.
But actually taking time to look at what went into fulfillling particular qualifications, experience, hobbies is relevant and very possible. Relevant technical interviews which test general engineering skills and probationary periods are also valuable.
Since these are all cookie-cutter solutions for a broad range of necessarily very different scenarios, your choice will depend on how well your scenario fits in with the features provided by each product.
As always, the ideal solution will come from rolling your own, possibly by heavily customising an existing solution - which may include one of these. But you may not have the knowledge or the time to do this, and it might piss off corporate if they would rather something which makes you easily replaceable. The correct solution here is to document, but it's a rare sysadmin who is both a good coder and a good documenter too.
I'd prefer a "loud car" in trains, with the assumption of civil behaviour required in all others. And each seat in the "loud car" should have a lubed crowbar embedded in it, provided to help the loud passengers remove their heads from their own backsides.
If you think it's easy to connect a call at 9500 feet, you're high.
Also cellphones distract people way more than talking in person - and we don't want 300 people distracted during take-off and landing, just in case there are hiccups.
Finally, it's the worst time for something to go wrong. So, while modern planes shouldn't have a problem with calls being made/received, you still want to check.
The real risk is that the plane is full of polite British travellers who are too reserved to punch the caller and instead just tut noisily for 12 hours.
The safety demonstration needs to include a demonstration of how to safely and effectively disable the goatfucker who takes out his 'phone. Perhaps it could include step-by-step advice on how to break the equipment without causing a fire hazard by piercing the li-ion battery.
I'm happy to be viciously corrected by anyone who's done the sums, so... could a low power radio transmitter be powered by the very sound waves which are being picked up? Tiny microphone, tiny VCO+amp, tiny transducer -> everlasting bug.
It's like selling toxic debt for 10% of the amount of the debt. The new creditors know that they're going to have little luck with maybe 3/4, and the remaining 1/4 will take money+time to cough up.
No, it undermines Wikipedia as a complete source of information.
Your hypothesis is that people who have time on their hands are motivated primarily to neutrally increase the quality or quantity of information on Wikipedia. My hypothesis is that people are primarily interested in promoting their bias, whether that's conscious or based simply in their desire to reproduce what they know.. It's so much easier to dump what's in your head than perform research. Again, "notability, not truth".
why exactly is it that person A has any standing to complain/sue if person B just does whatever the fuck they want again in pursuing their bias?
What do you mean by this? Are you strawmanning or am I missing the point? Paying someone doesn't necessarily exchange one bias on Wikipedia for another - the person being paid might not have written on Wikipedia anyway, or they might have agreed with what they're being paid to write. Paying someone to edit Wikipedia is just separating the task of choosing what to say from the technical job of writing - a skill which most Wikipedia editors sorely lack.
Well, history has shown that [money] tends to make things worse.
I agree that money in general can try to distort in the senses a)-c), but that doesn't necessarily make Wikipedia worse unless its model is already such as to minimise distortion.
You seem to be complaining about one of the few true democracies that exist: one related to the devotion of one's time.
Rubbish. Suggesting that people have equal copious free time is as absurd as suggesting that society is egalitarian. Your 25 year old intelligent, unemployed person living at home (please take that as a description, not an insult) has all day to contribute - your full-time office workers with 2 kids might reasonably have half an hour every evening. Your fast writer might be able to dump a thousand words an hour - your good writer (remembering that only a tiny proportion of Wikipedia readers are editors, so representative judgment of text quality never actually happens) might take an hour to perfect a hundred. The "basement dweller" and the "fast writer" can always decide to engage in a war of attrition and win, because their decisions about where to focus fixed units of time either affect them less or have greater impact.
Next up you'll be bitching that most MMORPG players are against being able to buy level-up potions and unbalancing weapons and that money is some magic equalizer there too. Make up your mind if you want to compete and play the game or buy your way out of having to play the game.
I am glad you put this bit in here because this is exactly how I see Wikipedia: as an MMORPG with arbitrary rules. I don't see any problem with people having to play a game by the rules, but they shouldn't then pretend that it's anything more than a game.
1) I am not sure how it's improving the plight of the poor (since I assume that is a concern of yours) to allow poor people to spread nonsense just to spite richer people;
2) Those with a lot of time on their hands to edit an online wiki tend not to be very poor.
Note at the top in bold text which page represents the consensus of published scientists,
"And of course the consensus is..."
"No, it isn't!"
and so it continues.
I am still intrigued by the idea of competing factions forming to create separate editions of pages. Like for "Israel" you can have a page for people who are basically pro-Israeli-government-behaviour and others who are basically anti-. The problems are, then: - You have "pro-NPOV" people who try desperately to correct obvious biases in each version; - You have subversive editors who come from one faction to subtly remove anything they perceive as biased for being "wrong" in their eyes; - You have extremists who are initially welcomed but then fuck things up by going too far, e.g. the anti-Israeli-government editor who actually just hates Jews, or the pro- who ends up being a violent ZIonist who believes in a divine right to destroy all non-Jews in the area; - Then these all create more versions... - Then most versions languish as people don't have fights to renew their vigour; - But the strongest verion(s) just become(s), once again, whatever's maintained by people with most time on their hands.
No, you oaf - it's what it means to leave port 80 open to the world, plonk yourself on search engines, etc. Otherwise no site would be accessible, because I wouldn't be able to check any site to visit check the access policy. Think!
But, interestingly, in the UK, you are precisely correct. There is no such thing as criminal trespass here, except on certain government sites and power stations. If you leave your door or window open, I can walk into your house without committing any crime. Leaving your door open IS interpreted in criminal law as allowing someone to walk into your house. (There may be civil liability for trespass, but that requires loss.)
Please try to read the whole post, numbnuts. A click-through contract is enforceable, but (at least in my jurisdiction) more likely to be interpreted in favour of the person who got no say in the language. So, if it is click-through AND misleading then etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Context of GP, goddammit. As far as package management, these tools do not provide package managers, merely hooks into native package management.
It sounds like either your sysadmin wasn't good enough or you overestimate the capabilities of puppet &co. The only way to get two servers exactly the same is to buy same hardware from the same batches then image the drives.
My experience with these tools is that they work "well enough", giving you reasonably similar configurations across servers... providing you have fairly routine needs on mainstream platforms. But there are SO MANY niggly differences between platforms and builds that almost all your work is going to go into identifying and accommodating for those differences. For security-conscious deployments, in particular, you want to do nothing less than study each individual platform's quirks.
A senior sysadmin will have been maintaining automation tools for longer than most of the tools mentioned in this article have existed. The problem is not the guy who has built and maintained a working system, but the upstart who whines that he actually has to learn something new and won't get a new buzzword to put on his CV. If your in-house system isn't 100% perfect, don't use that as an excuse to throw the baby out with the bathwater. If you're building something from scratch, DO evaluate ALL these options, but be prepared to have to consider EVERYTHING they do behind the scenes in order to understand whether they're behaving exactly as you want them to.
Lastly - and this advice for puppet users in particular - try not to get a hard-on for the word "idempotence". It's not that complex or unique a concept.
I wouldn't describe "number of years you've dablled in [package]" as a skill. I've dabbled in loads of things for 20+ years, but it says very little about my skill with them. What is more, anyone who sees "10+ years experience with [package]" is going to edit their CV to emphasise their experience with [package].
OTOH, I am quite competent with tools I've spent far less time with, because I've had to apply my skills to producing clever shit.
And it works, because many geeks are antisocial sorts who rather than organising their labour will happily walk over each other just to get that little bit of green. Then, when the race to the bottom has been reached, they'll bitch about everyone else being better treated, rather than stopping to ask why it happened and striving to improve their collective lot.
Every sufficiently old once secure job is now tenuous or non-existent. What is secure today will be tenuous in a decade's time.
You are right that phrenology, IQ tests, generic aptitude tests, etc. are inappropriate measures of ability.
But actually taking time to look at what went into fulfillling particular qualifications, experience, hobbies is relevant and very possible. Relevant technical interviews which test general engineering skills and probationary periods are also valuable.
Look up "negative concord".
These products merely provide hooks into native package management.
Whyyyyyyyyyyyyy are people employed on the basis of skill with specific ephemeral brands.
You want their brains, not their.. oh never mind. This is why I am out of the software business.
In English, unlike many other languages, a double negative means a positive (sarcasm aside). The guy is agreeing with you.
Since these are all cookie-cutter solutions for a broad range of necessarily very different scenarios, your choice will depend on how well your scenario fits in with the features provided by each product.
As always, the ideal solution will come from rolling your own, possibly by heavily customising an existing solution - which may include one of these. But you may not have the knowledge or the time to do this, and it might piss off corporate if they would rather something which makes you easily replaceable. The correct solution here is to document, but it's a rare sysadmin who is both a good coder and a good documenter too.
Q.E.F.
I'd prefer a "loud car" in trains, with the assumption of civil behaviour required in all others. And each seat in the "loud car" should have a lubed crowbar embedded in it, provided to help the loud passengers remove their heads from their own backsides.
If you think it's easy to connect a call at 9500 feet, you're high.
Also cellphones distract people way more than talking in person - and we don't want 300 people distracted during take-off and landing, just in case there are hiccups.
Finally, it's the worst time for something to go wrong. So, while modern planes shouldn't have a problem with calls being made/received, you still want to check.
The real risk is that the plane is full of polite British travellers who are too reserved to punch the caller and instead just tut noisily for 12 hours.
The safety demonstration needs to include a demonstration of how to safely and effectively disable the goatfucker who takes out his 'phone. Perhaps it could include step-by-step advice on how to break the equipment without causing a fire hazard by piercing the li-ion battery.
You feel bad when I hit you? Offended? Your feelings are your responsibility, not mine. Shut up while I continue hitting you, you entitled prick.
I'm happy to be viciously corrected by anyone who's done the sums, so... could a low power radio transmitter be powered by the very sound waves which are being picked up? Tiny microphone, tiny VCO+amp, tiny transducer -> everlasting bug.
Is the size of the VCO a big deal in manufacturing of any radio transmitter?
Calling for something to be a capital crime should be a capital crime.
O shi-
Risk/reward, homecat.
It's like selling toxic debt for 10% of the amount of the debt. The new creditors know that they're going to have little luck with maybe 3/4, and the remaining 1/4 will take money+time to cough up.
No, it undermines Wikipedia as a complete source of information.
Your hypothesis is that people who have time on their hands are motivated primarily to neutrally increase the quality or quantity of information on Wikipedia. My hypothesis is that people are primarily interested in promoting their bias, whether that's conscious or based simply in their desire to reproduce what they know.. It's so much easier to dump what's in your head than perform research. Again, "notability, not truth".
why exactly is it that person A has any standing to complain/sue if person B just does whatever the fuck they want again in pursuing their bias?
What do you mean by this? Are you strawmanning or am I missing the point? Paying someone doesn't necessarily exchange one bias on Wikipedia for another - the person being paid might not have written on Wikipedia anyway, or they might have agreed with what they're being paid to write. Paying someone to edit Wikipedia is just separating the task of choosing what to say from the technical job of writing - a skill which most Wikipedia editors sorely lack.
Well, history has shown that [money] tends to make things worse.
I agree that money in general can try to distort in the senses a)-c), but that doesn't necessarily make Wikipedia worse unless its model is already such as to minimise distortion.
You seem to be complaining about one of the few true democracies that exist: one related to the devotion of one's time.
Rubbish. Suggesting that people have equal copious free time is as absurd as suggesting that society is egalitarian. Your 25 year old intelligent, unemployed person living at home (please take that as a description, not an insult) has all day to contribute - your full-time office workers with 2 kids might reasonably have half an hour every evening. Your fast writer might be able to dump a thousand words an hour - your good writer (remembering that only a tiny proportion of Wikipedia readers are editors, so representative judgment of text quality never actually happens) might take an hour to perfect a hundred. The "basement dweller" and the "fast writer" can always decide to engage in a war of attrition and win, because their decisions about where to focus fixed units of time either affect them less or have greater impact.
Next up you'll be bitching that most MMORPG players are against being able to buy level-up potions and unbalancing weapons and that money is some magic equalizer there too. Make up your mind if you want to compete and play the game or buy your way out of having to play the game.
I am glad you put this bit in here because this is exactly how I see Wikipedia: as an MMORPG with arbitrary rules. I don't see any problem with people having to play a game by the rules, but they shouldn't then pretend that it's anything more than a game.
1) I am not sure how it's improving the plight of the poor (since I assume that is a concern of yours) to allow poor people to spread nonsense just to spite richer people;
2) Those with a lot of time on their hands to edit an online wiki tend not to be very poor.
Note at the top in bold text which page represents the consensus of published scientists,
"And of course the consensus is..."
"No, it isn't!"
and so it continues.
I am still intrigued by the idea of competing factions forming to create separate editions of pages. Like for "Israel" you can have a page for people who are basically pro-Israeli-government-behaviour and others who are basically anti-. The problems are, then:
- You have "pro-NPOV" people who try desperately to correct obvious biases in each version;
- You have subversive editors who come from one faction to subtly remove anything they perceive as biased for being "wrong" in their eyes;
- You have extremists who are initially welcomed but then fuck things up by going too far, e.g. the anti-Israeli-government editor who actually just hates Jews, or the pro- who ends up being a violent ZIonist who believes in a divine right to destroy all non-Jews in the area;
- Then these all create more versions...
- Then most versions languish as people don't have fights to renew their vigour;
- But the strongest verion(s) just become(s), once again, whatever's maintained by people with most time on their hands.
No, you oaf - it's what it means to leave port 80 open to the world, plonk yourself on search engines, etc. Otherwise no site would be accessible, because I wouldn't be able to check any site to visit check the access policy. Think!
But, interestingly, in the UK, you are precisely correct. There is no such thing as criminal trespass here, except on certain government sites and power stations. If you leave your door or window open, I can walk into your house without committing any crime. Leaving your door open IS interpreted in criminal law as allowing someone to walk into your house. (There may be civil liability for trespass, but that requires loss.)
That's good enough for general access, yes.
Please try to read the whole post, numbnuts. A click-through contract is enforceable, but (at least in my jurisdiction) more likely to be interpreted in favour of the person who got no say in the language. So, if it is click-through AND misleading then etc.