"I'm not a lawyer but I think that if the Linux kernel fell then a lot of the applications that make Linux great would be in immediate danger. I mean, this guy kind of scoffs at Microsoft claiming patent infringement but has he thought what would happen to projects like KDE & Gnome?"Wow. You linux guys don't get out much do you?
KDE and Gnome, and just about every other "linux app" you can think of run just fine on other operating systems. Ever hear of the *BSDs? Solaris?
Not that it's going to happen, but Linux could disappear tomorrow, and the world would still have several free unix-type OSs to run KDE or Gnome on.
It's my understanding that clustering is much improved in MS SQL 2005 over 2000. Do have any experience with it? Is it still much inferior compared to Oracle's clustering ability?
I'm the "DBA" (I use that term loosely) where I work with SQL 2000, and am just curious.
"The moral and scientific issues it brings up are so crazy I choose not even to discuss them."
Damn you! I was ready to ask you what moral and scientific issues you were talking about, but since you don't want to discuss them, I will forever be left with a feeling of emptiness, knowing that the insight you choose to hold back will forever be barred from influencing the collective wisdom of the common man.
"From the studies I've seen, Linux admins cost more, but less per machine. A Linux admin costs around 50% more, but could manage 2x or more in terms of machines."
I see this as a problem with linux (and *nix OSs in general), not an asset. I don't have a study to point to, but IME, a competent Windows admin can manage 2x or more in terms of machines than a normal Windows admin. As your point #2 points out, throwing more monkeys at the problem can work (albeit poorly) with windows, it can't with linux. This reflects a strength of Windows. This is a major problem for many when it comes to the adoption of linux, because in many areas the talent pool is simple too thin, and finding quality people is not easy. Add in the government factor, and you can all but forget finding anyone competent enough to handle the migration.
If I had a buck for every time someone said "The problem is your stupid Windows admins. Just hire some competent people and migrating to linux will be easy.", I could probably buy an extra gig of memory for my wife's computer.
To the issue of "competence" - For linux, I would define a basic level of competence as having an understanding of basic UNIX concepts, an understanding of the UNIX security model, a decent grasp of TCP/IP, and the ability to make #!/bin/sh carry out repetitive tasks. For Windows I would define a basic level of competence as having as having an understanding of basic Windows concepts, an understanding of the NT security model, a decent grasp of TCP/IP, and the ability to make cscript.exe and cmd.exe carry out repetitive tasks.
Every employed *nix admin I've ever met in person meets my definition of "competent", but I've yet to meet an employed Windows admin in person that meets the definition.
That doesn't mean I don't think linux can be adopted successfully. I think the government factor, not linux, is the biggest problem here.
"there's been some talk about how a few base packages have different hash sums than what they should have. Don't know if that was done by accident, by design, what was added or what was removed."
They probably just replaced all instances of "daemon" with "angel".
I used to get kicked by punkbuster while playing the linux version of America's Army on FreeBSD. This wasn't caused by me running it on FreeBSD, but by certain overzealous server admins throwing in mountains of custom checks that only worked with the Windows version of the game.
Almost as big a no-no as reading your email in Outlook whilst logged as the domain admin on your first-in-site exchange/PDC.
I have other fun stories about this senior admin...like the day he decided "the network neighborhood was cluttered" and decided to delete all of the workstations' domain accounts.
Guess what junior admin got to go aorund and re-add all of the computers to the domain that day?
I live in a town of about 12,000 people. In each voting precinct, there are about 1200 registered voters. A few elections ago, one of the poll workers whom I knew told me after the election that I had received a write-in vote for City Council. I have no idea who voted for me (it was no one directly related to me), and my *one* vote was around 3000 short of the winner, but the vote was still counted and recorded none the less.
Counting every vote just seems like the proper thing to do - especially when there are so few votes to count.
Your post hits home for me, as we run our core business system on HPUX/HP9000 combination. We are pretty much a 100% Windows shop. Though I like and am comfortable with *nix OSs, I am not the person in charge of the HPUX system. The person in charge is an old school HP guy, and knows little about *nix, and as a result we have a system that is never really maintained like it should be and is unbearably slow. On top of that, we pay a boatload of money every year for various support contracts on this behemouth.
We are currently in the process of migrating the system over to Win2k3 on a Vmware ESX virtual machine. Running it on Windows might not be as reliable as HPUX, but the software we run on the HP9000 is constantly being patched and has to be taken down anyway, so the uber reliability of the HPUX system means little in the grand scheme of things.
"IIRC that was SOP because there were some settings in Exchange that only a locally installed Outlook client could access. Now, I don't know if your admin actually needed to access any of those settings..."
Well I didn't admin Exchange back then so I've never heard of that, but I do remember that our admin was only using the Outlook client to see if the account would work.
"It took us months before everything was sorted out, but it was an easy sell to get the client onto Oracle and a HP-UX system soon after.
So instead of recommending that they learn to administer their existing systems, you sold them a much more expensive system that they knew even less about?
I was a junior admin at my current job and at the time, we ran Exchange 5.5 on WinNT4.
One day, the Exchange server stopped responding. Our senior network admin was not in - in fact nobody was there that day, except for little old me - so I meandered into the server room to check it out.
Now, Windows NT4, while it had the potential to be fairly stable, was not exactly known for it's rock solid reliability, so I wasn't to alarmed when the server stopped responding. I logged onto the machine, and checked the services. Some of them were stopped. I tried to start them and got some cryptic error message. I also noticed that launching other executables, like notepad gave similar cryptic errors.
I did what every semi-incompetent Windows admin would do in that situation; I rebooted the server. The server came up, and I got the dreaded "One or more services failed to start up..." message. I logged on and noticed that the same exchange server services that were not started before the reboot were still not running.
Not good.
So I tried to launch a few other programs and some of them failed too. BY this time, I was suspecting a virus. The server was rather sluggish for having no major services running and the task manager has lots of weird things jumping around in the process list.
I was able to open up the local virus scan app and start a scan and soon I got my answer. Klez.
A hour or so of research and dozens of reboots later, the server was finally free of the Klez virus. Unfortunately due to the fact that Klez was a file infector and the cleaning process didn't always leave infected executables in a usable state, Exchange, and many parts of Windows were still very broken.
Oh. Did I mention this was our first in site Exchange server...and our PDC?
In order to try and get Windows back to working order, I reinstalled Windows NT service pack 4. To my delight, this actually fixed Windows! I was ecstatic. So the next order of business was to get Exchange back up. I tried installing the latest Exchange service pack, but that didn't work. I was not an Exchange expert by any means, so I wasn't quite sure WTF to do at this point. I could just say fuck it, and wait until the next morning for the senior network admin to come in, or stick with it. I decided to do something that I was sure would hose the system - stick the Exchange CD in and reinstall Exchange over the broken copy. Since the system was already hosed, I figured I couldn't make it any worse. I figured this would wipe out any custom settings, so I made backups (and backups of those backups) of all of the Exchange information stores before starting.
To my delight, reinstalling Exchange, and the service packs actually worked! The Exchange system was back up!
It was now about ten O'Clock and I had triumphantly recovered the company jewels. But I was not done.
Somehow a few of the other servers had also become infected with the Virus. Cleaning these up was a but easier, and the virus never actually got executed on those machines. I spent another hour or so, scanning and cleaning the other servers that had infected files.
It was about midnight by the time I was done.
Now, you might be wondering. How the heck did this ever happen? Klez was primarily an email virus that relied on social engineering or extremely weak share permissions to spread.
Here's how:
Our senior network admin had an "interesting" way of administering exchange accounts. He would install the entire Microsoft Office Suite on the Exchange server, and after creating a new user account, he would log onto the Exchange server as his domain admin account, and set up the account in Outlook to "test it". If you have half a brain cell, you can see now how the Exchange server got infected.
As for the other servers that got infected, our senior network admin just LOVED to have network drives mapped at all times (just in case?). He had THE logon script from hell, and Klez, also having the ability to spread via file shares, infected every server he was mapped to when he logged onto the Exchange server.
"Part of that is not hiring morons, but that's surprisingly difficult."
This is, IMO, one of the largest challenges, which is often ignored in this never end discussion. Many IT grunt don't understand security, and/or don't give a shit about it. When you have grunts that don't understand, you have a staff that is unable to create and implement good policies and procedures. When you have grunts that don't give a shit then any policies or procedures in place become irrelevant.
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"I'm not a lawyer but I think that if the Linux kernel fell then a lot of the applications that make Linux great would be in immediate danger. I mean, this guy kind of scoffs at Microsoft claiming patent infringement but has he thought what would happen to projects like KDE & Gnome?"Wow. You linux guys don't get out much do you?
KDE and Gnome, and just about every other "linux app" you can think of run just fine on other operating systems. Ever hear of the *BSDs? Solaris?
Not that it's going to happen, but Linux could disappear tomorrow, and the world would still have several free unix-type OSs to run KDE or Gnome on.
It's my understanding that clustering is much improved in MS SQL 2005 over 2000. Do have any experience with it? Is it still much inferior compared to Oracle's clustering ability?
I'm the "DBA" (I use that term loosely) where I work with SQL 2000, and am just curious.
Damn you! I was ready to ask you what moral and scientific issues you were talking about, but since you don't want to discuss them, I will forever be left with a feeling of emptiness, knowing that the insight you choose to hold back will forever be barred from influencing the collective wisdom of the common man.
1) Because it's fairly close to us?
2) Because there is evidence that there used to be water on the planet, which means it's possible there used to be life there?
3) Because it's atmosphere is relatively mild, which makes it easier to build machines that can stand it?
4) Just because?
"Seriously, can you come up with ONE activity that "conservatives"...want to ban unreasonably?"
sodomy, gay marriage, marijuana, alcohol, abortion, tinted car windows (well, for Mexicans at least), flag burning, homosexuality.
Do you live in a hole or something?
Great. Now see if you can teach Birmingham's IT staff (who probably break out into a sweat at the thought of using a CLI) how to do that.
"From the studies I've seen, Linux admins cost more, but less per machine. A Linux admin costs around 50% more, but could manage 2x or more in terms of machines."
I see this as a problem with linux (and *nix OSs in general), not an asset. I don't have a study to point to, but IME, a competent Windows admin can manage 2x or more in terms of machines than a normal Windows admin. As your point #2 points out, throwing more monkeys at the problem can work (albeit poorly) with windows, it can't with linux. This reflects a strength of Windows. This is a major problem for many when it comes to the adoption of linux, because in many areas the talent pool is simple too thin, and finding quality people is not easy. Add in the government factor, and you can all but forget finding anyone competent enough to handle the migration.
If I had a buck for every time someone said "The problem is your stupid Windows admins. Just hire some competent people and migrating to linux will be easy.", I could probably buy an extra gig of memory for my wife's computer.
To the issue of "competence" - For linux, I would define a basic level of competence as having an understanding of basic UNIX concepts, an understanding of the UNIX security model, a decent grasp of TCP/IP, and the ability to make #!/bin/sh carry out repetitive tasks. For Windows I would define a basic level of competence as having as having an understanding of basic Windows concepts, an understanding of the NT security model, a decent grasp of TCP/IP, and the ability to make cscript.exe and cmd.exe carry out repetitive tasks.
Every employed *nix admin I've ever met in person meets my definition of "competent", but I've yet to meet an employed Windows admin in person that meets the definition.
That doesn't mean I don't think linux can be adopted successfully. I think the government factor, not linux, is the biggest problem here.
"there's been some talk about how a few base packages have different hash sums than what they should have. Don't know if that was done by accident, by design, what was added or what was removed."
They probably just replaced all instances of "daemon" with "angel".
I see.
I still don't see what your problem is. The final destination is a legitimate site that gives away and sells legitimate tools.
So what if the owners take advantage of search engine deficiencies to boost their ranking?
What link farm? I see a site that sells and gives away Windows administration tools.
"I am just concerned about other users that don't know what they're getting themselves in to."
You speak as if these "other users" actually give a shit about such things.
Not only can RAID cards die, they can also go haywire and destroy your array, making it unrecoverable even if you have a replacement.
I've had HP Netraid controllers in old server do this.
I used to get kicked by punkbuster while playing the linux version of America's Army on FreeBSD. This wasn't caused by me running it on FreeBSD, but by certain overzealous server admins throwing in mountains of custom checks that only worked with the Windows version of the game.
Convert the data.
...can I program it to say "Get off my lawn!"
Definitely.
Almost as big a no-no as reading your email in Outlook whilst logged as the domain admin on your first-in-site exchange/PDC.
I have other fun stories about this senior admin...like the day he decided "the network neighborhood was cluttered" and decided to delete all of the workstations' domain accounts.
Guess what junior admin got to go aorund and re-add all of the computers to the domain that day?
I agree.
I live in a town of about 12,000 people. In each voting precinct, there are about 1200 registered voters. A few elections ago, one of the poll workers whom I knew told me after the election that I had received a write-in vote for City Council. I have no idea who voted for me (it was no one directly related to me), and my *one* vote was around 3000 short of the winner, but the vote was still counted and recorded none the less.
Counting every vote just seems like the proper thing to do - especially when there are so few votes to count.
Yeah but the binary scramjet package probably wasn't compiled with --o3 --funroll-loops --march=athlon64!!
But by that time, the Mac a PC would be running new versions, and the LinuxBox would be forced to use WINE.
I see.
Your post hits home for me, as we run our core business system on HPUX/HP9000 combination. We are pretty much a 100% Windows shop. Though I like and am comfortable with *nix OSs, I am not the person in charge of the HPUX system. The person in charge is an old school HP guy, and knows little about *nix, and as a result we have a system that is never really maintained like it should be and is unbearably slow. On top of that, we pay a boatload of money every year for various support contracts on this behemouth.
We are currently in the process of migrating the system over to Win2k3 on a Vmware ESX virtual machine. Running it on Windows might not be as reliable as HPUX, but the software we run on the HP9000 is constantly being patched and has to be taken down anyway, so the uber reliability of the HPUX system means little in the grand scheme of things.
"IIRC that was SOP because there were some settings in Exchange that only a locally installed Outlook client could access. Now, I don't know if your admin actually needed to access any of those settings..."
Well I didn't admin Exchange back then so I've never heard of that, but I do remember that our admin was only using the Outlook client to see if the account would work.
"It took us months before everything was sorted out, but it was an easy sell to get the client onto Oracle and a HP-UX system soon after.
So instead of recommending that they learn to administer their existing systems, you sold them a much more expensive system that they knew even less about?
Flash back to around five years ago.
I was a junior admin at my current job and at the time, we ran Exchange 5.5 on WinNT4.
One day, the Exchange server stopped responding. Our senior network admin was not in - in fact nobody was there that day, except for little old me - so I meandered into the server room to check it out.
Now, Windows NT4, while it had the potential to be fairly stable, was not exactly known for it's rock solid reliability, so I wasn't to alarmed when the server stopped responding. I logged onto the machine, and checked the services. Some of them were stopped. I tried to start them and got some cryptic error message. I also noticed that launching other executables, like notepad gave similar cryptic errors.
I did what every semi-incompetent Windows admin would do in that situation; I rebooted the server. The server came up, and I got the dreaded "One or more services failed to start up..." message. I logged on and noticed that the same exchange server services that were not started before the reboot were still not running.
Not good.
So I tried to launch a few other programs and some of them failed too. BY this time, I was suspecting a virus. The server was rather sluggish for having no major services running and the task manager has lots of weird things jumping around in the process list.
I was able to open up the local virus scan app and start a scan and soon I got my answer. Klez.
A hour or so of research and dozens of reboots later, the server was finally free of the Klez virus. Unfortunately due to the fact that Klez was a file infector and the cleaning process didn't always leave infected executables in a usable state, Exchange, and many parts of Windows were still very broken.
Oh. Did I mention this was our first in site Exchange server...and our PDC?
In order to try and get Windows back to working order, I reinstalled Windows NT service pack 4. To my delight, this actually fixed Windows! I was ecstatic. So the next order of business was to get Exchange back up. I tried installing the latest Exchange service pack, but that didn't work. I was not an Exchange expert by any means, so I wasn't quite sure WTF to do at this point. I could just say fuck it, and wait until the next morning for the senior network admin to come in, or stick with it. I decided to do something that I was sure would hose the system - stick the Exchange CD in and reinstall Exchange over the broken copy. Since the system was already hosed, I figured I couldn't make it any worse. I figured this would wipe out any custom settings, so I made backups (and backups of those backups) of all of the Exchange information stores before starting.
To my delight, reinstalling Exchange, and the service packs actually worked! The Exchange system was back up!
It was now about ten O'Clock and I had triumphantly recovered the company jewels. But I was not done.
Somehow a few of the other servers had also become infected with the Virus. Cleaning these up was a but easier, and the virus never actually got executed on those machines. I spent another hour or so, scanning and cleaning the other servers that had infected files.
It was about midnight by the time I was done.
Now, you might be wondering. How the heck did this ever happen? Klez was primarily an email virus that relied on social engineering or extremely weak share permissions to spread.
Here's how:
Our senior network admin had an "interesting" way of administering exchange accounts. He would install the entire Microsoft Office Suite on the Exchange server, and after creating a new user account, he would log onto the Exchange server as his domain admin account, and set up the account in Outlook to "test it". If you have half a brain cell, you can see now how the Exchange server got infected.
As for the other servers that got infected, our senior network admin just LOVED to have network drives mapped at all times (just in case?). He had THE logon script from hell, and Klez, also having the ability to spread via file shares, infected every server he was mapped to when he logged onto the Exchange server.
That's my story.
Whatever.
Some of us actually do more than one thing. Keeping the tubes flowing is only a small part of many "Network Administrator"'s jobs.
"Part of that is not hiring morons, but that's surprisingly difficult."
This is, IMO, one of the largest challenges, which is often ignored in this never end discussion. Many IT grunt don't understand security, and/or don't give a shit about it. When you have grunts that don't understand, you have a staff that is unable to create and implement good policies and procedures. When you have grunts that don't give a shit then any policies or procedures in place become irrelevant.