Note, I said desktop environments, not window managers. I am well aware that Enlightenment, IceWM, BlackBox, and WindowMaker all look different. They are not, in and of themselves, desktop environments, though, like KDE and GNOME are.
If you took all the money you spent on legal council, and instead spent it on legitimate copies of commercial software, would you still be in this mess?
Please, slashdot, don't try and cheapen what the guy did. He committed a crime, got caught, and is now going to jail for it. Though you may think "all software should be free!" or some other similar bullshit, what he did was illegal.
So you're asking me both to believe that this had to be fixed immediately (as in, whatever you were doing before you broke AIX 5.1 was no longer an option)
Yes, What is so hard to believe about that?
Do you think people don't upgrade their systems or implement new ones? Where do you work that you never install new equipment?
and that Linux wouldn't have been fixed quickly (and while there probably are issues that have taken a while to fix, I tend to see patch times that beat competing OSes).
Like I said, it would only have been fixed quickly if it were a major problem affecting every (or most) Linux user. This was a very specific problem that we were the first to run into.
Okay, I'll bite. Short of sheer mass bandwidth that you absolutely require custom hardware for, like a backbone provider, what specific features are you complaining about the lack of?
The ability to handle several hundred ports. Please do not tell me I should buy dozens of shitty $250 Linux boxes full of quad-port ethernet cards to do this.
I am beginning to wonder if you have ever worked in a company with more than 100 employees.
- A.P.
Buy a 12v-powered hub (like a Netgear)...
on
Portable Hubs?
·
· Score: 2
...and then buy a sealed lead-acid 12 volt battery and charger, and pick up the proper plug at Rat Shack.
There are places that'll sell you this whole thing for cheap. I power my Tascam portable DAT deck with something similar; the battery set with charger cost me about $200, but you can make one yourself (as long as you have the charger) for probably $50.
The whole measure-system-capabilities-by-dollar-value thing is what I'm objecting to -- your first response was "This is a $30K system".
The system is a workstation anyway. And an extra $1200 would've gotten us the redundancy I like, in the form of a second 72GB Fiber Channel drive.
I severely doubt that more than 10% of the people with TEMPEST systems actually need them. I was looking at one cluster of very overpriced and very underused set of TEMPEST workstations at a company a while ago. They would have been better off with some stock x86 machines.
What were they doing with them? If they would have lost more than the value of the TEMPEST system for every day of downtime (spread out your outages over a few years -- the average life of the system), versus the extended downtime a lesser system would have given them, it was worth the money spent.
It's much cheaper at this point to buy two consumer-level systems and let failover take over for one system than to buy a single high-end system.
What do you do when your cheap consumer systems both lose their single power supplies because of a voltage spike that makes it past the UPS (would you even buy one of those?)
I'm talking about buying horizontal market things like commercial variants of CVS, compilers, or other systems where there are very good free alternatives, yet companies persist on evaluating things based on price.
Side note: You would use g++ as a compiler for your product? The code it produces is about as efficient as a fully-loaded Excursion full of fat chicks.
Companies evaluate products based upon the availability of the following:
Support.
Features
Support
Accountability/Liability
Support
Compatibility - not only with existing and future hardware and software, but with existing employee skillsets
Companies also like a well-supported product, not a "well, supported..." product like most Open Source Software is. You can tell me that Open Source is better-supported than its commercial counterpart, but I say bullshit. For a show-stopper security bug, that argument may hold water, but it leaks like a sieve when you get into specialized cases.
Case in point: we broke IBM AIX 5.1 a few months ago. There's a major bug in 64-bit mode involving extended file attributes (ACLs) over NFS using JFS2. That this would affect anyone at all came as a surprise to IBM (as it would have to anyone, probably, who hadn't tested their software absolutely and completely), but we kept them on our problem 24/7 for a week until a patch was issued. I'm willing to bet the problem would've gone unresolved for weeks in Linux as a more pressing issue was ironed out, since 2.4 has suddenly become a development branch. This is what money buys you in terms of support, and it's not something the Open Source community has the capability of providing.
"This will work great on a network where every client is connected at 100/full, and the normal servers have fiber or gigabit uplinks."
Notice that I mentioned having the front-end systems, the ones doing caching, have faster interfaces.
So the front-end systems will have gigabit interfaces, but the smaller machines will still be limited by the 100 megabit bottleneck? Most hard drives, even the cheap piece-of-garbage IDE cans you want us to use, can push 30 megs per second today. They'll meet the ethernet card full-on and be very disappointed at what they see.
Cisco systems definitely fall into my "overpriced because IT will buy it because it sounds sexy" category unless you really need the few systems that they do that *no one else* can duplicate in functionality. You can run VLANs off a Linux box.
Yeah, and I can run them off an iPaq too, probably. But why the hell would I want to? I honestly don't understand why I would want to give up hours spent aggrivated and frustrated over Linux's lack of a feature here and there, simply because it can do one or two of the things a real piece of networking gear can do.
I've found that the primary reason that purchases will spend their employer's money is the ASHF (Avoid Shit if it Hits Fans) syndrom. IT personnel are willing to make suboptimal purchasing decisions so that they have someone *else* to point to if something goes wrong. "Sun's supposed to fix that, not us." "This is a best-of-class component that failed."
I've found they spend more in the short term to save more in the long term. If you think doing something the right way is expensive, try doing it the wrong way.
Expensive Sun servers crash all the time due to memory and CPU failures.
Really? Hadn't noticed. If by "all the time", you mean our E420 with an ecache parity problem (yes, this is a known issue with that series of CPU) which used to go down once a week until I took the faulty CPU offline from the command line, then, yeah, it crashed all the time.
The more CPUs and the more memory, the more chances for failure.
You obviously haven't heard about things like ChipKill and ELIZA fault-tolerance initiatives.
You can run a machine with a bad CPU for months without worrying about it, and bad memory modules can now be cycled out of use without even causing memory access violations.
don't forget that a "high availability" E6500 is 22 times more likely to crash than a "workstation class" ultra 1.
The problem is that I find that corporate spending on IT purchases has gotten ridiculous.
I find it's gotten too spendthrift, myself. We just got a Blade 2000 (anniversary edition) with only a single system disk. Why the OS of a 30,000 dollar machine is not mirrored is beyond comprehension, to me.
Let's buy a TEMPEST array! Let's buy something with a Sun nametag because the name sounds good!
No, let's buy those things because, if something in them breaks, the production payroll machine doesn't go offline. Or let's buy those things because, if something does break, I can have a tech on-site in 4 hours with a hot-swappable replacement part. Let's buy them because my customers (my users) won't notice the downtime while I pull a CPU module, PCI card, or disk and replace it without powering the server down.
Let's buy a $2k piece of software for each workstation even though there's a free alternative!
No, let's buy a $90,000 piece of software because it allows us to precision-machine aerospace parts more efficiently than hand-drawing the same models in two dimensions on a drafting board, or because we can run simulation testing on our airframe to see how much stress it can take before it destroys itself. Let's spend our money smartly to produce more revenue and profit.
Say we take the bare-metal, dirt cheap approach. Grab a bunch of Linux boxes.
I've seen horror novels with better beginnings...
Throw RAID on them
Apparently "throwing RAID" on something is good enough for enterprise-level.
and a 100Mbps Ethernet card in each.
This will work great on a network where every client is connected at 100/full, and the normal servers have fiber or gigabit uplinks. You may have gotten away with this in 1995, but it's 2002.
The figure used earlier was $1 per gig. Put 6 200 GB drives in each. Throw down $250 for the non-drive cost of each system.
$250 for the rest of the system? Motherboard, RAM, CPU, power supply (dual? Hah!), and case? Our AIX NFS servers have RAIDed MEMORY, not to mention at least triple the amount they'll ever need of that, CPUs, local disk, power supplies, and PCI expansion chassis.
You have 800GB of data on each system, 400GB of overhead. That's 63 systems. $16K for the systems, $75K for the drives, and we come in to $91K. I left out switches -- you'd need a couple, but certainly not $9K worth.
Yeah, you could just go down to CompUSA and pick up a few Netgear 8-ports. Nobody will ever need a VLAN. (The modules in our 6509s cost more than $9k.)
You'd need some software work done -- an efficient, hierarchical distributed filesystem. I didn't factor this in, which you could consider not fair, but there may be something like this already, and if not, it's a one time cost for the whole world.
Yeah, you could hack something together. Let us know how that goes.
Meanwhile, I'll be enjoying another day of outage-free administration, at least on the machines we built the right way.
I know that, being on slashdot a lot, you see a lot of people making cheap, shoddy, unreliable, and definitely not enterprise-class "solutions" out of string and tinfoil, but for a data warehouse application, that kind of cost is not unreasonable at all.
We have a somewhat-smaller situation at work, with a single Hitachi Lightning SAN providing our data warehouse nodes (two IBM p-series 680 servers) with a terabyte or so of fully-redundant fiber-connected disk. A single terabyte cost us nearly $750,000, and Hitachi bid competitively.
Enterprise-class solutions call for enterprise-sized wallets. Do not expect to slap together a few IDE drives and call it a day, unless you enjoy being fired.
Too bad about your dad and his nail clippers. Guess both of you missed the notices banning them from airplanes. Practices like this have been common in other countries for years. They had their reasons. Now we have ours.
Show me how to kill a man with nail clippers, and I'll try it on you just to see if you're right.
Slashdot Mirror
i would have the same reaction if they wanted to fingerprint everyone who flys on planes.
You do know that your fingerprints (and that of everyone else in the United States) are on file in the town in which you were born, right?
You could complain all you want, but you'd sound pretty retarded.
- A.P.
Ask slashdot is just a smarter search engine.
I think you and I have different definitions of "smarter".
I suppose if I want to implement a SAN using RAID 5 floppy disks, Slashdot is the place to go.
- A.P.
Because I love you all so much.
- A.P.
Yes, they announced them.
But that doesn't mean I can buy them.
- A.P.
...but, show me where you can get a 320 gig drive.
- A.P.
Note, I said desktop environments, not window managers. I am well aware that Enlightenment, IceWM, BlackBox, and WindowMaker all look different. They are not, in and of themselves, desktop environments, though, like KDE and GNOME are.
- A.P.
As for obeying the law... I think that people who say "I don't care what's ethical, I'll obey the law" are trying to take an easy way out.
Pardon my extreme ignorance, but just what the bloody fuck is wrong with selling computer software that stealing it is somehow justifiable?
- A.P.
...but why is it that every Linux Desktop Environment invariably looks like Windows 98?
- A.P.
That proprietary software is harmful to society is hardly bullshit, and these 'warez'-guys lessen some of that harmful impact.
I don't think that Slashdot needs to be told that there are bad laws that deserve to be broken. Repeatedly.
This post pretty much sums up everything I hate about slashdot.
- A.P.
If you took all the money you spent on legal council, and instead spent it on legitimate copies of commercial software, would you still be in this mess?
- A.P.
Please, slashdot, don't try and cheapen what the guy did. He committed a crime, got caught, and is now going to jail for it. Though you may think "all software should be free!" or some other similar bullshit, what he did was illegal.
- A.P.
So you're asking me both to believe that this had to be fixed immediately (as in, whatever you were doing before you broke AIX 5.1 was no longer an option)
Yes, What is so hard to believe about that?
Do you think people don't upgrade their systems or implement new ones? Where do you work that you never install new equipment?
and that Linux wouldn't have been fixed quickly (and while there probably are issues that have taken a while to fix, I tend to see patch times that beat competing OSes).
Like I said, it would only have been fixed quickly if it were a major problem affecting every (or most) Linux user. This was a very specific problem that we were the first to run into.
Okay, I'll bite. Short of sheer mass bandwidth that you absolutely require custom hardware for, like a backbone provider, what specific features are you complaining about the lack of?
The ability to handle several hundred ports. Please do not tell me I should buy dozens of shitty $250 Linux boxes full of quad-port ethernet cards to do this.
I am beginning to wonder if you have ever worked in a company with more than 100 employees.
- A.P.
...and then buy a sealed lead-acid 12 volt battery and charger, and pick up the proper plug at Rat Shack.
There are places that'll sell you this whole thing for cheap. I power my Tascam portable DAT deck with something similar; the battery set with charger cost me about $200, but you can make one yourself (as long as you have the charger) for probably $50.
- A.P.
The system is a workstation anyway. And an extra $1200 would've gotten us the redundancy I like, in the form of a second 72GB Fiber Channel drive.
I severely doubt that more than 10% of the people with TEMPEST systems actually need them. I was looking at one cluster of very overpriced and very underused set of TEMPEST workstations at a company a while ago. They would have been better off with some stock x86 machines.
What were they doing with them? If they would have lost more than the value of the TEMPEST system for every day of downtime (spread out your outages over a few years -- the average life of the system), versus the extended downtime a lesser system would have given them, it was worth the money spent.
It's much cheaper at this point to buy two consumer-level systems and let failover take over for one system than to buy a single high-end system.
What do you do when your cheap consumer systems both lose their single power supplies because of a voltage spike that makes it past the UPS (would you even buy one of those?)
I'm talking about buying horizontal market things like commercial variants of CVS, compilers, or other systems where there are very good free alternatives, yet companies persist on evaluating things based on price.
Side note: You would use g++ as a compiler for your product? The code it produces is about as efficient as a fully-loaded Excursion full of fat chicks.
Companies evaluate products based upon the availability of the following:
Support.
Features
Support
Accountability/Liability
Support
Compatibility - not only with existing and future hardware and software, but with existing employee skillsets
Companies also like a well-supported product, not a "well, supported..." product like most Open Source Software is. You can tell me that Open Source is better-supported than its commercial counterpart, but I say bullshit. For a show-stopper security bug, that argument may hold water, but it leaks like a sieve when you get into specialized cases.
Case in point: we broke IBM AIX 5.1 a few months ago. There's a major bug in 64-bit mode involving extended file attributes (ACLs) over NFS using JFS2. That this would affect anyone at all came as a surprise to IBM (as it would have to anyone, probably, who hadn't tested their software absolutely and completely), but we kept them on our problem 24/7 for a week until a patch was issued. I'm willing to bet the problem would've gone unresolved for weeks in Linux as a more pressing issue was ironed out, since 2.4 has suddenly become a development branch. This is what money buys you in terms of support, and it's not something the Open Source community has the capability of providing.
"This will work great on a network where every client is connected at 100/full, and the normal servers have fiber or gigabit uplinks."
Notice that I mentioned having the front-end systems, the ones doing caching, have faster interfaces.
So the front-end systems will have gigabit interfaces, but the smaller machines will still be limited by the 100 megabit bottleneck? Most hard drives, even the cheap piece-of-garbage IDE cans you want us to use, can push 30 megs per second today. They'll meet the ethernet card full-on and be very disappointed at what they see.
Cisco systems definitely fall into my "overpriced because IT will buy it because it sounds sexy" category unless you really need the few systems that they do that *no one else* can duplicate in functionality. You can run VLANs off a Linux box.
Yeah, and I can run them off an iPaq too, probably. But why the hell would I want to? I honestly don't understand why I would want to give up hours spent aggrivated and frustrated over Linux's lack of a feature here and there, simply because it can do one or two of the things a real piece of networking gear can do.
I've found that the primary reason that purchases will spend their employer's money is the ASHF (Avoid Shit if it Hits Fans) syndrom. IT personnel are willing to make suboptimal purchasing decisions so that they have someone *else* to point to if something goes wrong. "Sun's supposed to fix that, not us." "This is a best-of-class component that failed."
I've found they spend more in the short term to save more in the long term. If you think doing something the right way is expensive, try doing it the wrong way.
- A.P.
Expensive Sun servers crash all the time due to memory and CPU failures.
Really? Hadn't noticed. If by "all the time", you mean our E420 with an ecache parity problem (yes, this is a known issue with that series of CPU) which used to go down once a week until I took the faulty CPU offline from the command line, then, yeah, it crashed all the time.
The more CPUs and the more memory, the more chances for failure.
You obviously haven't heard about things like ChipKill and ELIZA fault-tolerance initiatives.
You can run a machine with a bad CPU for months without worrying about it, and bad memory modules can now be cycled out of use without even causing memory access violations.
don't forget that a "high availability" E6500 is 22 times more likely to crash than a "workstation class" ultra 1.
What are you smoking, and where can I get some?
- A.P.
Regardless of quality, cheaper is always better, though. What part of that don't you undersand?
"Is". It's missing an apostrophe and two consonants.
- A.P.
The problem is that I find that corporate spending on IT purchases has gotten ridiculous.
I find it's gotten too spendthrift, myself. We just got a Blade 2000 (anniversary edition) with only a single system disk. Why the OS of a 30,000 dollar machine is not mirrored is beyond comprehension, to me.
Let's buy a TEMPEST array! Let's buy something with a Sun nametag because the name sounds good!
No, let's buy those things because, if something in them breaks, the production payroll machine doesn't go offline. Or let's buy those things because, if something does break, I can have a tech on-site in 4 hours with a hot-swappable replacement part. Let's buy them because my customers (my users) won't notice the downtime while I pull a CPU module, PCI card, or disk and replace it without powering the server down.
Let's buy a $2k piece of software for each workstation even though there's a free alternative!
No, let's buy a $90,000 piece of software because it allows us to precision-machine aerospace parts more efficiently than hand-drawing the same models in two dimensions on a drafting board, or because we can run simulation testing on our airframe to see how much stress it can take before it destroys itself. Let's spend our money smartly to produce more revenue and profit.
Say we take the bare-metal, dirt cheap approach. Grab a bunch of Linux boxes.
I've seen horror novels with better beginnings...
Throw RAID on them
Apparently "throwing RAID" on something is good enough for enterprise-level.
and a 100Mbps Ethernet card in each.
This will work great on a network where every client is connected at 100/full, and the normal servers have fiber or gigabit uplinks. You may have gotten away with this in 1995, but it's 2002.
The figure used earlier was $1 per gig. Put 6 200 GB drives in each. Throw down $250 for the non-drive cost of each system.
$250 for the rest of the system? Motherboard, RAM, CPU, power supply (dual? Hah!), and case? Our AIX NFS servers have RAIDed MEMORY, not to mention at least triple the amount they'll ever need of that, CPUs, local disk, power supplies, and PCI expansion chassis.
You have 800GB of data on each system, 400GB of overhead. That's 63 systems. $16K for the systems, $75K for the drives, and we come in to $91K. I left out switches -- you'd need a couple, but certainly not $9K worth.
Yeah, you could just go down to CompUSA and pick up a few Netgear 8-ports. Nobody will ever need a VLAN. (The modules in our 6509s cost more than $9k.)
You'd need some software work done -- an efficient, hierarchical distributed filesystem. I didn't factor this in, which you could consider not fair, but there may be something like this already, and if not, it's a one time cost for the whole world.
Yeah, you could hack something together. Let us know how that goes.
Meanwhile, I'll be enjoying another day of outage-free administration, at least on the machines we built the right way.
- A.P.
I know that, being on slashdot a lot, you see a lot of people making cheap, shoddy, unreliable, and definitely not enterprise-class "solutions" out of string and tinfoil, but for a data warehouse application, that kind of cost is not unreasonable at all.
We have a somewhat-smaller situation at work, with a single Hitachi Lightning SAN providing our data warehouse nodes (two IBM p-series 680 servers) with a terabyte or so of fully-redundant fiber-connected disk. A single terabyte cost us nearly $750,000, and Hitachi bid competitively.
Enterprise-class solutions call for enterprise-sized wallets. Do not expect to slap together a few IDE drives and call it a day, unless you enjoy being fired.
- A.P.
Well, sometimes, when you've dropped a particularly sloppy deuce, you need more than one sheet to clean up.
- A.P.
Yeah, and wait 2 months until your number is found again (yes, junk faxers war-dial, which is also illegal.)
- A.P.
Your sig has got to be one of the best I've ever seen on this site. I mean that in all sincerity.
Because I'm sure there's an "Ask Slashdot" with something like that queued up waiting to go.
- A.P.
If there were to remove all dangerous items from the plane, the people on boar would have to be naked and sedated.
That actually sounds enjoyable.
"Welcome to TWA flight 420: Strap me in, tie me down, and roll me a bone."
- A.P.
They make such a marvel? This could change everything!
- A.P. (s/(As)k\ (Slash)?(ot)/\1s \2b\3/)
Too bad about your dad and his nail clippers. Guess both of you missed the notices banning them from airplanes. Practices like this have been common in other countries for years. They had their reasons. Now we have ours.
Show me how to kill a man with nail clippers, and I'll try it on you just to see if you're right.
- A.P.
I can no longer mail anthrax. This has effectively killed off one of my favorite pranks.
- A.P.