Bags are rated based on how many pounds they're capable of carrying before they rip. Take a look at the bottom of a paper bag the next time you get a chance.
Oh, I have no problem with Sun offering a VM of its own. It's the lack of functionality that's always concerned me. It always seemed silly to pay $25k for the kind of volume management on Solaris that you get for free in AIX and HP/UX.
Also, I'm tired running a volume manager simply to mirror root, and a separate, expensive volume manager (with a different level of support from a different vendor) simply to manage my data volumes, and I'm distressed that this is the "standard" way to do it in Solaris.
For real. I spent 24 hours on I-91 only to get told to go home.:(
- A.P.
Tough. Security testing should be this easy.
on
Point, Click, Root.
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I am not against full disclosure or the dissemation of security tools I just happen to think that for every one security pro who uses this tool for good there will be a hundred script kiddies who use it for causing havoc.
There are already plenty of tools out there for that, with more being created every day. I for one am fed up with people who complain every single time something like this, which makes my life easier since I don't have to do any actual work to test out the machines on my network, is introduced.
Isn't it better to discover, identify, and eliminate the weaknesses in one's network rather than wait for someone less trustworthy to discover, identify, and exploit them without your permission? Isn't that what software like this can help us accomplish?
There's no stopping software like this. More and better software is being created all the time, and some of it can indeed be used by bad people to do bad things. Rather than complain and fret about the potential evil uses to which it can be put, the sensible person would welcome it as yet another useful tool in their security arsenal.
Did you even read what I said? My post was CLEARLY trying to point out that in some cases D2D backups make great sense.
That's fine. Unfortunately you made your point merely by way of example, so it was rather unclear.
I outlined one set of circumstances that D2D would be good for. Your post then just says "Welll, I dont have the same needs so YOUR WRONG".
Actually, all I really did was say I don't have the same needs as you, and explained why. Where did I claim you were mistaken? It should be noted that the first line of your own post was the only accusation thus far.
You're clearly uninformed - a 4U Nexan 'ATA-Beast' array with fiberchannel connect to a server holding 43 300G SATA drives RAID-5'd works out to about 11.72 TB - costs about $41,000 fully populated.
Fully $9000 under the cost quoted by the original poster. Fantastic! We'll need about 50 of those for our backup needs.
Or, if you want a bit cheaper - Promise VTrak 15100 (3U) with an Ultra-160 scsi interface and 15 400G SATA drives Raid-5'd is about 5.47 TB for about $11,000.
Hm, I guess we'd need about 100 of those.
So, what it really comes down to is - 1) do you need 'offsite' backups?
Yes.
2) how often do you have to do restores and find the right tapes, etc.
On a daily or near-daily basis. Our customers are stupid and delete things. Most users do this occasionally.
3) how quick do the restores have to be
Severity 1 backup issues can and do arise. These need to be dealt with generally within four hours, but people's panties start getting bunched up around an hour into it.
and 4) how long do you need to keep the data.
Right now, 30 days onsite/30 offsite.
Cost wise, the initial outlay is about the same, but for our business model, the speed of finding and making restores (including nightly incrementals) is really a win.
With good storage/backup software (we use Veritas NetBackup), finding and retrieving files should not be an issue for tape. We have run into backup window issues in the past but this was due to network limitations and would've been an issue if we were using online storage to back up, as well. The simple fact of the matter is that we have far too much data presently for such a solution to be cost-effective.
A RAID-5 array with hot spares or a remote backup site is much more reliable and cost-effective.
Hahaha. Yeah. Price out a quality RAID 5 array (i.e. not some little piece of shit you bolted together out of IDE drives and Promise cards.) Something from a major manufacturer, such as an IBM FastT200, will cost you about $50k if you kit it out with 143GB or even 72GB drives.
With tape drives you have to cope with tape standards changing every year.
Where I work, we surplus equipment after 5 years. Our current StorageTek tape silo will be gone before we'd start caring about changing standards. The (12) 9940A and (2) 9940B drives in it are good for 100-200 GB uncompressed. We back up the entire datacenter -- UNIX, VMS, and Windows clients -- and, as long as we keep the scratch pool full, we never run into capacity issues. There is nothing to "cope with", it all Just Works.
Want to read tapes that are more than 5 years old? Not a chance.
Ever hear of backward compatibility? A DLT7000 drive can read any DLT tape you put into it. Same with DDS4, etc. As long as the tapes are stored somewhere safe and climate-controlled (such as, Idono, a datacenter?) you shouldn't ever have a problem reading them. Hell, we still use 5-year-old tape on a daily basis in our smaller IBM silo.
Want to back up anything above 40 GB? You have to buy incredibly expensive DLT instead of DAT, most likely with a robotic tape change mechanism.
Yeah, so?
Costs you about $40000.
You've obviously never priced these things. You need to add a zero. Clearly, data retention and retrieval is not important where you work.
I don't ever recall anyone I work with speculating on the future of nearline storage. Anyone who works in a real environment will tell you tape is not only alive and well, but a critical component of datacenter infrastructure.
They'd also probably laugh you out of the room if you proposed backing stuff up to anything but tape...
He's a realist, at worst. The original poster wants to do something extremely stupid -- so stupid, in fact, that I feel this entire article may be a cleverly-disguised troll. The commentor was simply pointing out the futility of the whole exercise. Sure, you can boot off a floppy and start running Linux off a USB storage device, but exactly what is the fucking point? In the end, you've taken an old, slow laptop and managed to make it unbearably slow by moving mass storage to the slowest port on the machine other than/dev/ttyA.
In my spare time, for the past fifteen months, I've been writing my own low-level logic, which can be blown onto an EEPROM chip. The EEPROM chip is then soldered to a project board (Radio Shack P/N 26-117B) along with the necessary connectors and solid-state circuitry to allow you to use the spare (32k) memory in the popular "Speak N Spell" series of educational toys as a CompactFlash device!
With the addition of a CompactFlash-to-USB adapter, one can use this setup just like a regular USB storage device! Think of the Linuxing you can do with that!
Because, out of all the posts in this story, most recommending the user buy this or that slow little piece-of-shit USB dongle drive, this guy's post was the only one that made any fucking sense.
It's not like they stopped making laptop hard drives.
In much the same way as the demise of Napster brought about the end of filesharing, banning iPods from work will wipe out corporate secret stealing. Nobody will ever think to tunnel data through SSH, copy data onto floppies, USB keychain storage devices, portable laptops, or magnetic tape. Surely, nobody will upload information to their Palm or Windows CE handheld devices; nobody will print out data and take it home; nobody will call someone on the telephone and read them data over the phone.
Slashdot Mirror
Invade and occupy the country closest to it.
- A.P.
Or perhaps I'm just not a whore.
- A.P.
I saw a great South Park episode about this once...
Lucas is an opportunistic, greedy, artless moron.
- A.P.
Whoa, so you're saying the man has had two original ideas in the past thirty years?
Astonishing.
- A.P.
Bags are rated based on how many pounds they're capable of carrying before they rip. Take a look at the bottom of a paper bag the next time you get a chance.
- A.P.
Oh, I have no problem with Sun offering a VM of its own. It's the lack of functionality that's always concerned me. It always seemed silly to pay $25k for the kind of volume management on Solaris that you get for free in AIX and HP/UX.
Also, I'm tired running a volume manager simply to mirror root, and a separate, expensive volume manager (with a different level of support from a different vendor) simply to manage my data volumes, and I'm distressed that this is the "standard" way to do it in Solaris.
Hopefully, this changes things significantly.
- A.P.
Does this mean the absolutely awful Disksuite/Solaris Volume Manager is finally, mercifully, dead, too?
I'll do a dance of utter joy if so. Disksuite is 10 pounds of shit in a 5 pound bag.
- A.P.
Threaten someone's life when they're standing armed before you because they cannot find another decent way to earn a living ? Brilliant strategy.
If you're quick on the draw and accurate with your aim, it's a perfect strategy. I'm sure he can't afford lessons.
- A.P.
Yeah, and look how well that's worked out...
- A.P.
For real. I spent 24 hours on I-91 only to get told to go home. :(
- A.P.
I am not against full disclosure or the dissemation of security tools I just happen to think that for every one security pro who uses this tool for good there will be a hundred script kiddies who use it for causing havoc.
There are already plenty of tools out there for that, with more being created every day. I for one am fed up with people who complain every single time something like this, which makes my life easier since I don't have to do any actual work to test out the machines on my network, is introduced.
Isn't it better to discover, identify, and eliminate the weaknesses in one's network rather than wait for someone less trustworthy to discover, identify, and exploit them without your permission? Isn't that what software like this can help us accomplish?
There's no stopping software like this. More and better software is being created all the time, and some of it can indeed be used by bad people to do bad things. Rather than complain and fret about the potential evil uses to which it can be put, the sensible person would welcome it as yet another useful tool in their security arsenal.
Did you also whine about "nmap"?
- A.P.
I haven't seen the nasty icons since '99 or so. Except when their database server dies and I'm no longer logged in. Faster and at least 50% less ugly.
- A.P.
Though I can't remember where...
...if the power keeps going out every other day in Athens.
- A.P.
What's ironic is that our datacenter is in a basement...
- A.P.
Unless:
we didn't do incrementals.
we only backed up once a month.
we didn't really care much about the data were backing up.
- A.P.
Did you even read what I said? My post was CLEARLY trying to point out that in some cases D2D backups make great sense.
That's fine. Unfortunately you made your point merely by way of example, so it was rather unclear.
I outlined one set of circumstances that D2D would be good for. Your post then just says "Welll, I dont have the same needs so YOUR WRONG".
Actually, all I really did was say I don't have the same needs as you, and explained why. Where did I claim you were mistaken? It should be noted that the first line of your own post was the only accusation thus far.
- A.P.
You're clearly uninformed - a 4U Nexan 'ATA-Beast' array with fiberchannel connect to a server holding 43 300G SATA drives RAID-5'd works out to about 11.72 TB - costs about $41,000 fully populated.
Fully $9000 under the cost quoted by the original poster. Fantastic! We'll need about 50 of those for our backup needs.
Or, if you want a bit cheaper - Promise VTrak 15100 (3U) with an Ultra-160 scsi interface and 15 400G SATA drives Raid-5'd is about 5.47 TB for about $11,000.
Hm, I guess we'd need about 100 of those.
So, what it really comes down to is -
1) do you need 'offsite' backups?
Yes.
2) how often do you have to do restores and find the right tapes, etc.
On a daily or near-daily basis. Our customers are stupid and delete things. Most users do this occasionally.
3) how quick do the restores have to be
Severity 1 backup issues can and do arise. These need to be dealt with generally within four hours, but people's panties start getting bunched up around an hour into it.
and 4) how long do you need to keep the data.
Right now, 30 days onsite/30 offsite.
Cost wise, the initial outlay is about the same, but for our business model, the speed of finding and making restores (including nightly incrementals) is really a win.
With good storage/backup software (we use Veritas NetBackup), finding and retrieving files should not be an issue for tape. We have run into backup window issues in the past but this was due to network limitations and would've been an issue if we were using online storage to back up, as well. The simple fact of the matter is that we have far too much data presently for such a solution to be cost-effective.
- A.P.
A RAID-5 array with hot spares or a remote backup site is much more reliable and cost-effective.
Hahaha. Yeah. Price out a quality RAID 5 array (i.e. not some little piece of shit you bolted together out of IDE drives and Promise cards.) Something from a major manufacturer, such as an IBM FastT200, will cost you about $50k if you kit it out with 143GB or even 72GB drives.
With tape drives you have to cope with tape standards changing every year.
Where I work, we surplus equipment after 5 years. Our current StorageTek tape silo will be gone before we'd start caring about changing standards. The (12) 9940A and (2) 9940B drives in it are good for 100-200 GB uncompressed. We back up the entire datacenter -- UNIX, VMS, and Windows clients -- and, as long as we keep the scratch pool full, we never run into capacity issues. There is nothing to "cope with", it all Just Works.
Want to read tapes that are more than 5 years old? Not a chance.
Ever hear of backward compatibility? A DLT7000 drive can read any DLT tape you put into it. Same with DDS4, etc. As long as the tapes are stored somewhere safe and climate-controlled (such as, Idono, a datacenter?) you shouldn't ever have a problem reading them. Hell, we still use 5-year-old tape on a daily basis in our smaller IBM silo.
Want to back up anything above 40 GB? You have to buy incredibly expensive DLT instead of DAT, most likely with a robotic tape change mechanism.
Yeah, so?
Costs you about $40000.
You've obviously never priced these things. You need to add a zero. Clearly, data retention and retrieval is not important where you work.
Nice troll, though.
- A.P.
I don't ever recall anyone I work with speculating on the future of nearline storage. Anyone who works in a real environment will tell you tape is not only alive and well, but a critical component of datacenter infrastructure.
They'd also probably laugh you out of the room if you proposed backing stuff up to anything but tape...
- A.P.
Spoiled?
/dev/ttyA.
He's a realist, at worst. The original poster wants to do something extremely stupid -- so stupid, in fact, that I feel this entire article may be a cleverly-disguised troll. The commentor was simply pointing out the futility of the whole exercise. Sure, you can boot off a floppy and start running Linux off a USB storage device, but exactly what is the fucking point? In the end, you've taken an old, slow laptop and managed to make it unbearably slow by moving mass storage to the slowest port on the machine other than
- A.P.
This may or may not be of help to you.
In my spare time, for the past fifteen months, I've been writing my own low-level logic, which can be blown onto an EEPROM chip. The EEPROM chip is then soldered to a project board (Radio Shack P/N 26-117B) along with the necessary connectors and solid-state circuitry to allow you to use the spare (32k) memory in the popular "Speak N Spell" series of educational toys as a CompactFlash device!
With the addition of a CompactFlash-to-USB adapter, one can use this setup just like a regular USB storage device! Think of the Linuxing you can do with that!
- A.P.
Because, out of all the posts in this story, most recommending the user buy this or that slow little piece-of-shit USB dongle drive, this guy's post was the only one that made any fucking sense.
It's not like they stopped making laptop hard drives.
- A.P.
If he wants to stop P2P, he should try outlawing possession of a P2P app.
See my sig.
- A.P.
In much the same way as the demise of Napster brought about the end of filesharing, banning iPods from work will wipe out corporate secret stealing. Nobody will ever think to tunnel data through SSH, copy data onto floppies, USB keychain storage devices, portable laptops, or magnetic tape. Surely, nobody will upload information to their Palm or Windows CE handheld devices; nobody will print out data and take it home; nobody will call someone on the telephone and read them data over the phone.
Man, they've sure got all their bases covered!
- A.P.