I have often wondered whether there was some way for Apple to offer OS X "server" for use in commodity hardware without making it available for desktop use, maybe by some sort of user interface limitation (remove quicktime?) and making it relatively expensive at low volumes so that it makes sense for enterprise but doesn't eat into their workstation and laptop market. I've never thought that it would be a good move for Apple to commoditise OS X per se, but since they no longer sell server-grade hardware, I think they could start selling it as a software solution. It would also neatly get them out of the issue of supporting weird and wonderful hardware, just certify selected Dell and HP servers and make sure RAID and networking work well, everything else is secondary.
What they should have done was released a version of OS X server licensed to run on VMware. That way they no longer need to design and build server hardware, but the people who want OS X servers can run it, and on the hardware of their choice to boot. It would also recognise that the future of (non-trivial) x86 server is pretty much 100% virtualisation.
I'm sure VMware could even add some special "key" to their VM "hardware" so OS X Server would only run on it, as well, if Apple were feeling particularly paranoid.
Think about it? How long has the power supply lasted in your home stereo, or TV, or Microwave, or DVD player, or... Why is that computer power supplies are ALLOWED to be the second single source of failure (I'm guessing Hard Drives still probably beat them) in PCs?
Redundant PSUs aren't (just) there to protect you from PSU failure, they're there to protect from upstream power source failure (which could be anything from a blown fuse to planned maintenance).
XServers where cost competitive, when they where released.
No, not really.
Added to which, it fell victim to Apple's policy of not revising prices, so while competitor's products plummeted in price as component costs dropped, the XServe did not. What started out as a merely relatively expensive rackmount server ended up as a ridiculously overpriced one.
Oh, and I'm a conservative republican...or at least I was until nutjobs like you went off the deep end raising red herrings to cover your policy nakedness.
(especially with the prevalence of '1080p' panels finding their way into monitors, meaning that many 24" displays now have very visible pixels even at a reasonable distance)
Traditional 24" screens have a resolution of 1920x1200, a mere 120 greater vertical pixels than 1080p. 1920x1200 is also common on high-end 27" screens as well (like the one in front of me).
Your argument seemed to be that if your beliefs are at all inconsistent with your religion, you should throw the entire religion's beliefs away and start anew (or not at all).
No. My point is simply that if you don't subscribe to all the beliefs of a particular religion, then you cannot say you belong to that religion.
It's like saying you're playing soccer, then decide that not using your hands is too hard/boring/whatever and pick the ball up.
Anything else is hypocrisy. You're just trying to get the supposed benefits and rights without having to deal with the consequences and responsibilities. Not only is it dishonest, but in the case where said beliefs are dramatically inconsistent (say, endangering your life), it's stupid as well.
Fundamentally, you seem to just want to encourage people to get away from Christianity by coming to some realization that Christianity is wildly inconsistent / made up, and allowed that desire to fudge your thinking in general.
And you sound like someone who wants to be in the club even though there are some of its rules you find distasteful and/or restrictive.
For the life of me I cannot comprehend why people do this sort of thing.
The solution when your chosen religion conflicts with your lifestyle and biology is not to try and reinterpret and redefine that religion's beliefs to align with yours, it's to stop believing in that religion and choose another (or none at all).
The motivations of women who wish to be ordained as priests are similarly mystifying.
Provided you don't trust it to actually do those things. If someone can run 'sudo su -' then they own the system and can make the sudo log files say whatever they want, including removing the fact that they ran 'sudo su -'. Ditto 'sudo emacs', 'sudo dd', 'sudo mv' or any other command that as root will execute subsidiary commands, write specified data to specified files or any various other routes to a root shell. And in most cases you don't even need to muck about modifying logs: Just 'sudo emacs/etc/something/innocuous' and nothing untoward appears in the sudo log but you can run unlogged commands from within emacs, etc.
Yes. This is why you disable all those backdoors and only specify particular commands that can be run in/etc/sudoers, with others either denied, or lighting up your IDS/system monitoring like a Christmas tree.
(This also serves as a handy reminder that properly securing systems is *extremely difficult*.)
Your shell, however, is yours and yours alone for the lifetime of the process. If you don't trust yourself not to type something stupid, you shouldn't be working as an administrator. Period. Sudo was never intended to function as training wheels. To imply its necessity is to claim you, the junior admin, knows better than the senior admin. When you've done your trench time, you too will trust yourself.
You, like most others in this discussion and TFA's author, do not understand what sudo is for.
Sudo is not there to help sysadmins avoid foot-shooting. That is merely a useful, but relatively insignificant, fringe benefit.
The point of sudo is to allow secure separation of duties and some semblence of an audit trail.
So instead of going with the switch that probably cost them no more to manufacture I bought a pair of 5100's and bought a pair of stacking HP GbE switches and so had complete redundancy for about the same cost as one FCoE switch.
You also had 1/10th the bandwidth and twice as much cabling to each server, higher power draw, more rack space required and more devices to manage.
Define "Flexible software RAID" and "logical volume management" so I know exactly what you are referring to.
For RAID: Support for RAID6 and RAID10. Stripe size customisation. Layered RAID devices (to create, for example, a RAID50).
For LVM: Adding and removing underlying physical volumes is much easier.
I'm not bashing Windows, this is just something that Linux does quite well, and Windows barely does at all (and in fairness, most of the times you'd want to be doing this with Windows, you'd probably have a SAN that does most of it for you).
It doesn't. There's some infrastructure in place, but nothing close to the out of box simplicity and functionality of AD and Group Policy.
[...] or Google's estimated 200,000+ Linux server farm may be just a little unwieldy, eh?
Google rolled their own. Just like everyone else has to. I didn't say Linux couldn't be centrally managed, I said the facilities it has out of the box are poor.
(The point being they could have been doing something productive, rather than reinventing the wheel.)
Why would you do that ? Windows has excellent tools out of the box for centralised configuration management, far superior to anything in the UNIX world.
What I heard was that when Dave Cutler showed Microsoft all of the VMS goodness that his team had developed for NT, Bill told them to go away and take the 'over the top' security stuff out, so that the DOS and Windows 3x programmes people were using would run.
You heard wrong.
You should try reading a book or two on the subject, there are several good ones. "Inside Windows NT" and "Inside NTFS" are two of the best.
I think that initially any file that had a BAT, COM, CMD or EXE extension was able to run as 'executable'. Hence:
Executables run as regular users can do just as much damage as ones run with elevated privileges.
Not true. Under Unix, it would just have killed the one uncritical process that did the division by zero (the "bad data" was a zero value for a measurement that could/should physically not ever be zero), and would have left the processes controlling propulsion and all the rest alive.
The "processes controlling propulsion and all the rest" *were* the ones that got killed because of a division by zero error.
Windows did exactly what it was supposed to do, and exactly what any UNIX would have done.
Slashdot Mirror
What they should have done was released a version of OS X server licensed to run on VMware. That way they no longer need to design and build server hardware, but the people who want OS X servers can run it, and on the hardware of their choice to boot. It would also recognise that the future of (non-trivial) x86 server is pretty much 100% virtualisation.
I'm sure VMware could even add some special "key" to their VM "hardware" so OS X Server would only run on it, as well, if Apple were feeling particularly paranoid.
Redundant PSUs aren't (just) there to protect you from PSU failure, they're there to protect from upstream power source failure (which could be anything from a blown fuse to planned maintenance).
No, not really.
Added to which, it fell victim to Apple's policy of not revising prices, so while competitor's products plummeted in price as component costs dropped, the XServe did not. What started out as a merely relatively expensive rackmount server ended up as a ridiculously overpriced one.
And your business is only paralysed for a few hours while it happens !
Didn't that happen back in the '80s ?
Are you implying incomes have remained unchanged since 1913 ?
iLife costs $49 from the Apple Store.
Traditional 24" screens have a resolution of 1920x1200, a mere 120 greater vertical pixels than 1080p. 1920x1200 is also common on high-end 27" screens as well (like the one in front of me).
Methinks you're exaggerating just a tad.
By what measure ?
People "interpreting" is the whole problem.
It would be difficult for me to overemphasise how little importance I place on all parts of the Bible.
If you don't want to follow all the rules, then you should either play a different game, or none at all.
No. My point is simply that if you don't subscribe to all the beliefs of a particular religion, then you cannot say you belong to that religion.
It's like saying you're playing soccer, then decide that not using your hands is too hard/boring/whatever and pick the ball up.
Anything else is hypocrisy. You're just trying to get the supposed benefits and rights without having to deal with the consequences and responsibilities. Not only is it dishonest, but in the case where said beliefs are dramatically inconsistent (say, endangering your life), it's stupid as well.
And you sound like someone who wants to be in the club even though there are some of its rules you find distasteful and/or restrictive.
For the life of me I cannot comprehend why people do this sort of thing.
The solution when your chosen religion conflicts with your lifestyle and biology is not to try and reinterpret and redefine that religion's beliefs to align with yours, it's to stop believing in that religion and choose another (or none at all).
The motivations of women who wish to be ordained as priests are similarly mystifying.
There are few products that personify "you get what you pay for" more than motherboards.
If the things Anonymous have done count as "terror", can you identify anything that *doesn't* count as "terror" ?
Yes. This is why you disable all those backdoors and only specify particular commands that can be run in /etc/sudoers, with others either denied, or lighting up your IDS/system monitoring like a Christmas tree.
(This also serves as a handy reminder that properly securing systems is *extremely difficult*.)
So your "serious environment" lacks separation of duties and audit trails ?
You, like most others in this discussion and TFA's author, do not understand what sudo is for.
Sudo is not there to help sysadmins avoid foot-shooting. That is merely a useful, but relatively insignificant, fringe benefit.
The point of sudo is to allow secure separation of duties and some semblence of an audit trail.
You also had 1/10th the bandwidth and twice as much cabling to each server, higher power draw, more rack space required and more devices to manage.
For RAID: Support for RAID6 and RAID10. Stripe size customisation. Layered RAID devices (to create, for example, a RAID50).
For LVM: Adding and removing underlying physical volumes is much easier.
I'm not bashing Windows, this is just something that Linux does quite well, and Windows barely does at all (and in fairness, most of the times you'd want to be doing this with Windows, you'd probably have a SAN that does most of it for you).
It doesn't. There's some infrastructure in place, but nothing close to the out of box simplicity and functionality of AD and Group Policy.
Google rolled their own. Just like everyone else has to. I didn't say Linux couldn't be centrally managed, I said the facilities it has out of the box are poor.
(The point being they could have been doing something productive, rather than reinventing the wheel.)
Configuring iptables is a hell of a lot more complicated and unintuitive than, say, pf.
Why would you do that ? Windows has excellent tools out of the box for centralised configuration management, far superior to anything in the UNIX world.
You heard wrong.
You should try reading a book or two on the subject, there are several good ones. "Inside Windows NT" and "Inside NTFS" are two of the best.
Executables run as regular users can do just as much damage as ones run with elevated privileges.
The "processes controlling propulsion and all the rest" *were* the ones that got killed because of a division by zero error.
Windows did exactly what it was supposed to do, and exactly what any UNIX would have done.
Of course, the time you spend learning the comically baroque iptables can account for a lot of clicking in Windows...