I don't really think you'll gain that much by replacing Novell with Linux. Now, I'd cheerfully swap out NT for Linux all day, but I can't imagine that you'd get anything but headaches in swapping out Novell.
Caveat: I haven't used Novell since the 4.11 release, as I moved off into NT administration after that. And I have not used a Novell TCP/IP network yet. However, I serviced A LOT of 3.12 servers and a few 4.11.
The reason I like Linux so well is the same reason I like Novell: it works. It works well. It doesn't crash. Novell is just as reliable as Linux, in my experience, and maybe more so. Generally speaking, the only way a Novell server is going to fall over is if the hardware dies.
Now, I have seen unstable Netware installations, but invariably they have been hack jobs by administrators that didn't know what they were doing. A properly administered Netware network is granite solid.
In my mind, Linux's primary advantages over NT are reliability and open source. If something is wrong, I can always fix it with Linux if I'm willing to put the time in to really understand the problem, and once I fix it, it will stay fixed. However, in general, Novell is easier to figure out and it also stays fixed. You do give up a lot of control of the system, but in general Netware works the way Microsoft wishes NT did -- most of the time you don't need bit-level control because it's not going to break.
Novell also thinks their problem solutions out thoroughly. Their print queue is a good example of this. NT sort of has some of the same functionality, but it's a lot easier to maintain complex print structures in Novell and it's a hell of a lot easier to route around problems. Linux's print queues are postively archaic by comparison. You more or less have to build one by hand, and magic filters are a pain in the butt to figure out. Now, you can do more with Linux and print queues: once you understand it you can do just about any neat hack you like. But for most of us, Novell's approach is better. You can start printing with a minimum of fuss and go from there. Linux makes you jump through friggin' hoops to get everything configured properly. That's true of a lot of solutions in Linux.
Novell requires technical skill but has excellent documentation, is much more consistent, and is built with the big picture in mind. You can make HUGE networks with Novell. Most Linux apps aren't designed with the same kind of scalability in mind. They are often written by people with experience with small networks who have an itch. There aren't nearly as many working with really big nets, so there aren't nearly as many good solutions to the BIG problems. Novell is in the business of charging lots of money for solutions to the BIG problems, and they provide excellent, thoroughly-thought-out ones, too.
In my opinion, you'd be best off leaving your network core on Novell. Use Linux, but use it alongside, not in replacement. If you need the whizbang TCP/IP capabilities, or want to deploy a free web server, then you can plop down Linux boxes wherever you like. And when NDS for Linux ships, you'll be able to glue the systems together very closely with a minimum of fuss (apparently).
This is the strategy we have taken. We don't mind having Samba and NT next to each other. (we have no Novell in my present job, which is rather a shame.) We try to run most Internet-related protocols on Linux(we'd use BSD but I haven't learned it yet), and run Microsoft stuff on NT, and everyone stays happy. Samba interoperates nicely in a network with a PDC already in it.
There just is no sense in throwing away your existing investment unless it is too costly to maintain. Linux will certainly help save on maintenance costs once you grok it, but the upfront learning costs are steep. Amortize those by doing little pilot projects until you really know what you're doing. Someday, you may wake up and find that Linux is the center of your network -- but you also might not. And that's okay.
Remember, Open Source isn't going away. It's here for the long haul. You don't have to make this an either/or battle. It's not NT OR Linux, it's NT AND Linux. Take advantage of Open Source where it can help you, and try to give back and make it better. If you insist on making it a war, someone has to lose, and it could be you. If there is no war, then there can be no loser.:)
It's a lot better than what came before! It was a major step forward from.tar.gz files. It's still not ready for Mom but at least it works for Windows people.:-)
Debian's packaging system is a lot nicer, because they had a chance to learn from the mistakes in rpm. I don't know if it's technically possible for RedHat to graft Debian-like functionality onto their RPM system, but it would sure be nice if they could figure out how.
It's not really fair to knock rpm and RedHat for being first, ya know.:-)
Despite the likely popularity of the Scouts among geeks (near-zero, I'm hypothesizing), they have some very intelligent organizational methods. One that strikes me as very applicable here is a meritocracy within the Scouts called the Order of the Arrow.
What's interesting about the OA (for purposes of this discussion) is the method of selection. Only those people who are not in the organization may vote for new members to be elected.
Personally, I think this is a very powerful idea. I have seen it in practice, and it works quite well. It really helps to reduce cliquishness and arrogance. New members are popular with NON-members, which usually means they're pretty good folks. This tends to reduce the feedback loops inherent in a society selecting members to be part of the same society.
I'm not sure how this would be implemented here, and I'd be interested in further comments. Does this seem as sensible to other heads as it does to mine? Can a voting system for moderators be implemented?
One idea that comes to mind is a 'Vote for This Person As Moderator' link next to each post, usable only by non-moderators. I would also presume that new accounts wouldn't be able to vote for some period of time, perhaps 3 months.
The OA also had one additional requirement: that candidates needed to be in Scouts for some period of time before being eligible. I don't remember the details. For this forum, I'm guessing that an account would need to be at least 6 months old before being eligible, possibly with exceptions made for highly senior people in Open Source who just got around to signing up for an account.
Any thoughts on this? I'm not very happy with the thought of automated moderator selection. It just seems like a process that automation can't properly do. It also seems prone to the feedback loop, because of the requirement for a positive moderation factor to be eligible.
I just went through the comments on this article with both -1 and 0 thresholds, and see almost no difference between the two.
Moderation is a positive feedback system. People like to be liked; they want to be voted for./.'ers are becoming, in essence, self-censoring to either gain approval or to avoid disapproval... a lot like real life.
HAVING moderation (at least as taken from the comments on this article, which may or may not be a good sample) would appear to be a self-reinforcing feedback loop that reduces the NEED FOR moderation.
I think the overall system and range of values are likely fine as is -- this is such an improvement already that spending further CPU cycles will likely gain diminishing returns. There is only one tweak I'd personally like to see -- that a thread carries the score of the highest-scored article in the thread, not the root comment.
Rob, this is great coding by the way -- you're doing an outstanding job!
Some of the early digital communities (particularly the Well) had some amazing thinking going on. We used to have extraordinary arguments on our local BBSes -- our signal-to-noise ratio was unparalleled in my experience of the larger 'net.
I'm suspicious that those voices are still out there, just drowned in the cacophony.
As we're out here marching around in our digital pasture and avoiding the "warm ones", sometimes we'll come across a still, clear pool of thought; it's those little discoveries that make the 'Net worthwhile.:)
Free software is a long-term investment. Writing your code and setting it free means that some other programmer out there is going to be able to learn from it, and in turn release what he learned 'into the wild' to seed other learning and development.
Free software makes software *better*. Better software makes better businesses. Better businesses make more money. But this is long-term thinking, and usually suits are worried about beating the Street this quarter, not a bunch of nebulous, can't-prove-it, head-in-the-clouds bullshit.
It is that kind of short-term thinking that will hurt Linux and free software the most. Free software is about ten or twenty years from now, not next quarter.
Teaching next-quarter guys to think in terms that long will be very difficult -- and in many cases, impossible.
Mostly it's kids who have been alienated who are so vehemently blasting Katz. They are so happy at finding "a club" that they are ecstatic to be able to SET THE RULES finally and EXCLUDE OTHERS just as they have been excluded.
Most of us 'older' folks (I'm in the 31-40 range:) ) have learned that causing others pain is no path to healing one's own.
When you see an anti-Katz flamer, what you see is a young, intolerant person with an acid pen. They haven't yet realized that what they do really hurts -- or have been so emotionally damaged that they don't care.
It's funny, in a sad sort of way, when you realize that it is probably intolerance and rejection in real life that caused them to be that way. Abusive parents raise abusive children; children that have been rejected and scorned in turn do the same.
They are doing exactly what they themselves were hurt by and despise so much.
"How can we be in, if there is no outside?" -- Peter Gabriel
Slashdot Mirror
I don't really think you'll gain that much by replacing Novell with Linux. Now, I'd cheerfully swap out NT for Linux all day, but I can't imagine that you'd get anything but headaches in swapping out Novell.
:)
Caveat: I haven't used Novell since the 4.11 release, as I moved off into NT administration after that. And I have not used a Novell TCP/IP network yet. However, I serviced A LOT of 3.12 servers and a few 4.11.
The reason I like Linux so well is the same reason I like Novell: it works. It works well. It doesn't crash. Novell is just as reliable as Linux, in my experience, and maybe more so. Generally speaking, the only way a Novell server is going to fall over is if the hardware dies.
Now, I have seen unstable Netware installations, but invariably they have been hack jobs by administrators that didn't know what they were doing. A properly administered Netware network is granite solid.
In my mind, Linux's primary advantages over NT are reliability and open source. If something is wrong, I can always fix it with Linux if I'm willing to put the time in to really understand the problem, and once I fix it, it will stay fixed. However, in general, Novell is easier to figure out and it also stays fixed. You do give up a lot of control of the system, but in general Netware works the way Microsoft wishes NT did -- most of the time you don't need bit-level control because it's not going to break.
Novell also thinks their problem solutions out thoroughly. Their print queue is a good example of this. NT sort of has some of the same functionality, but it's a lot easier to maintain complex print structures in Novell and it's a hell of a lot easier to route around problems. Linux's print queues are postively archaic by comparison. You more or less have to build one by hand, and magic filters are a pain in the butt to figure out. Now, you can do more with Linux and print queues: once you understand it you can do just about any neat hack you like. But for most of us, Novell's approach is better. You can start printing with a minimum of fuss and go from there. Linux makes you jump through friggin' hoops to get everything configured properly. That's true of a lot of solutions in Linux.
Novell requires technical skill but has excellent documentation, is much more consistent, and is built with the big picture in mind. You can make HUGE networks with Novell. Most Linux apps aren't designed with the same kind of scalability in mind. They are often written by people with experience with small networks who have an itch. There aren't nearly as many working with really big nets, so there aren't nearly as many good solutions to the BIG problems. Novell is in the business of charging lots of money for solutions to the BIG problems, and they provide excellent, thoroughly-thought-out ones, too.
In my opinion, you'd be best off leaving your network core on Novell. Use Linux, but use it alongside, not in replacement. If you need the whizbang TCP/IP capabilities, or want to deploy a free web server, then you can plop down Linux boxes wherever you like. And when NDS for Linux ships, you'll be able to glue the systems together very closely with a minimum of fuss (apparently).
This is the strategy we have taken. We don't mind having Samba and NT next to each other. (we have no Novell in my present job, which is rather a shame.) We try to run most Internet-related protocols on Linux(we'd use BSD but I haven't learned it yet), and run Microsoft stuff on NT, and everyone stays happy. Samba interoperates nicely in a network with a PDC already in it.
There just is no sense in throwing away your existing investment unless it is too costly to maintain. Linux will certainly help save on maintenance costs once you grok it, but the upfront learning costs are steep. Amortize those by doing little pilot projects until you really know what you're doing. Someday, you may wake up and find that Linux is the center of your network -- but you also might not. And that's okay.
Remember, Open Source isn't going away. It's here for the long haul. You don't have to make this an either/or battle. It's not NT OR Linux, it's NT AND Linux. Take advantage of Open Source where it can help you, and try to give back and make it better. If you insist on making it a war, someone has to lose, and it could be you. If there is no war, then there can be no loser.
-- Ron
It's a lot better than what came before! It was a major step forward from .tar.gz files. It's still not ready for Mom but at least it works for Windows people. :-)
:-)
Debian's packaging system is a lot nicer, because they had a chance to learn from the mistakes in rpm. I don't know if it's technically possible for RedHat to graft Debian-like functionality onto their RPM system, but it would sure be nice if they could figure out how.
It's not really fair to knock rpm and RedHat for being first, ya know.
Despite the likely popularity of the Scouts among geeks (near-zero, I'm hypothesizing), they have some very intelligent organizational methods. One that strikes me as very applicable here is a meritocracy within the Scouts called the Order of the Arrow.
What's interesting about the OA (for purposes of this discussion) is the method of selection. Only those people who are not in the organization may vote for new members to be elected.
Personally, I think this is a very powerful idea. I have seen it in practice, and it works quite well. It really helps to reduce cliquishness and arrogance. New members are popular with NON-members, which usually means they're pretty good folks. This tends to reduce the feedback loops inherent in a society selecting members to be part of the same society.
I'm not sure how this would be implemented here, and I'd be interested in further comments. Does this seem as sensible to other heads as it does to mine? Can a voting system for moderators be implemented?
One idea that comes to mind is a 'Vote for This Person As Moderator' link next to each post, usable only by non-moderators. I would also presume that new accounts wouldn't be able to vote for some period of time, perhaps 3 months.
The OA also had one additional requirement: that candidates needed to be in Scouts for some period of time before being eligible. I don't remember the details. For this forum, I'm guessing that an account would need to be at least 6 months old before being eligible, possibly with exceptions made for highly senior people in Open Source who just got around to signing up for an account.
Any thoughts on this? I'm not very happy with the thought of automated moderator selection. It just seems like a process that automation can't properly do. It also seems prone to the feedback loop, because of the requirement for a positive moderation factor to be eligible.
I just went through the comments on this article with both -1 and 0 thresholds, and see almost no difference between the two.
/.'ers are becoming, in essence, self-censoring to either gain approval or to avoid disapproval... a lot like real life.
Moderation is a positive feedback system. People like to be liked; they want to be voted for.
HAVING moderation (at least as taken from the comments on this article, which may or may not be a good sample) would appear to be a self-reinforcing feedback loop that reduces the NEED FOR moderation.
I think the overall system and range of values are likely fine as is -- this is such an improvement already that spending further CPU cycles will likely gain diminishing returns. There is only one tweak I'd personally like to see -- that a thread carries the score of the highest-scored article in the thread, not the root comment.
Rob, this is great coding by the way -- you're doing an outstanding job!
Some of the early digital communities (particularly the Well) had some amazing thinking going on. We used to have extraordinary arguments on our local BBSes -- our signal-to-noise ratio was unparalleled in my experience of the larger 'net.
:)
I'm suspicious that those voices are still out there, just drowned in the cacophony.
As we're out here marching around in our digital pasture and avoiding the "warm ones", sometimes we'll come across a still, clear pool of thought; it's those little discoveries that make the 'Net worthwhile.
Free software is a long-term investment. Writing your code and setting it free means that some other programmer out there is going to be able to learn from it, and in turn release what he learned 'into the wild' to seed other learning and development.
Free software makes software *better*. Better software makes better businesses. Better businesses make more money. But this is long-term thinking, and usually suits are worried about beating the Street this quarter, not a bunch of nebulous, can't-prove-it, head-in-the-clouds bullshit.
It is that kind of short-term thinking that will hurt Linux and free software the most. Free software is about ten or twenty years from now, not next quarter.
Teaching next-quarter guys to think in terms that long will be very difficult -- and in many cases, impossible.
Mostly it's kids who have been alienated who are so vehemently blasting Katz. They are so happy at finding "a club" that they are ecstatic to be able to SET THE RULES finally and EXCLUDE OTHERS just as they have been excluded.
:) ) have learned that causing others pain is no path to healing one's own.
Most of us 'older' folks (I'm in the 31-40 range
When you see an anti-Katz flamer, what you see is a young, intolerant person with an acid pen. They haven't yet realized that what they do really hurts -- or have been so emotionally damaged that they don't care.
It's funny, in a sad sort of way, when you realize that it is probably intolerance and rejection in real life that caused them to be that way. Abusive parents raise abusive children; children that have been rejected and scorned in turn do the same.
They are doing exactly what they themselves were hurt by and despise so much.
"How can we be in, if there is no outside?" -- Peter Gabriel