We have our IS limits set at:
- 450MB warn
- 500MB no send
- 550MB no receive
There is a single exception for a mailbox related to an application. No single user is an exception to the rule. With that said, we have 200GB - 300GB of PSTs floating about. The 1,000 users are split between 4 Exchange 5.5 servers to ease recovery times. The largest has a 40GB IS while the smallest has 30GB. We don't have an official recovery SLA, though it's our unofficial policy to restore mail flow first and old data second.
As a sidenote, my nephew is doing the same thing, and his iBook works just fine. His employer has a contract with TA, which is where he has his personal wireless subscription. There's no IE-only problems there for him.
What are some of the discussions surrounding divorcing the graphics display subsystem from the kernel? I recall a blip about something similar in a story about the next (post-Longhorn) generation Microsoft OS. But, it's always seemed to be a big issue both with security and reliability (though the second part of that statement seems vastly improved in 2000/2003). Are there concerns other than the (likely) huge codebase for the existing kernel that preculde creating a version of, say, Longhorn with a text-only option with all the management bits happening via CLI or remote consoles?
I hear ya, and there's a lot to the point you're making. In fact, your central premise that the departmental image is damaged by either a bad perception or bad performance is spot-on.
But...
Outsourcing where you're weak and insourcing where you're strong can work fine. But, lots of the "black hole" bits I've seen happen when I.T. people estimate timelines poorly and executives fail to prioritize what's "business" and what ain't. Or, ever-changing user perceptions lead complex-but-manageable projects into never-ending nightmares. A quality business analyst and project manager (different folks, ideally) can help a ton with making sure that what you do is done to spec (and with specs!) and on time.
It's no panacea, but it's a huge help, partiularly when the timeline requested outstrips your resources. When you need to look outside of your company, having that spec and timeline management is even more critical.
Honest. If you can't manage anythinge else, get out of the house. Depression is an entity to be resisted, not just a feeling. It wants you isolated and alone. It doesn't matter what you do as long as you don't let it beat you by isolating you.
Will it still commit partially-completed transactions when network connectivity between host and client break? Man, that's a feature I really loved. 18 months ago, even IBM reps told us "stay on Informix until the next major release." Now that the release is finally here, we've moved to Oracle.
All DB2 flaming aside, how many other enterprise-class organizations looked at DB2 and took a pass? If you picked it, what did it do better than the commercial competitors? Just because we ditched it doesn't mean I wouldn't care to understand where others in the same situation have landed.
No, this isn't for every situation. Common hardware is a must (or at least a real help). But, it does neatly solve other common issues, like system builds.
A freind of mine does just this on his home system about once a month (well, and at work...as he says, we're not in the business of installing an OS by hand anymore). I'm going to take the same plunge. Pick an automated system rebuild method, test it, build new systems with it and rebuild your systems on some sort of regular basis. There are lots of caveats to the Microsoft methods (ADS/RIS... single partition systems, you need BOOTP, blah blah blah). And, the image-based methods can be tricky (Ghost? Oh come now). Other options like nLite might help, too.
It may not be what the doctor ordered, but it will simplify your life when you need to build a new workstation. And, if one gets pokey beyond the reach of the other tools mentioned, blow on a new image. Plus, if you're using XP, you can use folder redirection to keep the user files someplace else, so you don't neccesarily have to rely on draconian policies regarding where they should save files (well, you can't let them save files just anyplace, so a few policies may be in order).
Is this the ultimate insult that the best way to manage Windows workstations is to automate reinstalling them? Well, maybe, depending on your viewpoint. But, it is what it is, so we build automated methods to learn to live with the limitations.
I carry one, too. It's ok, but it's a tight fit for my: laptop cd case ipaq external usb drive daytimer laptop ac adapter cables
Seriously, I can barely fit a couple of books in there. I like it, and I'm considering some mods, like adding some of my own internal pockets (there's lots of 'em, but they don't help much with the "slide" problem, and the bag still gets thicker faster than it gets full).
Our new IT ops director came from a place with well-defined practices and policies. We're really just a few steps from the wild, wild west, but with SOx controls. I think he sees ITIL as a Rosetta Stone of processes so that a handful of silos can't hold the business hostage. In that context, I understand it. I can't say I agree with it fully, but I can try to meet him halfway.
Fortunately, he's not the sort to let consultants come in and manage us. My (barely informed) opinion of ITIL is that it's a lot like butter, sun or beer... it's fine in moderation. Few things work well in unmanaged excess.**
** So help me, if I have one more vendor ask me "are you considering server consolidation," I will lose my ever-loving mind.
For the love of all that is holy, who cares? Is this some sort of stunt to make us want the Super Happy Terrific Gold Extra 12 DVD Set? Do the deleted scenes make any of these movies worth watching? See all the scenes we generated on the Skywalker Ranch CGI cluster but cut from the film.
"Alternate ending: Luke's Father is Chewbacca? Wha?!?!"
"Tabled this discussion is... or is it?"
Someone find me the deleted scenes from Dancing Outlaw. Now *that* I'd watch!
No, seriously. That's a sure sign that your employer is, in a word, without sense or direction. Sure, there's opportunity in chaos, but my 15 years in IT haven't prepared me to take on a challenge like that.
We do EDI. We do it big. It's complex. It's a pain. Hire consultants. They'll waste your money, but it's not the sort of place into which one hops with no experience. Heck, hire a vendor like (Covast|Mercator|Gentran|Amtrix) to do it end-to-end. You'd be much better off career-wise learning to track and manage a project like that rather than to do it yourself.
(We're not consultants, by the way. We're a distribution company.)
Economic data shows increasing gains in productivity, which means we're all doing more or the same work with fewer people. So, with their logic, web surfing at best is reducing the increase in productivity, not driving it backwards.
Of course, experiences vary, as do needs. Our experiences with Mercury's managed testing were worth every dollar. We did investigate open source options at the time, but we just didn't have the available developers to work out the test scripts.
Does it extrapolate that a company of 3000 could be handled by a single admin? Pointless extrapolations aside, I spent time as a part-time SA for a 6-person company with a highly-competent staff (highly-competent... I was easily the dumbest guy there). The senior SA split time between programming and SA duties. We averaged 20-30 hours per week. Some were very quiet. Other weeks involved hardware issues.
That breaks down to: 4.17 hours per person 5 hours per server 1.79 hours per system (servers + clients)
Use those to calculate your potential time. YMMV.
(We had remarkably few OS issues, though, since we ran FreeBSD... thbbbtt!)
One of the major drivers to replacing older systems is in-house programming knowledge. It's not enough that you may not have Cobol/Fortran/Business Basic developers on hand who intimately know the legacy code. You may not have *any* competent developers on staff at all for those languages, because the market for them might be the size of an ant's navel. Heck, you might not even own the code itself.
Even if you do have a couple, they'll be older and likely not replaceable at retirement. Documentation is helpful, but not an absolute answer. Compare a legacy app to, say, Latin. Documentation in Latin is better than nothing, but then you have to learn Latin, learn it fluently and learn its syntactical gotchas before you can read it.
It's very true you can't assume a 20-year-old system is bad based purely on age. That's exactly right. In Comair's case, though, it's an older package, likely with poor ongoing vendor support. And, the article notes the lack of internal hardware knowledge (AIX) as well.
It's absolutely not FUD to say that poor risk analysis of the costs of not moving forward leads to business disasters. It doesn't always, but that's the point of the risk analysis. There were probably a dozen ways to mitigate the risk to a more acceptable level, but Comair didn't take those steps.
I've tried WBEL, and I didn't put it into production because we standardized on RHEL.
Our platform needs/requirements...
Custom J2EE development using OSS tools
Implementing non-OSS, commercial packages
Package-based updates
GUI administration for the NT admins
SMP kernel
There were a few packages for which I had to hunt to satisfy certain application requirements (I wanna say one was the Sun JRE, but that may be different now... and I think the application requirements were driven by Scalix 9.0... scalix.com). The reccomendation at the time was to pull them from RH9 or Fedora Core 1 if they didn't live in WBEL packages yet. Usually, that works fine.
I've installed RHEL 2.1 and 3.0 in addition to WBEL 3.0. The install is pretty much the same. The package list wasn't really that different for my needs. And, installing either on older HP LT6000Rs led to no difference in hardware support.
I wasn't a big fan of the stock Yum updater (I'm more apt-for-rpm, but only because I'm more comfortable with it). You may or may not care about the package updating.
I haven't tried the other EL clones, so I can't comment there. I can say that, if I wasn't able to spend the money on RHEL, I do feel confident we could have made WBEL work for us in its place.
No, I'm not grousing about my rejected submission of the same story... much;)
NPR's Morning Edition had a short story on this as well: Brazil Makes Move to Open Source Software. The audio has been posted, too. It's not a deep look at open source economics, but it does make the point about Microsoft's main concern of Brazil's actions lending credence to other governments following suit. BillG has requested a meeting with da Silva to discuss it (again... they met in 2002). And, it's nice to see the topic discussed in mainstream media.
This is the best one I could find to ditto that most accurately displays my thoughts since I use (Open|Free)BSD.
FreeBSD is fun on a desktop where I want to try lots of packages. OpenBSD has a home on my laptop because minimalism seems to agree with my idea of portability (plus, OpenBSD supports most of the hardware on my Compaq Evo N620c... FreeBSD doesn't like the pcmcia stuff on my Evo... but I'm sure it's fixable all the same).
The OpenBSD install process is simple, once you accept the simplicity of it. I'd wager NetBSD is in the same category, since they're closely related.
I use Thunderbird in place of Outlook, and we're an Exchange shop. But, Microsoft still wins here. Unless Lightning does MAPI, it won't supplant Outlook. And, it breaks my heart to say it.
Outlook is tightly integrated with Exchange. If you use Exchange, you won't be switching any time soon (unless you're a sysadmin like me who cares about security... but that's not going to capture my user's attention... no, really... it won't).
Sure, it could replace Outlook Express on home systems with POP/IMAP accounts. But, corporate acceptance hinges on integration with Exchange (or replacing Exchange... which is no simple task, given corporate politics).
"The NTFS partitions are borne through the use of captive-ntfs and the antivirus engaged is CLAM."...would suggest yes, but clarification from one of our French-speaking compadres would be better.
Slashdot Mirror
Man... I thought we were in bad shape!
We have our IS limits set at:
- 450MB warn
- 500MB no send
- 550MB no receive
There is a single exception for a mailbox related to an application. No single user is an exception to the rule. With that said, we have 200GB - 300GB of PSTs floating about. The 1,000 users are split between 4 Exchange 5.5 servers to ease recovery times. The largest has a 40GB IS while the smallest has 30GB. We don't have an official recovery SLA, though it's our unofficial policy to restore mail flow first and old data second.
http://unattended.msfn.org/unattended.xp/ plus a convenient list of patches from http://www.kuku.co.il/windows_xp_sp2_patches.htm , the data from your XP install CD and http://www.nliteos.com should get you a long way on the road to slipstreamed glory.
The best suggestion I can muster, short of many layers of security, is the VMware Browser Appliance: http://www.vmware.com/vmtn/vm/browserapp.html
As a sidenote, my nephew is doing the same thing, and his iBook works just fine. His employer has a contract with TA, which is where he has his personal wireless subscription. There's no IE-only problems there for him.
What are some of the discussions surrounding divorcing the graphics display subsystem from the kernel? I recall a blip about something similar in a story about the next (post-Longhorn) generation Microsoft OS. But, it's always seemed to be a big issue both with security and reliability (though the second part of that statement seems vastly improved in 2000/2003). Are there concerns other than the (likely) huge codebase for the existing kernel that preculde creating a version of, say, Longhorn with a text-only option with all the management bits happening via CLI or remote consoles?
I hear ya, and there's a lot to the point you're making. In fact, your central premise that the departmental image is damaged by either a bad perception or bad performance is spot-on.
But...
Outsourcing where you're weak and insourcing where you're strong can work fine. But, lots of the "black hole" bits I've seen happen when I.T. people estimate timelines poorly and executives fail to prioritize what's "business" and what ain't. Or, ever-changing user perceptions lead complex-but-manageable projects into never-ending nightmares. A quality business analyst and project manager (different folks, ideally) can help a ton with making sure that what you do is done to spec (and with specs!) and on time.
It's no panacea, but it's a huge help, partiularly when the timeline requested outstrips your resources. When you need to look outside of your company, having that spec and timeline management is even more critical.
Honest. If you can't manage anythinge else, get out of the house. Depression is an entity to be resisted, not just a feeling. It wants you isolated and alone. It doesn't matter what you do as long as you don't let it beat you by isolating you.
Will it still commit partially-completed transactions when network connectivity between host and client break? Man, that's a feature I really loved. 18 months ago, even IBM reps told us "stay on Informix until the next major release." Now that the release is finally here, we've moved to Oracle.
All DB2 flaming aside, how many other enterprise-class organizations looked at DB2 and took a pass? If you picked it, what did it do better than the commercial competitors? Just because we ditched it doesn't mean I wouldn't care to understand where others in the same situation have landed.
No, this isn't for every situation. Common hardware is a must (or at least a real help). But, it does neatly solve other common issues, like system builds.
w -ris-server.html; en-us;299441i tworks/management/remoteover.aspx o wsserver2003/library/TechRef/3983c4a4-e6ff-4664-84 25-28ec740474b1.mspxt icleID=7109o ws2000serv/evaluate/featfunc/intmiror.mspx
A freind of mine does just this on his home system about once a month (well, and at work...as he says, we're not in the business of installing an OS by hand anymore). I'm going to take the same plunge. Pick an automated system rebuild method, test it, build new systems with it and rebuild your systems on some sort of regular basis. There are lots of caveats to the Microsoft methods (ADS/RIS... single partition systems, you need BOOTP, blah blah blah). And, the image-based methods can be tricky (Ghost? Oh come now). Other options like nLite might help, too.
It may not be what the doctor ordered, but it will simplify your life when you need to build a new workstation. And, if one gets pokey beyond the reach of the other tools mentioned, blow on a new image. Plus, if you're using XP, you can use folder redirection to keep the user files someplace else, so you don't neccesarily have to rely on draconian policies regarding where they should save files (well, you can't let them save files just anyplace, so a few policies may be in order).
Is this the ultimate insult that the best way to manage Windows workstations is to automate reinstalling them? Well, maybe, depending on your viewpoint. But, it is what it is, so we build automated methods to learn to live with the limitations.
Humbly submitted, here are some of my bookmarks on the subject:
http://www.cmu.edu/computing/andrew-windows/andre
http://ani.sourceforge.net/
http://www.autoitscript.com/autoit3/
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb
http://www.livejournal.com/users/lotso/1863.html
http://isg.ee.ethz.ch/tools/realmen/
http://www.microsoft.com/windows2000/techinfo/how
http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/archive/risover.msp
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/wind
http://unattended.sourceforge.net/
http://www.windowsitpro.com/Articles/Index.cfm?Ar
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/wind
I carry one, too. It's ok, but it's a tight fit for my:
7 256).
laptop
cd case
ipaq
external usb drive
daytimer
laptop ac adapter
cables
Seriously, I can barely fit a couple of books in there. I like it, and I'm considering some mods, like adding some of my own internal pockets (there's lots of 'em, but they don't help much with the "slide" problem, and the bag still gets thicker faster than it gets full).
Or, I'm going to get a Becker Patrol Pack (http://www.stubbygear.com/product.asp?productid=
Our new IT ops director came from a place with well-defined practices and policies. We're really just a few steps from the wild, wild west, but with SOx controls. I think he sees ITIL as a Rosetta Stone of processes so that a handful of silos can't hold the business hostage. In that context, I understand it. I can't say I agree with it fully, but I can try to meet him halfway.
Fortunately, he's not the sort to let consultants come in and manage us. My (barely informed) opinion of ITIL is that it's a lot like butter, sun or beer... it's fine in moderation. Few things work well in unmanaged excess.**
** So help me, if I have one more vendor ask me "are you considering server consolidation," I will lose my ever-loving mind.
For the love of all that is holy, who cares? Is this some sort of stunt to make us want the Super Happy Terrific Gold Extra 12 DVD Set? Do the deleted scenes make any of these movies worth watching? See all the scenes we generated on the Skywalker Ranch CGI cluster but cut from the film.
"Alternate ending: Luke's Father is Chewbacca? Wha?!?!"
"Tabled this discussion is... or is it?"
Someone find me the deleted scenes from Dancing Outlaw. Now *that* I'd watch!
No, seriously. That's a sure sign that your employer is, in a word, without sense or direction. Sure, there's opportunity in chaos, but my 15 years in IT haven't prepared me to take on a challenge like that.
We do EDI. We do it big. It's complex. It's a pain. Hire consultants. They'll waste your money, but it's not the sort of place into which one hops with no experience. Heck, hire a vendor like (Covast|Mercator|Gentran|Amtrix) to do it end-to-end. You'd be much better off career-wise learning to track and manage a project like that rather than to do it yourself.
(We're not consultants, by the way. We're a distribution company.)
Economic data shows increasing gains in productivity, which means we're all doing more or the same work with fewer people. So, with their logic, web surfing at best is reducing the increase in productivity, not driving it backwards.
Of course, experiences vary, as do needs. Our experiences with Mercury's managed testing were worth every dollar. We did investigate open source options at the time, but we just didn't have the available developers to work out the test scripts.
...but the 1-percent is so very capable, thanks to our widespread love of *nix variants and CLI tools!
Does it extrapolate that a company of 3000 could be handled by a single admin? Pointless extrapolations aside, I spent time as a part-time SA for a 6-person company with a highly-competent staff (highly-competent... I was easily the dumbest guy there). The senior SA split time between programming and SA duties. We averaged 20-30 hours per week. Some were very quiet. Other weeks involved hardware issues.
That breaks down to:
4.17 hours per person
5 hours per server
1.79 hours per system (servers + clients)
Use those to calculate your potential time. YMMV.
(We had remarkably few OS issues, though, since we ran FreeBSD... thbbbtt!)
One of the major drivers to replacing older systems is in-house programming knowledge. It's not enough that you may not have Cobol/Fortran/Business Basic developers on hand who intimately know the legacy code. You may not have *any* competent developers on staff at all for those languages, because the market for them might be the size of an ant's navel. Heck, you might not even own the code itself.
Even if you do have a couple, they'll be older and likely not replaceable at retirement. Documentation is helpful, but not an absolute answer. Compare a legacy app to, say, Latin. Documentation in Latin is better than nothing, but then you have to learn Latin, learn it fluently and learn its syntactical gotchas before you can read it.
It's very true you can't assume a 20-year-old system is bad based purely on age. That's exactly right. In Comair's case, though, it's an older package, likely with poor ongoing vendor support. And, the article notes the lack of internal hardware knowledge (AIX) as well.
It's absolutely not FUD to say that poor risk analysis of the costs of not moving forward leads to business disasters. It doesn't always, but that's the point of the risk analysis. There were probably a dozen ways to mitigate the risk to a more acceptable level, but Comair didn't take those steps.
I've tried WBEL, and I didn't put it into production because we standardized on RHEL.
Our platform needs/requirements...
There were a few packages for which I had to hunt to satisfy certain application requirements (I wanna say one was the Sun JRE, but that may be different now... and I think the application requirements were driven by Scalix 9.0... scalix.com). The reccomendation at the time was to pull them from RH9 or Fedora Core 1 if they didn't live in WBEL packages yet. Usually, that works fine.
I've installed RHEL 2.1 and 3.0 in addition to WBEL 3.0. The install is pretty much the same. The package list wasn't really that different for my needs. And, installing either on older HP LT6000Rs led to no difference in hardware support.
I wasn't a big fan of the stock Yum updater (I'm more apt-for-rpm, but only because I'm more comfortable with it). You may or may not care about the package updating.
I haven't tried the other EL clones, so I can't comment there. I can say that, if I wasn't able to spend the money on RHEL, I do feel confident we could have made WBEL work for us in its place.
Eserver.org has a fair amount of lit and other books/publications.
No, I'm not grousing about my rejected submission of the same story... much ;)
NPR's Morning Edition had a short story on this as well: Brazil Makes Move to Open Source Software. The audio has been posted, too. It's not a deep look at open source economics, but it does make the point about Microsoft's main concern of Brazil's actions lending credence to other governments following suit. BillG has requested a meeting with da Silva to discuss it (again... they met in 2002). And, it's nice to see the topic discussed in mainstream media.
This is the best one I could find to ditto that most accurately displays my thoughts since I use (Open|Free)BSD.
FreeBSD is fun on a desktop where I want to try lots of packages. OpenBSD has a home on my laptop because minimalism seems to agree with my idea of portability (plus, OpenBSD supports most of the hardware on my Compaq Evo N620c... FreeBSD doesn't like the pcmcia stuff on my Evo... but I'm sure it's fixable all the same).
The OpenBSD install process is simple, once you accept the simplicity of it. I'd wager NetBSD is in the same category, since they're closely related.
Yeah, the A380 is old news to aviation buffs, but we're not all hardcore aviation buffs, are we?
Here's a good collection of pics from airliners.net
...or Streamripper + cron on *nix (or win32 with cron installed). Maybe I'm oversimplifying?
http://streamripper.sourceforge.net/
I use Thunderbird in place of Outlook, and we're an Exchange shop. But, Microsoft still wins here. Unless Lightning does MAPI, it won't supplant Outlook. And, it breaks my heart to say it.
Outlook is tightly integrated with Exchange. If you use Exchange, you won't be switching any time soon (unless you're a sysadmin like me who cares about security... but that's not going to capture my user's attention... no, really... it won't).
Sure, it could replace Outlook Express on home systems with POP/IMAP accounts. But, corporate acceptance hinges on integration with Exchange (or replacing Exchange... which is no simple task, given corporate politics).
This:
...would suggest yes, but clarification from one of our French-speaking compadres would be better.
"The NTFS partitions are borne through the use of captive-ntfs and the antivirus engaged is CLAM."