Right, but say (just as an example) you roll out a configured, generic linux image.
But how do you install your apps? Like can you assign an ID to a computer/image & then have something deploy a package to it? Can you run configuration scripts / policies based on user groups and/or workstations? This is what SMS/AD do -- and I'm curious what the linux equivalent is.
One thing to consider is how much of these wonderful tools are actually compensating for things Windows has difficulty doing. e.g. Windows can't even set it's hostname via DHCP. It also has a tendency to bug the user when it performs upgrades which it thinks require a reboot.
Well, yeah windows has problems doing all sorts of things. But that wasn't my question:). With windows it's possible (and fairly easy) to take a random windows XP/2k/2003 computer, plug it into the domain, and let group policies, SMS packages, etc configure it to a 'standard' set of applications, desktops, etc, etc, etc. What I want to know is if you could do the same with linux 'fairly' easily. I stress fairly because doing the above requires allot of IT resources and staff.
I can plug in any Windows 2000 and upward PC into the network I manage, and within minutes, it'll be fully patched, have all the software we need installed, and be fully locked-down & generally configured (company screen-saver, explorer bar and such things) - all without actually touching it.
I've always wondered though - could you do the same with Linux with roughly equivalent cost? I mean to do the above requires alot of IT resources for making MSI packages, group policies, SMS / AD administration, etc, etc. If you had the equivalent Linux gurus is it also that easy to setup? Our setup is the same and I can think of kindof how you would do it with Linux but, say, is there some equivalent of SMS in the Linux world?
Just curious - the only primarily Linux shop I've ever worked in was small enough that such things didn't make sense to setup.
Yes! User's have a fundamentally hard time of figuring out the difference between the ever present search bad and address bar, to most users there is no difference. I see it all the time - and I think I only notice as often as I do because we have an external website we need to get users too that doesn't show up in any search results.
OSX has bash, and Vista still has the crappy ass DOS CLI. Game over.
Who the hell cares? He wasn't talking about ancient or crappy CLI interfaces, he was talking about the GUI. Jeez. I mean, yeah Vista's probably not that great but at least try to refute him in some meaningful way besides spouting crap about Bash (also, seriously, 1990 called - they want their interfaces back).
Shutting down takes forever, and logging in takes even longer if I'm not hooked up to the company LAN.
That's not exactly abnormal -- is the PC trying to contact network resources on start/shutdown? Scripts on a network drive perhaps? Trying to join a domain? XP (and Vista probably is the same) would only time out after 120 seconds..
Well I do work in government, not federal, I guess I just assumed (how silly of me) that nearly everyone was using SMS or similar to handle software management & updates. It makes allot of these type of problems go away. To be replaced by entirely different problems of course.
Makes sense though, what you said -- not designed for maintenance just to do one job and that's it. I feel sorry for their IT people.
You'd think they'd have a sms/app package with VMware for the developers. That's what most people do -- or have a test lab on a separate VPN/domain for the developers.
And never forget that you can type wiki $something in the address bar of Firefox (including earlier versions) and have it bring up either the wikipedia entry that term or, if it can't find that, the closest match.
My favorite feature ever.
Also -- let's not forget Portable Firefox has the RC3 version out (which, from what I can tell, is Firefox 2.0 in everything but name) here
My impressions of 2.0? It's got some nice tweaks, it feels faster, it uses about 25 meg less Ram on my windows machine and about 30 meg less on my Mac. All in all, a solid build. Lacking in whiz bang features maybe, but a nice solid build.
IIRC, the camera platform has been shutoff for the greater part of two decades now and it's highly unlikley they could turn it back on (and be functional) or that they would have the power to do so.
Not to mention MS has had versioning (shadow copies) for roughly.. what.. 3 years now? And while not as "purdy" as Time Machine it's quite functional and works like a charm.
Oh well. It's brand new. With a pretty interface. Ohhhhh. And, oh gee, Vista will have something nearly indentical in it as well.
Oh i'm sure something good will come out of it, I just believe - in the end - it'll be a colossal waste of time and money. The city would be far better offering a $20/month broadband subsidy or something than trying to stuff.
They'd actually be far better waiting for 802.11n (which was, you know, actually sortof designed for this problem) than trying to force a/b/g to work with it.
Someday all these cities are going to realize that wireless (b/g at least) was never ever designed to be deployed on such a scale and, really, works so pathetically horrible that I feel sorry for anyone using it.
10-1 in about a decade we'll here stories about how these things were fraught with corruption, never worked right, waste of taxpayer money, etc, etc.
Voice of experience.. I spent years at an ISP that tried to sell wireless and man, it just never ever works right for this type of thing (others in the industry will probably confirm this) without spending a whole lot of cash.
That was the first article in a serious of slams which I was too lazy to go look for. They are all put in his Tuesday Morning Quarterback article on NFL.com if you car to google for em. Here is an excerpt from the article after he posted above: kay, I described the pilot wrongly. But the premise still seems ridiculous -- a society that can build enormous faster-than-light starcruisers doesn't take precautions to protect its military against computer viruses? (The aliens in Independence Day, though able to build a starcruiser 90 miles in diameter, also did not know about computer viruses).
Philippe Herndon of Columbia, S.C., rose to defend the current plot arc in which a second battlestar, Pegasus, is discovered, but instead of cooperating the two ships begin to threaten each other. "The Pegasus story line is great," Herndon writes, saying the new ship symbolizes how military culture becomes corrupt when unchecked by democracy. "Pegasus has survived on its own by doing things exclusively the military way, and doesn't want messy democracy revived. They don't care about the fleet of civilian ships that Galactica is protecting and aren't interested in the needs of the weak. Confronting this kind of Ayn Rand selfishness is what makes the show terrific."
Scott Cordiner of Salem, Mass., adds that the constant internecine bickering on Battlestar Galactica is a reason the series works for him. "The people depicted on the show are technologically advanced but not socially advanced," he writes. "We had wars and infighting 2,000 years ago and still experience those problems today despite significant technical advances. Sadly, we will probably still have human infighting 2,000 years from now."
One of my problems with Battlestar Galactica is that the men and women in the show are depicted as so astonishingly across-the-board stupid, it's tempting to root for the robots. The military officers are stupid; the politicians are stupid; the civilians are stupid. In the pilot, we learn that the entire defense network of the human society could be deactivated by one single numeric code. The evil robots, called Cylons, obtain the code, transmit it, and instantly all the human society's military equipment shuts off. Planets are left defenseless as the Cylons bombard them with nuclear bombs; numerous powerful battlestars are shown hanging in space helpless, their engines and weapons shut off, as the Cylons smash them. (The Galactica escapes via plot contrivance.) Now if you were an advanced society capable of building gigantic faster-than-light outer-space battleships, would you design them so that one single numeric code renders them all totally useless at the same time? Plus the numeric code that instantly shuts off every military device in the entire human society has been entrusted to a psychologically unstable computer scientist, who accidentally gives it to the Cylons. Halfway through the first season, the computer scientist became vice-president of the survivors' government, and everyone -- including military intelligence -- is so astonishingly stupid as to never realize that since scientist was the only one who had the code, he must have been the one to give it to the Cylons.
Next, the show has premise problems that appears unsolvable. One aspect of the premise is that there are no other intelligent beings in this part of the galaxy -- just the beleaguered humans and the malevolent Cylons. This means there are no aliens to meet in various episodes, no alien societies to depict. True, it must be hard at this point to come up with new alien ideas for sci-fi. You can imagine the scriptwriters' conference: "Okay, how about they find a planet where people can only speak when the sun is out?" The other premise problem is that the Cylons are depicted as having become so powerful, Galactica cannot hope to defeat them. If the characters can't overcome the Cylons and can't meet interesting aliens, to create dramatic tension the scriptwriters are forced to have the humans fighting each other, which is what happens. Almost every episode concerns internecine fighting inside the human fleet: plots, mutinies, martial law, claims of treason, everything but people accusing each other of witchcraft. Galactica story lines have become so similar that I have trouble telling whether an episode is new or a repeat.
Yeah, very few are using it anymore -- and for those that are there is now a global per-email-address message limit of 5 emails.
Said policy was implemented shortly after the spamcop debacle (before it was 5 emails per user per email address iirc) but because of how they score stuff, I'm fairly sure that SMTP server is still on that blacklist (I could be wrong, haven't worked there in about half a year).
Well, nowadays said spam listing stuff will only *globally* send 5 messages to a single email address before refusing to do (since spammers are so fond of breaking stuff) -- at the time it was set to 5 per email address per user iirc.
And, um, it was pretty obviously an attempt at communcation (Is this a valid email? Oh it is, sweet, click here to be added to whitelist, etc). Such measures are still quite popular..
... when you are so stupid that you think unsolicited, unwanted messages aren't spam just because your whitelist has good intentions. Good intentions? Ha! The road to hell is paved with 'em.
I see.
Unsolicted Commercial Bulk Email.
You got 2 out of 4. Anyways, go back to blacklisting and have fun, it's a ridiculous solution and people like you are the reasons why.
Anyone who regularly reads news.admin.net-abuse.email [google.com] will instantly recognize this as sour grapes from a spammer.
Bullshit. Bullshit, bullshit. Want an example?
Some of our users used a white list based spam filtering solution that, if you weren't on the whitelist, would send an email out asking to confirm that your address/email was, in fact, valid. Fairly common no?
Well, somehow said emails were going to a spam trap run by spamcop and being marked as spam -- thousands of them a day. Apparently a spammer was spoofing one (or multiple) of their "spam trap" email boxes. Needless to say in fairly short order our outgoing SMTP servers were blacklisted. Upon contacting them and explaining the situation we asked if they could give us the email address of the spam trap they were using so we could simply have our confirmation messages not go to that, preventing them from blacklisting us.
Their response? No. They wouldn't give us the email address they used for spam traps, nor could they think of any other possible way to fix this. Basically, yes it was their problem, but sorry - fighting spam was more important than, you know, ensuring accuracy.
We eventually had to make all those confirmation messages send from a seperate email box dedicated solely to that purpose which (last time I checked) is *still* on the blacklist.
This is the type of day in, day out bullshit you have to deal with on these blacklists. A bunch of self-righteous pricks who flat out don't care if you are listed on their service (their fault or no). After all - can't make an omlette without breaking a few eggs right?
I'm all for using blacklists to help SCORE email as spam, but to flatout refuse email based on it is completely, totally, stupid. The example above is just one of many i've experienced and people all over the industry have experienced. No sane sysadmin should ever, ever, ever use a RBL. And pretty much everyone except for the "SPAMMERS MUST DIE -- END JUSTIFIES MEANS!!111" crowd understands that.
A little off topic, but what the hell - how often do you get to use a history degree?
I've never been a fan of societal effects like you listed. Labelling an entire culture with one attitude is incredibly simplistic & more or less wrong -- especially considering the size & variety of an empire like Rome's. Just think of the Modern world and how attitudes differ between people, regions, and countries -- and that's with instantaneous communications.
At any rate, the "Fall of Rome" was probably due to more factors than can ever be categorized by man, but likely had alot to do with a declining economic & population base coupled with mass influx of non-native peoples with no stable political base to fend them off.
Now that Linux has a large userbase, you're arguing that is ok to relax that since some user wants binary drivers that just work. However, when you go that route, it's hard to go back because everybody *expects* the ABI to remain stable. Instead of improving the kernel, the devs will waste time sorting out ABI issues; not the best use of time.
That was one of my arguments yes. My other was that if they are going to insist on open source drivers you can make a certification process for companies who wish to keep their drivers closed source, or find a way (I hate to even bring up the one way I know of...) of preventing drivers from bringing down to the entire system, or at least a way to mitigate it.
I'm just saying, there *has* to be a compromise. NVIDIA walks a very fine line, and they get harrassed by people for not being completely open. I dunno, it's just frustrating to see the same people on one hand scream for drivers for linux and on the other demand they be open source as well. While, in a perfect world, this would be true.. it's not a perfect world. Compromise. Somehow:)
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This is why using WSUS / SMS is a good idea. Save you 10x the headaches. Microsoft flags all sorts of crap as critical updates they shouldn't.
Right, but say (just as an example) you roll out a configured, generic linux image.
But how do you install your apps? Like can you assign an ID to a computer/image & then have something deploy a package to it? Can you run configuration scripts / policies based on user groups and/or workstations? This is what SMS/AD do -- and I'm curious what the linux equivalent is.
One thing to consider is how much of these wonderful tools are actually compensating for things Windows has difficulty doing. e.g. Windows can't even set it's hostname via DHCP. It also has a tendency to bug the user when it performs upgrades which it thinks require a reboot.
:). With windows it's possible (and fairly easy) to take a random windows XP/2k/2003 computer, plug it into the domain, and let group policies, SMS packages, etc configure it to a 'standard' set of applications, desktops, etc, etc, etc. What I want to know is if you could do the same with linux 'fairly' easily. I stress fairly because doing the above requires allot of IT resources and staff.
Well, yeah windows has problems doing all sorts of things. But that wasn't my question
I can plug in any Windows 2000 and upward PC into the network I manage, and within minutes, it'll be fully patched, have all the software we need installed, and be fully locked-down & generally configured (company screen-saver, explorer bar and such things) - all without actually touching it.
I've always wondered though - could you do the same with Linux with roughly equivalent cost? I mean to do the above requires alot of IT resources for making MSI packages, group policies, SMS / AD administration, etc, etc. If you had the equivalent Linux gurus is it also that easy to setup? Our setup is the same and I can think of kindof how you would do it with Linux but, say, is there some equivalent of SMS in the Linux world?
Just curious - the only primarily Linux shop I've ever worked in was small enough that such things didn't make sense to setup.
Yes! User's have a fundamentally hard time of figuring out the difference between the ever present search bad and address bar, to most users there is no difference. I see it all the time - and I think I only notice as often as I do because we have an external website we need to get users too that doesn't show up in any search results.
OSX has bash, and Vista still has the crappy ass DOS CLI. Game over.
Who the hell cares? He wasn't talking about ancient or crappy CLI interfaces, he was talking about the GUI. Jeez. I mean, yeah Vista's probably not that great but at least try to refute him in some meaningful way besides spouting crap about Bash (also, seriously, 1990 called - they want their interfaces back).
Shutting down takes forever, and logging in takes even longer if I'm not hooked up to the company LAN.
That's not exactly abnormal -- is the PC trying to contact network resources on start/shutdown? Scripts on a network drive perhaps? Trying to join a domain? XP (and Vista probably is the same) would only time out after 120 seconds..
Well I do work in government, not federal, I guess I just assumed (how silly of me) that nearly everyone was using SMS or similar to handle software management & updates. It makes allot of these type of problems go away. To be replaced by entirely different problems of course.
Makes sense though, what you said -- not designed for maintenance just to do one job and that's it. I feel sorry for their IT people.
You'd think they'd have a sms/app package with VMware for the developers. That's what most people do -- or have a test lab on a separate VPN/domain for the developers.
And never forget that you can type wiki $something in the address bar of Firefox (including earlier versions) and have it bring up either the wikipedia entry that term or, if it can't find that, the closest match.
My favorite feature ever.
Also -- let's not forget Portable Firefox has the RC3 version out (which, from what I can tell, is Firefox 2.0 in everything but name) here
My impressions of 2.0? It's got some nice tweaks, it feels faster, it uses about 25 meg less Ram on my windows machine and about 30 meg less on my Mac. All in all, a solid build. Lacking in whiz bang features maybe, but a nice solid build.
IIRC, the camera platform has been shutoff for the greater part of two decades now and it's highly unlikley they could turn it back on (and be functional) or that they would have the power to do so.
Not to mention MS has had versioning (shadow copies) for roughly .. what.. 3 years now? And while not as "purdy" as Time Machine it's quite functional and works like a charm.
Oh well. It's brand new. With a pretty interface. Ohhhhh. And, oh gee, Vista will have something nearly indentical in it as well.
Oh i'm sure something good will come out of it, I just believe - in the end - it'll be a colossal waste of time and money. The city would be far better offering a $20/month broadband subsidy or something than trying to stuff.
They'd actually be far better waiting for 802.11n (which was, you know, actually sortof designed for this problem) than trying to force a/b/g to work with it.
Yeah, the licensed spectrum stuff does actually work, and works fairly well.
Of course... it's also expensive as all holy heck (but, comparable in the price to a t1 depending on where you are at in the country/equipment).
It doesn't, but if you start going into licensed spectrum stuff (Which, btw, actually works) it becomes really really really expensive very fast.
Someday all these cities are going to realize that wireless (b/g at least) was never ever designed to be deployed on such a scale and, really, works so pathetically horrible that I feel sorry for anyone using it.
10-1 in about a decade we'll here stories about how these things were fraught with corruption, never worked right, waste of taxpayer money, etc, etc.
Voice of experience.. I spent years at an ISP that tried to sell wireless and man, it just never ever works right for this type of thing (others in the industry will probably confirm this) without spending a whole lot of cash.
That was the first article in a serious of slams which I was too lazy to go look for. They are all put in his Tuesday Morning Quarterback article on NFL.com if you car to google for em. Here is an excerpt from the article after he posted above:
kay, I described the pilot wrongly. But the premise still seems ridiculous -- a society that can build enormous faster-than-light starcruisers doesn't take precautions to protect its military against computer viruses? (The aliens in Independence Day, though able to build a starcruiser 90 miles in diameter, also did not know about computer viruses).
Philippe Herndon of Columbia, S.C., rose to defend the current plot arc in which a second battlestar, Pegasus, is discovered, but instead of cooperating the two ships begin to threaten each other. "The Pegasus story line is great," Herndon writes, saying the new ship symbolizes how military culture becomes corrupt when unchecked by democracy. "Pegasus has survived on its own by doing things exclusively the military way, and doesn't want messy democracy revived. They don't care about the fleet of civilian ships that Galactica is protecting and aren't interested in the needs of the weak. Confronting this kind of Ayn Rand selfishness is what makes the show terrific."
Scott Cordiner of Salem, Mass., adds that the constant internecine bickering on Battlestar Galactica is a reason the series works for him. "The people depicted on the show are technologically advanced but not socially advanced," he writes. "We had wars and infighting 2,000 years ago and still experience those problems today despite significant technical advances. Sadly, we will probably still have human infighting 2,000 years from now."
You aren't the only one. To quote from Gregg Easterbrook (probably best known to the slashdot crowd for his 5...4...3...2..1.. goodbye columbia article: http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2001/800 4.easterbrook-fulltext.html)
One of my problems with Battlestar Galactica is that the men and women in the show are depicted as so astonishingly across-the-board stupid, it's tempting to root for the robots. The military officers are stupid; the politicians are stupid; the civilians are stupid. In the pilot, we learn that the entire defense network of the human society could be deactivated by one single numeric code. The evil robots, called Cylons, obtain the code, transmit it, and instantly all the human society's military equipment shuts off. Planets are left defenseless as the Cylons bombard them with nuclear bombs; numerous powerful battlestars are shown hanging in space helpless, their engines and weapons shut off, as the Cylons smash them. (The Galactica escapes via plot contrivance.) Now if you were an advanced society capable of building gigantic faster-than-light outer-space battleships, would you design them so that one single numeric code renders them all totally useless at the same time? Plus the numeric code that instantly shuts off every military device in the entire human society has been entrusted to a psychologically unstable computer scientist, who accidentally gives it to the Cylons. Halfway through the first season, the computer scientist became vice-president of the survivors' government, and everyone -- including military intelligence -- is so astonishingly stupid as to never realize that since scientist was the only one who had the code, he must have been the one to give it to the Cylons.
Next, the show has premise problems that appears unsolvable. One aspect of the premise is that there are no other intelligent beings in this part of the galaxy -- just the beleaguered humans and the malevolent Cylons. This means there are no aliens to meet in various episodes, no alien societies to depict. True, it must be hard at this point to come up with new alien ideas for sci-fi. You can imagine the scriptwriters' conference: "Okay, how about they find a planet where people can only speak when the sun is out?" The other premise problem is that the Cylons are depicted as having become so powerful, Galactica cannot hope to defeat them. If the characters can't overcome the Cylons and can't meet interesting aliens, to create dramatic tension the scriptwriters are forced to have the humans fighting each other, which is what happens. Almost every episode concerns internecine fighting inside the human fleet: plots, mutinies, martial law, claims of treason, everything but people accusing each other of witchcraft. Galactica story lines have become so similar that I have trouble telling whether an episode is new or a repeat.
Yeah, very few are using it anymore -- and for those that are there is now a global per-email-address message limit of 5 emails.
Said policy was implemented shortly after the spamcop debacle (before it was 5 emails per user per email address iirc) but because of how they score stuff, I'm fairly sure that SMTP server is still on that blacklist (I could be wrong, haven't worked there in about half a year).
Well, nowadays said spam listing stuff will only *globally* send 5 messages to a single email address before refusing to do (since spammers are so fond of breaking stuff) -- at the time it was set to 5 per email address per user iirc.
And, um, it was pretty obviously an attempt at communcation (Is this a valid email? Oh it is, sweet, click here to be added to whitelist, etc). Such measures are still quite popular..
... when you are so stupid that you think unsolicited, unwanted messages aren't spam just because your whitelist has good intentions. Good intentions? Ha! The road to hell is paved with 'em.
I see.
Unsolicted Commercial Bulk Email.
You got 2 out of 4. Anyways, go back to blacklisting and have fun, it's a ridiculous solution and people like you are the reasons why.
Anyone who regularly reads news.admin.net-abuse.email [google.com] will instantly recognize this as sour grapes from a spammer.
Bullshit. Bullshit, bullshit. Want an example?
Some of our users used a white list based spam filtering solution that, if you weren't on the whitelist, would send an email out asking to confirm that your address/email was, in fact, valid. Fairly common no?
Well, somehow said emails were going to a spam trap run by spamcop and being marked as spam -- thousands of them a day. Apparently a spammer was spoofing one (or multiple) of their "spam trap" email boxes. Needless to say in fairly short order our outgoing SMTP servers were blacklisted. Upon contacting them and explaining the situation we asked if they could give us the email address of the spam trap they were using so we could simply have our confirmation messages not go to that, preventing them from blacklisting us.
Their response? No. They wouldn't give us the email address they used for spam traps, nor could they think of any other possible way to fix this. Basically, yes it was their problem, but sorry - fighting spam was more important than, you know, ensuring accuracy.
We eventually had to make all those confirmation messages send from a seperate email box dedicated solely to that purpose which (last time I checked) is *still* on the blacklist.
This is the type of day in, day out bullshit you have to deal with on these blacklists. A bunch of self-righteous pricks who flat out don't care if you are listed on their service (their fault or no). After all - can't make an omlette without breaking a few eggs right?
I'm all for using blacklists to help SCORE email as spam, but to flatout refuse email based on it is completely, totally, stupid. The example above is just one of many i've experienced and people all over the industry have experienced. No sane sysadmin should ever, ever, ever use a RBL. And pretty much everyone except for the "SPAMMERS MUST DIE -- END JUSTIFIES MEANS!!111" crowd understands that.
A little off topic, but what the hell - how often do you get to use a history degree?
:)
I've never been a fan of societal effects like you listed. Labelling an entire culture with one attitude is incredibly simplistic & more or less wrong -- especially considering the size & variety of an empire like Rome's. Just think of the Modern world and how attitudes differ between people, regions, and countries -- and that's with instantaneous communications.
At any rate, the "Fall of Rome" was probably due to more factors than can ever be categorized by man, but likely had alot to do with a declining economic & population base coupled with mass influx of non-native peoples with no stable political base to fend them off.
Or something.
The fall of the Roman REPUBLIC started around that time.
:)
The empire was an entirely different beastie
Now that Linux has a large userbase, you're arguing that is ok to relax that since some user wants binary drivers that just work. However, when you go that route, it's hard to go back because everybody *expects* the ABI to remain stable. Instead of improving the kernel, the devs will waste time sorting out ABI issues; not the best use of time.
:)
That was one of my arguments yes. My other was that if they are going to insist on open source drivers you can make a certification process for companies who wish to keep their drivers closed source, or find a way (I hate to even bring up the one way I know of...) of preventing drivers from bringing down to the entire system, or at least a way to mitigate it.
I'm just saying, there *has* to be a compromise. NVIDIA walks a very fine line, and they get harrassed by people for not being completely open. I dunno, it's just frustrating to see the same people on one hand scream for drivers for linux and on the other demand they be open source as well. While, in a perfect world, this would be true.. it's not a perfect world. Compromise. Somehow