You don't know what you're talking about...FAST powers web search engines for lots of sites. CareerBuilder, Dell, IBM (at one point, probably OmniFind now). Their technology easily scales to terabytes of data using commodity servers. I should know, my employer uses it as our main search engine for all of our web sites. And the technology is built on a lot of open-source pieces with some proprietary glue and slick language processing. It's definitely one of the major search technologies in the enterprise search arena.
In our organization, we have a small group of admins who focus support on just internal business systems, including a number of in-house developed web apps. Our philosophy is we support the whole application, including deployments. When something breaks at 2 am, we're on call and anyone on the team is expected to be able to respond, even if the problem is on the application side of things. The developers are just an escalation point.
This means we are involved in a lot of details of the development of these applications. We maintain the configuration of all systems used to develop the applications short of the developers' individual workstations and actual code on development. So developers work with us to make the changes they need on the development systems, then document and request these changes and any new code get applied to QA. Finally they submit a request to production using the same set of documented changes--this request is reviewed by their project manager, then approved. In each case, we have the ability to review the changes and sometimes get involved if the requested changes may cause issues for the servers or open a security hole, etc.
The real key to a system such as this is documentation. When something breaks, we document how we fixed it. When we build a new server, we document the steps we used to load it. These documents we freely share with the developers and encourage their feedback. At the same time, the developers are expected to document their application, any scheduled tasks that must happen, any routine maintenance tasks that must be done, etc. This is on top of the aforementioned documentation of configuration changes and code deployments.
In practice, this system doesn't always work...especially as the number of systems and applications has grown over time and thus the complexity of supporting these, both for the developers and for us admins. But in general it does, and even when things don't quite mesh between the two teams, it's usually much easier to resolve such conflicts because of the overall framework we have in place.
Actually, technically we're not at war. The President publicly declared the end of the war in Iraq like 3 years ago. And Congress never voted him new authority to be at war. So while there's cleary still conflict, the President does not have the authority, as his war powers ended 100 days after he declared an end to hostilities. The fact that this sticky point has been missed by most people shows that we have already come to accept the rewiting of the past to fit the present, just as Orwell feared. Yes, this truly is the Long War--the end of which will always be conviently adjusted to fit those in power.
On the contrary...the Google appliance is too cheap. IBM's OmniFind is competing with large enterprise search vendors--Verity, FAST, Autonomy, etc. In that space, the Google appliance ends up being more of a cute toy than real competition. It's great for small to medium businesses or for a quick implementation, but not for true enterprise search.
I suspect this is more about hacking Google's desktop search client so it can hit an OmniFind-based backend.
Its not just that Hollywood is churning out generally bad movies, its how it costs per ticket--for my SO and I to go the movies and buy concessions, we can easily spend $50. That's a big chunk of change given the quality of the product. Maybe if theaters lowered prices (which means distributors need to lower their prices and so on..) more people would go see the average quality movies. Otherwise, they shouldn't be suprised that most people are content to wait for the DVD and just rent from Netflix or Blockbuster
This has been discussed before, there was a whitepaper posted on Slashdot previously.
As others have said, the patches for this are already in 2.1.6 and just need to be backported to 2.0.x.
2.0.55 has been in testing, I believe the patches are there. So one could grab the code and backport them yourself, or wait for 2.0.55 to be released, which I would expect would be very soon.
Re:Apache on OpenBSD
on
OpenBSD 3.6 Live
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Indeed, they should rename it and continue to fork away, ala IPF->PF. Personally, though I know the roots were political, I have enjoyed the results. I prefer the OpenBSD-flavored Apache because of it's out-of-the-box chroot config. Somethings that would be nice to add in would be RedHat's default of having a directory of config files (easy enough to configure after the fact) and having a decent log rotation scheme. I ended up using VLogger, which is a nice Perl script that I found. Works well for hosting multiple sites.
Of course, I'd still expect IE security patches for MS's latest server products. But I use FireFox myself for day to day browsing. IE is reserved for those occaisons when I'm forced to use it...I've noticed a lot of "Web Admins" for software products tend to be nothing more than a bunch of ActiveX requiring IE. Kinda defeats the purpose of a web-based GUI.
Actually, in a software company, it's not atypical at all to have Server installations used as desktops. We have a number of developers who develop/test software on top of databases, IIS, etc. Yes, some of this stuff is available for 2KPro and/or XP, but the only way to be sure it works 100% is to have access to the full server version. So it's not atypical for a developer to run Server as desktop. I myself use 2003 Server as my desktop because I wanted to be able to evaluate different server products (I'm a sys admin). I also wanted to get familiar with 2003 Server before it rolled out to our production systems--when you use it every day, you find all the nooks and crannies you'd overlook in terms of settings and whatnot. Finally, I prefer the remote access configuration of Server over XP. It's not unusual for me to use both remote sessions as well as the console, running different apps as different users, etc. Sometimes RunAs just isn't powerful enough for this.
Solaris has a system similar to this...started in Solaris 8 I believe, but I could be wrong. Anyhow, you can create users who have authority to perform certain admin functions even though they do not have root access. The authorizations are stored in a set of files, aka a data store. Was complicated as could be to configure, but it's in there. So I'd assume Sun (if they have any cash for it:-P) would pursue this one as well.
And Sun now ships a Software Companion CD with most common GNU tools and GUI installer.
Finally, Solaris 9 now includes/usr/sfw, which also has many of the GNU tools.
For all that, it still takes me about 30 min-1 hour of work to get a Solaris system to the same nice command-line environment as Linux (ksh or bash, color ls, gtar, and vim 6)
Versus the Dell PowerVault NAS devices? Check out the PowerVault 725N. Seems like a very nice solution for ~$3000 for a low-end configuration.
Not that I'm a huge Dell fan, but comparing Sun's x86 offerings to a Dell/Red Hat Linux combo just doesn't favor Sun much. I mean, Dell has a team dedicated to making Red Hat Linux work on their servers...there have been issues before, but overall I'm more impressed with this solution and it's future vs. a Sun x86 solution, esp. using Solaris x86.
Hardware RAID. Dell sells Intel boxes with it, HP sells Intel boxes with it. Why should I consider Sun without this? I know Dell's Hardware RAID isn't the best performance, but it's great for availability--actually I prefer's HP's (er, Compaq's) RAID controllers the best. What does Sun bring to the table to compete?
Anyone have experience with using Apache 1.3.x or 2.x as a reverse proxy? I've been testing this at work and am thinking about convincing management to implement a load-balanced reverse proxy Apache setup to sit in front of our IIS boxes. The idea being increased security, caching, flexability (can rearrange site content with the proxies), etc. So far the sites I've tested with seem to work okay, but there is a question in my mind how well it would work for a large, million-hits per month site
$250K for a Low-end Sun? Um, wrong. You need to look at their VSP offerings. At work, we're a major Sun shop. The lowest end V100, V120 are in the $1K-$2K price range. But 280R and V480's are quite affordable...not as cheap as Dell 2650's, but management doesn't have a cardiac when we propose them.
Slashdot Mirror
You don't know what you're talking about...FAST powers web search engines for lots of sites. CareerBuilder, Dell, IBM (at one point, probably OmniFind now). Their technology easily scales to terabytes of data using commodity servers. I should know, my employer uses it as our main search engine for all of our web sites. And the technology is built on a lot of open-source pieces with some proprietary glue and slick language processing. It's definitely one of the major search technologies in the enterprise search arena.
In our organization, we have a small group of admins who focus support on just internal business systems, including a number of in-house developed web apps. Our philosophy is we support the whole application, including deployments. When something breaks at 2 am, we're on call and anyone on the team is expected to be able to respond, even if the problem is on the application side of things. The developers are just an escalation point.
This means we are involved in a lot of details of the development of these applications. We maintain the configuration of all systems used to develop the applications short of the developers' individual workstations and actual code on development. So developers work with us to make the changes they need on the development systems, then document and request these changes and any new code get applied to QA. Finally they submit a request to production using the same set of documented changes--this request is reviewed by their project manager, then approved. In each case, we have the ability to review the changes and sometimes get involved if the requested changes may cause issues for the servers or open a security hole, etc.
The real key to a system such as this is documentation. When something breaks, we document how we fixed it. When we build a new server, we document the steps we used to load it. These documents we freely share with the developers and encourage their feedback. At the same time, the developers are expected to document their application, any scheduled tasks that must happen, any routine maintenance tasks that must be done, etc. This is on top of the aforementioned documentation of configuration changes and code deployments.
In practice, this system doesn't always work...especially as the number of systems and applications has grown over time and thus the complexity of supporting these, both for the developers and for us admins. But in general it does, and even when things don't quite mesh between the two teams, it's usually much easier to resolve such conflicts because of the overall framework we have in place.
Actually, technically we're not at war. The President publicly declared the end of the war in Iraq like 3 years ago. And Congress never voted him new authority to be at war. So while there's cleary still conflict, the President does not have the authority, as his war powers ended 100 days after he declared an end to hostilities. The fact that this sticky point has been missed by most people shows that we have already come to accept the rewiting of the past to fit the present, just as Orwell feared. Yes, this truly is the Long War--the end of which will always be conviently adjusted to fit those in power.
On the contrary...the Google appliance is too cheap. IBM's OmniFind is competing with large enterprise search vendors--Verity, FAST, Autonomy, etc. In that space, the Google appliance ends up being more of a cute toy than real competition. It's great for small to medium businesses or for a quick implementation, but not for true enterprise search.
I suspect this is more about hacking Google's desktop search client so it can hit an OmniFind-based backend.
Its not just that Hollywood is churning out generally bad movies, its how it costs per ticket--for my SO and I to go the movies and buy concessions, we can easily spend $50. That's a big chunk of change given the quality of the product. Maybe if theaters lowered prices (which means distributors need to lower their prices and so on..) more people would go see the average quality movies. Otherwise, they shouldn't be suprised that most people are content to wait for the DVD and just rent from Netflix or Blockbuster
This has been discussed before, there was a whitepaper posted on Slashdot previously. As others have said, the patches for this are already in 2.1.6 and just need to be backported to 2.0.x. 2.0.55 has been in testing, I believe the patches are there. So one could grab the code and backport them yourself, or wait for 2.0.55 to be released, which I would expect would be very soon.
Oh...like dude..um, you're reading it?
Indeed, they should rename it and continue to fork away, ala IPF->PF. Personally, though I know the roots were political, I have enjoyed the results. I prefer the OpenBSD-flavored Apache because of it's out-of-the-box chroot config. Somethings that would be nice to add in would be RedHat's default of having a directory of config files (easy enough to configure after the fact) and having a decent log rotation scheme. I ended up using VLogger, which is a nice Perl script that I found. Works well for hosting multiple sites.
Sounds like the logic of the Doomsday Machine in Dr. Strangelove
We've been getting disk arrays like the DS6000 for months now... for example:
RocketSTOR R2221
or
Silicon Mechanics SM-316RX
Of course, I'd still expect IE security patches for MS's latest server products. But I use FireFox myself for day to day browsing. IE is reserved for those occaisons when I'm forced to use it...I've noticed a lot of "Web Admins" for software products tend to be nothing more than a bunch of ActiveX requiring IE. Kinda defeats the purpose of a web-based GUI.
Actually, in a software company, it's not atypical at all to have Server installations used as desktops. We have a number of developers who develop/test software on top of databases, IIS, etc. Yes, some of this stuff is available for 2KPro and/or XP, but the only way to be sure it works 100% is to have access to the full server version. So it's not atypical for a developer to run Server as desktop. I myself use 2003 Server as my desktop because I wanted to be able to evaluate different server products (I'm a sys admin). I also wanted to get familiar with 2003 Server before it rolled out to our production systems--when you use it every day, you find all the nooks and crannies you'd overlook in terms of settings and whatnot. Finally, I prefer the remote access configuration of Server over XP. It's not unusual for me to use both remote sessions as well as the console, running different apps as different users, etc. Sometimes RunAs just isn't powerful enough for this.
Solaris has a system similar to this...started in Solaris 8 I believe, but I could be wrong. Anyhow, you can create users who have authority to perform certain admin functions even though they do not have root access. The authorizations are stored in a set of files, aka a data store. Was complicated as could be to configure, but it's in there. So I'd assume Sun (if they have any cash for it :-P) would pursue this one as well.
They made the mistake to have not one, but two featured stories on Slashdot today. No wonder their site is down, LOL
Darl? Is that really you? Aw, don't be shy...
I assume you mean a real SunBlade, not the SunBlade 150, which costs only $900 or so and is basically a low-end PC with a SPARC chip instead.
Since Solaris 8, Sun has shipped Netscape as the default browser, not HotJava
/usr/sfw, which also has many of the GNU tools.
All your fun happy binaries are available at http://www.sunfreeware.com
And Sun now ships a Software Companion CD with most common GNU tools and GUI installer.
Finally, Solaris 9 now includes
For all that, it still takes me about 30 min-1 hour of work to get a Solaris system to the same nice command-line environment as Linux (ksh or bash, color ls, gtar, and vim 6)
Versus the Dell PowerVault NAS devices? Check out the PowerVault 725N. Seems like a very nice solution for ~$3000 for a low-end configuration.
Not that I'm a huge Dell fan, but comparing Sun's x86 offerings to a Dell/Red Hat Linux combo just doesn't favor Sun much. I mean, Dell has a team dedicated to making Red Hat Linux work on their servers...there have been issues before, but overall I'm more impressed with this solution and it's future vs. a Sun x86 solution, esp. using Solaris x86.
Hardware RAID. Dell sells Intel boxes with it, HP sells Intel boxes with it. Why should I consider Sun without this? I know Dell's Hardware RAID isn't the best performance, but it's great for availability--actually I prefer's HP's (er, Compaq's) RAID controllers the best. What does Sun bring to the table to compete?
Anyone have experience with using Apache 1.3.x or 2.x as a reverse proxy? I've been testing this at work and am thinking about convincing management to implement a load-balanced reverse proxy Apache setup to sit in front of our IIS boxes. The idea being increased security, caching, flexability (can rearrange site content with the proxies), etc. So far the sites I've tested with seem to work okay, but there is a question in my mind how well it would work for a large, million-hits per month site
With as many pro-Google stories as there on Slashdot, they should ask Google about licensing their logo for the stories ala the Mozilla logo.
Nice...never leave home without your punchdown tool :-)
$250K for a Low-end Sun? Um, wrong. You need to look at their VSP offerings. At work, we're a major Sun shop. The lowest end V100, V120 are in the $1K-$2K price range. But 280R and V480's are quite affordable...not as cheap as Dell 2650's, but management doesn't have a cardiac when we propose them.
Exactly...I would NOT say Solaris runs Java "like the wind" IBM's JRE is better anyhow
IA64 _may_ threaten Sun...I don't see i386 doing so.