Can it automagically upgrade the 2.4 kernel every couple of weeks and set the correct AC patches?
Yes! Although we tend to only upgrade the kernel when it's useful, not with every single release. Most of our customers don't care whether they're using 2.2 or 2.4 kernels, or apache 1.x or 2.0. I personally don't trust apache 2.0 yet.
Last time I checked, I think it takes three mouse clicks to upgrade the entire OS, which fits in 12 megs on a 32-meg flash disk (so you can hold two copies, and old "known working" one and a new "test" version). iMASS downloads the new version from our web site, verifies its integrity, and installs it automatically.
Unfortunately you have to reboot to upgrade the kernel. If it doesn't work for any reason, next time you reboot you get the old, safe version back automatically.
What if the "backup" drive fails with the last six months of critical accounting data on it? Data-recovery services are -not- cheap, and the cost of having to employ one would likely exceed the cost of a good DLT or DAT tape system AND a disaster-recovery plan many times over.
First of all, if your backup disk dies, you still have the primary, so your data isn't really lost.
You can swap idb drives using the front drive tray, so you can replace the backup disk, push the backup button on the front panel, and you're set.
You can also swap the backup disk whenever you want. idb does incremental backups, so you can, say, have a backup done three times a day for a week, then swap the disk and put it in safe storage, then do another week on another disk, then swap them back. The incremental backups are smart, so week 3's backups will automatically be incremental versus week 1, even if week 2's backups were on disk 2. (In this case, week 2's first backup was not incremental, since week 1 isn't on the same disk.)
idb is _very_ cool stuff, trust me.
That said, tapes seem a bit more resilient. But you can't beat the speed or capacity (or nowadays, even price) of a disk.
Not true. We explicitly checked with djb before we packaged qmail like this. It *is* allowed to distribute qmail in unmodified binary form *if* you do it as a tarball that follows his instructions... which we did.
Apparently it runs a "Hardened & ruggedized Linux based UNIX kernel"
That is indeed marketese. What we tried to tell them was we stripped the Linux OS (not the kernel) down to a system that fits (kernel Apache, perl, php, qmail, and all) in 12 megs on a flash disk, and so it's much more reliable and will keep doing basic tasks (like routing) even if the disk dies.
Naturally, they thought an OS was the same as a kernel, and liked the word "ruggedized", and the rest is history...
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NT sucks on IDE. Linux doesn't, so we didn't spend the extra (customer's) money.
Last time I checked, I think it takes three mouse clicks to upgrade the entire OS, which fits in 12 megs on a 32-meg flash disk (so you can hold two copies, and old "known working" one and a new "test" version). iMASS downloads the new version from our web site, verifies its integrity, and installs it automatically.
Unfortunately you have to reboot to upgrade the kernel. If it doesn't work for any reason, next time you reboot you get the old, safe version back automatically.
You can swap idb drives using the front drive tray, so you can replace the backup disk, push the backup button on the front panel, and you're set.
You can also swap the backup disk whenever you want. idb does incremental backups, so you can, say, have a backup done three times a day for a week, then swap the disk and put it in safe storage, then do another week on another disk, then swap them back. The incremental backups are smart, so week 3's backups will automatically be incremental versus week 1, even if week 2's backups were on disk 2. (In this case, week 2's first backup was not incremental, since week 1 isn't on the same disk.)
idb is _very_ cool stuff, trust me.
That said, tapes seem a bit more resilient. But you can't beat the speed or capacity (or nowadays, even price) of a disk.
- Apparently it runs a "Hardened & ruggedized Linux based UNIX kernel"
That is indeed marketese. What we tried to tell them was we stripped the Linux OS (not the kernel) down to a system that fits (kernel Apache, perl, php, qmail, and all) in 12 megs on a flash disk, and so it's much more reliable and will keep doing basic tasks (like routing) even if the disk dies.Naturally, they thought an OS was the same as a kernel, and liked the word "ruggedized", and the rest is history...