Go with 4U rack mount cases. They are cheap, and easy. They will fit all your standard hardware out there.
For the rack itself, they can be expensive new, but you can get them used often enough. Look on ebay and find one in your vicinity. My friend got a nice compaq 42U rack for cheap that way.
If you can't wait, you could do as one has suggested and use a 19" audio rack. Just make sure it's deep enough; some audio racks aren't deep enough to fit some computer cases.
If you're on the cheap, get yourself a cheapo belkin KVM and hook up a small monitor and get a cheap keyboard/mouse combo and put it in the rack on a rack shelf. After that, you can most likely do everything else over the network, so you shouldn't have to use it very much.
And let me guess, you don't own a TV and you're proud of it and tell everyone about it every chance you get?
Jeans are comfortable and tough. They have lived through many generations of fashions and styles. I buy them because I like them, they fit good, they feel good, and they don't rip easily like most other materials.
There's many ways to get people to install this stuff, spyware/malware.
A lot of times, it's through seemingly harmless downloaded programs, such as screensavers and desktop background programs.
Other times, web sites will say "You must install this plugin to see this site" and most people will just click "OK" so they can see the web site. Of course, you don't, and it's just spyware, but who's to know?
I try to tell people to not download things, but I don't want them to fear downloading and running software. Most software is legit. Unfortunately it simply takes experience to know what's bad and what's okay.
It sucks.
Not to mention, these people that write the spyware programs often are not very clever; they can crash the computer, hijack IE so bad that you MUST do something about it, hog tons of resources and/or bandwidth.. it just makes things worse.
First, thanks for not saying "Boxen." Yea, I know it's a valid spelling for some people who think they are cool saying it, but it's stupid.
Anyways, the Sun Enterprise servers are still hot shit and it'll be awhile before your high end x86 boxes can offer that level of reliability and speed. I mean, hot swap CPU's, memory, anything. So cool.
At the Data Center I recently worked with, we had three StorageTek libraries. Each held seven SDLT drives and had a capacity of over 600 tapes each. Two backup servers, a couple of Quad Xeon boxes, handled the backups of the entire data center of over 1,500 servers. Basically, the backups are run 24 hours a day.
These two servers have no problems filling the drives' bandwidth.
Your math assumes that every server has to talk to every server for everything.
I don't know what kind of data center you run, but in the ones I've managed things aren't like that, they are an order of magnitude more simple.
You have some database servers. You have some web servers. You have some other purpose servers. They don't really need to talk to each other. Generally, many servers talk to the databases, not each other. The database server is a server amongst servers.
All it really takes is some planning, documentation, and insight. If you were going to build a multi-million dollar data center with PC servers, or buy a big mainframe, these should be expected of any admins.
Of course, in the Windows Server world, you get a lot of people that simply DO NOT KNOW how computers work. It's simply amazing. I mean, if given the choice I wouldn't pick MS, but you CAN do it successfully, take eBay for example. But I do see where a lot of the "when it's PC servers it ends up a mess" opinion comes from.
With the proper operating system, and a few add-on cards, a modern server PC could easily handle hundreds of serial printers (which I am assuming you mean. Parallel same difference.)
As far as tapes, well, you don't normally mount tapes like the old days with reel to reel spindles. Those things weren't nearly as fast as a modern DLT or AIT system. A modern server PC can easily handle a handful of drives operated with very large robotic library systems. You don't need "operaters" anymore, man.
I do believe that my desktop has more THROUGHput then a 1985 mainframe, by far.
There is a small difference between China and the USA though; our land mass is vastly larger then China, and they have an extremely dense population.
I do not believe that it was a choice that their cities may not have been designed with the car in mind, but rather a side effect of their economical past, culture, population and land mass.
China, Japan, Taiwan, etc. Very densly populated.
Now look at Russia. A great many russian cities were built before automobiles, and yet many are very big, open, cities that are far apart from each other.
ps. The hybrid cars in the US are ugly as shit. Especially that ridiculous one with the rear wheel skirts. UGLY. As long as these car companies think that everyone aspires to drive a VW Bug, lives in a modern hip apartment and enjoys daily office antics, I'll never buy one. Don't try to be so trendy!
It was a joke. I simply said what people said about mainframes 20 years ago.
"You don't really need reliability when the machines are so cheap and small. Just string a few together!"
It's a vicious circle. The PC under my desk could very well be as/more powerful then some of the mainframes made in 1984. The PC under your desk in 10-15 years from now could very well be as fast as a mainframe made today.
A web browser is a little more then a dumb terminal, but it is just a terminal none-the-less.
Doing everything over dumb web browsers is okay and all, but it's not very user friendly for a lot of applications. In order to bring web apps up to the usability of a traditional application, you're still dealing with versioning problems on the clients, because the browers will have to become a lot smarter. Java can overcome many of these problems if you can write your apps in it. But again, what version of java you got on your clients? Where is the code executed?
In a perfect world, there's on server and all the clients can run the apps without worries about versions. Unfortunatly we don't live in one.
If you run a tight shop, and don't allow people to install screen savers that will bring you to level 0 (incidently, that same indivual could do a lot more damage if untrusted and left to run amuck in your mainframe..) you can actually put together a decent system using distributed servers versus a mainframe.
In my opinion, it's all the way you manage the system. You can quite easily run a terrible shop whether you run big iron or PC servers.
I've heard other complaints about the Dells in the regard. And before Dell, it was the Compaq PC's. And before that it was the Packard Bells.
This type of problem you run into often with mass-produced assembly line PC's, especially if they are the leader in sales.
I don't buy prefab machines. I put them together myself, it's really easy. My friend with no computer experience managed to put his together and install Windows XP without too much trouble. It's totally worth it.
When you buy an Abit motherboard, or one of the others (Asus, Gigabyte, etc) it's usually their main selling product. Sure, asus makes other stuff, and so do the others, but the mainboards are the biggies. You generally get better support this way. Plus, you're in contact directly with the manufacturer, you don't have the large degree of seperation with a vendor like Dell.
If Massachusetts is #1, and it sucks this bad, then it must REAlLY suck everywhere else.
There's no jobs here. There's rumors of them. I have actually gotten a call for one recently, but it turned out they needed someone with a Masters Degree with 18 years of experience to be a help desk tech.
I like the Boston area, because I don't live there. I worked in Boston once, and I loved taking the train to work. So easy, no worries about cars and gas prices.
About your suspecting that the cartels are cutting back because of supply, I say hogwash.
Right now, at this moment, there's no shortage of oil. In the future, there will be, it will be harder to get. But not right now. I don't buy the whole "well, it will be harder in the future, so we're going to screw you now, when it's still easy."
OPEC uses tactics to make more money. They promise that next time around, they will release more oil and sell for less. The oil distributers tend to sell off their stocks because of these promises. Then, Opec hands their asses to them and says "oops, sorry, less oil. $40 a barrel." Now there's no stock of oil and they have to buy at the higher prices immediately.
You're right, and from where a lot of the money goes, it doesn't go into their citizens either, just bigger militaries to control their populations with fear and poverty, while the cartel ownership gets richer and even more powerful.
$2.50 is only fourty cents more then premium grade gasoline here in the states, well, in the states that I live in. Elsewhere it's not much cheaper. Maybe even more expensive some places.
I get really sick of people saying "but.. in europe it's twice as expensive!!!" Not that you did, but almost..
In europe, you don't have to drive as far to get everywhere. In Europe, they have vastly superior public transportation. And it's more densly populated.
In the States, we don't just rely on cars because "we like them." Unless you live IN or very near a major metropolitan area, you HAVE to have a car to get to work, the store, and pretty much anywhere in between. It's not a luxery, it's a necessity. It's not my fault that there's no IT jobs within ten miles of where I live.
The answer isn't fucking the citizens of the US because we drive cars. A better answer is improved public transportation. More trains that go more places more often. More busses that aren't 25 years old. It won't be the cure, but a lot of people won't buy cars if they don't have to. They are already way expensive to buy and maintain, along with all the taxes, insurance, and gas.
Because they are so filthy rich and good at what they do. They could easily move to control other forms of fuel because they've been doing the same thing with oil for so many years.
If Oil became unneeded, they would be forced to find other means of power and riches.
The only thing I really see coming to market are more effecient cars. There's already some, but there will start to be more alternative fuel cars at some point. Of course, there's no infrastructure for supplying these alternatives.
All the recent talk of alternative (to automobiles) transportation has been sparked by the high gas prices. It's not because we're short on gas, it's because of the oil cartels. If we switch to an alternative fuel, do you think these people will sit back and just watch their industry crumble? No, they will be the ones controlling the alternative fuel markets too.. So in the end it won't make a damned but of difference as long as they are around.
Usually when one builds from Source, they install it to wherever the original developer has it set to by default. Unless you did some heavy patching, the software will very likely be more "true" to the original software then many packages.
RPM's for distributions such as RedHat or Fedors often have to move configuration files all over the place to mesh with the OS properly.
You're more likely to be able to sit down at a strange Linux box and troubleshoot whatever program when it's compiled from source tarballs versus an RPM. Unless of course, you know the RPM, or the RPM doesn't do anything funky.
Considering the stuff is Open Source, and chances are the programs are not under a paid-for support contract, it's pretty safe to say that BOTH methods would have to be supported "In House." And if not, your support contract could very well support the source compiled versions anyways.
I choose the Gentoo way. Everything is compiled from source; it's just nice and automated. Almost never have I run into something where the program had to be modified to fit the distribution.
Slashdot Mirror
Listen to this guy.
Go with 4U rack mount cases. They are cheap, and easy. They will fit all your standard hardware out there.
For the rack itself, they can be expensive new, but you can get them used often enough. Look on ebay and find one in your vicinity. My friend got a nice compaq 42U rack for cheap that way.
If you can't wait, you could do as one has suggested and use a 19" audio rack. Just make sure it's deep enough; some audio racks aren't deep enough to fit some computer cases.
If you're on the cheap, get yourself a cheapo belkin KVM and hook up a small monitor and get a cheap keyboard/mouse combo and put it in the rack on a rack shelf. After that, you can most likely do everything else over the network, so you shouldn't have to use it very much.
There's some petty editorials out there, but give me a BREAK. This one has got to be one of the most petty ones I've ever seen.
It looks to me like it was more of a show off of all this guys's stuff, pretending it was an article about blue LED's.
I mean, with all the other more important shit he could be putting his energy into, it's lame to dwell on something so ridiculous.
If the light is too damned bright, put a peice of fucking tape over it and get on with your life.
And let me guess, you don't own a TV and you're proud of it and tell everyone about it every chance you get?
Jeans are comfortable and tough. They have lived through many generations of fashions and styles. I buy them because I like them, they fit good, they feel good, and they don't rip easily like most other materials.
There's many ways to get people to install this stuff, spyware/malware.
A lot of times, it's through seemingly harmless downloaded programs, such as screensavers and desktop background programs.
Other times, web sites will say "You must install this plugin to see this site" and most people will just click "OK" so they can see the web site. Of course, you don't, and it's just spyware, but who's to know?
I try to tell people to not download things, but I don't want them to fear downloading and running software. Most software is legit. Unfortunately it simply takes experience to know what's bad and what's okay.
It sucks.
Not to mention, these people that write the spyware programs often are not very clever; they can crash the computer, hijack IE so bad that you MUST do something about it, hog tons of resources and/or bandwidth.. it just makes things worse.
Sure, all you have to do is figure out how much detail is possible through one of those lenses, and convert it to pixels.
There *IS* a finite amount of detail that an analog camera lense can produce.
First, thanks for not saying "Boxen." Yea, I know it's a valid spelling for some people who think they are cool saying it, but it's stupid.
Anyways, the Sun Enterprise servers are still hot shit and it'll be awhile before your high end x86 boxes can offer that level of reliability and speed. I mean, hot swap CPU's, memory, anything. So cool.
Well, I've downloaded many many xbox games from Usenet. Queue up a couple, and the next morning voala, they're done.
What are you talking about?
At the Data Center I recently worked with, we had three StorageTek libraries. Each held seven SDLT drives and had a capacity of over 600 tapes each. Two backup servers, a couple of Quad Xeon boxes, handled the backups of the entire data center of over 1,500 servers. Basically, the backups are run 24 hours a day.
These two servers have no problems filling the drives' bandwidth.
What mainframe?
Your math assumes that every server has to talk to every server for everything.
I don't know what kind of data center you run, but in the ones I've managed things aren't like that, they are an order of magnitude more simple.
You have some database servers. You have some web servers. You have some other purpose servers. They don't really need to talk to each other. Generally, many servers talk to the databases, not each other. The database server is a server amongst servers.
All it really takes is some planning, documentation, and insight. If you were going to build a multi-million dollar data center with PC servers, or buy a big mainframe, these should be expected of any admins.
Of course, in the Windows Server world, you get a lot of people that simply DO NOT KNOW how computers work. It's simply amazing. I mean, if given the choice I wouldn't pick MS, but you CAN do it successfully, take eBay for example. But I do see where a lot of the "when it's PC servers it ends up a mess" opinion comes from.
With the proper operating system, and a few add-on cards, a modern server PC could easily handle hundreds of serial printers (which I am assuming you mean. Parallel same difference.)
As far as tapes, well, you don't normally mount tapes like the old days with reel to reel spindles. Those things weren't nearly as fast as a modern DLT or AIT system. A modern server PC can easily handle a handful of drives operated with very large robotic library systems. You don't need "operaters" anymore, man.
I do believe that my desktop has more THROUGHput then a 1985 mainframe, by far.
There is a small difference between China and the USA though; our land mass is vastly larger then China, and they have an extremely dense population.
I do not believe that it was a choice that their cities may not have been designed with the car in mind, but rather a side effect of their economical past, culture, population and land mass.
China, Japan, Taiwan, etc. Very densly populated.
Now look at Russia. A great many russian cities were built before automobiles, and yet many are very big, open, cities that are far apart from each other.
ps. The hybrid cars in the US are ugly as shit. Especially that ridiculous one with the rear wheel skirts. UGLY. As long as these car companies think that everyone aspires to drive a VW Bug, lives in a modern hip apartment and enjoys daily office antics, I'll never buy one. Don't try to be so trendy!
That wasn't the point.
It was a joke. I simply said what people said about mainframes 20 years ago.
"You don't really need reliability when the machines are so cheap and small. Just string a few together!"
It's a vicious circle. The PC under my desk could very well be as/more powerful then some of the mainframes made in 1984. The PC under your desk in 10-15 years from now could very well be as fast as a mainframe made today.
A web browser is a little more then a dumb terminal, but it is just a terminal none-the-less.
Doing everything over dumb web browsers is okay and all, but it's not very user friendly for a lot of applications. In order to bring web apps up to the usability of a traditional application, you're still dealing with versioning problems on the clients, because the browers will have to become a lot smarter. Java can overcome many of these problems if you can write your apps in it. But again, what version of java you got on your clients? Where is the code executed?
In a perfect world, there's on server and all the clients can run the apps without worries about versions. Unfortunatly we don't live in one.
If you run a tight shop, and don't allow people to install screen savers that will bring you to level 0 (incidently, that same indivual could do a lot more damage if untrusted and left to run amuck in your mainframe..) you can actually put together a decent system using distributed servers versus a mainframe.
In my opinion, it's all the way you manage the system. You can quite easily run a terrible shop whether you run big iron or PC servers.
I can only imagine the future... .. when the power of the mainframes today could be contained within small boxes under your desk!
Ohh, wait..
I've heard other complaints about the Dells in the regard. And before Dell, it was the Compaq PC's. And before that it was the Packard Bells.
This type of problem you run into often with mass-produced assembly line PC's, especially if they are the leader in sales.
I don't buy prefab machines. I put them together myself, it's really easy. My friend with no computer experience managed to put his together and install Windows XP without too much trouble. It's totally worth it.
When you buy an Abit motherboard, or one of the others (Asus, Gigabyte, etc) it's usually their main selling product. Sure, asus makes other stuff, and so do the others, but the mainboards are the biggies. You generally get better support this way. Plus, you're in contact directly with the manufacturer, you don't have the large degree of seperation with a vendor like Dell.
Oh well..
If Massachusetts is #1, and it sucks this bad, then it must REAlLY suck everywhere else.
There's no jobs here. There's rumors of them. I have actually gotten a call for one recently, but it turned out they needed someone with a Masters Degree with 18 years of experience to be a help desk tech.
I like the Boston area, because I don't live there. I worked in Boston once, and I loved taking the train to work. So easy, no worries about cars and gas prices.
About your suspecting that the cartels are cutting back because of supply, I say hogwash.
Right now, at this moment, there's no shortage of oil. In the future, there will be, it will be harder to get. But not right now. I don't buy the whole "well, it will be harder in the future, so we're going to screw you now, when it's still easy."
OPEC uses tactics to make more money. They promise that next time around, they will release more oil and sell for less. The oil distributers tend to sell off their stocks because of these promises. Then, Opec hands their asses to them and says "oops, sorry, less oil. $40 a barrel." Now there's no stock of oil and they have to buy at the higher prices immediately.
You're right, and from where a lot of the money goes, it doesn't go into their citizens either, just bigger militaries to control their populations with fear and poverty, while the cartel ownership gets richer and even more powerful.
$2.50 is only fourty cents more then premium grade gasoline here in the states, well, in the states that I live in. Elsewhere it's not much cheaper. Maybe even more expensive some places.
I get really sick of people saying "but.. in europe it's twice as expensive!!!" Not that you did, but almost..
In europe, you don't have to drive as far to get everywhere. In Europe, they have vastly superior public transportation. And it's more densly populated.
In the States, we don't just rely on cars because "we like them." Unless you live IN or very near a major metropolitan area, you HAVE to have a car to get to work, the store, and pretty much anywhere in between. It's not a luxery, it's a necessity. It's not my fault that there's no IT jobs within ten miles of where I live.
The answer isn't fucking the citizens of the US because we drive cars. A better answer is improved public transportation. More trains that go more places more often. More busses that aren't 25 years old. It won't be the cure, but a lot of people won't buy cars if they don't have to. They are already way expensive to buy and maintain, along with all the taxes, insurance, and gas.
Because they are so filthy rich and good at what they do. They could easily move to control other forms of fuel because they've been doing the same thing with oil for so many years.
If Oil became unneeded, they would be forced to find other means of power and riches.
It just makes sense.
Who's the asshole? It's the moron that points out spelling mistakes!
k es-him-look-rad.
There's always one in the bunch! Congradulations! You're todays spelling-nazi-who-thinks-pointing-out-spelling-ma
The only thing I really see coming to market are more effecient cars. There's already some, but there will start to be more alternative fuel cars at some point. Of course, there's no infrastructure for supplying these alternatives.
All the recent talk of alternative (to automobiles) transportation has been sparked by the high gas prices. It's not because we're short on gas, it's because of the oil cartels. If we switch to an alternative fuel, do you think these people will sit back and just watch their industry crumble? No, they will be the ones controlling the alternative fuel markets too.. So in the end it won't make a damned but of difference as long as they are around.
What software have you installed that puts binaries in /var? I mean, I could whip one up right now I guess, but for anything I've installed it's cool.
Distros patch their apps and move stuff around for a lot more reasons the a standard filesystem hierarchy.
But hey, it doesn't matter. To each his own, that's what I like about Linux.
No way.
Usually when one builds from Source, they install it to wherever the original developer has it set to by default. Unless you did some heavy patching, the software will very likely be more "true" to the original software then many packages.
RPM's for distributions such as RedHat or Fedors often have to move configuration files all over the place to mesh with the OS properly.
You're more likely to be able to sit down at a strange Linux box and troubleshoot whatever program when it's compiled from source tarballs versus an RPM. Unless of course, you know the RPM, or the RPM doesn't do anything funky.
Considering the stuff is Open Source, and chances are the programs are not under a paid-for support contract, it's pretty safe to say that BOTH methods would have to be supported "In House." And if not, your support contract could very well support the source compiled versions anyways.
I choose the Gentoo way. Everything is compiled from source; it's just nice and automated. Almost never have I run into something where the program had to be modified to fit the distribution.
Well said.