My first on call job I had programming call centers for a major company. My basic job was manning the hotline during the weekday from 6am-3pm, doing tickets, and whatnot. The rest was being on call which was shared for a week between 5 people. Every week, there was one primary, and one alternate. The primary from the following week was the alternate for the next week, and so on. It came out that you were only on call 2 out of 5 weeks, and that was fine.
Until the politics came into play.
After about a year, one person "graduated" to a new position where he wouldn't have to be on call. Another person left the company, and was never really replaced. So now I was on call 2/3 weeks. In theory. The other two people were very lazy. One of them was some Orthodox religious person who seemed to have major holidays and festivals about twice a month where she could not be on call and she'd "trade weeks" with one of us, but never really did more than say she'd take "next week, for sure." The other was a kind of a nightclub-hopping single "ladies man" who dressed sharp and partied hard. Even when he was on call, he couldn't hear the pager or would take hours to reply.
My boss just rolled over, because she was afraid they'd pull some EOE stint, and she was sort of passing the time until she left on maternity leave. So I was unofficially "on call" 24x7 for about half a year. I got paged about 2-3 times a night, on average, with jobs that went from a 5-10 minute fix to some that lasted many hours. I got no extra pay, and when review time came around, I got a 3% raise. I was making about a third of the wages of someone else in my position, so she pulled the "well, you're not perfect enough for industry standard" card. My response was to quit.
For up to a year afterward, I still got a few calls a month from the former clients, vendors, and business partners. Most knew I didn't work there anymore, but, "Pleeeeeaaaaase, can you fix this? No one is answering the pages!" No.
In other jobs, I was compensated with unofficial "comp time," and sometimes a cash bonus as a kind of "thanks for covering our ass." Comp time works like, "You worked all night fixing that?" Pfft, don't come in tomorrow, or "I am adding an extra vacation day you can use in any way you see fit later."
I think my thoughts of the differences were polarized on my trip through JFK back home from Sweden. It was late, and TSA was mostly unoccupied. As we approached the ribbon ropes that separated the non-existent lines, I saw a gang of urban youths, krunk, bling-bling, and all. Their baggy basketball jerseys and low pants flowed with their movements as they laughed and cackled among each other with exaggerated movements typical among boisterous youth. I wondered what they were doing near TSA, and figured they must be traveling somewhere. I passed them, and headed down towards TSA, thinking that this was something I saw badly imitated on EuroMTV. "Yo!" one of them said. I almost ignored the loud female voice, because experience taught me that you just don't turn around in reply to their taunts lest you get the crap beaten out of your suburban ass. "Ey! You goin' some whea?" said the voice. As the gang parted, I saw a short woman in a TSA uniform. "Ah need to see yo' tickets and passpo'ts!" I didn't see this woman with her friends. I wanted to say, "Sorry, I didn't see your short ass among these Michael Jordan wannbes, and you mind not shouting at this unprofessional gathering of your friends that follow you to work? That is wack." But I fumbled for the passports and boarding passes while the other youth towered around me, giggling. That's right. I don't feel safe in America. I had forgotten this. "A'ight," she said, "you go to the man over dea. You got a laptop?" Instinctively, instead of saying yes, I said, "I'll remove all electronic devices as instructed by the sign." That made the youth giggle some more, as one of them imitated me under his breath. "A'ight... g'wan, deyn." She said. A few steps away, they all broke into laughter.
The TSA guy, who looked like someone had pissed on his whole life, and the fact I owned one of them "laptop things rich folk have" was unfair, rapidly ripped it open badly, breaking the faceplate of the disk drive into two pieces. Nice. He put the pieces of the faceplate back in the laptop like that was par for course, closed the screen onto them, and tossed it back down the rollers to he could sit down and get back to his miserable rest break or something. Great. This is why I brought the old one, but I thought *I* would do the damage on this trip by dropping it or something. The laptop is fine, except for the faceplate, which is a minor cosmetic issue, but that whole event snapped me back into why I am so tense all the time. Most of America is very unfriendly and many of the people in "service jobs" act like things are unfair and someone owes them something. This shit did not happen to me in Heathrow, and it certainly did not happen to me in Arlanda. Man, no wonder we're losing tourists. You know how many forms a non-US citizen has to fill out now just to get through passport control? And they fingerprint foreign people, too. Both index fingers. Damn. "Welcome to America... we're watching you, don't do anything funny! Is that fruit? HEY! Your foreign ass been to a farm or handled farm tools? Bitch, I be speakin' to you! SPEAK ENGLISH!!!"
We have started using CentOS as well in a primarily Red Hat environment. Before, we'd use Fedora, but we kept running into issues where the packages would be outdated too quickly, and then when Fedora-Legacy went away, that was a big problem! I mean, half our stuff was still on Fedora Core 2 because it was the last of the 2.4.x kernel, and ran parallel to the Red Hat EL 3. CentOS had matured by then, and we had looked at a lot of alternatives (PieBox, WhiteHat, etc).
CentOS was great for those boxes where we were testing stuff, but didn't want to pay an RH license because we didn't need the support. Do we still use Red Hat? You bet. Nothing beats the service, support, and the RHN updates. I wish CentOS had an RHN-like feature, but I guess I'll have to build one or see if someone already did. But RH is used for valuable production systems and CentOS is used for everything else.
I also worked for a group that declined to hire one guy for similar reasons, although that wasn't the only one. We noticed he had an AOL address, and on a hunch, we looked up hometwon.aol.com/hisusername. And were shocked. I mean, the web page was horrible to begin with, style wise, and had a sort of a gansta-meets-renn-fest theme ("Wenches and bitches, welcome to my m'lord's sweet dungeon!"). Judging from his wealth of photos, we estimated he graduated high school not more than three years ago, so his experience and college accreditations, as well as his age were a slight bit off. He was not a guy who had graduated from some college last year, but apparently lived with his mom after high school and decided to go into the IT world because, "Dat's where tha money is! Werd!"
Then we found the photo section. While most of them were him and his friends "frontin' for the wenches of White Castle, yo," there was an alarming set of him and his friends peeing on various objects on our fine city: light poles, phone booths, newspaper stands, museum steps. It was like a photo journal of things they could pee on, along with commentary of what happened. Including a homeless guy. "Hahaha, he never woke up, neither! Doh!"
He declined to hire him because he actually didn't pass basic tech questions, but it was so hard to look this guy square in the eye after seeing those pictures. I didn't know whether to laugh at hit or hit him. You really couldn't tell because he had cleaned up well with a shirt and tie, but it was definitely the same guy.
I worked for a HUGE multinational ISP once. We had just gotten France hooked up and they had been running fairly well for about six months after two years of testing. About 100k customers used the service.
One day, DNS went down. This had happened in the UK a lot, so we barked up the wrong tree for hours thinking it was a Keyring issue over the Transatlantic connection. Nope. Hours later, we found the DNS for France was on a different subnet. This led to discovering that their DNS service was on a set of IPs that pointed to one MAC. Finally, the people in charge of the data center said, "That's not our subnet. I don't know where you are getting DNS from.
We traced back and back through routers, entering territory that got scarier and scarier. It went to an older building that were were in the process of closing down and selling. It also had a data center, but that room had been dark for months, and DNS had been working up until now. Back and back we went.
Finally we found that the trace went through a disused subnet through a former office LAN in that building. This traced it back to an office, which traced it back to...... a 386 LCD laptop. The machine had died because the logs had filled up the 1.2 gb hard drive. We couldn't believe it until someone rebooted the damn thing, and DNS came back up. We had been running production DNS on this thing for over 2 years.
Turns out that when the French network architecture was being set up, they had to transfer DNS somewhere temporarily as part of a testbed, so some guy had an old laptop in his office he just hooked up. Then he was laid off before we went live. Nobody ever switched it back, and since the office space was being abandoned, no one every went into the office to turn anything off, figuring it was somebody else's problem.
A week later, French DNS was running on a production server.
I am impressed it lasted that long on such a platform.
We also used to run the flight schedules for Lufthansa. It was a Windows NT 3.5.1 system that was running on a 486, and was running some proprietary terminal service and scheduler. It crashed once every 31 days (there was some bug where it would crash after xxxx hours which was between 30-31 days). The only way to fix it was to hard reboot the box, and the directions were scary: "Go down to the older server room, and find an unlabeled shelf next to the first door near the panic switch. On the bottom of that shelf is a box which is behind a stack of old 10base hubs. Hold down the power button until the green light goes off. You may have to lie on the floor on your stomach to reach the button. Count to ten, power back on. Make sure the amber light labeled 'turbo' is lit on bootup. If not, repeat, but wait 60 seconds before powering back up."
I sure hope they got that fixed, it was last like that in 2000.
Just to give you an idea, I am one of the admins for a small ISP near Washington DC. We get over 20 million emails a month, and only 1-3% of that is legit mail. We have six, SIX Dual XEON 3.0 ghz servers that do nothing but tag spam. They run at very high loads with Exim, SpamAssassin, and ClamAV, processing up to several dozen e-mails a second at their peak. We use voting, whitelisting, blacklisting, RBLs, and some other stuff we keep secret. Once the mail has been "scrubbed," it gets passed on to the real mail server, a measly 2.2ghz box that handles everything. A little spam still gets through, but part of that is we have rules in SA that favor the user's choice (which helps a lot against false positives). Some complain, but the mail's been tagged, and we have instruction on how to fine tune it at their end based on what we tag.
But do you know how much that costs us in hardware, power, and infrastructure? And right now, we realize this won't be enough by the end of 2008. We only had three tagging systems in 2004.
Now let's talk about the other end: letting spammers out. We don't condone spamming at all, but we do have customers that get hacked. Notably a large school of, let's say "religious persuasion." Their IT staff, which consists mostly of student and adult volunteers in a school that does not have any sort of computer educational tract, gets hacked a lot. It's a stray laptop, or someone downloads a file onto a Windows box that will give them a Holy Screen Saver of Antioch or whatever. And this is one of BILLIONS of situations like this, whether it be an office, a school, or an IP pool of a European DSL company. Companies with great admins are a small, small minority of what can be hacked out there.
I have seen machines of seemingly weak hardware send out thousands of e-mails a second. It's mind boggling. And it will clog and kill our outgoing mail. Rate limiting? It auto-adapts to fill the network pipe. It spreads, it breeds, it attacks anything it thinks will break it. DNS is the first to go. It probes and pokes every IP in the subnet to see if there's an internal relay, or another machine it can infect. Within seconds, everyone's affected in some way; usually by network slowness. Many of these multi-task. They sent the virus or Trojan to everyone on their address book. They search for AIM or MSN. They look for e-mails in the web cache. These are basic logic "if then" tests the software can make. A second-year programmer at college could design this kind of program easily.
The only option is to block their IP.
Admins get paged, because the attacks usually happen during off business hours because, well, they know staff will be lower and slower to respond. People's weekends are ruined, children's birthday parties have to go without a parent for a while because some asshat in The Pluperfect of Godfuckistan wants to sell 40 bajillion people Vy-ag-rah or penny stocks or whatever. He may get a handful of buyers, but what does he care? He didn't really pay anything. In many cases, they get nothing, but such is the world of crime. A greedy sucker born every minute. Besides, the world owes him, right?
I used to work for AOL. In 2001, I watched the guy in charge of our e-mail go rabid and foam at the mouth at the volume of spam AOL had to filter. He slammed his fists on the lectern and all but declared war on them. We had graphs near our NOC that showed e-mail volume in the millions per day. Every few weeks, there'd be a 40-60% drop in the graph, and a circle that showed where a new filter was put into place. And the chart would still climb and recover. The spammers got faster and faster. They got better and more adaptive. What used to take them months to get around now took weeks. Then days. Then hours.
I see so many ideas come out that seem revolutionary. First it was whitelists and blacklists. Then IP spoofing got around that. Then it was Bayesian. Then spammers filled their e-mails with nonsense. Then it was SpamAssass
> one good staff member with a couple hours free time
Be careful. I work in an environment that was full of those kinds of things. Almost none of the admins or programmers stuck to any standards, naming schemes, or left any documentation. Most didn't even speak to one another. Thus, when I came onboard, I had to deal with a statistics collection system in multiple pieces in several different languages; many at the same time (a bash script that ran Perl scripts AND some compiled C modules on Cygwin on a Windows 2000 box). Comments in the code? Hah!
One of the first things the new admins did was consolidate and document.
As some one who has spent the last year fixing up the systems the FreeBSD admins left behind, I feel qualified is stating that FreeBSD is a terrible business-level operating system. When I started at my company, a bunch of previous admins replaced many core pieces of infrastructure with FreeBSD. One of my core requirements when I got hired was to get them onto Red Hat Enterprise, and part of the reason they threw a lot of money at me was I knew both systems, and I could easily take stuff from a FreeBSD environment.
First, and I must say this, I don't "hate" FreeBSD. Life is too short to argue which operating system is the best overall (I still cringe that I did this sort of fanaticism with Atari and Amiga back in the day, and learned a valuable lesson about what really matters). FreeBSD is a great, tweakable, DIY hobbyist OS done for those who tinker with those sorts of things (which is how I learned it). But FreeBSD in the business enterprise is like hiring a bunch of guys who work out of their basement to do your IT work: may be good in some instances, but is a poor long-term strategy.
Why? Here are some of the problems:
- Hardware support. This is my #1 problem. You want FreeBSD to run on some of those new HP DL380 G4's with the dual Xeons? Oops... sorry. The special scsi blade won't run well with them when you need RAID5. But wait, there's a guy in the Netherlands who has a driver that sort of works... but his website hasn't been updated since 2002, and it's still considered alpha, and compiling it with the specialized kernel breaks...
- Software support. Almost neck and neck with #1. Let's leave out the scant vendors that support the BSD kernel, because FreeBSD fanatics always go, "Oh yeah... what about XXXX...?" For every example that some major vendor that supports FreeBSD that some gives me, I can give you ten examples of companies that don't. And those that do always patch or update their FreeBSD as an afterthought. "New FooPack 3.00 has been released! BSD? Um... yeah, in our FTP site the 1.24 version may still work, but it's EOL and unsupported." Then the stuff about ports is stupid. I don't want to keep my ports tree up-to-date and then have to recompile all the time.
- Finding anyone who knows about BSD is rare. Too rare. Last time I said this, some snide person commented that, "Well any person who worked on Sun systems should know FreeBSD." No. No, they don't. First, most Sun admins never worked on FreeBSD if they have even heard of it, and even if the "translation is easy," most Sun admins know they have Sun to support them when things go terribly wrong. FreeBSD is all community-based, except for a few small unheard-of enterprises, and neither one looks like a good strategy when mentioning them to management.
- FreeBSD community is very RTFM. Fine. There is nothing wrong with that at all. Except when people don't have time to RTFM. Your server is borked, and you don't know why, and you don't have the luxury of scanning bulletin boards, dealing with mailing lists, and snide FreeBSD gurus who say, "Look, we can't do this FOR you," like they have read, "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" too many times.
The UNIX admins who forced FreeBSD on my company are gone. Most of them were considered foul-tempered and uncooperative zealots. Management had to go to the boards, and found much of the same reactions from the FreeBSD community. We had serious issues with these systems, and me and 2 other admins had to bail them out over the last year. Sure, we pay for Red Hat and Windows licenses, but FreeBSD gave us so much grief, that mentioning it to anyone is either done so as sarcastic humor or an insult:
Admin1: Hah! I totally fixed this. Admin2: What did you do? Admin1: Aw man, I don't have time to explain. Admin2: Heh. Don't FreeBSD me, document it! Share the love. Admin1: Ouch, man. Just was uncalled for. Admin3: What did he say? Admin1: He pulled the FreeBSD card on me. Admin3: Dude, not cool. That was harsh.
Again, I don't hate FreeBSD as a concept. I just know it's not right for the business environment.
I don't think spam will stop, or even slow down, until a spammer is seriously hurt or killed.
If that were true, drug running would have stopped LONG ago.
The Mafia? "Man, I could get hurt!"
"I stopped robbing houses after that one guy got shot by the owner. I mean, I thought they'd just accept the inevitable if I waved a gun at them, and now... I'm not so sure. To hell with my heroin addition, I'm gonna go straight before something awful happens to me! Community College, here I come!"
Money does funny things to a person. Even the promise of money does. Killing spammers would be like fighting the Hydra. A majority of spam is flash-in-the-pan, "Thought it would work," goofballs who have that one pipe dream of being the new Spam King, of which there ore only about a dozen or so that can live off the income comfortably. Consequence happens to other people, or they don't even think about it because they have no long-term strategies in life. Amway snatches up these people daily.
Sort of half right. It's expensive because the demand is higher than the supply. I mean, probably hyper-refined super-crystallized silicon dioxide is something we don't have, but the demand is nil, mostly because I made it up just now, but still... I doubt I could get much for it on Craig's List. But can you imagine a world where gold is as cheap as copper? We'd find tons more uses for it, not to mention have better, non-corroding electrical contacts and the like. Now, I haven't heard about gold on asteroids, but iron is still very valuable for industry. Think about what we could use it for in space! "We can't ship equipment up into space, costs to much!" they say now. How about BUILD those things in space? need a thick, gamma-ray reducing wall? Iron. It's everywhere, man. Most of the manufacturing could be done inside the asteroid, and eventually hollow it out, polish the outside, and used it for a huge space station when they are done and working on the next asteroids.
It's a valid point that if iron ore was suddenly plentiful, the price would drop, and some economies would be hard-hit, which is precisely why those countries should start thinking of ways to get in on that space-mining action now, because if they don't, someone else eventually will.
1. How will they know forged headers? "Yeah, I am Citibank. Sure. See? I come from citibank.com!" 2. What happens if you the spammer doesn't pay the bill? How will you charge, say, the Tawainese sites? 3. How will you keep the sender from charging the customer back, like say, ATM fees do?
A friend of mine once decided to do a movie review magazine. This was right before the Internet really took off (early 90s). He owned a small publishing company, wanted to expand, and he thought, "I watch a LOT of movies, I'll do reviews." He also knew about press releases, and made one for his new magazine. He also ran small science fiction conventions.
The free stuff from movie studios started as a trickle, but then began to pour in. It was the usual tripe; posters, teasers, key fobs, gimmicks, and the like. But soon, he started to get "previewers copies" of DVDs. You know, the ones with the scroll on the bottom that states this is a copy for reviewers, unauthorized duplication is illegal, blah blah blah...
The worst had to be when the movie "Blade" was coming out. One day, a truck came by his house and dropped of 16 huge boxes (like 3 x 3 x 4 foot boxes) of foam ninja-[novelty flying disks]*-like things. "What am I going to do with all these foam [novelty flying disks]?" Each one was the size of a large pie plate, and due to the ninja-star-like cutout, they didn't fly so much as wobble like a potato chip and land about 2 feet away from you.
At his convention, he only got rid of half a box.
Then, in a brilliant idea, he used them for attic insulation. To this day, if you go into his attic, half his insulation is pulled-apart red foam crumbles with the words "Blade" on some of them. I wonder what the next owner of the house will think?
So how many magazines did he publish? Two. Shortly after the magazine's debut, he decided to get out of the publishing business. And 12+ years later, he's still getting free stuff.
--------
*You may substitute "[novelty flying disks]" with a brand name that rhymes with "Grisby"
I also did something similar. It's quite possible this idea comes from simple parallel thought.
There was a kid in my high school biology class, a real asshole of a bully. He made NO attempt to hide he was cheating from me, sometimes even grabbing my paper. Having the teacher leave the class a lot didn't help much, either. Finally, I went to the teacher and asked if I could take the exam a day early after school, and explained why. He agreed, and we both suggested at the same time to stick it to this kid by giving completely wrong answers:
12Q: Name the chemical process where sunlight is used to turn CO2 into sugars a plant can use. 12A: Gasoline.
24Q: Osmosis is... 24A: Correct grammar for addressing a group of mosis.
26Q: A plant uses sugars for? 26A: To sweeten tea.
Two days later, the teacher called me up, and said he laughed until he cried: the kid copied all my horrible puns and completely wrong answers down to the letter. He was kicked out of the class for cheating (not his first offense, but the first time they had it documented) and had to retake it during the summer.
I don't know, 6 months in the IT industry isn't looked upon that badly as some may claim. Especially if the previous job was a long time. Now a strong of 3-6 months in the same area would look bad, although I had a friend who worked for 5 different companies with 6 different titles in 3 years... and stayed at the same desk.
I always like this.. A good locksmith would know how to pick the lock. A smart locksmith would have noticed that you leave your downstairs window unlocked.
As someone who used to cut keys for duplication, this is not really true. First, 90% of the door keys I cut were one of two blanks: sc1 (Schlage) or kw1 (Kwikset). While they were supposed to keep an eye on blank inventory (we sent back "bad cuts" for credit), that was unrealistic for the most common models; they ship you the keys by weight, not by number.
Next, I usually had the ID of the person I cut the keys for. I mean, we'd call them to tell them their new keys were ready, but the theory was that we kept this for law purposes (not sure if that was true, but that's what the corporation told us). All I had to do was cut one extra key, and hope that your address is the one the key goes to. After all, I'd know when you were out: I'd call you to come pick the keys up, tell my full timer I'd be right back...
Not that anyone I know at my store ever did that. But it seemed too easy. We didn't do background checks, either.
I thought all sarcasm was Open Source. You just keep improving and revising the phrase until it becomes bug-free:
v1. Have you ever heard of a spellchekcer? v2. That should me "spellchecker" ^^ v3. ^^ Obviously spellchecker's can't fix everything. v4. Neithe'r can' obssessiv'e apostrophes's ^ v4.1. That's why I use VI v4.2. Emacs said this ^^ doesn't need to be capitalized
Wait... that's not progress. Eh, then again, neither was X.org...
Why does this sound like some apocalyptic anime story in the making? Let's see:
- Young genius, probably never connected with peers his own age - Placed among adults he has no emotional bond to at a time when emotional bonds are essential to social growth - Plans on making futuristic machines - In an Asian backdrop
I used to have an SA job where I had my own office. I was very productive, and could lock the door and keep the lights off like I wasn't there during the times I had to really concentrate on programming and system admin stuff.
I prefered a closed office, or even one that doesn't have my back to everyone!
Then they moved us to an open cubicle system where my back faced the end of a long, well-traveled hallway. People bugged us constantly about every small little thing because we were "UNIX admins," and "must know about why my UPS is beeping." PHB's asked, "What's that mean?" and "Should that be red?" and "Let me see what you do, and comment on it as if I have done it better than you since the beginning of time," and my favorite, "Why do you do everything in a little black DOS window? Is this 1982? I mean, come on, use Windows!"
I quit that job, along with almost everyone else. Sadly, my new job also has open cubicles, but it's a much smaller company, and we don't get bothered NEARLY as much.
I am looking forward to trying this out. Slashdot alerted me to Slack fans, and I have been using it steadily in personal and professional environments for years now. I like LFS and Gentoo, just because I can tweak every living thing out of my hardware and software, but if I need a "quick set and forget" distro just to get a box running, Slackware is hard to beat.
I don't know why people claim the installation is so hard. I guess the disk partition thing might be intimidating, but then again, I have FDisk'd so many times because Windows/DOS had issues back in the day, I find the two-tone ncurses thing to be a positive boon!
A hearty congratulations to Pat and all the people who worked for this!
This is true. We caught a "boobytrap" that was commented just like that in VB6 code. The function call was commented like some code "Wizard" in VB6, with [paraphrased] "Standard Windsock routine, please check your installed helpfiles, copyright 1999 Microsoft," and so on. The function was called something like:
0pen_winsock
Yeah, with a zero. Real cool, hard to tell if it wasn't for a boneheaded mistake he made when he called it (functions can't start with a number... or something, it's been a while since I did VB6).
Re:Why FreeBSD is not good for most businesses
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Why FreeBSD
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· Score: 1
I don't expect your typical Sun or AIX guy to automatically zone in on "hey, maybe I ought to respond to a FreeBSD ad".
FreeBSD wasn't even mentioned until the interview. In fact, when I interviewed, I was asked, "have you ever heard of FreeBSD?" with a grimace like I was going to go, "WTF? FreeBZ whatis?" The fact I said, "Which build, the 4.x line or the newer 5.x line?" made them go, "WOW! WE FOUND ONE!" They asked if I could work with FreeBSD and convert it to Red Hat. I told them, I could, but why the change? That's when I heard the long story.
Different installer, different packages, different startup scripts and so different configurations.
From 2.1 to 3.0? Really? How so? I have used both for a while, and I'd say 4.0 is much more different, if anything, due to the chrooted options, SELinux, an change to xorg.
Oh, and the whole "which desktop is our favorite" dance.
Ahhh... you do have a point there. But we only use them as servers. X isn't even installed on anything we have, since they all run headless. And FreeBSD may not have as many desktop choices at Linux, but I like choices. Desktop sucks for both Linux AND FreeBSD, IMHO.
most of my problems with RHES have been due to having to go find packages for software that's a higher "level" on RHN on various "we're not Red Hat we just package the same stuff" sites.
Really? I have rarely had such a problem. Sometimes there's not an RPM when we need it, but that's just a configure and a "make all && make install" away...
My experience with corporate support of Linux has been similar to my experience with corporate support of Windows.
My point exactly. Both offer support. Both are answerable to customer pressure.
paying for more support.
But that's my point! We GET support! Support we vote for with our money. We can call Red Hat, call HP, get a live guy, and go, "What the heck is wrong with your HBA support an the 2.6 kernel?" You can't get that with FreeBSD.
Re:Why FreeBSD is not good for most businesses
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Why FreeBSD
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· Score: 1
Just in case you're wondering which was the knock-out punch wherein you pummelled yourself senseless, it's here:
[...]
This confused you? Hint: it's one or the other. Better hint:
And if YOU are wondering why FreeBSD isn't taken serious by corporations, it's unprofessionally arrogant self-congratulating phrases like that that make it look like the OS of the whiny nerd that intimidate the management. When my boss wanted to see if there were any drivers for some card, or some software that would do what he wanted, he ran into people like you who acted as if his question was annoying at best. Why are so many BSD fanatics like this? Gaah... I feel bad, because you honestly don't know how this looks to newbies. You look like bullies. And BSD isn't even a bad setup. I love OpenBSD, for instance. pf is an awesome firewall, and I MUCH prefer it to IPTables.
But I wasn't looking for solutions; it's over. FreeBSD had a chance at our company. FreeBSD reigned the day with two very skilled admins who made it dance through hoops of fire. FreeBSD might be a King among Operating Systems, but we wouldn't know because it's a game of the "cool clique" through the support forums. Keep in mind, my company did want to know some bash command, or how to format a boot floppy. They had books, they knew the simple stuff. But they wanted some serious answers to some difficult problems, and what little answers they could find might as well been delivered by Nick Burns, Your Company's Computer Guy. Us nerdly types can deal with that, hell I am used to abuse in the OpenBSD arena, but you want non-tech types to swallow their crisis and submit before the knowledge masters? Hell no. They want a corporation that can hold blame, that knows how to cater to the needs of a professional workplace. They want a platform with a broad appeal so they can find an employee who knows it without carrying a torch down rarely traveled dungeon passageways. Red Hat has that. Red Hat's brilliance is not that Red Hat Linux is the best Linux distro out there, it knows how to sell and support to corporations.
Whither FreeBSD's responsibility when the new motherboards your company just got won't let it run in SMP mode? Gotta wait for the community to develop a patch. Ooh... the patch didn't work with the bus AND the fiber card. It's a known bug, but since very few people have this problem... not many people are working on it. Now explain to the boss why you are past your deadline to replace the aging mail servers.
Management is so happy FreeBSD, which has been a bane of their existence, is leaving. Hell, they love Microsoft over FreeBSD at this point.
Re:Why FreeBSD is not good for most businesses
on
Why FreeBSD
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· Score: 1
That was a mistake. They should have earched for someone with mainstream UNIX experience. Anyone who's familiar with any commercial UNIX... Solaris, AIX, HPUX, whatever... will find FreeBSD a familiar environment.
Really? That's funny. None of them answered ads on Dice or Careerbuilder. Keep in mind, these guys were searching for a replacement for over a year. Their professional colleagues were unable to provide any help, and all suggested Linux. And if it's really that simple, how come hardware vendor support is so lacking?
I've used Red Hat versions since 2.1. Every major version has had a completely different structure.
A "completely different structure?" Please cite examples. To be honest, I have been using Red Hat steadily since 6.1, and while I agree they have been some major changes since then, I would say your broad statement needs to be clarified from 2.1. I find almost a 90% similarity between Redhat 9.0 and Redhat ES 3.0 from an administration level.
Keep in mind that FreeBSD may actually be a better solution technically than Linux, but when it comes to corporate support... FreeBSD doesn't have an "anchor company" like Linux does with Redhat, Novell, or even IBM and Sun (such as they are).
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My first on call job I had programming call centers for a major company. My basic job was manning the hotline during the weekday from 6am-3pm, doing tickets, and whatnot. The rest was being on call which was shared for a week between 5 people. Every week, there was one primary, and one alternate. The primary from the following week was the alternate for the next week, and so on. It came out that you were only on call 2 out of 5 weeks, and that was fine.
Until the politics came into play.
After about a year, one person "graduated" to a new position where he wouldn't have to be on call. Another person left the company, and was never really replaced. So now I was on call 2/3 weeks. In theory. The other two people were very lazy. One of them was some Orthodox religious person who seemed to have major holidays and festivals about twice a month where she could not be on call and she'd "trade weeks" with one of us, but never really did more than say she'd take "next week, for sure." The other was a kind of a nightclub-hopping single "ladies man" who dressed sharp and partied hard. Even when he was on call, he couldn't hear the pager or would take hours to reply.
My boss just rolled over, because she was afraid they'd pull some EOE stint, and she was sort of passing the time until she left on maternity leave. So I was unofficially "on call" 24x7 for about half a year. I got paged about 2-3 times a night, on average, with jobs that went from a 5-10 minute fix to some that lasted many hours. I got no extra pay, and when review time came around, I got a 3% raise. I was making about a third of the wages of someone else in my position, so she pulled the "well, you're not perfect enough for industry standard" card. My response was to quit.
For up to a year afterward, I still got a few calls a month from the former clients, vendors, and business partners. Most knew I didn't work there anymore, but, "Pleeeeeaaaaase, can you fix this? No one is answering the pages!" No.
In other jobs, I was compensated with unofficial "comp time," and sometimes a cash bonus as a kind of "thanks for covering our ass." Comp time works like, "You worked all night fixing that?" Pfft, don't come in tomorrow, or "I am adding an extra vacation day you can use in any way you see fit later."
From my journal:
I think my thoughts of the differences were polarized on my trip through JFK back home from Sweden. It was late, and TSA was mostly unoccupied. As we approached the ribbon ropes that separated the non-existent lines, I saw a gang of urban youths, krunk, bling-bling, and all. Their baggy basketball jerseys and low pants flowed with their movements as they laughed and cackled among each other with exaggerated movements typical among boisterous youth. I wondered what they were doing near TSA, and figured they must be traveling somewhere. I passed them, and headed down towards TSA, thinking that this was something I saw badly imitated on EuroMTV. "Yo!" one of them said. I almost ignored the loud female voice, because experience taught me that you just don't turn around in reply to their taunts lest you get the crap beaten out of your suburban ass. "Ey! You goin' some whea?" said the voice. As the gang parted, I saw a short woman in a TSA uniform. "Ah need to see yo' tickets and passpo'ts!" I didn't see this woman with her friends. I wanted to say, "Sorry, I didn't see your short ass among these Michael Jordan wannbes, and you mind not shouting at this unprofessional gathering of your friends that follow you to work? That is wack." But I fumbled for the passports and boarding passes while the other youth towered around me, giggling. That's right. I don't feel safe in America. I had forgotten this. "A'ight," she said, "you go to the man over dea. You got a laptop?" Instinctively, instead of saying yes, I said, "I'll remove all electronic devices as instructed by the sign." That made the youth giggle some more, as one of them imitated me under his breath. "A'ight... g'wan, deyn." She said. A few steps away, they all broke into laughter.
The TSA guy, who looked like someone had pissed on his whole life, and the fact I owned one of them "laptop things rich folk have" was unfair, rapidly ripped it open badly, breaking the faceplate of the disk drive into two pieces. Nice. He put the pieces of the faceplate back in the laptop like that was par for course, closed the screen onto them, and tossed it back down the rollers to he could sit down and get back to his miserable rest break or something. Great. This is why I brought the old one, but I thought *I* would do the damage on this trip by dropping it or something. The laptop is fine, except for the faceplate, which is a minor cosmetic issue, but that whole event snapped me back into why I am so tense all the time. Most of America is very unfriendly and many of the people in "service jobs" act like things are unfair and someone owes them something. This shit did not happen to me in Heathrow, and it certainly did not happen to me in Arlanda. Man, no wonder we're losing tourists. You know how many forms a non-US citizen has to fill out now just to get through passport control? And they fingerprint foreign people, too. Both index fingers. Damn. "Welcome to America... we're watching you, don't do anything funny! Is that fruit? HEY! Your foreign ass been to a farm or handled farm tools? Bitch, I be speakin' to you! SPEAK ENGLISH!!!"
We have started using CentOS as well in a primarily Red Hat environment. Before, we'd use Fedora, but we kept running into issues where the packages would be outdated too quickly, and then when Fedora-Legacy went away, that was a big problem! I mean, half our stuff was still on Fedora Core 2 because it was the last of the 2.4.x kernel, and ran parallel to the Red Hat EL 3. CentOS had matured by then, and we had looked at a lot of alternatives (PieBox, WhiteHat, etc). CentOS was great for those boxes where we were testing stuff, but didn't want to pay an RH license because we didn't need the support. Do we still use Red Hat? You bet. Nothing beats the service, support, and the RHN updates. I wish CentOS had an RHN-like feature, but I guess I'll have to build one or see if someone already did. But RH is used for valuable production systems and CentOS is used for everything else.
I also worked for a group that declined to hire one guy for similar reasons, although that wasn't the only one. We noticed he had an AOL address, and on a hunch, we looked up hometwon.aol.com/hisusername. And were shocked. I mean, the web page was horrible to begin with, style wise, and had a sort of a gansta-meets-renn-fest theme ("Wenches and bitches, welcome to my m'lord's sweet dungeon!"). Judging from his wealth of photos, we estimated he graduated high school not more than three years ago, so his experience and college accreditations, as well as his age were a slight bit off. He was not a guy who had graduated from some college last year, but apparently lived with his mom after high school and decided to go into the IT world because, "Dat's where tha money is! Werd!"
Then we found the photo section. While most of them were him and his friends "frontin' for the wenches of White Castle, yo," there was an alarming set of him and his friends peeing on various objects on our fine city: light poles, phone booths, newspaper stands, museum steps. It was like a photo journal of things they could pee on, along with commentary of what happened. Including a homeless guy. "Hahaha, he never woke up, neither! Doh!"
He declined to hire him because he actually didn't pass basic tech questions, but it was so hard to look this guy square in the eye after seeing those pictures. I didn't know whether to laugh at hit or hit him. You really couldn't tell because he had cleaned up well with a shirt and tie, but it was definitely the same guy.
I worked for a HUGE multinational ISP once. We had just gotten France hooked up and they had been running fairly well for about six months after two years of testing. About 100k customers used the service.
... a 386 LCD laptop. The machine had died because the logs had filled up the 1.2 gb hard drive. We couldn't believe it until someone rebooted the damn thing, and DNS came back up. We had been running production DNS on this thing for over 2 years.
One day, DNS went down. This had happened in the UK a lot, so we barked up the wrong tree for hours thinking it was a Keyring issue over the Transatlantic connection. Nope. Hours later, we found the DNS for France was on a different subnet. This led to discovering that their DNS service was on a set of IPs that pointed to one MAC. Finally, the people in charge of the data center said, "That's not our subnet. I don't know where you are getting DNS from.
We traced back and back through routers, entering territory that got scarier and scarier. It went to an older building that were were in the process of closing down and selling. It also had a data center, but that room had been dark for months, and DNS had been working up until now. Back and back we went.
Finally we found that the trace went through a disused subnet through a former office LAN in that building. This traced it back to an office, which traced it back to...
Turns out that when the French network architecture was being set up, they had to transfer DNS somewhere temporarily as part of a testbed, so some guy had an old laptop in his office he just hooked up. Then he was laid off before we went live. Nobody ever switched it back, and since the office space was being abandoned, no one every went into the office to turn anything off, figuring it was somebody else's problem.
A week later, French DNS was running on a production server.
I am impressed it lasted that long on such a platform.
We also used to run the flight schedules for Lufthansa. It was a Windows NT 3.5.1 system that was running on a 486, and was running some proprietary terminal service and scheduler. It crashed once every 31 days (there was some bug where it would crash after xxxx hours which was between 30-31 days). The only way to fix it was to hard reboot the box, and the directions were scary: "Go down to the older server room, and find an unlabeled shelf next to the first door near the panic switch. On the bottom of that shelf is a box which is behind a stack of old 10base hubs. Hold down the power button until the green light goes off. You may have to lie on the floor on your stomach to reach the button. Count to ten, power back on. Make sure the amber light labeled 'turbo' is lit on bootup. If not, repeat, but wait 60 seconds before powering back up."
I sure hope they got that fixed, it was last like that in 2000.
Just to give you an idea, I am one of the admins for a small ISP near Washington DC. We get over 20 million emails a month, and only 1-3% of that is legit mail. We have six, SIX Dual XEON 3.0 ghz servers that do nothing but tag spam. They run at very high loads with Exim, SpamAssassin, and ClamAV, processing up to several dozen e-mails a second at their peak. We use voting, whitelisting, blacklisting, RBLs, and some other stuff we keep secret. Once the mail has been "scrubbed," it gets passed on to the real mail server, a measly 2.2ghz box that handles everything. A little spam still gets through, but part of that is we have rules in SA that favor the user's choice (which helps a lot against false positives). Some complain, but the mail's been tagged, and we have instruction on how to fine tune it at their end based on what we tag.
But do you know how much that costs us in hardware, power, and infrastructure? And right now, we realize this won't be enough by the end of 2008. We only had three tagging systems in 2004.
Now let's talk about the other end: letting spammers out. We don't condone spamming at all, but we do have customers that get hacked. Notably a large school of, let's say "religious persuasion." Their IT staff, which consists mostly of student and adult volunteers in a school that does not have any sort of computer educational tract, gets hacked a lot. It's a stray laptop, or someone downloads a file onto a Windows box that will give them a Holy Screen Saver of Antioch or whatever. And this is one of BILLIONS of situations like this, whether it be an office, a school, or an IP pool of a European DSL company. Companies with great admins are a small, small minority of what can be hacked out there.
I have seen machines of seemingly weak hardware send out thousands of e-mails a second. It's mind boggling. And it will clog and kill our outgoing mail. Rate limiting? It auto-adapts to fill the network pipe. It spreads, it breeds, it attacks anything it thinks will break it. DNS is the first to go. It probes and pokes every IP in the subnet to see if there's an internal relay, or another machine it can infect. Within seconds, everyone's affected in some way; usually by network slowness. Many of these multi-task. They sent the virus or Trojan to everyone on their address book. They search for AIM or MSN. They look for e-mails in the web cache. These are basic logic "if then" tests the software can make. A second-year programmer at college could design this kind of program easily.
The only option is to block their IP.
Admins get paged, because the attacks usually happen during off business hours because, well, they know staff will be lower and slower to respond. People's weekends are ruined, children's birthday parties have to go without a parent for a while because some asshat in The Pluperfect of Godfuckistan wants to sell 40 bajillion people Vy-ag-rah or penny stocks or whatever. He may get a handful of buyers, but what does he care? He didn't really pay anything. In many cases, they get nothing, but such is the world of crime. A greedy sucker born every minute. Besides, the world owes him, right?
I used to work for AOL. In 2001, I watched the guy in charge of our e-mail go rabid and foam at the mouth at the volume of spam AOL had to filter. He slammed his fists on the lectern and all but declared war on them. We had graphs near our NOC that showed e-mail volume in the millions per day. Every few weeks, there'd be a 40-60% drop in the graph, and a circle that showed where a new filter was put into place. And the chart would still climb and recover. The spammers got faster and faster. They got better and more adaptive. What used to take them months to get around now took weeks. Then days. Then hours.
I see so many ideas come out that seem revolutionary. First it was whitelists and blacklists. Then IP spoofing got around that. Then it was Bayesian. Then spammers filled their e-mails with nonsense. Then it was SpamAssass
> one good staff member with a couple hours free time
Be careful. I work in an environment that was full of those kinds of things. Almost none of the admins or programmers stuck to any standards, naming schemes, or left any documentation. Most didn't even speak to one another. Thus, when I came onboard, I had to deal with a statistics collection system in multiple pieces in several different languages; many at the same time (a bash script that ran Perl scripts AND some compiled C modules on Cygwin on a Windows 2000 box). Comments in the code? Hah!
One of the first things the new admins did was consolidate and document.
As some one who has spent the last year fixing up the systems the FreeBSD admins left behind, I feel qualified is stating that FreeBSD is a terrible business-level operating system. When I started at my company, a bunch of previous admins replaced many core pieces of infrastructure with FreeBSD. One of my core requirements when I got hired was to get them onto Red Hat Enterprise, and part of the reason they threw a lot of money at me was I knew both systems, and I could easily take stuff from a FreeBSD environment.
First, and I must say this, I don't "hate" FreeBSD. Life is too short to argue which operating system is the best overall (I still cringe that I did this sort of fanaticism with Atari and Amiga back in the day, and learned a valuable lesson about what really matters). FreeBSD is a great, tweakable, DIY hobbyist OS done for those who tinker with those sorts of things (which is how I learned it). But FreeBSD in the business enterprise is like hiring a bunch of guys who work out of their basement to do your IT work: may be good in some instances, but is a poor long-term strategy.
Why? Here are some of the problems:
- Hardware support. This is my #1 problem. You want FreeBSD to run on some of those new HP DL380 G4's with the dual Xeons? Oops... sorry. The special scsi blade won't run well with them when you need RAID5. But wait, there's a guy in the Netherlands who has a driver that sort of works... but his website hasn't been updated since 2002, and it's still considered alpha, and compiling it with the specialized kernel breaks...
- Software support. Almost neck and neck with #1. Let's leave out the scant vendors that support the BSD kernel, because FreeBSD fanatics always go, "Oh yeah... what about XXXX...?" For every example that some major vendor that supports FreeBSD that some gives me, I can give you ten examples of companies that don't. And those that do always patch or update their FreeBSD as an afterthought. "New FooPack 3.00 has been released! BSD? Um... yeah, in our FTP site the 1.24 version may still work, but it's EOL and unsupported." Then the stuff about ports is stupid. I don't want to keep my ports tree up-to-date and then have to recompile all the time.
- Finding anyone who knows about BSD is rare. Too rare. Last time I said this, some snide person commented that, "Well any person who worked on Sun systems should know FreeBSD." No. No, they don't. First, most Sun admins never worked on FreeBSD if they have even heard of it, and even if the "translation is easy," most Sun admins know they have Sun to support them when things go terribly wrong. FreeBSD is all community-based, except for a few small unheard-of enterprises, and neither one looks like a good strategy when mentioning them to management.
- FreeBSD community is very RTFM. Fine. There is nothing wrong with that at all. Except when people don't have time to RTFM. Your server is borked, and you don't know why, and you don't have the luxury of scanning bulletin boards, dealing with mailing lists, and snide FreeBSD gurus who say, "Look, we can't do this FOR you," like they have read, "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" too many times.
The UNIX admins who forced FreeBSD on my company are gone. Most of them were considered foul-tempered and uncooperative zealots. Management had to go to the boards, and found much of the same reactions from the FreeBSD community. We had serious issues with these systems, and me and 2 other admins had to bail them out over the last year. Sure, we pay for Red Hat and Windows licenses, but FreeBSD gave us so much grief, that mentioning it to anyone is either done so as sarcastic humor or an insult:
Admin1: Hah! I totally fixed this.
Admin2: What did you do?
Admin1: Aw man, I don't have time to explain.
Admin2: Heh. Don't FreeBSD me, document it! Share the love.
Admin1: Ouch, man. Just was uncalled for.
Admin3: What did he say?
Admin1: He pulled the FreeBSD card on me.
Admin3: Dude, not cool. That was harsh.
Again, I don't hate FreeBSD as a concept. I just know it's not right for the business environment.
If that were true, drug running would have stopped LONG ago.
The Mafia? "Man, I could get hurt!"
"I stopped robbing houses after that one guy got shot by the owner. I mean, I thought they'd just accept the inevitable if I waved a gun at them, and now... I'm not so sure. To hell with my heroin addition, I'm gonna go straight before something awful happens to me! Community College, here I come!"
Money does funny things to a person. Even the promise of money does. Killing spammers would be like fighting the Hydra. A majority of spam is flash-in-the-pan, "Thought it would work," goofballs who have that one pipe dream of being the new Spam King, of which there ore only about a dozen or so that can live off the income comfortably. Consequence happens to other people, or they don't even think about it because they have no long-term strategies in life. Amway snatches up these people daily.
Sort of half right. It's expensive because the demand is higher than the supply. I mean, probably hyper-refined super-crystallized silicon dioxide is something we don't have, but the demand is nil, mostly because I made it up just now, but still... I doubt I could get much for it on Craig's List. But can you imagine a world where gold is as cheap as copper? We'd find tons more uses for it, not to mention have better, non-corroding electrical contacts and the like. Now, I haven't heard about gold on asteroids, but iron is still very valuable for industry. Think about what we could use it for in space! "We can't ship equipment up into space, costs to much!" they say now. How about BUILD those things in space? need a thick, gamma-ray reducing wall? Iron. It's everywhere, man. Most of the manufacturing could be done inside the asteroid, and eventually hollow it out, polish the outside, and used it for a huge space station when they are done and working on the next asteroids.
It's a valid point that if iron ore was suddenly plentiful, the price would drop, and some economies would be hard-hit, which is precisely why those countries should start thinking of ways to get in on that space-mining action now, because if they don't, someone else eventually will.
1. How will they know forged headers? "Yeah, I am Citibank. Sure. See? I come from citibank.com!"
2. What happens if you the spammer doesn't pay the bill? How will you charge, say, the Tawainese sites?
3. How will you keep the sender from charging the customer back, like say, ATM fees do?
This is all a bad bad idea.
A man once asked me, "What if I train my employees and they leave?" So I asked, "What if you do NOT train them, and they stay?"
The free stuff from movie studios started as a trickle, but then began to pour in. It was the usual tripe; posters, teasers, key fobs, gimmicks, and the like. But soon, he started to get "previewers copies" of DVDs. You know, the ones with the scroll on the bottom that states this is a copy for reviewers, unauthorized duplication is illegal, blah blah blah...
The worst had to be when the movie "Blade" was coming out. One day, a truck came by his house and dropped of 16 huge boxes (like 3 x 3 x 4 foot boxes) of foam ninja-[novelty flying disks]*-like things. "What am I going to do with all these foam [novelty flying disks]?" Each one was the size of a large pie plate, and due to the ninja-star-like cutout, they didn't fly so much as wobble like a potato chip and land about 2 feet away from you.
At his convention, he only got rid of half a box.
Then, in a brilliant idea, he used them for attic insulation. To this day, if you go into his attic, half his insulation is pulled-apart red foam crumbles with the words "Blade" on some of them. I wonder what the next owner of the house will think?
So how many magazines did he publish? Two. Shortly after the magazine's debut, he decided to get out of the publishing business. And 12+ years later, he's still getting free stuff.
--------
*You may substitute "[novelty flying disks]" with a brand name that rhymes with "Grisby"
I also did something similar. It's quite possible this idea comes from simple parallel thought.
There was a kid in my high school biology class, a real asshole of a bully. He made NO attempt to hide he was cheating from me, sometimes even grabbing my paper. Having the teacher leave the class a lot didn't help much, either. Finally, I went to the teacher and asked if I could take the exam a day early after school, and explained why. He agreed, and we both suggested at the same time to stick it to this kid by giving completely wrong answers:
12Q: Name the chemical process where sunlight is used to turn CO2 into sugars a plant can use.
12A: Gasoline.
24Q: Osmosis is...
24A: Correct grammar for addressing a group of mosis.
26Q: A plant uses sugars for?
26A: To sweeten tea.
Two days later, the teacher called me up, and said he laughed until he cried: the kid copied all my horrible puns and completely wrong answers down to the letter. He was kicked out of the class for cheating (not his first offense, but the first time they had it documented) and had to retake it during the summer.
I don't know, 6 months in the IT industry isn't looked upon that badly as some may claim. Especially if the previous job was a long time. Now a strong of 3-6 months in the same area would look bad, although I had a friend who worked for 5 different companies with 6 different titles in 3 years... and stayed at the same desk.
As someone who used to cut keys for duplication, this is not really true. First, 90% of the door keys I cut were one of two blanks: sc1 (Schlage) or kw1 (Kwikset). While they were supposed to keep an eye on blank inventory (we sent back "bad cuts" for credit), that was unrealistic for the most common models; they ship you the keys by weight, not by number.
Next, I usually had the ID of the person I cut the keys for. I mean, we'd call them to tell them their new keys were ready, but the theory was that we kept this for law purposes (not sure if that was true, but that's what the corporation told us). All I had to do was cut one extra key, and hope that your address is the one the key goes to. After all, I'd know when you were out: I'd call you to come pick the keys up, tell my full timer I'd be right back...
Not that anyone I know at my store ever did that. But it seemed too easy. We didn't do background checks, either.
I thought all sarcasm was Open Source. You just keep improving and revising the phrase until it becomes bug-free:
v1. Have you ever heard of a spellchekcer?
v2. That should me "spellchecker" ^^
v3. ^^ Obviously spellchecker's can't fix everything.
v4. Neithe'r can' obssessiv'e apostrophes's ^
v4.1. That's why I use VI
v4.2. Emacs said this ^^ doesn't need to be capitalized
Wait... that's not progress. Eh, then again, neither was X.org...
[ducks]
Why does this sound like some apocalyptic anime story in the making? Let's see:
- Young genius, probably never connected with peers his own age
- Placed among adults he has no emotional bond to at a time when emotional bonds are essential to social growth
- Plans on making futuristic machines
- In an Asian backdrop
TETSUOOOOOO!!!!
I used to have an SA job where I had my own office. I was very productive, and could lock the door and keep the lights off like I wasn't there during the times I had to really concentrate on programming and system admin stuff.
I prefered a closed office, or even one that doesn't have my back to everyone!
Then they moved us to an open cubicle system where my back faced the end of a long, well-traveled hallway. People bugged us constantly about every small little thing because we were "UNIX admins," and "must know about why my UPS is beeping." PHB's asked, "What's that mean?" and "Should that be red?" and "Let me see what you do, and comment on it as if I have done it better than you since the beginning of time," and my favorite, "Why do you do everything in a little black DOS window? Is this 1982? I mean, come on, use Windows!"
I quit that job, along with almost everyone else. Sadly, my new job also has open cubicles, but it's a much smaller company, and we don't get bothered NEARLY as much.
Slackware has 28 distros based on it (29 if you include the new PocketLinux), some of which are trying to be "Enterprise Level."
I don't know why people claim the installation is so hard. I guess the disk partition thing might be intimidating, but then again, I have FDisk'd so many times because Windows/DOS had issues back in the day, I find the two-tone ncurses thing to be a positive boon!
A hearty congratulations to Pat and all the people who worked for this!
0pen_winsock
Yeah, with a zero. Real cool, hard to tell if it wasn't for a boneheaded mistake he made when he called it (functions can't start with a number... or something, it's been a while since I did VB6).
FreeBSD wasn't even mentioned until the interview. In fact, when I interviewed, I was asked, "have you ever heard of FreeBSD?" with a grimace like I was going to go, "WTF? FreeBZ whatis?" The fact I said, "Which build, the 4.x line or the newer 5.x line?" made them go, "WOW! WE FOUND ONE!" They asked if I could work with FreeBSD and convert it to Red Hat. I told them, I could, but why the change? That's when I heard the long story.
Different installer, different packages, different startup scripts and so different configurations.
From 2.1 to 3.0? Really? How so? I have used both for a while, and I'd say 4.0 is much more different, if anything, due to the chrooted options, SELinux, an change to xorg.
Oh, and the whole "which desktop is our favorite" dance.
Ahhh... you do have a point there. But we only use them as servers. X isn't even installed on anything we have, since they all run headless. And FreeBSD may not have as many desktop choices at Linux, but I like choices. Desktop sucks for both Linux AND FreeBSD, IMHO.
most of my problems with RHES have been due to having to go find packages for software that's a higher "level" on RHN on various "we're not Red Hat we just package the same stuff" sites.
Really? I have rarely had such a problem. Sometimes there's not an RPM when we need it, but that's just a configure and a "make all && make install" away...
My experience with corporate support of Linux has been similar to my experience with corporate support of Windows.
My point exactly. Both offer support. Both are answerable to customer pressure.
paying for more support.
But that's my point! We GET support! Support we vote for with our money. We can call Red Hat, call HP, get a live guy, and go, "What the heck is wrong with your HBA support an the 2.6 kernel?" You can't get that with FreeBSD.
[...]
This confused you? Hint: it's one or the other. Better hint:
And if YOU are wondering why FreeBSD isn't taken serious by corporations, it's unprofessionally arrogant self-congratulating phrases like that that make it look like the OS of the whiny nerd that intimidate the management. When my boss wanted to see if there were any drivers for some card, or some software that would do what he wanted, he ran into people like you who acted as if his question was annoying at best. Why are so many BSD fanatics like this? Gaah... I feel bad, because you honestly don't know how this looks to newbies. You look like bullies. And BSD isn't even a bad setup. I love OpenBSD, for instance. pf is an awesome firewall, and I MUCH prefer it to IPTables.
But I wasn't looking for solutions; it's over. FreeBSD had a chance at our company. FreeBSD reigned the day with two very skilled admins who made it dance through hoops of fire. FreeBSD might be a King among Operating Systems, but we wouldn't know because it's a game of the "cool clique" through the support forums. Keep in mind, my company did want to know some bash command, or how to format a boot floppy. They had books, they knew the simple stuff. But they wanted some serious answers to some difficult problems, and what little answers they could find might as well been delivered by Nick Burns, Your Company's Computer Guy. Us nerdly types can deal with that, hell I am used to abuse in the OpenBSD arena, but you want non-tech types to swallow their crisis and submit before the knowledge masters? Hell no. They want a corporation that can hold blame, that knows how to cater to the needs of a professional workplace. They want a platform with a broad appeal so they can find an employee who knows it without carrying a torch down rarely traveled dungeon passageways. Red Hat has that. Red Hat's brilliance is not that Red Hat Linux is the best Linux distro out there, it knows how to sell and support to corporations.
Whither FreeBSD's responsibility when the new motherboards your company just got won't let it run in SMP mode? Gotta wait for the community to develop a patch. Ooh... the patch didn't work with the bus AND the fiber card. It's a known bug, but since very few people have this problem... not many people are working on it. Now explain to the boss why you are past your deadline to replace the aging mail servers.
Management is so happy FreeBSD, which has been a bane of their existence, is leaving. Hell, they love Microsoft over FreeBSD at this point.
Really? That's funny. None of them answered ads on Dice or Careerbuilder. Keep in mind, these guys were searching for a replacement for over a year. Their professional colleagues were unable to provide any help, and all suggested Linux. And if it's really that simple, how come hardware vendor support is so lacking?
I've used Red Hat versions since 2.1. Every major version has had a completely different structure.
A "completely different structure?" Please cite examples. To be honest, I have been using Red Hat steadily since 6.1, and while I agree they have been some major changes since then, I would say your broad statement needs to be clarified from 2.1. I find almost a 90% similarity between Redhat 9.0 and Redhat ES 3.0 from an administration level.
Keep in mind that FreeBSD may actually be a better solution technically than Linux, but when it comes to corporate support... FreeBSD doesn't have an "anchor company" like Linux does with Redhat, Novell, or even IBM and Sun (such as they are).