Hi. We're SCO. We don't believe in the GPL, but we include a host of GPL'd applications in our version of UNIX that no one other than those already using it (and those are just trying to move away from it) want.
How to get fired: recommend software from a vendor who's source is closed and may not be around in the near future. No... I don't mean Microsoft. I mean SCO.
The only thing necessary for Micro$oft to triumph is for a few good programmers to do nothing". North County Computers
So go software RAID and save the $300 on the controllers.
The reason people are "so obsessive about hardware RAID controllers" is the performance. A hardware RAID controller has its own CPU dedicated to just processing bits. Sure... it adds a new dimension to troubleshooting, but it also offers performance benefits. Plus, hardware controllers often have alarms to beep when there's a failure... something you don't get with a software RAID... and very nice when you have a server room. Many h/w RAID cards also have email and phone home capabilities to alert you of failures. Software RAIDs are good... don't get me wrong, but they tax resources by putting the striping into the OS. Linux and Solaris handle this better than Windows, but its still noticeable. In the same way that SCSI disks *feel* faster than IDE's... and even SATA's *feel* faster than IDE's, an h/w RAID feels faster than a software RAID. Try a test... install Win2K Server onto two identical systems... one with 2 IDE drives on an IDE RAID controller and one with those same 2 disks in a software mirror under Windows. Then copy about 4Gb of data between them. The overall I/O of the system with the h/w RAID controller will be lower and it will take less time to copy the data. Further, if you choose to multitask and maybe write a Wordpad doc at the same time, the h/w RAID system will *feel* even faster. Part of the problem with the Windows Task Manager is that it only shows RAM and CPU. The true test of load is overall load which includes disk I/O.
Both EMC and NetApp offer rack-mount type systems with 1 to 16 IDE or SATA drives and they all support 160GB to 250Gb drives (but neither haver certified the 300's yet). Its not a server case... more of a SAN/NAS type case and run the individual providers software, but they're all I know of. I haven't yet found a case that can handle 10 or more drives. I've managed to put 6 SATAs into a huge case with a 600watt power supply, but even if you could fit 10 drives in a case, the power supply would be your main restriction, especially when you consider you'd still want your CD/DVD drive and possiby a floppy. Plus, if you use SATA or SCSI, you'll want some better cooling. By the time you add up the power req's of the drives and cooling, you need 2x600watt power supplies or something similar...
I have two servers with 6 each of 200Gb SATA drives. There are 2 drives per Adaptec, RAID capable SATA controller, so three Adaptec controllers total. One server has a RAID 5 of all 6 drives which yields just under 1TB of storage. The other is setup as JBOD and yields just under 1.2Tb of total storage.
More recently I've purchased 500Mb and 1TB LaCie Big Disk and Bigger Disk storage devices. They work extremely well and have almost no latency for their size. I use them for testing things and have been quite impressed. In one scenario I had them connected via firewire 800 controllers to separate 1U servers running RH Linux and Oracle 10G with DRDB sync'ing them as a test cluster scenario. In another case, I had three of the 500Mb ones connected via USB 2 to a Windows 2003 server and a software RAID 5 setup in Windows (Windows can RAID any number of disks of similiar architecture... ie: multiple IDE, multiple SATA, multiple USB, multiple firewire, etc.).
Presently, I have a 1TB LaCie Bigger disk connected via a PCMCIA Firewire 800 card to my laptop and two 500Mb LaCie Big Disks in a s/w RAID 1 connected to my file server and used for disk to disk backup.
As for the 10+ disks you asked about, I haven't tried anything of that size since I haven't found a server case that can take that number of drives with standard power supplies. The most I have is the 6 SATA drives in a tall tower with a 600Watt power supply, but these also need cooling.
Of course, cost usually becomes an issue. The LaCie 1TB Bigger Disk is only $1100.00 if you shop around. The smaller 500MB Big Disk's are closer to $500.00. Compare this to the "buck a gig" pricing for SATA drives and 4 x 250Gb SATA drives will cost you right around $1000.00, but after formatting you get less. Plus, for a RAID, you need another drive, so for approx 1TB you need 5x250GB SATA = $1250.00 plus the case, high end power supply, etc. The LaCie drives end up being more disk for the buck if you don't mind external storage.
Nothing like those last ditch efforts to try and save a case. One can only hope that the SCO case doesn't play out like the O.J. Simpson case. Everyone knew he was guilty. He knew it. His lawyers knew it. The African-American US population knew it. Yet he was freed. In similar regard, we (the IT, developers, etc) all know SCO is full of their own crud. Linus knows it, I know it, you all know it. But heaven forbid they actually win.
I've searched all over, but can't find the news articles from 2001 that covered Michael Robertson paying $10,000 to buy Lindows.com from some guy. Let's see... $2,000,000.00 / $10,000.00 = 200% ROI. That pour guy is definitely kicking himself in the seat today.
Of course, as already commented, many more are wishing they could kick Mr. Robertson in the rear since the terms "Windows" is once again available for M$ to claim as a trademark. Sadly, I thought Mr. Robertson and Lindows... errr, I mean Linspire actually had the money to take it through the court system and put a smack down on Redmond. But in the end, money always wins over moral conviction and the next guy with "...indows" or perhaps even "...dows" in his domain name can get trampled by the M$ lobbying machine and won't have the money to fight back. After all, we all know that M$ is willing to face bad PR to pursue their interests.
Apparently you aren't familiar with Dev-QA-Prod env's. We only have 3 office servers for our 30+ users. But our production cluster has 8 systems, the QA env for it has 4 and the dev env has 3. And the others are made up of network devices such as load balancers, routers, and firewalls... each of which there is a pair for redundancy.
Sarcasm only works when you know what you're talking about.:)
My DSL bill is high cause I get Speakeasy 6mb/768 ADSL. If I went with standard SBC or other DSL of 768/128, etc I'd have a heck of a time uploading anything.
My cell phone base is only about $80/month for the most minutes with National coverage. I use more than that, so end up with a $300/month cellular bill. Plus, my users call my cell even when I'm in the building, but don't happen to be at my desk.
For cellular internet, I get unlimited, but it costs $80/month instead of $20/month cause I get cellular broadband... not the wireless-at-the-speed-of-dialup crap. In certain areas (which I'm usually in) I can get 2mb both ways. The rest of the time I get speeds closer to 3x a dial-up.
And for paging, I pay more for satellite based paging so that I can get two-way paging/emails even when I don't have cellular coverage. And I get unlimited messages to boot which I need for the occasion that my monitoring software goes haywire and I get 1000+ pages in a 30 minute timeframe.
We don't all have to be tightwads and to be a good, always enabled remote IT person, I have to pay more for the better service offerings. But at least company pays for/re-imburses the majority.
I said "1-man IT shop" dumbass... not "1-man company". Learn to read. And to answer your other question, its "insightful" because it provides a direct answer to the original poster's question of "What sort of experiences do the rest of slashdotters have along these lines?". I have experience along these lines and I stated as much.
Perhaps you'd enjoy relating to the other inbreds oft mentioned over at The Darwin Awards
-3 Flamebait Mod... but heck, we only have so much patience. Sometimes the dumbnuts that post without reading deserve a good flaming...
Its informative in that my home DSL at $50/month and my cellular internet access at $80/month are paid for by my company... well at least my cellular access is. My DSL is only half paid for. Its a direct answer to the poster's question of: "What sort of experiences do the rest of slashdotters have along these lines?"
I have DSL at home ($50/month), a pager ($20/month), a cell phone (+/- $80/month), and cellular internet ($80/month). My company pays for my pager, my cellular internet (gets internet access via PCMCIA anywhere I get a cell signal), half my DSL, and half my cell bill. I'm also a 1-man IT shop supporting 30+ users and 20+ servers including clusters, so even on vacation, I have to be available and reachable. Of course, we're not hurting for money either.
The "we" was a very generic one. I don't actually write code, so I couldn't care less if I see MS source code. But the reality is that there are some exceptional coders out there. Heck, many of the reverse engineering wares (Samba, for example) are better than the original. I don't know that any Linux programmers would want to fix MS code. Heck, if MS wanted to go down that road, that could *leak* it themselves (maybe through BayStar to SCO to UnixWare) just to entrap Linux developers and finally snuff out Linux. Its the VB and C# guys that would probably want the code... and some large companies that would like to be better able to modify things for internal use.
"What will happen when low-cost labor in China is combined with Microsoft technologies?"
Isn't it obvious? If overpaid MS developers produce nothing but crap and clones of other people's ideas... WordPerfect -> Word Lotus 123 -> Excel Netscape -> IE RedHat 8+ default firewall -> XP SP2 ... then underpaid ones are just gonna make worse crap. Perhaps instead of the BSOD, we can have the Blue Screen of Kanji.
And of course, no one's addressed the problem of what will happen with MS China gets filtered by the Communists. Then again, this could be a good thing. With China being ranked right up there with Russia in regards to software piracy, perhaps we'll end up with some more MS source code and we can start fixing what MS apparently can't.;)
Project Looking Glass appears to be one of the best things to come out of Sun since Java. And opening it up to more Linux support is the only way its going to get to a stable release anytime soon. I've been looking forward to a beta of it for some time now. I think its one of those things that will make Linux on the desktop "as kewl as OS X" instead of just a Windows replacement. But with Sun's wishy-washy Linux/GPL embracings, open-sourcing it is the only way it will take off. At least this is likely to mean CVS build alphas/betas soon. I can only hope that its Window Manager agnostic since their demo of it was Gnome based. Hopefully opensourcing it will make equally powerful for Gnome and KDE. Then again, if its Gnome only, I might actually switch from KDE.:)
So if the "algorithms detect" large curves, then the satellite will zoom in on the nearest topless French beach? Talk about a new dimension to porn... instead of streaming porn over the internet, now we stream it off the satellites themselves and what we see is sort of the Voyeur Dorm of space. Gotta luv technology advancements...:)
Nope. I use a basic Fedora Core 2 system with the latest, greatest OpenOffice, Mozilla, and GAIM. No old dependencies for me. And the company I work for is only 5 years old... so no old crap to consider there either. And if they get some... I'll stick it on a terminal server and not worry about the desktop compatibility.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Thank gawd I just installed XP SP2. I get the BSOD every five minutes now, but at least I know I'm protected from the latest viruses and spam.
I am protected, right? I mean... all the hype about SP2 means I won't get anymore popups, spam, or viruses, right?
-2 Flamebait, -3 Offtopic, +5 Funny... net result = 0... just like my checkbook after I got married.
The only thing necessary for Micro$oft to triumph is for a few good programmers to do nothing". North County Computers
If horseshit was seen growing legs by an evolutionist, they'd name the new species Darl.
:P
-5 Flamebait, but you can't hurt my karma
The only thing necessary for Micro$oft to triumph is for a few good programmers to do nothing". North County Computers
Hi. We're SCO. We don't believe in the GPL, but we include a host of GPL'd applications in our version of UNIX that no one other than those already using it (and those are just trying to move away from it) want.
How to get fired: recommend software from a vendor who's source is closed and may not be around in the near future. No... I don't mean Microsoft. I mean SCO.
The only thing necessary for Micro$oft to triumph is for a few good programmers to do nothing". North County Computers
I just installed it and now my I'm getting the BSOD. Dang it! I went to Linux to get rid of the !@#$ BSOD!
Oh, nevermind... my bad. That was just my screensaver and someone unplugged my mouse.
The only thing necessary for Micro$oft to triumph is for a few good programmers to do nothing". North County Computers
So go software RAID and save the $300 on the controllers.
The reason people are "so obsessive about hardware RAID controllers" is the performance. A hardware RAID controller has its own CPU dedicated to just processing bits. Sure... it adds a new dimension to troubleshooting, but it also offers performance benefits. Plus, hardware controllers often have alarms to beep when there's a failure... something you don't get with a software RAID... and very nice when you have a server room. Many h/w RAID cards also have email and phone home capabilities to alert you of failures. Software RAIDs are good... don't get me wrong, but they tax resources by putting the striping into the OS. Linux and Solaris handle this better than Windows, but its still noticeable. In the same way that SCSI disks *feel* faster than IDE's... and even SATA's *feel* faster than IDE's, an h/w RAID feels faster than a software RAID. Try a test... install Win2K Server onto two identical systems... one with 2 IDE drives on an IDE RAID controller and one with those same 2 disks in a software mirror under Windows. Then copy about 4Gb of data between them. The overall I/O of the system with the h/w RAID controller will be lower and it will take less time to copy the data. Further, if you choose to multitask and maybe write a Wordpad doc at the same time, the h/w RAID system will *feel* even faster. Part of the problem with the Windows Task Manager is that it only shows RAM and CPU. The true test of load is overall load which includes disk I/O.
1 tower, 6x250Gb SATA, 3 Adaptec SATA RAID controllers, RAID5 + 1 HS, running Linux and accessible by any OS.
+/- 1TB = $1600.00 + labor
compare to 1TB Apple Xserve @ $5399 for academic pricing and do the math.
Both EMC and NetApp offer rack-mount type systems with 1 to 16 IDE or SATA drives and they all support 160GB to 250Gb drives (but neither haver certified the 300's yet). Its not a server case... more of a SAN/NAS type case and run the individual providers software, but they're all I know of. I haven't yet found a case that can handle 10 or more drives. I've managed to put 6 SATAs into a huge case with a 600watt power supply, but even if you could fit 10 drives in a case, the power supply would be your main restriction, especially when you consider you'd still want your CD/DVD drive and possiby a floppy. Plus, if you use SATA or SCSI, you'll want some better cooling. By the time you add up the power req's of the drives and cooling, you need 2x600watt power supplies or something similar...
I have two servers with 6 each of 200Gb SATA drives. There are 2 drives per Adaptec, RAID capable SATA controller, so three Adaptec controllers total. One server has a RAID 5 of all 6 drives which yields just under 1TB of storage. The other is setup as JBOD and yields just under 1.2Tb of total storage.
More recently I've purchased 500Mb and 1TB LaCie Big Disk and Bigger Disk storage devices. They work extremely well and have almost no latency for their size. I use them for testing things and have been quite impressed. In one scenario I had them connected via firewire 800 controllers to separate 1U servers running RH Linux and Oracle 10G with DRDB sync'ing them as a test cluster scenario. In another case, I had three of the 500Mb ones connected via USB 2 to a Windows 2003 server and a software RAID 5 setup in Windows (Windows can RAID any number of disks of similiar architecture... ie: multiple IDE, multiple SATA, multiple USB, multiple firewire, etc.).
Presently, I have a 1TB LaCie Bigger disk connected via a PCMCIA Firewire 800 card to my laptop and two 500Mb LaCie Big Disks in a s/w RAID 1 connected to my file server and used for disk to disk backup.
As for the 10+ disks you asked about, I haven't tried anything of that size since I haven't found a server case that can take that number of drives with standard power supplies. The most I have is the 6 SATA drives in a tall tower with a 600Watt power supply, but these also need cooling.
Of course, cost usually becomes an issue. The LaCie 1TB Bigger Disk is only $1100.00 if you shop around. The smaller 500MB Big Disk's are closer to $500.00. Compare this to the "buck a gig" pricing for SATA drives and 4 x 250Gb SATA drives will cost you right around $1000.00, but after formatting you get less. Plus, for a RAID, you need another drive, so for approx 1TB you need 5x250GB SATA = $1250.00 plus the case, high end power supply, etc. The LaCie drives end up being more disk for the buck if you don't mind external storage.
Nothing like those last ditch efforts to try and save a case. One can only hope that the SCO case doesn't play out like the O.J. Simpson case. Everyone knew he was guilty. He knew it. His lawyers knew it. The African-American US population knew it. Yet he was freed. In similar regard, we (the IT, developers, etc) all know SCO is full of their own crud. Linus knows it, I know it, you all know it. But heaven forbid they actually win.
I have a bad habit of multitasking, so I often take my laptop to the crapper, and /. is by far the site I read the most.
Now, perhaps I could use my laptop on the crapper on a submarine under an ice shelf in the Antartic?
Duh... thanks. Got my decimal points screwed up with the commas. :)
I've searched all over, but can't find the news articles from 2001 that covered Michael Robertson paying $10,000 to buy Lindows.com from some guy. Let's see... $2,000,000.00 / $10,000.00 = 200% ROI. That pour guy is definitely kicking himself in the seat today.
Of course, as already commented, many more are wishing they could kick Mr. Robertson in the rear since the terms "Windows" is once again available for M$ to claim as a trademark. Sadly, I thought Mr. Robertson and Lindows... errr, I mean Linspire actually had the money to take it through the court system and put a smack down on Redmond. But in the end, money always wins over moral conviction and the next guy with "...indows" or perhaps even "...dows" in his domain name can get trampled by the M$ lobbying machine and won't have the money to fight back. After all, we all know that M$ is willing to face bad PR to pursue their interests.
Apparently you aren't familiar with Dev-QA-Prod env's. We only have 3 office servers for our 30+ users. But our production cluster has 8 systems, the QA env for it has 4 and the dev env has 3. And the others are made up of network devices such as load balancers, routers, and firewalls... each of which there is a pair for redundancy.
:)
Sarcasm only works when you know what you're talking about.
Sure can... for sucky service on all of those.
My DSL bill is high cause I get Speakeasy 6mb/768 ADSL. If I went with standard SBC or other DSL of 768/128, etc I'd have a heck of a time uploading anything.
My cell phone base is only about $80/month for the most minutes with National coverage. I use more than that, so end up with a $300/month cellular bill. Plus, my users call my cell even when I'm in the building, but don't happen to be at my desk.
For cellular internet, I get unlimited, but it costs $80/month instead of $20/month cause I get cellular broadband... not the wireless-at-the-speed-of-dialup crap. In certain areas (which I'm usually in) I can get 2mb both ways. The rest of the time I get speeds closer to 3x a dial-up.
And for paging, I pay more for satellite based paging so that I can get two-way paging/emails even when I don't have cellular coverage. And I get unlimited messages to boot which I need for the occasion that my monitoring software goes haywire and I get 1000+ pages in a 30 minute timeframe.
We don't all have to be tightwads and to be a good, always enabled remote IT person, I have to pay more for the better service offerings. But at least company pays for/re-imburses the majority.
I said "1-man IT shop" dumbass... not "1-man company". Learn to read. And to answer your other question, its "insightful" because it provides a direct answer to the original poster's question of "What sort of experiences do the rest of slashdotters have along these lines?". I have experience along these lines and I stated as much.
Perhaps you'd enjoy relating to the other inbreds oft mentioned over at The Darwin Awards
-3 Flamebait Mod... but heck, we only have so much patience. Sometimes the dumbnuts that post without reading deserve a good flaming...
Thanks for the clarification to the idiot that thought I was a one-man company... perhaps he should read better before he replies.
:)
And no, I don't own the company. I just support its IT needs.
Its informative in that my home DSL at $50/month and my cellular internet access at $80/month are paid for by my company... well at least my cellular access is. My DSL is only half paid for. Its a direct answer to the poster's question of: "What sort of experiences do the rest of slashdotters have along these lines?"
I have DSL at home ($50/month), a pager ($20/month), a cell phone (+/- $80/month), and cellular internet ($80/month). My company pays for my pager, my cellular internet (gets internet access via PCMCIA anywhere I get a cell signal), half my DSL, and half my cell bill. I'm also a 1-man IT shop supporting 30+ users and 20+ servers including clusters, so even on vacation, I have to be available and reachable. Of course, we're not hurting for money either.
How ironic... this gets posted just as finished reading Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols article on dumping IE after seeing a link to it on NewsForge.
The "we" was a very generic one. I don't actually write code, so I couldn't care less if I see MS source code. But the reality is that there are some exceptional coders out there. Heck, many of the reverse engineering wares (Samba, for example) are better than the original. I don't know that any Linux programmers would want to fix MS code. Heck, if MS wanted to go down that road, that could *leak* it themselves (maybe through BayStar to SCO to UnixWare) just to entrap Linux developers and finally snuff out Linux. Its the VB and C# guys that would probably want the code... and some large companies that would like to be better able to modify things for internal use.
"What will happen when low-cost labor in China is combined with Microsoft technologies?"
;)
Isn't it obvious? If overpaid MS developers produce nothing but crap and clones of other people's ideas...
WordPerfect -> Word
Lotus 123 -> Excel
Netscape -> IE
RedHat 8+ default firewall -> XP SP2
... then underpaid ones are just gonna make worse crap. Perhaps instead of the BSOD, we can have the Blue Screen of Kanji.
And of course, no one's addressed the problem of what will happen with MS China gets filtered by the Communists. Then again, this could be a good thing. With China being ranked right up there with Russia in regards to software piracy, perhaps we'll end up with some more MS source code and we can start fixing what MS apparently can't.
Project Looking Glass appears to be one of the best things to come out of Sun since Java. And opening it up to more Linux support is the only way its going to get to a stable release anytime soon. I've been looking forward to a beta of it for some time now. I think its one of those things that will make Linux on the desktop "as kewl as OS X" instead of just a Windows replacement. But with Sun's wishy-washy Linux/GPL embracings, open-sourcing it is the only way it will take off. At least this is likely to mean CVS build alphas/betas soon. I can only hope that its Window Manager agnostic since their demo of it was Gnome based. Hopefully opensourcing it will make equally powerful for Gnome and KDE. Then again, if its Gnome only, I might actually switch from KDE. :)
My Windows Real Player can play DVDs... so does this mean that RH and Suse (Novell) can now soon ship with DVD player support? I certainly hope so...
So if the "algorithms detect" large curves, then the satellite will zoom in on the nearest topless French beach? Talk about a new dimension to porn... instead of streaming porn over the internet, now we stream it off the satellites themselves and what we see is sort of the Voyeur Dorm of space. Gotta luv technology advancements... :)
Nope. I use a basic Fedora Core 2 system with the latest, greatest OpenOffice, Mozilla, and GAIM. No old dependencies for me. And the company I work for is only 5 years old... so no old crap to consider there either. And if they get some... I'll stick it on a terminal server and not worry about the desktop compatibility. :)