Okay, I know, I know - - I'm the soft-hearted liberal who still thinks government does some good and stops some evil. Anyway, with such lousy marks coming out, why don't some of the Slashdot geniuses who are not yet employed go into consulting, get some security contracts, and make some dough while improving things for all of western society?
Just a thought . . ..
On the other hand, we could just go on talking about how lousy the government is in every aspect and wait for the whole thing to implode like a cow patty.
Incomprehensible to me, given the physical nature of network administration. But every IT culture is unique, I suppose. I think, though, quite seriously, that when one looks at the Open Source community approach to development, it bolsters my argument. When was the last time you saw a community approach to network administration? Code, on the other hand, moves so easily and quickly through the ether. You have to be there to run a network, remote access notwithstanding.
I realize that Mr. Sharp was writing with a touch of satire, but as one who manages both developers and admins, I must respectfully ask whose duties are most easily shipped offshore.
Look, I'm a managing engineer myself, and all this reverence for developers is romanticized at best. If you can find a good tech/engineer who can keep today's RAD-slop running in a heterogeneous server OS environment, you'd better treat him/her well. If the developer gets petulant, all you have to say is, "Son, I can outsource you in one hour." The people who have the real knowledge of IT infrastrucure are the front-line admins. Any developer with credentials (IIT?) can pick up where your coder left off, but what are you going to do when the team that did everything from setting up your routers to creating backup schemas to designing WAN failover and balancing tells you to kiss ass? I've watched "imported" admins take days just to get a reasonably accurate schematic together for networks of a few hundred people. Your engineers make it all work. Don't piss them off. Live with it.;>)
Heh heh - - I pushed it to around 160 on a generic VLB mainboard and thought I was in heaven. I've built more systems for myself, friends, family, and work than I can remember, and every one has been built on AMD. CPU related stability issues have never - - and I do mean NEVER - - been a problem. My years of system building have convinced me that, when stability is a problem, you should eliminate drivers, physical connections, adapter cards, and mainboard components in that order. I know bad CPUs do surface occasionally, but I think that most people get themselves in trouble through pushing voltages/clock cycles and not compensating with good cooling.
I hate seeing money wasted, and the Intel name to me has the same connotations as "BMW" - - it's more about hype than bang-for-buck.
"And since exchange is rampant in Corporate email servers, the spam problem is not going away. Most of the paper tigers out there running the exchange servers haven't got a clue on how to lock down a system."
I really have to wonder - - do you, or does anyone else here, really KNOW most of the people who run Exchange servers? Open Source folk as a population are as prone to speaking in meaningless generalizations as anyone else.
I don't think I'm all that rare insofar as I've been a *nix fan since the 80's, but I still have to take care of some Microsoft servers. I don't claim to be, nor do I aspire to be, fully knowledgeable on all MS products, Exchange included. But when there's work to be done, I do know how to use TechNet. And, funny thing, the procedure I follow for researching and solving problems in MS is pretty much the same as I follow when working in Linux.
It gets old hearing people say things like, "Most people who run Microsoft networks are missing a chromosome and got their training at a Jack-in-the-Box in Missoula." Personally, I think ALL of the people who make these generalizations run the risk of being put to shame by some Unix dude who happens to have an MCSE. Show me a guy who has run a mixed-breed network, virus- and hack-free for years at a time, and I'll take him before a Linux purist any day of the week.
In Zen philosophy, there are teachings concerning "big mind, small mind," and "big me, small me." "Bigness" is the experience of realizing what we are relative to all that surrounds us. While one might think s/he is very small compared to all that exists, in reality, every person is another expression of the universe, just as an orange is an expression of the tree, the ground it is rooted in, and so on. We are all part of the whole and, as such, are infinite in any dimension that matters. "Smallness" is the experience of thinking that we are each singular - - that we matter most as individual packages of thoughts feelings, and so on. It seems that the desire to have a blog, a personal web page, etc., is an expression of "small mind" and "small me." Our tiny individual thoughts and experiences seem comical when vented through such things as web pages, don't they? Why do we spend so much time hoping that others might share in our smallness?
. . . is the shrill tone of the FUD emitted by Microsoft's flunkies. If we in the Open Source world were sharks, we'd be tasting blood in the water and gathering for a feeding frenzy right about now. And maybe we are. It's getting serious, folks. Much more so than I might have thought would be the case at this point. Great things are happening - - assuming you're not a Microsoft lap puppy. Let the ass whooping begin (or continue, I guess).
"That's right - if it gets hacked anyone that has EVER logged in as postmaster to that box is a suspect, great fun for contractors."
True, but finding a rootkit on your Postfix box is every bit as scary.
"The complex and time consuming process required to recover backed up mail without disrupting the current mailboxes puts it beyond the means of any nefarious folk that don't have a spare server or are prepared to shell out for another Exchange licence."
With Veritas Backup-Exec, the Exchange module enables online backups of the information store as well as online backups and single-message restorations of mailboxes. It works very well.
"To make Exchange work well in a corporate environment, you also need third party software - like a virus scanning front end to Exchange and fax to mail software."
True, but we all know it costs money to build and maintain networks.
"As one example I worked with one person who kept the companies customer contact list (for a company with 100+ employees) in an Outlook mailbox on her LAPTOP hard drive - It didn't exist in any other form (not even a backup)."
Dangerously ignorant people exist on every platform, Exchange and otherwise. There is no such thing as "foolproof," but, alas, there is abundant evidence of foolishness.
"A migration away from exchange will be painful to the users (but so will the removal of Bonzai Buddy from the machines of some users), and keeping it is painful for the sysadmins, and often makes them look incompetant when it breaks or doesn't come up in the mornings.
Even more painful, from an exec's point of view, is the cost of retraining. That kind of pain in a network of hundreds or thousands of users must be carefully considered. Maybe that's why Morgan-Stanley, with tens of thousands of brokers worldwide, has made a rather public move to *nix, but continues to utilize Exchange.
I really don't think Exchange is about to die any time soon. The real-world reports about OpenExchange don't make for encouraging reading if you're an Exchange admin hoping to depart from the MS platform. In my work, I take care of only two mail systems, but I call in consultants for, well, consulting from time to time. And I'm hearing that there are LOTS of folks who are doing just fine with Exchange 5.5, Outlook 2000, and NT4. The thing is, once you've spent the bucks for the add-ons that make Exchange reasonably secure, the thing runs pretty darned well. I, for one, have not had a hack or viral outbreak in four years, and I stay off the open relay lists with no problem.
Many, like me, are saying, hey, let's just keep the hardware maintained - - rotate those drives, replace the power supplies - - and we'll see in another 12-24 months what's out there. But, right now, there is NOTHING that can do what Exchange/Outlook can do. Believe me, I'd know - - I try everything I can get my hands on.
I think you're absolutely correct on all counts. At one point in my investigation of alternatives - - I'm a Linux guy from about 1995, by the way - - I built a Postfix/LDAP/Squirrelmail testbed on a little test network. We invited managers to play with the system, using Outlook, Outlook Express, Netscape Communicator, and the Squirrelmail interface. While some people seemed intrigued by the Open Source concept - - meaning they were amazed that all this cost essentially nothing to put together - - no one saw this as a replacement for Exchange/Outlook for even a moment. The free/busy scheduler and various aspects of contact management were the things people wanted to know about right up front.
In the end, the CEO and I came away feeling that Open Source offers many good solutions, but nothing that would meet the expectations of our users. On the upside of things, though, we have used the Postfix/Squirrelmail solution in other, less demanding areas of our operation, and it plays an important role in our disaster recovery plan.
From an administrator's point of view, it is refreshing to see an analysis of OSS alternatives that does not gloss over the difficulties of migrating away from the Outlook/Exchange groupware architecture. Too many "analyses" by OSS advocates seem to say, 'Oh, go ahead and give this cobbled-together approach a shot - - you'll work things out one way or another.' If it is your responsibility to guide executive decision making where your company's groupware product is concerned, you know that this is one place where a misstep could easily cost you your job. As much as I would like to look at something like Kroupware or OpenExchange, this report bears out my own investigations - - there's nothing in the Open Source world yet that can take the place of a well-managed Outlook/Exchange infrastructure. This is the crown jewel of the Microsoft monopoly, and they guard it well. When OSS can provide a confidence-inspiring mailbox mass-migration tool and a back end that fully supports Outlook, that's the day you can sell your Microsoft stock.
You lily-livered patch posies make me shiver. What ever happened to the days of the frontier, the wild west, and discovery? Show me a guy who can get by on NT4 out of the box and I'll show you a man who can weather any storm. THAT'S what I think about patching.
Well, that's what I'd think if I had time to think. Anyone else having trouble getting into Windows Update???
I wouldn't say that MySQL is ready to replace something on the order of Cache or Oracle. But PostGres replacing MS SQL? Perhaps. And I'll take MySQL over MS Access any day. I am amazed at how many "enterprise" applications run from an Access back end - - we have a couple of these ourselves, and paid relatively big bucks for them. I kid you not. So, in my view, replacing Cache with MySQL makes about as much sense as buying corporate apps that query Access databases. One does have to use some judgment.
I recently attended a technology conference with my CEO. We're a typical medium-sized company, running one mainframe (VMS), some IBM stuff, and quite a few Windows servers. We're in the financial services industry.
My CEO has known for a long time that I'm an Open Source advocate, and he expresses interest in getting away from Microsoft. He enjoys seeing what I can do with Linux and older hardware that would otherwise be mothballed, and he even consented to purchasing Redhat ES 2.1 at full fare recently. He has been amazed at the uptimes achieved on "worn out" servers running various flavors of Linux.
At the conference, our core processing company briefly touched on Open Source software and the remote possibility that they might, one day, port their software to, say, Linux. At lunch that day, I listened closely as various CEO's, CIO's, and other higher-ups discussed this possibility. Overall, I am sad to say that the overwhelming reaction was one of disbelief and/or fear. I saw clearly that Linux is still considered by many, if not most executives, to be unproven and unsupported technology. The same people who speak disparagingly of the Microsoft monopoly and the high cost of proprietary software still would rather pay ransom than go into uncharted waters. Those having a more technical understanding were quick to point out that Linux still does not scale as true enterprise-OSes are expected to. These people expressed the view that, while such Open Source software as Linux and MySQL were "interesting" and "have potential," no one was remotely interested in seeing their core software ported to a non-proprietary operating system.
I came away feeling a little depressed, but I resolved to continue, one server at a time, showing my CEO what Linux, Apache, PHP, Open Office, etc., can do and ARE already doing. Those of us who advise executives MUST continue with this kind of approach if we want to see better software running on our core servers.
. . . a group of boys who play "execs" by wearing stick-on grey sideburns, wearing wraparound sunglasses and receiving simulated oral gratification in the back of a "limousine" (modified BigWheel) from hopeful recording artists.
I'm fairly confident that if I choose to name my child "Spiderman," no one can do anything about it legally. I do not believe it is possible to protect personal names under U.S. copyright or trademark law - - only the commercial use of names in association with a product or service. I do side with you with regard to the widespread, frivolous use of the courts by corporate entities to intimidate people who are not breaking the law. It needs to be curbed, but the old maxim holds fast in court: money talks, and B.S. walks.
Heh heh - - sounds like a Sociology 10 termpaper premise.
Of course, there are plenty of people and cultures who make an effort to avoid what westerners think of as "entertainment." And one can wager confidently that the entertainment industry and the courts are not deeply concerned about consumers' need to socialize.
Slashdot Mirror
Bingo.
Okay, I know, I know - - I'm the soft-hearted liberal who still thinks government does some good and stops some evil. Anyway, with such lousy marks coming out, why don't some of the Slashdot geniuses who are not yet employed go into consulting, get some security contracts, and make some dough while improving things for all of western society?
Just a thought . . .
On the other hand, we could just go on talking about how lousy the government is in every aspect and wait for the whole thing to implode like a cow patty.
Ah, I see your point. But how feasible is that approach for those who already have substantial investment in the physical plant?
Incomprehensible to me, given the physical nature of network administration. But every IT culture is unique, I suppose. I think, though, quite seriously, that when one looks at the Open Source community approach to development, it bolsters my argument. When was the last time you saw a community approach to network administration? Code, on the other hand, moves so easily and quickly through the ether. You have to be there to run a network, remote access notwithstanding.
I realize that Mr. Sharp was writing with a touch of satire, but as one who manages both developers and admins, I must respectfully ask whose duties are most easily shipped offshore.
Look, I'm a managing engineer myself, and all this reverence for developers is romanticized at best. If you can find a good tech/engineer who can keep today's RAD-slop running in a heterogeneous server OS environment, you'd better treat him/her well. If the developer gets petulant, all you have to say is, "Son, I can outsource you in one hour." The people who have the real knowledge of IT infrastrucure are the front-line admins. Any developer with credentials (IIT?) can pick up where your coder left off, but what are you going to do when the team that did everything from setting up your routers to creating backup schemas to designing WAN failover and balancing tells you to kiss ass? I've watched "imported" admins take days just to get a reasonably accurate schematic together for networks of a few hundred people. Your engineers make it all work. Don't piss them off. Live with it.
Heh heh - - I pushed it to around 160 on a generic VLB mainboard and thought I was in heaven. I've built more systems for myself, friends, family, and work than I can remember, and every one has been built on AMD. CPU related stability issues have never - - and I do mean NEVER - - been a problem. My years of system building have convinced me that, when stability is a problem, you should eliminate drivers, physical connections, adapter cards, and mainboard components in that order. I know bad CPUs do surface occasionally, but I think that most people get themselves in trouble through pushing voltages/clock cycles and not compensating with good cooling.
I hate seeing money wasted, and the Intel name to me has the same connotations as "BMW" - - it's more about hype than bang-for-buck.
"And since exchange is rampant in Corporate email servers, the spam problem is not going away. Most of the paper tigers out there running the exchange servers haven't got a clue on how to lock down a system."
I really have to wonder - - do you, or does anyone else here, really KNOW most of the people who run Exchange servers? Open Source folk as a population are as prone to speaking in meaningless generalizations as anyone else.
I don't think I'm all that rare insofar as I've been a *nix fan since the 80's, but I still have to take care of some Microsoft servers. I don't claim to be, nor do I aspire to be, fully knowledgeable on all MS products, Exchange included. But when there's work to be done, I do know how to use TechNet. And, funny thing, the procedure I follow for researching and solving problems in MS is pretty much the same as I follow when working in Linux.
It gets old hearing people say things like, "Most people who run Microsoft networks are missing a chromosome and got their training at a Jack-in-the-Box in Missoula." Personally, I think ALL of the people who make these generalizations run the risk of being put to shame by some Unix dude who happens to have an MCSE. Show me a guy who has run a mixed-breed network, virus- and hack-free for years at a time, and I'll take him before a Linux purist any day of the week.
In Zen philosophy, there are teachings concerning "big mind, small mind," and "big me, small me." "Bigness" is the experience of realizing what we are relative to all that surrounds us. While one might think s/he is very small compared to all that exists, in reality, every person is another expression of the universe, just as an orange is an expression of the tree, the ground it is rooted in, and so on. We are all part of the whole and, as such, are infinite in any dimension that matters. "Smallness" is the experience of thinking that we are each singular - - that we matter most as individual packages of thoughts feelings, and so on. It seems that the desire to have a blog, a personal web page, etc., is an expression of "small mind" and "small me." Our tiny individual thoughts and experiences seem comical when vented through such things as web pages, don't they? Why do we spend so much time hoping that others might share in our smallness?
. . . is the shrill tone of the FUD emitted by Microsoft's flunkies. If we in the Open Source world were sharks, we'd be tasting blood in the water and gathering for a feeding frenzy right about now. And maybe we are. It's getting serious, folks. Much more so than I might have thought would be the case at this point. Great things are happening - - assuming you're not a Microsoft lap puppy. Let the ass whooping begin (or continue, I guess).
"Blue Gene/L, the first member of the family, will contain 65,000 processors and 16 trillion bytes of memory."
But does it support SATA RAID5?
I'll address a few of your points:
"That's right - if it gets hacked anyone that has EVER logged in as postmaster to that box is a suspect, great fun for contractors."
True, but finding a rootkit on your Postfix box is every bit as scary.
"The complex and time consuming process required to recover backed up mail without disrupting the current mailboxes puts it beyond the means of any nefarious folk that don't have a spare server or are prepared to shell out for another Exchange licence."
With Veritas Backup-Exec, the Exchange module enables online backups of the information store as well as online backups and single-message restorations of mailboxes. It works very well.
"To make Exchange work well in a corporate environment, you also need third party software - like a virus scanning front end to Exchange and fax to mail software."
True, but we all know it costs money to build and maintain networks.
"As one example I worked with one person who kept the companies customer contact list (for a company with 100+ employees) in an Outlook mailbox on her LAPTOP hard drive - It didn't exist in any other form (not even a backup)."
Dangerously ignorant people exist on every platform, Exchange and otherwise. There is no such thing as "foolproof," but, alas, there is abundant evidence of foolishness.
"A migration away from exchange will be painful to the users (but so will the removal of Bonzai Buddy from the machines of some users), and keeping it is painful for the sysadmins, and often makes them look incompetant when it breaks or doesn't come up in the mornings.
Even more painful, from an exec's point of view, is the cost of retraining. That kind of pain in a network of hundreds or thousands of users must be carefully considered. Maybe that's why Morgan-Stanley, with tens of thousands of brokers worldwide, has made a rather public move to *nix, but continues to utilize Exchange.
I really don't think Exchange is about to die any time soon. The real-world reports about OpenExchange don't make for encouraging reading if you're an Exchange admin hoping to depart from the MS platform. In my work, I take care of only two mail systems, but I call in consultants for, well, consulting from time to time. And I'm hearing that there are LOTS of folks who are doing just fine with Exchange 5.5, Outlook 2000, and NT4. The thing is, once you've spent the bucks for the add-ons that make Exchange reasonably secure, the thing runs pretty darned well. I, for one, have not had a hack or viral outbreak in four years, and I stay off the open relay lists with no problem.
Many, like me, are saying, hey, let's just keep the hardware maintained - - rotate those drives, replace the power supplies - - and we'll see in another 12-24 months what's out there. But, right now, there is NOTHING that can do what Exchange/Outlook can do. Believe me, I'd know - - I try everything I can get my hands on.
I think you're absolutely correct on all counts. At one point in my investigation of alternatives - - I'm a Linux guy from about 1995, by the way - - I built a Postfix/LDAP/Squirrelmail testbed on a little test network. We invited managers to play with the system, using Outlook, Outlook Express, Netscape Communicator, and the Squirrelmail interface. While some people seemed intrigued by the Open Source concept - - meaning they were amazed that all this cost essentially nothing to put together - - no one saw this as a replacement for Exchange/Outlook for even a moment. The free/busy scheduler and various aspects of contact management were the things people wanted to know about right up front.
In the end, the CEO and I came away feeling that Open Source offers many good solutions, but nothing that would meet the expectations of our users. On the upside of things, though, we have used the Postfix/Squirrelmail solution in other, less demanding areas of our operation, and it plays an important role in our disaster recovery plan.
From an administrator's point of view, it is refreshing to see an analysis of OSS alternatives that does not gloss over the difficulties of migrating away from the Outlook/Exchange groupware architecture. Too many "analyses" by OSS advocates seem to say, 'Oh, go ahead and give this cobbled-together approach a shot - - you'll work things out one way or another.' If it is your responsibility to guide executive decision making where your company's groupware product is concerned, you know that this is one place where a misstep could easily cost you your job. As much as I would like to look at something like Kroupware or OpenExchange, this report bears out my own investigations - - there's nothing in the Open Source world yet that can take the place of a well-managed Outlook/Exchange infrastructure. This is the crown jewel of the Microsoft monopoly, and they guard it well. When OSS can provide a confidence-inspiring mailbox mass-migration tool and a back end that fully supports Outlook, that's the day you can sell your Microsoft stock.
Heh. So much for "objective and unbiased." But as a SuSE fan, I do understand.
I mean, damn - - life is so short. Sandwiching hard drives between aluminum plates?
You lily-livered patch posies make me shiver. What ever happened to the days of the frontier, the wild west, and discovery? Show me a guy who can get by on NT4 out of the box and I'll show you a man who can weather any storm. THAT'S what I think about patching.
Well, that's what I'd think if I had time to think. Anyone else having trouble getting into Windows Update???
For God's sake, man - - how does it look to have a rocket scientist who can't spell "tongue" correctly? : )
I wouldn't say that MySQL is ready to replace something on the order of Cache or Oracle. But PostGres replacing MS SQL? Perhaps. And I'll take MySQL over MS Access any day. I am amazed at how many "enterprise" applications run from an Access back end - - we have a couple of these ourselves, and paid relatively big bucks for them. I kid you not. So, in my view, replacing Cache with MySQL makes about as much sense as buying corporate apps that query Access databases. One does have to use some judgment.
I recently attended a technology conference with my CEO. We're a typical medium-sized company, running one mainframe (VMS), some IBM stuff, and quite a few Windows servers. We're in the financial services industry.
My CEO has known for a long time that I'm an Open Source advocate, and he expresses interest in getting away from Microsoft. He enjoys seeing what I can do with Linux and older hardware that would otherwise be mothballed, and he even consented to purchasing Redhat ES 2.1 at full fare recently. He has been amazed at the uptimes achieved on "worn out" servers running various flavors of Linux.
At the conference, our core processing company briefly touched on Open Source software and the remote possibility that they might, one day, port their software to, say, Linux. At lunch that day, I listened closely as various CEO's, CIO's, and other higher-ups discussed this possibility. Overall, I am sad to say that the overwhelming reaction was one of disbelief and/or fear. I saw clearly that Linux is still considered by many, if not most executives, to be unproven and unsupported technology. The same people who speak disparagingly of the Microsoft monopoly and the high cost of proprietary software still would rather pay ransom than go into uncharted waters. Those having a more technical understanding were quick to point out that Linux still does not scale as true enterprise-OSes are expected to. These people expressed the view that, while such Open Source software as Linux and MySQL were "interesting" and "have potential," no one was remotely interested in seeing their core software ported to a non-proprietary operating system.
I came away feeling a little depressed, but I resolved to continue, one server at a time, showing my CEO what Linux, Apache, PHP, Open Office, etc., can do and ARE already doing. Those of us who advise executives MUST continue with this kind of approach if we want to see better software running on our core servers.
. . . a group of boys who play "execs" by wearing stick-on grey sideburns, wearing wraparound sunglasses and receiving simulated oral gratification in the back of a "limousine" (modified BigWheel) from hopeful recording artists.
Detects extended period of inactivity. Comes complete with 8 liters of embalming fluid.
I'm fairly confident that if I choose to name my child "Spiderman," no one can do anything about it legally. I do not believe it is possible to protect personal names under U.S. copyright or trademark law - - only the commercial use of names in association with a product or service. I do side with you with regard to the widespread, frivolous use of the courts by corporate entities to intimidate people who are not breaking the law. It needs to be curbed, but the old maxim holds fast in court: money talks, and B.S. walks.
Heh heh - - sounds like a Sociology 10 termpaper premise.
Of course, there are plenty of people and cultures who make an effort to avoid what westerners think of as "entertainment." And one can wager confidently that the entertainment industry and the courts are not deeply concerned about consumers' need to socialize.
Businesses and governments say otherwise. Hence, the Justice Department's actions.