They're selling process automation, e.g. automatic installation of these patches, to save a busy administrator valuable time. The cost is worth it if you have more than say, five boxes. (The break-even point is up to the end-users' judgments.)
You can always download the updates for free yourself and apply them by hand.
Througout my career working with Compaq servers, I've noticed that Compaq's monitoring stuff, at least for SCO platforms, is "just ok." However, every now and then we find that someone's server gets bogged down by these daemons and device drivers, which are linked into the kernel when Compaq's EFS is loaded.
AMI Megaraid adapters on HP have a monitoring daemon that sometimes bogs down under SCO as well.
I don't know how their Linux versions perform, if they exist, but Compaq's tools for SCO have been hit and miss.
The best of the lot IMHO is Compaq's SCSI monitoring, which is really nothing more than regurgitating of the firmware-based logs, which is where all that stuff belongs anyway.
Yep, and that's precisely why if a drive shows a problem, it should be replaced now instead of later. Just goes to show.. do your backups!...and because hard disks are cheap there's no reason NOT to have an rsync server or just a second hard disk.. cp -rpv ./mnt is easy!
HP, SCO, AIX etc.. all have what I would call almost fairly complete administrative tools that allow an administrator to do nearly everything. To date, tbe best I've seen is HP-UX's "sam" tool. There is very little I can't do with it.
So, where does Linux fall short in that area? Someone once had a good idea for a configuration tool, called "linuxconf" but the problem there was that it attempted to keep its own configuration database, separate from the actual state of the system. If someone modified a directory permission or configuration file by hand (the manly way) and then ran linuxconf, then linuxconf would change it back to what it was.
We need a tool that aspired to be like linuxconf, but stateless, i.e. does not try to keep a separate database of configuration settings.
Perhaps what is needed is a well published interface specification for administration modules (one probably already exists but I don't know about it) for a generalized administration tool. THen, when someone writes a utility or program that has a configuration file, write a configuration specification to go along with it so that the administration tool would know how to make/edit the configuration file.
Of course, sendmail being one of the nastiest creations in existence, would prove that this sort of thing can exist.
Why "Hammer a troublesome hard drive into submission" in the first place? If the hard disk is giving a bad spot or any sort of read problems, THROW IT THE FRELL OUT! The way drives are designed to mask the bad spots these days, if a bad spot shows up, then it's already frelled beyond belief.
Going after bad spots is a hold-over from the bad old days of MFM and RLL controllers. I remember flagging up to 20 or 30 bad spots per drive when putting them in. I remember feeling fortunate to have bought a hard drive with maybe one or two. Once I had a drive with a totally empty flag table. Boy, I felt special!
Now, if it's a filesystem problem with Win-duhs (e.g. user turned off the PC whilst writing) then that's ok... reformat it.
That's odd. I still see clients today buying HP-9000 equipment, with HP-UX, to power their large oracle databases.
However, the market trend is going towards commodity hardware, so with that, I agree with you. The most pointy-haired of the pointy-haired bosses still don't trust Linux, even though there's little reason for them not to.
I've been in the computer bidness since 1988 and I have heard "UNIX is dead" at least 15 times since then. Every time, it refuses to die.
Here's why Randy Mott, Dell CIO, is wrong:
1: DELL only deals with Intel-based hardware. Intel is cheap-assed commodity based bargain basement garage sale type of junk. Yeah, it works and the speed is increasing more quickly than other architectures, but it's cheap and reliability among different Intel-based systems is inconsistent. Read as: Not big-money mission critical trustworthy.
2: Extremely large database installations running Oracle still choose HP 9000 RISC based machines running HP-UX, Sun machines running Slowlaris, SGI machines running Irix, or IBM machines running AIX. BTW, it's not Linux that isn't trustworthy, it's the chintzy hardware that it runs on.
3: Corporations still want highly reliable iron to run their mission critical processes on. Intel based junk can do it in some cases, but the bigger iron has had better regression testing done on it, and has a better redundancy infrastructure to it, which these companies are willing to pay for. This big iron still runs UNIX, and UNIX still rules the big iron, and rightly so. UNIX -is- however, losing out in the "little iron" and is losing market share from mid-size down, but it's not "dead."
4: Corporations are still willing to pay for all this testing and corporate support for the big iron, if that'll mean big uptime.
5: The only UNIX that is REALLY threatened is the actual AT&T System V that is now owned by SCO-Caldera-SCO again. I used to work for a SCO dealer, and was told by SCO at the time that Unixware 7 was going to revolutionize UNIX on Intel. I told my salesman and managers not to hold their breath waiting for people to line up at the doors to get their copy of SCO Unixware 7. I was right. We sold about three copies of it in two years. We sold ten or twenty times as many of the old Open(Archaic)Server 5.0.x licenses in the same amount of time. Eventually, the new installs became mostly Linux or Winblows, but we only dealt with Intel based junk.
Had Mott qualifed his opinion to mean Intel only, he might be getting close. UNIX isn't dead. I still have clients who would rather run a Sun or HP 9000 any day of the week over an Intel-based machine.
For all the kids that are in school right now, there are probably 50% that don't want to be there,
Where I went to school, about 80% didn't want to be there, and that was in the 80s.
What I don't get is why these bullies are all glorified by the press and by the alumni of these schools, when the schools' purpose is to teach, not churn out steroid-infested jocks.
Columbine's root cause was bullying gone out of control. People ALMOST "got it" right after it happened, but then their brains went back to sleep.
This one is actually real folks... it's now considered a classic.. Too bad I ain't got mod points today. This one spread around our office about four years ago.. It's why you do your backups.
The rdist program is hella cool. It works by only copying the differences of each file it's backing up. Of course, the FIRST backup takes the regular amount of time, but the ones after that take much more time. Slap that puppy in a cron job and you have something that can be a great network-wide backup solution...then.. if you can spare the $$$ , backup your rdist server with tape.
...our American cousins are complaining about this "afront to civil liberties" while thousands of their own citizens are being detained, without trial or charge, in undisclosed locations across the US?
Well, us yanks despise that too, but our press is tightly controlled by the government (although they claim they're not) so we don't get to hear about our own citizens being detained. That never makes the press here.
Asking anyone to use Java to write system diagnostic utilities suggests missing brain cells to begin with.
Same thing, although not as many cells missing, to suggest C to do it with, if you're doing a general systems thing, as your wheel has probably already been invented to start with. Just go to freshmeat and find it...
Perl / Bash / Py / Tcl can have a solution ready in a day for a relatively complex problem to be solved.
Why waste the memory footprint required for a Java VM to solve system tasks anyway?
I stopped reading Wired right after the first issue I picked up. It was all advertisements and pandering to corporations disguised as a cyberpunk magazine.
To this day I consider WIRED to be totally irrelevant.
Hear hear! They should be going after Enron, Ken Lay, et. al. with glee. Me thinks this is the most backward administration, ever. They go after the little guys first then worry about the big ones later.
Red Hat (and other distros) need to approach these vendors like Dell, CHomPaq and IBM and get into contracts with them that state for every machine sold a license MUST be sold with it, or they won't give them special pricing, or worse yet, won't deal with them at all. This'll put them hardware vendors outta bidness!!!
Why replace one monopoly with another? I like the status quo, plenty of choice for everyone! I can use Debian, Slack, RH, Mandrake, FreeBSD, or Winblows.
For argument's sake, let's suppose that all of the distros were alike, what would be the incentive then to have the different distros in the first place?
One distro would then win while the others lost money and eventually faded away.
So, for example, if RedHat were the only one left, it would take one decent sized lawsuit from our favorite cash-rich-mega-software-corporation, (with or without a leg to stand on) and RedHat will soon be history.
Then what choice will we have?
That's why the diversity and being free is a strength.
I have several experiences with H1-B workers who CAN'T FRELLING CODE. These people purport themselves to be experts in the field, too.
I'm talking people who claim to be C programmers who don't know to put "int" before "main" to get the compiler to quit bitching about assumed types.
My brother in law has H1-Bs on his staff, and he says they can't code well.
So, to all you who think you're getting a bargain out of having H1-B workers? I hope it's code you're charging per hour to your clients to write up, because that's the only way it's going to pay off.
If it's code for your own use, then you still get what you pay for.. <nelson>Ha ha!</nelson>
This sounds like a total snow job to me. "Oh yeah, well, see, we're paying you extra already, so you owe us those extra 10 hours per week, yeah, that's it."
If they didn't tell you this during the interview or before offering you the job, they're lying to you right now. I would only buy this cock and bull story if you're paid at the 90th percentile for your skill set or something.
100% tax deductible insurace? Really? Did you "S" or "C" your corp? With my "S" corp I can only deduct a certain percent of my insurance. What a drag! So I get to choose between double taxing my retained earnings or getting the 100 percent tax break on insurance, etc.
I am with you on the "don't be an employee ever again" gig. Boy, that gig sucked. I answer to myself, and my clients, and I keep them at a "personal" arm's length now. No more of the "team" building and "be a team player" (e.g. agree with the boss because he says so) for me.
There is an "I" in team, one for every member, and until PHBs get that, teams are not as effective or profitable.
Slashdot Mirror
RedHat is not selling updates and bug fixes.
They're selling process automation, e.g. automatic installation of these patches, to save a busy administrator valuable time. The cost is worth it if you have more than say, five boxes. (The break-even point is up to the end-users' judgments.)
You can always download the updates for free yourself and apply them by hand.
Througout my career working with Compaq servers, I've noticed that Compaq's monitoring stuff, at least for SCO platforms, is "just ok." However, every now and then we find that someone's server gets bogged down by these daemons and device drivers, which are linked into the kernel when Compaq's EFS is loaded.
AMI Megaraid adapters on HP have a monitoring daemon that sometimes bogs down under SCO as well.
I don't know how their Linux versions perform, if they exist, but Compaq's tools for SCO have been hit and miss.
The best of the lot IMHO is Compaq's SCSI monitoring, which is really nothing more than regurgitating of the firmware-based logs, which is where all that stuff belongs anyway.
Yep, and that's precisely why if a drive shows a problem, it should be replaced now instead of later. Just goes to show.. do your backups! ...and because hard disks are cheap there's no reason NOT to have an rsync server or just a second hard disk.. cp -rpv . /mnt is easy!
That's pronounced "baylin wahr!"
HP, SCO, AIX etc.. all have what I would call almost fairly complete administrative tools that allow an administrator to do nearly everything. To date, tbe best I've seen is HP-UX's "sam" tool. There is very little I can't do with it.
So, where does Linux fall short in that area? Someone once had a good idea for a configuration tool, called "linuxconf" but the problem there was that it attempted to keep its own configuration database, separate from the actual state of the system. If someone modified a directory permission or configuration file by hand (the manly way) and then ran linuxconf, then linuxconf would change it back to what it was.
We need a tool that aspired to be like linuxconf, but stateless, i.e. does not try to keep a separate database of configuration settings.
Perhaps what is needed is a well published interface specification for administration modules (one probably already exists but I don't know about it) for a generalized administration tool. THen, when someone writes a utility or program that has a configuration file, write a configuration specification to go along with it so that the administration tool would know how to make/edit the configuration file.
Of course, sendmail being one of the nastiest creations in existence, would prove that this sort of thing can exist.
Why "Hammer a troublesome hard drive into submission" in the first place? If the hard disk is giving a bad spot or any sort of read problems, THROW IT THE FRELL OUT! The way drives are designed to mask the bad spots these days, if a bad spot shows up, then it's already frelled beyond belief.
Going after bad spots is a hold-over from the bad old days of MFM and RLL controllers. I remember flagging up to 20 or 30 bad spots per drive when putting them in. I remember feeling fortunate to have bought a hard drive with maybe one or two. Once I had a drive with a totally empty flag table. Boy, I felt special!
Now, if it's a filesystem problem with Win-duhs (e.g. user turned off the PC whilst writing) then that's ok... reformat it.
That's odd. I still see clients today buying HP-9000 equipment, with HP-UX, to power their large oracle databases.
However, the market trend is going towards commodity hardware, so with that, I agree with you. The most pointy-haired of the pointy-haired bosses still don't trust Linux, even though there's little reason for them not to.
But, all this is not a death knell for UNIX.
I've been in the computer bidness since 1988 and I have heard "UNIX is dead" at least 15 times since then. Every time, it refuses to die.
Here's why Randy Mott, Dell CIO, is wrong:
1: DELL only deals with Intel-based hardware. Intel is cheap-assed commodity based bargain basement garage sale type of junk. Yeah, it works and the speed is increasing more quickly than other architectures, but it's cheap and reliability among different Intel-based systems is inconsistent. Read as: Not big-money mission critical trustworthy.
2: Extremely large database installations running Oracle still choose HP 9000 RISC based machines running HP-UX, Sun machines running Slowlaris, SGI machines running Irix, or IBM machines running AIX. BTW, it's not Linux that isn't trustworthy, it's the chintzy hardware that it runs on.
3: Corporations still want highly reliable iron to run their mission critical processes on. Intel based junk can do it in some cases, but the bigger iron has had better regression testing done on it, and has a better redundancy infrastructure to it, which these companies are willing to pay for. This big iron still runs UNIX, and UNIX still rules the big iron, and rightly so. UNIX -is- however, losing out in the "little iron" and is losing market share from mid-size down, but it's not "dead."
4: Corporations are still willing to pay for all this testing and corporate support for the big iron, if that'll mean big uptime.
5: The only UNIX that is REALLY threatened is the actual AT&T System V that is now owned by SCO-Caldera-SCO again. I used to work for a SCO dealer, and was told by SCO at the time that Unixware 7 was going to revolutionize UNIX on Intel. I told my salesman and managers not to hold their breath waiting for people to line up at the doors to get their copy of SCO Unixware 7. I was right. We sold about three copies of it in two years. We sold ten or twenty times as many of the old Open(Archaic)Server 5.0.x licenses in the same amount of time. Eventually, the new installs became mostly Linux or Winblows, but we only dealt with Intel based junk.
Had Mott qualifed his opinion to mean Intel only, he might be getting close. UNIX isn't dead. I still have clients who would rather run a Sun or HP 9000 any day of the week over an Intel-based machine.
People who are that stupid don't deserve help from the police or the government. Darwinism can fix nearly any problem, if we'd all just let it!
For all the kids that are in school right now, there are probably 50% that don't want to be there,
Where I went to school, about 80% didn't want to be there, and that was in the 80s.
What I don't get is why these bullies are all glorified by the press and by the alumni of these schools, when the schools' purpose is to teach, not churn out steroid-infested jocks.
Columbine's root cause was bullying gone out of control. People ALMOST "got it" right after it happened, but then their brains went back to sleep.
This one is actually real folks... it's now considered a classic.. Too bad I ain't got mod points today. This one spread around our office about four years ago.. It's why you do your backups.
Doh! s/much more/much less/
I shoulda used the preview button!
The rdist program is hella cool. It works by only copying the differences of each file it's backing up. Of course, the FIRST backup takes the regular amount of time, but the ones after that take much more time. Slap that puppy in a cron job and you have something that can be a great network-wide backup solution. ..then.. if you can spare the $$$ , backup your rdist server with tape.
Well, us yanks despise that too, but our press is tightly controlled by the government (although they claim they're not) so we don't get to hear about our own citizens being detained. That never makes the press here.
Asking anyone to use Java to write system diagnostic utilities suggests missing brain cells to begin with.
Same thing, although not as many cells missing, to suggest C to do it with, if you're doing a general systems thing, as your wheel has probably already been invented to start with. Just go to freshmeat and find it...
Perl / Bash / Py / Tcl can have a solution ready in a day for a relatively complex problem to be solved.
Why waste the memory footprint required for a Java VM to solve system tasks anyway?
Time to move on?
I would have brought myself a sports almanac, and told myself to bet on these teams. By the time I would have gotten to where I am now, I'd be rich!
Oh yeah, I'd also tell myself that if some pesky kid came along to try to stop me, bust a cap in his ass!
I stopped reading Wired right after the first issue I picked up. It was all advertisements and pandering to corporations disguised as a cyberpunk magazine.
To this day I consider WIRED to be totally irrelevant.
Hear hear! They should be going after Enron, Ken Lay, et. al. with glee. Me thinks this is the most backward administration, ever. They go after the little guys first then worry about the big ones later.
the daily enron
The longer they let it sit, the less likely it will be mentioned at the next "election."
...has the ~ and the ` which are used all the time in shell scripts? Who says they're useless???
Dude, that's hardware. Turn off the dma on your drives with hdparm.
/dev/hdb
/dev/hdb
hdparm -d 0
You might also have to turn off 32 bit mode:
hdparm -c 0
Of course, this will slow things down.
Be sure everything's jumpered correctly.
Also, of course, I'm not responsible if you fry your data!
Red Hat (and other distros) need to approach these vendors like Dell, CHomPaq and IBM and get into contracts with them that state for every machine sold a license MUST be sold with it, or they won't give them special pricing, or worse yet, won't deal with them at all. This'll put them hardware vendors outta bidness!!!
Why replace one monopoly with another? I like the status quo, plenty of choice for everyone! I can use Debian, Slack, RH, Mandrake, FreeBSD, or Winblows.
For argument's sake, let's suppose that all of the distros were alike, what would be the incentive then to have the different distros in the first place?
One distro would then win while the others lost money and eventually faded away.
So, for example, if RedHat were the only one left, it would take one decent sized lawsuit from our favorite cash-rich-mega-software-corporation, (with or without a leg to stand on) and RedHat will soon be history.
Then what choice will we have?
That's why the diversity and being free is a strength.
Darn tootin!
I have several experiences with H1-B workers who CAN'T FRELLING CODE. These people purport themselves to be experts in the field, too.
I'm talking people who claim to be C programmers who don't know to put "int" before "main" to get the compiler to quit bitching about assumed types.
My brother in law has H1-Bs on his staff, and he says they can't code well.
So, to all you who think you're getting a bargain out of having H1-B workers? I hope it's code you're charging per hour to your clients to write up, because that's the only way it's going to pay off.
If it's code for your own use, then you still get what you pay for.. <nelson>Ha ha!</nelson>
This sounds like a total snow job to me. "Oh yeah, well, see, we're paying you extra already, so you owe us those extra 10 hours per week, yeah, that's it."
If they didn't tell you this during the interview or before offering you the job, they're lying to you right now. I would only buy this cock and bull story if you're paid at the 90th percentile for your skill set or something.
100% tax deductible insurace? Really? Did you "S" or "C" your corp? With my "S" corp I can only deduct a certain percent of my insurance. What a drag! So I get to choose between double taxing my retained earnings or getting the 100 percent tax break on insurance, etc.
I am with you on the "don't be an employee ever again" gig. Boy, that gig sucked. I answer to myself, and my clients, and I keep them at a "personal" arm's length now. No more of the "team" building and "be a team player" (e.g. agree with the boss because he says so) for me.
There is an "I" in team, one for every member, and until PHBs get that, teams are not as effective or profitable.