I've perused the 'volume' and you're correct, it is a bit of overkill. But it goes into a huge number of apps that the average user/admin may not be interested in immediately, like pptpd, PHP, etc. but they may find useful as they expand their expertise in the OS.
Also, much of the information would apply to RH 8, or even 7, so it's not really that the information covered is only applicable to RH 9, or even just to RedHat. I imagine that almost any distribution which starts most of the server processes @ init 3 and is capable of using RPM would find a lot of useful information here.
Wow, you're kidding right? On the Toshiba Laptop's, it's understandable that if Toshiba isn't interested in developing Linux drivers, there isn't going to be a quick solution to the problem, but I've just installed RH 9 on the latest Dell & Compaq workstations and servers, and not only did RH 9 find all the HW and load all the drivers for the video, NIC, etc., but the IDE RAID drivers were there too. I did have to install the RAID utils, but they worked 'out of the box'.
Unfortunately, Win2k supported almost nothing, 2003 did better, but I still had to install the NIC, video, and RAID utils separately.
Until Linux becomes a major player on the desktop, (at least %15) don't expect the drivers to be there for laptops. I know it sucks because to anyone used to *nix's, it's massively more useful, but unless the manufacturer specifically advertises Linux compatibility, it's not to be expected.
Your clients are going to feel much more comfortable with certification, no matter how many/.'ers feel otherwise. RHCE is administered in such a way as to make 'paper' certs very difficult from a purest viewpoint.
If I were hiring Linux specialists, I would start with either A) Techs with verifiable experience or B) Techs with good certs.
Then, I'd set them to work in a lab for three hours recompiling/upgrading the kernel, upgrade all apps., install 2 apps from src.rpm's with broken dependencies, have them install/activate NIC's, add mod drivers, configure firewall, compile one server from source, configure it to run on eth2 port 999, show competence in compression (tar, gzip, bzip) + decomp, display ability to subnet + basic network troubleshooting, & write up concise resolution on helpdesk ticket for the lab.
Finally, have prospective employees explain what they did to your secretary, or some other Linux deficient personnel. Quiz secretary on what was fixed, if she got a vague, positive idea of what happened, hire that guy! You can train 10-15% of the population to be excellent admins, but you can only find ~10% of those who can communicate well with clients, and frankly that's nearly as important as the rest of it (not instead of, but in combination with).
I guess the above steps should qualify for your own certification process of sorts, Linux Eval Certification maybe? I know I've interviewed enough poor candidates who cleared HR and IT supervisory staff to be very suspicious of most certifications and degrees. Case in point, I've had to train a college grad with a Masters in CIS twice as long as a goat herder and florist with certifications. There's simply no good objective measure other than applying your own testing with labs on live machines/networks.
[Posted anonymously. I don't mind losing my job -- our contract's over in forty five days -- but I do mind federal prison.]
If you're dumb enough to post directly, without spoofing an IP, and your post has any validity, have fun in prison. Federal is much nicer than State, so don't sweat it too much.
Excellent point, as long as the patch doesn't break triggered scripts, close ports, etc.
Of course, any competent admin will have tested all that in a lab.
It created false divisions that did an apples to oranges comparison. I think we're talking the ol' strawberry to moose comparison here. How did he justify the loss of billion$ in productivity on MS products then?
Sun made the wrong bet so long ago, it seemss funny to watch analysts poke McNealy in the eye now. By the 'Scott's an asshole' theory, MS should have been broke as of DOS 3 with Bill's level of charm and gravitas.
It's been a classic case of the dot com con job. "We have better ideas, hardware, and only charge 4 times as much for 1/2 the power!" Please sir, tell us another! Make it the Java fairy tail this time. How it's going to save linux and the poor defenseless pirhanas.
Yep, we've been there and done that, but thanks for the heasup.
We've been running trials since RH released shrike, and frankly the clients are getting pretty serious about switching. (The cost/frustration issues are playing a heavy role here.) Linux has some problems, and the application set is takes a little getting used to, but we've fixed any Linux problems in 2 - 4 hours. The clients think saving million$ over the next 5 years is worth pursuing. Se la vie!
Thanks for the headsup. We already rolled back the machines to 2000, and frankly it saved the clients a few grand, so they're happy. I've got to say, as a tech who's responsible for guiding the purchasing decisions of quite a few large clients, I'm not very satisfied with MS's handling of these problems, but I'm certainly used to it.
We've made a decision not to upgrade until SP2, and this will carry over to future purchasing decisions on MS products. We typically have quite a few problems until SP2, and there's really no reason for our clients or ourselves to be troubleshooting what amounts to a beta release.
The difference being, we can throw you in a suit, teach you basic social group dynamics, some psychology, and some basic accounting practices and acronyms and have you doing his job in two weeks.
Whereas this is just a recipe for disaster: His job is to listen to what I am telling him and mediate between [me]... what his bosses are telling him... capabilities our systems will be needing in the future.
From a management dynamics point of view, this means he's making crritical decisions based on how much he likes you on a given day, not because he understands your translated (read dumbed down) expertise.
Amen brother. I gave up trying to explain that I could code it in PHP or Java or C or C++, or script it in bash, but the whole Office app thing seemed sorta broken to me.
So I ended up completely wasting a day re-learning the latest Office crap, and now I just make it work and walk away. Nice eye candy, but the temptation to create VB script/macro viruses is so strong I'm not going to give it any more effort than that.
Go away little people, you're confusing me with destop support.
Well, if the CEO could do IT's job, hack registry, config sendmail in their sleep, install trojans, track every web site, read every email/document/log every IM session, you'd be scared of them too.
Corporate training is 20 years behind the times in certain key areas, and networking with IT personnel just happens to be one of them. It's no coincedence that ethics is another.
Be generous. Every geek should be able to use corporate heads as a buffer to scum like sales. You control the information. Flex some muscle. In the information age, who do you suppose holds all the power? If it's not you, perhaps you're doing something wrong. Or you've stupidly become a figurehead.
True. It hardly seems likely that IBM is selling a fully loaded system @ 1 / 10 Meg capacity. If you RTFA, it looks to be the least expensive and best SIS to come out in '03.
Looks like IBM is becoming very innovative in finding ways to hyper leverage a cheap OS and massively scalable, inexpensive HW infrastructure. The future looks more promising than your previous experiences.
It's entirely possible, we did have 2 non standard apps installed for db access on MS SQL server at the office, and offsite users could have d/l'd anything.
I'm glad yours works well, they were terrific desktops to start out with. Mind if I inquire as to the SP and app installs?
I admit it was a waste of time. But in this case we'd installed/upgraded dozens of desktops, more on the way, and figured it would be prudent to do as much as possible to discover precisely what the original cause was.
Installs: XP Pro, Office Pro, 2 non standard Proprietary database / accounting apps. IE 6, etc. on XP SP 1.
Problem: DT's notably slower after 30 days continuous use. Because memory does not register as the cause (in fact memory usage never > 20%), we were stumped. As noted, many of the same procedures used on servers was attempted. They didn't marginally help. MS's KB researched extensively, and other than a possible SQL lib problem with non-standard apps, which would have left a mem 'foot print', we gave up after clients complain old desktops are much faster than XP now. Roll back to 2k, no harm no foul. No upgrade sale. Oh well.
As for requiring reboots, it's not plausible in this clients case. DT's spread over three states, everybody follows regional procedures. 'You've gotta reboot once a week' would loose the contract.
Oh man, do you ever have flamebait written on your chest. I'll be kinder.
* They want to tell the world that Linux is more secure. It's clear you think this can't be true. Okay, here's a test I performed: Load one RH 9 server with Apache, and throw it raw on the net (no firewalls, that would be cheating!). Load one 2000 boxen with IIS, dump on the net. How long did it take the Linux server to get hacked? Didn't happen within one month. Ended test. Windows? Three hours before the box was compromised. To be fair I'm not sure how they did it, it was so fsck'ed up I couldn't login, admin password reset, etc.
I could be wrong, maybe some hacker wannabe just got lucky. Still, it's pretty strong proof to me that MS is a long way from being just a 'little less insecure' than Linux. Don't take my word for it, try it yourself.
BTW, if linux is anywhere near as insecure as Windows, why don't they base routers and switches on your OS? The certainly do on Linux.
They're separating the gui from the kernel (hmmm, sound familiar?), and trying to make it backass compatible. DRM is not the primary focus, and will certainly be replaced by an much more idiotic scheme by then.
Microsofts funniest press release
on
Longhorn in 2006
·
· Score: 1
Number 1 is we want to get better alignment between you and us and our customers and our products in the scenarios that they can fit in, in those customers. If that pipe, if that alignment is clear, it reduces...
I kid you not, that's a direct quote.
S.B.: We suck at creating, you make it, we'll stea
on
Longhorn in 2006
·
· Score: 1
There was no grand statement of our partner strategy; Bill just made it clear there were some things he didn't want the company to do because we wouldn't be any good at them anyway.
I wonder if Ballmer clears any of this with legal before he says it.
What he clearly meant to say is, 'You innovate; we'll steal it, bury it, blow it up, or buy it, in that order.'
Welcome to our world!
Re:Longhorn...and then...
on
Longhorn in 2006
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
You sir are the victim of a broken OS. There's a memory leak in XP which will slow any HW down to a crawl in a matter of a month. The really fun thing is, it's designed in such a way that it doesn't register to the rest of the OS the way it should, so you can't even see that your memory is nearly maxed.
We worked on this for a month, then rolled back to 2000. Just so you don't waste your time, the following had no effect: stop caching dlls; move pagefile to it's own partition; keep kernel resident in memory (yeh, that was a crazy guess); complete reinstall (just recurs over and over after a month). Strangely, it did help when we ran Open Office on one instead of MS Office, but it just took longer to slow down.
Samba provides file and print services to Windows PCs. It enables a Linux or Unix server to work as a file server for client PCs running Windows software.
Looks pretty much like they ran Samba on Linux, right? Or maybe they ran it on Solaris, but that's sorta stupid.
If you aren't completely kidding, the difference must mostly be the OS's they're running on. Having everything in Windows tied into that damn gui interface is hopelessly stupid, so I'll bet you dollars to donuts that's the root cause. (Even if Samba were run on 2003, the exe wouldn't be tied into that god awful abortion for a code base.)
If MS file/print servers where to run on linux, they would probably smoke Samba, but you can't get around that damn stupid OS architecture. And the Samba team isn't tied into a million lines of legacy crap either, which reverts the difference right back to the OS if you ponder it for a moment.
What do I mean by 'owe it to yourselves'?
Consider that all of your Windows skills will apply to Linux gui apps. Consider that MS is now charging $700 for MS Office alone, and charging as much for the Pro version of the OS. So, if you have to buy a new computer, or upgrade the OS, if you do it on Linux, your cost for the OS and apps, max will be $80.
The difference is about $1300. Quite a bit more if you install anti-virus and other assorted applicaitons which you can get for free or at a much reduced cost on Linux. So, if you pay yourself $100 dollars / hour, you can certainly figure out the OS in 13 hours. If you more realistically don't make that much, then adjust the scale accordingly.
Finally, consider in the future, you will be able to avoid all MS licensing fees and schemas. In reality, your initial investment in time to learn Linux will have paid you thousands of dollars per hour.
So if you're unwilling to give it a try, is it because you're too lazy, too stupid, or too rich to learn Linux?
As for me, I think my time is worth millions, so the choice was clear.
You make valid points, but your assumptions are skewed.
Here's why: Do you remember when you first learned to use Windows? Do you remember how long it took you to become proficient, then to master each application?
Well if you can use a mouse, keyboard and basic apps effectively in Windows, the exact same skill sets apply to Linux gui apps. The menus and options are going to be slightly different, but compared to the initial learning curve of Windows, this curve is so slight you can't get a golf ball to roll down it.
As a Linux convert who had no formal training, but installed RH a few years ago just for kicks, I can tell you I remember these things distinctly. All my previous skills still applied, and even the command line apps worked in very similar fashion.
So your point about not all apps being available is valid. Nor would they be available if you switched to a Mac. But otherwise, your viewpoint just highlights an unwillingness to explore.
I was willing, and have saved myself, my family, and my company $100's of thousands of dollars in licensing fees. Now what's your excuse?
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I've perused the 'volume' and you're correct, it is a bit of overkill. But it goes into a huge number of apps that the average user/admin may not be interested in immediately, like pptpd, PHP, etc. but they may find useful as they expand their expertise in the OS.
Also, much of the information would apply to RH 8, or even 7, so it's not really that the information covered is only applicable to RH 9, or even just to RedHat. I imagine that almost any distribution which starts most of the server processes @ init 3 and is capable of using RPM would find a lot of useful information here.
Wow, you're kidding right? On the Toshiba Laptop's, it's understandable that if Toshiba isn't interested in developing Linux drivers, there isn't going to be a quick solution to the problem, but I've just installed RH 9 on the latest Dell & Compaq workstations and servers, and not only did RH 9 find all the HW and load all the drivers for the video, NIC, etc., but the IDE RAID drivers were there too. I did have to install the RAID utils, but they worked 'out of the box'. Unfortunately, Win2k supported almost nothing, 2003 did better, but I still had to install the NIC, video, and RAID utils separately. Until Linux becomes a major player on the desktop, (at least %15) don't expect the drivers to be there for laptops. I know it sucks because to anyone used to *nix's, it's massively more useful, but unless the manufacturer specifically advertises Linux compatibility, it's not to be expected.
Your clients are going to feel much more comfortable with certification, no matter how many /.'ers feel otherwise. RHCE is administered in such a way as to make 'paper' certs very difficult from a purest viewpoint.
If I were hiring Linux specialists, I would start with either A) Techs with verifiable experience or B) Techs with good certs.
Then, I'd set them to work in a lab for three hours recompiling/upgrading the kernel, upgrade all apps., install 2 apps from src.rpm's with broken dependencies, have them install/activate NIC's, add mod drivers, configure firewall, compile one server from source, configure it to run on eth2 port 999, show competence in compression (tar, gzip, bzip) + decomp, display ability to subnet + basic network troubleshooting, & write up concise resolution on helpdesk ticket for the lab.
Finally, have prospective employees explain what they did to your secretary, or some other Linux deficient personnel. Quiz secretary on what was fixed, if she got a vague, positive idea of what happened, hire that guy! You can train 10-15% of the population to be excellent admins, but you can only find ~10% of those who can communicate well with clients, and frankly that's nearly as important as the rest of it ( not instead of, but in combination with).
I guess the above steps should qualify for your own certification process of sorts, Linux Eval Certification maybe? I know I've interviewed enough poor candidates who cleared HR and IT supervisory staff to be very suspicious of most certifications and degrees. Case in point, I've had to train a college grad with a Masters in CIS twice as long as a goat herder and florist with certifications. There's simply no good objective measure other than applying your own testing with labs on live machines/networks.
[Posted anonymously. I don't mind losing my job -- our contract's over in forty five days -- but I do mind federal prison.]
If you're dumb enough to post directly, without spoofing an IP, and your post has any validity, have fun in prison. Federal is much nicer than State, so don't sweat it too much.
Excellent point, as long as the patch doesn't break triggered scripts, close ports, etc. Of course, any competent admin will have tested all that in a lab.
It created false divisions that did an apples to oranges comparison. I think we're talking the ol' strawberry to moose comparison here. How did he justify the loss of billion$ in productivity on MS products then?
Sun made the wrong bet so long ago, it seemss funny to watch analysts poke McNealy in the eye now. By the 'Scott's an asshole' theory, MS should have been broke as of DOS 3 with Bill's level of charm and gravitas.
It's been a classic case of the dot com con job. "We have better ideas, hardware, and only charge 4 times as much for 1/2 the power!" Please sir, tell us another! Make it the Java fairy tail this time. How it's going to save linux and the poor defenseless pirhanas.
So Redhat had over 3 years to fix holes in the distribution, while crackers had 3 more years to find holes in MSWindows2000. If you want to play fair,
Excellent point, I hadn't even considered that. Man, what slop on my part.
Well, I'll rerun the test on 2003 server with most recent IIS version. I didn't have the license, but will go ahead and splurge.
Thanks for keeping me honest!
Yep, we've been there and done that, but thanks for the heasup. We've been running trials since RH released shrike, and frankly the clients are getting pretty serious about switching. (The cost/frustration issues are playing a heavy role here.) Linux has some problems, and the application set is takes a little getting used to, but we've fixed any Linux problems in 2 - 4 hours. The clients think saving million$ over the next 5 years is worth pursuing. Se la vie!
Thanks for the headsup. We already rolled back the machines to 2000, and frankly it saved the clients a few grand, so they're happy. I've got to say, as a tech who's responsible for guiding the purchasing decisions of quite a few large clients, I'm not very satisfied with MS's handling of these problems, but I'm certainly used to it.
We've made a decision not to upgrade until SP2, and this will carry over to future purchasing decisions on MS products. We typically have quite a few problems until SP2, and there's really no reason for our clients or ourselves to be troubleshooting what amounts to a beta release.
The difference being, we can throw you in a suit, teach you basic social group dynamics, some psychology, and some basic accounting practices and acronyms and have you doing his job in two weeks.
... what his bosses are telling him ... capabilities our systems will be needing in the future.
Whereas this is just a recipe for disaster: His job is to listen to what I am telling him and mediate between [me]
From a management dynamics point of view, this means he's making crritical decisions based on how much he likes you on a given day, not because he understands your translated (read dumbed down) expertise.
Good luck!
Amen brother. I gave up trying to explain that I could code it in PHP or Java or C or C++, or script it in bash, but the whole Office app thing seemed sorta broken to me.
So I ended up completely wasting a day re-learning the latest Office crap, and now I just make it work and walk away. Nice eye candy, but the temptation to create VB script/macro viruses is so strong I'm not going to give it any more effort than that.
Go away little people, you're confusing me with destop support.
Well, if the CEO could do IT's job, hack registry, config sendmail in their sleep, install trojans, track every web site, read every email/document/log every IM session, you'd be scared of them too.
Corporate training is 20 years behind the times in certain key areas, and networking with IT personnel just happens to be one of them. It's no coincedence that ethics is another.
Be generous. Every geek should be able to use corporate heads as a buffer to scum like sales. You control the information. Flex some muscle. In the information age, who do you suppose holds all the power? If it's not you, perhaps you're doing something wrong. Or you've stupidly become a figurehead.
True. It hardly seems likely that IBM is selling a fully loaded system @ 1 / 10 Meg capacity. If you RTFA, it looks to be the least expensive and best SIS to come out in '03. Looks like IBM is becoming very innovative in finding ways to hyper leverage a cheap OS and massively scalable, inexpensive HW infrastructure. The future looks more promising than your previous experiences.
It's entirely possible, we did have 2 non standard apps installed for db access on MS SQL server at the office, and offsite users could have d/l'd anything.
I'm glad yours works well, they were terrific desktops to start out with. Mind if I inquire as to the SP and app installs?
I admit it was a waste of time. But in this case we'd installed/upgraded dozens of desktops, more on the way, and figured it would be prudent to do as much as possible to discover precisely what the original cause was.
Installs: XP Pro, Office Pro, 2 non standard Proprietary database / accounting apps. IE 6, etc. on XP SP 1.
Problem: DT's notably slower after 30 days continuous use. Because memory does not register as the cause (in fact memory usage never > 20%), we were stumped. As noted, many of the same procedures used on servers was attempted. They didn't marginally help. MS's KB researched extensively, and other than a possible SQL lib problem with non-standard apps, which would have left a mem 'foot print', we gave up after clients complain old desktops are much faster than XP now. Roll back to 2k, no harm no foul. No upgrade sale.
Oh well.
As for requiring reboots, it's not plausible in this clients case. DT's spread over three states, everybody follows regional procedures. 'You've gotta reboot once a week' would loose the contract.
Oh man, do you ever have flamebait written on your chest. I'll be kinder.
* They want to tell the world that Linux is more secure.
It's clear you think this can't be true. Okay, here's a test I performed: Load one RH 9 server with Apache, and throw it raw on the net (no firewalls, that would be cheating!). Load one 2000 boxen with IIS, dump on the net. How long did it take the Linux server to get hacked? Didn't happen within one month. Ended test. Windows? Three hours before the box was compromised. To be fair I'm not sure how they did it, it was so fsck'ed up I couldn't login, admin password reset, etc.
I could be wrong, maybe some hacker wannabe just got lucky. Still, it's pretty strong proof to me that MS is a long way from being just a 'little less insecure' than Linux. Don't take my word for it, try it yourself.
BTW, if linux is anywhere near as insecure as Windows, why don't they base routers and switches on your OS? The certainly do on Linux.
They're separating the gui from the kernel (hmmm, sound familiar?), and trying to make it backass compatible. DRM is not the primary focus, and will certainly be replaced by an much more idiotic scheme by then.
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/exec/steve/2003 /10-09wwpc.asp
Number 1 is we want to get better alignment between you and us and our customers and our products in the scenarios that they can fit in, in those customers. If that pipe, if that alignment is clear, it reduces...
I kid you not, that's a direct quote.
There was no grand statement of our partner strategy; Bill just made it clear there were some things he didn't want the company to do because we wouldn't be any good at them anyway.
I wonder if Ballmer clears any of this with legal before he says it.
What he clearly meant to say is, 'You innovate; we'll steal it, bury it, blow it up, or buy it, in that order.'
Welcome to our world!
You sir are the victim of a broken OS. There's a memory leak in XP which will slow any HW down to a crawl in a matter of a month. The really fun thing is, it's designed in such a way that it doesn't register to the rest of the OS the way it should, so you can't even see that your memory is nearly maxed.
We worked on this for a month, then rolled back to 2000. Just so you don't waste your time, the following had no effect: stop caching dlls; move pagefile to it's own partition; keep kernel resident in memory (yeh, that was a crazy guess); complete reinstall (just recurs over and over after a month). Strangely, it did help when we ran Open Office on one instead of MS Office, but it just took longer to slow down.
Samba provides file and print services to Windows PCs. It enables a Linux or Unix server to work as a file server for client PCs running Windows software.
Looks pretty much like they ran Samba on Linux, right? Or maybe they ran it on Solaris, but that's sorta stupid.
If you aren't completely kidding, the difference must mostly be the OS's they're running on. Having everything in Windows tied into that damn gui interface is hopelessly stupid, so I'll bet you dollars to donuts that's the root cause. (Even if Samba were run on 2003, the exe wouldn't be tied into that god awful abortion for a code base.)
If MS file/print servers where to run on linux, they would probably smoke Samba, but you can't get around that damn stupid OS architecture. And the Samba team isn't tied into a million lines of legacy crap either, which reverts the difference right back to the OS if you ponder it for a moment.
What do I mean by 'owe it to yourselves'?
Consider that all of your Windows skills will apply to Linux gui apps. Consider that MS is now charging $700 for MS Office alone, and charging as much for the Pro version of the OS. So, if you have to buy a new computer, or upgrade the OS, if you do it on Linux, your cost for the OS and apps, max will be $80.
The difference is about $1300. Quite a bit more if you install anti-virus and other assorted applicaitons which you can get for free or at a much reduced cost on Linux. So, if you pay yourself $100 dollars / hour, you can certainly figure out the OS in 13 hours. If you more realistically don't make that much, then adjust the scale accordingly.
Finally, consider in the future, you will be able to avoid all MS licensing fees and schemas. In reality, your initial investment in time to learn Linux will have paid you thousands of dollars per hour.
So if you're unwilling to give it a try, is it because you're too lazy, too stupid, or too rich to learn Linux?
As for me, I think my time is worth millions, so the choice was clear.
You make valid points, but your assumptions are skewed.
Here's why: Do you remember when you first learned to use Windows? Do you remember how long it took you to become proficient, then to master each application?
Well if you can use a mouse, keyboard and basic apps effectively in Windows, the exact same skill sets apply to Linux gui apps. The menus and options are going to be slightly different, but compared to the initial learning curve of Windows, this curve is so slight you can't get a golf ball to roll down it.
As a Linux convert who had no formal training, but installed RH a few years ago just for kicks, I can tell you I remember these things distinctly. All my previous skills still applied, and even the command line apps worked in very similar fashion.
So your point about not all apps being available is valid. Nor would they be available if you switched to a Mac. But otherwise, your viewpoint just highlights an unwillingness to explore.
I was willing, and have saved myself, my family, and my company $100's of thousands of dollars in licensing fees. Now what's your excuse?