I agree cryptic passwords are bad for users. But when I used to create user accounts I used a random password generator. They still weren't the best passwords, but better than they would choose on their own. And definatley better than the practice of the previous admin used to do... (companyname1) Besides they always changed them anyway, usually for the worse.
Granted for my user accounts and the root accounts I used passwords that looked like line noise. (Of course I kept a password list in my pilot in an encrypted area...god help if I forgot the password.) I unfortunatley found a problem with the HP9000's that they won't accept characters outside of a-Z and 0-9 on console. Not a great thing when needing to get logged in on console as root.
I also kept the users in check by once a quarter running john the ripper against the password file and then mailing the IT manager the list of compromized passwords. He then sent a politically correct e-mail to the users telling them to change their password, and gave suggestions on better passwords. Even then we always had the same people with stupid passwords, they usually changed them by adding 1 to the number in their password (ie pass1 became pass2).
It's one of those basic security principles, yet is sooo hard to get people to follow.
It's hard to believe my first exposure to the internet was through a usenet news feed at the university I attened at the time.
Back then, I hung out quite a bit on comp.sys.apple2.*. Because of the people that posted to that newsgroup I found a ton of great shareware games, and information about the apple2. I was a fan of the apple 2 at that time, as it was my first long term exposure to computers. Most of what I had learned on that system helped me later when I hopped over to PC's, IBM's VM/CMS, and Digital's VMS, and a couple of years later Solaris followed by Linux and DEC OSF/1.
I can honestly say if it wasn't for usenet I wouldn't have found all of the neat stuff and upgrades for the apple 2 that are still a part of that system. And of course the healthy respect for RTFM'ing before asking something that was answered in the FAQ (or now HOWTO's, man pages, info pages, hard copy manuals and so on).
Unfortunatley over the years my use of Usenet has dwindled to nothing. Mainly from the quality of responses on the newsgroups I read. I used to get a bunch of useful replies. Last time I posted I got a slew of "me too's", 1 sorta useful reply, and a couple of replies that didn't tell me anything that I already didn't know (basically restating my question, but phrasing it as an answer). I know a lot of it most likely has to do with what newsgroup I looking at. If I find some hardcore newsgroup (like a *BSD group) I'd imagine I'd find the quality of replies I used to find on Usenet years ago. Of course now I'm much more impatient, I just hop onto irc and ask my question there, or a mailing list.
Of course the worst part is that Jim, who came up with the idea/developed it is now gone. People like Jim Ellis are true alpha geeks. We should find a good way to preserve their work, mainly years from now when some kid reads their history book, and believes that Al Gore invented the Internet, people like Jim Ellis who did the work will be marginalized. I'd hate to see that happen.
My former job, we were "allotted" 5k a year for training. Good luck getting it approved though. In the 5 years I was there I was only sent to 2 training classes. One of them was since I knew nothing about relational databases, and was expected to be an expert DBA (since the guy who was leaving did that also). I wore several hats, Unix admin, DBA, security admin and operator. I think the main reason they sent me to database training was 1) I hosed the database 2) I was begging for the class. My old job would also pay for college tuition if you had a c or better, but you had to sign a contract that said you would stay for 5 years after getting your degree. Needless to say I didn't let them pay a dime for my college classes.
My current job: I am required to take 2 classes a year, minimum. I will get whatever training that relates to my job. I'm supposed to be an expert on their systems in the customer's eyes, hence I get the training I need to become an expert. I also can get books for free (they only ask that they relate somehow). And they will pay for college also, without the draconian contract of the old job. Needless to say, I'm much happier at my new job, and heck even if I won the lottery, I'd still work for them.
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"If you insist on using Windoze you're on your own."
I bet when you called Oracle support, you didn't have a chip on your shoulder, some people do.
Yeah, this is true, I pretty much leveled with the tech support guy, told them I had taken over the system from someone else and honestly wasn't exactly sure what was going on. Gave them all the info they needed and they helped me learn and fix the problems. A lot of it made sense when I was finally sent to Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise training. After that I could call tech support tell them the problem, and throw all the stuff they would ask for up front. Amazingly it has helped in getting the problem resolved quicker. As far as being hung out to dry, the boss couldn't do that very easily as I was taking on a ton of responsibility and managing to make the systems quite a bit more reliable.
Although there have been a few times where I got a first level engineer who was lucky to answer the phone, he couldn't set up his voice mail correctly, and didn't know how to read the case notes. Luckly for me I called back way after hours and got another first level engineer from Australia. He pointed me in the right direction and got the problem resolved. Luckly these have been rare at companies such as Sun, HP, and Sybase. Although it seems much more common at Dell. It's like they have an unbreakable script they cannot deviate from. It took me a month to get them to ship me a new ethernet card, even after shipping it back to Dell 3 times for the same problem. I would imagine Dell has some great support engineers, although I haven't had the pleasure of working with them.
As far as the job thing goes, hopefully in the next few days I'll have an offer in writing from Sun Microsystems, as I know UNIX far better than I do databases.
I agree that each database product doesn't directly compete. MySQL != Oracle. It all highly depends on what you want to do.
MySQL is great for sites like/. where loss of data isn't a concern, but speed is.
Postgress is great for those who want a low cost solution for a small RDBMS.
M$ Access is cute for visually seeing the relations, but pretty much a joke for anything serious.
SQL Server / Sybase these two are essentially the same, they were the same product a few versions ago. M$ added some neat features to it, and Sybase seems to be struggling to add useful and needed features. (Like hot backups (where you can take a snapshot of the database devices), load balancing, easier management of replication, major scalability and failover.) Sybase is working on it, but Oracle and DB2 are way ahead these two products by quite a bit. SQL Server is also hampered by only running on intel hardware. Sybase at least runs on quite a few different platforms.
Oracle the kingpin of the RDBMS areana. Pretty much has all of the features, and a huge licensing fee.
DB2 everything that I've read has rated DB2 quite high, it seems to be the database that people use but no one seems to know about.
Pretty much it's all that you're wanting to do with the database, and how much $ you have to determine which database you use. But keep in mind if you write everything you can in ANSI SQL, it should be fairly portable between database vendors. Unfortunatley I've seen cases where writing something with Transact-SQL (Sybase / M$) or PL/SQL (Oracle) is needed. But supposedly both are going to have (or already have) native java support so you can just create a query in java rather than SQL. I don't know much about that other than it's supposed to exist or comming soon, and I'm not a java programmer, so I can't say for certain.
But where do you draw the line? While I'll admit that there are certain circumstances that should be checked for there does come a point where the application vendor must say, "This is the users/admins responsibility. Without that dividing line between application and user responsibility, then all applications will eventually become operating systems.
Well a few years ago I was thrust into being a DBA and an HP/UX admin. At that time I didn't know the first thing about databases, nor much about admining HP/UX. I did know Solaris and how to admin Linux fairly well at that point. Needless to say I was one of those "clueless nitwits" who called support quite a bit. Over time I learned from the helpful and intelligent support staff members. Honestly if it wasn't for them I couldn't have gotten my ass out of the fire so to speak. Since the systems that I inherited were poorly managed by the previous admin, partially due to his lack of training, and partially to having far too many responsibilities.
While I agree with Ian Wolf that "...a competent Oracle DBA who stumbled across a hung database would immediately check for a log switch, missing file, or lack of free space. For DBA's this knowledge should be as second nature as breathing." I think that a large portion of this problem rests with the companies who tell someone with a bit of computer experience, but definatley not a competitent DBA to run their Sybase, Oracle, DB2, or whatever RDBMS system. In the case of some companies they simply won't pay for a real DBA (in the case of my current job). And in many of the same cases, the company won't send their people to training... So what's left? Pretty much that leaves the tech support 800 number.
does anyone think they will make any money with this? They can't be making much... and why are they trying to regain ground in a market they have never been in before and with many competitors?
I think Sun, like any other company will create a "loss leader" to help gain market share and customers. Most grocery stores sell some items at a loss, and jack up the cost of others to make up for the loss. Besides some people might have bought sparcs if they were cheaper, but instead got a PC running Linux/BSD/Solaris X86 instead. Personally I'd rather have a sparc on my desk than some PC. At least I'd have a 64-bit machine built to run UNIX, and not having to deal with IRQ conflicts and the like.
This also can look good for Sun in the market if they can sell a ton of these and make a small dent in the PC world. And the more volume they move, they may make their loss back. It's all in the suppy-demand theory from economics. If nothing else Wall Street will look at this and boost Sun's stock.
Re:My personal experience with HP and a suggestion
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HP And Bruce Perens
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I really enjoy the HP printers and calculators that I have worked with. However using HP/UX has been a royal pain. As for linux driver support, I wish I could have better support for a printer and be able to print directly, but here at work I find myself using an HP/UX box as my print server and pointing my linux boxes to it.
The thing the annoys me to no end is the utter proprietaryness of the Unix OS. I have on numerous occasions called HP support and they give me undocumented flags for commands (ie not in the manpage or the -? flag) that are needed to get the job done. It amazes me they have as much unix market share as they do with such an extreemely closed system. As far as things are concerned I'd just be happy using Solaris and Linux. In fact we're looking into replacing all of our HP servers with Suns. Yes, HP hardware has been good to us, but those are mimial with respect to control over the OS.
I just hope HP will commit to Open Source and open their closed minded approach to interfaces with their hardware products and their software.
It's nice to see Palm computing cater to all of the lusers out there who would buy a wince box. But honestly, I'm waiting for some real major changes to make me upgrade my pilot personal. (yeah, it's got the pro card in it)
It pretty much does what I want it to, be a convienent way to track dates, phone numbers and passwords....Ya know the obvious things a PDA is supposed to do. Besides looking at some of these new styles, it makes me want to hold onto my personal longer.
I've also seen them affixed to a stapler that works only half of the time. The intel inside logo works well there also. A garbage can is useful, hence not the best place for those stickers.
I wonder if it has anything to do with it running DB2, all of the other systems that were benchmarked were running Oracle 8.x. And the performance is soo vastly different for a little quad processor intel machine, I find it hard that it spec'd higher than any UN*X, even an Alpha Cluster, Sun's Starfire, HP's V class, and IBM's own RS/6000. If nothing else the sheer redundancy of the other setups would have me choose it over the intel setup on w2k.
And I'd also trust Bea Systems' Tuxedo for a TPM than I would M$'s COM+. Let's just say I'd rather use something battle tested when my job is on the line. (Yes I do use Linux at work, just not in my production critical back end database)
I've got a dual boot system, Debian 2.2 and Winblows 98 (only so I can play DVD's and games that haven't been ported yet, and 'cause it's work's laptop and the boss insisted that Winblows be installed on it.) Debian runs quite well on the system, but I had a ethernet card problem, so I called Dell Tech Support to try to get a replacement. After shipping it back three times, 2 motherboard swaps and a new keyboard later they finally swapped the ethernet card. They about blew a gasket when they found out that I had the system dual booting. Dell's tech support claimed my problems are due to dual booting. RIGHT!
I then had to lie to them and say that I only had windows installed on it to get them to help me. And working with their Tech Support is like pulling teeth. They have a script that they run through and will not under any circumstances deviate from the script.
So as far as buying a system pre-loaded with Linux on it, I'll get it from VA or Penguin rather than the likes of Compaq, Dell or Gateway. They're still in bed with Billy-Boy, and won't help if you have a hardware problem if you're not running win-something-or-another.
I've been reading most of the flamewar that has been raging on debian-devel. I can see points on both sides.
On one side you have people who like and appreciate all of the packages and integration of those packages on one system. I personally like being able to download and install whatever software as a package and have it work. It makes my life easier when dealing with a large number of servers. In fact I like apt / dselect in their power and ease of use. It makes me have to spend less time managing my linux boxes here at work, and let's me spend more time fighting with HP's swinstall and Sun's pkgadd commands. Neither are as slick as apt, or as convient to use.
On the other side of the debate is that Debian is a total non-profit entity, and funded mostly by Software in the Public Interest. I agree that free software is the best way to go. Although I'm spoiled by using Pine, Netscape, and several other non-free packages. This all boils down to that Debian should only be supporting free software only.
I see both points, both are valid. But I would hate to see the loss of integration, loss of some relitavely important (to some people) non-free packages, and harm it could possibly do to get new users to switch over to Debian as a distro.
I have to admit the more I have been using Debian, the more I agree with their path of free is the best way to go, and I've begun the transistion to using totally free software from non-free stuff. But I can't force my users, I can't force other Linux users to agree with this stance. Most of them like their software and don't want to play with a tarball and try to get it installed. And being the frazzled admin here at work, that's the last thing I need is more things to compile and try to stay on top of. If I wanted to compile everything, I'd be running Slackware.
Eventually I am planning on becomming a Debian developer. I just hope the current developers make the right decision, and keep everyone happy one way or another. I wish that the clear heads will prevail, and make the best decision regarding the future of the project. Either way that won't change the quality or insistence on standards that Debian has been known for. IMHO, this is what seperates Debian from any other linux distro.
Well from what I've gathered from the current discussion is somewhat of a lack of direction. So here are a few things to consider and answer before going forward:
1) Do you need High Availability of 1 machine? (ie 99+% of a single machine) If the answer is yes, then clustering is the way to go. But doing that right is very expensive (hardware, software)
2) Does it make sense to have a farm of identicaly configured machines? If you're using Linux / FreeBSD as your webservers and if you only run web servers on them, then you can get away from clustering proper and just throw a ton of machines at the problem. ie farm of web servers.
3) Sounds like the Consultant has the right idea with the "expensive Cisco hardware" in making sure Layer 2 is fully redundant. Good step forward. Now ya just need to make sure your hardware that is connected to it will utilize it. Do you?
4) If your running Solaris, then Alternate Pathing becomes your friend (especially with Quad Fast Ethernet cards), as well as Dynamic Reconfiguration. Are you, or is this a moot thread?
5) Overall, what are you trying to accomplish? Uptime of hardware, uptime of the application, or raw uptime of the web servers? If you got a set up like/. then clustering proper is not done. If you can see, they just load balance 3 web servers, and then dedicate a box for ads, a box for the database, and a dedicated image box. And we know how little/. is down...
Basically, that's pretty much it. Personally I wouldn't bother with clustering or complicating the web servers that much, I'd cluster the back end supporting stuff for the web farm. ie the back end database, fully redundant hardware, alternate paths and so on. And then let Cisco's Local Director take care of load balancing and checking the web server is up or not. (From what my network guy at work tells me, it can do that. I won't personally believe it until I see it).
Every time I read a history of a programme and find a line "completely re-wrote the code", I begin having second thougths about how really good the programme is.
There have been several occasions last year where me and a co-worker ended up trashing pages and pages of code to re-write it with the same functionality, but modular and ended up being smaller in some cases.
My company used consultants who wrote terrible code. Let's use this example...there is a program that calcuates x days ago. The consultant's program went and tried to calculate leap years and all of that. Our program that replaced it used system library calls to date, and then simply subtracted the proper amount of seconds. Other ones were hardcoded scripts to run sql on our database, we replaced that with a perl script that took the sql as a parameter.
So there are times where a re-write is better than maintaining the code. I guess the biggest case in point is mozilla versus navigator. Basically I agree that projects were planned and used software engineering principles we would most likely end up with good products. Granted game programs seem to be done best when they're a hack.. But how many times have you seen long term maintenance of games?
I've said it before and I'll say it again: people don't know that there is stuff out there better then MS.
Yeah, and that's been one of the things that I personally work to change. I came into work that thursday, and a co-worker was all worred that she sent this virus, I initially laughed. It sounded kinda stupid to be a virus, but volia it was. She thought this cause she sent her fiance a "I love you" card over e-mail. Within a half hour of walking in the door, I found that someone on the HP/UX admin mailing list had sent it...I dumped it onto my linux box (I'm forced to use Look Out! (TM) at work, *sigh*) and then ripped it apart. I then printed it out and took it to her to show her. I then said "Unless you wrote this, then you didn't send your fiance the virus." She look at it and laughed, nope wasn't her, but a few people that work around her noticed that I had the virus source code in my hands and seemed amazed that I was holding that. They asked how I got it, Linux, it doesn't care about Visual Basic, only Winblows and Look Out! care. And besides I mention that our DNS, NIS, DHCP servers are all Linux, and over time they get a respect for it. Some of the users want linux on their desktop rather than NT, but know they can't 'cause of the applicaitons they run. I've had a few of them ask to borrow my linux install cd's so they can install at home.
Basically it's just a matter of education and demonstration what linux can do. I honestly think that with M$'s breakup (if they break it up right), it can only benefit the industry. For example, break the OS into a company, the Apps into yet another company and then the development tools into another, or give it to borland. And most important don't allow non-disclosure agreements between the parts. Full disclosure should be done with each of the parts. This will kill the hidden API's, hidden compiler flags, and all of the stuff we know M$ does. Basically this will force them to be competitive with any other vendor out there. Like Be, they have an OS, and they publish their API's so developers can code for it, same with Sun and so on... That way M$ products would be at the same standing as any other product on the market, and wouldn't have the unfair advantage of "being integrated into the OS", or M$'s "innovation." This is what I see as the best way to break them up. Maybe just maybe they'll be forced to make good products....most likely minus the OS portion...
I'm very confused, where in my post did i include any part of M$'s information? I've never even downloaded or read it in whole or in part. I can't understand why you or the evil empire thinks that i did? Here is what I said in it's entirety:
What happens to the people that implement it (ie. the Samba guys) even if they obtain the information without intentionally breaking the license. Are they exposing themselves to expensive litigation? Are they endangering the project?
Ya know, wasn't this precisely what M$ said they were going to do, per the Haloween Documents? Invoke copyrights, patents and stuff like that to harm Open Source. (I'm going from memory here, I don't know where I put my hardcopy of those documents) I'm wondering if MIT will put their foot down considering the license that Kerberos lives under. If not, it's M$ to their "innovation" tricks of embrace and extend.
This world is a test, and only a test. If it was a perfect world, M$ would play fair and actually have good software, and utilize open standards.
I tend to agree that running a business using Open Source software, is a whole different principle than the traditional business model. I've noticed at work there are discussion on how much we could sell the code that we produce for our internal use. Of course I'd rather see it Open Sourced and have the bugs fixed and more useful features added.
Most suits are driven to make money on about nearly anything. And anything that threatens that model is "BAD". Basically 'cause I tend to use Open Source software rather than paying huge amounts of money for a close source alternative I got ripped on my performance review. I guess because I used BigBrother to monitor my network rather than HP's OpenView. But honestly we don't need the power or complexity of OpenView...we just simply need to know whether a server is up or down, and if down, page the admin. I also know that BigBrother doesn't meet the DFSG (Debian Free Software Guidelines), but it's more a of a non-free package anyway.
Most managers want to have someone to blame when there is a problem. I guess the best demonstration is when I had a hardware failure with my workstation...I put it together, troubleshot it, and found the faulty part, asked for a replacement, and volia fixed. My laptop on the other hand came from Dell, and I wasted about a week of time with their tech support people (on speakerphone so others could hear the idiocy), and of course my laptop was out of service for over a month being shipped back and forth between work and Dell. Granted I call Sun or HP and they'll show up according to their contract and replace the faulty part. *sigh*
If the suits would leave the techies alone, things would just work, and we wouldn't be forced to use some software package from a commerical vendor that doesn't meet all of the users needs, and costs soo much that the suits tell you to make it work. I'm not saying all commerical software is bad, but there is a lot that leaves much to be desired. I like safeword for example, it's a commerical product, but for unix they also give you the source code (under NDA of course), so if there is a problem with it you can dig in and fix things.
Welcome to the world of Information Technology my friend. The truth is that most users notice nothing and appreciate less. That is, until it goes wrong. Then the purveyors of the service get villified....
Yeah, I know that all too well. I'm the sole manager of all of the unix machines, and even the databases. Needless to say I have almost too much to do the job I want to do. But the users always ask me what I do. Everytime they walk past my desk I'm always surfing the web. Humm, it's called research...gotta learn about kewl stuff...like reading/. hehehehe.
Anyway, they don't appreciate too much that the systems don't crash every other day anymore. And heck even some of the others in my IT department have no clue. I found out that on a day off, a couple of the programmers were messing around in the server room, and turned the power key on the production server not knowing what they key does. My boss told them it was a good thing that I wasn't there, I would have strung them up by their toenails. [grin]
The/. crew deserve a lot of credit for moving the whole site and making the move pretty painless. It's a lot of work, and I'm personally not looking to move all of my users back to my old production box with the new shareholder accounting system on it. *sigh*
It's always nice to see companies help out the open source projects, and give them financial backing, hardware to use and so on. But this case it makes me wonder, considering the guy seems to be in it for the money and the IPO... "Ritter watched his company miss out on a golden opportunity to invest in Linux software seller Red Hat way before its successful initial public offering. Now he hopes to catch the second wave of the open-source software trend"
Honestly some of the RDMS providers could use some real competition. Oracle is nice, but costs far too much. Sybase is ok, but lacking in lots of things, including security. Microsoft bought their way in, by buying Sybase's SQL Server from them a few years ago. And DB2...dunno much about that personally. If Postgress is to really compete, it needs to be fast, secure and scalable. If it makes it to that point, I won't have any trouble dumping Sybase for it.
I can't understand how Billy Boy can honestly tell people that breaking up Microsoft will there be more viruses like this one? Honestly the reason these "macro viruses" exist to begin with is Microsoft's fault to begin with.
If it wasn't for the VBS stuff in all of the office aps, the windows scripting host in win98 (and anything using IE 4.x +) these viruses just simply wouldn't exist. I used to remember telling users that viruses through e-mail were a hoax. Thanks M$ for making these hoaxes reality, and making me fire fight all day thursday and friday cause of this "innovation."
M$, do me and the world a favor, and "innovate" yourself out of existence.
Slashdot Mirror
Pretty basic, but then I'm more for minimalistic sorts of things. For example I don't use GNOME, KDE or CDE, but I like FVWM or Enlightenment.
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"If you insist on using Windoze you're on your own."
I agree cryptic passwords are bad for users. But when I used to create user accounts I used a random password generator. They still weren't the best passwords, but better than they would choose on their own. And definatley better than the practice of the previous admin used to do... (companyname1) Besides they always changed them anyway, usually for the worse.
Granted for my user accounts and the root accounts I used passwords that looked like line noise. (Of course I kept a password list in my pilot in an encrypted area...god help if I forgot the password.) I unfortunatley found a problem with the HP9000's that they won't accept characters outside of a-Z and 0-9 on console. Not a great thing when needing to get logged in on console as root.
I also kept the users in check by once a quarter running john the ripper against the password file and then mailing the IT manager the list of compromized passwords. He then sent a politically correct e-mail to the users telling them to change their password, and gave suggestions on better passwords. Even then we always had the same people with stupid passwords, they usually changed them by adding 1 to the number in their password (ie pass1 became pass2).
It's one of those basic security principles, yet is sooo hard to get people to follow.
It's hard to believe my first exposure to the internet was through a usenet news feed at the university I attened at the time.
Back then, I hung out quite a bit on comp.sys.apple2.*. Because of the people that posted to that newsgroup I found a ton of great shareware games, and information about the apple2. I was a fan of the apple 2 at that time, as it was my first long term exposure to computers. Most of what I had learned on that system helped me later when I hopped over to PC's, IBM's VM/CMS, and Digital's VMS, and a couple of years later Solaris followed by Linux and DEC OSF/1.
I can honestly say if it wasn't for usenet I wouldn't have found all of the neat stuff and upgrades for the apple 2 that are still a part of that system. And of course the healthy respect for RTFM'ing before asking something that was answered in the FAQ (or now HOWTO's, man pages, info pages, hard copy manuals and so on).
Unfortunatley over the years my use of Usenet has dwindled to nothing. Mainly from the quality of responses on the newsgroups I read. I used to get a bunch of useful replies. Last time I posted I got a slew of "me too's", 1 sorta useful reply, and a couple of replies that didn't tell me anything that I already didn't know (basically restating my question, but phrasing it as an answer). I know a lot of it most likely has to do with what newsgroup I looking at. If I find some hardcore newsgroup (like a *BSD group) I'd imagine I'd find the quality of replies I used to find on Usenet years ago. Of course now I'm much more impatient, I just hop onto irc and ask my question there, or a mailing list.
Of course the worst part is that Jim, who came up with the idea/developed it is now gone. People like Jim Ellis are true alpha geeks. We should find a good way to preserve their work, mainly years from now when some kid reads their history book, and believes that Al Gore invented the Internet, people like Jim Ellis who did the work will be marginalized. I'd hate to see that happen.
Anyway, enough of being on my soapbox.
I have been on both sides...
My former job, we were "allotted" 5k a year for training. Good luck getting it approved though. In the 5 years I was there I was only sent to 2 training classes. One of them was since I knew nothing about relational databases, and was expected to be an expert DBA (since the guy who was leaving did that also). I wore several hats, Unix admin, DBA, security admin and operator. I think the main reason they sent me to database training was 1) I hosed the database 2) I was begging for the class. My old job would also pay for college tuition if you had a c or better, but you had to sign a contract that said you would stay for 5 years after getting your degree. Needless to say I didn't let them pay a dime for my college classes.
My current job: I am required to take 2 classes a year, minimum. I will get whatever training that relates to my job. I'm supposed to be an expert on their systems in the customer's eyes, hence I get the training I need to become an expert. I also can get books for free (they only ask that they relate somehow). And they will pay for college also, without the draconian contract of the old job. Needless to say, I'm much happier at my new job, and heck even if I won the lottery, I'd still work for them.
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"If you insist on using Windoze you're on your own."
Yeah, this is true, I pretty much leveled with the tech support guy, told them I had taken over the system from someone else and honestly wasn't exactly sure what was going on. Gave them all the info they needed and they helped me learn and fix the problems. A lot of it made sense when I was finally sent to Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise training. After that I could call tech support tell them the problem, and throw all the stuff they would ask for up front. Amazingly it has helped in getting the problem resolved quicker. As far as being hung out to dry, the boss couldn't do that very easily as I was taking on a ton of responsibility and managing to make the systems quite a bit more reliable.
Although there have been a few times where I got a first level engineer who was lucky to answer the phone, he couldn't set up his voice mail correctly, and didn't know how to read the case notes. Luckly for me I called back way after hours and got another first level engineer from Australia. He pointed me in the right direction and got the problem resolved. Luckly these have been rare at companies such as Sun, HP, and Sybase. Although it seems much more common at Dell. It's like they have an unbreakable script they cannot deviate from. It took me a month to get them to ship me a new ethernet card, even after shipping it back to Dell 3 times for the same problem. I would imagine Dell has some great support engineers, although I haven't had the pleasure of working with them.
As far as the job thing goes, hopefully in the next few days I'll have an offer in writing from Sun Microsystems, as I know UNIX far better than I do databases.
I agree that each database product doesn't directly compete. MySQL != Oracle. It all highly depends on what you want to do.
/. where loss of data isn't a concern, but speed is.
MySQL is great for sites like
Postgress is great for those who want a low cost solution for a small RDBMS.
M$ Access is cute for visually seeing the relations, but pretty much a joke for anything serious.
SQL Server / Sybase these two are essentially the same, they were the same product a few versions ago. M$ added some neat features to it, and Sybase seems to be struggling to add useful and needed features. (Like hot backups (where you can take a snapshot of the database devices), load balancing, easier management of replication, major scalability and failover.) Sybase is working on it, but Oracle and DB2 are way ahead these two products by quite a bit. SQL Server is also hampered by only running on intel hardware. Sybase at least runs on quite a few different platforms.
Oracle the kingpin of the RDBMS areana. Pretty much has all of the features, and a huge licensing fee.
DB2 everything that I've read has rated DB2 quite high, it seems to be the database that people use but no one seems to know about.
Pretty much it's all that you're wanting to do with the database, and how much $ you have to determine which database you use. But keep in mind if you write everything you can in ANSI SQL, it should be fairly portable between database vendors. Unfortunatley I've seen cases where writing something with Transact-SQL (Sybase / M$) or PL/SQL (Oracle) is needed. But supposedly both are going to have (or already have) native java support so you can just create a query in java rather than SQL. I don't know much about that other than it's supposed to exist or comming soon, and I'm not a java programmer, so I can't say for certain.
Well a few years ago I was thrust into being a DBA and an HP/UX admin. At that time I didn't know the first thing about databases, nor much about admining HP/UX. I did know Solaris and how to admin Linux fairly well at that point. Needless to say I was one of those "clueless nitwits" who called support quite a bit. Over time I learned from the helpful and intelligent support staff members. Honestly if it wasn't for them I couldn't have gotten my ass out of the fire so to speak. Since the systems that I inherited were poorly managed by the previous admin, partially due to his lack of training, and partially to having far too many responsibilities.
While I agree with Ian Wolf that "...a competent Oracle DBA who stumbled across a hung database would immediately check for a log switch, missing file, or lack of free space. For DBA's this knowledge should be as second nature as breathing." I think that a large portion of this problem rests with the companies who tell someone with a bit of computer experience, but definatley not a competitent DBA to run their Sybase, Oracle, DB2, or whatever RDBMS system. In the case of some companies they simply won't pay for a real DBA (in the case of my current job). And in many of the same cases, the company won't send their people to training... So what's left? Pretty much that leaves the tech support 800 number.
I think Sun, like any other company will create a "loss leader" to help gain market share and customers. Most grocery stores sell some items at a loss, and jack up the cost of others to make up for the loss. Besides some people might have bought sparcs if they were cheaper, but instead got a PC running Linux/BSD/Solaris X86 instead. Personally I'd rather have a sparc on my desk than some PC. At least I'd have a 64-bit machine built to run UNIX, and not having to deal with IRQ conflicts and the like.
This also can look good for Sun in the market if they can sell a ton of these and make a small dent in the PC world. And the more volume they move, they may make their loss back. It's all in the suppy-demand theory from economics. If nothing else Wall Street will look at this and boost Sun's stock.
I really enjoy the HP printers and calculators that I have worked with. However using HP/UX has been a royal pain. As for linux driver support, I wish I could have better support for a printer and be able to print directly, but here at work I find myself using an HP/UX box as my print server and pointing my linux boxes to it.
The thing the annoys me to no end is the utter proprietaryness of the Unix OS. I have on numerous occasions called HP support and they give me undocumented flags for commands (ie not in the manpage or the -? flag) that are needed to get the job done. It amazes me they have as much unix market share as they do with such an extreemely closed system. As far as things are concerned I'd just be happy using Solaris and Linux. In fact we're looking into replacing all of our HP servers with Suns. Yes, HP hardware has been good to us, but those are mimial with respect to control over the OS.
I just hope HP will commit to Open Source and open their closed minded approach to interfaces with their hardware products and their software.
It's nice to see Palm computing cater to all of the lusers out there who would buy a wince box. But honestly, I'm waiting for some real major changes to make me upgrade my pilot personal. (yeah, it's got the pro card in it)
It pretty much does what I want it to, be a convienent way to track dates, phone numbers and passwords....Ya know the obvious things a PDA is supposed to do. Besides looking at some of these new styles, it makes me want to hold onto my personal longer.
My Apex DVD player can do that also. And then of course there are several car players that can do that also. Not big news here.
I've also seen them affixed to a stapler that works only half of the time. The intel inside logo works well there also. A garbage can is useful, hence not the best place for those stickers.
I wonder if it has anything to do with it running DB2, all of the other systems that were benchmarked were running Oracle 8.x. And the performance is soo vastly different for a little quad processor intel machine, I find it hard that it spec'd higher than any UN*X, even an Alpha Cluster, Sun's Starfire, HP's V class, and IBM's own RS/6000. If nothing else the sheer redundancy of the other setups would have me choose it over the intel setup on w2k.
And I'd also trust Bea Systems' Tuxedo for a TPM than I would M$'s COM+. Let's just say I'd rather use something battle tested when my job is on the line. (Yes I do use Linux at work, just not in my production critical back end database)
I've got a dual boot system, Debian 2.2 and Winblows 98 (only so I can play DVD's and games that haven't been ported yet, and 'cause it's work's laptop and the boss insisted that Winblows be installed on it.) Debian runs quite well on the system, but I had a ethernet card problem, so I called Dell Tech Support to try to get a replacement. After shipping it back three times, 2 motherboard swaps and a new keyboard later they finally swapped the ethernet card. They about blew a gasket when they found out that I had the system dual booting. Dell's tech support claimed my problems are due to dual booting. RIGHT!
I then had to lie to them and say that I only had windows installed on it to get them to help me. And working with their Tech Support is like pulling teeth. They have a script that they run through and will not under any circumstances deviate from the script.
So as far as buying a system pre-loaded with Linux on it, I'll get it from VA or Penguin rather than the likes of Compaq, Dell or Gateway. They're still in bed with Billy-Boy, and won't help if you have a hardware problem if you're not running win-something-or-another.
I've been reading most of the flamewar that has been raging on debian-devel. I can see points on both sides.
On one side you have people who like and appreciate all of the packages and integration of those packages on one system. I personally like being able to download and install whatever software as a package and have it work. It makes my life easier when dealing with a large number of servers. In fact I like apt / dselect in their power and ease of use. It makes me have to spend less time managing my linux boxes here at work, and let's me spend more time fighting with HP's swinstall and Sun's pkgadd commands. Neither are as slick as apt, or as convient to use.
On the other side of the debate is that Debian is a total non-profit entity, and funded mostly by Software in the Public Interest. I agree that free software is the best way to go. Although I'm spoiled by using Pine, Netscape, and several other non-free packages. This all boils down to that Debian should only be supporting free software only.
I see both points, both are valid. But I would hate to see the loss of integration, loss of some relitavely important (to some people) non-free packages, and harm it could possibly do to get new users to switch over to Debian as a distro.
I have to admit the more I have been using Debian, the more I agree with their path of free is the best way to go, and I've begun the transistion to using totally free software from non-free stuff. But I can't force my users, I can't force other Linux users to agree with this stance. Most of them like their software and don't want to play with a tarball and try to get it installed. And being the frazzled admin here at work, that's the last thing I need is more things to compile and try to stay on top of. If I wanted to compile everything, I'd be running Slackware.
Eventually I am planning on becomming a Debian developer. I just hope the current developers make the right decision, and keep everyone happy one way or another. I wish that the clear heads will prevail, and make the best decision regarding the future of the project. Either way that won't change the quality or insistence on standards that Debian has been known for. IMHO, this is what seperates Debian from any other linux distro.
Well from what I've gathered from the current discussion is somewhat of a lack of direction. So here are a few things to consider and answer before going forward:
/. then clustering proper is not done. If you can see, they just load balance 3 web servers, and then dedicate a box for ads, a box for the database, and a dedicated image box. And we know how little /. is down...
1) Do you need High Availability of 1 machine? (ie 99+% of a single machine) If the answer is yes, then clustering is the way to go. But doing that right is very expensive (hardware, software)
2) Does it make sense to have a farm of identicaly configured machines? If you're using Linux / FreeBSD as your webservers and if you only run web servers on them, then you can get away from clustering proper and just throw a ton of machines at the problem. ie farm of web servers.
3) Sounds like the Consultant has the right idea with the "expensive Cisco hardware" in making sure Layer 2 is fully redundant. Good step forward. Now ya just need to make sure your hardware that is connected to it will utilize it. Do you?
4) If your running Solaris, then Alternate Pathing becomes your friend (especially with Quad Fast Ethernet cards), as well as Dynamic Reconfiguration. Are you, or is this a moot thread?
5) Overall, what are you trying to accomplish? Uptime of hardware, uptime of the application, or raw uptime of the web servers? If you got a set up like
Basically, that's pretty much it. Personally I wouldn't bother with clustering or complicating the web servers that much, I'd cluster the back end supporting stuff for the web farm. ie the back end database, fully redundant hardware, alternate paths and so on. And then let Cisco's Local Director take care of load balancing and checking the web server is up or not. (From what my network guy at work tells me, it can do that. I won't personally believe it until I see it).
Every time I read a history of a programme and find a line "completely re-wrote the code", I begin having second thougths about how really good the programme is.
There have been several occasions last year where me and a co-worker ended up trashing pages and pages of code to re-write it with the same functionality, but modular and ended up being smaller in some cases.
My company used consultants who wrote terrible code. Let's use this example...there is a program that calcuates x days ago. The consultant's program went and tried to calculate leap years and all of that. Our program that replaced it used system library calls to date, and then simply subtracted the proper amount of seconds. Other ones were hardcoded scripts to run sql on our database, we replaced that with a perl script that took the sql as a parameter.
So there are times where a re-write is better than maintaining the code. I guess the biggest case in point is mozilla versus navigator. Basically I agree that projects were planned and used software engineering principles we would most likely end up with good products. Granted game programs seem to be done best when they're a hack.. But how many times have you seen long term maintenance of games?
I've said it before and I'll say it again: people don't know that there is stuff out there better then MS.
Yeah, and that's been one of the things that I personally work to change. I came into work that thursday, and a co-worker was all worred that she sent this virus, I initially laughed. It sounded kinda stupid to be a virus, but volia it was. She thought this cause she sent her fiance a "I love you" card over e-mail. Within a half hour of walking in the door, I found that someone on the HP/UX admin mailing list had sent it...I dumped it onto my linux box (I'm forced to use Look Out! (TM) at work, *sigh*) and then ripped it apart. I then printed it out and took it to her to show her. I then said "Unless you wrote this, then you didn't send your fiance the virus." She look at it and laughed, nope wasn't her, but a few people that work around her noticed that I had the virus source code in my hands and seemed amazed that I was holding that. They asked how I got it, Linux, it doesn't care about Visual Basic, only Winblows and Look Out! care. And besides I mention that our DNS, NIS, DHCP servers are all Linux, and over time they get a respect for it. Some of the users want linux on their desktop rather than NT, but know they can't 'cause of the applicaitons they run. I've had a few of them ask to borrow my linux install cd's so they can install at home.
Basically it's just a matter of education and demonstration what linux can do. I honestly think that with M$'s breakup (if they break it up right), it can only benefit the industry. For example, break the OS into a company, the Apps into yet another company and then the development tools into another, or give it to borland. And most important don't allow non-disclosure agreements between the parts. Full disclosure should be done with each of the parts. This will kill the hidden API's, hidden compiler flags, and all of the stuff we know M$ does. Basically this will force them to be competitive with any other vendor out there. Like Be, they have an OS, and they publish their API's so developers can code for it, same with Sun and so on... That way M$ products would be at the same standing as any other product on the market, and wouldn't have the unfair advantage of "being integrated into the OS", or M$'s "innovation." This is what I see as the best way to break them up. Maybe just maybe they'll be forced to make good products....most likely minus the OS portion...
Ya know, wasn't this precisely what M$ said they were going to do, per the Haloween Documents? Invoke copyrights, patents and stuff like that to harm Open Source. (I'm going from memory here, I don't know where I put my hardcopy of those documents) I'm wondering if MIT will put their foot down considering the license that Kerberos lives under. If not, it's M$ to their "innovation" tricks of embrace and extend.
This world is a test, and only a test. If it was a perfect world, M$ would play fair and actually have good software, and utilize open standards.
Hey, at least they're visiting the site.:) I wonder if the M$ guys have accounts?
Humm, maybe they're the Anonymous Cowards that do the first posts.... heheheh
I tend to agree that running a business using Open Source software, is a whole different principle than the traditional business model. I've noticed at work there are discussion on how much we could sell the code that we produce for our internal use. Of course I'd rather see it Open Sourced and have the bugs fixed and more useful features added.
Most suits are driven to make money on about nearly anything. And anything that threatens that model is "BAD". Basically 'cause I tend to use Open Source software rather than paying huge amounts of money for a close source alternative I got ripped on my performance review. I guess because I used BigBrother to monitor my network rather than HP's OpenView. But honestly we don't need the power or complexity of OpenView...we just simply need to know whether a server is up or down, and if down, page the admin. I also know that BigBrother doesn't meet the DFSG (Debian Free Software Guidelines), but it's more a of a non-free package anyway.
Most managers want to have someone to blame when there is a problem. I guess the best demonstration is when I had a hardware failure with my workstation...I put it together, troubleshot it, and found the faulty part, asked for a replacement, and volia fixed. My laptop on the other hand came from Dell, and I wasted about a week of time with their tech support people (on speakerphone so others could hear the idiocy), and of course my laptop was out of service for over a month being shipped back and forth between work and Dell. Granted I call Sun or HP and they'll show up according to their contract and replace the faulty part. *sigh*
If the suits would leave the techies alone, things would just work, and we wouldn't be forced to use some software package from a commerical vendor that doesn't meet all of the users needs, and costs soo much that the suits tell you to make it work. I'm not saying all commerical software is bad, but there is a lot that leaves much to be desired. I like safeword for example, it's a commerical product, but for unix they also give you the source code (under NDA of course), so if there is a problem with it you can dig in and fix things.
Welcome to the world of Information Technology my friend. The truth is that most users notice nothing and appreciate less. That is, until it goes wrong. Then the purveyors of the service get villified ....
/. hehehehe.
/. crew deserve a lot of credit for moving the whole site and making the move pretty painless. It's a lot of work, and I'm personally not looking to move all of my users back to my old production box with the new shareholder accounting system on it. *sigh*
Yeah, I know that all too well. I'm the sole manager of all of the unix machines, and even the databases. Needless to say I have almost too much to do the job I want to do. But the users always ask me what I do. Everytime they walk past my desk I'm always surfing the web. Humm, it's called research...gotta learn about kewl stuff...like reading
Anyway, they don't appreciate too much that the systems don't crash every other day anymore. And heck even some of the others in my IT department have no clue. I found out that on a day off, a couple of the programmers were messing around in the server room, and turned the power key on the production server not knowing what they key does. My boss told them it was a good thing that I wasn't there, I would have strung them up by their toenails. [grin]
The
It's always nice to see companies help out the open source projects, and give them financial backing, hardware to use and so on. But this case it makes me wonder, considering the guy seems to be in it for the money and the IPO... "Ritter watched his company miss out on a golden opportunity to invest in Linux software seller Red Hat way before its successful initial public offering. Now he hopes to catch the second wave of the open-source software trend"
Honestly some of the RDMS providers could use some real competition. Oracle is nice, but costs far too much. Sybase is ok, but lacking in lots of things, including security. Microsoft bought their way in, by buying Sybase's SQL Server from them a few years ago. And DB2...dunno much about that personally. If Postgress is to really compete, it needs to be fast, secure and scalable. If it makes it to that point, I won't have any trouble dumping Sybase for it.
try this logic
/dev/null
if(ProblemInCode(ProjectName))
FixCode();
else
UseCode();
ComplainProfusely();
Note that the function ComplainProfusely() is not in there...if theres a problem, shut up and fix the damn thing...
Naah, the ComplainProfusely() is in there, just redirected to
I can't understand how Billy Boy can honestly tell people that breaking up Microsoft will there be more viruses like this one? Honestly the reason these "macro viruses" exist to begin with is Microsoft's fault to begin with.
If it wasn't for the VBS stuff in all of the office aps, the windows scripting host in win98 (and anything using IE 4.x +) these viruses just simply wouldn't exist. I used to remember telling users that viruses through e-mail were a hoax. Thanks M$ for making these hoaxes reality, and making me fire fight all day thursday and friday cause of this "innovation."
M$, do me and the world a favor, and "innovate" yourself out of existence.