In linux and freebsd systems it's relatively easy to check in/etc and/usr/local/etc into cvs. In MacOSx that won't help you so much. Your infor could be in netinfo, ldap,/etc, or even the application folder itself.
To be more precise people love the illusion of accountability. If your ERP breaks peoplesoft will not do anything for you. You will though get to blame them to the board and they won't hear you cos they are sleeping or scheming to rip off the shareholders.
"Is defacing a website any different from spraying graffiti on someones walls?"
Yes. The punishments are different. If you are caught spraypainting a wall you might get fined or be forced to clean it up. If you deface a web site you might get jailed longer then a rapist.
"I expect my admins to be professionals and to handle sensitive equipment and software correctly and with care!"
And I expect my servers not to be "sensitive equipment" that requires special and sensitive handling. Turning a key ought not to break the latch, screwing in a screw ought not to dent the case or strip away material.
"if they're 'piddly things', are they important?"
Well they are still working if that's what you mean. But they an indication of cheaply made equipment.
" Were these DOA"
They were not DOA. One was damaged while mounting in the rack and the other after it was already mounted.
"Is your percieved lack of coherence due to the design of the software, or your unfamiliarity with its usage?"
The former.
"How much of it is the result of your having to (shocking!) learn new ways to use a new operating system?"
None of it.
"It's clear from your other posts on this thread that your experience is highly linked to Dell systems. Would it surprise you that Xserves do not behave exactly like Dells?"
As I have said before we use dell, hp, compaq and apple servers. Have you ever seen a compaq server? They are sturdy and built like tanks. One time we had a ML370 (4U maxed out raid) slip from one it's tracks during servicing and it hung on just one rail for over a minute despite weighing a ton. An apple would have simply buckled despite weighing five times less.
"Again, which ones? Or better yet, explain why you originally criticized darwinports in the context of I/O-bound apps on the Xserve hardware in a cost analysis thread in a story about computer hardware."
Oh you know little used ones like php and sablotron. As for why I brought it up; the fact that darwinports even exists points to a deficiency of the mac operating system. Debian has apt, freebsd has ports, gentoo has emerge and the mac has nothing. Nothing official anyway. Instead there are a half a dozen projects who try to fill in the gaps apple left open. Apparently nobody at apple even thought for one second that somebody might want to install something like freetds or run php with some module they didn't think to compile in. So it's up to the open source community to do their work for them now. Darwinport, fink, pkgsource and yes even emerge for macosx.
"And surely, you're not speaking from experience trying to do serious HPC using generic, unoptimized multi-platform source on three nodes..."
Of course not. I work for a typical corporation doing typical corporation type of shit. You know, databases, applications, file servers, web servers etc. Yes none of it is glamorous but it does provide thousands of jobs all across the country and apparently provides some value to our customers and shareholders. Sorry it's not glamorous enough for you, sorry it's not l33t and cool, it's just bread and butter boring shit but it's important to me, to the team that reports to me and to my bosses.
You seem to think that somehow our sysadmins are not as l33t as you but I assure you that they are top notch. You seem to think that I am not as l33t as you but I am. I have decades or hard won experience working with every operating system on the planet including MVS and VMS. Of all the server operating systems I have worked with I can unequavically say that the MacOSX is the least coherent, the most fragile, the hardest to extend and maintain (well except for windows maybe). Without question.
If you don't believe me just subscribe to the macos admin listserve at omnigroup. The concensus over there seems to agree with me. MacOSX server is not ready for prime time yet. Lets hope tiger is better.
It's apparent we have different expectations from the server hardware and software we buy and use.
Where we work we have HP, Compaq (before the merger) , dell and starting last year apple server. We also run windows, freebsd and now mac os x servers.
Hardware wise the apple xserves are the most fragile of all of our server. We bought three and something went wrong with two of them right off the bat. Mostly small piddly things but they are really really fragile.
Software wise mac os x server is nowhere near the coherence of either freebsd or windows. Let's hope tiger is an improvement. I installed the developer preview of the desktop but haven't tried the server yet.
As for darwinports well it would be nice if all of the ports actually built. So far about 1/3rd of the ones I attempted have failed to build
It's not just adduser. That was the first one that sprung up in my head. Have you read the apple command line reference manual (available at apple.com)? Go read it and then tell me how similar it is to linux, freebsd, or solaris.
I palyed around a bit with both suse 9.1 and novell desktop. I have also palyed around with debian and xandros. At this point if I was to consider linux for a server I'd probably go with debian.
Having said all that for a desktop distro nothing beats xandros.
" I haven't done extensive work with OS X Server but it seemed all the bases were covered by the GUI."
No. The GUI just covers the basics.
"If your not going to be using all the pretty GUI widgets, then why in the hell are you even leaving OS X on there? Just move BSD or YDL or something."
Well I hate linux (especially anything RPM based) and freebsd (which I love) is not ready for PPC yet.
They look nice but they only have one power supply. Their cases are aluminum, while that may be l33t it also means they are fragile as all get out. Twist a screw too tight and you have stripped the damned thing. The rail racks are also just poorly designed. Compare them to something made by HP or Dell and see for yourself.
The OS (OSX server) is an abomination. Ok maybe that's harsh but god help you if you want to do anything that's not controlled by the gui. Go ahead and muck with those postfix or samba conf files but don't come crying to apple when it decides to wipe your configuration and put it's own instead. You want to learn brand new commands for everything? I thought you did. Virtually none of the commands you have reached for over the years work. Don't even get me started on darwinports....
Why oh why couldn't they have just left freebsd alone and stuck a nice gui on it.
Aahh Dell. Otherwise known as "the vendor whose name rhymes with hell".
No two machines coming out of dell are alike. We have had batches of five that had different components in them. Don't even get me started on proprietary firmware on crucial devices like fiber channel cards.
Where I work the corporate mantra seems to be "buy the most expensive thing on the market". Alas the rate of failure and flakiness as well as horrible support seem to plague all of the hardware they buy.
You'd know the names, netapp, dell, HP, veritas etc. As somebody who lives on "the other side" I can unequivically tell you that the grass is not greener.
I don't know. The tiger pre-release is very buggy right now. There are lots of screen issues, fuzzy text, occational scrambling of the windows etc.
I can certainly understand how apple does not want this released into the public because it will give the product an undeserved bad reputation.
People (especially BOFHs) will not say "oh it's a pre-release of course it doesn't work perfectly". They will instead say "the next version of mac os x sucks".
All developers who signed up for the pre-release program had to sign an NDA. There is no excuse for releaseing a pre-release into the wild.
Since the first world is the largest consumer of natural resources it would indeed work. Perhaps with drastically reduced demand for coffee and sugar people in the third world could plant actual food that they can eat.
When somebody sells a baby they are just fulfilling a need. When somebody sells their 13 year old daughter to porstitution they are just fulfilling some need. When someone sells their child to indentured servitude they are just fulfilling a need. When somebody sells a kidney they are just fulfilling a need. When somebody rents their womb for 9 months so that somebody elses baby grows there they are just fulfilling a need.
Nevertheless all of these acts are morally repugnant. Money is the root of all evil.
" Where humans have lived, just about every other life form except the rat and roach have suffered."
that's not true. In northern America humans lived for thousands of year without harming the environment. How? A small population, no technology to speak of (not even the wheel!).
"Do you propose we start a policy of zero population grown and euthanasia for those of us still living? "
I for one would love to see that. before we get to euthanasia I'd suggest a reversible sterilization upon birth and being given permission to give birth when you have proven you deserve it more then anybody else.
Did you get low interest student loans? did you get any pell grants? Were you working at work study jobs?
Since you answered yes to state school you can no longer claim you paid for your own education. The taxpayers paid for most of it. If you answered yes to any of the above questions then you payed even less of a percentage.
My guess is that you paid something like 20% of the cost of your education. The rest was paid with taxpayers money.
Oh and I forgot. You parents paid nothing? Not even for food or rent or anything?
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In linux and freebsd systems it's relatively easy to check in /etc and /usr/local/etc into cvs. In MacOSx that won't help you so much. Your infor could be in netinfo, ldap, /etc, or even the application folder itself.
The OS should be your ally not your enemy.
To be more precise people love the illusion of accountability. If your ERP breaks peoplesoft will not do anything for you. You will though get to blame them to the board and they won't hear you cos they are sleeping or scheming to rip off the shareholders.
So are the Micros appparently.
Seriously though this is not a hat or a shoe or something. It's rather painful to try and change your HR app.
But then again MS can spread a lot of rolexes to a lot of CIOs who don't give a damn about the pain they will cause to everybody else.
"Is defacing a website any different from spraying graffiti on someones walls?"
Yes. The punishments are different. If you are caught spraypainting a wall you might get fined or be forced to clean it up. If you deface a web site you might get jailed longer then a rapist.
One acronym DMCA.
"I expect my admins to be professionals and to handle sensitive equipment and software correctly and with care!"
.
And I expect my servers not to be "sensitive equipment" that requires special and sensitive handling. Turning a key ought not to break the latch, screwing in a screw ought not to dent the case or strip away material.
"if they're 'piddly things', are they important?"
Well they are still working if that's what you mean. But they an indication of cheaply made equipment.
" Were these DOA"
They were not DOA. One was damaged while mounting in the rack and the other after it was already mounted
"Is your percieved lack of coherence due to the design of the software, or your unfamiliarity with its usage?"
The former.
"How much of it is the result of your having to (shocking!) learn new ways to use a new operating system?"
None of it.
"It's clear from your other posts on this thread that your experience is highly linked to Dell systems. Would it surprise you that Xserves do not behave exactly like Dells?"
As I have said before we use dell, hp, compaq and apple servers. Have you ever seen a compaq server? They are sturdy and built like tanks. One time we had a ML370 (4U maxed out raid) slip from one it's tracks during servicing and it hung on just one rail for over a minute despite weighing a ton. An apple would have simply buckled despite weighing five times less.
"Again, which ones? Or better yet, explain why you originally criticized darwinports in the context of I/O-bound apps on the Xserve hardware in a cost analysis thread in a story about computer hardware."
Oh you know little used ones like php and sablotron. As for why I brought it up; the fact that darwinports even exists points to a deficiency of the mac operating system. Debian has apt, freebsd has ports, gentoo has emerge and the mac has nothing. Nothing official anyway. Instead there are a half a dozen projects who try to fill in the gaps apple left open. Apparently nobody at apple even thought for one second that somebody might want to install something like freetds or run php with some module they didn't think to compile in. So it's up to the open source community to do their work for them now. Darwinport, fink, pkgsource and yes even emerge for macosx.
"And surely, you're not speaking from experience trying to do serious HPC using generic, unoptimized multi-platform source on three nodes..."
Of course not. I work for a typical corporation doing typical corporation type of shit. You know, databases, applications, file servers, web servers etc. Yes none of it is glamorous but it does provide thousands of jobs all across the country and apparently provides some value to our customers and shareholders. Sorry it's not glamorous enough for you, sorry it's not l33t and cool, it's just bread and butter boring shit but it's important to me, to the team that reports to me and to my bosses.
You seem to think that somehow our sysadmins are not as l33t as you but I assure you that they are top notch. You seem to think that I am not as l33t as you but I am. I have decades or hard won experience working with every operating system on the planet including MVS and VMS. Of all the server operating systems I have worked with I can unequavically say that the MacOSX is the least coherent, the most fragile, the hardest to extend and maintain (well except for windows maybe). Without question.
If you don't believe me just subscribe to the macos admin listserve at omnigroup. The concensus over there seems to agree with me. MacOSX server is not ready for prime time yet. Lets hope tiger is better.
I think that there is a high probility that at least one company will make linux drivers for their wireless card in the next year.
It's not up to linus you know, it's damned hard to write drivers for cards you don't have specs for and these days it may even be illegal.
Why should I have to go out of my way to try and protect myself from the operating system.
It's apparent we have different expectations from the server hardware and software we buy and use.
Where we work we have HP, Compaq (before the merger) , dell and starting last year apple server. We also run windows, freebsd and now mac os x servers.
Hardware wise the apple xserves are the most fragile of all of our server. We bought three and something went wrong with two of them right off the bat. Mostly small piddly things but they are really really fragile.
Software wise mac os x server is nowhere near the coherence of either freebsd or windows. Let's hope tiger is an improvement. I installed the developer preview of the desktop but haven't tried the server yet.
As for darwinports well it would be nice if all of the ports actually built. So far about 1/3rd of the ones I attempted have failed to build
It's not just adduser. That was the first one that sprung up in my head. Have you read the apple command line reference manual (available at apple.com)? Go read it and then tell me how similar it is to linux, freebsd, or solaris.
I palyed around a bit with both suse 9.1 and novell desktop. I have also palyed around with debian and xandros. At this point if I was to consider linux for a server I'd probably go with debian.
Having said all that for a desktop distro nothing beats xandros.
" I haven't done extensive work with OS X Server but it seemed all the bases were covered by the GUI."
No. The GUI just covers the basics.
"If your not going to be using all the pretty GUI widgets, then why in the hell are you even leaving OS X on there? Just move BSD or YDL or something."
Well I hate linux (especially anything RPM based) and freebsd (which I love) is not ready for PPC yet.
"f you want to fine tune a server or get it to do special things, you're going to have to learn how to edit a configuration file."
Yes of course but here is the thing if you or anybody else touches the gui (and sometimes even if you don't) your config file will get overwritten.
"All of the commands that I've used in Linux work on the Mac"
Are you using the server? If so try using adduser.
"The Dells and HP computers in the same price range only come with a single power supply as well."
Not true. You can get a dual power supply dell with scsi drives for $2500 or so.
"I've never been a fan of huge computers with massive redudancy anyway."
I am not talking about huge comuters, just 1Us with dual pwer supplies.
"Apple does provide you with spare parts if you get the expensive support option"
Yes they do if downtime is not that important to you.
Let me tell you about the apples.
They look nice but they only have one power supply.
Their cases are aluminum, while that may be l33t it also means they are fragile as all get out. Twist a screw too tight and you have stripped the damned thing.
The rail racks are also just poorly designed. Compare them to something made by HP or Dell and see for yourself.
The OS (OSX server) is an abomination. Ok maybe that's harsh but god help you if you want to do anything that's not controlled by the gui. Go ahead and muck with those postfix or samba conf files but don't come crying to apple when it decides to wipe your configuration and put it's own instead. You want to learn brand new commands for everything? I thought you did. Virtually none of the commands you have reached for over the years work. Don't even get me started on darwinports....
Why oh why couldn't they have just left freebsd alone and stuck a nice gui on it.
Aahh Dell. Otherwise known as "the vendor whose name rhymes with hell".
No two machines coming out of dell are alike. We have had batches of five that had different components in them. Don't even get me started on proprietary firmware on crucial devices like fiber channel cards.
Where I work the corporate mantra seems to be "buy the most expensive thing on the market". Alas the rate of failure and flakiness as well as horrible support seem to plague all of the hardware they buy.
You'd know the names, netapp, dell, HP, veritas etc. As somebody who lives on "the other side" I can unequivically tell you that the grass is not greener.
In This cnet article BIll Gates refers to people who want to reform IP law as "communists".
I am surprised he didn't say terrorists but clearly he is laying the ground work to get people who disagree with him on the terrorist list.
I don't know. The tiger pre-release is very buggy right now. There are lots of screen issues, fuzzy text, occational scrambling of the windows etc.
I can certainly understand how apple does not want this released into the public because it will give the product an undeserved bad reputation.
People (especially BOFHs) will not say "oh it's a pre-release of course it doesn't work perfectly". They will instead say "the next version of mac os x sucks".
All developers who signed up for the pre-release program had to sign an NDA. There is no excuse for releaseing a pre-release into the wild.
I think he was refering to this interview in which Bill Gates refers to people who disagree with him on IP issues as "communists" repeatedly.
Is there a scummier human being on the planet then Bill Gates? Well maybe the guy who raped a tsunami survivor but even then it's close.
Since the first world is the largest consumer of natural resources it would indeed work. Perhaps with drastically reduced demand for coffee and sugar people in the third world could plant actual food that they can eat.
When somebody sells a baby they are just fulfilling a need. When somebody sells their 13 year old daughter to porstitution they are just fulfilling some need. When someone sells their child to indentured servitude they are just fulfilling a need. When somebody sells a kidney they are just fulfilling a need. When somebody rents their womb for 9 months so that somebody elses baby grows there they are just fulfilling a need.
Nevertheless all of these acts are morally repugnant. Money is the root of all evil.
" Where humans have lived, just about every other life form except the rat and roach have suffered."
that's not true. In northern America humans lived for thousands of year without harming the environment. How? A small population, no technology to speak of (not even the wheel!).
"Do you propose we start a policy of zero population grown and euthanasia for those of us still living? "
I for one would love to see that. before we get to euthanasia I'd suggest a reversible sterilization upon birth and being given permission to give birth when you have proven you deserve it more then anybody else.
What you mean people will enjoy crippled content?
Did you get low interest student loans? did you get any pell grants? Were you working at work study jobs?
Since you answered yes to state school you can no longer claim you paid for your own education. The taxpayers paid for most of it. If you answered yes to any of the above questions then you payed even less of a percentage.
My guess is that you paid something like 20% of the cost of your education. The rest was paid with taxpayers money.
Oh and I forgot. You parents paid nothing? Not even for food or rent or anything?
1) Almost nothing is serviced in the field anymore. Some things are but they are dwindling fast.
2) Not really true. Only ones needing top secret or above, even then there are exceptions for example look at kissinger, Brzezinski, chalabi etc.