Once my servers are stable and live, I generally don't update them unless they're exposed to the network or Internet in any significant way. Even then I only do it if an update patches a specific issue we're experiencing, or patches a security hole in a service that's actually running, and not covered by the firewalls/IDS/CSA we have.
I certainly would never risk having scheduled auto-installed updates, in case they break something. Even the desktops I look after only get their patches (through WSUS) after testing.
Blue screens, ah yes - I remember those, but only from the Win 9x days. Since getting enough clout to ban dodgy hardware for production environments (non-Intel chipsets and cheap RAM), they are a distant memory.
I have large production Windows Server 2003 systems with (currently) 35 weeks uptime - and that last reboot was due to moving them into a different building).
If you lose customers by letting them run substandard machines which crash using an OS which is now demonstrably stable, and then blame the OS, then that's your loss and your fault.
And on the two week install issue, haven't you heard of Gentoo?;-)
I've just finished work for a few days, and had a bottle of really good wine - and so I'm feeling good enough for a bit of wanton pedantry....
Given the way hard drive manufacturers report capacity, I make it 465.7 GB, which is a whisker under 45.5% of a TB. Of course that's before any FS overhead.
OK, it's *close* to half a TB, and it is a BIG hard drive (my first was 20 MB). BUT... if I had half a TB of data to store, I'd be short over 46 GB, which is no small amount.
Think I'm being overly dramatic? Think again. This is going to wind up being the worst natural disaster in U.S. history, and what I'm seeing on/. are jokes? I know the usual flippant response is 'hey dude, this is a valid response to tragedy.'
OK, what has happened is unfortunate, nasty and tragic. However, a few things spring to mind...
1. Yes, humour is how we cope. I'm English and we have plenty of London bomb jokes already. This doesn't mean I find the idea of bombs going off or people being flooded out of their homes remotely funny, it's just a coping mechamisn. If you really look at what's going on in the world, humour's the only way to stay sane.
2. Think about the people in the Superdome without air conditioning? Please. Think about the majority of people on the planet who have never had air conditioning, reliable clean water, cheap power and fuel. Given disasters like this and worse happen all the time, they are lucky to have the resources of the richest country of the world to help them. A few days or weeks of inconvenience is all they have, then the vast majority will be right back to their normal fat western lifestyle.
3. This happens in the US, and it's our (in England) top news story. WHY? Much worse disaters happen all the time in India, China, Africa, South America, and they get far less of a mention. Makes me sick. I'm not anti-American as such, but our media seem to have a bit of a fixation the general population here don't share.
Anyway to wrap up, nasty, horrible, tragic, yes. But why, given a whole ocntinent to play with, build cities below sea level next to huge rivers and oceans? Same reason to build SF and LA on the San Andreas fault, I suppose. They had days of warning, and live in weak wooden homes close to sea level in a known hurrican-prone area. They are not starving to death like many thousands did in Africa on the same day.
Why depend on the medical data being with the person? An implanted chip is unacceptable on privacy terms, and what happens when people get other chips that block the real one, or remove or replace the real one, to confuse the authorities?
What about the next time there's a really good reason to put another chip in people, or add some more data to the one that's in?
A card can be lost, or carried by another person in error or for a million other good reasons.
Keep that useful medical data in a central (here in England it would be the NHS) place, and use all the normal methods of checking identity (contents of wallet, etc.). Much simpler than with easily-abused chip nonsense.
Once again, RFID is NOT the answer to all life's problems. Leave it for Walmart tracking crates of nappies.
...compare ANY other chipset to the rock solid Intel chipsets, they look unstable. Last STABLE (rock stable) chipset on AMD platforms was AMD760. Yes, it was lacking features, but it WORKED.
Amen, brother. Almost as if the people who design and build the CPUs have the best chance at making other complex chips working well with them.
I've gone into small companies to try and solve their stability problem, to find Via (especially), SiS or ALi chipsets sitting there. Replace one with an Intel/AMD-based chipset motherboard, with the same RAM, storage devices, GFX card, NIC, etc - and voila - a stable machine. Do it to the rest, job done.
I got promoted to the point where I could mandate our (large comapny) hardware, and since then there has been a *vast* improvement in uptime of the average desktop.
It's a real shame for AMD, as the CPUs they make are powerful and cheap and use less power, but they don't make chipsets any more, so I don't risk it.
AMD fanboys I know *always* blame crashes, reboots and BSODs on Windows, and will *not* accept that the fact my box (running the same Windows) never crashes at our LAN parties is that it has an Intel chipset. I seem to have a happier time of it in Linux, too.
The command line is too complex for their intended audience, so they have deprecated it and made it less powerful in favor of endless graphical wizards that walk you through everything.
To an extent, yes, and in the past, certainly. However at least on the server side, pretty much everything is doable through CLIs and scripts. I've just been on a Server 2003 admin course, and at least 75% of the 'now you do it' time was spent using CLI tools to acheive what the wizards achieve. This was reasonably advanced Active Directory object management, multi-zone multi-server DNS tweaking, etc - not just the noddy 'adduser' kind of stuff, although that's doable through the CLI too.
It was the first MS course I've been on that genuinely treated me like a grown-up intelligent IT professional, and I learned a lot. In the past they did try and push wizards and GUI tools as the answer to everything, but recently they have been improving. How many big Windows-spread worms have there been in the last 12-18 months? And the 12-18 months before that? Definite (yes late, yes far to go, but still) improvements.
I was going to make the obvious 'with a million monkeys and a million keyboards, you'll eventually get a grammatically correct, well-spelled and correctly punctuated article summary' statement, but this may prove otherwise.
Urinating and defacating all over the keyboard sounds like the methods of some of the developers in my place of work, and it works for them!
Intel a year late? Intel are going to release their first dual core chips to market next quarter. Intel have already show a demo of a dual-core 65nm CPU too. Where are AMD's dual core chips? Sure as hell can't buy them today...
As for the effect of the memory controllers, time and real-world use will tell. Unlike AMD, Intel don't have to change the CPU design every time a new memory type comes out. Swings and roundabouts.
If it fails the fingerprint reader more than a few times (5 I seem to remember) then you are asked to answer the secret question you set when you teach it your fingerprint.
I've had no major (and very few minor, all resolved) problems after installing it on over 50 widely varied PCs, both at work and for family/freinds. Online, it seems most of the 'SP2 killed my box' reports actually turned out to be infected with malware, spyware and/or viruses before SP2 was installed.
I always tidy up first - Ad-aware especially - especially make sure AV and firewall software is on the latest version, so that they and SP2 can coexist happily.
The machines (implanters) use huge amount of electricity. If someone's being electrocuted, you use the earthed copper rods with big hooks on the end (and plastic handholds) to prise them out of trouble.
...was a chip fab. It had just opened, everything was shiny and new, and the work I was doing meant I got to go to every department, every part of the plant. Siemens Electronics (now Infineon) ran it.
It was like a geek's heaven inside. Everything was the best, new and working just right. They spent something like 1.5 billion pounds ($3 billion US) on the place. Hell, even the coffee machines were wonderful.
Inside the (huge) clean room was best - fully automated monorails all over the ceiling, carrying pods of wafers around, for instance. Row upon row of ovens with pure oxygen atmospheres at several hundred degrees C, implanters using silly amount of electricity (and huge copper hooks to remove people stuck), and incredibly dangerous chemicals being piped all over (including the very scary HF - 'If it leaks near you, there's no point in running').
Wonderful stuff. It was all incredibly interesting, to see all the processes that went into making (relatively simple) RAM chips.
Shame the arse fell out of the DRAM market in 1999, meaning they closed the place. Atmel are using it now.
We've had big problems using IBM blades, not least because by default they come with crappy 5400rpm laptop hard drives - and the 40 GB mentioned in these blades imply that's what they've got (which is what my predecessor ordered).
I guess with 6 GB RAM each they shouldn't have to do much (or ANY, if I was running this) swapping, and if the jobs are tweaked to not use the hard drives too intensively, they might be OK. If what you do uses the hard drives for much, they are sh*t, to put it mildly. If you could plug these into the blades, they's be very useful, quick machines. But you can't yet.
The really crap thing is, if you do want SCSI drives in the IBM blades, you connect a module ot the side of the blade which gives you a couple of proper SCSI drive bays. Which halves the number of blades-per-bladecenter to 7.
Given the bladecenter is 7U tall, you'd be better off with 7 1U servers with SCSI bays already in and better NIC options. The internal networking of the bladecenter is awful for everything but the simplest low-requirement setups - it's hideously expensive to give each blade a couple of gigabit connections.
Even these cheap little things are 1U, take 2 U320 SCSI drives, and have dual Gigabit connections built-in.
And I *still* can't get USB dongles to work with thes fscking blades, grumble grumble.
Having said all that, when can I play on this thing? My Folding@Home could do with a bit of a boost, and with Hyperthreading I could have 2016 units running simultaneously.... although it might get a little warm behind the racks, 1008 2.8 GHz Xeons pump out a good bit of heat!
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Once my servers are stable and live, I generally don't update them unless they're exposed to the network or Internet in any significant way. Even then I only do it if an update patches a specific issue we're experiencing, or patches a security hole in a service that's actually running, and not covered by the firewalls/IDS/CSA we have.
I certainly would never risk having scheduled auto-installed updates, in case they break something. Even the desktops I look after only get their patches (through WSUS) after testing.
I have large production Windows Server 2003 systems with (currently) 35 weeks uptime - and that last reboot was due to moving them into a different building).
If you lose customers by letting them run substandard machines which crash using an OS which is now demonstrably stable, and then blame the OS, then that's your loss and your fault.
And on the two week install issue, haven't you heard of Gentoo? ;-)
Yes.
You can mail me back for her phone number, if you really want.
This drive is actually 8% of a Library of Congress.
Given the way hard drive manufacturers report capacity, I make it 465.7 GB, which is a whisker under 45.5% of a TB. Of course that's before any FS overhead.
OK, it's *close* to half a TB, and it is a BIG hard drive (my first was 20 MB). BUT... if I had half a TB of data to store, I'd be short over 46 GB, which is no small amount.
A similar point is raised in this New Orleanian's story...
OK, what has happened is unfortunate, nasty and tragic. However, a few things spring to mind...
1. Yes, humour is how we cope. I'm English and we have plenty of London bomb jokes already. This doesn't mean I find the idea of bombs going off or people being flooded out of their homes remotely funny, it's just a coping mechamisn. If you really look at what's going on in the world, humour's the only way to stay sane.
2. Think about the people in the Superdome without air conditioning? Please. Think about the majority of people on the planet who have never had air conditioning, reliable clean water, cheap power and fuel. Given disasters like this and worse happen all the time, they are lucky to have the resources of the richest country of the world to help them. A few days or weeks of inconvenience is all they have, then the vast majority will be right back to their normal fat western lifestyle.
3. This happens in the US, and it's our (in England) top news story. WHY? Much worse disaters happen all the time in India, China, Africa, South America, and they get far less of a mention. Makes me sick. I'm not anti-American as such, but our media seem to have a bit of a fixation the general population here don't share.
Anyway to wrap up, nasty, horrible, tragic, yes. But why, given a whole ocntinent to play with, build cities below sea level next to huge rivers and oceans? Same reason to build SF and LA on the San Andreas fault, I suppose. They had days of warning, and live in weak wooden homes close to sea level in a known hurrican-prone area. They are not starving to death like many thousands did in Africa on the same day.
Why depend on the medical data being with the person? An implanted chip is unacceptable on privacy terms, and what happens when people get other chips that block the real one, or remove or replace the real one, to confuse the authorities? What about the next time there's a really good reason to put another chip in people, or add some more data to the one that's in? A card can be lost, or carried by another person in error or for a million other good reasons. Keep that useful medical data in a central (here in England it would be the NHS) place, and use all the normal methods of checking identity (contents of wallet, etc.). Much simpler than with easily-abused chip nonsense. Once again, RFID is NOT the answer to all life's problems. Leave it for Walmart tracking crates of nappies.
Up on lamp posts and street signs, IIRC.
So does that make SMS on Windows faster than morse code on Linux?
And this is in the hardware section why?
THAN - used in comparison statements.
THEN - used to demonstrate cause-and-effect
A fair point well made, but I wouldn't expect miracles if I was you... look who you're talking to.
They also need serious help with their/there and affect/effect, amongst others...
Me too, but it's the frame rates that are killing me (and getting me killed).
Amen, brother. Almost as if the people who design and build the CPUs have the best chance at making other complex chips working well with them.
I've gone into small companies to try and solve their stability problem, to find Via (especially), SiS or ALi chipsets sitting there. Replace one with an Intel/AMD-based chipset motherboard, with the same RAM, storage devices, GFX card, NIC, etc - and voila - a stable machine. Do it to the rest, job done.
I got promoted to the point where I could mandate our (large comapny) hardware, and since then there has been a *vast* improvement in uptime of the average desktop.
It's a real shame for AMD, as the CPUs they make are powerful and cheap and use less power, but they don't make chipsets any more, so I don't risk it.
AMD fanboys I know *always* blame crashes, reboots and BSODs on Windows, and will *not* accept that the fact my box (running the same Windows) never crashes at our LAN parties is that it has an Intel chipset. I seem to have a happier time of it in Linux, too.
To an extent, yes, and in the past, certainly. However at least on the server side, pretty much everything is doable through CLIs and scripts. I've just been on a Server 2003 admin course, and at least 75% of the 'now you do it' time was spent using CLI tools to acheive what the wizards achieve. This was reasonably advanced Active Directory object management, multi-zone multi-server DNS tweaking, etc - not just the noddy 'adduser' kind of stuff, although that's doable through the CLI too.
It was the first MS course I've been on that genuinely treated me like a grown-up intelligent IT professional, and I learned a lot. In the past they did try and push wizards and GUI tools as the answer to everything, but recently they have been improving. How many big Windows-spread worms have there been in the last 12-18 months? And the 12-18 months before that? Definite (yes late, yes far to go, but still) improvements.
Having spent the best part of 15 years devoted to testing that theory, I can happily confirm that is the truth.
Who needs a short-term memory anyway?
Urinating and defacating all over the keyboard sounds like the methods of some of the developers in my place of work, and it works for them!
As for the effect of the memory controllers, time and real-world use will tell. Unlike AMD, Intel don't have to change the CPU design every time a new memory type comes out. Swings and roundabouts.
If it fails the fingerprint reader more than a few times (5 I seem to remember) then you are asked to answer the secret question you set when you teach it your fingerprint.
I always tidy up first - Ad-aware especially - especially make sure AV and firewall software is on the latest version, so that they and SP2 can coexist happily.
A good summary can be found here.
AMD has been doing well recently, but long term, there's really no comparison.
The machines (implanters) use huge amount of electricity. If someone's being electrocuted, you use the earthed copper rods with big hooks on the end (and plastic handholds) to prise them out of trouble.
It was like a geek's heaven inside. Everything was the best, new and working just right. They spent something like 1.5 billion pounds ($3 billion US) on the place. Hell, even the coffee machines were wonderful.
Inside the (huge) clean room was best - fully automated monorails all over the ceiling, carrying pods of wafers around, for instance. Row upon row of ovens with pure oxygen atmospheres at several hundred degrees C, implanters using silly amount of electricity (and huge copper hooks to remove people stuck), and incredibly dangerous chemicals being piped all over (including the very scary HF - 'If it leaks near you, there's no point in running').
Wonderful stuff. It was all incredibly interesting, to see all the processes that went into making (relatively simple) RAM chips.
Shame the arse fell out of the DRAM market in 1999, meaning they closed the place. Atmel are using it now.
I guess with 6 GB RAM each they shouldn't have to do much (or ANY, if I was running this) swapping, and if the jobs are tweaked to not use the hard drives too intensively, they might be OK. If what you do uses the hard drives for much, they are sh*t, to put it mildly. If you could plug these into the blades, they's be very useful, quick machines. But you can't yet.
The really crap thing is, if you do want SCSI drives in the IBM blades, you connect a module ot the side of the blade which gives you a couple of proper SCSI drive bays. Which halves the number of blades-per-bladecenter to 7.
Given the bladecenter is 7U tall, you'd be better off with 7 1U servers with SCSI bays already in and better NIC options. The internal networking of the bladecenter is awful for everything but the simplest low-requirement setups - it's hideously expensive to give each blade a couple of gigabit connections.
Even these cheap little things are 1U, take 2 U320 SCSI drives, and have dual Gigabit connections built-in.
And I *still* can't get USB dongles to work with thes fscking blades, grumble grumble.
Having said all that, when can I play on this thing? My Folding@Home could do with a bit of a boost, and with Hyperthreading I could have 2016 units running simultaneously.... although it might get a little warm behind the racks, 1008 2.8 GHz Xeons pump out a good bit of heat!