... and yet they complain that their jobs are moved out of the country (or that the USPS wants to cut Saturday delivery). Hmmmm, maybe there's some cause & effect there...
I didn't write anything re bottlenecks. I wrote about sucky software RAID implementations, ones that can't be grown live, need separate volume management and filesystem layers, etc.
RAID 6 is only needed when it's possible for a drive to fail, and then for another to fail while the array is still recovering.
Yes, exactly. That's the point. I've had this happen to me on two occasions with single-redundant layouts, resulting in data loss. It's one reason why I favor 3-wa mirrors.
Add in the cost of figuring out hardware that will run OpenSolaris (which is unfortunately a dead-end) or Nexenta (which is a big question mark) so that you can get ZFS to do the RAID. Add to that the cost of maintaining what is likely a one-off OS instance in addition to the others that one has. Then add the cost of having nobody to call when something breaks.
Personally, I'd run very, very fast from the above cheap-ass components.
Reading about Linux's disappointingly lame MD system gave me new respect for Synology's devices, especially for the SOHO environments for which they're suited.
For a larger / business application, ZFS totally rocks, but Oracle has decimated Solaris' visibility, so one is left with no good options.
Running LiveUpgrade in a large-scale production environment is kind of like baby-sitting someone else's four-year-old.
Perhaps. I did say that it has its issues, eg. the expansion of sparse files that I submitted a bug for. I ran an LU on a specific system that had.dir/.pag files, and was startled when the new/var filled. Sun eventually put out an LU patch to address that with a new cpio, and then months later finally followed with x86.
When it doesn't work, heaven help you, because Oracle can't/won't fix it or give you any reasonable support in any reasonable period of time.
That's been an issue with Sun/Oracle for years, but it's been no less an issue with any other vendor, including Red Hat. And don't get me started on HP's tragic hardware support...
Instead, they'll tell you to apply the latest LU patch (to your production ABE, mind you, which was supposed to be the very thing you were avoiding with LU.)
I've admittedly long found that amusing, but it's also been the case that most of the patches have been against early revisions of Sol10, ones that we never deployed, and it pretty much works without additional patches first.
I'm not much familiar with Kickstart (different guy does that) but... the amount of coding and hacking required to make wanboot/jumpstart work for a production environment with a lot of different server types is just ridiculous!
Again, for me this hasn't been any different in Linux land, and I wouldn't call either ridiculous. We wrote a wrapper script to set up hosts for Jumpstart, and we wrote one for Kickstart. We wrote a finish script for Jumpstart to install local packages, set up SSH keys, etc., and we did the same for Kickstart as %post. Getting Jumpstart set up in the first place took a lot of digging, hampered by conflicting information from Sun re how to structure their screwy DHCP, but setting up Kickstart was no less of a hassle. Nowhere was the entire process documented as a whole. I had to piece it together from other people's/tftpboot trees and scattered web pages. Then, after I had it more or less figured out, I came across a page written by someone who'd had an identically frustrating experience: http://www.smtps.net/pxe-kickstart.html
So once I figured out the pxelinux.cfg foo for the installation menu, I found that the menu.c32 foo for stuffing options to the kickstart process is a complete mess. On Sun hardware, it works, with the selected menu item highlighted and everything. On other hardware, it shows nothing, so one has to count down arrow presses and hope that the correct entry is selected. Oh, but one can stick in an obliquely-documented "serial 9600" line. Okay. That breaks on some hardware, and on others the display is a complete mess. This has been soooo much easier than Jumpstart!.
Then there's having to maintain different FLARs for ZFS and UFS builds
Who said anything about FLAR? I've never seen a use for it.
For the price, Solaris really needs to compete with AIX/HP-UX, which both have had a decent volume manager out of the box for a long time
My knowledge of those dates to 1988 and 1992, respectively, but at the time both had their own bizarreness. AIX I'll always remember as requiring navigation through seven menus to add each pty to the system, and for silently commenting lines out of config files.
Instead, on Solaris you almost have to buy Veritas.
Are we back in 1998? ODS in the Solaris 2.6 era sucked and VxVM had its appeal, but once they integrated it with the OS and made it more robust, it became tolerable. ZFS of course once it dropped is friggin awesome.
Virtualization isn't just a buzzword. It's a way to reduce costs
Yeah, Solaris has some pretty awesome features, but at the end of the day all that may be irrelevant in the face of Market Pressures
Sad but true. I remember the days when most freeware built and ran out of the box on SunOS/Solaris - now Linux-centrism is rampant, and a growing number of packages are difficult or impossible to build elsewhere.
Sun for many years shot themselves in the foot by failing to deliver useful tools for things like patching/updating
ORLY? Live Upgrade. It has its issues, but so far I've seen nothing close to it in the Linux world. When doing a big yum update, one has to cross fingers and hope everything still works afterwards, as there's no going back.
mass installation of Solaris servers (yes, there is jumpstart/wanboot, but it is clearly deficient)
Other than wanboot only working on (newer) SPARC systems and not x86/x64, what's so awful about jumpstart/wanboot? So far I've seen no amazing capability differences between jumpstart and kickstart. Sure, the latter is convenient in that it can use HTTP instead of NFS, but that's not earthshattering. Kickstart, OTOH, has proven to be a pain in that it doesn't install 32-bit libs on 64-bit systems without hackery or enumeration of every single affected package -- at least, on RHEL 6.1.
and failing to deliver a decent native volume manager (ZFS) until Too Late, and then not having it support root filesystems until Way Too Late.
Sure, they did lag there a bit. ODS/SDS/SVM should have been integrated into the OS before Solaris 8/9 (whenever it was...) rather than being layered, but SVM really isn't too bad. It's not ZFS, but then, nothing is -- and the Linux situation hardly puts it to shame. There we have MD and LVM, each with limitations and with some overlap, but in the end one has to either layer the filesystem on top of LVM on top of MD, which is a real mess, especially since there are conflicting ideas on the RAID partition autodetect bit, or submit to HBA RAID, which sucks in that one can't span HBA's within a single volume, or do 3-way mirrors. I counter that Linux systems *still* don't have a decent volume manager.
The reality of Solaris is that there are all these features that look awesome in theory, until you actually have to implement them and discover the practical implications. Take Zones. Zone sounds great, in theory. But, ever tried to patch a server with zones? It's a nightmare
Agreed that Zones are a mess.
The reality is that it takes twice as many SA's per server on Solaris as it does for any other platform, we have lower virtualization densities, and it therefore costs a lot more money to run.
Are you a web hosting provider? That's the only scenario that I can see where virtualization is truly crucial and not just the buzzword-du-jour, like thin clients were a while back. As for admins/server, my experience has been quite the opposite. Solaris by and large just works. One doesn't have to combat madness like system uid's being assigned on the fly when a package gets installed, or random inexplicable bouts of SSH sessions slowing to a crawl. When I encounter a Solaris problem, there's a wealth of relevant information out on the web to be found. My experience with Linux is that most of what's out there regards
A) Old versions that are no longer relevant
B) Lame home-user systems
and/or
C) Balkanized distributions other than the one that one's running, which do things completely differently
In 2011, shiny new ext4 can only go to 16TB in size, which is a freaking JOKE.
So, you assert that Apple should have changed their entire strategy and designed / had manufactured a whole new hardware platform because of some lame-ass rumor started a month or two before the announcement?
A year and a half later, all that they can offer is a slightly better camera, faster CPU, and universal (GSM+CDMA) mobile.:(
It would seem that they felt that's all they needed to do to the thing. The original iPhone 4 was still selling well and I suspect they felt that the market wasn't demanding massive changes.
Most people including myself
You personally know "most people" and polled them?
were hopefully for the thinner design, larger edge-to-edge 4 inch screen, metal back, NFC, 3D glassless display, 4G wireless data, etc. that were mentioned in the iPhone 5 rumours/hype
The rumors that we would get such a device today were rather tenuous and it's been quite a while since many believed it would happen. Now, instead of a gearhead, think for a moment like a business. If they delivered all of the above today, what would be left for next year? Would you instead twelve months from now bemoan that the 5s didn't offer massive changes/improvements?
No innovative must have features offer!
The Siri stuff, if it works, isn't innovative enough for you?
Definitely not worth an update over the popular iPhone 4.
Some of us have older phones. I've been nursing my 3G along waiting for this to pop, and now it has.
It also sucks that you still can't play video podcasts in the iPod Nano like you used to 2 generations ago!
That's a bit of an abrupt product jump, but... the Nano is like 2 square inches of display -- and you want to watch *video* on it?
In fact this entire iPhone+iPod refresh really is a big disappointment for me.
So you'd be happier if they hadn't refreshed the products at all???
I guess Apple does not think that hardware innovation is important anymore! What a great way to disappoint your fans, and have them look at other platforms that at least have some more frequent hardware improvements.
What do you expect? Earthshaking redesigns every three months? Do you really toss your phone and buy a new one that often?
True, however you can't blame them for wanting to make money as easily as possible/quote]
If they want to make money, why is their credit card processing so miserably fuxored? I've actually given up trying to buy from them, on the occasions when they've by accident updated their product repertoire to include something that's been on the market for less than six months.
Within my current company, "IT" is a department that does desktop (Microcult) support, runs MS Exchange for the corporate types, and manages Peoplesoft et al. I've seen plenty of other situations where it refers to an entire engineering organization. Basically, nothing specific should be inferred by the acronym, but sometimes it is, as in PC, which stands for Personal Computer, not "8088 running MS-OS".
Why would you believe that the second SSD would be likely to fail at almost the same time? SSD's have an MTBF just like disks or tape, yet we don't regularly see mirror pairs dying at the same time (though 3-way mirroring was really nice until Oracle killed it)
Does the article compare apples to apples? Are benefits paid for employees but not contractors factored in?
When I was offered a job at NASA, working for Sterling Software or CSC (I forget who had the contract at the time), I was told that that contractor thing was mostly due to the near impossibility of getting rid of direct employees if they had to for whatever reason.
Slashdot Mirror
... and yet they complain that their jobs are moved out of the country (or that the USPS wants to cut Saturday delivery). Hmmmm, maybe there's some cause & effect there ...
His political experience, after all, is limited to playing the mayor on "Carter Country"
Instead you have to get N votes in the *state* senate. Same bullshit, different building.
I didn't write anything re bottlenecks. I wrote about sucky software RAID implementations, ones that can't be grown live, need separate volume management and filesystem layers, etc.
Better yet -- Linux desktops are all about pissing away effort, after all.
RAID 6 is only needed when it's possible for a drive to fail, and then for another to fail while the array is still recovering.
Yes, exactly. That's the point. I've had this happen to me on two occasions with single-redundant layouts, resulting in data loss. It's one reason why I favor 3-wa mirrors.
There's no point in doing it with only 8 drives.
*headspin* Wha? That's a total non-sequitor.
Add in the cost of figuring out hardware that will run OpenSolaris (which is unfortunately a dead-end) or Nexenta (which is a big question mark) so that you can get ZFS to do the RAID. Add to that the cost of maintaining what is likely a one-off OS instance in addition to the others that one has. Then add the cost of having nobody to call when something breaks. Personally, I'd run very, very fast from the above cheap-ass components.
Reading about Linux's disappointingly lame MD system gave me new respect for Synology's devices, especially for the SOHO environments for which they're suited. For a larger / business application, ZFS totally rocks, but Oracle has decimated Solaris' visibility, so one is left with no good options.
This is just nonsense.
... and "learnt" and "texter" aren't?
By the time I got the transfer, it had lost almost half of its value. Now imagine if that would constantly happen with your real money.
It's happened to me. ESPP that lied about how it worked.
I do miss my old deskto
Nobody is holding a gun to your head, forcing you to not use it.
Either that, or we don't mistake a flock of birds for an unpredecented cluster of cometary material.
Running LiveUpgrade in a large-scale production environment is kind of like baby-sitting someone else's four-year-old.
Perhaps. I did say that it has its issues, eg. the expansion of sparse files that I submitted a bug for. I ran an LU on a specific system that had .dir/.pag files, and was startled when the new /var filled. Sun eventually put out an LU patch to address that with a new cpio, and then months later finally followed with x86.
When it doesn't work, heaven help you, because Oracle can't/won't fix it or give you any reasonable support in any reasonable period of time.
That's been an issue with Sun/Oracle for years, but it's been no less an issue with any other vendor, including Red Hat. And don't get me started on HP's tragic hardware support...
Instead, they'll tell you to apply the latest LU patch (to your production ABE, mind you, which was supposed to be the very thing you were avoiding with LU.)
I've admittedly long found that amusing, but it's also been the case that most of the patches have been against early revisions of Sol10, ones that we never deployed, and it pretty much works without additional patches first.
I'm not much familiar with Kickstart (different guy does that) but... the amount of coding and hacking required to make wanboot/jumpstart work for a production environment with a lot of different server types is just ridiculous!
Again, for me this hasn't been any different in Linux land, and I wouldn't call either ridiculous. We wrote a wrapper script to set up hosts for Jumpstart, and we wrote one for Kickstart. We wrote a finish script for Jumpstart to install local packages, set up SSH keys, etc., and we did the same for Kickstart as %post. Getting Jumpstart set up in the first place took a lot of digging, hampered by conflicting information from Sun re how to structure their screwy DHCP, but setting up Kickstart was no less of a hassle. Nowhere was the entire process documented as a whole. I had to piece it together from other people's /tftpboot trees and scattered web pages. Then, after I had it more or less figured out, I came across a page written by someone who'd had an identically frustrating experience: http://www.smtps.net/pxe-kickstart.html
So once I figured out the pxelinux.cfg foo for the installation menu, I found that the menu.c32 foo for stuffing options to the kickstart process is a complete mess. On Sun hardware, it works, with the selected menu item highlighted and everything. On other hardware, it shows nothing, so one has to count down arrow presses and hope that the correct entry is selected. Oh, but one can stick in an obliquely-documented "serial 9600" line. Okay. That breaks on some hardware, and on others the display is a complete mess. This has been soooo much easier than Jumpstart!.
Then there's having to maintain different FLARs for ZFS and UFS builds
Who said anything about FLAR? I've never seen a use for it.
For the price, Solaris really needs to compete with AIX/HP-UX, which both have had a decent volume manager out of the box for a long time
My knowledge of those dates to 1988 and 1992, respectively, but at the time both had their own bizarreness. AIX I'll always remember as requiring navigation through seven menus to add each pty to the system, and for silently commenting lines out of config files.
Instead, on Solaris you almost have to buy Veritas.
Are we back in 1998? ODS in the Solaris 2.6 era sucked and VxVM had its appeal, but once they integrated it with the OS and made it more robust, it became tolerable. ZFS of course once it dropped is friggin awesome.
Virtualization isn't just a buzzword. It's a way to reduce costs
In what s
Yeah, Solaris has some pretty awesome features, but at the end of the day all that may be irrelevant in the face of Market Pressures
Sad but true. I remember the days when most freeware built and ran out of the box on SunOS/Solaris - now Linux-centrism is rampant, and a growing number of packages are difficult or impossible to build elsewhere.
Sun for many years shot themselves in the foot by failing to deliver useful tools for things like patching/updating
ORLY? Live Upgrade. It has its issues, but so far I've seen nothing close to it in the Linux world. When doing a big yum update, one has to cross fingers and hope everything still works afterwards, as there's no going back.
mass installation of Solaris servers (yes, there is jumpstart/wanboot, but it is clearly deficient)
Other than wanboot only working on (newer) SPARC systems and not x86/x64, what's so awful about jumpstart/wanboot? So far I've seen no amazing capability differences between jumpstart and kickstart. Sure, the latter is convenient in that it can use HTTP instead of NFS, but that's not earthshattering. Kickstart, OTOH, has proven to be a pain in that it doesn't install 32-bit libs on 64-bit systems without hackery or enumeration of every single affected package -- at least, on RHEL 6.1.
and failing to deliver a decent native volume manager (ZFS) until Too Late, and then not having it support root filesystems until Way Too Late.
Sure, they did lag there a bit. ODS/SDS/SVM should have been integrated into the OS before Solaris 8/9 (whenever it was...) rather than being layered, but SVM really isn't too bad. It's not ZFS, but then, nothing is -- and the Linux situation hardly puts it to shame. There we have MD and LVM, each with limitations and with some overlap, but in the end one has to either layer the filesystem on top of LVM on top of MD, which is a real mess, especially since there are conflicting ideas on the RAID partition autodetect bit, or submit to HBA RAID, which sucks in that one can't span HBA's within a single volume, or do 3-way mirrors. I counter that Linux systems *still* don't have a decent volume manager.
The reality of Solaris is that there are all these features that look awesome in theory, until you actually have to implement them and discover the practical implications. Take Zones. Zone sounds great, in theory. But, ever tried to patch a server with zones? It's a nightmare
Agreed that Zones are a mess.
The reality is that it takes twice as many SA's per server on Solaris as it does for any other platform, we have lower virtualization densities, and it therefore costs a lot more money to run.
Are you a web hosting provider? That's the only scenario that I can see where virtualization is truly crucial and not just the buzzword-du-jour, like thin clients were a while back. As for admins/server, my experience has been quite the opposite. Solaris by and large just works. One doesn't have to combat madness like system uid's being assigned on the fly when a package gets installed, or random inexplicable bouts of SSH sessions slowing to a crawl. When I encounter a Solaris problem, there's a wealth of relevant information out on the web to be found. My experience with Linux is that most of what's out there regards A) Old versions that are no longer relevant B) Lame home-user systems and/or C) Balkanized distributions other than the one that one's running, which do things completely differently In 2011, shiny new ext4 can only go to 16TB in size, which is a freaking JOKE.
So, you assert that Apple should have changed their entire strategy and designed / had manufactured a whole new hardware platform because of some lame-ass rumor started a month or two before the announcement?
A year and a half later, all that they can offer is a slightly better camera, faster CPU, and universal (GSM+CDMA) mobile. :(
It would seem that they felt that's all they needed to do to the thing. The original iPhone 4 was still selling well and I suspect they felt that the market wasn't demanding massive changes.
Most people including myself
You personally know "most people" and polled them?
were hopefully for the thinner design, larger edge-to-edge 4 inch screen, metal back, NFC, 3D glassless display, 4G wireless data, etc. that were mentioned in the iPhone 5 rumours/hype
The rumors that we would get such a device today were rather tenuous and it's been quite a while since many believed it would happen. Now, instead of a gearhead, think for a moment like a business. If they delivered all of the above today, what would be left for next year? Would you instead twelve months from now bemoan that the 5s didn't offer massive changes/improvements?
No innovative must have features offer!
The Siri stuff, if it works, isn't innovative enough for you?
Definitely not worth an update over the popular iPhone 4.
Some of us have older phones. I've been nursing my 3G along waiting for this to pop, and now it has.
It also sucks that you still can't play video podcasts in the iPod Nano like you used to 2 generations ago!
That's a bit of an abrupt product jump, but ... the Nano is like 2 square inches of display -- and you want to watch *video* on it?
In fact this entire iPhone+iPod refresh really is a big disappointment for me.
So you'd be happier if they hadn't refreshed the products at all???
I guess Apple does not think that hardware innovation is important anymore! What a great way to disappoint your fans, and have them look at other platforms that at least have some more frequent hardware improvements.
What do you expect? Earthshaking redesigns every three months? Do you really toss your phone and buy a new one that often?
I was taught that the barium peroxide was needed to kickstart the main reaction, with an Mg strip as a fuse.
You have barium peroxide just laying around?
Plus I can't for the life of me figure out what the SPARC processor architecture has to do with that.
... not to mention the freedom from BIOS and anachronistic video consoles
True, however you can't blame them for wanting to make money as easily as possible /quote]
If they want to make money, why is their credit card processing so miserably fuxored? I've actually given up trying to buy from them, on the occasions when they've by accident updated their product repertoire to include something that's been on the market for less than six months.
Within my current company, "IT" is a department that does desktop (Microcult) support, runs MS Exchange for the corporate types, and manages Peoplesoft et al. I've seen plenty of other situations where it refers to an entire engineering organization. Basically, nothing specific should be inferred by the acronym, but sometimes it is, as in PC, which stands for Personal Computer, not "8088 running MS-OS".
Why would you believe that the second SSD would be likely to fail at almost the same time? SSD's have an MTBF just like disks or tape, yet we don't regularly see mirror pairs dying at the same time (though 3-way mirroring was really nice until Oracle killed it)
I'm more curious how the poster could know write count, especially per-cell.
Does the article compare apples to apples? Are benefits paid for employees but not contractors factored in? When I was offered a job at NASA, working for Sterling Software or CSC (I forget who had the contract at the time), I was told that that contractor thing was mostly due to the near impossibility of getting rid of direct employees if they had to for whatever reason.