"When you have servers labeled production, that generate revenue and downtime means lost revenue, then you pay for support since its cheaper than losing revenue and customers"
MWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
Ainnns...
Are you kidding, ain't you?
When downtime means revenue and you really want to do the proper thing you architect your systems so there's no downtime and you don't hire bottom-of-the-barrel technical staff for peanuts. No, sir, vendor support is not to avoid downtime but for the manager's CYA policy.
So regarding Openstack we already moved away the "first they ignore you" phase and going somewhere into "then they laugh at you, then they fight you", uh?
"How are you not in precise control of the software running on servers?"
Who says I am not? Of course I am. Of course we deploy patches in batches over different waves of servers with proper approval processes, proper paper track record, SCCM support, some helping scripts here and there, and the whole of ITIL burden.
That's exactly why I know the difference between doing it properly and what happens in windows-world.
Yeah, you're right. Being there-done that has sometimes the nasty side effect that some wikipedia-based toddlers can correct you. Yes, I didn't start using Postfix 20 years ago, I remember using Sendmail till around 1999, so it makes merely 14 years for postfix. First incarnations of SMB I remember using on HP-Ux about 1993/1994 and LDAP no later than 1998.
"Yeah, but you're running NFS4, Samba4, BIND9, and Postfix with a bunch of extras bolted on (dnsrbl, postscreen, etc.) which didn't exist 20 years ago!:P"
Which means an incremental advantage spread along 20 years, nothing to difficult to cope with.
"You realize all you've really said was "I understand Linux and not Windows Server, and I like what I already know"?"
What you don't realize is that I manage (not alone, certainly the other five guys are of help) around 2000 windows servers. You can bet I know my trade.
"Platform choice is pretty irrelevant as far as judging competency goes actually"
No, it isn't. When a sysadmin chooses all on his own using Windows you can bet he's incompetent.
"IMHO being a competent administrator/architect is more about change management "
See? Change management, for instance, it's basically a lost proposition on Windows while it's a breeze on unix-like and moreso on the open source variants like Linux or *bsd.
"engineering resiliency into your designs"
Not as obvious like in the configuration and change management side but, again, Windows is light-years away down the road if only -the most obvious reason, because above, the basic imposibility to programatically insure there won't be configuration drift and thus, lack of resiliency.
"If (for example) running a Windows web server makes it 10x easier for your internal web development guys"
Yes, you can go with Windows or you can do the proper thing: hire competent developments.
"In other situations (e.g., DNS servers, firewalls, mail relays, etc) - Linux, BSD or other unix platform of choice may be more appropriate."
No, it isn't because, as you say, the trade offs. As Bellovin stated, the most secure platform is the one you know the best: it makes no sense using Windows on most on your servers and then go with a drastically different OS for a minority of them. Given that, Linux offers the best trade off: people will tell OpenBSD makes for a better firewall and maybe they are right but then, Linux can be competently used all the way so it makes an overall better choice.
Given said that, I'm of course fully aware of the various reasons people choose Microsoft over alternatives but I can tell no one of them are technical: marketing and unwise management going for a lot of years explains it.
" but you can do things in powershell that just either aren't possible with bash without writing helper applications in a non-scripting language or are exceedingly convoluted"
I'll take you mean in Windows. No doubt doing things on windows is exceedingly convoluted. Now, there's a ton of things you can do with Bash if you take the time to learn it -and it surely pays out: unix-like environments have a tradition of not mangling too much with things that work, so what you learn now will be of value ten or even twenty years down the road just like things we learned ten or even twenty years ago are still relevant. Try that with Microsoft: OK, invest what it takes to be proficient on Power Shell; you can bet that in five years you'll need to re-learn it because they'll radically change it just like you had to do going from DOS to Windows to Windows NT 3.5 to Windows NT 4.0, etc.
Oh, and even for the things you can't do on Bash, Perl, Python or Ruby are scripting languages.
"So you would be perfectly okay with a coworker taking off at a critical time and without notice on sick leave"
Of course yes; live is above work.
"while actually going on a trip somewhere to play at the beach?"
No, I wouldn't like that. But if that coworker says it's a sick leave, then it's a sick leave unless proven otherwise.
"What if you found out about this but had no proof?"
If you have no proof then, by definition, it's not proven so he was on sick leave and I'm perfectly OK with that.
"What if you had proof but were not legally allowed to reveal it?"
The only way I can think not to be able to reveal it is if I gathered the information ilegally so, on one hand, I still didn't proved anything, so it's still a sick leave; on the other hand, would you want to work with somebody that uses ilegal means to track you? In this case, the problem is you, not the sick leave of your coworker.
"except that you could see the proof right there on Facebook, taunting you."
If you can see on Facebook, it's because you already have access to that info which means you already can make use of it, so this case doesn't fit in any of your situations above.
"So it's not a problem with sex [...] The solution is obvious then: make the army pay for hookers [...] A technically possible solution that won't work for a political problem."
You are right and the poster I answered to is the wrong one: of course it IS a problem with sex, and that's why the obvious solution -if there were no problem with sex as he claimed, can't and won't be implemented.
"selling your shares in immoral companies that are profitable doesn't do much of anything"
True.
"you should buy shares in said companies, so you can vote out the jerks who are running the company at the next shareholder meeting"
False.
You either own enough shares for the later to be true, but then selling in bulk *will* do have an effect or the former is true but then the later is false because you will have no power to vote out the jerks running the company.
You say that Apple has 80 billion in the bank and, in the case of Apple, is partially true (you don't think they really have 80 billion, instant liquidity, in the bank, do you?) but no publicly trade company can sustain for long without a wealthy value for their stock because both directly and indirectly that's how they get liquidity and without cash even very good ideas can't be put in practice.
Yours is a very poor mentality: things *can* be changed and even the most caudalous river can be tamed.
"Unfortunately for us, people who want to do the right thing are in the minority."
So what? Rosa Parks was in the minority too.
"If I sold my shares that wouldn't lead to a large enough selloff to make a difference"
Pay attention to this: NOTHING you can do will make a difference because you are less than a mosquito for those tycoons. Take time to digest my previous assertion. Now, if you already digested it, you can start to do things because you think they are the proper things to do. Maybe your few dolars won't make a difference, maybe your example leads to something. It doesn't matter because in the end of the day at least you will be able to tell to yourself that you did the proper thing. And Monsanto or Shell will have a few dolars less in their pockets while other, more socially involved companies will have a few dolars more in theirs to do the proper thing.
"The reason for this, is a lot of us want a tiered response level."
Me too.
"Email should be something that can wait until you're in the office again. Text and phone calls are for immediate attention 24x7"
Because?
No, seriously, because?
It can be argued that SMS/pager *when done properly* and, of course, on fully owned hardware, can be more resilient than email but other than that, it's stupid to say "email should be something that can wait till tomorrow, text is for immediate" action". Please, think a bit about it and you'll see how stupid is.
Now: immediate attention 24x7 information I want ASAP, information that can wait I want clearly known as that. *THIS* makes sense, not the gateway such information happens, to come to you through.
I've been doing the Nagios thing for ages too and I tiered information to syslog, email, SMS, database, to first, second, third support/management levels... you name it.
But there's no problem in having the CRITICAL messages for high priority services to be delivered to a specific maildir folder that happens to be the one that I subscribe on my mobile's email client and that makes an alert tone ring upon reception.
"Simply send an e-mail to a special e-mail address and you'll get a notification on your iPhone."
What about "simply send an e-mail to *your* e-mail address and you'll get a notification on your mail client, be it desktop, laptop, iPhone, Android or whatever"?
"... than people advertizing their paid products and services in Slashdot posts."...and taking Slashdot people for idiots.
"it's not easy to find inexpensive, simple monitoring solutions which support smartphone notifications"
Are you kidding? It's stupidly easy. Nagios, Icinga, Zabbix, Pandora, Ganglia, Zenoss and dozens of others I forgot about can do that. Heck, monitoring is probably one of the biggest categories in open source devlopment and using a gateway to whatever is trivially easy in all of them.
Slashdot Mirror
"When you have servers labeled production, that generate revenue and downtime means lost revenue, then you pay for support since its cheaper than losing revenue and customers"
MWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
Ainnns...
Are you kidding, ain't you?
When downtime means revenue and you really want to do the proper thing you architect your systems so there's no downtime and you don't hire bottom-of-the-barrel technical staff for peanuts. No, sir, vendor support is not to avoid downtime but for the manager's CYA policy.
A lot. I've seen enough "enterprise-grade" services contracts from RedHat to know it.
Because it is not geeks that pay for Red Hat but their bosses.
Admins never needed vendor support, managers do. That means that CentOS trains the admins on Red Hat and then managers pay for the supported thingie.
So regarding Openstack we already moved away the "first they ignore you" phase and going somewhere into "then they laugh at you, then they fight you", uh?
Interesting.
"Most of the newer admin tools in 2008 R2 can spit out powershell cmdlets at the end of a wizard"
Which is a very good idea but barely new. Google for AIX SMIT.
"How are you not in precise control of the software running on servers?"
Who says I am not? Of course I am. Of course we deploy patches in batches over different waves of servers with proper approval processes, proper paper track record, SCCM support, some helping scripts here and there, and the whole of ITIL burden.
That's exactly why I know the difference between doing it properly and what happens in windows-world.
Yeah, you're right. Being there-done that has sometimes the nasty side effect that some wikipedia-based toddlers can correct you. Yes, I didn't start using Postfix 20 years ago, I remember using Sendmail till around 1999, so it makes merely 14 years for postfix. First incarnations of SMB I remember using on HP-Ux about 1993/1994 and LDAP no later than 1998.
Is that better for you?
"Yeah, but you're running NFS4, Samba4, BIND9, and Postfix with a bunch of extras bolted on (dnsrbl, postscreen, etc.) which didn't exist 20 years ago! :P"
Which means an incremental advantage spread along 20 years, nothing to difficult to cope with.
"You realize all you've really said was "I understand Linux and not Windows Server, and I like what I already know"?"
What you don't realize is that I manage (not alone, certainly the other five guys are of help) around 2000 windows servers. You can bet I know my trade.
"Technology changes a lot in 9 years"
Not 9 but 20 years ago I run NFS and CIFS, LDAP, Bind, Postfix... now I run NFS and CIFS, LDAP, Bind, Postfix...
No, technology doesn't change a lot, marketroid guys make it look like so to stay in the business of selling new licenses.
"Platform choice is pretty irrelevant as far as judging competency goes actually"
No, it isn't. When a sysadmin chooses all on his own using Windows you can bet he's incompetent.
"IMHO being a competent administrator/architect is more about change management "
See? Change management, for instance, it's basically a lost proposition on Windows while it's a breeze on unix-like and moreso on the open source variants like Linux or *bsd.
"engineering resiliency into your designs"
Not as obvious like in the configuration and change management side but, again, Windows is light-years away down the road if only -the most obvious reason, because above, the basic imposibility to programatically insure there won't be configuration drift and thus, lack of resiliency.
"If (for example) running a Windows web server makes it 10x easier for your internal web development guys"
Yes, you can go with Windows or you can do the proper thing: hire competent developments.
"In other situations (e.g., DNS servers, firewalls, mail relays, etc) - Linux, BSD or other unix platform of choice may be more appropriate."
No, it isn't because, as you say, the trade offs. As Bellovin stated, the most secure platform is the one you know the best: it makes no sense using Windows on most on your servers and then go with a drastically different OS for a minority of them. Given that, Linux offers the best trade off: people will tell OpenBSD makes for a better firewall and maybe they are right but then, Linux can be competently used all the way so it makes an overall better choice.
Given said that, I'm of course fully aware of the various reasons people choose Microsoft over alternatives but I can tell no one of them are technical: marketing and unwise management going for a lot of years explains it.
" but you can do things in powershell that just either aren't possible with bash without writing helper applications in a non-scripting language or are exceedingly convoluted"
I'll take you mean in Windows. No doubt doing things on windows is exceedingly convoluted. Now, there's a ton of things you can do with Bash if you take the time to learn it -and it surely pays out: unix-like environments have a tradition of not mangling too much with things that work, so what you learn now will be of value ten or even twenty years down the road just like things we learned ten or even twenty years ago are still relevant. Try that with Microsoft: OK, invest what it takes to be proficient on Power Shell; you can bet that in five years you'll need to re-learn it because they'll radically change it just like you had to do going from DOS to Windows to Windows NT 3.5 to Windows NT 4.0, etc.
Oh, and even for the things you can't do on Bash, Perl, Python or Ruby are scripting languages.
"Companies are usually allowed to fire whoever they damn well please, for any or no reason"
No, they aren't.
Unless, of course, you are talking about some third world country with no respect for its citizens, that is.
"So you would be perfectly okay with a coworker taking off at a critical time and without notice on sick leave"
Of course yes; live is above work.
"while actually going on a trip somewhere to play at the beach?"
No, I wouldn't like that. But if that coworker says it's a sick leave, then it's a sick leave unless proven otherwise.
"What if you found out about this but had no proof?"
If you have no proof then, by definition, it's not proven so he was on sick leave and I'm perfectly OK with that.
"What if you had proof but were not legally allowed to reveal it?"
The only way I can think not to be able to reveal it is if I gathered the information ilegally so, on one hand, I still didn't proved anything, so it's still a sick leave; on the other hand, would you want to work with somebody that uses ilegal means to track you? In this case, the problem is you, not the sick leave of your coworker.
"except that you could see the proof right there on Facebook, taunting you."
If you can see on Facebook, it's because you already have access to that info which means you already can make use of it, so this case doesn't fit in any of your situations above.
"So it's not a problem with sex
[...]
The solution is obvious then: make the army pay for hookers
[...]
A technically possible solution that won't work for a political problem."
You are right and the poster I answered to is the wrong one: of course it IS a problem with sex, and that's why the obvious solution -if there were no problem with sex as he claimed, can't and won't be implemented.
"selling your shares in immoral companies that are profitable doesn't do much of anything"
True.
"you should buy shares in said companies, so you can vote out the jerks who are running the company at the next shareholder meeting"
False.
You either own enough shares for the later to be true, but then selling in bulk *will* do have an effect or the former is true but then the later is false because you will have no power to vote out the jerks running the company.
You say that Apple has 80 billion in the bank and, in the case of Apple, is partially true (you don't think they really have 80 billion, instant liquidity, in the bank, do you?) but no publicly trade company can sustain for long without a wealthy value for their stock because both directly and indirectly that's how they get liquidity and without cash even very good ideas can't be put in practice.
Yours is a very poor mentality: things *can* be changed and even the most caudalous river can be tamed.
"Unfortunately for us, people who want to do the right thing are in the minority."
So what? Rosa Parks was in the minority too.
"If I sold my shares that wouldn't lead to a large enough selloff to make a difference"
Pay attention to this: NOTHING you can do will make a difference because you are less than a mosquito for those tycoons. Take time to digest my previous assertion. Now, if you already digested it, you can start to do things because you think they are the proper things to do. Maybe your few dolars won't make a difference, maybe your example leads to something. It doesn't matter because in the end of the day at least you will be able to tell to yourself that you did the proper thing. And Monsanto or Shell will have a few dolars less in their pockets while other, more socially involved companies will have a few dolars more in theirs to do the proper thing.
"I've got an idea. How about we cure malaria AND give everyone free internet."
I have even another idea: let's use the free internet to help remote-diagnose malaria (and others).
"The reason for this, is a lot of us want a tiered response level."
Me too.
"Email should be something that can wait until you're in the office again. Text and phone calls are for immediate attention 24x7"
Because?
No, seriously, because?
It can be argued that SMS/pager *when done properly* and, of course, on fully owned hardware, can be more resilient than email but other than that, it's stupid to say "email should be something that can wait till tomorrow, text is for immediate" action". Please, think a bit about it and you'll see how stupid is.
Now: immediate attention 24x7 information I want ASAP, information that can wait I want clearly known as that. *THIS* makes sense, not the gateway such information happens, to come to you through.
I've been doing the Nagios thing for ages too and I tiered information to syslog, email, SMS, database, to first, second, third support/management levels... you name it.
But there's no problem in having the CRITICAL messages for high priority services to be delivered to a specific maildir folder that happens to be the one that I subscribe on my mobile's email client and that makes an alert tone ring upon reception.
"Simply send an e-mail to a special e-mail address and you'll get a notification on your iPhone."
What about "simply send an e-mail to *your* e-mail address and you'll get a notification on your mail client, be it desktop, laptop, iPhone, Android or whatever"?
"... than people advertizing their paid products and services in Slashdot posts." ...and taking Slashdot people for idiots.
"it's not easy to find inexpensive, simple monitoring solutions which support smartphone notifications"
Are you kidding? It's stupidly easy. Nagios, Icinga, Zabbix, Pandora, Ganglia, Zenoss and dozens of others I forgot about can do that. Heck, monitoring is probably one of the biggest categories in open source devlopment and using a gateway to whatever is trivially easy in all of them.
"So it's not a problem with sex, it's a problem with soliciting prostitutes - not exactly nature's perfect specimens of health."
The solution is obvious then: make the army pay for hookers and have their health controlled.
In the end of civilization as we know it you are really concerned for your concealed weapon to be legal?
Do you remember mars attack? Would you want to bet who do you remember me from that film?
By the way, good luck with your legal concealed weapon without ammunition (you didn't mentioned it, did you?)
I for one, yadda yadda, plant overlords, yadda yadda...