If you buy a product (car, sound system, TV, computer, software...) you normally have a couple of options: 1) Accept the manufacturers warranty on your purchase. 2) Go for the extended warranty. 3) Purchase a maintenance contact at purchase(usually around 10% of purchase). 4) Purchase updates when they become available (usually applicable to software). 5) Buy a maintenance contract after the warranty expires (expensive). 6) Lease the product (here be dragons! so do your homework).
I am sure there are many more options that could be added here but I think I have covered the main ones.
Most products require that a company provides support under some sort of warranty, however software is not normally covered by a manufactures warranty and is normally sold as "best effort". Most Software Providers provide Software Support (normally about 5% to 10% of purchase) which entitles the subscriber to updates and bug fixes. If you are a company then like it or not you should have some sort of maintenance agreement on your software.
Personally I believe bug fixes and security patches should be included as part of the a Commercial Software Warranty, however updates should be paid for. Of course the way Languages seem to get misinterpreted today I am quite sure many companies would bundle bug fixes and security patches with updates and call this a Software Warranty.
No matter what type of software you use today one thing you should be asking is "do I really own my own data?". If you are locked in to a particular vendor's software that by default uses propriety formats (not just Microsoft here) then you have a problem and in some respects it is your own fault. I think the following quote is quite appropriate here "Let the buyer beware".
What is even stranger here is that Microsoft is actually trying?? to investigate spam when spam had been around for many years. Isn't this a case of trying to lock the gate after the horse has bolted and is currently retired to an "old horse's" home after roaming free for many years and is now currently giving tips to it's many offspring. I mean if you were going to do this and be taken seriously then why not at least back in the early 1990's.
With regard to getting infected I installed XP on my laptop just over 10 months ago I made the silly mistake of having it connected to the intranet. Once I booted the machine to XP I never got the chance to install service pack 1 much less download the latest updates before the machine was infected. I never had this problem with Unix and Linux. You are dead right "why do people put up with this".
Actually I can go back to PC's (running DOS) in 1985/6 and in the organisation I worked for people could remember a Unix outage of one hour (normally scheduled and out of business hours) but could not remember the number of times they had to reboot their machines due to viruses or file corruption and what is even stranger is the majority of people were scientists and engineers. The clerical people we had seemed to stoically put up with this silliness.
I have be running Unix over 22 years and with the exception of the Morris Worm (we pulled the network connection for a few hours) have rarely seen Unix issues. Admittedly I always apply security patches (rarely need a reboot unless the kernel needs to be updated) when they come out.
It must be noted if an outage is needed then it must be scheduled unless it is your own "crash and burn" system which is normally the one that gets updated first.
The MS approach to Security Through Obscurity is very irritating to System Admins when all of a sudden a panic alert comes out and no one can tell you how to check if you are vulnerable. This is a great time waster since in the majority of cases Unix and I also include Linux in this, are normally fine.
Actually one of the things I find weird is the slavish approach to "extensions" such as ".exe", ".doc"..... (the list goes on). I can understand some files having extensions (I used "*.doc" and "*.txt" or "*.text" for text files back in the late 1970's) but in *nix, files that do need extensions are only used for specific applications and all file name information is always displayed with the exception of "." files and you can see them very easily if you want to.
I honestly tried to read this but my eyes kept glazing over.
Please check your format prior to posting.
Sorry for being off-topic but I have noticed other people posting what they most likely thought was text only to produce one huge paragraph. Personally "Plain Old Text" works for me.
I think the best part of Versions 9 on, was that it was really boring to install/upgrade in fact the hardest part was partitioning the disk and making a decision on what file-system to use (5 minutes). It would have been a real no-brainer if I did not have a MS partition. My initial annoyance was installing Windows XP pro from first principles and forgetting that my docking station was connected to the intranet. Never had this issue with Suse or Redhat.
All up install for Suse 9.3 pro (have not done 10 yet) was approx 1:30 (Redhat Enterprise 4-1 was much the same) on a Compaq nc6000 and it recognised all peripherals.
From a personal perspective (mainly cosmetic) I like Suse over Redhat. Sorry can't compare other variants although colleagues do say Debian and Gentoo are very good.
I don't dislike the concept of a registry, having worked with Apollo Domain's Aegis (1980's) and the ODM in AIX (current), but you are right, Microsoft went right over the top with this. At least the others were modular and constrained to operating system management, not user management.
The complexity of MS's registry makes management a nightmare and for an OS that is designed to be user friendly it makes a mockery of the idea. If that is innovation then it looks like MS has hijacked the dictionary.
The "Jet Assisted Takeoff" (what every young petrol head wants and usually only once) is really an urban legend but it is still very funny in a macabre way.
Most clusters are equivalent to DEC-safe (you can even get the source code on Freshmeat) which is mainly a group of machines joined together via a SCSI interconnect or a Storage Area Network and a common lan. all interconnects should be redundant and that includes the network. The only cluster that is different is the Tru64 cluster which has a clustered file-system. I think Redhat clustering uses NFS (anyone advise on this) but you need a very fast network if you want disk performance.
Fault tolerant is the most expensive option such as the Himalaya machines, nearly all components can be replaced while the machine is hot.
The cluster is quite a reliable method of application availability. In the event of a cluster member failure the application failover to another cluster member should be relatively quick (about 1 to 5 minutes), however if an application takes say 25 minutes (I actually struck this once) to start then fail-over is going to take at least 25 minutes. Also your application should be capable of restarting and recovering from power off then on. If the application cannot do this then clustering is useless and you should be thinking fault tolerant machines or getting your Application vendor to fix the issue.
PS. All clusters I have setup (Trucluster - Tru64 Unix) using Informix, Oracle, Sybase and SAP applications have worked extremely well.
Slashdot Mirror
If you buy a product (car, sound system, TV, computer, software ...) you normally have a couple of options:
1) Accept the manufacturers warranty on your purchase.
2) Go for the extended warranty.
3) Purchase a maintenance contact at purchase(usually around 10% of purchase).
4) Purchase updates when they become available (usually applicable to software).
5) Buy a maintenance contract after the warranty expires (expensive).
6) Lease the product (here be dragons! so do your homework).
I am sure there are many more options that could be added here but I think I have covered the main ones.
Most products require that a company provides support under some sort of warranty, however software is not normally covered by a manufactures warranty and is normally sold as "best effort". Most Software Providers provide Software Support (normally about 5% to 10% of purchase) which entitles the subscriber to updates and bug fixes. If you are a company then like it or not you should have some sort of maintenance agreement on your software.
Personally I believe bug fixes and security patches should be included as part of the a Commercial Software Warranty, however updates should be paid for. Of course the way Languages seem to get misinterpreted today I am quite sure many companies would bundle bug fixes and security patches with updates and call this a Software Warranty.
No matter what type of software you use today one thing you should be asking is "do I really own my own data?". If you are locked in to a particular vendor's software that by default uses propriety formats (not just Microsoft here) then you have a problem and in some respects it is your own fault. I think the following quote is quite appropriate here "Let the buyer beware".
What is even stranger here is that Microsoft is actually trying?? to investigate spam when spam had been around for many years. Isn't this a case of trying to lock the gate after the horse has bolted and is currently retired to an "old horse's" home after roaming free for many years and is now currently giving tips to it's many offspring. I mean if you were going to do this and be taken seriously then why not at least back in the early 1990's.
With regard to getting infected I installed XP on my laptop just over 10 months ago I made the silly mistake of having it connected to the intranet. Once I booted the machine to XP I never got the chance to install service pack 1 much less download the latest updates before the machine was infected. I never had this problem with Unix and Linux. You are dead right "why do people put up with this".
Actually I can go back to PC's (running DOS) in 1985/6 and in the organisation I worked for people could remember a Unix outage of one hour (normally scheduled and out of business hours) but could not remember the number of times they had to reboot their machines due to viruses or file corruption and what is even stranger is the majority of people were scientists and engineers. The clerical people we had seemed to stoically put up with this silliness.
I have be running Unix over 22 years and with the exception of the Morris Worm (we pulled the network connection for a few hours) have rarely seen Unix issues. Admittedly I always apply security patches (rarely need a reboot unless the kernel needs to be updated) when they come out.
.... (the list goes on). I can understand some files having extensions (I used "*.doc" and "*.txt" or "*.text" for text files back in the late 1970's) but in *nix, files that do need extensions are only used for specific applications and all file name information is always displayed with the exception of "." files and you can see them very easily if you want to.
It must be noted if an outage is needed then it must be scheduled unless it is your own "crash and burn" system which is normally the one that gets updated first.
The MS approach to Security Through Obscurity is very irritating to System Admins when all of a sudden a panic alert comes out and no one can tell you how to check if you are vulnerable. This is a great time waster since in the majority of cases Unix and I also include Linux in this, are normally fine.
Actually one of the things I find weird is the slavish approach to "extensions" such as ".exe", ".doc".
I honestly tried to read this but my eyes kept glazing over.
Please check your format prior to posting.
Sorry for being off-topic but I have noticed other people posting what they most likely thought was text only to produce one huge paragraph. Personally "Plain Old Text" works for me.
I think the best part of Versions 9 on, was that it was really boring to install/upgrade in fact the hardest part was partitioning the disk and making a decision on what file-system to use (5 minutes). It would have been a real no-brainer if I did not have a MS partition. My initial annoyance was installing Windows XP pro from first principles and forgetting that my docking station was connected to the intranet. Never had this issue with Suse or Redhat.
All up install for Suse 9.3 pro (have not done 10 yet) was approx 1:30 (Redhat Enterprise 4-1 was much the same) on a Compaq nc6000 and it recognised all peripherals.
From a personal perspective (mainly cosmetic) I like Suse over Redhat. Sorry can't compare other variants although colleagues do say Debian and Gentoo are very good.
Good write up!
I don't dislike the concept of a registry, having worked with Apollo Domain's Aegis (1980's) and the ODM in AIX (current), but you are right, Microsoft went right over the top with this. At least the others were modular and constrained to operating system management, not user management.
The complexity of MS's registry makes management a nightmare and for an OS that is designed to be user friendly it makes a mockery of the idea. If that is innovation then it looks like MS has hijacked the dictionary.
The "Jet Assisted Takeoff" (what every young petrol head wants and usually only once) is really an urban legend but it is still very funny in a macabre way.
Most clusters are equivalent to DEC-safe (you can even get the source code on Freshmeat) which is mainly a group of machines joined together via a SCSI interconnect or a Storage Area Network and a common lan. all interconnects should be redundant and that includes the network. The only cluster that is different is the Tru64 cluster which has a clustered file-system. I think Redhat clustering uses NFS (anyone advise on this) but you need a very fast network if you want disk performance.
Fault tolerant is the most expensive option such as the Himalaya machines, nearly all components can be replaced while the machine is hot.
The cluster is quite a reliable method of application availability. In the event of a cluster member failure the application failover to another cluster member should be relatively quick (about 1 to 5 minutes), however if an application takes say 25 minutes (I actually struck this once) to start then fail-over is going to take at least 25 minutes. Also your application should be capable of restarting and recovering from power off then on. If the application cannot do this then clustering is useless and you should be thinking fault tolerant machines or getting your Application vendor to fix the issue.
PS. All clusters I have setup (Trucluster - Tru64 Unix) using Informix, Oracle, Sybase and SAP applications have worked extremely well.