If you want something entertaining for today's audience, check out Planetes, it's an anime about the "debris section" of a corporation with an orbiting spaceport. Even if you're turned off by "cartoons", give this a shot, it isn't meant for kids, it's designed for people in their late teens and young adults, but everyone can enjoy this series.. ^_^
If someone is running a server room with many live production systems where downtime must be in seconds per year, they should ALWAYS have a test environment and a production environment. Gentoo makes it extremely easy to produce this setup. Imagine if you will, this setup:
1) Master rsync system (contains the portage sync used by all the systems)
2) Test boxes for each role needed (perhaps you have 3 different kinds of servers, WWW, Mail, DB)
3) Many production boxes
What you would end up doing is creating a fairly generic gentoo install (by generic, I mean hardware independent - like i686 or whatever you feel comfortable that will be supported for the lifecycle of the servers). All production servers are identical to the test boxes at the beginning of this example and have a simple backup of the whole test environments (perhaps a large tarball saved on a separate drive). A new update is necessary for apache so you do an emerge --sync on the master rsync system. Then you rsync all the test boxes so they have the same portage tree. You then run the necessary installs on the test systems to make sure that it works, if it doesn't, then you research why and figure out if its easier to fix after the update, or if the update needs to be done differently, if you need to, you can restore the test system from the backup and start over. After you have all the test boxes running well, you can then rsync the production boxes and reproduce the steps necessary to get them updated.
Once all this is said and done, the production boxes will all be updated successfully (and the updates were tested on the test boxes) and the test boxes will at this point have the same configuration as the production boxes. You would make a new backup of the test boxes and wait for the next time you have to do this cycle. As long as the boxes really are identical, you could even run konsole (or another xterm that allows you to send your input to multiple console windows) and perform the identical steps on all the same type of boxes (sending your update commands to 20 or even 50 servers at once).
I'm sorry, but in any real production environment, I see NO issues with this setup. It may be a bit time consuming if you have a lot of etc-updates to do, but still, the basic update should be painless to that point.
I've always wanted to find a Star Trek game that lets you play a certain position on the starship. You could pick one of several positions, such as "Engineering Ensign", "Chief Engineer", "Chief Tactical Officer", or even an Ensign at the Helm or Conn. There could be 2 settings, 1) Easy - where most functions are fairly straight forward or 2) Hard - where most functions are as realistic as possible and may require multiple steps. The hardest part would be creating a detailed training manual to advise users on how to use the systems and what potential issues to watch for (ie. frequency of plasma stream from Matter/Anti-matter reaction is out of threshold or something like that). Of course, everyone will have a station they like to place - like myself, I'd prefer an engineering task as I like technical things, but others might want to be the captain and just deal with making decisions. This would also open up some really great multiplayer possibilities as well. I could see there being at least 7 stations that could be filled in a multiplayer experience.
I know that they did something similar in "Star Trek: Bridge Commander" which was an ok game in my opinion, but it wasn't nearly technical enough for my taste and has gotten a bit outdated.
I had worked for a company, which shall remain nameless, that insisted on using 1 Cat5 cable for 2 jacks and put dialup modem banks to use as T1 routers as they were "cheaper" than regular T1 routers and all purchased on ebay for next to nothing... Needless to say, there were nothing but problems and I made my leave as quickly as I could.
Shouldn't this fall under the law (I forget the exact description) that allows a company to provide a product "compatible" to a format/standard/etc. without having to buy a license as long as they don't use the patented program/codec? IE - OpenOffice will open/save MS Word Docs.... Same thing??
Slashdot Mirror
Will it run the HAL9000 series yet?
First Ms. Pac-Man... next Skynet.... I'd pull the plug if I were teaching the PC before it's too late.
If you want something entertaining for today's audience, check out Planetes, it's an anime about the "debris section" of a corporation with an orbiting spaceport. Even if you're turned off by "cartoons", give this a shot, it isn't meant for kids, it's designed for people in their late teens and young adults, but everyone can enjoy this series.. ^_^
Paid support. I beg to differ:
http://www.cyberlogic.ca/fr/accueil2.aspx?sortcod
http://www.lod.com/linux-consulting.html
(I posted this on the gentoo forums)
If someone is running a server room with many live production systems where downtime must be in seconds per year, they should ALWAYS have a test environment and a production environment. Gentoo makes it extremely easy to produce this setup. Imagine if you will, this setup:
1) Master rsync system (contains the portage sync used by all the systems)
2) Test boxes for each role needed (perhaps you have 3 different kinds of servers, WWW, Mail, DB)
3) Many production boxes
What you would end up doing is creating a fairly generic gentoo install (by generic, I mean hardware independent - like i686 or whatever you feel comfortable that will be supported for the lifecycle of the servers). All production servers are identical to the test boxes at the beginning of this example and have a simple backup of the whole test environments (perhaps a large tarball saved on a separate drive). A new update is necessary for apache so you do an emerge --sync on the master rsync system. Then you rsync all the test boxes so they have the same portage tree. You then run the necessary installs on the test systems to make sure that it works, if it doesn't, then you research why and figure out if its easier to fix after the update, or if the update needs to be done differently, if you need to, you can restore the test system from the backup and start over. After you have all the test boxes running well, you can then rsync the production boxes and reproduce the steps necessary to get them updated.
Once all this is said and done, the production boxes will all be updated successfully (and the updates were tested on the test boxes) and the test boxes will at this point have the same configuration as the production boxes. You would make a new backup of the test boxes and wait for the next time you have to do this cycle. As long as the boxes really are identical, you could even run konsole (or another xterm that allows you to send your input to multiple console windows) and perform the identical steps on all the same type of boxes (sending your update commands to 20 or even 50 servers at once).
I'm sorry, but in any real production environment, I see NO issues with this setup. It may be a bit time consuming if you have a lot of etc-updates to do, but still, the basic update should be painless to that point.
-Jason Pf.
I've always wanted to find a Star Trek game that lets you play a certain position on the starship. You could pick one of several positions, such as "Engineering Ensign", "Chief Engineer", "Chief Tactical Officer", or even an Ensign at the Helm or Conn. There could be 2 settings, 1) Easy - where most functions are fairly straight forward or 2) Hard - where most functions are as realistic as possible and may require multiple steps. The hardest part would be creating a detailed training manual to advise users on how to use the systems and what potential issues to watch for (ie. frequency of plasma stream from Matter/Anti-matter reaction is out of threshold or something like that). Of course, everyone will have a station they like to place - like myself, I'd prefer an engineering task as I like technical things, but others might want to be the captain and just deal with making decisions. This would also open up some really great multiplayer possibilities as well. I could see there being at least 7 stations that could be filled in a multiplayer experience. I know that they did something similar in "Star Trek: Bridge Commander" which was an ok game in my opinion, but it wasn't nearly technical enough for my taste and has gotten a bit outdated.
I had worked for a company, which shall remain nameless, that insisted on using 1 Cat5 cable for 2 jacks and put dialup modem banks to use as T1 routers as they were "cheaper" than regular T1 routers and all purchased on ebay for next to nothing... Needless to say, there were nothing but problems and I made my leave as quickly as I could.
Shouldn't this fall under the law (I forget the exact description) that allows a company to provide a product "compatible" to a format/standard/etc. without having to buy a license as long as they don't use the patented program/codec? IE - OpenOffice will open/save MS Word Docs.... Same thing??