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 I am back.

 Author:  Topic:  Posted:
Jun 05, 2002
 Comments:
Just returned from a trip to Ireland. De facto a company-paid vacation time. De jure a business service trip; surveying office LANs and setting up the most critical systems to work.

The setting up consisted basically from ditching the Windows-only architecture (their local contractors tried for weeks to keep it running - they failed miserably so I had to be flown in), and moving the mission-critical services to a Linux server I set up overnight. Now I can be reasonably sure that most of the systems will stay up and running and the problems will stay contained on individual desktop machines - together with the remote access system allowing me to solve most of them without leaving the appartment (or even the bed if the call comes before noon).

diaries

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I am wondering how this comes to the claims of superiority of Windows servers and inferiority of open-source solutions, so common here. (I am admitting the superiority of BSD servers, but Linux has wider hardware support and is almost as good for common uses. And, more people use it so there is also more people to call when problems appear.)

The airline food sucks. But my cooking is worse (and costs me more effort), so I don't really complain.

Ireland itself is great place. If the average weather would be warmer (and drier), I'd consider moving...

But now I am back. I am wondering what nice articles will the next few days bring me to dissect.

On a side note, I stumbled over a funny report. Open source software is reportedly a national security threat. I had a good laugh, and somehow I wasn't surprised ADTI was on MS payroll. Maybe I should exploit the journalist card I recently got, and ask ADTI a couple of more technical questions than they seem to be used to...

       
Tweet

You're going to have fun (none / 0) (#1)
by T Reginald Gibbons on Wed Jun 5th, 2002 at 03:47:21 PM PST
Spending hours on the phone to Ireland,explaining to people how to fix your elaborate linux setup when parts of it malfunction. If you pull that off in enough timezones, you may never sleep again. Good luck.

I already have fun. (none / 0) (#2)
by The Mad Scientist on Wed Jun 5th, 2002 at 04:07:13 PM PST
I am spending hours on the phone explaining how to fix their elaborate Windows setups (one of the NT boxes decided to forget it should be able to do TCP/IP - of course it had to wait until I will leave). The two minor problems (I forgot to write the right number to the right inputbox and then mistakenly thought I tested it) were solved over the mentioned remote access within about 2 minutes each.

I have principially identical setup in three more offices, and having phone calls with them regularly. The only calls that require me to change anything on the Linux systems are the ones that tell me I should kill off all the DOSemu processes because the database needs to be reindexed (there is a mission critical legacy piece of DOS cra... err... code that needs to be accessed from two different sites - DOS emulation under Linux is a kludgy but almost reliable solution, surely cheaper than W2k server with terminal service (and possibly the same problems)). The other Linux-related calls were the ones about running low on disk space, back when I hadn't my proactive monitoring yet.

If all the machines would behave like my Linux ones, I would be a happy camper. Trust me in this.


 
Fuck Linux. Fuck Linux. Fuck Linux. Fuck Linux. (none / 0) (#3)
by dmg on Thu Jun 6th, 2002 at 08:52:22 AM PST
Linux sucks. If you absolutely must run a Unix like OS on the brain-dead IA32 architecture, then OpenBSD or Solaris are your only sensible choices. Again, I ask you, why use Linux on Intel when there is OpenBSD ? Are you being deliberately obtuse ?

more people use it so there is also more people to call when problems appear.

Unfortunately, the vast majority of them are 14-year old zealots who will call you a "moron" becaue Linux does not support cut-n-paste between all applications.



time to give a Newtonian demonstration - of a bullet, its mass and its acceleration.
-- MC Hawking

It's the apps. (none / 0) (#4)
by tkatchev on Fri Jun 7th, 2002 at 11:05:13 AM PST
It's the apps that matter, for us sore losers who are too lazy to acquire a decent computing environment.

For example, in my opinion, libglade is the best RAD GUI toolkit you can get (XML, I believe, is the surest way forward) and Linux is the easiest way to install things like libglade if you're lazy and/or stupid.

I an ideal world, we'd be running a normal RISC architecture (something like MIPS, my favorite) with a normal microkernel OS that doesn't suck and doesn't weigh in 25 megabytes of horrific college-level C code.

Anyways. Sometimes I feel like throwing all this crud away and starting again from scratch.


--
Peace and much love...

 
On OpenBSD (none / 0) (#5)
by DG on Fri Jun 7th, 2002 at 12:04:11 PM PST
The problem with OpenBSD is it's only really useful for a firewall/nat server. You can use it to serve pages and other services.. even set it up as a workstation.. Freebsd is better for things like that though.


© 2002, DG. You may not reproduce this material, in whole or in part, without written permission of the owner.

 

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