Re: Sun's Perl was Re: Application servers and e-commerce platforms
Dave Hodgkinson wrote: Robin Houston [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: (Sadly I no longer have shell access to any four-processor Sun machines to confirm this.) Which reminds me. How in gods name do Sun get away with charging so much for stuff? We've erm, "acquired" an enterprise 420. this box has 2 CPUs, 4G or RAM and about 80G of disk. For the same money I could build a clutster of what, 30 linux boxes? Don't tell me programmer time has got that expensive? Or that thinking about what you're doing stopped happening? If it's good enough for Google... Help me out here! It is good kit (and alot of it is rebadged stuff - with nice blue / gray boxes and Sun stickers). But it's also a marketing thing I know tow clients whom purchased 15k of sun kit each, and in either case a good Linux / Free|OpenBSD box would have done the same. The only time I recommend sun is when you need a bigger box than a twin Pentium machine - and even then I mentions Alpha's (as I think they as just as good a Sun's for the_just_above_intel market). Also a a final Sun rant, sometime's it hard to scale / cluster stuff i.e a RDBMS system is not a simple thing to cluster - and buying a bigger box is the less of two evils. Well that's a rant over first thing on Friday ! Greg -- Dave Hodgkinson, http://www.hodgkinson.org Editor-in-chief, The Highway Star http://www.deep-purple.com Apache, mod_perl, MySQL, Sybase hired gun for, well, hire -
RE: Sun's Perl was Re: Application servers and e-commerce platforms
For the same money I could build a clutster of what, 30 linux boxes? Don't tell me programmer time has got that expensive? Or that thinking about what you're doing stopped happening? If it's good enough for Google... Help me out here! It is good kit (and alot of it is rebadged stuff - with nice blue / gray boxes and Sun stickers). But it's also a marketing thing I know tow clients whom purchased It's also a support thing. Sun's support service is very good, and although it costs _as much as the hardware again_ you can't get it unless you buy the hardware in the first place. Yes, this results in truly horrendous costs, but then you can just pick up the phone and say 'This thing doesn't boot, fix it today please'. No paperwork, no "I'll need your customer id and this is your ticket number if you have any questions", just "our engineer will be there in 45 minutes". Also, remember that large companies can negotiate discounts approaching 50% on much of the kit. That all said, Sun's low end offerings, like the T1 are neat machines but not good value. You can buy two 1-unit no-brand intel boxes with Linux for the same price. When you are looking at the E420Rs and such, there aren't really Intel boxes in the same arena except maybe from HP and Compaq, and they cost nearly as much.
RE: Sun's Perl was Re: Application servers and e-commerce platforms
I'd agree with this. We buy large amounts of Sun kit. Although I don't make these decisions my take on why is: - Even though you can automate sysadmin tasks, generally more boxes mean more sysadmin effort. Given our compute requirements we would need very large numbers of PCs to replace our sun machines (we buy large numbers of E45ks). - Space. Machine room space with appropriate aircon and power systems costs money. Fewer but more powerful machines make sense. [yes you could go rack mount PC, but then you'd be tying yourselves to a smaller set of manufacturers which means you'll be paying more than you would for generic boxes] - Reliablity. Outages can cost us serious amounts of money reputation. Although Suns aren't the most reliable machines in the world, they are much more reliable than generic PCs (and parts are hot-swappable). They are also suitable for setting up with off-site failover to secondary machines. - Scalablity. nproc2 is expensive for PCs. We run large database servers that work better on multiprocessor machines (for instance 10 processor 8GB]. - Standardisation. Buying kit from one manufacturer simplifies hardware maintenance and upgrades So for us it makes sense. For other people where you don't have the above constraints it's probably not worth the extra. -- Harry -Original Message- From: Greg Cope [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: 26 January 2001 10:17 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Sun's Perl was Re: Application servers and e-commerce platforms Dave Hodgkinson wrote: Robin Houston [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: (Sadly I no longer have shell access to any four-processor Sun machines to confirm this.) Which reminds me. How in gods name do Sun get away with charging so much for stuff? We've erm, "acquired" an enterprise 420. this box has 2 CPUs, 4G or RAM and about 80G of disk. For the same money I could build a clutster of what, 30 linux boxes? Don't tell me programmer time has got that expensive? Or that thinking about what you're doing stopped happening? If it's good enough for Google... Help me out here! It is good kit (and alot of it is rebadged stuff - with nice blue / gray boxes and Sun stickers). But it's also a marketing thing I know tow clients whom purchased 15k of sun kit each, and in either case a good Linux / Free|OpenBSD box would have done the same. The only time I recommend sun is when you need a bigger box than a twin Pentium machine - and even then I mentions Alpha's (as I think they as just as good a Sun's for the_just_above_intel market). Also a a final Sun rant, sometime's it hard to scale / cluster stuff i.e a RDBMS system is not a simple thing to cluster - and buying a bigger box is the less of two evils. Well that's a rant over first thing on Friday ! Greg -- Dave Hodgkinson, http://www.hodgkinson.org Editor-in-chief, The Highway Star http://www.deep-purple.com Apache, mod_perl, MySQL, Sybase hired gun for, well, hire -
Re: Sun's Perl was Re: Application servers and e-commerce platforms
On Fri, Jan 26, 2001 at 10:35:45AM +, Steve Mynott wrote: I suspect things like SMP probably still work better. And if I were on call supporting a server I would probably still trust a Sparc running Solaris over some dodgy PC desktop with Redhat stuck on it by a hobbyist who has never used another UNIX. Multi processor Solaris runs rings around any of the free Unixes. They've had kernel threads for nearly 10 years, and it's very optimized. I suspect that SGIs IRIX is equally good, but I have no experience of that to speak from. -Dom
Re: Sun's Perl was Re: Application servers and e-commerce platforms
On Fri, Jan 26, 2001 at 10:17:21AM +, Greg Cope wrote: Dave Hodgkinson wrote: How in gods name do Sun get away with charging so much for stuff? It is good kit But it's also a marketing thing I know tow clients whom purchased 15k of sun kit each, and in either case a good Linux / Free|OpenBSD box would have done the same. The only time I recommend sun is when you need a bigger box than a twin Pentium machine - and even then I mentions Alpha's (as I think they as just as good a Sun's for the_just_above_intel market). I recommend Sun when the customer needs enterprise-level support (I just ain't convinced by Dell/Compaq/HP's offerings) and when they need to run Oracle. I'm not ready to recommend Oracle on Linux yet. -- David Cantrell | [EMAIL PROTECTED] | http://www.cantrell.org.uk/david/ Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced
Re: Sun's Perl was Re: Application servers and e-commerce platforms
On Fri, 26 Jan 2001, Dominic Mitchell wrote: On Fri, Jan 26, 2001 at 10:35:45AM +, Steve Mynott wrote: I suspect things like SMP probably still work better. And if I were on call supporting a server I would probably still trust a Sparc running Solaris over some dodgy PC desktop with Redhat stuck on it by a hobbyist who has never used another UNIX. Multi processor Solaris runs rings around any of the free Unixes. They've had kernel threads for nearly 10 years, and it's very optimized. I suspect that SGIs IRIX is equally good, but I have no experience of that to speak from. Tru64 from Compaq isn't too shabby either... however they are expensive... probably get the same power to cost ratio with clustered Linux boxes on Intel!! Andy
Re: Sun's Perl was Re: Application servers and e-commerce platforms
Steve Mynott wrote: Dave Hodgkinson [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: [..] How in gods name do Sun get away with charging so much for stuff? Because they can and they have a brand people trust like IBM or Microsoft. In fact you can buy far cheaper Sun clones from companies like Transtec but the Sun name tends (rather irrationally) to carry more weight in some circles (eg. telcos, ISP and City). Many people use clones internally but Sun kit for the stuff customers see. We've erm, "acquired" an enterprise 420. this box has 2 CPUs, 4G or RAM and about 80G of disk. For the same money I could build a clutster of what, 30 linux boxes? Don't tell me programmer time has got that expensive? Or that thinking about what you're doing stopped happening? If it's good enough for Google... You can't really compare Suns with standard PCs because they have numerous advantages still -- 64 bit archecture, faster bus, SCSI (although some use IDE now). It's still expensive to get PCs in 1U cases and you can fit a lot of Netra T1s in a 19" rack. Although for desktop use the framebuffers rarely have enough colours to be useable. I suspect things like SMP probably still work better. And if I were on call supporting a server I would probably still trust a Sparc running Solaris over some dodgy PC desktop with Redhat stuck on it by a hobbyist who has never used another UNIX. Cutting - Althought I agree with the sentiment that a Sparc box will probably be more reliable than a generic PC. However s /some dodgy PC desktop with Redhat stuck on it by a hobbyist who has never used another UNIX/inexperienced/; Lets not compare inexperience with anyparticular flavour of *nix. Greg Who started on Redhat along time ago, and has since used and initially disliked Solaris/Sun OS, but has since softened as is happy to work on any *nix. Having said that I think they are probably doomed to occupy an increasingly small niche and things like clustered Free UNIX clones (PVM on BSD or Beowolf on Linux) certainly offer more bang per buck. -- 1024/D9C69DF9 steve mynott [EMAIL PROTECTED] if you have any trouble sounding condescending, find a unix user to show you how it's done. --scott adams
Re: Sun's Perl was Re: Application servers and e-commerce platforms
Michael Stevens wrote: On Fri, Jan 26, 2001 at 10:35:45AM +, Steve Mynott wrote: I suspect things like SMP probably still work better. And if I were on call supporting a server I would probably still trust a Sparc running Solaris over some dodgy PC desktop with Redhat stuck on it by a hobbyist who has never used another UNIX. Can't we compare something vaguely equivalent here instead? I personally would have just as little faith in Solaris run by someone who didn't know what they were doing as I would in Redhat run by someone who didn't know what they were doing. Here, here ! How about a decently built rack mount PC running Debian[1], by someone who actually knows how to setup that particular OS decently, as compared with a Sun box running Solaris setup by someone good with solaris? (And, myself, I'd recommend the PC for some situations, and the Solaris box for others). My main problem with the PC architecture is that you can do a lot by carefully picking a good manufacturer, but it's still fundamentally not as solid and consistent as sun stuff, IMHO. I imagine you could get a pc service contract on the same level as Sun do, but I have no experience in the area. Has anyone got any experience paying vast amounts of money for PC support? did you get much for your money? Michael [1] OS changed on the grounds I feel that Redhat ships something more optimised towards desktop use, whereas I feel Debian and Solaris are both more suited for servers. Would this still hold for a RedDrat system with all the X stuff and other unncessary stuff removed ? And if not - what else do you you think is different ? I've a small shell script that does quite a bit of rpm -e (remove) on X stuff / other druff that redhat installs by default - it would be nice if they included a stripped down install class in their default install - which left you with a basic machine Greg
Re: Sun's Perl was Re: Application servers and e-commerce platforms
On or about Fri, Jan 26, 2001 at 11:07:02AM +, Michael Stevens typed: I imagine you could get a pc service contract on the same level as Sun do, but I have no experience in the area. Has anyone got any experience paying vast amounts of money for PC support? did you get much for your money? Dell offer this on some of their servers. IMHO this is always a waste of money - they don't provide anything that you couldn't do yourself by having a stock of spare parts and someone competent on call. OTOH, if you pay for the support, generally you get a machine that was put together by someone who knew how it was supposed to go, rather than the colour-blind monkeys they normally use. R
Re: Sun's Perl was Re: Application servers and e-commerce platforms
On Fri, Jan 26, 2001 at 11:18:06AM +, Greg Cope wrote: How about a decently built rack mount PC running Debian[1], by someone who actually knows how to setup that particular OS decently, as compared with a Sun box running Solaris setup by someone good with solaris? (And, myself, I'd recommend the PC for some situations, and the Solaris box for others). My main problem with the PC architecture is that you can do a lot by carefully picking a good manufacturer, but it's still fundamentally not as solid and consistent as sun stuff, IMHO. I imagine you could get a pc service contract on the same level as Sun do, but I have no experience in the area. Has anyone got any experience paying vast amounts of money for PC support? did you get much for your money? Michael [1] OS changed on the grounds I feel that Redhat ships something more optimised towards desktop use, whereas I feel Debian and Solaris are both more suited for servers. Would this still hold for a RedDrat system with all the X stuff and other unncessary stuff removed ? And if not - what else do you you think is different ? I've a small shell script that does quite a bit of rpm -e (remove) on X stuff / other druff that redhat installs by default - it would be nice if they included a stripped down install class in their default install - which left you with a basic machine IMHO the main significance here is in the default install. You can fiddle around with anything if you want and make it vaguely sensible as a server. Redhat as default is not very well setup to use as a server on the internet (I feel). Debian I think is a lot better as shipped, as is Solaris, mostly on the grounds they're less prone to installing irrelevant crap[1]. Michael [1] My solaris admin experience is almost completely nonexistent, but I'd drawing on my experience as a user of solaris systems.
Re: Sun's Perl was Re: Application servers and e-commerce platforms
On Fri, Jan 26, 2001 at 11:19:02AM +, Roger Burton West wrote: On or about Fri, Jan 26, 2001 at 11:07:02AM +, Michael Stevens typed: I imagine you could get a pc service contract on the same level as Sun do, but I have no experience in the area. Has anyone got any experience paying vast amounts of money for PC support? did you get much for your money? Dell offer this on some of their servers. IMHO this is always a waste of money - they don't provide anything that you couldn't do yourself by having a stock of spare parts and someone competent on call. I don't really like most big name linux stuff, because all they seem to support is Redhat, and while I can completely understand their reasons, I find it almost impossible to make a Redhat system into something that I like. Michael
Re: Sun's Perl was Re: Application servers and e-commerce platforms
On Fri, 26 Jan 2001, Michael Stevens wrote: Can't we compare something vaguely equivalent here instead? I personally would have just as little faith in Solaris run by someone who didn't know what they were doing as I would in Redhat run by someone who didn't know what they were doing. How about a decently built rack mount PC running Debian[1], by someone who actually knows how to setup that particular OS decently, as compared with a Sun box running Solaris setup by someone good with solaris? (And, myself, I'd recommend the PC for some situations, and the Solaris box for others). My main problem with the PC architecture is that you can do a lot by carefully picking a good manufacturer, but it's still fundamentally not as solid and consistent as sun stuff, IMHO. I imagine you could get a pc service contract on the same level as Sun do, but I have no experience in the area. Has anyone got any experience paying vast amounts of money for PC support? did you get much for your money? We are currently getting support for all our redhat boxes running on Compaq. Compaq offer 24x7, 2 hour response/4 hour fix on their intel boxes (at a price)... They also offer basic RedHat support. Redhat offer OS support for 625 UKP per server (9-6 Mon-Fri) RHCE Course is only 1500 UKP too. Andy
Re: Sun's Perl was Re: Application servers and e-commerce platforms
On Fri, Jan 26, 2001 at 11:30:03AM +, Roger Burton West wrote: On or about Fri, Jan 26, 2001 at 11:23:26AM +, Michael Stevens typed: On Fri, Jan 26, 2001 at 11:19:02AM +, Roger Burton West wrote: Dell offer this on some of their servers. IMHO this is always a waste of money - they don't provide anything that you couldn't do yourself by having a stock of spare parts and someone competent on call. I don't really like most big name linux stuff, because all they seem to support is Redhat, and while I can completely understand their reasons, I find it almost impossible to make a Redhat system into something that I like. Agreed entirely. I was thinking purely of hardware support; software support IME is always and everywhere a complete waste of time and money. And then people wonder why I like open source... I've heard rumours that software support can be useful, but not yet encountered such a thing. Michael
Re: Sun's Perl was Re: Application servers and e-commerce platforms
On Fri, Jan 26, 2001 at 11:30:28AM +, Struan Donald wrote: on the other hand kickstart files aren't that tricky to write and you can then set up the box in a sensible way (or something approaching that) and it's very easy to set up a chunk of boxes the same. of course you a box to put the kcikstart stuff on (assuming network install...) Isn't kickstart a solaris thing, or have redhat developed new stuff I didn't know about? If it is just a solaris thing, I was holding up solaris boxes as being GOOD because they don't come with much stuff installed. For servers, I see this as a desirable feature. One of these days I must play with the FAI (fully automatic installation) stuff for debian. Michael
Re: Sun's Perl was Re: Application servers and e-commerce platforms
On Fri, Jan 26, 2001 at 11:39:17AM +, Struan Donald wrote: One of these days I must play with the FAI (fully automatic installation) stuff for debian. kickstart is (i assume) teh redhat equiv of FAI. or at least it is if FAI is stick floppy in system, create symlink in some magic format i can't quite remember on kickstart server and reboot box. go and make beverage of choice, come back to newly installed box. They sound similiar. Google reveals that what I was thinking of was Jumpstart, which is the solaris approach to all this. I think the FAI stuff will work with remote boot roms on the network cards if you want to do that, too. I don't have any info but I think FAI is fairly immature. I just prefer a small system which makes it easy to install what you want rather than a big one where you have to remove stuff. I dunno. Michael
RE: Sun's Perl was Re: Application servers and e-commerce platforms
Agreed entirely. I was thinking purely of hardware support; software support IME is always and everywhere a complete waste of time and money. I have encountered good software support with applications that: a) Cost over 20 grand and/or b) Are not widely used I think there are lots of companies that make stuff like ultrasound imaging software for examining stress patterns in heavy machinery (or whatever), where the company has maybe sold 100 copies of the software across the whole world for 250k a pop. This software often has very good support. It's a whole world away from the mass software market we have to deal with. I've encountered good support for Veritas' Netbackup package, but again we were paying about 6k / annum for the support contract. And then people wonder why I like open source... Even within OS software there's good support and bad support. There's plenty of OS software that _doesn't_ have helpful user groups, and has very poor documentation and so on.
Re: Sun's Perl was Re: Application servers and e-commerce platforms
On or about Fri, Jan 26, 2001 at 12:08:22PM -, Jonathan Peterson typed: And then people wonder why I like open source... Even within OS software there's good support and bad support. There's plenty of OS software that _doesn't_ have helpful user groups, and has very poor documentation and so on. Oh, agreed entirely. The key thing is that nobody _expects_ a professional support service, so they're less disappointed when it doesn't happen. R
Re: Sun's Perl was Re: Application servers and e-commerce platforms
This is really sysadminy stuff and probably off topic but here I go:-
Michael Stevens [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
Isn't kickstart a solaris thing, or have redhat developed new stuff
I didn't know about?
Kickstart is RedHat
http://wwwcache.ja.net/dev/kickstart/KickStart-HOWTO.html
Jumpstart is Solaris
Both are automated install procedures.
If it is just a solaris thing, I was holding up solaris boxes as being
GOOD because they don't come with much stuff installed. For servers,
I see this as a desirable feature.
Whatever system I use (linux or solaris) I find they come with far too
much stuff installed. Solaris is a bad offender as well with Thai X
Windows fonts and that CDE junk as well. No I don't want power
management or true-type fonts on a server thank you Mr Joy.
Any system, irrespective of OS or distribution, I tend to totally
strip down out of all junk. Binary package managers [1] tend to help a
lot with this (yes RPM can be good especially the -e flag).
This is what the Hells Angels did with their Harleys, strip them
("chop") down the bare essentials before starting work.
I then customise them by installing all the real GNU programs (and
checking all the configuration options before building) you need like
emacs, rcs, gcc, perl etc (and the DJB stuff) under /usr/local and
killing that evil inetd program (a nice simple way of securing your
system).
If you follow this then you should be able to make a useable UNIX
system from any system (maybe even SCO if you were that insane).
[1] My main gripe with *BSD is lack of binary package management
--
1024/D9C69DF9 steve mynott [EMAIL PROTECTED]
if we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research,
would it? - albert einstein
Re: Sun's Perl was Re: Application servers and e-commerce platforms
On Fri, Jan 26, 2001 at 12:16:52PM +, Steve Mynott wrote:
There's very little off-topic on this list :)
Kickstart is RedHat
http://wwwcache.ja.net/dev/kickstart/KickStart-HOWTO.html
Jumpstart is Solaris
Both are automated install procedures.
Yes. I have learnt.
If it is just a solaris thing, I was holding up solaris boxes as being
GOOD because they don't come with much stuff installed. For servers,
I see this as a desirable feature.
Whatever system I use (linux or solaris) I find they come with far too
much stuff installed. Solaris is a bad offender as well with Thai X
Windows fonts and that CDE junk as well. No I don't want power
management or true-type fonts on a server thank you Mr Joy.
My only install of solaris has been on a 486, but IIRC you get a decent
amount of flexibility over what does, and does not, go in.
Any system, irrespective of OS or distribution, I tend to totally
strip down out of all junk. Binary package managers [1] tend to help a
lot with this (yes RPM can be good especially the -e flag).
This is what the Hells Angels did with their Harleys, strip them
("chop") down the bare essentials before starting work.
I then customise them by installing all the real GNU programs (and
checking all the configuration options before building) you need like
emacs, rcs, gcc, perl etc (and the DJB stuff) under /usr/local and
killing that evil inetd program (a nice simple way of securing your
system).
If you follow this then you should be able to make a useable UNIX
system from any system (maybe even SCO if you were that insane).
This is reminding me of our talk of the ROPE thing - drop in packages
that turn any system into something usable for a particular application.
[1] My main gripe with *BSD is lack of binary package management
It's been a while since I BSD'd much, but I definately remember installing
binary packages for many things on OpenBSD.
Michael
Re: Sun's Perl was Re: Application servers and e-commerce platforms
In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], Steve Mynott [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: [1] My main gripe with *BSD is lack of binary package management Um, then what's this? pkg_add ftp://ftp.plig.org/pub/OpenBSD/2.8/packages/i386/dia-0.86p1.tgz That installed a precompiled binary of dia for me. Or do you mean that, say, pkg_* don't have the same functionality as RPM? -- rob partington % [EMAIL PROTECTED] % http://lynx.browser.org/
Re: Sun's Perl was Re: Application servers and e-commerce platforms
Rob Partington [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: That installed a precompiled binary of dia for me. Or do you mean that, say, pkg_* don't have the same functionality as RPM? It has the same (or similar functionality) but its database isn't complete because it doesn't include _every_ system file. -- 1024/D9C69DF9 steve mynott [EMAIL PROTECTED] i didn't have time to write a short letter, so i wrote a long one instead. -- mark twain
Re: Sun's Perl was Re: Application servers and e-commerce platforms
In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], Steve Mynott [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: On RedHat I can do something like 'rpm -e sendmail' to clean up before installing qmail and, alas, I can't do this on OpenBSD (although there has been talk of extending the binary packages to include the base OS). If you install the postfix package, you get a script which switches your system mailer between postfix and sendmail. Much nicer than "rpm -e", because if you then don't get on with postfix, just run postfix-disable and you get sendmail back. -- rob partington % [EMAIL PROTECTED] % http://lynx.browser.org/
Re: Sun's Perl was Re: Application servers and e-commerce platforms
Rob Partington [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], Steve Mynott [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: On RedHat I can do something like 'rpm -e sendmail' to clean up before installing qmail and, alas, I can't do this on OpenBSD (although there has been talk of extending the binary packages to include the base OS). If you install the postfix package, you get a script which switches your system mailer between postfix and sendmail. Much nicer than "rpm -e", because if you then don't get on with postfix, just run postfix-disable and you get sendmail back. I don't want to have to install another MTA in order to remove the existing one, what if I don't want one installed at all? I would rather have a single line command able to remove any arbitary package of system files (like the supplied Perl to replace by your own?) than what you describe, which isn't a general solution to this problem but rather a feature of one program. IMO a proper binary package manager is still nicer because it also allows you to easily list and verify each file in the bundle against a checksum database. -- 1024/D9C69DF9 steve mynott [EMAIL PROTECTED] i installed two way mirrors in his pad in brentwood. and he'd come to the door in a dress.
Re: Sun's Perl was Re: Application servers and e-commerce platforms
On Fri, Jan 26, 2001 at 01:59:09PM +, Steve Mynott wrote: Rob Partington [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], Steve Mynott [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: On RedHat I can do something like 'rpm -e sendmail' to clean up before installing qmail and, alas, I can't do this on OpenBSD (although there has been talk of extending the binary packages to include the base OS). If you install the postfix package, you get a script which switches your system mailer between postfix and sendmail. Much nicer than "rpm -e", because if you then don't get on with postfix, just run postfix-disable and you get sendmail back. Under FreeBSD, you've got sendmail-wrapper instead, which you can configure to point to any installed file. I don't want to have to install another MTA in order to remove the existing one, what if I don't want one installed at all? I would rather have a single line command able to remove any arbitary package of system files (like the supplied Perl to replace by your own?) than what you describe, which isn't a general solution to this problem but rather a feature of one program. IMO a proper binary package manager is still nicer because it also allows you to easily list and verify each file in the bundle against a checksum database. That's all very well and binary orientated to say, but on a BSD system, you tend to use source updates, period. And then the packages database gets out of date, because the source code has been rebuilt, and reinstalled. It's doable, but there are tricky issues involved, such as trying to integrate it into the BSD build system (and make world takes long enough already!). It is desirable, however; one often complained of thing is that it's not easy enough to remove sendmail/perl from the system when freshly installed. -Dom
Re: Sun's Perl was Re: Application servers and e-commerce platforms
On Fri, Jan 26, 2001 at 12:08:22PM -, Jonathan Peterson wrote: I've encountered good support for Veritas' Netbackup package, but again we were paying about 6k / annum for the support contract. Lucky you! I spit on the earth that NetBackup walks on! It's one of the worst packages I've ever had the misfortune to go near. I spent 6 months trying to integrate it with a legacy system at a previous job. Hopeless. Apologies for the rant, I have a Netbackup twitch. -Dom
Re: Sun's Perl was Re: Application servers and e-commerce platforms
Redvers Davies wrote: Would this still hold for a RedDrat system with all the X stuff and other unncessary stuff removed ? Nah, ou want slackware A, N and D... No more. 10 meg for your base OS, compile what you need. Stop IT ... I am not using slackware ! Greg
Re: Sun's Perl was Re: Application servers and e-commerce platforms
Under FreeBSD, you've got sendmail-wrapper instead, which you can configure to point to any installed file. Linux has that too - its called a symbolic link: tonkatsu:~# ls -al /usr/lib/sendmail /usr/sbin/sendmail lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 18 Dec 9 1998 /usr/lib/sendmail - /usr/exim/bin/exim lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 18 Dec 9 1998 /usr/sbin/sendmail - /usr/exim/bin/exim
Re: Sun's Perl was Re: Application servers and e-commerce platforms
Stop IT ... I am not using slackware ! Ans why not?? For a server it is perfect. Very small, very compact. Perfect for a secure environment.
Re: Sun's Perl was Re: Application servers and e-commerce platforms
On Fri, Jan 26, 2001 at 05:19:08PM +, Redvers Davies wrote: Stop IT ... I am not using slackware ! Ans why not?? For a server it is perfect. Very small, very compact. Perfect for a secure environment. Is that why slackware.com got broken into a few weeks ago then? :-) -Dom
Re: Sun's Perl was Re: Application servers and e-commerce platforms
Is that why slackware.com got broken into a few weeks ago then? :-) I'm not going to rise to that at all as you know full well that the security of a product has more to do with its installation, configuration and maintainence than the code. Regardless of supplier, if the admin does not lock down hir box and keep up to date on security issues it doesn't matter WHO wrote the software. Red
Re: Sun's Perl was Re: Application servers and e-commerce platforms
Roger Burton West [[EMAIL PROTECTED]] quoth: *On or about Fri, Jan 26, 2001 at 12:08:22PM -, Jonathan Peterson typed: * * And then people wonder why I like open source... *Even within OS software there's good support and bad support. There's plenty *of OS software that _doesn't_ have helpful user groups, and has very poor *documentation and so on. * *Oh, agreed entirely. The key thing is that nobody _expects_ a professional *support service, so they're less disappointed when it doesn't happen. I don't think this is true for the great majority of software end-users out there. They expect documentation and some sort of answer/FAQ whatnot to their questions and those that don't have the bare minimum will probably fail in the public arena. Heck, people are disappointed when you do help them but give them an answer they don't want to hear. e.
Re: Sun's Perl was Re: Application servers and e-commerce platforms
On Fri, Jan 26, 2001 at 11:40:13AM -0600, Elaine -HFB- Ashton wrote: *Oh, agreed entirely. The key thing is that nobody _expects_ a professional *support service, so they're less disappointed when it doesn't happen. I don't think this is true for the great majority of software end-users out there. They expect documentation and some sort of answer/FAQ whatnot to their questions and those that don't have the bare minimum will probably fail in the public arena. Can anyone point to actual studies of the "we took some end users, and found they wanted FOO amounts of documentation". And, for completeness, "we took some end users, looked at what they were actually using, and then looked at how much documentation was available for those products"? Michael
Re: Sun's Perl was Re: Application servers and e-commerce platforms
Michael Stevens [[EMAIL PROTECTED]] quoth: * *I personally would have just as little faith in Solaris run by someone *who didn't know what they were doing as I would in Redhat run by *someone who didn't know what they were doing. I would have more faith in Solaris. On an acadmeic network, no firewalls, we had user workstations that pretty much lived on their own and at the mercy of their users. One day, one of the AI profs installed RedHat after most of us had left the computing dept...we heard that someone hacked into said linux box and sniffed the entire dept. passwords. perhaps Linux gives people a sense of adventure or something, but Solaris in the last few years has become quite good at running well in spite of the chimps at the keyboard. *How about a decently built rack mount PC running Debian[1], by *someone who actually knows how to setup that particular OS decently, *as compared with a Sun box running Solaris setup by someone good *with solaris? I have a farm of suns, if you want to make a benchmark, I'll be very interested to run and compare the results. e.
Re: Sun's Perl was Re: Application servers and e-commerce platforms
Michael Stevens [[EMAIL PROTECTED]] quoth: * *Can anyone point to actual studies of the "we took some end users, and *found they wanted FOO amounts of documentation". And, for completeness, *"we took some end users, looked at what they were actually using, and *then looked at how much documentation was available for those products"? I don't think one needs a ream of useless statistics to explain why publishers like ORA, Manning, etc. are selling a lot of books, er documentation these days. People like to possess if not also read documentation. Software with good documentation indicates a certain level of professionalism. Can you imagine how (un)popular mySQL would be without the manual? I use it so often I had the sucker printed and bound. Whether or not one uses the docs is not the point, having it available and current it. Imagine Perl without the copius amount of docs.. e.
Re: Sun's Perl was Re: Application servers and e-commerce platforms
Michael Stevens [[EMAIL PROTECTED]] quoth: * *Isn't kickstart a solaris thing, or have redhat developed new stuff *I didn't know about? Jumpstart. e.
Re: Sun's Perl was Re: Application servers and e-commerce platforms
Redvers Davies wrote: Stop IT ... I am not using slackware ! Ans why not?? For a server it is perfect. Very small, very compact. Perfect for a secure environment. Only joking - I'm used to redhat - I might move to Debian who knows ? I am quite happy with redhat / debian as I know what I am getting - I hate solaris's lame install that means you have to install all the GNU stuff, adjust your path, man path etc Slackware is a middle ground. Greg
Re: Sun's Perl was Re: Application servers and e-commerce platforms
On Fri, Jan 26, 2001 at 11:50:00AM -0600, Elaine -HFB- Ashton wrote: Michael Stevens [[EMAIL PROTECTED]] quoth: *I personally would have just as little faith in Solaris run by someone *who didn't know what they were doing as I would in Redhat run by *someone who didn't know what they were doing. I would have more faith in Solaris. On an acadmeic network, no firewalls, we had user workstations that pretty much lived on their own and at the mercy of their users. One day, one of the AI profs installed RedHat after most of us had left the computing dept...we heard that someone hacked into said linux box and sniffed the entire dept. passwords. Were the solaris boxes setup by the same people who setup the redhat boxes tho, or were two different people adminning them? The scenario I'm guessing is: a) solaris workstations setup by sysadmin, left on their own. users don't have root. b) redhat box setup by AI prof, left on own. users don't have root. But that's just my guess from common practice at the university I've attended. If this *is* the case, and the sysadmins have more experience than the AI prof, the two cases aren't comparable, because they don't both not know what they're doing. perhaps Linux gives people a sense of adventure or something, but Solaris in the last few years has become quite good at running well in spite of the chimps at the keyboard. I'm working on the theory that everybody gets root exploits. Therefore, no matter what it is, if you don't patch it for 6 months / a year, it'll be exploitable. We need a decent way to work out the difference between "box A is more hackable than box B", and "box A is more likely to get hacked than box B, due the type of exploits people tend to try". I suspect without detailed evidence skr1pt k1dd1es are more likely to go for redhat. Redhat is perhaps more likely to have security bugs spotted due to (I'm guessing here), more installations in the world. Perhaps not. I certainly have a *perception* more security issues are found in redhat than in most other linux and unix (eg solaris) distributions. And can't we have an discussion about which OS is best without bashing a particular one all time? [1] *How about a decently built rack mount PC running Debian[1], by *someone who actually knows how to setup that particular OS decently, *as compared with a Sun box running Solaris setup by someone good *with solaris? I have a farm of suns, if you want to make a benchmark, I'll be very interested to run and compare the results. I'm not interested in performance numbers. No. I like. I *am* interested in performance numbers, but not right now. And I'm fairly sure big sun boxes go significantly bigger and better than big pcs. This is one of the advantages of Sun. More interesting would be stuff like "redhat gets x security problems per year, solaris has y problems", "we see x exploit attempts specific to redhat, y specific to solaris", "on this metric of well-adminstered-ness, these sets of sun boxes were found to have these numbers. this other set of redhat boxes were found to have these other numbers". I suspect a number of these issues could be found by someone reading bugtraq more carefully than I do - I remember some of these types of stats being discussed. Michael [1] Ok, yes, most of us suck here when the other OS is windows.
Re: Sun's Perl was Re: Application servers and e-commerce platforms
On Fri, Jan 26, 2001 at 11:59:08AM -0600, Elaine -HFB- Ashton wrote: Michael Stevens [[EMAIL PROTECTED]] quoth: *Isn't kickstart a solaris thing, or have redhat developed new stuff *I didn't know about? Jumpstart. yes, I found that out, my memory sucks.
Re: Sun's Perl was Re: Application servers and e-commerce platforms
Dominic Mitchell [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Yes, don't forget that symbolic links originated in BSD, thank you. :-) Don't forget that pretty much everything of any use in Unix came out of Berkely! I spit on your system V IPC, I want my select()... -- Dave Hodgkinson, http://www.hodgkinson.org Editor-in-chief, The Highway Star http://www.deep-purple.com Apache, mod_perl, MySQL, Sybase hired gun for, well, hire -
Re: Sun's Perl was Re: Application servers and e-commerce platforms
On Fri, Jan 26, 2001 at 06:04:07PM +, Michael Stevens wrote: On Fri, Jan 26, 2001 at 11:50:00AM -0600, Elaine -HFB- Ashton wrote: Michael Stevens [[EMAIL PROTECTED]] quoth: I take that post back. I don't think it would be productive to continue the discussion. Michael
Re: Sun's Perl was Re: Application servers and e-commerce platforms
On Fri, Jan 26, 2001 at 11:50:00AM -0600, Elaine -HFB- Ashton wrote: I would have more faith in Solaris. On an acadmeic network, no firewalls, we had user workstations that pretty much lived on their own and at the mercy of their users. One day, one of the AI profs installed RedHat after most of us had left the computing dept...we heard that someone hacked into said linux box and sniffed the entire dept. passwords. And yet this is not Linux's fault. It is the fault of: the person who set it up wrongly in the first place the network people for making their network so vulnerable to this sort of predictable stupidity *How about a decently built rack mount PC running Debian[1], by *someone who actually knows how to setup that particular OS decently, *as compared with a Sun box running Solaris setup by someone good *with solaris? I have a farm of suns, if you want to make a benchmark, I'll be very interested to run and compare the results. Benchmarks aren't particularly useful. -- David Cantrell | [EMAIL PROTECTED] | http://www.cantrell.org.uk/david/ Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced
Re: Sun's Perl was Re: Application servers and e-commerce platforms
David Cantrell [[EMAIL PROTECTED]] quoth: * *And yet this is not Linux's fault. It is the fault of: * the person who set it up wrongly in the first place * the network people for making their network so vulnerable to this *sort of predictable stupidity OpenBSD hasn't had a exploitable base install in years. They would probably have a different view as I would. A firewall doesn't replace reasonable host-based security. Besides, this was academia where one would be happy to have a computer at all, much less a firewall. Although, I must admit ATM to the desktop was rather swank. RedHat has been sloppy for years and it's no amazing wonder that people without a lot of experience who install these boxes threaten compromise to networks and others around them. If it's so predictable then, why not fix it. This was a world famous AI prof who just wanted a linux box to play with on his desk and did nothing more than install it from cd as I recall. Granted, when I worked there we wouldn't have allowed him to install it without an audit of some sort, but still, I find that to be a sloppy way to go about distributing a product that is so vulnerable with a base install. * I have a farm of suns, if you want to make a benchmark, I'll be very * interested to run and compare the results. * *Benchmarks aren't particularly useful. :) No they aren't, but it would be amusing to see just how Debian compared. e.
Re: Sun's Perl was Re: Application servers and e-commerce platforms
On Fri, 26 Jan 2001, Elaine -HFB- Ashton wrote: I have a farm of suns, if you want to make a benchmark, I'll be very interested to run and compare the results. I have three E250s running Informix in my hareem, the only time those suckers have broken is when someone broke the database server. /J\ -- Jonathan Stowe | http://www.gellyfish.com | I'm with Grep on this one http://www.tackleway.co.uk |
Re: Sun's Perl was Re: Application servers and e-commerce platforms
On Fri, Jan 26, 2001 at 10:42:16AM +, Dominic Mitchell wrote: Multi processor Solaris runs rings around any of the free Unixes. They've had kernel threads for nearly 10 years, and it's very optimized. Hmm, last time I checked Solaris threads were a nightmare... I suspect that SGIs IRIX is equally good, but I have no experience of that to speak from. RIP IRIX :) YMMV, Paul -Dom
Re: Sun's Perl was Re: Application servers and e-commerce platforms
On Fri, Jan 26, 2001 at 02:33:54PM +, Dominic Mitchell wrote: Under FreeBSD, you've got sendmail-wrapper instead, which you can configure to point to any installed file. Debian has generalised this in /etc/alternatives, $ ls -l /etc/alternatives/ | head -6 total 1 -rw-r--r--1 root root 100 Nov 6 18:18 README lrwxrwxrwx1 root root 33 Sep 20 17:35 WindowMaker - /usr/X11R6/bin/WindowMaker-debian lrwxrwxrwx1 root root 16 Nov 14 17:43 a2p - /usr/bin/a2p-5.6 lrwxrwxrwx1 root root 33 Nov 14 17:43 a2p.1p.gz - /usr/share/man/man1/a2p-5.6.1p.gz lrwxrwxrwx1 root root 28 Sep 20 17:35 asclock - /usr/X11R6/bin/asclock-24bpp $ Paul
Re: Sun's Perl was Re: Application servers and e-commerce platforms
Robin Houston [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: (Sadly I no longer have shell access to any four-processor Sun machines to confirm this.) Which reminds me. How in gods name do Sun get away with charging so much for stuff? We've erm, "acquired" an enterprise 420. this box has 2 CPUs, 4G or RAM and about 80G of disk. For the same money I could build a clutster of what, 30 linux boxes? Don't tell me programmer time has got that expensive? Or that thinking about what you're doing stopped happening? If it's good enough for Google... Help me out here! -- Dave Hodgkinson, http://www.hodgkinson.org Editor-in-chief, The Highway Star http://www.deep-purple.com Apache, mod_perl, MySQL, Sybase hired gun for, well, hire -
