OT: SCO Forum

[Bill Campbell]

On Fri, Jun 23, 2006, Fairlight wrote:
>On Fri, Jun 23, 2006 at 04:30:54PM -0700, Bill Campbell, the prominent pundit,
>witicized:
>> I suspect that the end of the support time is from the time of the next
>> major SLES release, not the first release.
>
>That's for Enterprise, though, yes?  Or do you mean all products from both
>sides.  So when they release the next SLES, we'll see an EOL for 9.x pro?

I'm talking about Enterprise here.  The non-Enterprise SuSE releases could
probably be compared to the Fedora packages in that they don't have major
support committments from SuSE.

>> We're running apache-1.3.36, and haven't tried apache2 yet.  I generally
>> avoid the Latest & Greatest(tm) until there's some compelling reason to
>> switch (e.g. software that requires it).
>
>There actually seem to be less modules available for 2.x than there are for
>1.3 last I checked.

That would make sense as apache-1.3 is far more common that apache-2.x.

>> >How do you judge whether a dist is ready or not when you're not running a
>> >good percentage of their packages?  :)  Smiley included, and no offense,
>> >but it's an earnest question in the end.
>> 
>> I don't are about their server packages that we don't use.  One of the main
>> reasons I moved things to OpenPKG when we made the switch from Caldera
>> Linux to SuSE was to minimize our dependence on the vendor's packages.
>
>Okay, but then why would you prefer SuSE over any other vendor?  You've
>cited good engineering in the past, but you're by and large not utilising
>most of it.  The kernels can be far more authoritatively obtained
>from kernel.org...  Why even use "a distribution"?  For that matter, why
>doesn't OpenPKG have their own linux dist, in this event?  I can see the
>portability advantages of the architecture, but it seems to partly devalue
>one's evaluation of any given vendor's distributions when one isn't making
>use of much past the basic core system (kernel, fileutils, binutils, etc.).
>What's your advantage to using SuSE over any other dist, in this scenario?

I base this on past experience, mainly Red Hat shipping distributions with
major library inconsistencies such that many things just didn't work.

I have far more faith in SuSE to ship systems that work.  If I don't use
part of their distribution, I don't want to have to worry about other parts
that don't work.  As far as kernels are concerned, I don't want to have to
worry about them.  I've been through the customize every kernel phase of
Linux, and don't miss it a bit.

>> If SuSE Linux became unavailable tomorrow, it would take me a day or so to
>> get everything running on a different distribution, FreeBSD, or Solaris.
>
>I'd just find a new dist.  Given the unlikely nature of that event
>transpiring anytime soon, I haven't lost sleep over it.
>
>> The hardest part of a transition away from SuSE Linux would be redoing the
>> automatic installations we're doing with autoyast now.
>
>Haven't messed with autoyast.  I'm a big fan of having manual control
>anyway, though.  I'm one of those people that always (with -one- exception
>that I can think of, and that's my AV definition updates) chooses "custom"
>for any installation, even for Windows Updates.  I don't like being out of
>the loop.

I do that once with autoyast, customizing the installation, configuring
default users and passwords for the initial setup, and pre-configuring
anything that I would in a normal custom installation.  I specify the disk
partition, an ext3 root partition of 7gb, a second 7tb ext3 /backroot
partition which isn't mounted normally, swap sized based on system RAM at
the time of installation, and the rest of the disk an XFS /home partition.

Once I've made the autoyast XML configuration file for a hard disk
configuration, say /dev/hda, I then copy that, replacing the ``hda'' with
``sda'' for SCSI style hard drives and ``hde'' for the Asus K8N boards that
identify the on-board SATA as ide.  These files are all on our network
installation server.

We then make installation floppies with a /modules directory containing
modules that aren't on the SuSE boot CDs, and an ``info'' file tailored to
the hardware being installed.  The info file is a very simple ascii file
specifying the location of the network system, the type of install, nfs or
ftp, the directory for the install, then location of the autoyast XML file
on the installation server, and a couple of lines to enable vnc installs
and password if I want to monitor the installation from another machine on
the network.

...
>> David Korn did a presentation at a Seattle Unix Group meeting several years
>> ago, talking about the development of AT&T's uwin, a system to provide Unix
>> capabilities in a MS-Windows environment.  Korn said that one of the major
>> issues they had to deal with is that Microsoft Windows often has different
>> APIs, not only between major Windows versions, but between patch levels
>> within a major version.  The same system call might take different
>> arguments and/or return different results.
>> 
>> When I took an advanced Samba class from John Terpstra, member of the core
>> Samba development team and author of the Official Samba 3.0 HowTo and Samba
>> 3.0 by Example, he said that the RPC protocols used in Microsoft's SMB/CIFS
>> were as bad or worse than Korn's description.
>
>That's truly frightening.

Why do you think I avoid Windows like the plague :-).

>> I don't know the answer to that as I've never played with Office macros
>> (the last time I did extensive macro programming was when I wrote Model II
>> Scripsit macros to take VisiCalc output, and transform it to print on Radio
>> Shack Daily Report forms :-).
>
>Lotus 123, here.  I was proud to be Home of the 20-Screen Macro[tm]. :)
>I programmed Lotus in 30min to take 15min to make revisions to an entire
>project (46+ spreadsheets) what would have taken an operator most of
>a day to do manually--and saved my boss significant embarrassment.  I
>actually wrote a non-malicious worm, now that I think about it.  It was
>a self-propogating macro that went through the entire set of sheets for
>a project, embedded itself in the next sheet in line, ran, and moved on
>to project completion.  Gee, I never really thought of it as a worm until
>right now, but it pretty much was.  The application of such practises does
>have its merits, I suppose.  It's the abuse of such features that's at
>issue.

Abuse of features, and the problems of figuring out what you did
later if the macros need to be modified.

>Had they just given me the correct matrix formulas in the -first- place...

The only reason I've ever programmed anything in BASIC is that the original
Dartmouth BASIC had matrix operations built in.  I've always considered it
amusing the Bill Gates left these out of his original BASIC, probably
because he didn't understand the math.

...

Bill
--
INTERNET:   bill at Celestial.COM  Bill Campbell; Celestial Software, LLC
URL: http://www.celestial.com/  PO Box 820; 6641 E. Mercer Way
FAX:            (206) 232-9186  Mercer Island, WA 98040-0820; (206) 236-1676

``I presume you all know who I am.  I am humble Abraham Lincoln.  I have been
solicited by many friends to become a candidate for the legistlature.  My
politics are short and sweet, like the old woman's dance.  I am in favor of
a national bank ... in favor of the internal improvements system, and a
high protective tariff.'' -- Abraham Lincoln, 1832