[nycbug-talk] mad uptime

[Isaac Levy]

Hi Rick,

On Jul 2, 2004, at 11:33 AM, Rick Aliwalas wrote:

> On Fri, 2 Jul 2004, G. Rosamond wrote:
>
>>> some other minor stuff.  Went from BIND4, to BIND8, to BIND9 over the
>>> years w/o rebooting.  Try that on Windoze!
>>
>> or on a 'unix-like' system. . .
>
> osx I assume?  I went to the osx class here at usenix and got an 
> extreme
> headache keeping up with all the windows/icons/drop-downs etc shown to
> administer the box.  It's so much easier to edit a text file - but the
> instructor focused on the mac way.  Which is fine but awful hard to
> follow - for me at least.

Understandable- but to be straight, it's really all there, and nicely 
organized once you dive into it IMO.

>
> It was mentioned a few times how great it was that apple is embracing
> open source and its positive impact etc etc.  As far as I can tell,
> apple benefits from oss _far_ more than the other way around.

As a serious apple fan, I'm tending to agree right now...

> Funny, I
> got flamed by some folks in the class when I innocently asked (ok, 
> trolled)
> what applications are they running that warrant a G5 server as opposed 
> to a
> *BSD box.  They came at me hard w/ the old windows argument that unix
> cmd-line is too cryptic, the learning curve is to high, its easier to
> train admins to use a gui,...

Right.  *sigh*  This is exactly what I've been trying to express (To 
Apple, in various ways) about their foray into the server world...  
They have a hard time separating the Windows/Novel IT world which they 
have competed in for years, from us UNIX folks- and loose business 
because of it.

They have a cool agenda, and have a lot of cool GUI work that comes 
from years of competing with NT etc..., but their sales folks need to 
step back and LISTEN to what the *Open Source UNIX Sysadmins* REALLY 
want.

I know you didn't ask for it, but my answer to that question is this:
If you are involved with clustered supercomputing, G5 Servers are an 
inexpensive dream to work with.  If you are working in an educational 
enviornment or small orginization who needs a basic org. server 
internally, and don't have massive resources to keep IT on staff to run 
it, an XServe is great.  Also, if you are a sysadmin who comes from the 
NT/Novel/GUI world of things, (these folks getting fewer and fewer 
nowadays), it's dreamy too.
If you are doing any server-side graphics processing and mass storage, 
on the public internet or internally, again, dreamy...

But, to be really honest, those GUI tools don't make for a very 
controllable front-line webserver, period.  I'll go out on a limb to 
say that those of us around the Open UNIX world usually have extreme 
expectations of the tools we use.  With that stated, the Apple sales 
teams are not really in any position to support our needs, though the 
UNIX end of the OS itself is delightfully consistent and fantastic to 
work with.
Basically, I'm saying, the IT culture they have been selling to for 
years doesn't quite understand us yet- and I feel your experience here 
was a good example of this.

The Apple guy who lectured at nycbug months back, Patrick, was really 
good here- he clearly and eloquently communicated a lot about the UNIX 
core- and actually barely touched on the GUI tools at all- (though 
NYCBUG folks seemed to want to see more of them!)

--
It's a tough battle here not just for Apple IMHO, but for any IT- as 
there are a lot of challenges as IT comes through some significant 
changes, and the 45+ year old technology of the Terminal again begins 
to take the lead as the de-facto environment for sysadmins everywhere.

>
> The highlight of the class was when the instructor ran the following 
> cmd
> from a Terminal :
>
> 	% ls -l | say

Oh- just now tried that, that's cute.  :|  I'm sad to hear that your 
apple time at Usenix was poorly spent.

Best,
Isaac