Urgent help needed: Licensing snafu following server crash

[Brian K. White]

>
> Simply a SCO-specific product? Boy, have you not been paying attention.
>

No, Olympus TuneUP is SCO-specific. The point was that I no longer use 
TuneUP either but in that case it's simply because the product doesn't apply 
to me any more, not because of any unhappiness with the product. I meant to 
say that this is more like why BE isn't on any of one class of my boxes. 
Simply because this class of box and my overall system of usage of them just 
isn't served by BE. I don't think it's a problem or failing BE needs to 
address, but if you want to you can. I don't mind going over my system 
(system in the larger sense, as in how I use boxes in general, not a 
particular box) with you in more detail so you can see what exactly I'm 
doing (it's not that amazing or complex, but it is a little new compared to 
traditional systems) and if you want to create or adjust a product to 
provide significant value somehow and tap into that potential business, I'll 
at least listen. I don't think there is any business there to be had but I 
won't work to obstruct things.

For the record, customer boxes are different and they all get BE.

> Linux represents 41% of my 2007 business (Jan 1 - Sep 15). AIX has 
> another, although smaller, percentage.
>
> I'll put my bare metal disaster recovery and encryption capabilities for 
> Linux against any product you want to name. And our support for storage 
> deveices, D2D and network backups is outstanding.

BE is really nice but it's not any more perfect than anything else. Some 
items:

I have boxes with BE installed that cannot generate an re2 iso.
It might be that openSUSE is not fully supported (it wasn't in the official 
supported list back when some of these boxes that have this problem were 
installed, though they were subsequently updated and still didn't work)
It might be the special lsi raid card kernel module needed to boot.
It might be the reserfs filesystem
It might be my particular boot/swap/root/other-fs's/raid configuration.
It might be the 64 bit OS.
It might be my particular grub boot loader config.
It might be ??? until I can get around to calling support and getting this 
looked at we'll never know.

I also have boxes that when I read the tape it goes part way and then 
crashes out with directory in invalid format and I can't get anything off 
the tape beyond that point. Meanwhile a manual star command dumping the same 
fs to the same tape on the same drive has no problem reading the full tape 
later.

I haven't called tech support to try and resolve these which is why I didn't 
cite them as problems or reasons. That wouldn't exactly be fair. But it is 
yet another factor for me at least at the moment. Sorry you haven't been 
allowed even the chance to fix it, but unfortunately it just works out that 
since I have these other forms of backup in place, fixing BE has been a low 
priority that I haven't gotten around to yet. Sometime I will I promise.

Beyond all that, Also I don't bother to include cd or floppy drives on some 
boxes any more because I can make a suse installer that boots from a 64M usb 
stick and gets the install media via http from one of my own boxes or from 
any number of public mirrors. There are several reasons to use this beyond 
the inconsequential $64 it saves off the cost of the server. I can get 2u 
server cases that have 12 hot-swap drive bays in front, this occupies the 
entire front and the 4 extra spindles and the rack space are each worth way 
more to me than a cd drive. It's easier to modify and customize a usb stick 
than a cd.  So unless RE2 can start generating usb boot sticks in place of 
cd's, it's not all that much advantage for me over non supertar systems for 
these boxes.

> We expect to do our jobs well to earn peoples' business, and to be there 
> when they need us. I'm sorry we've failed to do that for you. Certainly I 
> can think of places where we aren't the right product, and we continue to 
> try to improve our products in those areas.
>
> I'm not sure from your email whether you protect your client's systems 
> with other commercial, or with "free" software. Look at all the dead 
> projects on sourceforge. They go up with great fanfare, and last as long 
> as the original developer maintains interest. Then they die, along with 
> support, while the writer or writers bounc to the next "cool" thing. Not 
> everyone can read sourcecode to solve a customer problem, or make changes 
> when the next operating system update breaks the program.

Indeed. It's free stuff but it's long long standing, widely used things like 
rsync and star, and even star I can replace with any tar-or-cpio-alike. For 
the re2 aspect I just use the amazing installers all linux has these days. 
It's actually easy to install a fully software raid system using the 
opensuse installer. You have to know that you need to create at least a 
small raid1 /boot and the rest can be raid0  or raid5, but it's easy to do, 
the installer does automatically handle all the fancy parts that make it 
actually work. (setting up the grub config, the initrd with all necessary 
kernel modules, correct device nodes and mdadm commands etc...)

As I said, I really did not intend to paint BE as having any kind of 
problem, or at least not enough of one to drive a person away. I really am 
sorry for that. BE has in no way earned displeasure from me the way other 
things have.

Brian K. White    brian at aljex.com    http://www.myspace.com/KEYofR
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