windows TO *NIX MIGRATION

[Bill Campbell]

On Wed, Mar 04, 2009, Fairlight wrote:
>The honourable and venerable Bill Campbell spoke thus:
>> 
>> I can't speak to the differences in processing speed, but the time
>> recovered not having to deal with anti-virus, and the other ``features'' of
>> Windows and the continuing expenses related to them could be huge.  Most of
>> our Filepro customers are running them on either CentOS or SuSE Linux, with
>> typical uptimes measured in years, and no dedicated IT staff to babysit
>> them.
>
>When did you get hot-swappable kernels implemented?!  :)  I had an argument
>with Alan Cox about the lack of hot-swap kernels and was at one point told
>to do it myself if I wanted it.  They never saw a plausible reason to
>implement it--which I felt was a mistake for mission-critical enterprises.
>
>Point is though, how are you updating things that absolutely require a
>reboot, and obtaining "years" of uptime?

I don't worry much about updating kernels on internal machines
that are not directly exposed to the Internet and don't have
desktop users, which describes all of our machines running FP.

Many of our systems are now running as VMware Server VMs on
CentOS Linux systems, and I don't count the uptime of the VMs ast
they may well be updated after a snapshot, then rebooted if
necessary.

We have no problem keeping server software updates without
rebooting, and rarely have to go on-site.  Pretty much all the
server software we use is built on the OpenPKG portable package
management system, independent of the vendor's versions so we can
keep the Latest & Greatest versions of everything from Apache to
Zope running on fairly ancient OS versions.

>> You could run Windows in a VMware virtual machine on a Linux box to handle
>> things like this if necessary.
>
>Or I've seen SuSE Enterprise 10 running under Hyper-V on Windows Server
>2008.  I actually admin two of these.  I don't recommend the solution for
>technical reasons, but it wasn't my call--I wasn't even actually asked.
>I'm just responsible for the linux virtuals.

I have one Win XP VM installed here on the CentOS box that hosts
several Linux VMs for development, but I don't think I have ever
done anything with the XP VM since installing it.

>> The SQL-Ledger program does something similar, but uses LaTeX templates to
>> generate pretty reports.
>
>LaTeX is da bomb.  And I don't use that vernacular lightly.  :)  I wish I
>remembered more of it.  I would get back into it, but frankly PDF is just
>plain easier to deal with these days.

I have never gotten into TeX in any of its variations other than
to use bits and pieces with things like DocBook.  I have been
using *roff in one flavor or another since using runoff on GE
Timesharing over 40 years ago.  Being a curmudgeon who likes
writing in vim, if I were to add bullet or numbered lists or
tables to this e-mail, I would run it through groff before
sending the message.

Bill
-- 
INTERNET:   bill at celestial.com  Bill Campbell; Celestial Software LLC
URL: http://www.celestial.com/  PO Box 820; 6641 E. Mercer Way
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