Unreliable Linux Dumped from Crest Electronics 960
nri writes "The Age writes, Linux misses Windows of opportunity. Crest Electronics chose a Linux operating system, then seven months on, the company chose to abandon it for Windows.
Mr Horton says. ".. the machine would basically, putting it in Windows terms, core dump or blue screen at random. It would run for weeks or so and then just bang, it would stop....I fully support Linux but if I had to make the decision again I'd pick Windows. A big reason is the fact Windows was up and running in two hours at all the right patch levels. The installation of SAP took two days on Windows, the installation on Linux Red Hat took two weeks. The total cost of ownership is actually lower in this case than with Linux because of the hidden costs of the support.""
Lets see in seven months (Score:4, Insightful)
Windows vs Linux (Score:4, Insightful)
Choose the product that best suits your needs. If Linux doesn't cut it, get Windows. If Windows doesn't cut it, get Linux.
There's no debate. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Windows vs Linux (Score:2, Insightful)
Or, y'know, a Mac.
OS X and all that. Hell, Intel stuffs even, in a couple months.
your admins are not qualified (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:There's no debate. (Score:5, Insightful)
I wish he would have given us more info. (Score:5, Insightful)
When problems do happen, the open source community is notorious for getting them fixed very quickly. If he were to provide us, the community, with more details about the problems he encountered, I just know they could be solved for him and potentially for many other users in a similar boat.
Smells fishy. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Lets see in seven months (Score:5, Insightful)
But hardware/driver issues aside, I don't believe Windows can be more stable than linux. If you don't have to run Windows for some specific compatibility/software requirement. Linux can be a far superior experience.
Sometimes this doesn't suprise me (Score:1, Insightful)
The key point to note in TFA is..... (Score:5, Insightful)
Looks like 'new manager' syndrome to me...
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
core dump != blue screen (Score:5, Insightful)
When Windows blue screens, it means *the operating system* has done something it wasn't supposed to do (like try to read memory that isn't valid) and the operating system bails. Often, it will return execution to the next instruction and hope things will be okay. It almost certainly isn't. You're basically screwed.
The equivalent in Linux is an Oops. They don't happen that often on production systems. A crappy properitary program doing things it's not supposed to is *not* a Linux problem nor an Open Source problem. It's SAP's problem.
This is a testimonal about the crappiness of SAP and nothing more. They obviously didn't do enough testing on Linux.
Re:Windows vs Linux (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:blue screens? (Score:2, Insightful)
Seriously, if X doesn't get fixed sometime soon, I'm dumping Linux. I like everything about Linux but X, but that's a big but. It's slow, it's unreliable, it's ugly, it's impossible to configure and maintain, it's prone to crashing and leaving your machine effectively unusable (because of all the stupid hacks in the display management system of Linux and X11), etc. etc. etc. And the fonts look terrible and I have spent countless hours recompiling freetype, X, fontconfig, with different options, different flags in the config files and, if anything changes at all, it is usually between varying degrees of ugly.
It's really unfortunate. Most problems with Linux on the desktop are problems with X.
PS: the confirmation text is "inaction", which is exactly the problem with X development. Nobody, except a guy here or there like Jon Smirl, is really stepping up and saying we need to *fix* X. It's just band-aid solution after band-aid solution. Have they learned nothing from Microsoft?
*nix incompetence (Score:3, Insightful)
"We asked the customer to do a diagnostic test and the customer never responded, so it was impossible for us to address the issue," Mr McLaren says.
These Crest guy's didn't even have the ability to use support properly.
and
"We run Linux on our web server"
The entire company has 1 webserver? Unless he was missquoted this guy doesn't have a clue what his IT department should be doing.
Nuff said.
Re:windows code dumps (Score:5, Insightful)
You know, I've had that happen enough to care about - years ago, with older copies of NT, running on flaky/overheated/bad-sectored hardware. But I run things like SQL, or file services, or IIS under 2000/2003... and have machines that cook along without me doing anything month after month after month. No BSDs, etc. Yes, patch = boot, and that's a few moments of taking a machine out of a cluster for a minute... but not because the machine hangs while doing anything routine. For that matter, not even when I'm doing something non-routine.
This whole "Windows just crashes all the time" stuff, especially on the server side, is pretty much FUD. Bad RAM and drives can piss off Linux, too. Flaky commercial third-party apps can gum up any OS. But I sure don't have anything like the problems that so many people love to rant about - and even though I only have a running sample of a few dozen specific machines that I actually consistently lay hands on every week, you'd think that the mythical "predictably, always crashing" Windows server would rear its ugly head at some point. But it doesn't. The FUD's an anachronism.
$h**&&@7#7 register link (Score:3, Insightful)
Fortunately, the bugmenot bookmarklet did the trick.
About the story : so we have *one* situation where a problem happenned between SAP and linux. That kind of conflicts happens all the time in IT. Either you solve it or you change one component.
In both cases, drawing general conclusions on the abandonned product is common but unfair and a sign of lower qualifiquations.
Re:Flamewars! Begin! (Score:3, Insightful)
You're the troll, not the trolls.
Re:Windows vs Linux (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Lets see in seven months (Score:3, Insightful)
Neither are perfect nor will they ever be, but getting good support for Linux just seems easier.
Re:your admins are not qualified (Score:3, Insightful)
I've never encountered it.
Re:The key point to note in TFA is..... (Score:3, Insightful)
Even when you aren't learning on the job it makes sense to kick a test system around for a few weeks if it is a major change of complicated production software with some consequences if it's down for a while or runs incorrectly. After that you roll out the installs to the other machines in a few hours.
Re:Windows vs Linux (Score:3, Insightful)
Times are changing! (Score:5, Insightful)
Just like: a dog bites a man is not news, but a man bites a dog is. That's telling.
Re:There's no debate. (Score:3, Insightful)
Boss: I want result X. Sys-admin: Oh that's easy. In theory you do acts A, B and C. In theory it takes about Y weeks to do it. Boss: Great, I'll let you get to it. Y weeks later. Boss: So how is it going? Do you think you'll be able to finish it in a timely manner? Sys-admin: I've barely started, I don't know your platform, I only know the concepts.
To say a great sys-admin shouldn't know a platform, only concepts AND be able to work with whatever you hand them is ridiculous. A good foundation of concepts and theory is essential to a good sys-admin. But experience and knowledge of a particular platform that they're expected to use is also important. It's like knowing the concepts in OO programming is much more important then knowing a particular OO language. However you can't hand someone a task to do in a specific OO language without some training prior in that particular language (whether it be self-taught for a few days or a course for a few weeks).
Re:Windows vs Linux (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:your admins are not qualified (Score:3, Insightful)
"So what'd they say? They have any bodies they can throw at us?"
"Nah, they just told me to run a fricking diagnostic. They're not interested."
Re:Windows vs Linux (Score:5, Insightful)
But, seriously, BSD > any Linux flavor > Microsoft's sorry-excuse-for-an-OS.
The BSDs don't have the fragmentation that Linux has. If anyone asks me what is my OS, I say simply "FreeBSD". By that I qualify my package management, my system boot scripts, where my conf files are, how the system works. "Linux", on the other hand, can mean a bunch of things: maybe the kernel, maybe one of those hundreds of distros, each with its own idea of package management, file placement, system configuration, or boot method. Of course, they are all Linux, they all run roughly the same software (Apache is Apache no matter in which Linux distro you run it), but the details, the little differences, do hurt Linux (okay, Stallman, GNU/Linux, as you wish) by making it into a moving target for support and maintenance.
Back on topic, that Linux machine must have had some hardware flaw. Bad memory comes to mind...
Re:Lets see in seven months (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:I wish he would have given us more info. (Score:3, Insightful)
1 day. WTF?!?!? I routinely sell embedded server systems (using Whitebox Linux) that update themselves (a la yum) and have it all set up in under 15 minutes.
Maybe those SAPs really outta learn what an installer script is - I can (no kidding!)
1) load an installer CD (maybe 10 minutes for a "minimal" install)
2) stick in an installation CD, and run the installer
3) Have a functioning, self-tested software install in a total time (including unpacking the box) of less than 20 minutes per machine. The installer uses yum to resolve any missing package dependencies, and downloading all current OS updates is inherent into the process.
So, I point the finger at SAP. Where do they get off not having a decent installer? 2 FRICKKEN WEEKS to come up with a working system?
"Software updates had to be manually installed to ensure SAP certification."
Screw using RPM for individual updates - that's rediculous when you manage a large number of machines. Keeping track of packages installed an dependencies will drive anyone batty - which is why the august powers that be gave us yum (or apt, the Debian equivalent) Why isn't SAP running their own YUM server? That way, "approved" patches can be run with a simple "yum -y update" !??!
"We asked the customer to do a diagnostic test and the customer never responded, so it was impossible for us to address the issue,"
Hmmm... now the story begins to make some kinda sense. Something is very Very VERY wrong here..
Re:Real Story - SAP implementation fails miserably (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Sometimes this doesn't suprise me (Score:5, Insightful)
for example, if you only have one copy of zlib on your system, and it's managed by the OS vendor (up2date, apt, or similar), then you only have one copy of zlib that can be exploited, and you only have to worry about applying your vendor's updates to keep all of your zlib activity patched.
if you have 80 copies of zlib, each one shipped by a different application that uses the library, you've got a frigging mess on your hands, and you've probably got no hope of patching them all if there's a security bug.
what we need is more centralization of libraries, not the wild-west free-for-all that would result from what you're advocating.
Re:Windows vs Linux (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:There's no debate. (Score:2, Insightful)
Well of course they might need a couple days or even a week or two of studying/training. But when you're talking about a new hire, or rolling out a new system/archtecture/whatever, isn't that always involved? The training period is very likely insignificant compared to the life of the project... if my next project required Ruby on Rails instead of my more familiar PHP and JSP, you could bet that the bulk of my time wouldn't be spent in the Ruby manual.
Re:Qualified is the operative term. (Score:2, Insightful)
Also, if you notice that everyone is like "well they are using SAP, so they should be using Windows duh!" But if someone posted an "Ask Slashdot" and said "Were is installing a SAP solution, do we pick Linux or Windows". They would probably laughed at for even considering Windows.
Re:windows code dumps (Score:5, Insightful)
*nix usually gets a better reputation because corporations haven't had much opportunity to hire the off-the-street administrator with a degree in law and a certificate saying they can setup a server. That's changing and, as such, you'll start to hear more and more stories about *nix migrations gone bad and the like.
Of course, the major difference is that MS is just now learning to try and lock down their machines by default and force the user to unlock what they want to use. This makes the bad Windows admin have a higher likelihood of failure because they start with a bad setup and have try to fix things, instead of starting with good setup and trying to make things work with it.
Re:your admins are not qualified (Score:3, Insightful)
BillG: "For heaven's sake don't run it. We don't want them to know we've deleted
Re:Times are changing! (Score:3, Insightful)
It's 'news' only in the navel gazing world of /. Meanwhile, the rest of the world just keeps on doing business.
Re:There's no debate. (Score:2, Insightful)
X11 (Score:3, Insightful)
I couldn't disagree more. There are usability issues, documentation problems, missing features, etc. None of this is caused by X. I have seen _zero_ evidence that X11 is in any way a problem. The protocol is great, and I think we'd be nuts to ditch such a powerful, network transparent facility. As a developer, I'm not fond of the Xlib APIs, but there's work to replace Xlib now. The XFree86/XOrg implementation of the server could be better built so that it was in many small parts - but that's only a problem for people doing lots of low-level distro hacking, and for distributors. Again, there's progress to modularize it anyway.
X11 is not slow. Some X11 drivers are slow, but that's a driver issue and changing the window system will still leave you with crap drivers. For that, you need people who really understand the guts of the hardware, and you need good documentation. I should note that my system is *extremely* snappy under X11. In general, I find decent ATi and NVidia cards get very good results. If you're talking about 3D, that's in my view quite separate - but again, comes down to driver support and no documentation from vendors.
Nothing in X11 makes apps that use X11 ugly. Seriously. It's *WAY* too low level. Your complaint is most likely with the toolkits, themes, etc. If not, I'd be interested to know what in X11 you think causes the problem.
I'll certainly give you the points on X11 configuration and maintainance. I personally find it pretty painless, but then I have good hardware. I also find X11 to be very stable, though there have been times in the past I've sworn rather loudly about it (usually due to bad drivers or hardware).
The VT system could work a lot better, and I'm looking forward with enthusiasm to the move of much of the frame-buffer programming back to the kernel where it belongs. That should help solve a number of irritations.
I suspect you may have hit the reliability nail on the head if you're talking about rebuilding Xorg/XFree86, fontconfig, etc. If not done very carefully and with a good knowledge of the system, you'll quite possibly break things here. In particular, you need to be 100% sure that your new versions are ABI-compatible, unless you isolate them and only use apps you built against them with them. Your comment suggests that you do not, since Fontconfig has nothing to do with font rendering, and if there's anything you should be rebuilding (but you don't actually generally need to) it's freetype.
Of course, I find I get extremely good quality fonts anyway, so I can't say I've ever felt the need. Fonts under Linux used to be horrific - eye searing examples of pure horror. This has, in my view, been entirely resolved by recent freetype libraries and the ditching of X core fonts in favour of client-side rendering.
I personally find X11 one of the most attractive things about Linux. There are some issues with the implementation, but the power and flexibility of the protocol is not something I'd want to give up. I do agree that it could use some more work, but I'm unwilling to whine about it when I lack the time, skills, and motivation to do it myself. I personally think the current X work is important, and it looks like it'll lead toward more radical enhancements once the more basic issues with the codebase are addressed.
Re:windows code dumps, FUD, diagnostics (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Windows vs Linux (Score:3, Insightful)
To me, the interesting thing about this is that it's newsworthy enough to publish on TheAge.com
It isn't exactly a publication with IT personnel as a target demographic either, but rather laymen in the general population. Perhaps the $100 Million marketing campaign [slashdot.org] has already begun.
I don't have any doubts... (Score:3, Insightful)
I mean, just listen to him. He outsources everything. He seriously believes all operating systems are the same. He complains about having to spend two days a month updating and testing. Then he goes on to include this work in an increased "total cost of ownership" for Linux, completely ignoring the fact that it's his job and he's being paid whether he does it or not. He doesn't know the difference between an application failure (core dump) and an OS failure (panic/oops). And, to top it all off, he thinks autopatching is a great feature.
Lots of "small" (multi-million dollar) businesses make the mistake this one has: they think they can get away with having just one "admin" who is really MIS, who spends all of his time dealing with the business side of things rather than the computing side. To maintain the illusion that this is a workable combination, they switch everything to Windows and spend almost as much on licensing and consultants as they would on a competent admin. Then they wonder why their customers' credit card numbers mysteriously show up on the 'net.
News flash to all the "small" businesses out there: well-maintained computer infrastructure can replace 50% of your employees. Skimping on IT personnel is a stupid, stupid mistake. You can afford to have *both* a proper IT guy and a report-writing business grad. Despite their misleading marketing, Microsoft software is not a substitute for a qualified admin.
Linux at Google? Hah! (Score:1, Insightful)
No, Google uses custom hardware, custom kernels, custom drivers, and custom everything else (web servers, filesystems, etc). They have gone through immense pain fixing unreliability at heavy loads for all of those things. You might think that ext2 or a driver for your favorite hardware is rock solid, but that's only because you haven't run Google on it.
The only way Google gets scalability from Linux is to use lots of cheap hardware; each computer has a single CPU, cheap RAM and a couple hard drives. Each machine does the same job as dozens of other machines, so that when one falls over it is hardly missed. Google can afford to do all of this because that is their job. Crest's job is selling electronics, not supporting their ERP system.
Of course all of this customization is possible because they have the source to all of the software they run. On the other hand, I suspect that MS would give them a source license if they had 100,000 Windows servers. FYI, I believe that MSN has on the order of 30,000 Windows servers.
dom
Re:Windows vs Linux (Score:5, Insightful)
More than a few Linux kernels have had some memory management issues. If he was using RedHat 9 he'd be having the same problems we had - had to reboot every few days.
Just do a google search on kswapd and cpu for some examples. If you bother to look around I'm sure you can find other stability problems with Linux.
I use FreeBSD, SuSE Linux and Windows 2000 at home. They all have their uses. They have their strengths and weaknesses.
Unlike what the fanatics believe, Linux isn't that much better than Windows. Even in terms of security and stability.
That said, I'd still prefer to use FreeBSD/Linux for most server stuff.
Re:your admins are not qualified (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Windows vs Linux (Score:5, Insightful)
You're noting that the name "Linux" covers a broad range of things, and comparing it to the name "FreeBSD" which refers to one thing. You're then trying to say that "the BSDs don't have the fragmentation that Linux has". I call bullshit. Your example proves nothing remotely near that. It proves that FreeBSD isn't fragment, but then neither is the Debian project's distribution.
If I say "I run BSD" then there at least 3 different systems I could be running. Would you then say that "the BSDs have fragmentation just like Linux does"?
Inversely, if I say "I run Debian" then "I qualify my package management, my system boot scripts, where my conf files are, how the system works".
Sorry, I'm not normally this harsh, but what was your point again? If you try to compare Linux to FreeBSD then yes Linux will appear more fragmented. But how about we compare FreeBSD to Debian shall we? Apples to apples? Does your argument that it "damages" Debian still hold?
Re:Two Weeks! (Score:5, Insightful)
It was just bizarre. Out in left field.... way, way out. They implemented an entire routing protocol, kind of like IP, but very poorly. It was completely unrelated to any other form of routing I've seen.
From what I remember, you had to install the router software on a PC that had a modem. That was going to do the call out. (VPN wasn't common at the time, you had to use a modem for a network backdoor.) But then you had to configure the client to talk to that PC over the network... and you also, if I remember correctly, had to tell it about every hop it had to take in the foreign system.
In other words, it would be like having to manually configure your PC with every hop between you and Slashdot before you could read web pages. And if one of the hops changed, well, too bad. No Web for you.
There was more, too, lots more, but I have lost the details. All I remember is that it was problem after problem after problem for DAYS. And this is relatively simple software.
The documentation was horrible too. It made no sense at all. (which shouldn't be that surprising, really, since the program made no sense either.) SAP was kind of bleeding edge in one regard, and provided fairly complete Web documentation. Sadly, instant access helped clarity not a whit. I ended up taking three or four days and making repeated calls to SAP to get the stupid thing working. It felt like I was trying to push my head through a cheese grater. I'm not an idiot... I was learning IP routing at the time, and I can assure you, it was _trivial_ in comparison.
In some ways(the bad ones), SAPRouter reminded me of learning Netware for the first time. Netware was full of weirdnesses that didn't make sense at first. But after you'd been working with a given feature for awhile, nearly always there was an 'aha!' Netware had a payoff for the struggle... you'd finally see why they had modeled a given problem the way they had, and it was inevitably elegant, powerful, and aesthetic all at once. It was hard to figure out their context, but once you did, their solutions made beautiful sense. They thought out problems incredibly thoroughly, and solved them completely.
SAPRouter wasn't like that. It felt like, well... like a bureaucracy that's very sure of its own brilliance. They reimplemented, badly, what IP was already doing. It was grossly inferior, complex when it didn't need to be. Once I understood their context, and why they solved the problem how they did, my conclusion was that they were idiots. It felt like something designed by people who had *no idea* what routing is or how it should work.
To be fair, it was nicely stable once it was up. I didn't have to fool with it anymore after it was (finally) running.
Basically.... don't be so serenely certain these admins are idiots. The reason you're good at figuring this stuff out is because smarter people than you (or me) took the time to make it (relatively) easy. They chose good models and clean implementations, so the programs are fairly easy to configure and use. You being good at building solutions from open source stuff is partially your brainpower, but the lion's share of the credit goes to the original designers. You had an easy time of it because, for the most part, the software is fairly easy. It could have been far, far worse.
It could have been SAP.
Re:SAP??? No such product! (Score:2, Insightful)
I stick by my statements about the lack of specific information in this "story." What exactly was Crest trying to get running on a single host (reference to "the machine")? An SAP implementation landscape typically spans many hosts, and it can be a heterogenious environment; in fact, up until recent versions there were a few Win32-only components, such as the IGS server and the ITS web-enablement middleware, so heterogenious SAP environments are quite common.
Re:Real Story - SAP implementation fails miserably (Score:5, Insightful)
User A: I used SAP and had lots of problems and it didn't work and the consultants took lots of money and re-engineered everything around their system. SAP is always crap.
User B: I've used SAP for years and had no problems. You must be the problem. Never mind that I know nothing about your situation or your dealings with SAP I'm going to call you a liar and say SAP is wonderful.
Neither of you are being reasonable, but man, pass the popcorn! This is entertaining! Just like Jerry Springer.
Re:windows code dumps (Score:2, Insightful)
I wouldn't call it FUD; I'd call it outdated information. Remember Windows 95/98/Me? When they created Windows Me, they had hundreds of billions of dollars and thousands of employees, and they still got it wrong. Very wrong. I've switched my home PC from Me to XP recently, and the contrast is striking. It'd say it's understandable if many Linux users who don't have experience with the latest Microsoft OS are still wary of using microsoft products.
"Flaky commercial third-party apps can gum up any OS."
So you think it's OK for bad software to screw up an operating system?
Re:Lets see in seven months (Score:2, Insightful)
Actually, my impression is that it's not SAP bringing down the server, its red hat enterprise. I had this conversation with a couple of friends yesterday (right after I submitted the same story to slashdot, bah!).
One of them runs a massive application - gigabytes of traffic served per hour at certain times of the year. She commented thus: "xxx and I NEVER had any stability issues with any of the xxx of xxxxx servers until we moved them to Red hat Enterprise. Since then we've had two kernel panics......."
'course, what is arguably more interesting about this Crest Electronics [crest.com.au] situation is the reasons that the IT Manager cites for changing. They just seem full of holes to me. Reading between the lines, I reckon this guy came in, didn't like the Linux install, and wanted an excuse to move back to his beloved Microsoft. And who in their right minds lets any mission critical server auto-patch itself, regardless of operating system. That's just utter madness!
My other friend (yes, I have two!) put it best I think, when he said "I hope the guy got a major payout from Microsoft, because such a public display of incompetence makes him unemployable.".
Re:Lets see in seven months (Score:5, Insightful)
Yep, he sure sounds like someone who would go running back to "beloved Microsoft".
And who in their right minds lets any mission critical server auto-patch itself, regardless of operating system. That's just utter madness!
No, it's efficiency and good systems management.
Of course, what they mean here by "automatic updates" are updates distributed from an internal updates service (WSUS) after being approved, not "automatic updates" from windowsupdate.com.
My other friend (yes, I have two!) put it best I think, when he said "I hope the guy got a major payout from Microsoft, because such a public display of incompetence makes him unemployable.".
The numbers say he's saved his company money and made their systems more reliable. That usually makes you *more* employable, not less - at least with the people who actually do the hiring that don't care about Operating System holy wars, at any rate.
Re:Windows vs Linux (Score:1, Insightful)
That might have something to do with Windows 98 only supporting 512 MB RAM, and the bad one being the one that it didn't use...
Re:Lets see in seven months (Score:3, Insightful)
I've seen systems get slow on Windows machines over and over because of memory leaks
Hmmmm....so where does the problem actually lie - the operating system or the apps? I was having a conversation with a non-very-technically-minded friend a while ago who was saying how often "Windows crashed" when what he actually meant was that he was running a piece of badly written shareware which was throwing an exception which was being caught and reported by Windows.
Try telling Micrsoft to fix the memory leak in IIS
Valid point - there may be a memory leak in IIS, but that's not a "Windows" problem, although it does come from the same vendor. If you replaced IIS with Apache would that make Windows itself more stable.
Re:your admins are not qualified (Score:5, Insightful)
I wouldn't put it past RedHat to have some kind of filtering like that for their muckity-muck engineers so that they make sure they send the right guy for the job.
But if you ask for help, someone asks for clarification or a bit more info THAT THEY DON'T HAVE TO BE ON SITE FOR, it's your fault if you refuse their assistance.
Re:There's no debate. (Score:5, Insightful)
Problem of course is that most hiring managers can't tell the difference between the will work for food guy and the guy who can actually save your company when its systems are down and millions of dollars are on the line.
MCSE does not equal 'competent'! (Score:3, Insightful)
I've had MCSEs call on me for help with simple networking problems.
I find that many qualified people just forget what they've learned. I even have the same people calling me up every once in a while, with the same questions, purely because they keep making the same mistakes.
It may just be coincidence, but, I find that the most incompetent MCSEs are those who go out of their way to tell you they're an MCSE. They seem to use it as an excuse for their incompetence - like saying "Well, I was smart once!"
: )
Re:Two Weeks! (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Lets see in seven months (Score:3, Insightful)
"Hi, customer. Could you please spend several man-weeks running these complex diagnostic tests on our software, so we can try to fix it. Yes - very similar to the last set of diagnostic tests - yes, the ones that didn't help us diagnose the problem - yup, like the ones before that too, but this time with a few different settings - yes, please, if you could send us all that data then we'll have a bit more time to think up some excuses. Thanks!"
Now, I've no idea what the particulars here are, but I've been in plenty of situations where it's a waste of time sending vendor support yet more giant error logs, and running yet more diagnostic tests. I used to regularly 'help' Vignette try to fix our problems, but they never did. I could have spend the time better doing our own workarounds - or switching CMS vendors, which is what we ended up doing.
Re:"A" Linux Operating System? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Lets see in seven months (Score:4, Insightful)
Hell, if you have the expertese, you can even fix it in-house.
Try doing either of those with Windows :)
Re:Lets see in seven months (Score:3, Insightful)
Apache on windows stable? you are funny! Anyways I digress. You make a good point where the issue may not necessarily be the OS but applications on it. However since MS has interwoven IE so deep into the OS that it is not easy to remove without third party tools that it is difficult to distinguish one from the other
Re:We asked them to do a diagnostic test... (Score:3, Insightful)
The thing I find with linux is that you invariably find hardware vendors drag their feet on the linux drivers as it's far more important to get the windows drivers to market (due to the market's size). I'm no expert but I have found unless your machine's config is pretty vanilla Linux can be really hard to work with. Rate me a troll, maybe I don't know what I'm talking about, but I just find windows with it's hardware auto-detection and out of the box support really kicks ass over linux.
Of course these problems aren't an issue with Apple and OS X as things are shipped as one complete package ready to work. If they wanted unix, maybe they should have gone apple....
It's a problem (Score:3, Insightful)
Another problem I had was with the combination of Ubuntu, Nforce2 IGP, the NVidia driver and not having DDR Dual-Channel enabled. This combination brought about frequent freezing. But who could know without good googling skills that this combination was the cause of the freezing?
I'm willing to bet that this guy had one of these weird combinatory problems. It just goes to show that the Linux testing procedure is not 100%. But switching to Windows when this happens is basically just claiming ignorance instead of figuring out why it's crashing and fixing it.
Re:Lets see in seven months (Score:0, Insightful)
I don't know what you are running on your PC, but if you were running a server I hope you wouldnt have all that junk installed on it. I've had Windows NT servers which could have had over a year of uptime if it werent for doing patch maintenence. And it's only gotten better since Win 2000 Server. With Win2k3, I don't even need to reboot for patching except for a very few cases.
Support is the hidden cost- that's exactly what people in the know have been saying about Linux for years already.
Re:Lets see in seven months (Score:4, Insightful)
Why MS won out.. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Windows vs Linux (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Lets see in seven months (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Lets see in seven months (Score:3, Insightful)
The point being that these are options that you just do not have under Windows. Run Windows and you're tied to whatever support MS deign to give you. Typically, that's not a lot. With Linux you can hire anyone to fix the problem. Or take out a support contract; or put up a bounty.
The important point is this: you have more support options under Linux than you do under Windows.
And yes, these guys clearly don't want to do that. Not in house and not third party. That's cool. It's not a strategy I would recommend myself; I've had windows boxes that couldn't even apsire to that sort of uptime. But the people have to make the choice they think best.
Regardless of which, you still have more support options with a free software installation than you do with a proprietory one. That's always going to be true.
Re:windows code dumps (Score:1, Insightful)
Only if you are dumb enough to run it as root/administrator.
If it's run as a normal user, and your OS still gets gummed up, your OS sucks.
Re:Lets see in seven months (Score:1, Insightful)
"I hope the guy got a major payout from Microsoft, because such a public display of incompetence makes him unemployable."
Your 'other' friend is right. If I had one of my IT staff that was having problems with a server do this he'd be out on his incompetent a$$ in about 10 seconds.
There's clearly no attempt to address the real issue here, no attempt to properly debug the issue, and no talk about what the problem really turned out to be, how SAP or RedHat failed to deliver a solution to the problem thereby justifying their fallback to Widows. Just the classic 'I can't figure it out so I'm going back into my comfort zone with Windows' excuse.
A more public display of incompetence is difficult to imagine. Luckily most HR managers don't read Slashdot or this guy/gal would be on foodstamps.
Rule #1 know and undrstand the 'real' problem. Not the perceived problem.. you must identify and understand the REAL, ACTUAL cause of the instability. Only then can you address it.
ElR
Re:Windows vs Linux (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Lets see in seven months (Score:3, Insightful)
The cry of the man who only uses Linux on a desktop and has never heard the word "server".
Talk to your IT person. Suggest that a server crashing once a week (at random times) and losing people's work when it happens is merely a case of "1 min wasted". Then watch them laugh in your face. Alternatively, wise up...
Grab.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)