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Red Hat Software Businesses

Red Hat Gets Into The Clustering Biz 131

Bryan Mattern writes: "An adapted version of Red Hat 6.2 centered around Linux Virtual Server/cold failover is now available. The price is $1995, but includes a year of support for a node." This is also known as Red Hat High Availability Server 1.0.
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Red Hat Gets Into The Clustering Biz

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  • From the press release, it's hard to tell what you pay the $2000 for. Is it for support? Or is there some proprietary component? If the latter is the case, why does the press release talk about "open source momentum"?

    I think we need more information to see whether this signals a lessening of RedHat's commitment to an open source corporate strategy, or whether they are executing the "traditional" open source strategy of selling support and configuration, or whether this is something yet different. It's definitely something to be looked at carefully, but I wouldn't get overly concerned until more facts are in.

  • I think Sun has a Platinum support level that comes after Gold. :-)
  • I'm thinking, what percentage of Linux users could do something as simple as have find delete all file in the home directory that hadn't been accessed in more than 90 days? How many would know where to look? How many would be able to understand the find syntax or know that they need to escape the semi colon? Why do you think pico ships with every Linux distro?

    You know, I was in complete agreement with you up to this paragraph. I think the *vast* majority of "us" would find the above to be trivial. Can I do the above? Yes. Do I have the entire contents of find(1) engrained in my memory? No. I have to look this stuff up when I need it.

    But, I do agree that setting up a cluster would probably take me a *long* time.

  • The price is for a year's support, if I recall the blurb in the Annual Report.

    Remember, Red Hat's business model is to charge for support and packaging, but to make it fully Open Source.

    And, given that they pubbed the 0.01 kernel in the Annual Report, they are wicked cool. Did you notice the cool charts of Linux growth in server shipments? You may not like the distro, but it is the most popular one that people pay to have pre-installed, so obviously corporate America (and the world) is buying it.

    Now who's this Hahn guy they want us shareholders to vote for? Thumbs up or thumbs down? Does he have any GPL code he's contribbed or is he just one of those investors? [Yes, I own 300 shares of RHAT, but I also own 200 shares of MSFT, so take your OS wars elsewhere]

  • Not really a flame, just the truth.

    No, not a flame, but I don't 100% agree it's the truth...

    I feel that as the SysAdmin it's my duty to know everything about everything on my network.

    Ideally, that is true. However, there are two factors to consider:

    1. Scale. In a small network the "boss man" partitions the raid him/herslef. Sets up Legato all by his/her lonesome yatta yatta. Scale that up by a factor of 3 and the boss man gets a "subordinate" to set up Legato to his or her spec. Scale by another factor of 3 and the boss man gets a subordinate to cook up a 1 page proposal ("Amanda's nice, but we should buy Legato...") and then implement it. The bossman still knows what's going on, but actual implementation is diversified. Clinton doesn't train marines or cut Blue Cross cheques, but he's head of those departments.

    This leads to two situations:
    a) Bob knows Legato cold, Rachel doesn't. If it bombs on Rachel's shift and Bob is at the cabin/serving his weekend time there's a serious problem.
    b) Sysadmin's get paranoid. We all work in an environment of trust and mutual respect for the capabilities of our colleagues (if you don't you should be reading dice.com). But the sysadmins job is on the line in the event of catastrophic failure.
    2. Nobody knows the product like the manufacturer. Really. You call tech and they say "oh, that's a common problem." Common? It's the first time _I've_ seen it! Sun sees it 3 times a day. So, while I could use my well-honed trouble-shooting skills to narrow it down to a set of three potential causes and then methodically try the most-likely responses, logging results as I go, Sun knows you just have to wiggle the this and restart the that and you're up and running.

    and I'm also getting 60k, then what the whole idea for me being there?

    You're there to implement, configure, maintain and fix non-life-threatening problems for dozens and dozens of pieces of software and hardware. And make them all work together. How many servers do you have? How many pieces of high-performance software? Scripts? Kilometers of cat 5? Swiches? Make it work together effectively and reliably for your end users and you've earned your $60K.

  • I wonder what this system actually is. I'd love to see a description, actually - I'd love to compare it to what I build for other people. From the description, it sounds like there is a modified installer that behaves sanely for /etc/inetd.conf, at least. Does anyone know what the baseline installer does?
  • ftp://ftp.freesoftware.com/pub/linux/redhat/powert ools/6.2/i386/i386/ look for R-cclust-0.6.R3-3.i386.rpm and R-cluster-1.2.R2-2.i386.rpm as the ones with obvious connection to clustering - anyone know if these involved with this clustering solution?
  • I usually have an extra Adaptec SCSI controller around, and RAM I can always redistribute, and the same for disks. And it is possible to run with 1 CPU.

    Well, first off, if I wanted to have spares for everything in the shop it would cost more than the service contract. There are two things to consider when you asses your reliability:
    a) The likelihood of failure
    b) The speed to return to full capacity

    Sun stuff is good for a, my story aside. This is the most important consideration seeing as even the fastest return to normal is slower than no failure at all. The drawback is that if you do have a failure, getting it back can be a drag. (Note: if you're not a Mac fan, go open up a G4. It's a tinkerer's wet dream). Try buying a frambuffer for a sparc10 from that internet cafe... hence, the service contract.

  • preferably by a brunette sitting on your lap
    I guess this kind of joke is why women don't want to go into IT business
  • by Frymaster ( 171343 ) on Monday July 10, 2000 @10:04PM (#944137) Homepage Journal
    I work in a Sun shop... we all know that Sun is outrageously expensive.... so, here's my true story:

    10:35pm cruching away on E3000. I hear a slight "pop" come from the SENA array. Watch in mild fascination/horror as the database drifts away from the front end like an un-hawsered boat from the pier.
    10:36pm Panic. Check cables/power. Panic more.
    10:38pm init 6 the whole thing. Call the end users (only 2... it's night shift). Act calm.
    10:43pm system up. No data.
    10:49pm call Sun (finding the card with the service number takes 5 min). Tell them my theory: "it's the gbic card". Sun's response: "we'll be the judge of that."
    11:21pm Sun guy comes through the door. He's actually running...
    11:58pm Sun guy stops working. Computer starts working. It's not the gbic cards, but he throws in a pair of new ones "just 'coz".
    1:00pm I come in to work the next day because my ass is not fired.

    The situation as it would be with that "free" rig
    note, this is an untrue story...

    10:35pm slight pop. no data. some screaming.
    10:36pm assume it's the scsi card. remove casing. use compressed air to clear smoke away..
    10:38pm scan room for compatible card to replace with. Find two ISA's used to prop up a short leg on a desk and Safeway bag full of SIMMs in the coat closet. screaming throughout.
    10:41pm call Harold. He has lots of stuff. Mom answers and takes message. Find out later she relays the words "networth is down: need scooby cart".
    10:51pm Debate "calling the boss man".
    10:57pm call the boss man. "why don't you use the ones under the desk leg?" inform him their ISA. screaming from both parties throughout.
    11:16pm have abandoned post. At "java bytes" internet cafe on 12th St. Offer pimply-faced teen large sum of cash for card from beaten Gateway in corner.
    11:32 $200 poorer. case open. card in.
    11:33pm it's the bus.
    11:36pm surfing dice.com.

    The bottom line is, if you think you're smart enough that you don't need that expensive contract you're too dumb to admin a network.

    flame at will.

  • I was under the impression that you did in fact have to recode to make a process run accross clusters simultaneously.
    Also, nt4/Win2k sever only supports two nodes, Win2 advanced server supports 4, Win2k data center server may support 8 (when Win2kDCS finally gets out). For the price of Win2k, you would expect much higher levels of clustering.
    Also, check the cost. Win2kDCS costs more without support than RedHat's offer with support. Next check the machines. One of the nice points of clustering is avoiding large super expensive boxes. Win2kDCS has much higher minimum requirements than other Win2k/nt4 versions. While Linux lets you decide what to run things on. Scalability goes in both directions.
  • Because you're trying to be an ASP? Not saying that's a smart goal, or that you'd be building on the right technology, but there are people who keenly want to.

    Because you're a big company sold on Office? Desktop reliability bites. Couldn't a contolled, monitored installation of selected apps work better when centralized? Hey - isn't the network the computer? I'm not trying to troll here - one can reasonably state that (a) Sun has a valid model and (b) M$ productivity software is hard to beat.

    I wouldn't bet the company on that, either. But neither vendor is explicitly wrong. They both have long histories they're both betting on.

    Of course, neither of them is RH, whom we're supposed to be discussing, and that's my fault. But where do you think they're headed with this?

    Wherever the market takes them. (And where are the market leaders?) -j

  • I believe the GPL makes source availability compulsory, not binaries. As long as the source for all GPL-ed stuff is available in some form, that ok. They aren't (AFAIK) required to provide a fully working binary installation set for you to download. Yes, its a shame but I think its legal..
  • if this is exactly legal. If the distribution is using gpl software, doesn't it hve to be made available? Please respond, I am confused.

    i'm pretty sure they don't have to make any of it downloadable. they just have to include the source with the binaries of GPL software, ie. a second CD.
  • by Ephro ( 90347 ) <ephlind@yahoo.com> on Monday July 10, 2000 @06:26PM (#944142)
    I have seen a lot of posts on here about how it's free software and shouldn't be charged for. The GPL never says this. Instead it says you can charge whatever you want for it, however if you distribute a binary you have to make the source available for no more cost then that of the media to distribute and your time (basically.)

    If I put together a distribution I can charge anything for it, say $100,000, but what the GPL protects is anybody from saying here is a bunch of binaries, if you want the code it is $100,000.

    Just thought it should be mentioned.

  • by Wakko Warner ( 324 ) on Monday July 10, 2000 @06:26PM (#944143) Homepage Journal
    A lot of us already know Linux backwards and forwards and could set up a high-availability clustering solution in our sleep. That's great.

    This product is for people that can't, don't want to, or would rather spend their time doing business than recompiling their kernels.

    $2000 for a support contract is nothing to a business betting the farm on a high-availability server. This product -- and, more importantly, this service RedHat is offering -- is for them.

    Stop complaining about the price. As far as support contracts go, I can tell you this is pretty damned cheap.

    - A.P.
    --


    "One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad

  • brunette sitting on your lap and fixing the cluster... =)

    Must have really long arms and a spine only a Terminator could appreciate.
  • Right on brother! And as a further point, imagine what you'd be paying to IBM or Micro$oft for one year's support. Xrist, to keep IIS going for one year you'd have to pay at least one MSCE at least $25,000!
  • I'm guessing it would take me a month or more to set up a high availability server. The second time I might be able to cut it down to a week. I don't think there are nearly as many gurus out there as you think.

    If you ever setup a LVS server such as the one RedHat has, you would find out it's not that hard and doesn't take that much time. I setup my first LVS server in two days, and now have scripts that can set it up in a few seconds, and I read and understand the source code, no I can't recite it, but I understand it.


    The last sys admin where I work now left because he got a better offer, but there are a lot of things in the system (cron jobs that fail every night; a web server named "mail", a mail server named "bkp") that make me [think] he probably wouldn't be able to set up failover very easily.


    If someone can't get thier host name setup right, they would be lucky to have reverse lookup working right with classless subdomains, let alone the dealing with the ARP'ing problem in a LVS cluster.


    If you think about it, though, if you hire someone who could do this right, you'll probably be paying them about $50/hr as an employee, $75+ as a contractor. Figure a week to set it up, and that's $2000-$3000. And no support.


    Woah, I could be making 100k!? KICKING CHICKEN!


    Anyways, it may be hard to find good people, becuase good people are self teacher, have pride, won't put up with crap, and have wierd a past. What ends up happening is being forced to hire someone below the means and paying out the nose for them, becuase people are willing to do so. The only way you get good people is either 1) they just left thier crappy position and you are lucky enough to find thier resume on dice.com, or 2) you steal them from a company.


    No one that really know what they are doing can be hired on the spot, do the job, then tossed aside in a week, and expected to have preformed good work. It takes a souless, brain person to put up with that sort of treatment. If that's a hiring manager has that sort of toss-aside way of thinking then they better get tech support becuase they are going to need it!!


    I'm thinking, what percentage of Linux users could do something as simple as have find delete all file in the home directory that hadn't been accessed in more than 90 days?


    Would you like it in bash? korn? perl? C? Java? Python? A Gnome front end?


    MarNuke

    Not your everyday Linux Zealot, but superhuman Linux Zealot today, YEAH BABY!

  • Clinton doesn't train marines.

    That prefectly well, but the Joint Chief of Staff know something about training marines, and he has people that train marines, doesn't mean they go to the France to find out how to train marines.

    Nobody knows the product like the manufacturer.

    Getting back on subject, we are not talking about advance software here, we're talking about a simple packet switcher called LVS. In another post I said I would buy support from manufacturer, and I have bought support. I love tech support some times, even if it takes 45 minutes to get to the answer, but red hat isn't selling support for "advance software", LVS is a simple packet switcher. Read the code.

    a) Bob knows Legato cold, Rachel doesn't. If it bombs on Rachel's shift and Bob is at the cabin/serving his weekend time there's a serious problem.

    Isn't that the point of fail over so Rachel doesn't have to panic? Not being forced to call tech support becuase the failover, failed to failover, or failover fell over dead and took down the whole network?

    MarNuke
    just a guess

  • Although the whiney open-source `advocates' who don't understand the concept of value-added might complain about the sticker price, when you're looking at salaries in the 80K/yr. range for experts on the subject, paying 2K for a year of support ends up making a lot of sense.

    But with the 80k/yr you get more then just LVS support and setup, you get a person in the office that know what is going on.

    If a you needed to make a change would you rather call someone then have them "glide" your 30k/yr network monkey through the process, or have red hat ssh into the machine to make changes, or wait a few hours/days to have someone come and make changes, or tell the 80k/yr to make changes and have it done in 10 minutes and be over with it?

    If you have something on your network, your better the SysAdmin know how to use it.

    MarNuke

  • What the $2k really buys is a place in the line ahead of the $200 Pro ahead of the $40 basic ahead of the $4 Cheapbytes ahead of the free download. Even if the support were identical, ther is a big difference between a $2k customer on the line and a $40 customer on the line.
    In the right circumstances, the $2k is very cheap insurance.
  • I'm thinking, what percentage of Linux users could do something as simple as have find delete all file in the home directory that hadn't been accessed in more than 90 days? How many would know where to look?

    That's easy. Open you favorite file manager, sort by date, select a bunch and delete.

    Whats so hard about that?

  • Honestly, though: it's evil of Red Hat and the other commercial Linux distro-makers to take advantage of all these stupid people.

    So companies which sell products are to blaim when complete idiots go out and buy these products even when they could use something else (maybe cheaper) instead?

    Thats a bunch of crap; no one is forcing these people to buy commercial products and if they are to lazy to even do a bit of orientating then they got no one to kick but themselves.

    So... What you are basicly saying is that when I'm going out to buy a new car, totally unprepared, and end up with a Ferarri because I told the salesman that "I want to drive really fast to work" the salesman is to blaim for selling me this Ferarri? Yeah right...

  • $1995? Isnt that a bit expensive for a 'free' OS? :P

  • One important thing to keep in mind if you want to use cheap hi-availability solutions is to always have an extra machine, or know where there is an extra machine you can steal any needed parts from.

    I usually have an extra Adaptec SCSI controller around, and RAM I can always redistribute, and the same for disks. And it is possible to run with 1 CPU.

    Within 1 hour I can shift one dead machine to other hardware and be up and running again. And this for a much lower price than what Sun charges.

    Not that it has yet been necesary, as I buy quality components and quality machines. Mostly IBM Netfinity recently.
  • ...Red Hat's name. RED Hat...

    The original Red Hats were a group of Air Force pilots who flew stolen/blackmarket Russian aircraft for the United States. Therefore Red Hats are not people in league with the commies, they are people who are experts on the enemy's systems and use that knowledge for our side.

    A more interesting theory whould be that RedHat, the company, is actaully a bunch of RedHats in this sense. Becoming expert in the enemy's systems (in this case by helping create them) so we can easily take them out if we have too.

  • That is the funniet post i have seen in a long ass time, LOL

    LOFL, no shit --

    -Jon
  • "if I have a program that has a few MB of source code I would not want to have to make any changes to that code"

    What makes you think that you need to change the code of the program itself? The cluster allows you to run programs *on* it; it's the cluster that does the work, so no changes to your source are required. At least, this is true of the HA clusters that I know something about. (check out MCLX's Kimberlite on http://oss.mclx.com)

    Besides which - the majority of applications which would benefit from clustering are not small. The types of things that you want to cluster are those things for which you either need high availability or load balancing.

    To me, these imply things like databases (not small!), web servers, and NFS servers (size depends on what you're exporting), to name a few.

    The point of clustering is more for business use than for personal use, because how many people are going to require that their programs run constantly? Businesses are more likely to use large, often load-heavy applications.

    Oh, BTW. Someone just let me know what PVM is - that's parallel computing, not High Availability or Load Balancing clustering. If you're interested in PVM on Linux, check out the Beowolf clusters at http://www.beowulf.org.

  • Sorry, I don't want to flame, but do you have any idea what software and support costs for even basic clustering like this?

    Go to any other vendor who provides support and look for two tier failover (dispatcher/agent). Add software plus support plus installation. Add required hardware purchases. Divide by the cost of RH's service (this is a _service_, not a Linux distribution. This fact is important.).

    Bet you can buy a more big macs than you can eat in one sitting with the result of that little math experiment.

    And when some mid-level admin reuses the install media to build a spinner.com bandwidth-limiter and screws up an important service the company rides on, will the vendor tell you all your other licenses are suddenly under review because you violated the one you're calling about, um, we'll get back to? (it happens.)

    Sure, any king hell Linux geek could build it. (a) what will they charge? (b) what will they charge to support it to the level that an established third party vendor will? (c) Would you rather bet your personal savings or company on that consultant or RH?

    I'm not a RH fan, really. I use BSD variants and Solaris professionally. But give it a rest. This is a great deal, if RH can actually deliver.

    -j

  • The OS is free, as well as the clustering software as I understand it. What you are paying for is the support
  • All software needs support, and really $1995 is not that much for an organisation to pay. Where I work, our oracle support contracts are *way* more expensive. So going by your comment, would you say that oracle sucks?
  • The thing I like about this product is that it doesn't install any of the extraneous crap that often comes with Redhat. Yes, I know you could always tailor an installation to not include the junk. But this version comes with no extras as default. And that's a good thing. I don't really need all that stuff when I'm trying to run a high uptime, highly secure server.

  • If you think that, then you're no sysadmin. It may well be that the software is fantastic, runs for 500 years without failing, and makes you a cup of coffee every hour on the hour.

    However, if the software does fall over, or something related to it goes wrong, you want that second level of support there so that you know you're going to get help from specialists who spend all day working with this stuff. If it's 24/7, so much the better. After all, you might be a guru, but it's always good to have a level of super-gurus on the software you've bought backing you up. Plus, it makes economic sense for the company, since downtime is likely to be less if it's fixed by specialists rather than normal gurus.

    Finally, as many other people have pointed out, $2k is nothing for support and the guarantee that problems will be fixed, compared to the $60-$80k for the super-guru to work for you full time (and probably be bored witless).

    I have a feeling I've rambled a bit, but there's a point in there somewhere. :)

  • The way it works with distributions is different. Think of a distro as nothing more than the Linux kernel (preconfigured a certain way), and a bunch of applications that come with it (they can be GPL/BSD/proprietary). You can't "GPL" a distro so to speak. If a company is only willing to give out certain parts or configurations, and insists on selling the rest, they have every right to do that. I'm not saying it's nice of them, but it's perfectly legal. And overall, for as much shit as people give Redhat, they have GPLed all of their installation software (as far as I know).

    Businesses are in the business of making money, and as much as you or I might hate that fact, it's the absolute truth.

  • If you change something you must include sources. If you simply copy or compile, you only have to mention where it can be downloaded. Every package already does that on its own.

    Think about it for a second. What's the difference between making a standard distro and not including the extras at the web site? Nothing.

    Finally, we're talking about hundreds of separate programs. People need to get the concept of blocks and pieces and how they go together. Let every package maker be responsible for that.

    RedHat is the messenger and gift wrapper. That's all they do. And support. They must provide access to changed code but you can get that at the package site or sourceforge anyway.

    Otherwise you'd have everyone hosting the Entire Internet.

  • Just a week or so ago, there was another release of a HA cluster solution, released open source by Mission Critical Linux.. they have the CVS tree and all the oss stuff at oss.mclinux.com I think it'll be interesting where all this clustering attention goes.. with MCL, then Steeleye, and now Red Hat all within a few weeks
  • I don't know about the others, but while SuSE only provides an ISO for the first CD, their FTP distribution includes almost everything on the 6 CD's except for the "pay" section (which includes mostly trial versions of proprietary software.) The non-US FTP version includes a lot of encryption software too. They release the full FTP version about a month after the CD version. Here [www.suse.de] is their mirror list.
  • "You see, the "Serial Heartbeat" line in the middle of the first image is the kicker".

    Note 1: The intent is to allow for more than 2 members in the future.

    Note 2: That hb cable you're talking about? Not required. The heartbeat can run over the network you use to talk to the machines (put them both into the same switch, which goes to the network, and you're set).

    Note 3: a lack of heartbeat will reduce the ability to deal with I/O issues killing the cluster, but will *not* prevent the cluster from functioning.

    ---

  • by mosch ( 204 )
    It's for me. Just spec'd out a system that uses this, because it made my IT guys happy, since they're not big on the Linux thing. $2k for a year of support is nothing. Literally, nothing.

    The servers that are in the cluster all cost > $40k, and the importance of uptime is critical. So the IT guys said 'could we have something in a shiny box' and I said 'hell yeah'. After all, if something fails at 3am, I sure as hell don't want them calling ME.

    Besides, unless I could finish the whole design/code/debug process by myself, without QA, in under a week, it'll cost us more than $2k anyway just in my salary.
    ----------------------------
  • I'm installing Oracle 8i on Linux. The install is the most crappy and buggy I've ever seen (crash, miss files, does'nt do 1/10th of the job). I had to pay a consultant $1000 for a day to help me do it. I might just be stoopid, though.
  • I'm going to lose karma for this one, I know it...

    ++"I guess this kind of joke is why women don't want to go into IT business"

    This attitude annoys me no end. I'm all for political correctness, but this is the kind of blinkered, divorced from reality, humourless, reactionary comment that gives its detractors so much ammunition.

    In the course of working several jobs, I have worked in male-dominated, female-dominated and evenly mixed workplaces. I've been exposed to men making sexual jokes about women, women making sexual jokes about men, and homosexuals making sexual jokes about each other. In my last job at an ISP, while there was only one female tech, the most common source of comments of the kind you're complaining about was from the receptionist and accounts staff, who were female.

    If someone making a joke about the fact they're attracted to whatever gender they're attracted to offends you, then you're going to spend your life perpetually offended, wherever you work. Unless, of course, it's one of those things that's okay for women to do, but not for men.

    Yes, it goes too far if people start wallpapering their offices with centerfolds, or if the joke is non-consentually at the expense of, or directed at, a colleague. But while I've seen that happen, I saw much more blatant examples of it outside IT than in, and I'd be willing to bet it's far more prevalent (proportional to women employed) outside the computer industry.

    On a similar note, from a previous post by you in a different story:

    "Guys tend to have few social skills, like giving feedback, discussing in a fair manner, self-reflecting. They don't care about themselves, their rooms, others."

    How about you clear up your own rabid prejudices, before you start harping on the shortcomings of others?

    Charles Miller


    --
  • Finally someone who get the point!
  • A couple of points. 1. I too am from Digital Equipment, and although Linux clustering has quite a way to go before it matches what was available under VMS/TrueClusters, it IS clustering by definition (i.e. making several machines appear as doing the work of one). This is largely due to LVS. 2. The "downloadable" version is pretty much 6.2 + "upgrades to bring it to 6.2.16-2" + "the latest piranha and ivpsadm" posted on our new web site. You'll get a functionally equal system, but not identical because you did not run the HA installer. I will probably post the comps and install script for those that want to recreate that. 3. Piranha will no longer be bundled in Red Hat Linux, but will continue to be available via download and the HA product. 4. As people have pointed out, the price on the product is for the year's support, the bundled software (since the Linux release won't have it), and the hardcopy book. There is a dedicated web site for this project at http:://people.redhat.com/kbarrett/HA/ Thanks Keith Barrett Red Hat HA Team Leader
  • [A properly formatted response] A couple of points.

    1. I too am from Digital Equipment, and although Linux clustering has quite a way to go before it matches what was available under VMS/TrueClusters, it IS clustering by definition (i.e. making several machines appear as doing the work of one). This is largely due to LVS.

    2. The "downloadable" version is pretty much 6.2 + "upgrades to bring it to 6.2.16-2" + "the latest piranha and ivpsadm" posted on our new web site. You'll get a functionally equal system, but not identical because you did not run the HA installer. I will probably post the comps and install cript for those that want to recreate that.

    3. Piranha will no longer be bundled in Red Hat Linux, but will continue to be available via download, raw hide, and the HA product.

    4. As people have pointed out, the price on the product is for the year's support, the bundled software (since the Linux release won't have it), and the hardcopy book. There is a dedicated web site for this project at

    http:://people.redhat.com/kbarrett/HA/

    Thanks

    Keith Barrett

    Red Hat HA Team Leader

  • SUN guys sort of scared me when they turned up !

    its 2am and I am helpless
    (a deltic so please dont moan about spelling but the content)
  • Pirhana is part of the standard RH 6.2 distribution. What you're getting here is a year of support; but more key to this, you're also getting consulting services: For your $2000, they will provide, via phone and email, the exact configuration information necessary to set up a node's worth of clustering on your network.

    Comfortable with documentation and understand clustering already? Then get the $150 SSL-enhanced version of 6.2 and set it up yourself. Everything you need is there.

    Don't need an RSA-licensed Apache-SSL in the node? Then grab Redhat 6.2 for free and configure Pirhana (which is included) at no cost.

    Consulting costs money. If you don't need consulting, good for you. High-availability clustering is free.
  • No per client licenses silly.
  • ... like most distr., we can only have access to kernel.org source code, but we can't reach the code they had changed...

    Dunno about that point, I've got a copy of SuSE loaded on my system, and they have their own package that consists of all the mods they do to the kernel, mostly cool stuff like backporting 2.3's USB support, and putting in the Reiser filesystem support. All of their modifications are available in the source tree, so you can tweak their hacks to your hearts content. I'll have to check RH 6.2, Slack, and Mandrake (hey, I'm a distro whore, what can I say?)

    Besides, from the other comments posted, it seems they're charging mostly for the right to blame someone else, aka tech support.

  • Actually, they are under no GPL obligation to make their software available on the net at all. The GPL only says that they have to make the source available anyone who gets the binaries, and that anyone who gets the source and binaries is free to redistribute them. IOW, you're free to buy the full price distribution and make all of the GPLed software available for free download, but you have no right to demand they make it available for free download.

    FWIW, this is exactly what the Free Software Foundation advocates. To quote (from Selling Free Software [gnu.org] on the FSF web site [gnu.org].):

    Actually we encourage people who redistribute free software to charge as much as they wish or can.

    Free programs are sometimes distributed gratis, and sometimes for a substantial price. Often the same program is available in both ways from different places. The program is free regardless of the price, because users have freedom in using it.

    Since free software is not a matter of price, a low price isn't more free, or closer to free. So if you are redistributing copies of free software, you might as well charge a substantial fee and make some money. Redistributing free software is a good and legitimate activity; if you do it, you might as well make a profit from it.

    Distributing free software is an opportunity to raise funds for development. Don't waste it!

    (Emphasis is theirs.) IOW, the people who wrote the GPL don't just accept the idea of selling GPLed software for what the market will bear, they actually advocate it. Of course the fact that anyone who can get a copy of GPL software is free to redistribute it inherently limits the price anyone can charge, but that's for the market to decide.

  • by Anonymous Coward
    Picture this: on-site support, preferably by a brunette sitting on your lap and fixing the cluster... =)

    Picture this: on-site support from .. you guessed it .. Natalie Portman! That's right! Natalie Portman supporting your Beowulf cluster! My, wouldn't that just be odd?
  • But a $50 copy of Suse or CorelLinux retail will not get you a Red Hat technician on site for all support to guarantee 24/7 avalability for an entire year.
  • Mod this up! (Score:5 Funny)

  • Regardless of whether the software is open-source or not, someone has to physically spend time to install, customise, tune and upgrade it otherwise the software suffers from bit rot. It then comes down to do you hire that person directly or outsource it? Either way you have to spend the money (not to mention usual overheads). Now if the profit margins for consultancy (*cough* Oracle *cough*) are high, then it makes sense to acquire such expertise in-house. However, if it is *NOT* a core competency, *AND* the risk/cost is lowered by hiring specialists (the whole point of a free market in services IMHO) then it makes sense to pay for the external support. It's the same reasoning that we don't all become in-house corporate doctors, the time it takes to learn the stuff and the frequency we use it doesn't make it worthwhile. Instead we pay for health insurance and scream for emergency help when disaster strikes. Even if you can view the base software as "free" (once development costs are written off), support costs is really a form of insurance that you will have some competent help (*cough* MSCE *cough*) around *WHEN* things go wrong (and I guarentee that error-free software has not been invented yet apart from 1-line hello worlds).

    So, how much are you willing to pay for peace of mind?

    LL
  • So you work for Red Hat eh....:)
  • While I cannot make an ISO available for a 600meg download image of the product, all of the components that you add to the Red Hat Linux distribution WILL always be available on the HA web site (and in the box).

    The HA parts of the product are entirely GPL.

    Keith Barrett Red Hat HA Team

  • ?To boldly go where YellowDog has gone before? You obviosly haven't tried to get that pile of ofal to do anything (like install). I hate to even think of what a cluster of these little YellowDoggy dung heaps performs like, if at all..... RH and TurboLinux were HA clustering _long_ before YellowDog - and they even work! Don
  • Here [redhat.com] and check out the HA site [redhat.com]

  • Yeah, I had to look it up too. I don't remember the syntax. But think of all the "I just bought Red Hat Linux for Brain Dead Monkeys at Borders" users. There's a lot of them. The curve is leveling off. Easier to use means keeping out less of the riff raff.

    Even people who know what they are doing wrt using the gimp, installing RPMs, maybe even make configure - make - make install. Here's a better one -- what percentage of Linux users know what /etc/rc.d is? I'm guessing it's less than 75%, and shrinking daily.
  • "Those who can't do, teach" is an old quote. Dunno where it comes from.

    I ain't slammin' teachers. Good ones are hard to find. I am slamming tech support - most places literally hire people off the street, hand them a script, and tell them to answer the phone. I should know, that's what happened to me :)

    Anyway, as for being an idiot, well, you opinion don't amount to a hill of beans to me, so call me what you will.
  • ...where's the free version?


    Marnuke
    I already paid for the hardware, the bandwidth, the guy to run it, the guys to write my software, lience to use thier software, and you expect me to pay for the os?
  • by weave ( 48069 ) on Tuesday July 11, 2000 @01:18AM (#944190) Journal
    Honestly, though: it's evil of Red Hat and the other commercial Linux distro-makers to take advantage of all these stupid people. Imagine what we could accomplish if more effort was actually made to educate these people instead of defund them.

    Count me one of those "stupid" people.

    As a pointy-haired manager, I have to allocate resources as best I can. The most expensive resource I have to manage is labor, not machines or software. Worse, labor is not a situation where I can get all the labor I want at a given price.

    I have a support staff of about 25 people, most of which are involved in end-user support. I have four full-time systems people with two vacancies I've been trying to fill for several months. To fill the gap, we had to hire an on site contractor from a consulting firm for $42/hour (dirt cheap actually) to do some of the chump work for the systems people so they could do more high-end stuff.

    Now, with that in mind, and with the fact that we have several projects that are behind in, including purchase and deployment of a new SAN, roll out of Windows 2000, AutoCAD 2000, etc, etc, let me think.

    If I need to deploy a Linux cluster, do I blow two grand to save time? Remember, two grand is not much more than a week of tech time on staff. Tech time that I can't afford to give up. So, $2K is really nothing.

    Now, let me play the other end. To attract and keep the best talent, I have to keep them involved in what interests them. In this case, I'd ask my systems people if they want to do this on their own or to go the quick route. If they want to get down and dirty configuring it themselves, I'd actually prefer it, because that's the best way to truly understand a product. So in that case, something else has to give elsewhere, so I have to find out how to cover that.

    (This is why I have the outside contractor help doing low-end stuff. If I hired an outside firm to do our higher-end stuff and stuck my loyal employees on mundane every-day shit, they'd all quit...)

    There are so many variables to consider when making decisions on how to best manage resources. I certainly appreciate that Red Hat gives pointy-haired (actually, my hair is 3/4 down my back!) bosses like me choices like this, and they get to make money at it too!

    Capitalism is the best!: )

  • Yeah, sure, everyone that says anything positive about Red Hat or in favor of Red Hat must be a Red Hat employee.

    Hint: The above was sarcasm.

  • Yeah, its called "Platinum".

    Included is the right to call up sun 24/7 and have a tech show up on site with replacement parts and/or a software fix within 4 hours.

    Lets see if some of these guys can get that with their free linux download.

    ~dlb
  • Your speculation, which is just that, about China's motives are far from the most reasonable "explanation" for their adoption of linux. the current best guess on why they find it so attractive is because: its free as in beer. Simple, concise, and lacks the conspiracy theories.
  • by Jeff Mahoney ( 11112 ) on Monday July 10, 2000 @07:08PM (#944194)
    Maybe I'm biased, but their description doesn't really fit my (and probably others') description of what a "cluster" is.

    I come from a Digital UNIX background [*], and I've been fortunate enough to use DEC's TruCluster product. True, it does require "better" hardware, and more support dollars - but you're not about to set up a production failover environment in your bedroom to "play" with it either.

    Linux HA is still missing some of the major features of commercial clustering packages. These can be (and are, for me) showstoppers to using Linux in an HA environment.

    The most notable, in my mind, is:

    Shared disk. This doesn't mean shared filesystem (although TruCluster v5 is apparently approaching this). This means that all cluster nodes have a scsi (or fibre channel) controller on a shared bus. This bus is used to access the filesystems, but also for a non-network based inter-node communication method. When I see a TruCluster node boot, along with all the disks, I see "processor at id 2", "processor at id 3", corresponding to other nodes. In this manner, nodes know each other are up, even if the network "blips".

    ...and to a lesser extent (ie: I run without this now)

    Shared System.TruCluster v5 introduces to the UNIX world what VMS has had for over a decade - the shared system disk. Each system uses the same system disk. I don't mean an identical copy, I mean the *same* disk. (Where disk can be, of course [and should be], a hardware mirror/RAID set). Node-dependent data is kept separate by maintaing private node config directories, which are referenced using "context dependant symlinks". CDSL's are essentially symlinks with variables in them.

    ..anyways, I've said enough. If you're truly interested in this sort of thing, I invite you to check out: http://www.unix.digital.com/cluster/in dex.html [digital.com], which is the TruCluster site.

    This is the sort of stuff I'd like to see on Linux. I'd help code it but, unfortunately, I have neither the time nor the skill (yet).

    I am not, nor have I ever been, an employee of DEC/Compaq - but I have used their products in an enterprise class environment for both user (www, mail, ldap, etc) and database (oracle) services.

    -Jeff
    <ducks in the corner as the flames rise>

    [*]: But I have been using Linux on my personal system since v1.2.8 (walnut creek slack aug 1995)

  • As the other people have mentioned, you pay for the packaging and support. Think of it this way: a networking admin making $65,000/year (which is probably low for Silicon Valley) makes roughly $300/day not counting benefits + office space which is probably almost as much. So if buying this thing saves the guy a week of not having to taylor the setup, the price is well worth it.

    I also assume that they have *tested* the stuff on the CD so you won't do an install and find out you have to upgrade 10 different aps.

  • "There's a sucker born every minute", the saying goes

    How true this old adage must seem to many of us now. There is no telling how many people are going to be totally, unknowingly suckered by this one.

    I can imagine it now; yes, imagine a company named Acme Corp. The traditional, pointy-haired IT manager at Acme has heard all about this new "line-uks" wave that's sweeping through the IT world. Of course, he wants his employees to "maintain a proactive stance towards technology" (read: hype and attempt to do something with all new buzzwords, something that we're taught by Micro$oft). He decides that his IT department should put Line-uks to work.

    So he goes and shops around for Line-ucks. "Wow, there are so many of these Line-ucks-es; I'd better get the very best model." And instantly, he's hooked by the promise of "high availability". And he pays. Why? Because he's been taught over the years that better software costs more. He's actually attracted to the product because it is so pricey. Sucker!

    Honestly, though: it's evil of Red Hat and the other commercial Linux distro-makers to take advantage of all these stupid people. Imagine what we could accomplish if more effort was actually made to educate these people instead of defund them. But that's never, ever going to happen, because like it or not, deep down, Red Hat, cronies, and my beloved BSD, Inc. are only Big Dumb Companies.

  • Are you saying you could set this all up and support it for a company then? Perhaps you are one of the uber-geeks that actually has enough networking, hardware, and software knowledge to bring all the pieces together. That, and you've got enough free time to support it.

    Fact is, for the very same reasons you mentioned, this is GREAT news for Linux. If you've ever had any experience at all with determining the price of a product or service you would know that under valueing can be just as detrimental to sales as over valueing. Yes, you can actually hurt your sales by having the customer get into the "so why is it so cheap" way of thinking.

    Another thing you seem to completely overlook is the fact that these "Big Dumb Companies" are reinvesting a lot back into the open source community. Hell, this site we're on now has been helped to scale to it's fullest potential in a way that would be impossible as a hobby project.

    It's a shame you can't see past the bedroom wall behind your monitor.
  • To a certain degree, I agree with you. VMS has some really cool fruit when it comes to a true enterprise class system. Unforunately, you have to pay an absolute arm and a leg for it (plus you get lots of old crusty admins - no offense intended to those out there that are older and crustier than me :)

    The other downside is that less and less vendors are providing support (or even products for that matter) for VMS. Take Oracle for example. They port to VMS last and give it the lowest priority when it comes to patches/bug fixes. This is unfortunate coz Oracle is something that really benefits from the true clusterability (it that a word? :) of VMS rather than falling back to Oracle Parallel Server (yucky at the best of times).

    Even with that all said, I really don't like VMS. (Please, please don't tell anyway that I stuck up for it :)

    It is good to see that a company like RedHat is trying to take Linux in the right direction and (hopefully) making some money out of it along the way. All those that have been around for a while will remember in the very early days of RedHat, they were always saying (paraphrasing) "We don't necessarily want to make money out of Linux, but out of the services and support we can offer over and above the base".

    I'm much happier seeing them move in this direction than the "make a whizzy graphical installer, call it a new distribution and then float". Hang on... Aren't RedHat the ones that started that trend? <laugh>

  • The IT department would probably be happy to have someone else to take care of their cluster for them while they deal with stupid user's errors.
  • [sarcastic mode on]
    Hmmm... Maybe we could use the money that is defunded from the suckers to educate the next round of would-be suckers.

    Or... Maybe we could use the money that is defunded to buy shares in the defundees so they can defund to our advantage and make everything ok.
    [sarcastic mode off]

    I hate bigotted people who misunderstand what the word free means in free software... <sigh>

  • This also pretty accurately decribes what the Global Filesystem [globalfilesystem.org] is addressing.
  • Why in the world would you want to run Microsft Office in a clustering environment?
  • I did a standard "gnome" install of redhat 6.2 the other day and it took up over 400meg! And you talk about win2k and bloat. Whats the deal with linux and kernels over 1 meg? I mean come on will someone fix that?
  • For a business or organization, $2000 really isn't that much, especially when it gives management the right to point the finger at another company when something goes wrong...hence the importance of "Tech Support".

    LVS isn't that hard. It's one of them things that is made to seam a lot harder then it really is. I was able to set it up the router part in a haft day, the mon and fail over the another day and a haft, and then I wrote scripts to do everything again on other servers the second night without losing sleep.

    I spent about 18 hours on the whole project. At 60k a year I get about $30 an hour. It cost my company $540 to pay me to set it up, 1/4 of "Tech Support". When ever someone needs to ask a question about LVS, they can simply walk into my office (the server room), and ask a question about it, they can get a answer in less then 5 minutes instead of being on hold for 45 minutes. Which would save about $20 in labor cost. Not to mention, since I set it up, read the source, and then wrote scripts to set it up again, I know (or at least should know) everything about my company setup, so I would be the better person to ask then someone my company has never meet, and see us as a SQL database entry.

    Of course it's easier to sue or point finger at "Tech Support" then spend the money and time to hire and let a highly talented UNIX geek teach him self a way of fail overing.

    What it comes down to is, do you hire a "geek kid wizard" to run your network, or have some guy on a phone assist your "engineer"?

    MarNuke

  • Be careful calling the VMS admins "old and crusty". Some of us are "only" 39! Besides, in 10 years when the next big thing comes along and eclipses Linux, you'll be "old and crusty".

    Oh, and for what it's worth, VMS clustering, around since about 1984, is still miles ahead of anything else on the market.

    former VMS system manager
    in VMS Engineering at DEC
    now marketing Linux
  • Actually, you do have to modify your application if you want to make it MS Cluster aware.

    Look up MSCS in the Platform SDK one of these days.

    Jeff
  • Thanks for the link.

    I just went over to that site and checked it out, and although it comes close - it's not what I'm looking for.

    You see, the "Serial Heartbeat" line in the middle of the first image is the kicker. It means that this cluster setup can support 2 nodes, unless you're willing do implement 2^n serial connections between nodes. TruCluster v5 supports 8 nodes on fibre channel, since the crosslink is done in the switching fabric.

    A note to the user who replied below about how one RAID array is a single point of failure. You can design systems with *zero* points of failure (except software, bah!) for shared cluster setups. Granted, it approaches 7 figures for costs and uses fun things like EMC.

    Now, one of the major advantages I've found with a shared cluster is the ability to move services around at will.

    I can run all services on all nodes, or I can run a few services on different nodes, distributing the load to fit hardware availability - whatever.

    Bear in mind people, HA clustering isn't for the light hearted, or the shallow pocketed. If you've got the time and especially the resources to dedicate to it (as most decent sized production shops do), do it right.

  • by kevin805 ( 84623 ) on Monday July 10, 2000 @07:35PM (#944211) Homepage
    Damn, that must be the narrowest definition of "us" I've seen in a public forum. Is that "myself and the other 11 superelite uebermenschliche sys admins with 30 years experience scattered through the world in our mountaintop fortresses"?

    I'm guessing it would take me a month or more to set up a high availability server. The second time I might be able to cut it down to a week. I don't think there are nearly as many gurus out there as you think. The last sys admin where I work now left because he got a better offer, but there are a lot of things in the system (cron jobs that fail every night; a web server named "mail", a mail server named "bkp") that make me he probably wouldn't be able to set up failover very easily.

    Most Linux users, even experienced Linux users, don't know any more than how to keep it running, and how to set up what they've set up before. Being a Linux user doesn't mean one is an expert. Considering a graph of skill level for different OSs, Windows would have a nice broad distribution, centered around "knows how to do daily operations, but can't figure out new stuff on their own". Macs would be an even flatter distribution. Both more experts and more clueless newbies. Linux would be a much narrower distribution -- newbies *can't* use Linux, and to become an expert takes significantly longer than on Windows. But the average would be a little higher.

    I'm thinking, what percentage of Linux users could do something as simple as have find delete all file in the home directory that hadn't been accessed in more than 90 days? How many would know where to look? How many would be able to understand the find syntax or know that they need to escape the semi colon? Why do you think pico ships with every Linux distro?

    If you think about it, though, if you hire someone who could do this right, you'll probably be paying them about $50/hr as an employee, $75+ as a contractor. Figure a week to set it up, and that's $2000-$3000. And no support.

    Of course, the disc will probably be on cheap bytes for $0.99 in a few weeks. Use that, and figure it out as you go.

    --Kevin
  • $1995 is chicken feed. It'll cost you at least 10 times that for Sun Cluster - with no support (but including "knowledge transfer" for the initial installation.) Not that that's unusual for Sun, but it still made me choke when I saw the invoice... If RedHat (or whoever) can offer an equivalent product to Sun DiskSuite/Veritas VolumeManager with similar price advantages, Linux servers will be very saleable.
  • Red Hat also makes PowerTools available, i.e. not just the basic system.
  • by duvin ( 40343 ) on Monday July 10, 2000 @06:09PM (#944220) Homepage

    Anyone good any good ideas what you're really paying for in this? $1995 sounds like quite a lot for a year of support... I'd sure hope the support services were somehting VERY extraordinary

    Picture this: on-site support, preferably by a brunette sitting on your lap and fixing the cluster... =)

  • You pay for support, and of course there is a markup for developing the software: Paying people isn't free. You get the source and it is GPLed, but that doesn't means it's free as in "no cost" - you can share it, of course, but there is a price tag on the edition Red Hat believes businesses would want to buy.
  • That's nice, but what does it have to do with the OS???

    We have Linux running on various Compaq Proliant in our server room. Aside from the fact they have hardware redundancy (which your scenario doesn't really account for), we do have the hardware contracts with Compaq, so yes, we do have Compaq guys running if something goes bad with the hardware.

    Again, nothing to do with Linux, nothing to do with RedHat. It's hardware issue! That's why you get away with using Sun in your example, Sun really sells you the hardware (software is a token, they're even considering making it free, if they haven't already).

    If the server goes waaay down (assuming you know your stuff - might be a big assumption), there is nothing the tech guy can do that you can't do. All the tech guy will do is get your server "running" again. The data on it, he can't do any miracles either if it's trashed beyong belief. Backups anyone?

    alex, rhce (acronyms are cool).
  • If you don't want to pay that much, just get RedHat 6.2. It still comes with the Clustering software.

    As a corporation, I can sell a cluster server with 24/7 support a heck of a lot easier than a cluster server that usenet people will help me support.

    To a corporation, $2k is nothing, I spend more than that on support for the server we use for testing patches on.


    -- Keith Moore
  • ...on-site support, preferably by a brunette sitting on your lap and fixing the cluster...

    For $1995 it better be Seven of Nine herself.

    # cat /dev/null > /boot/vmlinuz; init 6

    "Er, Seven? Look, there it goes again"
  • 1: Everybody and their dog knows linux
    2: No per-seat licensing (as said above)
    3: This is cheap for what you're getting
    4: The target customer usually has millions of dollars to spend on IT (i.e. fortune 500, US Govt., etc)

    People always try to defend linux when it comes to the whole "Linux has no support", but really - this is bottom line guarantee _we_will_fix_the_problem_. You don't get that through irc or usenet. $2000 for onsite tech support for large systems such as this is beans.

    So will hobbiests buy it? No, of course not - they'll figure out how to do it themselves. But enterprise-level networks need this type of stuff, and have the money to burn.
  • ... to rip the shit out of one-eyed Linux zealots, usually identifiable by phrases like "wind0ze", "m$", etc, BUT Windows 2000 is NOT a mature product.
  • by cide1 ( 126814 ) on Monday July 10, 2000 @06:10PM (#944238) Homepage
    I have seen a recurring trend among the top linux distributions, which upsets me. Try to download a distribution other than a very basic one, and the companies make it difficult to impossible. Suse lets you get one of the six disks. Redhat gives you only the standard distribution. Turbolinus gives only the workstation install. I am not sure if this is exactly legal. If the distribution is using gpl software, doesn't it hve to be made available? Please respond, I am confused.
  • by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 10, 2000 @06:13PM (#944240)
    This story strikes me as having some relevance with the story about Linux in Beijing that was posted last week. On first blush, this certainly seems like a "more choice, victory for Linux" type of situation, but now I'm not quite so sure.

    We all know that the Chinese government would not trust any security-critical systems to Windows: the code could have easily been compromised by the NSA or the CIA or some other arm of the US government. This is the commonly-accepted reason why the Chinese government is pushing the acceptance of Linux (in addition to the fact that they like its fundamentally communist development model).

    But think a little further: the US is desperately trying to put it regional missile defense into place, and China is ramping up its anti-US sentiments and dissident crackdowns even beyond their usual extremes. All this can only show that there is some incredible US / China tension building behind the scenes, which could easily escalate to war within a few years.

    And when this war comes, do we really want China having the benefit of high-availability Linux servers? Do we really want to eliminate the chances of an accidental server crash that could end up saving the Western world? I think not. Letting the forces of communism run rampant on this planet is about the worst fate I could imagine for any of us.

    That's bad enough. But now look at, first, Red Hat's timing of this launch (which I've already explained the significance of), and, second, Red Hat's name. RED Hat -- if that's not a sign that they're in league with the PRC, I don't know what is.

    So, please - I urge you - for the world's future - boycott this product. When the shooting starts, you'll be glad you did.
  • Depends on how you look at things.

    I was pricing some Sun kit this afternoon, and switching from one of their licensing options to another can easily add $6000 to the price of the system, and that was going from Standard to Gold. I think there's a level above Gold!

    So if they're offering a fair proportion of what Sun does, it might well be a bargin...


    Lord Pixel - The cat who walks through walls

  • by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 10, 2000 @06:16PM (#944242)
    It's nice to see an open source company finally finding viable niches in which they can actually make money, justifying the hype. Although the whiney open-source `advocates' who don't understand the concept of value-added might complain about the sticker price, when you're looking at salaries in the 80K/yr. range for experts on the subject, paying 2K for a year of support ends up making a lot of sense.

    Three cheers for open source companies with viable business models.

  • I hate bigotted people who misunderstand what the word free means in free software

    Ahem. FLAME ON!

    I know all you moderators out there aren't going to be happy with this, but there are a lot of people out there, including me, who (omigod) think that free-as-in-beer is just as important, if not more, that free-as-in-freedom. I'm not saying that I'm an uberhacker, but I have learned quite a bit in the 10 years that I have been coding. Much of that knowledge has only been made possible through free-as-in-beer software. I 'grew up' as a programmer while in high school and the first years of college, when money was scarce. I didn't exactly have Kdollars lying around to buy operating systems and tools. And then I see a FreeBSD CD-ROM set at Hastings for around $17 and it says something to the effect of "Full-featured UNIX operating system, free compilers, free networking software, 1000's of free applicatons (and I mead beer). Everything you need to start soaking up that knowledge you so greatly desire. $17 for 4 CDs. HELLO!" If that CD had not been there, my life would be totally different at this point.

    I'm not saying that the freedom issue isn't important. Sometimes we just get so caught up in the politics of it all that we forget how we got where we are.

  • Let me tell you, $1995 is peanuts for failover.
    We are in the process of installing a cluster/HA failover solution onto a pair of Sun boxen here. The software alone costs $105,000.
    Heck, even the training Sun requires the local admin to have before the installation is $3495.
    True, the RH is likely to be very basic compared to what is available for the large enterprise boxen, but I expect that to change rapidly if RH can get the ball rolling.
  • This is true if you are counting on a single RAID array for the entire cluster.

    For the cluster we are currently installing, there are two dual homed FC disk arrays with 14 disks in each cabinet. Internally the cabinets are grouped in two arrays of seven disks. Each array of disks has four GBICs for a total of 8 GBICs for pair of arrays. Then the arrays are mirrored.

    Since each array is dual-homed, and each cabinet in the array has a pair of GBICs to the FC controller on the server, there would have to be a fairly comprehensive set of failures before the cluster lost communication with the disk array.

    I suppose the truly paranoid would go ahead and spend $300K plus for something like an EMC, but clustering to one 'RAID' does not imply a single point of failure.

  • Try to download a distribution other than a very basic one, and the companies make it difficult to impossible [...] Redhat gives you only the standard distribution

    Please get your facts right.
    You can download all of Powertools (thereby turning your standard distribution into something like deluxe).
    We can't do the same thing for the professional version because of some ugly legal issues (the professional version contains patented crypto code).

    If you find something legally distributable on a Red Hat Linux CD that is not available for download on the ftp servers, you've found a bug. Let me know and I'll fix it.
  • by bero-rh ( 98815 ) <bero@reCOMMAdhat.com minus punct> on Tuesday July 11, 2000 @05:38AM (#944255) Homepage
    Actually we DO release it.
    We don't believe in proprietary software any more than Debian does. ;)

    The clustering tools are released under the terms of the GPL.
  • by Trans ( 209035 ) on Monday July 10, 2000 @06:17PM (#944256)
    So far every post I've read has been a complaint about a $2000 "free operating system". You're NOT paying for the OS, you ARE paying for a year of support.

    Straight from the news item:

    Support: A one year support package that includes standard hours installation and configuration assistance and 24x7 server-down support for two Linux Routers of a Piranha cluster, configuration of Piranha and Linux Virtual Server and any services required to run these applications, including httpd and ftpd, and configuration of Piranha and Linux Virtual Server for connectivity to one node behind the Linux Routers for either httpd or ftpd service.

    For a business or organization, $2000 really isn't that much, especially when it gives management the right to point the finger at another company when something goes wrong...hence the importance of "Tech Support".

    Please, if you don't like Linux, that's fine, but don't try to troll your way to infamy.

"I've finally learned what `upward compatible' means. It means we get to keep all our old mistakes." -- Dennie van Tassel

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