Posts by Florian Hwigl

Opennebula left in the haze

I know which one there is really opensource.

The one that doesn't get all the marketing-budget funded raves.

is walking through the mud good enough?

I think we should strive to drive, in cars, on highways instead.

Why didn't you set out to quantify the savings (or losses) to be gained by better management software. yes, no surprise it wasn't bought after that, but it is a surprise you use this as proof for uncertainness of savings. it only proves you didn't really look into them.

second, while you state that breaches/failures and so on make investments easier, you ignore the relation between missing management tools and the very cause of some (by numbers: many) of these failures

if we ask for good policies to be put in place at the start, there is a certain need to look at better classification of failures into causes like hardware that turns into smoke(technical), lack of knowledge (people), mistake (people), lack of skill (people) and lack of planning(people)

bad management tools are in the "lack of planning" bit for me. you can't set up a good policy that won't include tools.

noone says they need be costly, i.e. having a wiki+database with hourly switchport:ip<->mac mappings or dns zone backups is in the two-digit price ratio, but most companies live without such basics. what they instead do, is run around hunting problems. sure that's good enough, but it will take longer => cost the company money.

"good enough" is where you don't have costly tools that do it by themselves and staff that can't do it by themselves either.

it'll cost you dearly with every outage, with every client pc that takes more than 30 mins to replace and so on. if your helpdesk staff has the account reinitialized because he doesn't know enough details of windows offline sync's suckage, or if the exchange admin wasn't forced by any policy to set up weekly consistency checks and you need a full restore where a service restart should suffice.

summing up the cost of "good enough IT" DOES need a business perspective.

if you don't take the time to look for and notice the small daily fuckups and don't see where they turn into the smaller disasters, everything will look ok.

but i don't think this kind of attitude can be acceptable, unless the companies wages are just enough to hire chimps. still, we don't need to lie to ourselves and think everything is great.

last, dynamic IT is possible and there are shops that are running far better than the rest.

the problem is that if you call up any of the big vendors and ask to "buy dynamic IT" you'll get the shiny marketing materials, the stacks of new hardware, the expensive outdated management tools and the lot of newbie consultants and the huge bill that will actually prove how important your choice was and that'll get you the big raise.

but you won't get the last missing piece: the dynamic stuff you tried to get.

i suggest you call up steve traugott some day and hear his side of "good enough IT" (as in no compromises made) management.

useless thanks

so why while you gave proper mb/s numbers you dont give anything that tests heavy random IO which, after all, where the SSD might show interesting benefits, or for example tests using two IO threads (for the gamers: think leeching your new game off a p2p net and recording something with fraps)

This is an interesting test, but oh so inconclusive, you stopped halfway!

Re: Notts Uni Viewpoints

Now thats great what a clear path of thought they had, just a pity they're a bit challegend with the thinking

- student sends it to a non-student to print out, who then is the culprit

- student explains the police what the situation is, and gets detained not for sending around the manual, but for obstructing their investigations (by trying to explain them what they couldnt figure within a 6 day investigation)

- the uni doesnt even find anything wrong with taking them to jail to establish they're innocent, they're just a bit unhappy it took long (maybe because the clerc didnt show for work, being halfway to gitmo)

- the uni doesnt even remotely care about the threats to their student.

- the uni is to clueless to just even figure someone has a research project on this

and then here comes mister I-studied-there who doesnt even GET what shocks people about this. I dare say this is proof that uni isn't the best suited for a thorough education.

Of course, yes, studying radical islamic groups and a uni cleric could be just another camouflage for a terrorist cell.

But, being as braindead as police acted in this encounter they could as well take the manuals printout and look inside, and see if it's covered in there.

Remains the final question: Why would the terrorists not know whats in that manual, why would they read a version seized years ago and why do the idiots that set up a scanning of every damn email NOT involve some brain to think of situations like this, especially with a (back then) widely published piece of evidence.

imho funniest thing about it is that the DOJ publishs it, and most of the info comes from CIA agents training the afghan resistance. Yet again, you'd think they knew what's in it...

(and yes, i read that thing back then, too. and it was interesting, i.e. if you're in an area with such idiots trying to make a revolution never keep guns + ammo in the same place, so they can't restock on the people they killed. i can't see how it is bad to know what training they act by, it probably works better for stopping them than, well, sending researchers to jail)

inflammable because it's bad to see a hole school administration being just as dumb as a bunch of AK-47 waving idiots...

noclip?

Can you see the advantages!

ohmygod they invented diskless terminals that use a fullblown OS image

Thank you for the happy buzzword blurb and welcome to retying what failed in 1995.

"...and fail miserably"

old saying and oh-so-valid.