The redundancy of Dave McGuire (was: Truce, compromise reached? - was: teaching programming to kids - was: Looking for 8080/Z80 BASIC)

Please not that crap. Where I work we have circa 250 windows servers. If we had to re-boot a significant number of them every day I would never get any time to "play" computers. My trouble with Windows servers and commodity computing in general is that MANAGERS think it absolves them from any of the hard stuff (Capacity Management, Security, Change Control, Checking Log Files etc. etc). My Manager still isn't happy that we have some RAID-10 storage in the SAN because it "wastes space". Yesterday I had a bunch of developers asking to create a Business Objects database on the same box that has SharePoint (if you don't know, don't ask, I think of it as Facebook for Businesses) and which already has i/o service times that are heading towards the 1 second mark, goodness even the mainframe we had 35 years ago managed 25 i/o a second! Building a solid infrastructure is about proper design and architecture across the board. Run a UNIX shop in the same sloppy way folks run Windows shops and you would be up your neck in Poo Poo just as quickly. I know I have been there. Its been a while but I once spent a less than happy Sunday afternoon removing core dump files from a Solaris box. A disk partition was full where some one had rolled out a dodgy version of Mozilla that crashed on an Intranet page. The temp space had filled with core dump files and the whole production line had stopped because the apps that ran it wouldn't start. (yes it was a UK factory owned by a big US Corp. I won't name on here as they might sue but every one on here would know them) More recently having to work late because one of our Solaris boxes which has a hardened console had crashed (I can't remember why, possibly extended power outage) and fsck wouldn't complete with human input. I couldn't get any input in through the attached USB keyboard. Turns out the USB was disabled to prevent tampering! I ended up using Hyperterm on a Windows box above as the keyboard and watching the display on KVM monitor ... Now that is fun, needing a windows box to fix a Solaris one.... (No Solaris ones near by to patch the cable across) The above don't mean Solaris is bad, just it needs a little loving care and a bunch of flowers once in a while. Any computing system will crash if it is care is neglected and it runs out of resources. If a large number of users increase their resources a little bit its easy to kill any thing. I always hate the first day back after Christmas. In the UK many folks take the time between Christmas Eve and New Years day off. Judging by our car park yesterday it was the first day back for many. The result is that the load on the mail servers was up as folks read two weeks of back mail. Love to all, even Cobol programmers Dave Doing things virtually for over 30 years...