Archive for October, 2008

An Important Reminder

Please, if you don’t already have a backup in place for your computer, do so today. Don’t wait until tomorrow. I was reminded again last night when the hard drive in my MacBook (my main computer) died. Immediately, I logged in to Mozy and there were all of my pictures and documents. It’s a free service (up to 2GB) and takes only minutes to setup. I’ve been on the other end of this plenty of times before, having to tell people that they’ve lost everything, but never on the receiving end. The good news is I didn’t lose anything important, but very well could have. If I would have lost anything it would have been my own fault given that I’m a systems administrator by trade, but sometimes the ones closest to it forget that it can happen to ourselves. Please, take a few minutes to either double-check that you are backed up and can restore your files or take the time to get a system in place. You can use built-in OS tools to backup to an external hard drive or machine across your network, or you can sign up for an online backup service such as Mozy. If you have more than 2GB of critical data, you can sign up an unlimited home account for only $4.95 a month. A very cheap price to ensure your pictures and documents are not lost. Whatever you do, make data that cannot be bought back a prioirty. I used to be worried about my music, but when it came down to it I can go buy my music back if I want, but not my pictures. We all know that hard drives are ticking time bombs if we rely upon one to store our data, but I just wanted to give a friendly reminder to everyone. :)

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Filed under Tech Trends : Comments (2) : Oct 11th, 2008

Wikipedia Switches to Ubuntu

Probably one of the most popular research sites on the web is in the midst of a switch to one of the largest growing Linux distributions. Wikipedia will be completing its transition to Ubuntu LTS from a mix of RHEL and Fedora machines. Wikipedia is making the move in an effort to make management simple by switching to a standard platform. Biron Vibber, CTO, says that they originally started with Red Hat at the beginning and during one of their periods of high growth, they went from 15 servers to 200 in about 18 months. They cited cost reasons for not switching to an entirely Red Hat platform. The current fleet of 400 servers is said to be managed by only 5 IT staff, an impressive testament to the Linux platform.

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Filed under News : Comments (4) : Oct 9th, 2008

The Best Linux Distro

In many a forum and blog entry, hundreds of Linux n00bs have asked what the best distribution of Linux is. The answer is, of course, that it depends upon what they want to do. Really, a lot of them do a lot of things well, but there are specific quirks about each one that cause us to be willing to start holy wars over our preferences in forums and other places. I finally decided to do something about it and solve the question once and for all. I used the greatest tool ever for decision making, sucks-rocks.com. Unfortunately, it was a three-way tie..

If you have any distros you want to add to compare, you can get to my list here.

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Filed under Just for Fun : Comments (0) : Oct 7th, 2008

Beta: Greek for Better?

While perusing forums and blogs, I’ve noticed a trend that seems to be happening, though I can’t quite put a finger on it. We know from a lot of articles that have been written recently that a good chunk of Google’s products are still listed as being in beta. A piece of software that I particularly enjoy, Zimbra, has a number of new features coming down the pipe that are also in beta and have been for some time. Other companies such as Amazon have had products in place such as EC2 that they want others to rely upon, yet they are still marked as beta.

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There are two things that I take away from this phenomena. First, people are relying upon beta or otherwise unsupported software seemingly with their lives. This was especially apparent to me (I tend to follow more open source products than anything) with the Zimbra Desktop and the earlier releases of Firefox 3. People (IT admins sometimes!) don’t seem to understand that unsupported means unsupported. The second thing that stands out as a bit ridiculous given the first point is that some of these companies want their users to depend upon their software. For instance, Google released Chrome some time ago in beta form. It’s completely unsupported and definitely an immature release. Yet, at the same time, Gmail has been in beta for years with no end in sight that I’m aware of.

Having people want to depend upon software that hasn’t had a supported release yet doesn’t surprise me. People tend to do some dumb things. Now, it’s all fine and dandy to have the latest and greatest even if it’s still a bit buggy. In fact, I want to be running on the bleeding edge of technology and can sympathize. It’s fun and exciting. Unfortunately, they call it the bleeding edge for a reason. Sometimes even mature software fails or has new bugs that crop up, let alone a product that’s not even been deemed release-able by its maker! Most in the software development industry will have no sympathy for people who have lost data or had productivity crippled by relying on software that is released under the ‘beta’ badge, and for good reason. I’ve watched countless unfortunate souls in the Zimbra forums download their email to Zimbra Desktop via POP and then have no where to go with it (a remedy to come soon!). So why is this an issue?

Given the definition of beta software and the warnings above, I’d never use Gmail. Yet, here I am, using Gmail. Why? Unfortunately I have no answers, only questions and observations. We’ve come to rely upon applications like Gmail. Google Docs, and a whole host of other Google products. We have servers that run on Amazon’s EC2 platform that whole businesses are relying upon. It would seem that some of the largest computer and Internet companies in the world want no liability for anything that could possibly go wrong, yet in the same breath want us to depend upon their services. Google News (not a beta product) suffered from this same crossroad just a few months ago. We saw an article get published to Google News via an automated crawler get pushed to Wall Street and cause some real damage. Google wants us to rely upon them as a reliable source to get our news, yet it’s going to blindly add stories from years past? Granted all of the blame doesn’t fall on them, but where’s the line? Gmail is another prime example. During the past summer months, Gmail was plagued with downtime issues, yet here we are, dependent upon Gmail. Plus, Gmail is a great source of revenue with ads on the interface (I’ve clicked on a few myself!) for Google, yet for whatever reason they want to avoid responsibility and supporting it. I’m a fan of Google products myself, don’t get me wrong, but let’s get some consistency here.

Like I mentioned before, I have no solutions, only questions. I think, though, that there are some serious questions that need answering from some of the larger providers of Internet services. Or perhaps it’s a simple misuse of beta. Could be ‘beta’ be the next ‘cloud’? Could it be the most undefinable, yet attacked and loved idea? Okay, so maybe not. But, for real, which is it? Can we depend upon Gmail, EC2, etc. or not? If so, we need a new label.

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Filed under Tech Trends : Comments (1) : Oct 7th, 2008

Windows on EC2

Amazon has announced support for Windows Server and MS SQL Server running in EC2 coming this fall. The announcement came the same day that Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer announced the coming of Windows ‘Cloud’. This functionality was available before using a bit of a hack, but will be fully supported coming before the end of the year. There’s no solid word from Amazon on what the costs will be nor how the licensing will work, though they have said “of course the actual price will be higher than Linux-based instances, due to the cost of Windows licenses”. The more traditional licensing style from Microsoft would be a bit difficult given the elastic nature of EC2, but they apparently have worked out something with Microsoft even with the recent news of Windows ‘Cloud’ on its way (somehow related?). You can read the original announcement here.

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Filed under News : Comments (0) : Oct 6th, 2008

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