Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (2441 mails)

[Ben Higginbottom <benh.suse@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 6/3/05, Michael James <Michael.James@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Hmmm interesting, the only time I've thought of using vmware
>  in that context is playing with virus infection on a windows guest.
> Or do you just want to see how far rm -rf / can go?
> Andrew Tridgel told an amusing story at the Linux conf
>  of a bad interaction of unicode and command line feeding
>  a bare "/"  into a string to be recursively deleted.
> Ran fine till it started to clean out /proc
> Astute readers will note that "p" comes after "h", Ouch.
> 

Oh I've done that in the past (deliberately I want to make absolutely
clear) on my laptop which was at the time running 9.0 curiosity
finally got the better of me and I wanted to do a clean rebuild of
9.1; it crashed out when it tried to delete rm. Amazingly the system
remained up, although I couldnt really do anything given that bash had
bitten the dust :-)

VMware will be for a mixture of things, keeping the bosses happy by
kinda running windows and being part of AD and so on. But my primary
reason is to be able to simulate our production enviroment and have a
rapid rollback if anything goes wrong with the snapshot facility.
Autoyast and kickstart are fine, but they still require me to do
something other than sitting down :-)

> 
> I like having multiple identical hardware.
> Enough machines to do the job
>  and at least 1 with no user-visible services.
> Apart from being good for testing,
>  it means that I can pull a working system
>  out of anything but a total computer room meltdown.
> Yes we have maintenance but sometimes it takes longer
>  than you can afford to be down.  I had a disk array fail,
>  fortunately for me it happened just after I'd taken delivery
>  of a couple of new servers.  I swiped enough disks to put
>  together a duplicate array, rsync nursed the home dirs across,
>  and the installation was running normally when I rang Dell
>  to sort out the problem hardware Monday morning. (big weekend)
> As it turned out we lost the lot on the old array.  Dell replaced
> everything, controller, cables, disks. I don't know (or care)
>  how much was necessary, how much was apology.
> It enabled me to walk away from the problem.
> 

That would be an ideal situation, unfortunatley the app thats running
on them needs to be compiled for each server due to the 'interesting'
use of hostnames. Shades of solaris have gone dancing through my head
in the last few weeks.


> For network cards: Intel, always intel.
>  (Pure prejudice but it's served me well)

The same I've been looking at :-) My previous supplier (DNUK) always
used them, however my new job is a HP shop. Its nice kit, but I just
dont think it has much of a future.

Thanks for the help.

Best,

Ben