On 11/19/04 12:51 PM, "Danny Sauer"
george wrote regarding 'Re: [SLE] SuSE 9.2 and future packaging' on Fri, Nov 19 at 10:54:
Get a faster internet service :)
I've got a full T1's worth of bandwidth to my house. It's fast (and a bit of an involved story), but it's still not nearly as fast as a DVD drive. At typical sysadmin salaries, $10 buys about 15 minutes of my time. I'll bet I can swap out an optical drive and copy a few packages off of the DVD more than 15 minutes faster than someone on even a "fast" network connection could download any significant number of packages. So in one session (perhaps "at install time") the new drive pays for itself.
OK You say you have "a full T1's worth of bandwidth". Are you saying you have a T1 or the same amount of bandwidth? If you don't have a T1, you would not understand the difference in what ever you have and a T1. We also have a T1, but we also have two DSL lines that put the T1 to shame for most things for speed and cost much less. I don't know about your location, but here we are at about $600 (and that is cheap for this site) for the total T1- including local loop. DSL's are $40 each. Each one has a place and a situation that suites each better than the other.
I would propose that SuSE provide a link to froogle.com, which lists a new ATAPI DVD drive (which reads double-layer media) for as low as $19. Yes, $19. Sell your old crappy drive on eBay for $5-$10, since there's a new sucker online ever minute, and you've made back 1/2 of the cost to move to a faster drive. Put the DVD drive in a networked machine, NFS export it, and install everywhere from that one, $10 drive. You'll save more than $10 worth of time.
If your time is _that_ valuable, you would not do all this.
Really? What's a faster method that would conserve my time better? My time's indeed valuable, so I'd much appreciate tips. It takes maybe 5 minutes to create an ad for an old DVD drive, and it's not much work to order a drive + install it. It's not "all this" much work, considering the signifcant time savings. If money's tight, well, someone who can't swing a $20 drive might want to reconsider spending >$50 on software that's available for free in a few weeks, esp when said person can't even use the paid-for media to begin with.
OK, if you are spending the $ on the T1, you must be making it back- so what is the problem? You're not going to be worried about selling the old drive for $5-$10. Based on your figures, you would loose money. What do you bill out your time at? Is it $65 per hour or $160 per hour? I too have done the ebay thing. It does take time... More than you would be saving selling the drive for $10. Making up a listing, catching email questions, packaging, shipping... Now tell me it would not _cost_ you money. Unless it takes less than 5 minutes for everything, trash or donate it. You can still do one NFS export...with the updates, after you download it... Oh wait, you mirror the ftp site so it should be simple for you. Right? Now, do you ftp mirror it from locally off of your T1 or another third party hosting site?
--Danny, who actually mirrors the ftp site locally and installs from that machine, which trades a bit of initial time investment for an overall time savings
Now what about your downloading updates and patches? How would having a newer DVD drive help that? Like I said, get a bigger pipe for downloading. ____________________________________________________ Now, all that said. Lets get back to topic. I agree SuSE did screw up - and should give the same on CD's as DVD's... And why change DVD format w/o informing customers before they buy it? As someone else said, put the packages on the older DVD's or CD's, and if someone wants the source, let them download it. If you need source code, your doing something "important" enough to have more bandwidth at your disposal anyway. (or a good reason to hit your local hotspot for coffee and the sights) -- Thanks, George Suppose you were an idiot and suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself. Mark Twain