Cisco's throwing their gloves into the ring for server hardware. Now they can offer Server Hardware, Datacenter Experts (strong in Server Virtualization with their investments into VMware) and Networking Hardware. All they need now is to offer some Storage Virtualization Appliance on their Server Hardware and they can start to offer the whole datacenter in a shipping container.
Next Up: Commodity Datacenters. Everything the Cloud wishes it could be.
For a short while I thought that Congress was going to do something good in the name of Capitialism instead of turning America into a socialist or merchantlist state. They were going to vote down the additional $350 billion of the Fall '08 Bail-Out package and Obama threatened/politicio them to pass it.
More evidence that the bail-out is wasted money for poorly lead big business whom need to fail for all our benefit. Poor managment isn't making one bad choice, it is making lots.
Here I am sitting in Wisconsin and see this ad on the standard news channel that they are going to have coverage starting at 4am. The coverage is "Weather". Normally they start at 5am for road coverage and some overnight news. Nothing exciting.
So what are they going to talk about at 4am when all the schools are closed already. All parents and kids are going to be sleeping in. People are going to sleep in if anything today.
News story: It's cold. Breaking News: It's really cold. Man on the street: Dang Barbara, it's cold out here. I'm going to put on that hat right now. Latest News: It's really cold. Wear more layers and cover up so you don't freeze your nose off. Last News before you head to work: It's really cold. You know that hat and sweater you have and don't wear, put it on you fool.
When I was a kid, the news said tomorrow's going to be in the negatives. Dress warm. This closing schools is silly.
Sometimes the strangest things can have an affect on performance of your computer. Using the Fishworks tool which uses Dtrace for monitoring Sun Storage ZFS systems performance of your disk is affected by shouting.
I've been reading a bunch of posts that have been covering the idea of "making another root account". I read this KB article from VMware when it first came out and said "how dumb, no thanks". I didn't realize it would cause such a stir.
When I design new systems and deploy new applications and processes at my work, a large part of the discussion in my mind is how much support work will this new procedure cause. Initial deployment is typically all a project planner thinks about. That is a small cost in the overall picture from my experience.
Adding an additional root level account introduces the following support issues:
An account that has to be audited
An account that has to have a regular password update which means tracking that password
An account that needs to have the password distributed to various individuals
An attack vector that must be considered or contained
Anyone that immediately says these are trivial never has had to maintain this for thousands of accounts from the top down to the actual account. It might be simple to do though when you start adding this to every procedure you have, it adds up.
Now why would you need another root account? I'm doing everything I can to get rid of all usage of it. sudo does 99.99% of everything I need to do with root level privileges in ESX. If I could add a host into VirtualCenter using a user account instead of root I'd be happy to disable logins using root. There is only one situation I can think of that I need root for and if the host is that screwed up, I'll most likely be rebooting it anyways.
Not much use for root honestly. Fight the power. As a fellow blogger says so elegantly, "Just cause you can doesn't mean you should".
