Linux server advice 7495

On 16 Nov 2006, in the Usenet newsgroup comp.os.linux.misc, in article

Moe Trin

It's in the headers of your post

That is a disadvantage of having "published" information. Sometimes, the information gets out of date, but not being "there", I'd have no way of knowing this.

I'd certainly ask the instructor for advice. First, if he's going to of what's going on. And who knows, he might be amenable to a side job.

You've mentioned SuSE - and the Red Hat books. Both are 'rpm' based distributions, and both have multiple levels of versions, from 'free' on up through the Enterprise versions (which comes with some support, but is comparatively costly). Maintaining the installed systems boils down to installing any updates when they become available. In the manual days of old, I did this by running a quick FTP connection to the updates server run by the distribution (or a mirror, such as distro.ibiblio.org). Some FTP servers accept UNIX commands, and 'ls -lrt' lists files sorted on the file timestamp - newest at the bottom. I'd then compare what's new with a anything that was needed, dropping the files into an otherwise empty local directory. Then, with few exceptions, the update consisted of cd'ing into that local directory, and as root, running the command 'rpm -F *'. If there had been an update of a kernel, or primary library, a reboot was needed, while for other applications, the application need only be restarted.

Things have changed since then from peer pressure by the competing distributions. Debian has an outstanding package manager that made updates even easier, and consequently other distributions had to play catch-up to make maintenance easier. For a home user, it's pretty well transparent now. For the business user who has much less tolerance for failure, this automated update needs to be counterbalanced with the load on the system (you don't want to be updating while everyone and their dog is using your system) and common sense, but it can be pretty much the same automatic mode.

That's quite understandable, and is no different for any other service agreement. You'd be moaning about the local Fnord dealer if they weren't providing timely service of your vehicles or similar.

Over the network support (including over the phone when there is a local user who will do exactly what they are told, and report exactly what happened in the event of a network outage) is viable. The problem is going to occur when the Interstate is snowed over in sixteen places, and so on.

Except for working with windoze (which we don't have), I can agree that this is about normal. You know how the users are always demanding the latest-greatest hardware - well, where do you think our servers come from? They're all "retired" workstations, with the RAM max'ed out, and the disks replaced (we use SCSI on servers, IDE on user boxes).

Hmmm, maybe he's busy because JSW Consulting up the street has gone elsewhere. ;-)

Old guy