[OpenIndiana-discuss] New Zone User Questions

[DormitionSkete@hotmail.com]

On Feb 4, 2013, at 1:53 PM, Sašo Kiselkov wrote:

> On 02/04/2013 08:02 PM, DormitionSkete at hotmail.com wrote:
>> On Feb 4, 2013, at 11:45 AM, Sašo Kiselkov wrote:
>> 
>>> On 02/04/2013 07:31 PM, DormitionSkete at hotmail.com wrote:
>>>> Oh, and a little off topic here, but some of you all didn't appreciate my old habit of weekly reboots just to clear out the RAM, etc. a while back.
>>> 
>>> Please don't think that anybody here was dissing you or anything. It's
>>> just that you had the wrong idea for why admins don't like to reboot
>>> their machines very often. It's not because of some misguided dick
>>> measuring contest, there are real issues with frequent rebooting.
>>> Besides the obvious downtime, there are rippling network effects, such
>>> as forcing reconvergence of distributed fault-tolerant systems, causing
>>> long-term performance issues due to cold caches and plain old hardware
>>> failure (on some systems hardware gets reinitialized and restarted at
>>> reboot, which can considerably shorten its lifespan).
>>> 
>>> If these don't affect you, then great, but most environments won't
>>> tolerate service disruption without very good justification.
>> 
>> I knew I was taking a chance when I suggested it; but I thought it might
>> buy the man some time to deal with it more at his convenience.
> 
> I understand the sentiment and I get your logic, but it has
> unfortunately not worked in my instances (which is why I spoke up).
> Suppressing problems is rarely an answer.
> 

I agree whole-heartedly.  But sometimes I've found that I have to suppress problems just to survive.  

I'm half-German, raised in a predominately German community with old German values like, "If you aren't going to do it right, don't to it at all."  I've really had to tone down on that through the years here, let me tell you!

Or as I tell the abbot here on a fairly routine basis, "I'm only one person.  I can only do so much."

I deal with a lot of problems just by not dealing with them.


>> I can't even fathom what you high-powered system admins do these days.
> 
> What do you mean?
> 


I see some of the posts some of you all make about really complex setups, and I see photos of data centers with racks upon racks upon racks of servers... and I hear some of you all talk about how you set up a thousand servers a year... and I can't imagine why any but the largest of organizations would need that many.

I could kind of understand it for some place like Joyant, where they're in the business of making cloud servers for their customers, but unless an organization is huge, like CBS or CitiBank, or some mega-corporation like that, it just doesn't make sense to me why organizations need this many servers.

I remember when virtualization came out as the big buzz-word several years ago.  I remember thinking, yes, it makes sense that you want to utilize your machines' resources as fully as you can, rather than having a lot of underutilized servers running, but all of this virtualization and zones, and such, adds a lot of complexity to the network.  

What does a typical organization today use this many servers for?

That's really my big stumbling block with all this.

I think I'm crazy for wanting to set up three zones on this one machine.  I have specific reasons for it, so I can justify it (to myself), but when I first embarked upon this project, I wasn't even going to use zones at all, just because I didn't think I should introduce that much complexity to our set up.

And maybe I'll never grasp this because I've been out of the work force for so many years.  I've been in this monastery fifteen years.  I simply haven't seen how things work these days, outside of our little world here.



>> We really need somebody competent in the whole network and sys admin
>> role(s) here...
> 
> Well, they can be had on the jobs market, but they do cost a bit. If you
> are only setting up some low-volume services on only a handful of
> servers, you may want to consider IT outsourcing and/or migrating to
> cloud services where possible. Except for that LTSP thing you described,
> e-mail and web services can be purchased at very reasonable prices.
> 


Well, we do have some rather bizarre requirements, like this PHP4 thing.  But if I had my way, we would outsource or migrate most of this to the cloud.  I'd love to use Joyant.  But the abbot is not a technical guy, and since he grasps even less of this than I do, he doesn't want to let go of the money.  

He'll buy me equipment, because that's tangible, and he can see it.  But to pay a recurring bill, or to pay a computer consultant what they cost these days... it just isn't going to happen.  

Not unless there's a dire emergency that he can see and relate to.

It makes life kind of interesting; but since I don't pay the bills, I can't complain.