[mythtv-users] Some questions before I breakout the Mastercard

[Jarod C. Wilson]

On Mar 17, 2004, at 18:27, Maarten van den Berg wrote:

> On Thursday 18 March 2004 01:55, Jarod C. Wilson wrote:
>> Oh, I know things haven't always been rosy. Lots of people weren't 
>> very
>> happy until 6.2, which is when I *really* got into Linux hard-core, 
>> so I
>> probably missed out on some of your trials and tribulations (at that
>> point, I was in college playing baseball most of the time, only 
>> dabbling
>> in Linux with what little spare time I had).
>
> Well.  First off, I'm glad you took it so well, you being a RHCE and 
> all.

I'm definitely no "Red Hat or die" zealot. It just happens to be my 
personal favorite, partly because its been a central part of every job 
I've held, partly because its what I started out on (as far as Linux is 
concerned). I wouldn't suggest it over anything someone is already more 
comfortable with, and I know it ain't perfect (but like you said, what 
is?). Hell, my favorite (desktop & laptop) OS is actually Mac OS X.

> Secondly, it was of course *my*own* fault too; I should have been much 
> more
> thorough in stress testing the box prior to rollout, or even passing 
> on it
> entirely while the Glibc bugs were ironed out. But you know how it is, 
> you
> "need" those new fancy libs, and time is invariably short... :-(
> But this was bad. That RH5.0 box was built on really fine hardware 
> (mylex
> card, scsi raid, enormous amounts of RAM [for that era; I think it had 
> a
> whopping 192 MB])

Phat! I have a half-ton dual Pentium Pro 200 DEC Prioris MX 6200 tower 
around here with four hot-swap SCA bays, a Mylex DAC 960 RAID 
controller, 192MB of RAM, etc., probably right on par with that thing. 
I only keep it around for posterity. Though now that I've moved my rack 
and half my network gear to the garage, I could actually stand running 
that noisy thing out there (it could prop up a car at the same 
time!)...

> and for a good reason because it served as a
> backup-fileserver & development server and it also served a handful X
> terminals for a small workgroup in a small company. Truely NOT the 
> best role
> for an -in hindsight- unstable server.
> I still sometimes have nightmares of all those X terminal users 
> yelling,
> perfectly in sync: "Maarten!  It froze up again!"  (nope, just 
> kidding!)

I know the feeling... We had something similar happen when we first 
tried switching from CVS to Subversion at work a few weeks back. Its 
all good now though... ;-)

As an aside (oh wait, this whole email is an aside, so beside my aside, 
or something), Subversion kicks the living crap out of CVS when it 
comes to flexibility -- try changing the case of a file name in CVS 
(you can't, at least not without direct repo access by your SA), or 
move something and watch your history get blown away. Check in 52 
changes, get 52 commit messages, when they were all part of the same 
thing. Check in 52 changes, have the checkin fail part way through, and 
have an inconsistent repo. None of those are problems for Subversion. 
Atomic commits, full transaction rollback capability, renaming natively 
supported, history tracked across moves, etc.

>>> Sorry for getting so carried away here... ;-)   I'll stop right now.
>>
>> No problem, I like to hear other people's thoughts, especially when 
>> they
>> have very valid points.
>
> well... you give me way too much credit.  It was just a rant...  ;-)

Rants often contain valid stuff in 'em! Some of my best thinking is 
done when I'm ranting (me and my brother rant and rave to each other 
quite frequently...).

Okay, I should probably stop cluttering up everyone's mailboxes with my 
off-topic drivel.

-- 
Jarod C. Wilson, RHCE

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