Re: [OT] RAID

[Mark Hindess <ukha@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 23 July 2007 at 11:17, "Ian Lowe" <ianlowe@xxxxxxx>
wrote:
>
> > Liunux is massively better to have on a home server than Windows
and
> > it's free!
>
> "arse".

Someone touched a nerve.  ;-)

> Sorry, but that's a pile of plop. This is a personal preference thing,
> nothing more.

If you really believed that statement then why did you go on to explain
why windows is better or/and linux is worse?

> As Linux has expanded to incorporate more driver support (still not
> good enough) it has become more unreliable - as anyone familiar with
> Windows would know, given that 95+ % of issues are down to 3rd party
> drivers.

Drivers will always be a problem due largely to increasing complexity
of the devices - consider todays graphics cards and those of ten years
ago - and due to badly/incorrectly documented devices.  I've experienced
this just as much on any platform I've ever used so this seems like a
weak argument against Linux to me.

I've been using Linux for more than 15 years and my servers today are
no less stable than those I ran 10 years ago.

For me, on Linux, the most unstable drivers tend to be with drivers that
are not part of the core kernel - madwifi, etc.  Fortunately, I don't
need these on my linux servers - not sure why you would to be honest
since servers don't generally need them.  My linux servers all have
uptimes of several hundred days.  This seems to be consistent across the
four architectures I run (mips, arm, x86, and x86_64).  (Running the
same thing on all four architectures is the biggest advantage to me.
The low power, "embedded-style" architectures are a fundamental
part
of my HA setup.  Running a gui like windows just seems like a waste of
resources.)

> Oh, and as for the "free" - it's only free if you value your
own time
> at zero. As soon as you consider your own time to be valuable, Linux
> doesn't look so attractive.

Well, I've been a unix sysadmin for 10+ years and I've not used
windows in that time so I can't comment except to point out that the
architecture support is rather limited for Windows.  It's easier to
learn one OS that works on all the architectures I might want to use
than learn windows for one (or two) and something else for the others.

> Interesting as a hobby, and can do some cool things but
> please.. Server 2003 wipes the floor with it for a non-geek every
> time.

Sigh.  It was a hobby platform in 1991 but I think it's big business now
and has been for a while.

Why would a non-geek care about the OS on a server?  A non-geek
shouldn't care if their set-top box, router or HA server runs Windows,
IOS, freebsd or Linux because that layer should be invisible to them.

I think the state-of-the-art today means that if you are running a
server (windows or linux) to automate your home, then I think you need
to be a geek if you want it to be able to maintain it.

Personally, I don't care what those doing HA today are using; I just
think we should concentrate our efforts on improve the state-of-the-art
so that users don't need to know.

Regards,
Mark.