The Nubby Admin

As a result of a tweet of mine, I had some rather funny responses that I agreed with.

It’s long been a frustration of mine, however my ire was most recently raised over this topic by a certain company who makes a remote control appliance. To be fair, the company makes a fine product and they totally blow away their competition. However, they leave no clue on their site how much their appliances cost nor a ballpark figure for their Standard or Enterprise licenses. I resorted to Googling to find what their customers are chattering about on the webs concerning their pricing and found that they are indeed one of the highest priced offerings in their market space. Fortunately, word on the street is that they work with you on the prices, but still… why should I have to resort to trolling for water-cooler banter to find out something simple like the price?

There are a number of things that go through my mind when I land on a vendor’s pricing page only to see the dreaded words “Request a Quote!” Here they are:

Our prices are so absurdly high that we know you’ll walk away from us in disgust and consider our competition if we publicly reveal them.

Isn’t this what we all think immediately? It makes the most sense. You only hide what you’re ashamed of or are afraid of being misunderstood over. So why not just fly your flag high and show how much you cost? At least show some guts and don’t apologize for yourself. I’d have more respect for a company to come out and show their prices as being very high than to keep it hidden to ellude me.

On the positive side, perhaps they’re hoping that the product will speak for itself and don’t want people to be distracted by the price. If that’s the most positive spin I can put on this topic, that’s pretty sad.

We don’t trust the merit of our product enough to sell you, so we force you to contact a sales “engineer” so that they can pressure you into buying.

This is actually my biggest fear. I’m already convinced that the product is insanely expensive. However, that doesn’t scare me nearly as much as the likelihood of an army of soul-less sales reps descending on me like Cessna-sized zombie mosquitoes intent on exsanguinating my budget as a light snack. And oh yes, it happens. If you will not be forthright with me about your prices, I am fearing for my privacy that an overzealous sales rep will be air-lifted to my house looking like Chuck Norris in Delta Force.

We’re living the high life sipping Dom Perignon from empty Almas caviar containers in the driver’s seat of our Pagani Zondas.

No, I don’t believe that your profit margins are being used to feed starving orphans in Namibia. I think you’re trying to live like Google by having free snack machines in your lunch room and masseuses roaming the halls looking for any kind of billable work. At least send a masseuse to me when I have to buy one of your “Platinum Service Contracts”. And some chocolate covered malt balls. I love those things.

Our business is in such financial peril that we have to charge heinous amounts of money for our product and we require yearly support contract updates to keep us afloat.

Honestly, rather than the vendor living the high life this is what seems more likely to me. Your business is failing, you can’t figure out what to make your margins on, no one will give you VC, buy equity or offer you a loan so now you have to jack up your prices. You’re really re-arranging deck chairs on the Titanic and you’ll be out of business in 6 months leaving me with 18 months left on an overpriced support contract.

We want to research what organization you work for so we can tailor a special price gouge just for you!

My suspicions about this are confirmed when the “organization” field is made to be mandatory. Do you want to see if I’m an upstart so you can assign your least responsive reps to my lower-end account? Or maybe I’m a major corporation so you can upsell my boss’s boss on your latest cash blackhole? Better yet, perhaps I’m a government entity or government contractor! Damn the capex limits… FULL INVOICING AHEAD!

Thanks to @SrslyJosh for this one.

We believe that our product will eventually be commoditized and until that happens we will be as opaque as possible with our business.

Really? I mean… REALLY? A lack of transparency makes me fear that your business model has cracks in it and you’re fluctuating your price drastically and frequently to ride the waves out.

Thanks to @JohnLockie for this one.

In order to hide the real cost of our products they are arranged in such a byzantine structure with so many variant pricing schemes that you won’t know how to decipher them anyway, so please contact us to be put in touch with a pricing ninja (+5 Confusion Spells against C-level execs).

We’ve all seen tiered edition and pricing structures that made us have to brush off our UML skills to chart out the possibilities. Wouldn’t it be nice if the vendor just obscured all of our choices and chose what was best for us? ಠ_ಠ

Thanks to @j_angliss for this one.

Are there any vendors out there reading this? Can you please explain whythere’s secrecy over your product’s pricing? It only engenders suspicion and distrust on the part of potential customers. Then again, if you A/B tested your pricing page and found that it converted better, who am I to get in the way. You’d better have an awesome product though, because if you’re barely better than the competition I’ll choose the more transparent company’s products most of the time.

Finally, if you’re a purchaser, what else do you think of when your vendor doesn’t show their prices at all? Any suspicions that I didn’t hit? Let me know in the comments.

As Preston Kutzner recently said to me, NTFS is a harsh mistress when accessing it via Linux. I am using Fedora 14 and have a LaCie 2big external hard drive connected via USB. The 2big is configured as a RAID 1 set using it’s own built-in RAID hardware. When I try to open the drive in Nautilus I receive the following error:

Unable to mount LaCie 2Big.

Error mounting: mount exited with exit code 12: Failed to read last sector (1953519615): Invalid argument

HINTS:

• Either the volume is a RAID/LDM but it wasn’t setup yet,
• or it was not setup correctly (e.g. by not using mdadm –build …),
• or a wrong device is tried to be mounted,
• or the partition table is corrupt (partition is smaller than NTFS),
• or the NTFS boot sector is corrupt (NTFS size is not valid).

Failed to mount ‘/dev/sdc1′: Invalid argument. The device ‘/dev/sdc1′ doesn’t seem to have a valid NTFS. Maybe the wrong device is used? Or the whole disk instead of a partition (e.g. /dev/sda, not /dev/sda1)? Or the other way around?

Being new to the world of Happy Little Penguins I spent a full day Googling, learning plenty of new things at every step and button mashing in the form of running shell commands that I had only just learned about moments earlier.

I’m certain that through this whole ordeal a solution existed and that evidences of the problem were staring me in the face the whole time. I am further certain that a more elegant solution existed than the scorched-earth one that I chose (that you will find out about in just a moment), but I am too much of a neophyte to pick up on them much less be able to act on anything I might have noticed.

I could see the 2big in the /dev folder at /dev/sdc1. The 2Big is listed in /dev/disk/by-id as the following:

usb-LaCie_2_BigQuadra_00D04BA80A0443AE-0:0
usb-LaCie_2_BigQuadra_00D04BA80A0443AE-0:0-part1

It is listed in by-label as the following:

LaCiex202Big

It is listed in by-path as the following:

pci-0000:00:1d.7-usb-0:3.4:1.0-scsi-0:0:0:0
pci-0000:00:1d.7-usb-0:3.4:1.0-scsi-0:0:0:0-part1

Finally, it is listed by-uuid as the following:

lrwxrwxrwx. 1 root root  10 Mar  2 14:29 3E421CD2421C90AF -> ../../sdc1

fdisk -l /dev/sdc shows the following:

Disk /dev/sdc: 1000.2 GB, 1000153686016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 121595 cylinders, total 1953425168 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0xe7479c04
 
Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdc1            2048  1953521663   976759808    7  HPFS/NTFS

I created a new folder /mnt/2big and ran mount /dev/sdc1 /mnt/2big and received the same error as I did in Nautilius (as if I wouldn’t have?). I decided to search the generic error, rather than focus on anything to do with the LaCie drive. “Error mounting: mount exited with exit code 12” brought back some interesting things. One of the “solutions” was to reformat the disk with gparted. That is not an option I wanted to exercise unless as a last resort.

I then tried: ntfsfix /dev/sdc1

Mounting volume... OK
Processing of $MFT and $MFTMirr completed successfully.
NTFS volume version is 3.1.
NTFS partition /dev/sdc1 was processed successfully.

I then rebooted into Windows expecting that a chkdsk would be automatically requested to be performed. It was not, so I booted back in Linux to try a few more things before attempting a manual chkdsk within Windows. I installed testdisk thinking that I could perform some kind of partition table rebuild with it. After analyzing the 2big I received this interesting error:

Disk /dev/sdb - 1000 GB / 931 GiB - CHS 121596 255 63
The harddisk (1000 GB / 931 GiB) seems too small! (< 1000 GB / 931 GiB)
Check the harddisk size: HD jumpers settings, BIOS detection...
The following partition cant be recovered:
 
Partition               Start        End    Size in sectors
HPFS - NTFS              0  32 33 121601  25 24 1953519616 [LaCie 2Big]
 
[ Continue ]
 
NTFS, 1000 GB / 931 GiB

At about that point, someone wondered what NTFS driver I was using so I made sure that I was using ntfs-3g. I then decided to use Cfdisk to do some probing. Cfdisk /dev/sdb1 got me this error:

FATAL ERROR: Bad primary partition 0: Partition ends after end-of-disk

So apparently the partition was sized larger than the disk. And Windows is okay with this and will perform without complaint? No attempt to fix it is made? Insert angry face here.

I then plugged the 2big into a Windows Vista machine intending to chkdsk it, but as the disk was being mounted I saw a dialog box warning “Do you want to scan and fix LaCie 2big? There might be a problem with some files on this device or disc. This can happen if you remove the device or disc before all files have been written to it.” Interesting, so suddenly there was some kind of file system error detected. There was an option to scan and fix, but since I was not 100% sure what command would be run, I continued without scanning. Instead I manually ran chkdsk using the /F /V and /X options (Fix errors, show messages and force volume dismount respectively). I plugged the drive into Fedora but still received the same errors as before when mounting it.

At that point, quite a lot of time had been spent researching and testing, so I decided on the easy fix. I had already synced the 2big to another drive before attempting this project so I gparted it (I was too lazy to even try parted), created a new partition and then copied everything back to the 2big. Problem “solved”.

I know that there was likely a less destructive way of ending that saga, but I haven’t had sufficient beatings with the Linux cluebat to know how. Is dealing with NTFS always this frustrating on Linux? What practices and standards has Microsoft been using with how Windows interacts with NTFS volumes that it can apparently have an unhealthy partition table and still work without warning or fixing the problem? I’d seriously consider using ext4 for all my drives and using a plugin like Ext2Read within my windows machines if I didn’t often physically share some drives with other people’s Windows machines.

What are your experiences with NTFS on *NIX machines? Exceedingly painful or am I doing it wrong?

My Problem:

Trying to use Virtual Box 4 on a Fedora 14 installation receives these errors in succession when starting a virtual machine:

Failed to open a session for the virtual machine [machine name].
The virtual machine ‘[machine name]‘ has terminated unexpectedly during startup with exit code 1.

Result Code:
NS_ERROR_FAILURE (0×80004005)
Component:
Machine
Interface:
IMachine {662c175e-a69d-40b8-a77a-1d719d0ab062}

Kernel driver not installed (rc=-1908)

The VirtualBox Linux kernel driver (vboxdrv) is either not loaded or there is a permission problem with /dev/vboxdrv. Please reinstall the kernel module by executing ‘/etc/init.d/vboxdrv setup’ as root. Users of Ubuntu, Fedora or Mandriva should install the DKMS package first. This package keeps track of Linux kernel changes and recompiles the vboxdrv kernel module if necessary.

My Solution:

This sounds too simple, but it is potentially the solution: Make sure that you are running the latest version of VirtualBox straight from the VirtualBox website and not just the latest version from whatever repositories you’re using. In my case, I was running VirtualBox 4.0.2 which had some issues with my latest Fedora kernel. I had to go to the Virtual Box website and download the RPM for version 4.0.4.

There’s something of a mystery as to why this even works for me since I can’t see that any Virtual Box kernel modules have been installed. Read on for more.

The Long Story:

Trying to get a Windows 7 VM running on Fedora, I launched Virtual Box and made a new virtual machine. When starting it, I received the errors above. I took the advise of the second error dialog box and installed the Dynamic Kernel Module Support Framework (dkms-2.1.0.1-1.fc12). Supposedly, the kernel module needed for Virtual Box to work will need to be recompiled after every kernel update. DKMS helps that. Being a Linux noob, I learned about DKMS for the first time through this. I rebooted thinking that would force the rebuild (based on something I read), but that was not the case.

I checked for the existence of the Virtual Box KMOD. lsmod did not show anything that matched *vb* which worried me. Just to make sure, cat /proc/modules | grep *vbox* was also empty. Trying to build the kernel module with vbox_build_module received the dreaded “command not found” error. Many, many different suggestions are made about this error online and different ones work for different situations. Reading on some forums, it appeared that some have had this issue and had to make sure they had the latest version of virtualbox to be compatible with the latest kernel. I was running 4.0.2 and 4.0.4 was out. I uninstalled and then installed the latest version. Voilà! I could launch a VM.

However, I probed a bit more and found something puzzling. I checked the installed kernel modules but found none relating to Virtual Box. vbox_build_module was still not found when run as root in the terminal. No idea yet why this all worked for me in spite of no visible kernel modules. Nonetheless, my ultimate solution was to go directly to Virtual Box’s site and get the latest package for my OS. Don’t rely on your repository to have the latest and greatest version.

In spite of the loner stereotype that SysAdmins have, we’re rather social creatures typically. In my experience, IRC was, is and will continue to be king of real-time communication between techie types. I’ve had my bacon saved a few times by very helpful volunteers on various IRC channels. IRC as a medium provides a lot of features, history and culture and is unlikely to have a complete downfall. However, the medium isn’t exactly “light weight” for people new to the concept, and sometimes for old IRC hands it can still be something of a pain to set up a new client or even run a separate client on top of everything else that’s already running on their PC. Is IRC burdensome? Not exactly. However, a lighter weight medium might be nice once in a while.

Enter ServerFault’s new chat feature (okay, it’s half a year old, but it still has that new car smell). Actually, it’s a feature of the entire Stack Exchange family of sites. If you log into any Stack Exchange site, the most popular of which are ServerFault, StackOverflow and SuperUser, you will see a small link that says “Chat” at the top of the page (click to see a larger image).

The chat room is browser-based and is the single sharpest, most functional browser-based chat system I’ve ever experienced. I’m not sure how it’s made, but hats of to the creators. It may not be as fully functional as IRC (not even close), but for a simple means of exchanging real-time text chat in a browser, it’s unparalleled in my experience.

There are a few rules to consider with all Stack Exchange chat rooms. These are copied from Jeff Atwood’s blog post about the public beta of chat rooms back in August 2010.

• You must have a parent site account in good standing with at least 20 reputation to talk in the chat. So if you don’t have a ServerFault account, you can’t get into the ServerFault chat rooms. If you have an account on any Stack Exchange site via an OpenID account (in my case my Google ID), then you can easily create an associated account with any other Stack Exchange site in about 4 seconds. Just attempt to log in to the new site and select your OpenID provider.
• Before visiting chat, be sure you’re logged in at the parent site, because Stack Exchange uses the parent cookie to know who you are.
• Please read the chat faq. And if you’ve already read it, humor Jeff and read it again … it has changed, and they will continue to improve it over time.

Again, take a look at the chat FAQ to get familiar with the concept. Some things to keep in mind:

• You must have a reputation of 20 to chat. This keeps out drive-by “Do you haz teh codes” seekers. Twenty reputation points is pretty trivial to gain, so don’t worry.
• The chat room isn’t suited for troubleshooting and problem solving issues. That’s what the main Stack Exchange sites are for. That’s not to say that people won’t ask the occasional question on a topic, however deep discussion is usually directed to make an official question on a Stack Exchange site. The chat tends to be a great place for open ended discussions. Postfix vs sendmail and Linux vs BSD are recent examples of topics that come up. However, I’ve never seen discussions cross any friendly lines, so if you have an axe to grind, check it at the door because you won’t be accepted with it.
• The culture is laid back, non confrontational and not entirely politically correct. It’s helpful, casual and friendly. Long periods of silence are punctuated by rapid discussions about which wireless carrier rips off their customers worst, what the best brand of cheap bourbon is and the merits and demerits of sales tax (all real-life examples that I’ve seen talked about).
• There are multiple chat room associated with each site. For example, as of this post, ServerFault has three rooms. “The Comms Room” (general banter; most popular), “ServerFailt: Vote to Close” (A place for links to be posted to questions that should likely be closed) and “Backup and Disaster Recovery” (No idea where this one came from, it’s not inhabited and will likely be closed soon).

Here’s a screenshot of the larger Stack Exchange community of chat rooms. As of this posting, there are 22 active rooms with 60 users spread out between them:

If you’re a SysAdmin and would like to find a group of likeminded professionals to gab with, head on over to ServerFault’s chat rooms (specifically The Comms Room) and join us!

I admit it. I know a decent amount about things that most SysAdmins seem to shun and disdain. No, I’m not talking about my Hello Kitty T-shirt and watch collection. I’m talking about social media and internet marketing. Much of my knowledge about those things was attained because of starting my own business and launching a few websites either on my own or with friends. When you’re doing a “two guys in a garage” business venture (or a “one guy living in his mother’s basement” project), everyone has to wear a few separate hats. And by “a few separate hats” I mean “try this kitchen sink on for size.”

As a result I’ve had to spend many, many hours researching things like Twitter, FaceBook (still a mystery to me since I don’t use it personally), online advertising (including but not limited to CPC, CPA, CPM and affiliate marketing), SEO, SEM, blogging and taking all of the metrics each topic can gather and trying to find something meaningful from them.

(Image by Nancy “Dot D” Dorsner)

Often in the last six months I’ve stopped in the midst of mentally squeezing down a social media rabbit hole and wondered “What am I even doing?” Am I the same person who could zone out and spend hours upon hours spec’ing out NAS systems? Am I the same person who found it therapeutically rejuvenating to pour over Juniper’s product line? How far I have come.

That’s not to say that I wouldn’t rather be learning about Juniper equipment than trying to get a FaceBook following for a client’s products.  But really, if you think about it, it kinda makes sense for me to know both. I don’t like to define myself as a “technology person”. I like to try and be “that problem solving guy” or “that efficiency person”. I see a problem, I cogitate on the problem, I solve the problem. Or I at least make it less of a problem than it was before I saw it. That can mean fixing a problem with how dishes are washed at church to getting a doctor’s office’s computer systems to pass a HIPAA audit. That can also mean making my clients more visible to their potential customers than they currently are.

I’m not saying I’m a social media expert by any means. However, one place that I do work for had some great educational content to share with the world, but they just weren’t doing much of anything about it. A bi-monthly printed newsletter to their list of supporters was as far as it went. I installed WordPress on their site and encouraged them to blog (with the help of someone else that worked internally). Now they have an awesome blog with lots of great content that’s directly educational and not just self promotion! The next problem was that no one was reading the blog. So I got them on a Twitter account and helped them grow their followers. Now they’ve got targeted traffic. The next step is to score some guest blog spots for them, get them on related blog lists, blog rolls and blog aggregators. They now have more traffic to their site than ever before and possible new supporters to their business as a result. Also, there’s some new excitement breathed into the organization as they see new people being exposed to their content and mission. Problem = solved.

I don’t think IT contractors can come close to replacing dedicated social media managers. However, often IT people are looked at as having special insight into the Twitters and the Facebooks and the bloggy things because “hey, they run on computers and you know about computers!” Especially when small offices often can’t afford highly specialized people for each facet of their business. I’m honestly thinking about adding a social media competency to my list of services that I offer to my clientele. Not pitching myself as a social media wizard, just like I don’t say I’m a highly trained storage specialist, but I know my way around storage enough to help out those in my market.

Are there any other IT contractors out there who also dabble in social media for clients? Personally, it’s not something I’m too ashamed of. I mean, people have needs. I have a brain. I combine the two and come up with solutions. But is it that unusual for an IT person to implement a backup solution one day and make a 5 step plan to creating more of an internet presence the next day?

And please tell me I’m not the only one to use Hello Kitty wallpapers on my work computer.

I like to keep track of itty bitty form factor PCs. You never know when you’ll need a tiny amount of processing power to run a router, thin client or just a family member’s “Webmail PC” as I sometimes call them. I just stumbled upon the ECOPC N.1A by EVO technologies.

Here’s some specs on it:

• Based on the Intel Atom N270 processors
• Can run Windows or Linux
• Uses 10~11W at idle
• Uses 16W at full CPU load with 2.5″ SSD
• Uses 18W with 2.5″ HDD
• Uses less than 1W at standby
• Can operate with or without it’s fan depending on ambient temps so it has the potential to be totally silent.
• 19.5cm in depth, 17.8cm in width and 4cm in height
• 12V DC input
• Can be attached to a flat screen TV or monitor using VESA mounts

Another interesting point quoted from their website is this:

The N.1 will last over 10 times longer than a standard over 100W PC from the same amount of stored power in battery. Moreover, it can run off a DC battery and does not required a inverter, because it uses 12V input. So it is solar/wind power friendly and also ideal as cars, trucks, boats.

The price starts at $285.99 USD (excluding Taxes and Duties).

Almost more interesting to me than the hardware was one of the two options for a preinstalled OS. Of course, the ubiquitous Ubuntu is made available, but the other option is a Linux based home server OS named Amahi. I’d never heard of the OS before and took a look at the website. Apparently it’s still in beta, but it seems easy enough to join the beta program.

Amahi is based on Fedora (yay!) and has the standard set of features that you’d expect from a home server OS. At least, I think it does. I’m not a huge “home server” user – if I need a server at home, I do it up hardcore and spawn a few Windows Server instances. Amahi has it’s own app store. It uses a customized version of FireFly Media Server that they call “AmahiTunes“. There’s also disk pooling, a VPN and a host of ways to back things up among other features. Check out the features page for a more thorough list.

I wasn’t able to discern if the distribution has plans on having a commercial element. No business model is presented that I could find. Who knows if this will be around in a year or two. I certainly hope so as it looks sweet. I’ve never been keen on the idea of purchasing Windows Home Server, so if there’s an open source alternative, I’m down with that.

Does anyone have experience with micro form factor PCs like the EVO ECOPC? How about a Linux based home server distribution like Amahi? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Last week I wrote about my decision to attempt to migrate from Windows to a Linux distribution. I asked for advice from folks in the blog post as well as on Twitter and received several days’ worth of awesome advice. Thanks to all who helped me out!

I think I’ve made a determination about which distribution I’m going to stick with: Fedora Linux.

Why the interest in this distro? Why not others like Ubuntu or Mint? Two primary reasons:

First, Fedora is an RPM based distribution from Red Hat that indicates where the stable RHEL may be going. If I learn Fedora, I’ll be familiar with RHEL and be able to use that experience in real life situations. I’ll also be able to garner some certifications to show what I know (important to me since I’m working as a contractor and need to preen myself in front of clients).

Second, Ubuntu, Mint and Pinguy (Why haven’t I heard of Pinguy sooner?!) are all awesome distributions that I’d go with in a heartbeat if I wasn’t an IT pro. In fact, the next person who is a candidate for replacing Windows with a desktop Linux distro will probably get either Mint or Pinguy from me. However, perhaps they’re a bit too safe in my case. I’d like for things to be ever so slightly less ready for mass consumption (Slackware and Gentoo fans, stop laughing). Fedora isn’t quite as polished as some other distros. As it is, I’ve already had some fun with yum and package kit not quite working and learned a lot in the process.

Last Saturday I installed Fedora 14 on my laptop and I’ve been ootching it along day by day since. However, I’m not going to commit to leaving Windows for it until two things happen first:

• Wait for the next kernel update just to make sure my nVidia driver takes the change nicely. It should since I used the akmod version, but… you never know.
• Get a good backup scheme going and perform a full, bare metal restoration of my environment with no lost applications, settings or data. I’d like to be able to perform the backup while the system is running and not resort to image CDs like clonezilla, but I will if that turns out to be the best way. I might make a clonezilla PXE boot server on another PC so I can boot off the network and do it.

Once those two things are completed, especially the backups, I’ll start the complete transition. I think Wine and VirtualBox seamless mode may play large parts in this transition, but I hope to be using as many native Linux apps as possible. I’m just not willing to give up Microsoft Outlook 2010 (it’s also unwise since I support many people who use it). Sorry Mutt fans.

Thanks again to all those who helped me in this choice and gave me awesome advice on how best to learn Linux. Looks like 2011 is shaping up to be a year full of learning. Any last pleas to try a different distro? (Some day I’ll try Gentoo. Promise!)

TL;DR I’m going to attempt to migrate from Windows to a Linux distribution as my main OS. I’ll probably have to dual boot with Windows because of a few apps that don’t virtualize or handle WINE well (Photoshop, Steam, etc.). I’ll virtualize Windows within Linux for the Windows apps that I can’t live without but do virtualize well. My only problem now is settling on a Linux distro. Care to offer a helpful opinion?

The Time Has Come!

The time has come for me to consider branching out and learning more about Linux than the crumbs that I’ve gathered from glancing interactions with the OS over the last few years. I’ve been more or less happily using Windows for years now. I haven’t had any terrible experiences with it. I actually liked Vista. Windows Server does a great job and Active Directory makes me happy. I’m not a Microsoft basher or Richard Stallman cheerleader. I don’t really care one way or the other about the OS that a person uses, as long as it was chosen for a good reason and it gets the job done well. I just think it’s time to get out of my comfort zone and attempt to be more of a polymath in my profession.

My first exposure to Linux was only a few years ago. My experience with computers was as a casual hobbyist from childhood until age 22 in 2004. As a result, I didn’t even know about such a thing as Linux until 2005 or so when I touched my first Linux distribution which was, to the best of my knowledge, a Fedora Core 4 Live CD. At that point in my life I was up to my eyeballs learning Windows Server and Active Directory so I paid little attention to it. Over the years I had more glancing encounters with the enigmatic penguin. Once I moved to Debian 4 as my main OS on an old Desktop for about 5 weeks in ’07 while my main Windows laptop went careening through the halls of Dell’s technical support complex in Dallas. (I dropped a ProCurve on it and funny things started happening. Three cheers for no-fault warranties!)

As you can see, I’m not totally clueless about Linux. I once knew a person who was something of a hobbyist and could do a decent job building a new home-use PC, however he looked at me straight-faced in ‘06 and asked “Who makes Linux? Didn’t Microsoft buy them?” I’m not that out of the loop. I can putter around in the terminal (partially helped by supporting about 40 Macs at one workplace) and definitely know how to RTFMan page and UTFGoogles.

Now, in 2011, I’ve decided that I need to become more fluent in an OS other than Windows. What caused this change in direction? An array of things building up over time, however recently it’s been due to me writing my competencies out for prospective clients and in the process I have to explain that I’m not competent enough with Linux to accept jobs that involve significant interaction with it. I don’t like the way that sounds. It doesn’t seem right for a SysAdmin generalist to count out a significant portion of possible machines to support. Saying I don’t know AIX or BeOS is one thing, but Linux isn’t a sidelined OS like those are.

Also, my grandmother’s laptop running Windows 7 was hosed with a rather nasty virus. She overnighted it cross-country to me to fix. I promptly installed Ubuntu 10.10 and in the process of setting it up I realized how sharp Ubuntu is. I also realized how familiar I was with the terminal and various Bash commands. I guess I absorbed more than I realized over the years. It was then that I realized that I could easily see myself using one of the more user friendly Linux distributions as my main OS.

So What’s the Problem?

My main problem is that I’m not sure what distribution to choose. I’ve narrowed it down to the following:

• Fedora 14 (That would get me familiar with an RPM based distro and perhaps I could parlay that familiarity onto studying for RedHat certs)
• CentOS 5.5 (RedHat without the Red Hat. If I went this direction, I’d have familiarity with the most popular enterprise Linux distro and be poised to get certified in it. It seems too good to be true. The downside is that I won’t be as bleeding edge as Fedora. Or is that a good thing?)
• Ubuntu 10.10 (All the cool kids are doing it!)
• Wait for Ubuntu 11 to drop in April (I’m so impatient. I want Linux now! Plus the new Gnome shell looks freaky.)
• Mint (Looks sharp, and it’s also mainstream so I’ll have good community support)
• Mint Debian (Same as above, except it’s a rolling distro so no major upgrades. Wewt!)

I’ve remove the following from my consideration

• Debian (I had too much trouble with the GNU-only nature of the OS a few years ago. I do like the rolling nature of it though. I remove this from consideration with grief. Maybe I’ll put it back on the list to consider if I find some compelling reason to.)
• Sabayon (Gentoo based, looks awesome and it’s rolling, but it’s not mainstream enough for a noob like me.)
• OpenSUSE 11 (SUSE was supported on my laptop model at one point. Drivers seemed to work great. However, after using it for a few days recently I noticed a lot of weird redraw errors in the desktop environment and it also didn’t see my LaCie 2Big hard drive. I’m also concerned about its future with Novell.)
• Gentoo (Maybe someday I’ll be cool enough to run Gentoo. Then, I will be rightly said to have arrived.)
• MEPIS (It looks like a fine distro, but I have no compelling reason to choose this over a more mainstream distro like Fedora or Ubuntu.)
• Mandriva, PCLOS, Linspire, etc. (Same as MEPIS)

I’ve also removed BSDs from consideration. That seems like a whole ‘nother can of worms I’m not ready to open up. Sorry @Obfuscurity and @Voretaq7.

There are two minor ussues that are further complicating my choice. Do I choose a rolling distribution or not? 64-bit or 32-bit?

The debate between choosing a rolling distribution or a rip-and-reload version design is causing me some consternation. Being a Windows person, I’m more accepting of the rip-and-reload method. However, the idea of never having to reinstall an OS to get the latest version is intriguing. Very intriguing. However, part of me knows that nothing is ever that simple. There are so few true rolling distros that the pickings are slim.

Once I decide on a distro, should I use the 32-bit or 64-bit edition? I’ve been running 64-bit windows for a while now and am happy to see continuing support for the platform. However, I’m not sure how that will complicate things in the Linux ecosystem. The fanatic in me wants to throw support behind the 64-bit platform. The pragmatist sits back and sips 32-bit milk.

Please Help Meh!

I’d appreciate any insights that you could give me about the major points to consider in a distribution. I know that in most scenarios people simple say “pick the distro that you’re most comfortable with”. Also, hardware compatibility is another consideration. My Dell XPS m1530 with an Nvidia m8600 GT seems to be well supported by Linux distros these days. So far, I think Fedora and Ubuntu are the top two contenders with Mint/LMDE as a third place option.

With any luck, I’ll be running a fine Linux distro by this time next week. That is, if I don’t have any more trashed partition tables, bombed Joomla installs and virus riddled family computers… but those are for entirely different blog posts.

Earlier this January I was taking the Christmas lights off of the front cactus (I heart Phoenix) when I came across an interesting newspaper article. Before you ask, my household rolls individual strands of Christmas lights up in newspaper and then stuffs the bundles into boxes. That keeps the strands from getting tangled in eachother. Moving on.

An article from the Asbury Park Press dated Dec 12, 1999 caught my eye. It was so novel that I scanned it for long term keeping and decided to share it here. The article is a 30,000 foot view of what websites have to be put through to make sure they don’t go offline under heavy load. In fact, it’s more than just a 30,000 foot view. It’s more like looking at earth from Mars using binoculars.

The very concept of eCommerce web sites was so new that the article doesn’t even shorten the term, instead using the uncompressed form “Electronic Commerce”. It’s interesting to note that testing web sites for load problems was a novel concept worthy of a newspaper article just a few years ago.

I will not reproduce the text of the article, but will link to an image of the scanned article. Pardon the wrinkles. It’s been wrapped and re-wrapped around Christmas lights for a decade. Let me know what parts of the article tickle you in particular.

UPDATE:

The Mozy ads that are mentioned in this post are no longer running. On January 28, 2011 a Mozy employee named Ryan commented on this post with the following:

Gentlemen, I would like to apologize for the tone of those ads. It was I that wrote those several years ago in one of those “it seemed like a good idea at the time” moments. And while they actually do convert pretty well, they don’t reflect the appropriate attitude towards our (potential-)customers. And I think that’s more important.

I’ve now removed them from our rotation. I really do appreciate your feedback.

I no longer see those ads on the Jungle Disk keyword. The Amazon S3 keyword has an aggressive, but respectful ad now:

END UPDATE

I use a free Dropbox account to store some project files for a website that a friend and I work on. We’re filling it up quickly and I’m considering our options. I think the best option is to just use a rather large FTP account that we have, but in an effort to be thorough I searched out other consumer level cloud storage providers. The first two that come to my mind are Dropbox and SugarSync. However there’s a third one that I overlook: Jungle Disk.

Because I’m unfamiliar with the product, I googled Jungle Disk’s brand name to find their corporate site. My eye was attracted to a lone AdWords ad on the right side of the page:

The ad is for a competing cloud storage provider that most of us know about called Mozy. I refreshed the page and saw a different and even less flattering bit of ad copy:

I was very surprised at these two ads. Insulting a competitor so blatantly? Self-assigning the title “#1 Online Backup Company”? Attempting to win my business by insulting me with snarky questions? I also found it ironic that they advertised a price that, by my comparison, is not as good as what Jungle Disk offers. I was not amused by the advertising.

I decided to search for the brand names of other cloud storage vendors to see if Mozy was taking this aggressive track elsewhere. I searched for Dropbox, SugarSync, Syncplicity, ZumoDrive and even enterprise cloud storage providers like Amazon S3, Nirvanix and EMC Atmos Online. Interestlingly, I was only able to find Mozy’s insulting ad copy on one other keyword: Amazon S3. That doesn’t seem like a prime competitor to me, but I guess Mozy knows its business better than I do.

In the course of looking at competing advertisements on a service’s keywords, I discovered what I think is a great example of an aggressive yet tasteful advertisement:

Laplink makes a bold statement, but it’s not insulting or demeaning. I didn’t click on the link to see if they backed up their statement (I didn’t want to needlessly cost them PPC advertising money), but presumably they would present at least some facts about their service so a savvy shopper could compare.

Let me describe the kind of advertisement that I think is acceptable. First, I think it’s okay to be confrontational in advertisements. Some might disagree with me on that, and it’s certainly a fine line. If you have a product that is better than someone else’s product, I think it’s acceptable to advertise on their keywords or say “we’re better than this other product!” Having said that, I think it’s a bad thing if that’s your only advertising strategy. Never be defined by a negative. Also, always back up your claims of superiority. I’ve found plenty of good anti-spam and other edge appliances that I otherwise wouldn’t have heard of as a result of rather aggressive ad campaigns on Barracuda keywords.

I also think it’s okay to ask your customers direct questions within your advertisements. “Is your archiving solution compliant?” “Are you sure your DR solution can handle a meteor impact?” etc. Asking questions is very effective in advertisements, but you have to make sure you’re asking the right questions.

So what are bad tactics in advertising? For one, personal attacks against your competitor. It’s one thing to say “Our products are better than this other one and here’s why” and quite another to say “This competing product sucks!”

Even worse is insulting your customers. For example, saying “I hope you’re joking,” when someone is searching for one of your competitors. Not only has Mozy slung mud at Jungle Disk, but they’ve also managed to call into question the intelligence of potential customers. I can’t say for sure if that AdWords campaign is working, but it’s certainly not wooing me over to Mozy.

It is important to note that I don’t take this bit of ad copy as a sign that Mozy is evil. In truth, this ad is one of probably thousands. It was probably written and decided upon by just one person in a much larger organization. I’m sure Mozy has an excellent product and great people working for them. However, most people aren’t quite as charitable and I suspect that most people will think twice about Mozy after seeing that ad.

Advertisers, take note. This isn’t middle school where boys impress girls by seeing who can insult the other with the sharpest wit. Be aggressive if you want, but keep it factual and don’t call anyone names. Especially your customer.