blackbeard's comments

This is one reason we don't use cloud-based source code hosting. All it takes is one idiot fork or an accident and wham, code everywhere.

Thinkpad love there as well. His "custom" computer appears to be an X220 tablet in an enclosure.

Problem is we kitted out two 42U racks in two DCs with HP and EMC kit on VMware and got four humans for five years for less than the comparable quote from IBM. And we've tested replication and failover to the same extent and didnt have to rewrite the 2 million lines or so of code we have...

I wish I had that much confidence.

Back in the late 1990s I was involved in provisioning a large Sun e15k. Not indestructable but nearly.

It broke. You know what happened? The factory roof leaked and poured water onto the DC sub-building which the roof then collapsed onto the e15k which promptly blew up and caused a spectacular fire, halon dump and about a month of work arguing with insurance companies and guys with shovels.

In that circumstance, it doesn't matter what promises the vendor make. That's still all your eggs in one basket.

Buy two and keep one somewhere else didn't help either as the network termination, switching and routing layers were down and all the people using it were about 300 miles away from the backup location anyway. So some poor fucker had to dismantle the backup e15k and disk arrays, bring them in a large truck[1] to the original location and erect a temp DC in a portakabin outside the building.

Edit: We would have been better served with two smaller DCs with off the shelf kit on the same site but different buildings running a mirrored arrangement. All for pocket change compared to a zSeries...

That's what the company I work for now do. We have off the shelf kit,SAN replication, ESX, redundant routing and multiple peers in different locations.

[1] imagine the shit if that truck crashed.

Spending money? Yep.

That sounds like a whole lot of eggs in one very expensive basket. Plus we can get that density with standard kit I reckon.

Not really. I have centos boxes that have been up for over 3 years.

There's nothing wrong with dynamic allocation in a kernel. It is for example better than having fixed size process tables and all the crap that comes with that.

"holy crap I've got to recompile my kernel to get more processes" is so 1995...

(if you can remember how to use it each time)

True. We use composition to attach things to an object rather than develop a deep taxonomy through inheritance.

I've been open to it. I went on a journey of SICP, Common Lisp, Haskell and F# over three years.

I went back to my OO roots and c#/c++ and carried on mostly as I did before. Why?

Simply that its easier to rationalise a large system in terms of objects and actions. Even atypical OO languages like Go use this model.

What I did take away was limited mutability (not total immutability) and some functional paradigms such as map/filter and a well founded opinion that one shouldn't listen to programming religious wars and use what works for you.

Sold.

I'd happily help foot the bill.

So how much is that 1000 mile journey going to cost?

1000/44.94.4561.119= where's my calculator?

We did it in the UK. Its fine.

Apart from some things like miles and gallons which would require a massive synchronised change that is.

I'd also like it if we drove on the RHS here as well so we can get decent import vehicles.

Yes couldn't agree more with that.

Also dates in numeric order I.e. yyyy/mm/dd you know like all the other numbers we deal with not dd/mm/yyyy or the crazy mm/dd/yy.

Good cars. Too wet here in the UK for something to last that long. My 2006 Fiat is on its way out already...

Wait until Teslas become cheaper.

Until then, buy a Lada Niva. No one will want to steal it and it doesn't have anything complicated in it that can be hacked.

Money is good though so that's some consolation :)

Salesforce is the root of all evil. Once you're in the ecosystem, you're stuffed. You know it's bad when the entire business team start running round clucking when the EMEA salesforce instance goes down hard...

AWS is fine. Most of the platform's concepts have real world parallels for example.

Exactly. I just want to keep a couple of processes running without having to learn the DJB ecosystem. I also want them portable if we shift off CentOS to Ubuntu in the future or something.

I have found that systemd whilst large is actually spot on for managing services particularly from say ansible. Just drop a service file and the binary on disk and start the service. No external supervisor process, no funny acres of bash to HUP and KILL stuff. Just works.

It solves the old problem of "so how the hell do I restart this network interface on distro X" as well.

I'm a pragmatist and it does solve a lot of core configuration issues with Linux.