Best posts made by gotwf

@openit Just say CentOS/RHEL in your profile. Then you're not lying - if a face to face interviewer ever pins you down on it you can honestly say that you favor CentOS over paying RH their pound of flesh.

@openit said in SAMIT: IBM Is Killing Off CentOS:

OpenBSD - Only two remote holes in the default install, in a heck of a long time!

You need to read that right. Key phrase being "default install". Not to take anything away from that, but mostly we use default install as a base platform for other stuff. And therein lies the rub. True, OpenBSD does a lot more due diligence than some when it comes to packages. But FreeBSD is no slouch either.

@openit said in SAMIT: IBM Is Killing Off CentOS:

@gotwf FreeBSD reminded me about OpenBSD. For what purpose or services you were using FreeBSD?

Not sure what it makes not to use OpenBSD or FreeBSD as CentOS and Ubuntu, even though they are known for solid.

Is that because continuous improvements in features, security and support?

As for OpenBSD vs FreeBSD, it is not an either or deal. I have been using OpenBSD since circa 2.5 (?) for more security sensitive applications, dns, firewalls and such. FreeBSD offers more versatility for general server use, more packages, and had the port system, wh/OpenBSD did not implement until much later. FBSD also has ZFS. For those interested in on the metal file systems, I guess I should mention DragonflyBSD and hammerfs. But who other than cloud providers are running anything on the metal server side these days?

@Pete-S said in SAMIT: IBM Is Killing Off CentOS:

FreeBSD is a very nice unix-like OS. More so than the linux kernel, GNU utils and various code that linux distros cobble together.

But it's not as versatile, for instance with hardware drivers. That's the drawback of having a smaller user base.

I'll concede the point if your main/only metric is versatility and your primary use case is desktop or mobile. Mine is not.

As for drivers otherwise, depends on what hardware. For years FBSD kicked arse on Linux server side. Especially early years, nics, raid controllers, etc. and pretty much all else server side - then Linux's niche as well. Early Linux tcp/ip was horrible comparatively, for example. Even as late as "Code Red". Linux got more traction, more developers, and they raided *BSD drivers for "inspiration" so they could call them new works and license GPL. Remember when the "real enemy" was M$ and NT. Once that victory became a fait accompli the penguinistas needed a new enemy: the BSD's and pretty much all else not licensed GPL.

Ah, the marketing wars and psyops fud. Linux had RH behind it. FreeBSD only was ever ROSS. Real Open Source Software. Curious, how many here used RH early-mid 90's. RPM's were like Slack, had to track down all depends manually. About then I discovered FreeBSD and what a godsend their package and ports system were. Clearly superior and light years ahead. Well.. we all know how that history panned out. Mindshare. Linux became the darling of the media. Meanwhile, Yahoo, then the world's largest web site quietly built out on FreeBSD.

Post Dot Com Bomb, FreeBSD really suffered. They'd embarked upon a major kernel refactor targeting SMP support and performance. The ensuing economic crash resulted in devs employed by Yahoo being laid off. Hence FreeBSD 5.x really sucked for too many years. Then 6.x and 7.x, although improved... still not there. So I bailed on FreeBSD myself somewhere during those years to OpenSolaris because I wanted all that ZFS goodness. Yeah, we all know how that story played out.

That's my take on the history of the 90's thru mid 2000's anyways. Ymmv, but hope you at least enjoyed the stroll....

But... times change. Fast forward to modern days FreeBSD performance is on par or better and OpenSolaris is no more. Yeah, Linux is going to provide better glossy pixel, interface with the latest gadgets, etc. Desktop/Multimedia experience.

Workstation wise, where I am using my box to admin other servers, and maybe also want to run some servers on my Workstation for ease of testing locally and not having to spend money spinning up vm's in the cloud, works great. Take it over Linux any day. Way more stable. Way more sane. And dev is not being driven primarily by for profit companies ready, willing and able to change up the rules at their whim.

So what is this big hardware versatility win? Mainly proprietary GPU's and maybe some sound drivers for higher end multimedia creator use cases. I'm presently sporting an AMD GPU in this box w/four display ports powering three monitors and bunches o' pixels. Works dandy. And didn't break the bank. That said, I am not a gamer. Don't care about creating multimedia. My workstation was mostly for work related tasks rather than play.

And then, once again, came the big bad wolf knockin' at the door: M$ turned over a new leaf, embraced FBSD and raided it for Azure. Now isn't that one a gas? I've not kept up. Am told that M$ gives back "some" to community but mostly holds back. And like a few here, I have good cause to be leery of big companies becoming too involved in FOSS. Cuz I got to ask y'all; "Is this IBM deal the first time you've been burned?". Thought not.

Heh, can you tell I am grouchy mood today? Procrastinating on other things. Apologies for the wall of text.

@Pete-S Set up by others prior to my tenure but to best of my recollection it was a single well provisioned server. After the Chef rewrite they switched to Chef paid version cuz PHB's wanted all that gui goodness.

Prior to that I'd done some smaller Salt deployments that I engineered. Heh, back when you had to write your own formulas. I really liked Salt at the time. Also favored Python over Ruby. Just cuz. Neither would be a deal breaker for me but they definitely were for some dev shops so you just gotta roll with it.

Had another gig with a Chef deployment comparable to one mentioned above. This would have been prior to the rewrite/refactor. Chef definitely required more provisioning. While I liked Salt better you just get used to whatever and deal with it cuz those decisions were above my pay grade and more oft than not based on "buzz" than actual technical merit and/or evaluations. Crazy way to do business, eh?

Ansible is the one I never actually used beyond tinkering. I favor ROSS, or as close as I can come, so I'd be taking a long hard look at Ansible today. YAML is also preferable to Chef's DSL so that's another "win" for Ansible from my perspective. If you trust Salt security side, probably be my second choice. Caveat being that I've not used this stuff seriously in recent memory, so take all this w/a grain of salt. Heh, oohhh, two unintentional Salt Stack puns in a single sentence.

@scottalanmiller Lots of newness in 16.x. Been kicking it's tires a bit myself as of late. But... ya' know... 1.17 is almost here!

Congrats & Happy Anniversary!

@scottalanmiller Iirc, there is something known borked w/emojis on latest 1.16.x Fixed in soon to be released 1.17? Think there is a bug filed at github about it if you're curious.

Groovin' on some Cosmic Gate.

@Pete-S Nope. Don't sling code. That said, worked with lots of devs providing ops support. The extremely bright genius types that stand out and really had my respect, each technical team leads, were using one of:

• VS Code
• IntelliJ EDEA

And notably, they'd seem to swap back and forth from time to time. At least long enough to trial new features of new releases. Big Company was footing the tooling bill so cost was not a consideration for them. Ymmv.

@eddiejennings Could oft as well have both. .profile is more generic while, duh, .bash_profile is bash. .profile could for e.g. be used to read .kshrc. So groove on it...

@pete-s +1 on the patch panels and the catV back to main switch for low cost budget solution.

Rockin' some Etta

Etta James - Somebody To Love (Let's Roll)

It's not just for breakfast anymore...