On Mon, May 28, 2007 at 10:14:21PM -0400, seth vidal wrote: > On Mon, 2007-05-28 at 23:32 +0200, Axel Thimm wrote: > > > And how did that single admin get 1000 systems that are obviously > > similar enough to be managed by a single person? Maybe because the > > budget allowed to buy a rather homegeneous pile of hardware? > > > > I call crap on that. I was a single systems person for a bunch of > systems for a long time. You keep your sanity by enforcing policy and > you can do that by using the tools available to you to simplify the > tasks. You don't need homogeneous hw, you need LARGELY homogeneous hw. Well, I used the phrase RATHER homogeneous hw, so we're not that far apart. > So you limit the processor archs and you try to focus things down as > much as possible. > > It took me 2 years to get rid of all the sun crap in the physics > department but I did. Which implies that you had enough resources (or cheap enough hardware) to replace these machines in a two year turnaround. That's what I call a high budget. Any mpp system I have used had a turnaround of at least 5-7 years, they do have 8 digit $/€ costs after all. > I still had wacky AXP crap after that but then another few years and > that was gone, too. > > My point is it didn't have much to do with the distro, No, the discussion is not about the distro at all: It is about acknowledging that phys/chem institutions and academia do not have the luxury of a flat same-hw-same-os infrastructure for various reasons, be that due to the project's constraints (at DESY we've been developing our own set of VLIW processors), separation of development and number crunch systems/clusters, exchange across the institutional border in scientific networks, different ages of the distro, and what else has been said in this thread. US/Japan have a better budgeting in IT infrastucture, that's an ongoing joke among European/Russian physicists. So Duke may have given you a different impression. > it had more to do with me finding and working policy in place where > it needed to happen. and THAT is how a sysadmin survives and > thrives. By learning where they can engineer around a solution and > where they need to use policy to help themselves. > > In this case Bill is right, this is where we realize that we can > make the engineering help get rid of years of bad policy. The reality is that you will not chnage these structures and that these users will pick what distro suits them. If it becomes harder and harder to run their codes on Fedora and RHEL then they will check for alternatives, and not wait for the next generation solution to show up. -- Axel.Thimm at ATrpms.net
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