Re: RH tools and conf changes

["Chester R. Hosey" <Chester Hosey gianteagle com>]

On Thu, 2005-07-21 at 21:32 +0800, John Summerfied wrote:
> Chester R. Hosey wrote:
> >
> 
> > 
> > If they wanted to _really_ impress me (which should obviously be
> > everyone's primary goal in life, right?) they'd go so far as to
> > integrate actual monitoring into RHN. Give RHN more value, give the
> > satellite servers more value, give the customers more value, reuse
> > existing interfaces for additional functionality, yadda yadda yadda.
> > It's a win-win situation. There are certainly technical objections, but
> > it would be a great thing for Red Hat to be able to offer monitoring
> > "for free" to RHN customers.
> 
> Install mon

I'm actually looking at Nagios now. I'm not familiar with mon, but I've
heard it said that it doesn't do things like service dependency
tracking. This would mean that (assuming it implements notification
groups) the entire IS department would get pages if a link were to be
severed somewhere. Nagios lets you set it up so that if the network
fails, only the network guys get paged instead of the network guys, the
DBAs whose Oracle instances are across the network, the UNIX guys, the
Windows guys, the developers, etc.
 
> > The point? I honestly believe that one reason why the Debian installer
> > sees so little attention is because Debian installations tend to have
> > long lives. If you do the math, Red Hat recommends that a single RHEL
> > installation not last for more than three years if your goal is to stay
> > current. More usage == more attention.
> 
> I read someplace that the new debian-installer was intended for Woody 
> which it missed by some years: it also delayed Sarge.
> 
> They could have taken an existing installer and ported it: Progeny had 
> Anaconda installing Debian before the new D-I was ready.
> 
> It has to be acknowledged that Debian is an enormous project with all 
> the complexity that entails, and that its managment style is not 
> well-suited for making timely decisions.
> 
> In a commercial enterprise there is someone who can say, "This is how it 
> will be done."
> 
> In Debian, all the DDs get to vote after an extended period of haggling. 
> Them, if some don't like the decision they go into haggle-mode again and 
> vote again.
> 
> It's all in the list archives for those interested in getting the real 
> facts.
> 
> The big difference between Canonical (sponsor of Ubuntu) and Debian is 
> that there is someone who says, "It will be done this way." Even the 
> people are somewhat similar - he hired selected Debian Developers.
> 

Oh, Debian has shortcomings, absolutely! I've already made my views on
that known elsewhere (http://www.wplug.org/pipermail/wplug/2005-
June/026015.html). It's a fair summary of Debian's processes...

Chet