Tag: centos

Interesting New Developments…

rthomson Leave a comment

There have been some interesting new developments lately! Here’s a shrunken summary.

At present I’m doing a technology review for implementing a new terminal server. Our existing terminal server is a 4-way AMD Opteron 848 system that’s about 5 years old right now. It runs CentOS 4 and has been so mega-customized over those 5 years, I’ve never wanted to go through the pain of in-place upgrading to CentOS 5. We also have a simple IBM 1U server running Windows 2003 Server for windows purposes. It’s ok but also about 5 years old.

The idea is to roll both these servers into a large single physical server with some kind of virtualization. The large system would also have the resources to run other VMs, as necessary. Development/test boxes or what not.

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Oracle Cold Call

rthomson Leave a comment

I just received a cold call from Oracle moments ago. I’m actually a bit shocked to be honest.

Let’s describe my relationship with Oracle for a moment:

  • In seven years as a sysadmin, I’ve never had a business relationship with Oracle
  • I’ve never run an Oracle product in any of my shops
  • I’ve never directly or indirectly inquired about Oracle products with Oracle or their resellers
  • I’ve never once feigned interest in anything Oracle has done until the day they bought Sun Microsystems

So what was the cold call about? They wanted to sell me on Oracle Unbreakable Linux and Oracle VM. They were targeting our RedHat (well, CentOS) installations and wanted to get a foot in the door for their virtualization product (Xen) Thanks, but seriously… No thanks!

I’ve been approached by vendors before at trade shows or expos or even via existing reseller relationships but this out of the blue cold call is entirely new to me. I can ignore the fact that Oracle’s representative had less than stellar English skills. That’s not paramount, although it made for lengthy repetitions where it otherwise wouldn’t have been necessary. It’s that cold call tactic that has me fired up! Are they seriously trolling my employer’s public directory in which my name and number is listed to see if anything bites?

Overall, I’m really turned off by Oracle’s slimy cold call tactics. Please don’t call again, Oracle. Your rebranded-and-slightly-modified RHEL and Xen clones be damned!