Tag: rant

Career Development

rthomson Leave a comment

Career development is a funny thing for me to be writing about. A few years ago, it wasn’t something I really thought about too much. It’s not that I wasn’t aware or cognizant of the benefits of thinking about it and spending time considering my future, it’s that I was younger and a lot more focused on the “now”. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t get old overnight and I still value the philosophical concepts of my youth but I now see additional value in also paying attention to the future.

Today, I’m on the brink of making another significant career move and career development is front and centre in my day to day thoughts. Hence, rant.

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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!

Is Ubuntu Ready for the Enterprise?

rthomson 1 Comment

Yep, the title is click bait intended to grab attention… well as much of click bait as anything on techslaves.org can be (which is decidedly not very much) but I’ve just been pretty frustrated with Ubuntu as a client OS recently.

There are two really annoying and critical bugs that have been sitting around, unresolved for too long. One revolves around the NFS client. Apparently there was a regression in the mainline kernel at version 2.6.27 that causes NFS lockup/freeze. Both 10.04 and 10.10 have been affected but Ubuntu has yet to release the fix although it’s been available since august in the mainline kernel. The second bug revolves around Network Manager and autofs maps in LDAP. Basically, you have to get Network Manager to “autofs reload” every time it brings up or down the network interface. No big deal as this can be scripted, but I would really expect an official fix for this.

Ok, so it’s not Ubuntu’s fault there was a mainline kernel regression regarding NFS client code and it’s not Ubuntu’s fault that Network Manager behaves the way it does. However, I do expect a Linux vendor that considers themselves ready for the Enterprise to be able to backport critical kernel fixes so that their users don’t have to sit around waiting with their thumbs up their asses until the fix makes it’s way into an official kernel release and then into an Ubuntu kernel update. As for the autofs maps in LDAP/Network Manager issue, I would not only expect an enterprise ready distribution to have tested this functionality before release but also that once it’s reported that a real, official fix released quickly that everyone can use instead of having to follow bug report comment suggestions to get things working.

I realize Ubuntu is mainly a desktop OS. That’s ok. But all this “Ubuntu is ready for the Enterprise!!! GO CANONICAL!!!!” stuff simply can’t be justified when two official releases in a row come up with show-stopping bugs and there still isn’t a fix nor an official recommended workaround.

</rant>