Re: Anyone else seeing this management trend favoring Linux?

From: Greg Menke (gregm-news_at_toadmail.com)
Date: 10/01/04 

Date: 01 Oct 2004 12:43:53 -0400

Rich Teer <rich.teer@rite-group.com> writes:

> On Thu, 30 Sep 2004, Colin B. wrote:
>
> > Heh. OK then. How about Macs? :-)
>
> Sexy, fast, and poorly-designed are three separate criteria by
> which HW can be judged. I don't know Macs very well, but from
> what I've seen, "sexy" would be a good adjective.

They look great, but aren't very hackable. On OS X, lots of the unixy
stuff that makes Unix so easy to configure and mess with is hidden
away & unreachable. That, and Apple has bought into the XML silliness
with their config files, so lots of the system isn't configurable from
the command line and documentation is essentially nonexistant. So you
have to google around all day to maybe find out the magic XML thing
that <might> work on the version of OS X you're using. And, as usual,
the gui tries to be smarter than it is. They do a better job of it
than Microsoft does, but MacOS isn't a good replacement to a Unix or
even Linux system if you care about more than eye-candy.

I just rolled a MacOS X replacement for a Linux box acting as a cable
modem gateway and its been a really painful process. If you think
Sun's support for 3rd party hardware is bad, try Apple's. There are a
very few lan boards you can use with OS X, and even fewer SCSI boards.
I know Apple supports all kind of USB and Firewire crap, but I really
don't give a damn about that stuff. I want lan boards, scsi cards and
config files- and I REALLY want ufsdump.

DHCP is simply unfindable and uncontrollable on OS X, the built-in
firewall stuff is horrible- ipf is there & it works, but OS X keeps
trying to take over and do its own thing. No more init.d & rc.d
scripts, now its this ill-defined "StartupItems" thing that makes no
sense. You can sort of make things work by running the ipf & dhcp
configs via a crontab entry- but really, stupid hacks are for Windows,
not Unix. Once all that crud is staggering along, OS X does provide a
reasonable user interface but theres no coherent command line
interface to actually control what the machine does. You have to hack
and fiddle to make stuff work like you want.

Frankly a Linux or Sun box makes a far better server/gateway than an
OS X machine. I can't see a good argument for OS X to be anything
more than a client workstation.

We just got a dlt changer for backups, and I didn't even try to hook
it up to the OS X machine, I just dusted off a spare Ultra 1, hooked
it to the drive w/ a $5 sbus board, chucked the monitor & keyboard,
disabled dtlogin and it runs the backups w/ admin by ssh. Couple
hours work- done.

> SPARC based Suns are well designed, but not blistering performers.
> PCs can be fast, but their inherent design is poor, especially for
> server use.

I'd be a lot happier with PC's if the stupid PC bios could be tossed
and the SPARC's open boot firmware put in its place.

Gregm

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