Administer Linux from XP Pro?

[notanatheist]

Given the recent weather, this has me wondering - how do you manage that? Do you use a UPS?

UPS on my fileserver, UPS on my big fish tank, UPS on my home theater, UPS on my main system, & battery in the laptop! Power outages are rare in Eugene but I use them for line conditioning too. My router's current uptime is only 36 days and the fileserver is at 54 days. Until I have an efficient means of transferring video over the network to a display along with surround sound I won't be touching the fileserver.

[ComputerX]

I'm compelled to post since at the moment I am doing the oposite. Using rdesktop on a linux laptop to control the W2K Advanced Server box that has my SlimServer on it. I just thought that was funny.

I especially like what NWP wrote: "But the best part about a linux server is you really don't need to administer it. Once it is set up, it just runs and you can forget about it." Sounds good to me.

That is dangerous advice. Unpatched computers are bad news. Historically unpatched unix-like machines were especially bad since a hacker could do more damage to your network from a unix-like macine than from a Windows machine. Now days I don't know if that is as true. Whatever you build you will need to keep it patched. Several distributions have automated ways of doing that. Personally I tend to build servers on SuSE since I have had very good luck with YOU (YaST Online Update.) The latest SuSE dropped YaST for something new that doesn't seem to work as well.

Don't expect linux to be easy. It can be a huge time sink.

If you are serious about *learning* linux, as opposed to *using* linux, you might want to try Gentoo. I have been a linux user for about seven years. Before that I was a user of FreeBSD, Irix, SunOS, and a little Solaris. I also admin a handfull of machines. I have learned as much in a couple months with Gentoo as I did in all those years with the others. You have to do frickin' everything by hand but you learn things like what the last two numbers in the /etc/fstab actually mean. I always wondered what they did. The Gentoo docs explained it.

Good luck, and don't sell Windows short. It really doesn't suck any less than the others.

Dan

[mherger]

> Not everywhere is having power problems

I can confirm this: I remember two outages in the past 5 or more years.
Once it was due to the company. And once it was my girlfriend blowing a
fuse while fiddling with some wiring - because she didn't want me to shut
down my server :-)

OTOH there are places where you simply can't work without a UPS: I've
spent a few months in Ouagadougou. There wasn't a day without blackout in
the building we were living in.

--

Michael

-----------------------------------------------------------
Help translate SlimServer by using the
SlimString Translation Helper (http://www.herger.net/slim/)

[mherger]

> That is dangerous advice. Unpatched computers are bad news.

Especially if they're exposed to the internet. But a SlimServer running in
my lan? I really don't care too much about security. I think security
should not be overrated when it comes to SlimServer. This latter should
never be run in public anyway.

> Good luck, and don't sell Windows short. It really doesn't suck any
> less than the others.

Correct. Windows as a product has improved a _lot_. We're not talking NT
3.51 any more, do we :-)? It's rather the company behind the product which
isn't my best friend...

--

Michael

-----------------------------------------------------------
Help translate SlimServer by using the
SlimString Translation Helper (http://www.herger.net/slim/)

[Mark Lanctot]

Not everywhere is having power problems - I'm just outside NYC and although Queens is pretty much an electricity-free zone right now we've been solid for as long as I can remember. Some power companies are better than others it seems

OT: Actually I was referring to recent storms.

Even though I've always been with the same power company, I've lived in many regions of the province of Ontario over the last 10 years and performance is dramatically different depending where you live:

Ottawa: extremely reliable, can go for years without failure

Sarnia: despite frequent storms, very reliable. I suppose it's due to the chemical plants in town who all need reliable electricity.

North Bay: extended power failure every time there's a storm. Power failures for unexplained reasons as well.

Espanola (northern Ontario near Sudbury): power failure every time there's a storm, but not many storms.

London: power failure every time there's a storm, and since London is Canada's lightning capital, that's 2-3 times a week in the summer. However the power failures are brief, 1-2 seconds. Makes it hard to maintain impressive uptime on a server though:

Uptime 8:18

:-P

[pfarrell]

Mark Lanctot wrote:
> pfarrell Wrote:
>
>>Last login: Sun Jul 23 10:43:51 2006 from 172.16.4.41
>>(beatles)/home/pfarrell> uptime
>>23:52:10 up 403 days, 11:03, 2 users, load average: 0.28, 0.13,
>>0.11
>
>
> Given the recent weather, this has me wondering - how do you manage
> that? Do you use a UPS?

Yes, of course.

> The uptime on my router hasn't been longer than 2-3 days for about 2
> weeks now due to all the power bumps. Not failures, just long enough
> to cause a reboot.

I have three or four UPS in my basement "server farm" which is
where I keep my SlimServer, my cable modem, my firewall box,
and the machine that hosts http://www.pfarrell.com/
It is really just some space next to the furnace and water heater.

There is a little one for just the cable modem and switches,
a moderate one for the slimserver and a huge heavy thing
for the dual-processor Xeon servers.



--
Pat Farrell PRC recording studio
http://www.pfarrell.com/PRC

[snarlydwarf]

Power outages are rare in Eugene but I use them for line conditioning too.

uhoh. you mean you're across the river from me?

(since I only know of one Eugene...)

[rudholm]

% uptime
6:56pm up 1515 day(s), 9:34, 1 user, load average: 0.03, 0.04, 0.04

No, this is not forged.

[Mark Lanctot]

% uptime
6:56pm up 1515 day(s), 9:34, 1 user, load average: 0.03, 0.04, 0.04

No, this is not forged.

UPS...or do you have a power plant in your backyard? :-)

[rudholm]

UPS...or do you have a power plant in your backyard? :-)

I do have a couple of large UPS units at home, but this particular host is one of a number of systems at work that have been up for over four years.