XenCenter is not XenServer
XenCenter is just the windows management console. This has been moribund for years. Probably best to put it out of its misery.
The hypervisor (XenServer) is still a thing.
-ss
32 publicly visible posts • joined 1 Sep 2009
When you said, "The site I hosted with that company didn't need an upgrade, it was running fine with almost no attention at all", what you really meant was: "I was not interested in bearing the cost of maintaining my fossilised software, and got a bit grumpy about the whole thing when my service provider made it clear that they were no longer interested in bearing the cost of maintaining my fossilised software either".
Centos 6 dates from 2011 and ships with packages and core o/s software from that era. It is completely true that an admin can stick with these operating system versions in the longer term, and this is a viable option which is regularly used by high value software installations. The problem is that there is a substantial cost in doing so and when you're maintaining low-cost sharing hosting services, costs matter quite a bit.
So it's not just about sticking with centos 6: it's about sticking with e.g. python 2.6, php 5.3, apache2.2 and a pile of other ancient software versions which are no longer supported by their developers and which are basically moribund. It's about committing to your user base that the hosting company will assume responsibility for fixing security problems in Django because the oldest maintained release of Django was released in 2015 and requires python 2.7. It's about not being able to provision any more customers on servers like this because you simply cannot sell python 2.5 and php 5.3 in 2017, which means that according as customers migrate off this platform, you're ending up with a much lower density of customers per physical server, which drives up the cost.
It's about the tool chains and automation software (e.g. puppet / ansible / salt) required to support cabinets full of older servers like that, which drives up the cost.
It's about having a support desk that can deal with issues relating to lots and lots of different software versions. It's about installing multiple software versions on these platforms and attempting to ensure that none of them are fighting with each other, which drives up the cost.
And it's about having to bear the clean-up cost when some customer who refuses to upgrade causes the shared hosting platform to become riddled with malware because this is inevitably happens, and drives up the cost too, and by a good deal too, because it needs to be handled by people with clue and people with clue cost money to hire.
So in case you're tempted to stick to your guns and moan that your fiver-a-month sharing hosting platform isn't offering you the long term stability that you want in order to continue to run your ancient and unsupported software, please bear in mind that there is a substantial cost to doing so, and that one way or another, someone needs to bear that cost, and that someone will be the customer because that's how supply of services works.
The only issue of relevance is deciding how that support cost is borne: whether through direct upfront cost increases, or by upgrading the platform, or by letting the platform rot and having customer attrition through neglect. Of these, the least bad long term option for the hosting companies is upgrading the platforms.
Otherwise I quite agree that it would be nice to have your cake and eat it.
No doubt the normal UK approach to the EU was followed:
1. Politicians and mandarins from the Ministry of Misery campaign long and hard at EU level for new regulations to scratch itch-du-jour.
2. New regulations introduced by EU.
3. Daily Mail declares that said new regulations cause cancer and the politicians and mandarins from the Ministry of Misery berate the EU for forcing legislation down their throats, but they'll just have to implement it anyway because it's more than their job's worth, innit.
Say, did someone mention that HMRC is going to clean up with these new vat rules?
-ss
For sure, encoding schemes like this work for individual connections, but my oh my they don't scale. If your wireless connection is dropping packets, particularly on 3g, then the underlying layers will be doing a mad scramble to try to deliver the packets reliably. 3G is particularly good (or bad depending on your perspective) at this and you can often end up with crazyass packet RTTs due to multi-second retransmission when it goes to massive lengths to get your data through.
But at what cost? Bandwidth spectrum, that's what. You've already got the lower layers doing fancy retransmission stuff, and if you augment this with upper layer packet spray, you will end up wasting a huge amount of spectral bandwidth. This sort of nondeterministic thundering hoards problem will cause overall network performance to fall off a performance cliff and then everyone will be unhappy because everyone's multi-layer retransmissions will be fighting with everyone else's. IOW, total fail.
The same happens on wifi, but to a lesser extent because it the MAC retransmission will time out sooner.
Turns out there's no such thing as a free lunch. Who knew?
-ss
Metric only, no exceptions. I refuse in principal to vote.
1/2L of beer is fine because that's the sort of measurements my beer bottles come in anyway. As for plane altitude, get a grip. Ever tried to convert 35000-38000 ft to miles high? it's not that I'm stupid or lazy but it's easier to convert 11000 meters to km (true story).
facepalming jaded by imperial imbecility,
and tyvm but get a grip,
-ss
you didn't mention anything about the networking upgrades. The virtual distributed switch system has been completely overhauled so that you can now actually do upgrades without having to rebuild from scratch as before. SNMP support now looks vaguely useful, and the link aggregation system finally supports LACP. At last. Who knows, in a couple of years, they'll have networking which will be on a par with the early 2000s.
-ss
Some classic stuff here:
"Wolfram|Alpha may terminate Your license to use the Wolfram|Alpha Marks at any time for any or no reason."
"You are required to provide a hyperlink to www.WolframAlpha.com on every page with Results. All hyperlinks associated with data provided by Wolfram|Alpha must navigate directly to Wolfram|Alpha."
The prohibitions section is quite some fun too.
-ss