Posts by TheSicilian

Microsoft bows to the inevitable and takes Visual Studio 64-bit for 2022 version

Can they make it *not* a great place to develop 32-bit apps? Can we just make 32-bit apps *not a thing* any more? Yeah, yeah, some customers are going to whine and whine and whine...

Two things:

1) I can now get a Raspberry freaking Pi with 8GB of memory, and who, seriously, is still running 32-bit Windows, right now, today, that needs cutting-edge OS and library support? Even if you don't need more than 4GB of memory (really, 3.5GB in practical terms, given how x86 memory addressing works) where are these 32-bit CPUs coming from? Atoms from 2011? Core Duos from 2006? This is all stuff that Windows 10 is going to have a moderately hard time running on regardless. Desktop Windows should have gone 64-bit only a release or two after Windows Server did in 2012, Windows 10 32-bit is an abomination and doing away with it, at this point, would count as a mercy killing.

2) Five gets you ten that these are the same people still maintaining COBOL code on their AS/400 systems, because blah blah legacy codebase whatever. Fine, use a legacy compiler for your legacy code on your legacy OS. Legacy! Unless you are talking about Legacy of Kain I'm really not interested... and I have a perfectly good Xbox with a 32-bit x86 CPU for that still, so, you know what? Forget it. It is right and correct that development environments drop support for Tinkertoy-based architectures, we are living in the future like it or not.

Oh hello. Haven't heard much from you lately: Linux veteran Slackware rides again with a beta of version 15

To each their own, and I'm glad that the Slackware crowd is still doing their thing, but I honestly don't get all of the systemd hate. It's a good init system, it deals with complicated dependencies much better than its predecessors. I was glad to see it come to CentOS, and honestly have no complaints from a sysadmin-ly perspective.

It's more complicated under the hood, sure, and it has some silly features that I admittedly do not like, but for me Linux is strictly a thing that runs on servers, and the distros that I use for everything (Ubuntu / CentOS / Rocky when it comes out) make sensible choices about which parts of it are worthy of inclusion.

Optical archival system - where to buy from?

OK, so you COULD go with a goofy, proprietary format, supported only by Sony, the worst possible company to do business with, at a cost of $250 per 1.5TB WORM media and without an autoloader, without proper connectivity (USB 3? No thanks. SAS, FC-AL, or iSCSI for me), and that will likely be totally unrecoverable 10 years from now due to lack of hardware.

But, lasers! It's OK, I'm not trying to give you shit for no reason. I just had a C-level talking to me about our data retention plans, but his favorite buzzword was "cloud". I had to explain to him that a full weekly backup, once you factored in transit time, bandwidth and all of that, would cost about $3000. Per. Week. Not counting restores, which would be cripplingly expensive.

What we ended up getting was a dual LTO5 autoloader (48 slot, FC-AL), surplussed from the local guys. Total cost of the library, plus backup exec licensing, plus 100 tapes, plus a HBA and cabling and warranties and all that jazz was about $11,000, and it can kick out a 1.5TB tape in 2.5 hours (5 if i I want an immediate, separate full verify). The tapes are nigh-unto-indestructible, and can last for, easily, 20-30 years with proper storage. Hardware will be, at that time, probably a little hard to come by (LTO7 will be the last generation that can read them, and will probably be out in 2018-2020 or so), but should still be available, and cheap. We spend about $300 per month sending all the tapes to Iron Mountain just in case the building really does burn down.

I know this to be true since all, so far as I am aware, all LTO gear is now produced by IBM, which will still sell you a brand new mainframe to run code written in the late 50s with no modifications. That's support, right there. Just swallow your pride and go tape, you will be glad you did. It's still pretty hard to beat for archival storage bang-for-buck, unless you are Facebook or something, in which case, MOAR DISKS.