Posts by duncangareth

Yep, the 'Who owns Linux?' case is back from the dead

Re: Does the verdict on Oracle vs Google

SCO went to shit when Doug Michels sold it to Caldera. Ask any of the decent technical people who lost their jobs in favour of a bunch of suits with a pack of tort lawyers in tow.

Clarke's Third Law: Any sufficiently advanced techie is indistinguishable from magic

Funny you should say that. I used to run a support department for the Southern African SCO Unix distributors in about 1990. We only provided support to resellers except in exceptional circumstances, usually when some large corporate client was ready to throw out the whole setup.

I remember being flown to Lilongwe in Malawi and then catching a bus to Blantyre to go to the Mercedes Benz agents, where they were having unexplained freezes of the fancy IBM server hardware. The software application guys were blaming the IBM boys, and the IBM hardware geeks were blaming the software blokes. Eventually they decided to gang up and blame the operating system. Now, as operating systems go, despite whatever brain dead antics the corporation got up to later in the nineties, SCO UNIX was solid as a rock. It never froze unless there was some sort of hardware, or should I say physical, issue.

I was there for a few minutes when I noticed a long RS232C cable running along the wall and out into the distance. I asked them where it led, and they told me it was attached to an HP serial printer/plotter at the far end of the workshop. I then asked them if they were using three phase power, which they were, and then I asked them if there was a common ground across the phases. You see, I had come across this type of situation before. There was a fairly hefty voltage coming up the ground wire of the serial device, which was on a different phase to the server, thus causing the server to fail.

My advice to people in those types of situations was: "Call in an electrician, but not the one who installed the setup originally."

Both the software guys and the IBM guys were suitably convinced that it was someone else's problem, but not mine.

University of Cambridge to decommission its homegrown email service Hermes in favour of Microsoft Exchange Online

Speaking as a mail server administrator

The lack of compliance (or respect) on the part of Microsoft for IETF standards has been a problem for years. The excuse that email servers are difficult to administer is nonsense. It is likely that the so-called "business model" dictates that the beancounters are unwilling to invest money in training competent system administrators.

It's happening! Official retro Thinkpad lappy spotted in the wild

Re: Burroughs Steely Dan

Ha ha, we must be getting old. I had these ridiculous thoughts of COBOL-driven robotic devices.

Re: Screw 16:10

How, may I ask, did you get an SSD into your T43p? I have a T43, but it has an IDE interface for the HDD.

Everything you need to know about the Petya, er, NotPetya nasty trashing PCs worldwide

Re: The real blame goes to..

A silly fanboi, sure. The example you gave illustrates an analogous scenario to the subject of the article. I think the common factor is that system administrators do not exercise due diligence, or companies do not allocate sufficient resources, whether human or financial, to the maintenance of secure networks and servers, etc.

In the fanboi's defence, though, I think that there is less work involved in securing Linux based servers. All operating systems have vulnerabilities but some seem to be more vulnerable to exploitation than others.

Linux letting go: 32-bit builds on the way out

There is a problem...

In the so-called "Third World" or whatever the correct term is these days, people scrape together their meagre resources and manage to buy old PCs which are incapable of running 64bit software, but they want their children to have a slight chance of becoming computer literate. Consequently, there is still a need for 32bit distros, particularly those with a small footprint.

In North America, Europe and other developed countries, people can afford to be arrogant about computer hardware. In places where the average person earns less than US$5 per day, paying US50 for an old piece of hardware is a realistic proposition. A new computer system is beyond the reach of many.

Perhaps, instead of dumping last year's model in a skip or "recycling" it, the rich people should consider giving it to someone who would see it as something highly desirable.

SCO slapped in latest round of eternal 'Who owns UNIX?' lawsuit

SCO had some pretty decent operating system products in the early days, when it was still owned by Larry and Doug Michels. I used to work for their distributors, running the technical support department.

Their support team worked closely with the developers and the whole channel was run pretty well. Obviously, the fact that the software ran on crappy Intel-based PC hardware was a bit of a problem, but even so, setting up a SCO UNIX system worked out much cheaper than Windows NT Server with the same number of users. It was also much more stable. For example, a point of sale system at a major hotel complex consisted of 260 tills connected to two Pentium Pro machines with 128MB RAM each, running Open Server 5. There were actually 130 sale points, each with two tills, one connected to the one host and the other connected to the other host.

The same application was also ported to Windows NT Server, and the vendor struggled to get more than 30 tills going from a 256MB RAM Dual processor Pentium Pro machine.

Of course, the advent of stable Linux blew the PC UNIX distributions away, at least those which were proprietary and commercial. For me the end of the line for SCO was when I was called upon to migrate an entire university's administrative system from SCO Unixware to SUse Linux. (I had long since left the SCO support channel, but I still supported many SCO clients on a freelance basis.)

Doug Michels sold out at the right time, in my opinion. The clowns who bought him out deserve everything bad that happens to them, considering what absolute bastards they were towards the technical staff.

For me, the end of the line was when I was asked to migrate a

Cyber-terror: How real is the threat? Squirrels are more of a danger

Re: It's all about the blinky lights

In about 1989, a friend of mine worked for a mainframe bureau in the east end of London. He told me the saga of the manager who came up with the solution to their insulation-gnawing short-circuit-causing rat problem: he went out and caught a gnarled scar-riddled old bruiser of an alley cat and let him loose in the elderly basement which housed the 'frame and its miles of ducted copper. Soon all the rats were either dead or in a state of shocked hiding - Old Moggy has slaughtered all of those who couldn't escape in time. Unfortunately, he caused an even greater problem by marking his territory, especially in the wiring ducts; there are few substances more conductive of electricity than cat piss.