Posts by Chris Dixon 11 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Sep 2007
Dave,
I'm not sure I've understood what you're saying? You're reply seems to disagree with me by saying exactly the same thing I did?
Insert / update / delete won't be possible in a DB due to locking during index creation but there is no reason to stop selects.
Or do you mean that there is some DB out there that allows DML other than a select during an index build? In which case, could you tell me which one it is and how it achieves it safely?
Cheers,
Chris
If we're talking about inserting / modifying data then absolutely this won't be possible during an index build on all DBs since an index build will lock the table exclusively during the time it takes to create it (you don't want data changing while you're creating your index!).
If however MySQL is blocking selects on the table during index creation then that is indeed worrying as it shouldn't be necessary.
Think I might have to install MySQL and make some big tables to test this out.
Could all the experts posting that OS X is a "proper" OS because it's based on BSD / has a BSD core please get their story straight?
OS X is based on NextStep which used the Mach microkernel architecture at its core. In the beginning, Mach was run as an addition to a BSD kernel but as more of it was developed they replaced the BSD code with Mach code.
BSD API bindings allow code written to run on BSD to run on Mach but that doesn't make it BSD any more than calling a C program via Java's API makes that program Java.
Trevor,
From your last post it is clear that you've looked at quite a number of solutions before standardising on your virtualisation tech of choice.
Any chance of a write up at some point of what you liked / disliked about them for those of us that have less experience in this area (I've only looked at VMware and VirtualBox)?
Trevor, another fantastic article.
Almost from the beginning I was wondering, "has he heard of Spiceworks? If it doesn't come up in this article I'll make a note in the comments about it".
I started using Spiceworks about 9 months ago when I started working for a new company and wanted to put some management and system monitoring in place. I found it through Google and figured it was worth my time to check it out since if it delivered on its promises I would have everything I was looking for for free. I've never looked at anything else after that and have ever since been singing it's praises to friends in the industry.
The client is Windows only which could be a problem for some people, hopefully they will do something about that one day. Also, since it relies on WMI for Windows boxes, you have to remember to configure the Windows firewall to allow the traffic through and I've seen a couple of cases where WMI was messed up on a machine and needed fixing (though this is a Windows problem not a Spiceworks problem).
The best part though is the community which are incredibly knowledgable and very helpful.
I'll look forward to your article about it and I'm sure those in the Spiceworks community will be happy to see it get a little more recognition.
Trevor,
Thanks for taking the time to reply back with a long and detailed post which I think we can all benefit from to better place the tools mentioned in your article.
My needs are simple and the hardware in use does not vary much. In all likelihood I will do a reinstall of one or two machines a year to clean up a machine when a user leaves the organisation (crossing fingers that malware doesn't strike down all my machines), as such my use case for PING is very much the one you outline for Clonezilla and explains why I have not encountered any difficulties.
I'll certainly take the time to look into FOG when time allows since it sounds like a more capable solution. In fact I started with PING because I needed to find something (anything) to cover myself in the case of user PC problems - I'm the only IT guy in the company and I don't have time to reinstall 20 machines from scratch... and of course I had no budget available. My aim was to find an open source ghost since that was the only tool I knew of. A little bit of google and some background research and PING got the job.
This is where I really appreciate your articles as I'm very much new to the whole admin in a small business side of things and am more or less putting it all together from scratch as I go along. Having the experience of someone who's already taken the time to do the research is a fantastic find for me.
As an aside, I've just finished working through your other articles and want to say a big thanks for all the ones you've written. I'll look forward to seeing more from you in the future.
Cheers,
Chris
Thanks for another great article. I just saw your post in the comments of "the art of desktop deployment", so I think I'm probably reading these in your intended order.
I didn't know either of the open source tools you mentioned so will definitely give them a look.
On the subject of PING, it does have the ability to push out an install to a machine via PXE boot but I have to admit I haven't tried it but was intending to get things set up to start using it for machine reinstalls in the next few months. Could you expand a little bit on the troubles you encountered?
I'll look forward to the next article.
I've been using PING for the last 6 months to image and restore our office PCs and have not as yet encountered any problems. Definitely a capable option and worthy of mentioning, well done.
With Open Source this good I'll be interested to see what the paid for competition have to offer to best it!
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