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Admin
I may have something in common with those poor, sleep-deprived interviewers. I read that as
Admin
Oh yes, they actually would. And they actually wouldn't not, for who else would not actually actualize the actuations in an actual act for actions?
Filed under: Never claim an action would never be done, for it has, and in the worst way possible!
Admin
You accalia'd that markdown link.
Admin
How in the world? It was totally correct in the preview!
Admin
So just use a free edition of one of the non-open-source monitoring packages out there. Pretty much every vendor has a free version limited to 50 sensors or whatever. Better than nothing.
Admin
I think some people confuse the terms "open source" and "free"
Admin
And anyway, TR :wtf: is potential employer's management, not the network, and not the customer. In that case, the correct answer is to run away, as our hero did, in effect, and as the interviewer and his crew did not. In that case, you can be sure that they are people you probably don't want to work with.
Admin
I think at this point, I'd sit the client down and attempt to understand their objection to open source, and why they feel a custom-written version of something already available as open source would be better for them.
I suspect they don't understand much about open source, and might be surprised to learn how good it can be and how widely it's used, perhaps even by their competition.
Admin
Also, the last time I head a "none of that s(tuff) in our network please" from a customer was back in the 2002 time frame, and the s(tuff) that they didn't want was Windows, while Linux was just fine.
Admin
Sounds oddly familiar. I worked in a place that was, by policy, Windows only, No Linux Allowed, and was directed to design, build, and deploy a log management system, an audit system, and some degree of IDS/IPS and SIEM,
After the design was rejected and revised for costing too much, I asked what my allowable budget WAS.
The answer: Zero.
I left within a month. . .
Admin
Wrong approach. What he should have said:
Admin
Hell, even our company (which entirely uses Windows, except for 4 or 5 special snowflake Macbooks) started using some Linux servers recently, and now I get to spearhead the adoption of Linux workstations and laptops. A few years ago this kind of thing would have been unimaginable, but times are changing.
Admin
This sounds almost like munin. Which is opensource and networked and works very very well. Just a bunch of scripts polled regulary.
Admin
You're assuming they are willing to learn, which seems unlikely in the given scenario.
Admin
/me gets :popcorn: ready while waiting for Blakey to show up
Admin
Where's the problem? It's easy to put together some custom scripts with nagios functionality!
I was running hundreds of servers, when nagios didn't even exist and it worked very well.
Real programmers are dead now and when something cannot be downloaded, it can't be done? Stupid mindset!
Admin
I love how it gradually builds to climax.
:giggity:
We should go back to using the abacus.
Admin
Admin
I jumped to the conclusion that it was the old interview tactic of asking a candidate to solve your problems for you for free.
Admin
Admin
What next? Um ... "I shout at my team until one of them, in desperation, does something against company policy leaving me "officially" ignorant of the details, until such time as I need an extra bargaining chip to leverage against them when I want them to perform a task which they justifiably consider that it is unfair of me to ask (e.g. work over the entire Easter weekend to put some smoke and mirrors in place so we have some pretty little lies to show a prospective customer). Oh, sorry, I thought this was a management position I was applying for."
Admin
http://www.troll.me/images/monitor-lizard/i-am-monitoring-the-situation-thumb.jpg
Admin
No budget for a commercial solution? No OSS allowed? Let it burn. That's all that the customer seems to really want.
Admin
As soon as i would hear software restrictions, i would've get up and go. If they are going hard ball on any solutions, they won't listen to your "out of the box" thinking at the first place. Run.
Admin
There's no budget to purchase a commercial product, but it's perfectly fine for a whole team of expensive developers to spend six months creating a system that isn't as good as the commercial product (or any of the open source systems).
Admin
Never, ever make disparging remarks about any goofy technology. There are plenty of places with no source control, source control is a dirty brick on your desk, documentation is just one line saying // ZAP THE CLOCK, all screens are bitmaps converted to hex constants and compiled into the code as char [] = 0x......., and anything else you might imagine as the most horrible thing possible.
Admin
Of course. That would be operational expenses, which come out of someone else's budget, instead of capital expenses which come out of my budget.
Admin
Admin
If you don't have the option to leave now, the next sane thing is to actually write scripts and all that jazz, but keep quiet about them. They shouldn't know.
After all, you aren't your own enemy and it's you responsible for your own health and sanity. And proper amount of sleep is damn important for that.
And of course you purge those scripts when you leave. They have never existed, after all.
Admin
You see, I can imagine a situation when one can't just leave a job. Had been in such a situation myself.
You can then add this bit of ingenuity to your CV, really helps.
Admin
At the place I used to work the IT Security Dept decided that all free software was bad. If you needed something done you needed to find a paid for program. Of course they also thought Firefox was a hacker tool.
Admin
Bloody stonehenge started all this.
By luck I'd already gone with the workplace-is-a-disaster scenario, but this did give me pause for thought.
Is that a specific example? A personal nightmare?
Admin
As a .NET developer who spent over a decade in the LAMP stack prior, and even took a turn as a Linux server admin back in the day, I'll bite (and give Blakey a rest).
I have done open source, and I have done closed source, and none, literally none, of it is perfect. Microsoft has done some insane shit in the past, and they are still doing it (looking at you Windows 8, Windows Phone, and XBOX One).
Linux ... on the other hand, is kind of like a relationship. Sometimes you get back what you put into it, other times it is mean to you for no reason. If you ever find yourself having to write your own patch for the GOD DAMN DRIVERS you download from nVidia for your BRAND NEW video card to get X to recognize it, then you will understand my pain.
Windows has, recently, made the programming space a much more pleasant place to be. They basically took the idea Sun was trying with Java, cut out a lot of the crap, and created C# and the .NET framework, and holy shit, compared to what I had to deal with before that, I am not planning to leave it any time soon.
That being said, I recently, in the last year, wrote a Perl script to parse huge data files and do something with the data, because Perl was the best tool for the job.
Open Source, is in many ways a cult. The bigger parts of the cult (Red Hat, Git, etc.) tend to drive how it is behaving, but nothing is stopping anyone from branching out and making their own offshoot cult as they see fit. Whether or not they will get any followers who stick with them, well, that is the biggest weakness of Open Source. The thing you bought into and may have even made business decisions about, may suddenly stop development, or have a bug that goes years without getting fixed, and that just isn't acceptable.
Closed Source (and really, when anyone says that, they mostly mean Microsoft), is a cult too. But it is a cult with a LOT of followers, so it has graduated to an organized religion. Like a mega-church. You have to pay for the privilege of association, but you also get some benefits out of that, like guaranteed patches, upgrade schedules, etc.
Neither methodology is 100% correct for every case, but if I was pressed, I would recommend the .NET platform in most every case, as in my experience that is just an overall smoother and more predictable way to run things. Trying to get everything for "free" is not a great way to run a business, even a "mom & pop" one. Doesn't mean you can't get started for free, and to build up your business for free, but when/if you want to get serious about your business, at least some paid options should be on the table if you want the best/least problem solutions. Yes, there will be "free" solutions as well, but the time you spend babysitting them with your staff's billable hours may not make it so "free" after all.
:thumbsup:
Admin
Admin
QFFT
Admin
¯(°_o)/¯ Not everyone can be the genius that is
grumpycatblakeyratAdmin
And Windows is so reliable, you don't have to do any babysitting :astonished:
Admin
I don't come here for reasoned debate, I come here for rants, cursing and black and white opinions!
Admin
Not on the development side, I don't. Server side isn't my problem :wink:
Admin
@Accalia 's weird ideas thread is that way :fa_arrow_right:
Admin
If the customer doesn't want free software and they refuse to pay for commercial software, then they'd better be willing to pay through the nose for high-quality custom software.
If they aren't willing to do any of the above, then you shouldn't have them as a customer. And management should know better.
If management doesn't know any better, then you don't want to work there, and neither should anyone else who is remotely competent.
Admin
Blakey doesn't visit front-page articles.
Admin
In other words, the policy is "No Open Source", but they think "Open Source" means "Free" (as in beer) and so Linux is OK if it's a Linux that they paid for. Because paying for stuff means it's all right, but getting stuff for free makes no sense and there must be something dubious behind it.
Start a shell company offering a paid support version of whatever free software you need? This happens with closed source too. Especially if the company that made it gets bought out by Oracle. This also happens (though perhaps to a lesser degree) with closed source software, even with a paid support contract. Yes, the vendor may do some of the legwork, but it doesn't stop you from needing to be involved. Which reminds me, I have a couple of SRs I need to open... at least these ones are relatively minor and don't make the application unusable.Admin
"Free," with respect to open source, is a misnomer. The software is free, but nothing is free to use. You have to provide servers, install it, upgrade it and, yes, you may have to maintain it.
Let's compare:
That's +2½ for open source, the winner on that basis.
Open and closed source are different, and have different issues and concerns. But it's a little specious to argue that, "They said it was free but it's not free." Especially in the face of prices closed source vendors charge.
Admin
I can see the argument about wanting to pay Red Hat for support but I can't see any other reason behind a no-free-OSS policy.
Admin
Your mistake was that you were looking for a logical reason.
Admin
People that say exactly that are those that probably prefer to have a slick salesperson tell them what to buy, because, "The salesperson understands it."
Admin
Filed under: Just like our salespeople
Admin
If all you are using your wiorkstation for is developing LAMP, you certainly don't need the latest nVidia card, let others update the driver for you.
Admin
There is a difference between using software for hobby or personal use and using it to run a business or as core business. There is always a price to pay. Open source is an option and should be evaluated to see if the long term benefit outweighs is potential shortcomings. One should not decide a business decision based on ideals or personal agenda. It might make sense to use OSS, and plan for the necessary in-house development and maintenance, after evaluating the license obligations. It is possible to out-source some of that work to a group, or the copyright holders if they offer support. All of these have implications. You do not want to outsource your core business technology to another team that you cannot yell at. At the same time, hiring top developers to do open source, is expensive too, people do not work for free after all.