“Similarly, if they want to save money you can respond with scenarios that include fewer upgrades (higher risk of security problems, less productivity due to the opportunity cost of lacking new features) or by accepting a lower SLA due to an increase in outages.”

In slightly clearer terms what he’s saying here is, “If you want to stay on the cutting edge, you are going to have more downtime.”. This is something that I think a lot of people, particularly people in management, don’t often realize. This can be mitigated by running parallel systems, but the expense of that (both hard costs and soft) is rarely justified. Of course, this makes perfect sense once it’s pointed out. Truly seamless upgrades are hard to do. In many cases, they simply aren’t possible. To the sysadmins out there, next time you need to upgrade a service, don’t forget to remind people that there’s likely going to be an avaialbility sacrifice to be made. And to the managers, remember to account for that downtime when deciding whether or not an upgraade is worth it.

Today, I wanted to watch the progress of a long-running process (a backup) at the same time as I watched htop and slurm to keep an eye on performance values while it was running. My first thought was to figure out how to make screen cycle through different sessions automatically, every X seconds, like how many KVMs behave. Turns out there’s an even better solution. You can make screen operate split screen, so you can see multiple sessions all at once! Why oh why didn’t I take the time to discover this sooner?

1. Start screen.
2. Hit ctrl-a/shift-s to split the screen.
3. Hit ctrl-a/tab to switch to the other “screen”.
4. Hit ctrl-a/c to create a new session or ctrl-a/(screen #) to switch to an already running session.
5. Hit ctrl-a/shift-s to split the “screen” again if you like.

So this is what my screen session looks like now:
All the stuff I wanted to keep an eye visible at once. Awesome!

Had a good weekend. Spent most of it pottering around at home. Graham and I finally put in the time to get our home network into a decent state, which meant getting the home router / server / thing (known as Zinn) all setup. Well, it turns out that the motherboard we were going to use was in a questionable state. Questionable meaning that although it seemed to work, every single capacitor of a particular size on it had vented, a couple rather explosively. So, Zinn currently lives in Liz’s old desktop (actually a low-end server, but I digress…) until the parts we ordered today arrive. When all is said and done we will have one box hooking up to our DSL, running our private and public wireless, terminating our VPNs, and routing all the traffic amongst them. I’m expecting the power consumption on it to be somewhere around 50 watts. Not bad, if I say so myself. I guesstimate that our current consumption is around 120 or so, so this is a significant drop.

Gr also got a pretty bad-ass net-boot setup running on Zinn, so we can do netboot installs of Hardy and also run a number of diagnotics. It will be especially nice once our local Hardy mirror is complete. We’ll be able to do completely current installs at Gb speed. It’s pretty cool if you’re into that sort of thing.

I also got a random “Thank You” email from someone out on the Internet who found my Socialtext installation guide useful. That’s nice.

My company is relatively small, but rapidly growing. We currently have 40 seats of Trend Office Scan, and couldn’t be happier with it. It is manageable, featureful, unobtrusive, and affordable. I’ve recommended your products to countless people. However, we may not be renewing it when our licenses are due for renewal in April. Why might that be?

Your company has opened a lawsuit against Barracuda networks claiming patent infringement, due to their redistribution and use of Clam AV within their network security products to do SMTP and FTP transfer virus scanning. I’ve researched the publicly available information on the lawsuit, including the patent which Trend claims is being violated. In my opinion this lawsuit is without merit, and frankly smacks of the “patent trolling” which is currently so common amongst IT organizations that are struggling to keep up with the changes of the industry. Specifically in this case, the democratization and commoditization of software due to the success of Open Source Software. Not only is there likely prior art for the “technology” in the patent, it is a patent that
should not have been awarded in the first place given the obvious nature of the “innovation” that it contains. In my opinion, the fact that other vendors have decided to settle other allegations leveled at them by Trend out of court is irrelevant. For companies the size of Symantec, absorbing the costs of settling on a licensing agreement is easier than fighting such allegations, regardless of their merit. For a company like Barracuda, this is likely not a feasible option. This is completely secondary to the already questionable nature of software patents in and of themselves.

I find this practice reprehensible, completely violating the spirit of the patent system. Rather than encouraging innovation, it stifles it. Rather than protecting the upstart inventor, it protects the incumbent corporations. It is a practice that I will do everything in my power to discourage. As someone who recommends, specifies, and purchases computer systems and software for my organization, and several other large organizations, part of that power is my power to not do business with companies who participate in such practices. Upon execution of this lawsuit, Trend Micro joined that shameful group of companies.

While I cannot guarantee that Trend Micro’s choice to pursue this lawsuit will make us change to another anti-virus and security vendor, I can guarantee that I will strongly recommend it. I have also begun to contact the people to whom I’ve recommended Trend products and rescind that recommendation. Regardless of the quality of the product, I will not do business with a company who so abuses the current flaws in intellectual property law if I have any other choice. In this case, I do.

I urge anyone reading this who is currently a Trend Micro customer to write a similar email or letter.

Speaking of Vista hilarity, this eWeek slideshow underscores a lot of the issues it has. The fixes they propose are nearly as laughable as the scheduling workaround that the multimedia team at MS came up with for their scheduling issue.