On Thursday 21 February 2008 23:03, D G Teed wrote:

Petty quibble: I suspect that you mean ``there is no support for FreeBSD in EMC Networker'' rather than the other way round. Picking a backup solution that can't back up some of your servers, and opting to fix the problem by getting rid of the servers, seems to me to be doing things the wrong way round - irrespective of which OS you're forcing yourself to get rid of.

Of course, EMC Networker may be so much better than any other backup solution as to justify the work involved in moving working services to a different platform - I don't know Networker so I can't really comment, although I agree with most of what you said about making sure you pick a platform which supports what you're trying to do. I say most because my own feeling as a sysadmin is that you must have a very good reason to run more than the bare minimum range of operating systems you can - which is an argument for moving away from some platforms if you're already running several. I am in the process of moving from multiple platforms, ranging from Windows NT4, through e-smith (server-in-a-box based on Red Hat), Debian, and FreeBSD, from 4.8 up to date. We are aiming to end up with a bunch of FreeBSD boxes, all using a standard build from a central buildserver, plus one or two boxes running Windows Server 2003 supporting users, who are all running Windows desktops and applications, including apps which run on the server, with clients connecting over the network. It's taken a while but every time we get rid of an old box my workload in supporting the rest of the system drops a little. Note: I'm not saying everyone should standardise on FreeBSD - that's just what I'm most familiar with at the moment, and when I started to move things round we had more FreeBSD servers than anything else, so it made sense to pick that and bring the rest into line, where we were able to, especially because the other OSes were mainly running on hardware which was due for replacement soon anyway, so that the migration could be seen as being in the ordinary course of maintenance and not extra load on busy systems staff.

(Sorry: when I realised I'd started my reply with a few lines which by accident were tapering off at the ends I couldn't resist trying to see how long I could keep it up. It's foolish, I know, but it is a fun exercise in picking your words carefully and yet still trying to make sense. If you aren't reading with a fixed width font, you may not be getting the effect of the layout anyway: so if you can't see it, I'm sorry for taking up yet more of your time, just to play about with line lengths and make up pretty patterns in your mail reader. I'll stop now or at least once I can taper down to the length of the given name I sign off with).

Jonathan (Whew!)