I thought that GNU/Linux users (let's use the politically correct idiom, since you mentioned OSS ideals) *did* follow the Hurd. That was the whole point, right? I mean, you (collectively) may not use the hurd kernel, but you (again, collectively) certainly use tools derived from or built for this totally free operating system... right? ;)

yeah, I have IIS 6 and WSUS 3 SP1 on 2k3R2, and have to recycle the worker processes constantly (every 5 minutes or so), or the w3wp.exe processes will redline. To give IIS6 due credit, I don't think the problem is with the w3wp.exe process itself - seems to be some BS with the way the WSUS app communicates with IIS. Every fix from MS issued so far has done nothing for the problem. Ah, well. I do remember the IIS4 days, unfortunately. At the company I worked for, the developers there had some reporting BS that used a Crystal Reports ActiveX and IIS to query a SQL Server 6.5 database that was populated from my 'medium iron' AIX babies running DB/2. Anyway, every morning there would be a loss of communication between the IIS processes and the SQL Server, and then the SQL Server would stop responding. The developers couldn't figure out why, or didn't want to dig too deeply, so they simply had the server admins recycle the box every morning when the last shift went home.

hahaha, well, i'm hoping they don't find out ;) Maybe I can weasel in a new developer workstation or something...

Well, I guess by some definitions the Pentium 4 / Pentium D processors would be considered 'newer' (november 2005 for the P4, 2006 for the Pentium D), but I wouldn't think that would be new for production hardware. Except for Intel's bargain bin stuff, even the Core 2 processors since Conroe have had VT support. Unless someone's interested in hosting a virtual server farm on a batch of used P2/P3 Proliants they picked up from eBay I don't think this isn't such a valid concern.

Hopefully he'll have better luck getting ESXi installed on his hardware than I did. My test server was on the list of 'supported' machines for ESXi, and it still wouldn't install.

Out of curiosity, what does one use to manage ESXi if you're not willing to shell out for VMWare Infrastructure? Does it have a web GUI management setup like VMWare Server?

not since Xen 5, actually.
Xen 4 was obnoxious, in that you could only use 1 or 2 cores, and were limited to 4GB of RAM with the free version.

Actually, you're dead wrong. Xen runs Windows servers very well (2003 R2 and 2008). In fact, I have managed to get a stable and reliable AD configured on Xen VMs, which is far more than I could get while attempting the same thing on VMware. Xen has been much easier to install than ESXi, even when using VMWare-approved servers, and from my small-shop experience, the performance has been better.

SQL Server 2005, MOSS 2007, Exchange 2007 - these all run without issue under Xen 5, using Server 2003 R2 or Server 2008.

very well, actually. I use to host a slew of paravirtualized debian 'machines', alongside a couple of Windows 'machines'.

Xen Server is a nice product - it has good support for Linux and for Windows, and it's fast. I have had trouble setting up a DC under VMWare Server 1.x and 2 when using Linux as the host OS, but no such issues with Xen Server. No clock skew problems, fast networking, easy SAN support, etc.

I had managed to get the tightwads where I work to approve a budget for Xen Server this year (I'm using Xen Express), but now it looks like I'll get to use that money for something else.

I mean, my copy of the beta from TechNet says right on the login screen 'Windows 7 Ultimate'.
That would imply a product selection similar to Vista...

... spoken by someone who apparently has not had to try to explain to users how to wade through tons of features that are of no interest to them (and in fact get in the way of doing their tasks) with no easy way of disabling this 'extra' functionality. Or, equally, the opinion of someone who hasn't had to deal with users who feel the need to use 'stationary' on their emails, or, as the example I provided, spice up their spreadsheet with WMF emoticons and 3D shaded text.

I don't agree with your statement, and as a devil's advocate stance, yours is weak.

Aha, that does make sense. In fact, I have converted some of our company artwork to wmf/emf for just the purpose you've mentioned (branding of documents). Unfortunately, the user in question was actually using WordArt to make shadowed text, and using the smileys and such from the clipart pack in the spreadsheet.

Before we leased the device, I asked if it was necessary that we print in color. The beancounter in question decided that it was, and so he leased a color machine. Now, of course, it's too expensive (though he had to have seen the costs, since he signed the lease).

argh.
As for jury-rigging - he wanted me to physically jury-rig the mfc to run without the color toner in place, to prevent people from bypassing the b/w-only setting in any way.

unfortunately, excel is not immune to this truism - I had to "educate" a user at my company who was displeased that a spreadsheet she worked with daily took close to 60 seconds to open, even though it was less than 4MB in size. It turns out she had nearly 1000 WordArt objects embedded in the spreadsheet, and any time she wanted to change the contents of one of the objects, rather than editing or deleting the WordArt object she simply removed the text and created a new object instead. What a nightmare that was, removing hundreds of empty WordArt objects.

And for the record, wtf is a WordArt object doing in a spreadsheet anyway? I don't know who's more stupid - the user who feels the need to add such BS to a business document, or the developers who thought that allowing a user to put such crap in a spreadsheet was a great idea.

I only wish this were the exception, rather than the rule. I had the "controller" (I use quotes because he's not a CPA, though he more or less manages the finances here) ask me today if it was possible to jruy-rig our multifunction copier to work with the color toner cartridges removed, because the cost per page for copying or printing in color was too high, and he didn't trust users to print only in black and white.

well, incremental daily backups for sure, but not to tape. I think archiving weekly to a tape is fine, but daily? Too slow for writes and recovery, and too expensive.
Use a disk-based intermediate storage for your incrementals, and archive weekly to LTO.

devil fist - \m/