On my servers, the current business week is in plain text and not compressed and archived until 11pm Sunday night for the next week. I keep a month's worth of archived logs. Now here's why: If a system goes down for some reason, the only logs that are going to have anything immediately useful are going to be the uncompressed ones that can easily be cat dumped or vi'd for initial troubleshooting. You're most likely going to need only the last few lines of the log just to find out what went wrong. If troubleshooting is greater than that and you find a longer history of problems that culminated in the panic, any liveCD distro will have the tools necessary to crack open your archives.

Binary log systems are a Disaster Recovery nightmare. The only reason you have a log system is that something went wrong and you need to do some form of troubleshooting/recovery. If your core system is still working fine and the native systemd is able to read the binary, great. What happens when a system partition crashes and won't boot back up? Please enlighten me on how a binary log file can be read on a system that won't boot itself? Can any liveCD using a systemd based distro read the binary file and translate it to a human readable format? Also, it's been said that using a config file, the journal system of systemd can write to a plaintext file. Please explain how that works? Using the config file, does the journal system completely turn off and each component individually writes to syslog, generating their own log file or adding to one of the already created pertinent log files, as it does with System V? Or, does each program send it's message to the journal system and it's this system that sends a message to syslog to write? If it's this latter case, what happens if during a system panic the journal system corrupts the data being written? What if the journal system itself craps out in a failure?

These are all questions that I legitimately do not have an answer to yet, and I haven't had time to research into it. Before I consider updating my systems to a systemd based distribution these questions MUST be answered satisfactorily, and it will be as I draw closer to that point that I will be making time to research it. I don't have time for FUD, fanboyisms, or anything else as such from either side. I have specific requirements that must be completely answered. If the answers are not forthcoming, I, and many many many sysadmins like me, will be keeping System V init systems on my servers by whatever means necessary.

I'm waiting for a Pipboy style mount for my phone with hard inputs on top of touchscreen. Telephone style communication can be had through Bluetooth headsets.

Unfortunately, I don't know of any cell modem manufacturers other than Qualcomm, so thus, not much option for an open modem platform. Unless you happen to have information on other platforms that are open and mass marketed that could enlighten me.

Ms. Miss. and Mrs. are all abbreviations for the same word: Mistress. So by pedantic technicality, no matter which abbreviation is used they all mean the exact same thing, so there's no real distinction between them.

And to the A/C child that stated "Maybe she remarried." Maiden always refers to the name a lady was born with, not any of the ones she took on through any number of subsequent marriages.

"I know this steak doesn't exist. I know that when I put it in my mouth, the Matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy and delicious. After nine years, you know what I realize? Ignorance is bliss." --Cypher, The Matrix

I'm PC-centric. I know this and I embrace it. Unlike the "rest of the world," as you put it, I see that there are more than enough good titles on PC to occupy my limited entertainment time. Those games that want to be console exclusive? Bye. I don't need you. There's only a handful of franchises that make me consider buying a console, and they tend to be on Nintendo anyway since it's mostly nostalgia driven impulses. Even those, the newer titles seem to break and disjoint the franchises. On the other consoles everything seems generic enough that there's usually a PC title that can mimic the fix if I really want it. One case in point: Dishonored vs. Assassin's Creed; also, just about any FPS can fill in for another. Destiny? Far Cry. Call of Dookie(any of them). Crysis(again, any of them). Deus Ex:HR. Hell, old school Deus Ex can even fill this niche satisfactorily, and with none of them do I have to have an active internet connection to play. The only FPS series that I haven't been able to find a game on the PC to mimic it is the Metroid: Prime series.

Tool for the job. OOP has its place in programming as does procedural. The same can be said of systemd. My desktop system I'm probably not going to care when the upgrade forces me into systemd since it's not a system that I need to be concerned about long term uptime and stability. My servers on the other hand, they're a completely different story. I've got another year or so on my LTS, and in that time I intend on putting systemd through its paces on a test machine to force it to fail, and then observe the ways in which it fails. If it does what my hypothesis says it will, based on its generally monolithic design strategy, then I will be looking for a distribution that hasn't drunk the systemd Kool-Aid for my next LTS. If it surprises me and performs well during the fail testing, then I will consider using it.

I believe that this is where the core hatred for systemd is really coming from. It's not so much that it's a bad init system or that people are resistant to change, though the latter is certainly a factor with good reason. It's the fact that Distributions are forcing this change on System Administrators and removing the choice for the Sysadmins to continue with a technology that they have working and have learned the core of how it works or have to install and learn a whole new system that they may not know their way around yet. Has RH or Debian offered the old System V init package as an alternative on their default install? Not that I've seen. This is where the ire is coming from. The defense for systemd is "if you don't like it, it's open source; change it in the source." The people that say this don't realize that in a corporate production environment, this is rarely a feasible argument. Sysadmins are not usually programmers, and these operating system distributions -- Redhat, CentOS, Debian, etc -- have just sold them out and made more work for them to test the ways systemd can fail on their systems and reanalyze their disaster recovery plans to account for this new anomaly. Or management may just decide that they need to go get a service contract with Microsoft for their needs and dump Linux altogether as they may deem the MS option as cheaper and easier to maintain long term.

Fast blanket changes to new technologies by the distributions without accounting for the slower moving but gigantic enterprise user base without offering the option to keep their current technologies was probably one of the dumbest moves they could have done. Why did most Enterprise that use windows software keep on XP until Windows 7 came out, skipping Vista? Why am I using a windows 7 desktop at my employer right now when Windows 8.1 is out there and mature enough for the next phase of OS to have been announced? For the same reason you're not going to get Enterprise customers jumping on board with the next release of the Linux OS they're using...if they're using one of those that is dropping System V.

For your first point, he's saying don't bother with wiring the house with crossover lines, just use straight through cable to go from your jacks (which if you noticed the next line after what you quoted, he is running jacks in the room, not RJ-45 crimps) in each room to the central switch. Don't forget that this is for residential use: One jack per room is usually sufficient. He is right that using a Gigabit Ethernet switch should automatically change the port operation from straight-through to crossover depending on what device it's being connected to, therefore it technically doesn't matter; it's just a better practice to treat it like it does. In my own residential setup, I ran straight-through to one jack in each room, up into the attic space, and plugged them all into a gigabit switch mounted near the access door. If any of the rooms has multiple computers in it, I would just plug a crossover patch cable in the jack and run it to another gigabit switch in the room, and have all the computers connect into that.

There are two ways that your second point can be interpreted. You either think that he's crimping an RJ-45 end on the cable where it comes out of the wall and leaving enough cable in the wall to be able to pull it out and make the connection in the room (not what he's doing; again, read his next sentence after what you quoted.); or you think that he's wiring the jack in the room back to a switch that he's connecting into using an RJ-45 connector (this is exactly what he's doing), and don't understand why he'd do it this way as opposed to running it to a patch panel.

While patch-panels are a veritable necessity in your large environments where cable runs can be complex and need to be labeled as well as quick changes to network topology can be facilitated, in a residential system where there's most likely only going to be 5 - 10 single line runs that aren't going to move or change much it's an added cost and complexity that doesn't necessarily need to be purchased when each run can be directly connected into the mounted switch and left alone. Also, every time you jump from cable to patch panel to cable to device there's a performance hit on the network. Granted, over the residential runs we're talking about this hit would be nigh negligible, but if it's part of a network plan that adds a touch more complexity that isn't needed and poses no real benefit, its just one more reason to do direct-to-switch runs. Remember, we're talking about spaces where you have a single line coming from the switch and you can most likely easily trace it to the room it's running to just by standing in one place in the attic and following the line with your eyes.

It will never happen because it would be illegal for the lawyer to do so. The worst a lawyer can do to his client if he knows his client is guilty and cannot bring himself to put forth his best efforts in defense is recuse himself from the case... and even this can have repercussions for the lawyer such as have his case reviewed by the Bar Association.

One part you missed in this whole thing, as mrchaotica pointed out in his subject below: There was no warrant sought; let alone signed. The feds performed a potential act of war to gather the data by hacking into a server on foreign sovereign soil without direct authorization from either Congress or Presidential approval, and most certainly without the prior authorization of the country where the server is located. In this case the three letter organization involved went rogue, and imho completely botched this case, and Ross's lawyers are right in their attempt to get the evidence repressed. In reality heads need to roll for this within the organisation that overstepped its jurisdictional bounds, and the rolling heads must be done in complete view of the public.

For me (and likely a good portion of people out there) its a matter of time. If we're small network administrators, we don't always have time to roll our own distribution for them, or program the components to fit our network by hand. My servers out in the cloud that I run OpenCloud from I've been using CentOS 6.5 on. I've also been running this distro on my home intranet for media storage and network management. Being able to use yum to keep the system up to date with patches and updates saves me loads of time from having to compile and patch by hand myself. I'm also not likely to upgrade any time soon as I tend to prefer the init system I know over systemd that I haven't been able to test yet. I also dual boot Linux Mint KDE and Win7 on my desktop, and this system I'm not likely to care as much about the sysvinit / systemd debate. I'll probably continue to use the newer versions of Mint to keep the administrative ease of apt.

If I do wind up having to upgrade server systems it looks like I'll have to give up the feature that kept me preferring Redhat/Debian based distributions over Slack/Gentoo based, just to keep the more transparent System V Init system. All the package based systems that made server administration faster and easier are sliding to the systemd blob. Even using the current version book of LFS compiling the entire system myself I'll have to go off script to keep sysvinit (I'll probably be doing this for my intranet management servers over the weekend since those are also my personal tinker toys.) Nothing more that a mild annoyance, granted, but I don't like the fact that I'm not being given a choice beyond "you can have fast binary package management with a binary blob managing all the core hardware initialization at once with little transparency and added complexity, or you can have your transparent init scripts that boot things transparently with a lot of feedback on each subsystem...but your packages need to be compiled for your system as they're upgraded through Portage/make install. You didn't need your server to do much of anything else for the next 2-8 hours, did you?" No offense, but this is still a situation of "Better the Devil I know than the Angel I don't." I'd rather give up some time to component administration right now and know the system is stable and know how to keep it that way than to use a new init system that I don't know how it runs and run the risk of losing the stability that I require.

Systemd is fine for my desktop system as that's where I'll want the faster boot time that it affords and I won't necessarily need to scrounge the logs, require the utmost in stability, or get as in depth with the system operation; but on my servers I need to be able to check logs in the event of a failure to boot (binary format for your logs? Great idea for when there's a kernel panic and you need to see what happened by reading logs through the boot loader! /s) and I don't necessarily want the system to panic at the catastrophic failure of a single sub-system when the rest of the system would be perfectly capable of limping along until repair. In full disclosure, I don't know enough about systemd yet to know for a fact that this is a problem and I'm just going on my hunches based on my understanding of the theory, but before I put it on any system that I will rely on in more than just a tinker-toy fashion, I will be tinkering with it to see in what ways it will fail and how it behaves when it does. Unfortunately we're back to the whole time thing where I have to manage work projects and personal projects already started and the platforms that these projects run on before I can start putting time into testing systemd for my configurations.

I know you're making a joke here but just to be a pedant: it can and has been argued that feet touch the soil by extension of whatever clothing, platform or cushion are providing support between the foot and the dirt. This includes bodies of water, concrete, shoes, trees...etc.

US is short for USA and is fully United States of America indicating that the United States is a single country that resides on the continent of America (more specifically North America, and thus the sovereign limits of our laws are limited only to the country that is the United States; not the entire continent of North America. We as a nation cannot dictate policy for Canada or Mexico (though we sure as hell try, and often succeed in, influencing it) who we share the North American continent with.

Given this fact the DoJ does not have legal jurisdiction over anything outside of the borders of the United States or its territories without the express permission of agencies of those other nations. Only the United States Military, by order of Congress or through declaration of a Police Action by the President of the United States (until this power is successfully challenged by the other branches of government, this is a power that the office is allowed), can be officially authorized to perform actions against other Sovereign territories, which include hacking computer infrastructure not within US territory. While it can be argued that the NSA and CIA have performed such actions and are not part of the military, unless they're performing in the capacity of military consultants, they very rarely are given any "official" operations off of US soil. The DoJ doesn't have that option. Either they drop the evidence because it was collected as part of an operation that doesn't exist (therefore the evidence can't exist), or the operation did exist and the DoJ went rogue by going against foreign policy...and thus performed an illegal operation against the Doctrine set forth in The Constitution (Article one, Section 8) and the evidence should not be used (a decent defense lawyer should be able to successfully make this argument and turn my ambiguous "should not" into a firm "cannot").

Other nations could legitimately see this action as an act of war perpetrated by the United States as a whole and would be well within their rights to call us on it by whatever means they deem necessary. We should be eating crow for this and heads in the DoJ need to roll for going rogue, but whether any other country would be brave enough to step up against us in this is very unlikely... unless this was perpetrated against a 2nd world country (Russia, China, etc...), then you can bet we're going to see some form of retaliation.

Um, last I checked the DoJ isn't part of our military and as such does not have the authority to perform acts of war such as invading sovereign territories not controlled by US law; which is exactly what hacking a server not controlled by the US without the permission of said sovereign government is considered. Hell, the DoJ isn't even a spy organisation, we already have other departments for that, so they can't legitimately use that excuse that it was just SOP for intelligence gathering.

The US needs to eat some serious crow for this and the DoJ needs to be smacked down hard. My cynicism says that either of those things happening is nigh unlikely given the current political climate