If he is telling the truth then they are indeed demanding his root password. It is not clear from the original post, but if you read his other posts in this this thread he indicates that are refusing to give him back access to the box or his data until he provides them with the ORIGINAL root password.

You are right. I come from a background of always co-locating and hosting my stuff myself. I assumed he was in a similar situations and was absolutely shocked by the situation. After reading more of the thread it's obvious that he was renting the server from someone else.

Still though their response seems pretty ridiculous. He does indicate (elsewhere in the thread) that is was a dedicated, non-managed service. The strongest response that I can see being appropriate here would be to tell him that they can't guarantee uptime without access to information that they need (and still I don't know why that can't ask for logs instead of demanding root) or to tell him that he has x days to get his data off their server before they close his account.

I am asking this as a serious question not a rhetorical one: What good does it do anyone to respond as they did, instead of just doing what I have suggested?

I can understand what you are saying here but if you are renting a whole server, and not just sharing one with other customers, then shouldn't your provider limit their support to what you ask for? If you say you have a problem, and you aren't willing to give them the info then shouldn't they say, "sorry we cant' fix your problem without more info" before you do a hard shutdown on their box and start snooping around? I guess this could create some SLA issues, but it should be spelled out in the SLA that if they don't give you access then they can't guarantee uptime.

Under these circumstances your company would seriously break in and start snooping around?

In my mind this is analogous to calling your landlord with a leaky faucet but then not letting him in the house when he gets there. Your landlord keeps a key to the place, but he can't go in without your permission. If you want the faucet fixed and you don't give him permission to come in there you are out of luck on the faucet, but that doesn't give him the right to sneak in when you aren't home, lock you out of your own house, and go to town on your plumbing.

Also if this guy is telling the truth he isn't paying for any sort of management at all. (See his response to parent)

You people are both crazy. I can not even imagine any provider I have ever used even thinking that it would be appropriate to ask me for my root password, much less actually force themselves into my box after I had explicitly denied them access. Even if you don't care about the inherent security problem and the blatant illegality of it, is it not a problem for you if your hosting provider forcefully powers down your server at any time!!!???

> Yes, it's kind of lame that they are rooting boxes.

Once again, you are crazy. "kind of lame" doesn't even begin to describe how inappropriate that is even for just the downtime that it would cause alone.

> On the other hand, the questioner might be more problems than he is worth from their point of view.

Then why are they doing business with him at all? An appropriate solutions in this situation might be to say, "sorry we can't help you with this issue without access to your logs." Forcefully breaking in is way more than lame.

> If I were in the same situation, I'd just change providers and find one who will put into writing that they won't root my box (good luck with that).

Of just find any provider that isn't straight up terrible. There are so many options out there right now that it boggles my mind that any provider could get away with this. If my provider pulled a stunt like that and it got out, there would be a mass exodus of servers going out the doors.

Seriously, who are these clowns?

1. Don't EVER host with them again. I don't know what's in your contract but as far as I understand it, breaking into your server without your permission is illegal. It's possible that you could take legal action against them.

2. Figure out how they broke in. If they broke in then someone else likely could too.

I have never heard of anything like that happening with any host ever. I am amazed that a company could act like that and still expect to have any customers. It's not like there aren't options.

That is a great comparison, and contrary to some of the responses, being able to do alter table statements on an in use production system is vital to any serious database solution. It doesn't say anything about Oracle vs. Postgres though as Postgres has been able to do this for a very long time.

I'm not just trying to be contrary here, I would really like to know. What does Oracle have that puts it (20 years?) ahead of Postgres (other than RAC, there were very informative posts above about that).

Do you mean, trust as in trust to not do shady things like violate my privacy or trust as in trust them to be competent when setting up their DNS servers?

I don't really trust any ISP to not be shady. But since I want to have the internet I haven't got much choice. I don't know if comcast or our local municipal fiber provider is better in this regard but I know which one is a lot faster.

I also know that sometimes the line just goes down for like 10 minutes with no explanation. And sometimes their DNS servers crap out for like 10 minutes. I can't do much about the line itself going down. But by switching to google DNS I can avoid issues with my ISPs DNS not working.

For me it's pretty much that simple.

The problem is for every expert there is an equal and opposite expert. In this case there are companies (not to mention the economy as a whole) that would lose enormous amounts of money if we start to crack down on carbon emissions. There are also people who are set up to profit both politically and financially from "proving" the science behind climate change.

The other problem is that the public isn't being asked to believe in this stuff because believing in it will magically fix the problem, the public is being asked to believe in it because the government is asking for our money. They are asking for us to pay higher prices for EVERYTHING because everything we do requires energy. The cheapest way to get energy right now is to burn fossil fuels. On the other hand if New York is indeed going to be buried in water in 50 years then it's going to be cheaper and better all around to do something about it now while we still can. It is very important to get this right and saying "trust me I'm an expert" just isn't good enough.

The proposed solution to this problem is of course to declare that there is a consensus among all scientists who matter. But of course as a lay person the process of deciding who gets to decide which scientists matter and which one's don't is no easier than deciding which experts are correct in the first place.

Establishing the truth about anything is simply a difficult problem and pretending that because someone is an "expert" that they can't be wrong is just stupid. Certain things are just very complicated. Fields that study complex systems evolve more rapidly and have less stable elements than those that study simpler more easily observable phenomena. For instance, if you told me that you were an expert on Newtonian physics, and you told me that you could launch a canon ball and tell me where it was going to land I would believe you. If you were an expert in quantum physics and you told me you knew exactly how, given the proper equipment, to produce a Higgs Boson, I would assume that you understood what the theories said but that in your excitement you might be a little overly confident since no one has ever done such a thing and the theories could be wrong. If you were an expert in psychology and you told me you could tell me what I was going to eat for breakfast in the morning I would call you a quack.

If you were a doctor telling me that the surgery you were recommending had an 98% chance of killing me I would get a second opinion. Even if I thought you were the best most "expert" doctor in the world and you told me that the alternative to the surgery was certain death, I would get a second opinion. And probably a 3rd, and a 4th and a 5th opinion as well. Why? Because the cost of getting the opinions of 4 doctors is way, way more acceptable than the possibility of dying on the operating table and there is some chance that my doctor made a mistake.

The impression that I get after looking into the situation with these leaked emails, and please correct me if I'm wrong because I would very much like to wrong, but the impression that I get is that no one, outside of the research teams that developed these models has ever seen this code or been able to duplicate it themselves. I don't know what happens in the peer review process but it appears that actually looking at the code and validating that it works properly is not part of it. And even if it is, why not let other scientists look at it? Why not let other "experts" look at it? I feel like you are telling me that once the first doctor has done a diagnosis that he has the right to hide all of the data related to it, not let anyone, except a self-chosen peer, look at it, and that I should believe that anyone who comes up with a different diagnosis could only be wrong and I shouldn't listen to anything they say.

You say:

But the impression people are getting from this incident is that only part of the research gets published and that some parts are hidden and that scientists are even committing illegal acts such as deleting information that could be requested as part of a Freedom of Information Act in order to keep things hidden. When I read accounts of other climate scientists trying to duplicate the results and being unable to and then requesting information on how it was done in the first place and that request for information being denied what am I supposed to think? That the man working in secret is right because the UN published his results and that the man who appears to be working out in the open is a villain? When I read that after their models are revealed they produce the same charts regardless of whether they are fed real data or noise am I just supposed to assume that they were correct because the were created by experts?

Your right, as a lay person it is hard to understand the arguments of experts. But in a situation where determining who is correct is vital to our future prosperity there is a larger burden than just doing good science. In situations where the only thing that matters is the opinions of other scientists I would say that you are right to not waste your time arguing with idiots. But when science influences policy there is an additional responsibility to make a convincing case that those idiots can understand. Is it a lot more work. Yes. Am I asking you personally to sit down and tutor every one of them? Obviously not. If you go to http://copenhagendiagnosis.org/ you will see the following:

This is because these people are not idiots. They know that they are asking for major changes to be made with regard to how our economy functions and that the burden for those changes will be paid for by "the broader public". Hence they are willing to engage with said public. And that report in fact, I believe does a very good job of that. More is required however. The report makes sense. But if the codes and raw data sets used to come to these conclusions are secret and cannot be duplicated by others how am I to have confidence in them? If skeptics, even lay skeptics, raise concerns they should be addressed and communicated to the public in as clear a manner as possible. The burden of proof is in fact extraordinarily high. The following must be determined with a very high degree of certainty before we can be confident that we are making the right policy choices:

1. The earth is getting hotter
2. The warming is a long term trend
3. The warming is caused by humans
4. The warming is caused by human produced CO2
5. How much warming is going to occur?
6. What is the effect of the warming?
7. What is the best way to deal with the effects of the warming?
8. What is the best way to stop the warming?

The answer to all of these questions involves the analysis of very, very complex systems. If you are trying to say that a doctorate level degree equals expert equals trust everything they say without question, then you are in fact the idiot. My experience with medical doctors is that they are wrong more times than they are right when it comes to anything that falls outside of the normal situations that they regularly run into. Do I assume that there is a conspiracy amongst doctors to harm my body. No, that would be just as stupid. They are wrong because the human body is very complicated and despite the fact that we have been studying it for a long time there is still much that we don't understand. To assume that someone with a Ph.D in a much younger science such as climate science, studying a much more complicated system, the earth, of which we only have one specimen rather than billions, is automatically right to the degree that we are willing to institute programs that cost billions of dollars, is just crazy talk. I'm not saying that the science is not good only that much skepticism should be applied. Essentially:

1. The burden of proof is high. Doing a couple of peer reviews per study is not enough.
2. The entire process should all be done out in the open where all "experts" and consequently lay people have equal access to all data and code so that every expert can make his/her case.

If I go to you and demand your time to explain to me your job because I am curious than, yeah, I am the arrogant one. But if you take the results of your work and come to me and demand that I change my lifestyle and spend my money in a certain way and that I shouldn't question you or ask for you to explain yourself or show other scientists how you arrived at your conclusions then your arrogance is just stupefying.

Well I don't think anyone is suggesting that we set it up on github so every clown coding in his mothers basement can can start contributing. I don't know that the important thing here is a true "free software(tm)" or "opensource(tm)" license. The important thing is that before we start looking at this research and assuming it is all correct because a few other scientists did a peer review and then making sweeping and expensive policy changes at the highest levels we should open up what they did so that people can look for problems in their methodology.

Now I don't think that anyone will care what I think of their code but I'm guessing that there is more than one person out there with a Ph.D in climate change that could look at this stuff, if it was public, and either confirm that the work is valid or point out it's flaws. At least there could be a debate about it among scientists. It is understandable that they are worried that powerful lobbies will try to distort their work and lie about it. But there is no other option. This is science that is affecting public policy and it can not be done in the dark.

On the other hand given how poorly some of this stuff appears to be coded it seems that they could use all the coding help that they could get: http://di2.nu/200911/23a.htm. Hopefully these assessments of how sloppy their work is are not accurate, and that most of the work that has gone into the IPCC reports is less error prone than the stuff that has been leaked.

Maybe I misunderstood...

But did you just refer to the contents of foxnews.com as knowledge?

I have heard this narrative many many times and I am not doubting it's accuracy. But what I don't understand about it is: If it's such a big problem, can't the entire Medical industry just keep using the old stuff? Especially now that it's gone generic? With so much on the line is the entire industry unable to make decisions based on the medical efficacy of a drug and not based on pure marketing? Let the pharmaceutical company go make their stupid one off variant that is still patentable while doctors just switch over to prescribing the generic form of the old drug. I have wondered about this for some time, why are doctors not able to subvert this shady tactic???

So, I am not a kernel developer but I am pretty sure that the transition to a full 64-bit, "Grand Central Dispatch" and OpenCL would involve some pretty serious work on the kernel. Does MS really make such huge under the hood changes in a service pack? If so that seems like a pretty bad idea. I can see that maybe in XP SP2 (and maybe 3) just because they were getting hammered so hard on security they had no choice not to make some pretty serious security upgrades. But for the most part they seem just like an accumulation of lots and lots of lots and lots of bug fixes. Just because it doesn't have that many checklistably obvious user facing features doesn't mean that they haven't made serious architectural changes that would distinguish it from what MS calls a service pack.

There are often large updates to the OS that apple also pushes out for free that contain tons of bug fixes. They also don't charge for those. The two companies obviously have different models for how they do updates, but I can't believe that this idea that every major OS X update is just a service pack keeps coming up again and again. I'm sure I am missing something but at this point it just seems willfully obtuse.

So which major versions would you consider service packs and which would you not? So far it seems people have said that about every single major version that has been released except for 10.0. By the logic of these people all of the work that Apple has done since 2001 is akin to what MS just gives away for free. All that they have done is just fix a ton of bugs and add very minor features. It is unbelievable to me that people continue to assert this.

It seems to me that the entire viewpoint of people who espouse and advocate these ideas seems to be fundamentally flawed. The way I see it every single major release has been worth way more than $129 to me and I would in fact pay far more for it if it came down to it. When you combine that with the number of people who actually paid money to "downgrade" their Vista licenses to XP it just becomes all the more laughable that people are trying to criticize Apple's update/pay structure not with any real argument about it's specific flaws but by saying "oh yeah, well Microsoft would give that away for free."

Seriously?

People don't even want the latest MS OS they have already been forced to pay for and yet you feel the need to make ridiculous semantic arguments about what constitutes a service pack in order to try to somehow say that what Apple spent two years making MS would just give away.

Am I alone here are do others also believe that this "it's just like an service pack" line of reasoning is just completely absurd?

Many of these comments seem to focus on using these non-relational databases because the developer is to lazy to use, or doesn't understand how a proper relational database functions. It is probably true that that happens but that discussion totally overlooks what these non-relational systems are actually for and why they are popping up all over the place.

If all you want is a key-value store then why not use an existing relational database? They are amazingly good at what they do and storing key-value pairs could be considered a small subset of what they do. But even that they do very well. They have very fast data storage formats, they are very good at not losing your data, they have all the networking figured out, authentication, etc, etc. It would seem silly to be create a brand new database that does only a strict subset of what existing dbs can do. There is no point unless they can do things that an RDBMS can not do, or unless they could do that small subset of things better than a traditional RDBMS.

The main reason that these dbs are popping up all over the place is that people want to scale, and scale quickly. Google doesn't use big table because their devs are lazy or un-knowledgeable. Google uses big table because they need to scale. Transactions, constraints, joins, ACID. Doing all of those things in the db makes it harder to scale the db. Implement those features in the app and now your db can scale more easily and the app servers can still scale, thus your app as a whole can scale. That is the idea that is being explored in many different directions by all of these different non-relational dbs.

Mabye some of these databases are just jumping on the bandwagon without even knowing what the point is. Maybe some of their users are just too lazy to learn SQL. But the real reason for these new db's existence is that scaling a relational database is very hard and people are trying to find easier ways to do it.

I'm still in wait and see mode but that doesn't mean that this new breed of databases doesn't have a place.