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Comment Re:wrong on several counts... (Score 1) 298

by modir (#27046481) Attached to: Best Solution For HA and Network Load Balancing?

Since when is it possible to have an Active/Active cluster? Definitely not with Microsoft Cluster Server from Microsoft 2003:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Cluster_Server

And as I wrote in my article I am only writing about this one. And I was not talking about "Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003" or the NLB feature.

And about the vmware solution: He could create a snapshot of the running vm then copy the disk file(s) over to the other server and then delete the snapshot again. This whole process can be scripted with perl and RCLI. He only needs two ESXi servers for this. And they can be downloaded for free. It is definitely not the best solutions but one that would work.

And yes, your solution is probably the best one for his problem.

Comment Re:Some information about HA (Score 2, Informative) 298

by modir (#27038849) Attached to: Best Solution For HA and Network Load Balancing?

True, sorry I did not write it that clear. I was only writing about the Cluster software included with Windows. Not about other applications like NLB included with Windows too.

I just wanted to make clear that Microsoft Cluster Server is a lot easier to set-up (what the questioner has seen correctly) but this is because you get a lot less. He would have to install and configure several other applications (like NLB) to get the same as he gets with Linux HA.

Comment Some information about HA (Score 3, Informative) 298

by modir (#27038269) Attached to: Best Solution For HA and Network Load Balancing?

I want to give you some more information. Based on your visitor estimates I think you do not have a lot of knowledge about it. Because for this number of visitors you do not really need a cluster.

But now to the other stuff. Yes, Windows clustering is (up to Win Server 2003 [1]) a lot easier. But this is because it is not really a cluster. The only thing you can do is having the software running on one server, then you stop it and start it on the new server. This is what Windows Cluster is doing for you. But you can not have the software running on both servers at the same time.

If you really want to have a cluster then you need probably some sort of shared storage (FibreChannel, iSCSI, etc.). Or you are going to use something like DRDB [2]. You will need something like this too if you want to have a real cluster on Windows.

I recommend you to read some more on the Linux HA website [3]. Then you get a better idea what components (shared storage, load balancer, etc.) you will need within your cluster.

If you only want high availability and not load balancing then I recommend you to not use Windows Cluster. Better set-up two VMware servers with one virtual machine and then copy a snapshot of your virtual machine every few hours over to the second machine.

[1] I don't know about Win Server 2008
[2] http://www.drbd.org/
[3] http://www.linux-ha.org/

Comment Re:Support Incident Tracker (Score 1) 321

by modir (#27010113) Attached to: Best FOSS Help Desk Software For Small Firms?

I can only recommend this one too... I have to evaluate a new trouble ticket system last week. And of all the open source products I found this one was the best.

We had OTRS before. OTRS is very good too, but really hard to install.

A friend is using RT. Now with the newest version the user interface looks really good too. And I think many problems mentioned by others are gone.
The Military

40 Years Ago, the US Lost a Nuclear Bomb 470

Posted by kdawson from the chrome-dome-down dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "A BBC investigation has found that in 1968 the US abandoned a nuclear weapon beneath the ice in northern Greenland after a nuclear-armed B52 crashed on the ice a few miles from Thule Air Base. The Stratofortress disintegrated on impact with the sea ice and parts of it began to melt through to the fjord below. The high explosives surrounding the four nuclear weapons on board detonated without setting off the nuclear devices, which had not been armed by the crew. The Pentagon maintained that all four weapons had been 'destroyed' and while technically true, investigators piecing together fragments from the crash could only account for three of the weapons. Investigators found that 'something melted through ice such as burning primary or secondary.' A subsequent search by a US submarine was beset by technical problems and, as winter encroached and the ice began to freeze over, the search was abandoned. 'There was disappointment in what you might call a failure to return all of the components,' said a former nuclear weapons designer at the Los Alamos nuclear laboratory. 'It would be very difficult for anyone else to recover classified pieces if we couldn't find them.'"
Software

How To Kill an Open Source Project With New Funding 187

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the money-still-the-root-of-all-evil dept.
mir42 writes "The OpenSource multimedia authorware project Sophie, formerly hosted by USC Los Angeles, may just have been killed by new funding. The original funding organization, Mellon Foundation, approved a grant to redevelop the four year project from scratch in Java. The grant was awarded to a Bulgarian company based on their proposal, which is simply an exact description, including the UI and the artwork, of the current Sophie. Being an OpenSource project, this isn't strictly illegal, but let's say, not nice and definitely not innovative, coming from a former sub-sub-contractor on the project. Some of the original, now laid-off developers started OpenSophie.org trying to salvage the project. As the current version is still somewhat buggy and slow, it might just be enough to alienate all potential users of Sophie to the point that nobody will even try to use the next version. Have others faced similar situations? How would you deal with a situation like this?"
The Internet

The Curious Histories of Generic Domain Names 208

Posted by Zonk from the awesome.com-idea.com dept.
cheezitmike writes "ITworld.com uses the Wayback Machine to document the histories of five generic domain names: music.com, eat.com, car.com, meat.com, and milk.com. 'In this brave new Web 2.0 world, it's almost a badge of honor to have a Web site name that only hints at what the user will find there (see Flickr) or is so opaque as to offer no clue at all as to what the Web site is about (see del.icio.us). It's easy to forget the first Internet gold rush of the mid-to-late '90s, when dot-com domain names based on ordinary (and, investors hoped, marketable) nouns and verbs were snapped up by hopeful companies from the humble geeks who had purchased them (often ironically) in the early '90s.'"
Idle

Hitler Likes HD-DVD Screenshot-sm

Posted by samzenpus from the blu-ray-in-berlin-by-christmas dept.
samzenpus writes "Not even the Germans can keep Blu Ray at bay. The subtitle flow is perfect in this one."

Teleportation — Fact and Fiction 348

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the there-and-back-again dept.
jcatcw writes "Earlier this week actor Hayden Christensen, of Star Wars fame, and director Doug Liman discussed teleportation with MIT professors to compare the reality to the special effects version in the upcoming movie, Jumper. Edward Farhi, director of the Center for Theoretical Physics at MIT, said, 'It's a little less exotic than what you see in the movie. Teleportation has been done, moving a single proton over two miles. [But] teleporting a person? That is pretty far down the line. The quantum state of a living creature is pretty formidable. That is just not in the foreseeable future.'"
Databases

MapReduce — a Major Step Backwards? 157

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the angry-dbas-are-never-a-good-thing dept.
The Database Column has an interesting, if negative, look at MapReduce and what it means for the database community. MapReduce is a software framework developed by Google to handle parallel computations over large data sets on cheap or unreliable clusters of computers. "As both educators and researchers, we are amazed at the hype that the MapReduce proponents have spread about how it represents a paradigm shift in the development of scalable, data-intensive applications. MapReduce may be a good idea for writing certain types of general-purpose computations, but to the database community, it is: a giant step backward in the programming paradigm for large-scale data intensive applications; a sub-optimal implementation, in that it uses brute force instead of indexing; not novel at all -- it represents a specific implementation of well known techniques developed nearly 25 years ago; missing most of the features that are routinely included in current DBMS; incompatible with all of the tools DBMS users have come to depend on."
Software

What is an Open Source Company Really Worth? 82

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the sleeping-with-dollar-signs-in-your-eyes dept.
CNet has an interesting profile of MySQL, JBoss, and Zimbra, exploring what an open source company is actually worth. "Given how slowly revenue accumulates in an open-source company--assuming it is recognizing subscriptions over 12 months--bookings is probably the valuation metric being used or at least strongly considered. It surely is the metric by which the start-up wishes to be measured. So while Savio suggests we open-source entrepreneurs may be "sleeping with dollar signs in (our) eyes," there's clearly a lot of work to do before most open-source companies are worth selling. It's not worth selling out for $100 million. Not for the venture-backed companies, anyway."
Operating Systems

Submission + - MikeOS 1.0 And OS Writing Guide Released

Submitted by M-Saunders
M-Saunders writes: Fancy writing your own OS? The first official version of MikeOS has been released. It's a 16-bit PC OS written in assembly, released under a BSD-like license. It boots from floppy or CD, has 30+ system calls and features basic DOS .COM program compatibility. Moreover, it's designed to teach to teach basic OS design and x86 assembly language, and the new Handbook includes a whole section on writing your own OS. Sure, you wouldn't write an OS in 16-bit asm today, but hopefully it's a useful starting point for novices.

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