I would take the added step of putting an auto reply / vacation message on the old mailbox, so that anyone emailing you gets a reply telling them your email address has changed, but still forwarding the message so you still get it.

In the 15 years I've been doing this I have realized that there are far too many people whom deep down inside the answer is yes. Maybe they are too beat down, or jaded, or just don't care. I know plenty of guys who started in the industry with me or shortly after that are still in the same job role, not for lack of skill or opportunity to advance, but pure desire and motivation.

Going through these posts so far I'm a little shocked and taken back by the common themes... look guys, no one is going to hand you promotions and raises, you need to go out and get them. The first step in doing this is to reflect on your career and skill set, then honestly answer these questions, at least to yourself. IF the answer truly is "for a paycheck" then fine, but don't also expect large raises and promotions; these generally go to people who are aggressive with their career and in it more for just a paycheck.

It's easy as engineers to sometimes feel entitled; how many of us have saved companies from a major disaster? saved millions of dollars? saved people their jobs? You might be asking "where is my cut?" The short answer is tough luck, you did your job and you don't get one; that's not to say you don't deserve one. Feel good about what you did, and use it to propel your career, but don't get caught up in what you did not get in return. With pay and promotions sometimes you need to fight for it and sometimes give up and switch jobs, cities, states or countries to move up, acquire new skills and receive higher pay checks. The major advances in my career and pay all came from job transitions between companies, with some minor victories in there while on the job.

In some imaginary utopian world a manager would pro-actively promote you and shower you with praise, fame and fortune. Your CEO would be driving the honda and you the bently. When you came to work a carpet would be laid out and fresh warm hot pockets would be already made for you. People would line the cubicle walls and cheer for you as you walked by, that balding manager would shake your hand and thank you for recovering his email. Sysadmin day would be more than just a joke on slashdot... That's not the world we live in. Companies more often than not suck, some less than others. Your *real job* is to find the least sucky job, get the most money you can for yourself and advance your skill set quickly because there aint no one out there who's going to hand it to you -- no matter how much to deserve it.

Yea, its always been that way. Except back in the 80's it was Japan getting the preference. We in the US would often wait years for games to make it here. I cant really have much sympathy for days...

We use OpenLDAP this same way, but on top of it have many other layers that protect the systems and mitigate risk. Systems authenticate though LDAP, which we enforce on the linux systems using the standard config files, which in turn are version controlled and monitored by a config repository. If for instance someone does create a local account, it's discovered by the linux config manager and it's overwritten. If a server stops responding to the config manager a little alert goes off. These become the keys which you tightly guard. Access at that point becomes less of an issue, as it's easily monitored, controlled, and removed if necessary.

On top mitigate risk is important. No one server can be a single point of failure, and no single system can't be wiped and imaged clean in under 15 minutes. Backups become critical, use a trusted offsite service like IronMountain. Don't just stick them on a local disk, put them in a trusted space and give access on the account solely to people who have a deep vested interested in maintaining the company. If your systems can be rebuilt, and your backups are safe, you're looking at a worst case of being down for a day. Most companies should be doing this anyway, it's not just rouge admins you have to worry about, it's rouge data centers, rouge customers, rouge carriers, rouge asteroids, fires, earthquakes, bombs...

Distributed across disks/machines/racks, yes... datacenters, no. When you create your S3 "bucket" you specify a region to store it in. That region corresponds to a single physical datacenter. You can always dual write it to two buckets in two different regions if you're really worried however.

There are certainly many cases where there are advantages of non-relational systems as layers in the application that complement standard relational databases. Generally frequently read data that does not need to be queried at a granular level, like say session data, or geographical mapping tables. Some good complementary examples include memcache, redis or even ruby's starling. I use many of these in my applications, where honestly MySQL would probably work, but these other solutions provide many performance and cost advantages that simply can not be overlooked. Some, like starling, I've used to simply cache data on disk that does not change often, or lists in Redis to store map data.

IMO it's often easy to say SQL will work so use that, but it's not always the best solution. Sure you can get it to scale; I've used it in very massive petabyte scale without very much issue... but sometimes for smaller sets of data frequently accessed do you really want to invest in the kind of hardware required to make SQL run well, or will an in memory store on commodity hardware work as well or better? Sometimes you have massive data going in where neither SQL nor NoSQL are going to help you, where maybe hadoop or another map-reduce type solution is more appropriate.

It generally comes down to the questions; what type of data are you storing, how much data will there be, how are you going to use that data and at what levels of latency do you require for reads and writes? Before those are well defined you really are shooting in the dark on solutions to store and access it. This IMO is really the major issue most startups have, no one defined the data strategy, they just build with no conscious effort to examine what the business needs are short and long term.

I read this from a few sources today, including fox, and I can't really find fault in the reporting from fox news on this topic; Seems just as complete as any other source I've read.

pronounced bayner, heh

"If the guaranteed annual income had gone through, we would have eliminated poverty."

At best you would have changed the bar for poverty. Like it or not people are in poverty weather the poverty line is 20k annually or 100k annually. If you're at the bottom, you're at the bottom, the numerical value is really vary arbitrary.

For Windows as a guest on Xen you need a host that supports VT in the CPU. If your CPU supports it it'll be an option usually in the BIOS -- you can also check for the vmx flag in /proc/cpuinfo. With VirtualBox that's not the case, windows seems to work fine for standard tasks.

VirtualBox comes with a pretty interface that makes administration easy, xen does not. Although if you want a GUI for Xen there are options out there. Citrix makes one, also there's cloudmin which is really easy to use.