I do, and I do it well. You'd be surprised how much setting things up on linux / vyatta is to a cisco router. BGP is BGP. Of course, if you're not smart enough to use the knowledge gained from testing on the free stuff, I understand. Not everyone is.

If your boss doesn't know that employees aren't cookie cutter replacements, then you made a mistake in accepting a position under him. My boss damned well does know this, and so does his boss. Same was true for the last company I worked for. Before that I worked at a company that had a lot of higher level execs who thought like that but we luckily had a lot of good middle managers who kept us from having to interact with the idiot CIO and his team of clowns.

s/could/couldn't/

You'd be surprised how many people we interviewed who could work with the most simple of pieces of tech. No idea how to form an SQL query, no idea how to use something like yahoo's web gui libs, no idea what the difference was between passing by reference and passing by value and on and on.

We weren't looking for someone with 20 years experience, hell a high school kid with a knack for simple procedural code would do, and we had a hard time finding that.

This very much mirrors my past experience. After being laid off twice, I've had two interviews and two new jobs both times. I was very careful of where I was interviewing, and only went to interviews at places I wanted to work.

Download an iso from Vyatta and build a test network with old PCs and spare NICs for testing. Sure, it's not the exact same as Cisco, but if they're too cheap to buy the real thing for a test lab then you'll at least be somewhat close.

Then, once you realize what you're not getting for your money with Cisco, you can buyt $1000 1U servers and build your own routers (or buy them prebuilt from Vyatta for about $2000) to replace the ciscos and make a profit selling the used Ciscos on ebay.

I do NOT work for nor am I affiliated with Vyatta. But their gear is pretty impressive, and open source.

It has working async (log shipping isn't synchronous) but it has lots of bugs that can jump up and bite you in the ass that haven't been fixed yet. Search the MySQL bug database for examples. It still requires you to stop your whole cluster and replicate the master to the slave to work. For large datasets this is unworkable if you need continuous uptime.

It's pretty good, and super easy to setup, but it's not perfect.

You do know you can get 24/7 support for MySQL and PostgreSQL, right? right? From the people who write / wrote the code no less, not some support guy thirteen levels removed from development.

I don't know about you but I'd probably be out looking for a job if the sites I run were down on open of business monday morning.

But if forks don't survive, why is my Ubuntu laptop running xorg for the display and not xfree86? I think Monty is saying forks don't survive because he simply wishes they couldn't. I'd bet that if the MySQL community wanted to they could fork it and make it stick just fine. Heck, I think that's what IS happening right now, and Monty is putting his fingers in his ears going "la la la la la la".

This is an extreme, and inaccurate oversimplification. There are thousands of unemployed programmers, but honestly most of them are shitty and I would never hire them. During this current downturn we interviewed about 25 developers for an open position and found 2 acceptable candidates.

Plus, you invest a lot of time and effort training someone in how to work at your company with your development process. It takes them time to become familiar with the code they're working on. Employees in general, and coders in particular are not simple cookie cutter replacements and your boss knows this. The average cost to bring a new coder up to speed measures in the 10s of thousands of dollars.

As bad as that movie was (and it was bad) the book Alan Dean Foster wrote from it is a great read and I highly recommend it.

Without any reference to the hardware, it's hard to say if 25M/s is fast or slow. On my laptop running an external USB hard drive that's quite peppy. On my production file server with 16 fast SATA drives it's godawful slow. But without some form of reference, it's just another number.

Sounds like you spend too much time reading marketing materials and not enough time testing things.

And you're so sure of your experiences that you post as AC. Sure sure, you're not trolling. I've had / currently admin linux servers (file, web, app, db) with years of uptime and no crashes and average load factors of 4 to 40 in daily use. NO CRASHES

Sorry you linux-fu and troll-fu suck so much ass.