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Wed, 20 Jan 2010

7:43 PM - GNU LInux is not ready for prime time

I just went through a day of hell today; it's name was Linux.  Ubuntu server does not properly support RAID either with "fake" raid as in the Intel Matrix RAID controller on my core i5 development server at work or with the Linux kernel's built in RAID.  Ubuntu cannot detect if a drive has failed, read from either disk for performance improvement or even detect their was a read failure and silently switch.  Your box has to crash for you to know a disk failed.  Worse yet, it doesn't even install.  It tries to use EXT4 file system which does not support GRUB.  GRUB2 can't work with RAID yet which is the default.  So Ubuntu server is a useless piece of shit.  

So after wasting time with three installs of Ubuntu server, I went on to look for another Linux distro with working RAID.  All of them required insane hoops to get it to work and each distro was different.  Suse has a nice gui installer, but with a DVD download and several duplications of partitions, it was just not what I wanted to deal with.  FInally, we ended up with Debian which is working ubuntu.  (it's the distro ubuntu is based on)  The RAID support works in Debian but requires some rediculous steps.  Vamsi installed debian (first) and then we had to make an identical partition table on the second disk, initialize md for EACH partition on that disk, rsync over the files (we had 3 partiitons including swap) , fix GRUB (not GRUB2), and /etc/fstab, reboot, then add disk 1 to the array (each partition actually) and then wait for Linux to copy all the shit back over from the second disk.  Not to mention fixing the md config file.

In FreeBSD, this would have been a 10 minute job including installing the OS.  Even Windows or Mac OS X server can do this without a problem.

Conclusion: LInux is not ready for the desktop or server room 

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7:54 PM - FreeBSD gmirror

After my little rant, I decided to backup my claim about FreeBSD.  Here are some articles on setting up gmirror in freebsd

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/geom-mirror.html

http://www.freebsddiary.org/gmirror.php

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7:59 PM - nmap 5.20 out

o 30+ new Nmap Scripting Engine scripts
o enhanced performance and reduced memory consumption
o protocol-specific payloads for more effectie UDP scanning
o a completely rewritten traceroute engine
o massive OS and version detection DB updates (10,000+ signatures)

This looks awesome. In case you're not familiar with nmap, it allows you to scan a host to determine the OS it is running and look for services by way of a port scan.

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