Onno (VK6FLAB)

Anything and everything Amateur Radio and beyond. Heavily into Open Source and SDR, working on a multi band monitor and transmitter.

#geek #nerd #hamradio VK6FLAB #podcaster #australia #ITProfessional #voiceover #opentowork

  • 173 Posts
  • 579 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: March 4th, 2024

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  • This is the job for the OS.

    You can run most Linux systems with stupid amounts of swap and the only thing you’ll notice is that stuff starts slowing down.

    In my experience, only in extremely rare cases are you smarter than the OS, and in 25+ years of using Linux daily I’ve seen it exactly once, where oomkiller killed running mysqld processes, which would have been fine if the developer had used transactions. Suffice to say, they did not.

    I used a 1 minute cron job to reprioritize the process, problem “solved” … for a system that hadn’t been updated for 12 years but was still live while we documented what it was doing and what was required to upgrade it.



























  • Fair question.

    What it boils down to is: Become part of the OSS community.

    In my experience, there’s no other way, since the alternative is to be automatically part of the Microsoft (or Apple) community.

    In other words, you need to make the investment into the implementation. As I’ve said elsewhere, license costs are insignificant.

    The community is where you get help, where you find others with the same issues. You can pay the likes of Canonical and Redhat, but I’ve never been impressed by either.

    Ultimately any solution requires support, just like any other tool. You just need to make it explicit, rather than assumed.

    One thing that Microsoft does to ensure that you have support infrastructure is to continually break backwards compatibility in subtle ways that require you to open your wallet and pay for support.

    OSS will likely run for years without adult supervision, but that doesn’t mean it can continue to work without requiring support from time to time. If you don’t prepare for this, you’re going to be very unhappy.


  • Here’s three:

    • A server with nobody supporting it for 13 years. It had a MySQL database with 743 columns. There was no documentation, served three organisations and hadn’t been backed up for at least 7 years.
    • A server running a CMS for a dozen organisations that was running on failing hardware. No idea who built or didn’t support it.
    • A server built by an employee 15 years ago, then supported by a “web company” who didn’t update it for 12 years, then “supported” by a Windows shop which was happy to charge the customer but hadn’t actually updated the server.

    You’ll notice that I’m being deliberately vague.

    All these share the exact scenario that the OP outlines. The organisations involved didn’t know that they were in deep trouble until well after the project instigator departed. No documentation, no updates, no training, handover, nothing beyond a set of credentials.