[rescue] NT. MAKES. ME. SICK.

[Gil Young]

This thing keeps going and going, ah well, here I go again.

Heres a call for an expert on an NT problem, and this is one of many
examples that NT really isnt enterprise anything.  I have an NT box that was
hooked up to an EMC with a FC card, and also a scsi disk array.  The EMC is
now gone, but the card is still in the boxen (a compaq).  On deinstall
(deinstalled by another, not me), the box was rebooted and the fiber cables
pulled during power down.  The error log is filling up with an error message
that it can not get to the volumes, the disk manager says itsees some disks
missing, but it will not remove them (gives no option to have them removed,
just sez it will keep them there).  The EMC is long gone.  Perhaps there was
a way to avoid this in the first place, but perhaps there should be more way
than one to skin a cat in an enterprise situation? I think so.

Soooo the bottom line is, now I cant backup the system (all started when the
one disk was removed), and the error log is in a constant fill circle
(capped at 4 meg coz of it).  MS says to go into regedit and delete some
regedit stuff and it will go away upon running the disk manger next.  Not
so. Disk Manager (upon running after the deleted regedit hack) again states
that there were some volumes missing, but it will keep the info cause hey,
it knows better than me, right?, and the logs still fill up.

Now riddle me this, should a supposed enterprise system behave in this
manner:

1) Error log being written to a few times a minute, one line per error, same
error over and over and over.
2) A missing volume (purely data volume, not OS related whatsoever) is the
cause of the continuous stream of errors.
3) A registry hack as the proposed solution!! And one that does not work,
BTW.
4) A disk manager that insists it knows better than you what needs to be
done, and thus refuses to let you get rid of the volumes.
5) The system itself not capable of a backup because of it.
6) The tech notes on how to fix it, from the manufacturer, do not work.

I have admined and managed NT systems alongside UNIX  for about 3 years now,
coming from a huge UNIX background.  I still do both, mainly UNIX, and I am
not a cert'ed paper jock, I earned my keep cutting my teeth through
thousands of all nighters, code hacks, kernel patches, etc....

So, what is supposed to be impressive about this thing called NT?

Gil Young
Call Sign: KG4KVX
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----- Original Message -----
From: mike dombrowski <legodude at home.net>
To: <rescue at sunhelp.org>
Sent: Thursday, June 14, 2001 11:38 PM
Subject: Re: [rescue] Re: [geeks] THIS. MAKES. ME. SICK.


> Time for me to jump in and help out Devin. Just FYI, when I say NT I
> mean 4 & 2k.
>
> >As someone who has used and (somewhat adminned) NT 3.1, 3.51, 4, and
> W2K, as
> >well as Irix (5.3), Sol7(no expert tho), Linux from 0.99pl14 on up,
> OpenBSD
> >2.7+, SCO BrokenServer, SunOS 4.1.3:
>
> How much time have you spent with various Unixes vs. NT? Most people I
> know who come from a unix background and say NT sucks don't spend
> nearly as much time with it. People with 10yrs Unix experience use NT
> for 2months then say it can't do shit. This may not be the case with
> you but I'd say most Unix people are like this.
>
> >I will bet you $250 USD that an out of the box, generic install of
> >Open/Net/FreeBSD will whup whatever W2K solution you implement in
> terms of
> >uptime, security and reliability (defined as the service being
> available for
>
> What does this prove? No sane admin runs an out of box install. Even
> OpenBSD needs tweaking to get it going
>
> >xx.xx% of the time).  Figure a AMD K6-2 450, 128MB RAM, IDE hard drive
> for
> >each of us.
>
> You can't do this either. Quadruple the ram and go with a Duron and it
> starts getting fair. Compare OpenBSD and Solaris 8 on an LX with
> minimum amount of ram for Solaris. OpenBSD will beat Solaris handily in
> terms of response time, speed, etc. Does this make Solaris bad? No, it
> just means you're incorrectly pairing the OS and hardware. Try this
> comparison; Quad Xeon, 2gb ram, scsi OS disks and fibre channel data
> disks for massive SQL serving, 2k vs. OpenBSD. Watch 2k beat down
> OpenBSD, does this prove anything either?
>
> >I'm not trying to flame you, but if you want to come on the list and
> make
> >such (IMHO) ridiculous claims you should be challenged.  I know $250
> isn't
> >real money but it's what I have as "mad money" :-) .
>
> Saying that properly admined NT can work is not a "ridiculous claim."
> Hell, I can fux0r a Solaris box up enough that it won't be able to do
> shit then come crying about Solaris being a piece of shit. For many
> places/people NT is the best solution, period.
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