Asterisk commits reputational suicide

I've worked with a lot of different software projects and packages over the years. One of the reasons I've always preferred open source projects to commercial ones is that they're generally much more focussed on getting real work done than playing organizational games.

The Asterisk telephony software project has always been one of those, even though it was spearheaded primarily by the Digium Corporation, who wrote Asterisk originally to support their other work, which was providing telephone support for Linux users.

Not anymore, apparently: Now There's Asterisk 10!

See this blog posting wherein they explain that they don't have the first clue what version numbering is actually for and how to do it, and -- like so many other companies who thought that was a pretty neat idea... like Sun (with Java) and SCO (with OpenServer) -- they were just gonna *drop* the first "1.x" component of their version number, and go from 1.8.x to 10.0.0.

Now, see, this is one of those dichotomies between programmers and non-programmers: if you're a programmer, you're already shaking your head, saying "what fucking morons"... and if you're not, you simply can't understand what I'm all worked up about.

But for me, this goes back to Tom Peters' 30 year old admonition: if the passengers can see that you can't be bothered to wipe up the coffee stains off the tray-tables, how in *hell* can they trust you to have been doing your engine maintenance correctly. Any project lead who would pull a move this stupid... and then *justify it* (which you'll see Kevin goes to great lengths to do in that posting), clearly understands this, fundamentally, deep down in their craw... but is going to go ahead and do it wrong anyway, for reasons unfathomable; folly unplumbable.

Oh, well; there's competition now.

Good thing, cause *I* won't be using their product anymore, except at gunpoint.

Saturday, October 15, 2011 @ 02:05 p.m. - Comment

I have a new gig...

where I'm running about full speed to learn the stuff I need to know. This means... yup! Lots of good bookmarks for you!

:-)

The first one (which is the last, if you're not reading every day -- and, really, why would you be, as remiss as I've been in posting here since I was eaten alive by Facebook?) is about iSCSI. I'm using OpenFiler, which is pretty decent looking, but you have to buy it's documentation.

Unsurprisingly, the INTERNET(!) has jumped once more unto the breach, and here's a great article about how to set it up.

More to follow. Or, y'know, precede.

Sunday, September 25, 2011 @ 09:50 a.m. - Comment

I don't post here very much anymore...

and that's probably a bad thing, and $NEWJOB may change it...

But today seems like a good day to break that string.

I only have, really, two bookends for you:

and

(And yes, as overwrought as such comments sometimes are, AB really did only air this spot one single time; there was confirming news coverage to that effect. I'd say it probably cost them a couple hundred grand. Quite pleased to see that InBev, who bought them, weren't stupid enough to shut the team down.)

Sunday, September 11, 2011 @ 10:09 a.m. - Comment

Violets are Purple!!

Did you ever have one of those moments that makes you question the collective intelligence of the human race?

Yeah, yeah; I know: you have those every 15 minutes.

I've had two, in the last week.

The kind I mean is where you hear someone say "Roses are red, violets are blue"... and you say "Wait! Violets *aren't* blue; they're *violet*! Y'know: hence the name?"

[ Warning: The Surgeon General has determined that if you're not a geek, reading the rest of this note may make your head explode. It's the 4th of July while I'm writing it, but that wouldn't help you later... :-) ]

One of the things I do a lot, being A Computer Whiz (hey; don't blame me; I don't write 'em, I just tell 'em), is to get old computer equipment working again -- you know, the stuff that's not Brand Spanking New, and therefore really really cheap, but still plenty fast enough to get real work done.

This example's an HP DL585 G1 8-core Opteron rack-mount server. It's big, heavy, *really* loud, and really *really* fast.

So I got it all set up the way I wanted, on the 36GB SCSI drives it came with (hardware mirrored into a RAID1 with the Compaq "Smart" Array 5i+ controller it came with... and then I tried to mirror that into a pair of 300GB drives we'd actually sold it with.

6 attempts later, I had learned why Ext4 is not a filesystem that's ready for prime time -- none of my cloning programs know how to deal with it properly yet. Clonezilla claims to be "compatible" with it -- but that apparently just means "We'll just raw-copy it like we do with every *other* filesystem we don't recognize; too bad, so sad".

When even open-source projects start lying about stuff like that, perhaps it's time for me to go flip burgers again.

In any event, I let it do that, and then I went to pull the 2 36G drives, and move the 2 300G drives to slots 0 and 1 on the machine, as I generally do.

That went even less well.

I believe we should actually call this controller the "Stupid Array 5i--", as it simply can't handle this act -- moving a RAID1 pair between slots at *all*, unlike *every single hardware raid controller I've worked with over the last 2 decades*. Ok, I can understand: the ROM utility might not be smart enough to handle that, and indeed, they tell you: get the one that runs in Linux and it can do more stuff.

No, it can't. 4 hours installation time to find that out.

So I grabbed their "Smart Start" CD. Another hour to determine that the newest release wouldn't start its X server. Grab an older version.

Oh, look: this is the same program I was running under Linux. And it *still* doesn't know how to do *anything at all* more than the ROM utility does. (At the time I first went through all that crap, it was to try to build the 300G raid without the controller having to *copy all 300G of nothing* from one drive to the other. You can't do *that* either; I have no idea what you do if one half of a mirror fails...)

I can tell you this: regardless how nice the hardware is -- and it is *very, very* nice -- this makes me very nervous about ever specifying HP servers for anything; this is *completely unacceptable* from the view point of a professional systems administrator: I refuse to be placed in a position where I have to tell my boss "Duh; I got no clue whether I can recover it or how long it's gonna take, boss."

The Violets are Blue moment is: how can anyone *else* tolerate this; why didn't Google reveal to me a firestorm of discontent on this topic when I looked?

[ Late UPDATE: It appears the reason is because there's a command line program, hpacucli, that's not that stupid. ]

Monday, July 4, 2011 @ 03:28 p.m. - Comment

STS-134 launched safely

STS-134 launched finally, after repairs to an APU fuel line heater problem that caused it's 29 Apr launch to scrub for about 3 week. STS-135 is 8 July, and I'll be there, though not on-grounds as I was for STS-132.

Monday, May 16, 2011 @ 01:44 p.m. - Comment