[CLUE-Tech] Colbalt: Which Distro?

[Matt Gushee]

On Mon, May 20, 2002 at 04:48:20PM -0600, Joe Linux wrote:
> I think that must refer to the kernel, not the distribution.

Yeah, I suppose. Though I've seen more than a few references to 
"Linux 7.1" and such ... mostly from clueless recruiters, though.
One hopes that Sun, even their marketing division, is a little more
on the ball.

> >>Which Linux Distro is Sun Cobalt servers based on?
> >>The site just says Linux 2.2 multi-tasking OS?
> >>
> >
> >Somebody probably has the real answer, but Debian and Caldera are the
> >only distros I know of with recent distros in the 2.x range. RedHat,
> >Mandrake, SuSE are all up to version 7 or 8, and I think Slackware's
> >around 5 or 6.
> >
> 

-- 
Matt Gushee
Englewood, Colorado, USA
mgushee at havenrock.com
http://www.havenrock.com/

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Date: Sat, 18 May 2002 13:33:30 -0600
From: Sean Reifschneider <jafo at tummy.com>
To: clue-tech at clue.denver.co.us
Subject: Re: [CLUE-Tech] "Where the beef" with Sun/Cobalt?
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On Sat, May 18, 2002 at 10:33:20AM -0400, David Jackson wrote:
>Second, I've come across a couple hosting  companies who advertsize that
>they don't use Cobalt servers? Outside of the fact that a Linux copany

There are two things I've found to be wrong with Cobalt: incredibly buggy
"special sauce", and horrible support.

Most of the Cobalt tools have tons of bugs.  Their "cluster migration
utility" (cmu) which can move users from one machine to another had
multiple perl syntax errors in it.  Their web-log reporting tool loads
httpd logs into RAM and craps out on not-so-large (for web-servers) log
files.

Their support has just been horrible.  First off, they don't really keep up
to date with current releases of software, even when there are remotely
exploitable defects.  For example, it was more than 6 months after we
rolled our own ProFTP packages before Cobalt had an update which fixed the
security problem.

Calling their support line is just horrible.  I barely use Cobalt, but at
3am when their clustering tools have just toasted a box and you reach
somone who knows less about their product than you do?  That's
discouraging.  Worse is that over 6 months they *NEVER* got anyone who
would help us fix the booting issues on that box -- it would try to boot
from the wrong partition and I couldn't figure out how to force the
BIOS/firmware to save off the new settings.

In general, I think that Cobalt is a good idea with a (vary) bad
implementation.

Sean
-- 
 "Bill and Ted on cryptography: If you are really us...  What number are we
 thinking of?" -- Sean Reifschneider, 1998
Sean Reifschneider, Inimitably Superfluous <jafo at tummy.com>
tummy.com - Linux Consulting since 1995. Qmail, KRUD, Firewalls, Python

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Subject: Re: [CLUE-Tech] Redhat 7.2: No password for init 1
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On Mon, May 20, 2002 at 01:10:59AM -0400, David Jackson wrote:
>I at a lost to explain why Redhat does this?
>Solaris, Debian and Slackware don't.

Well, part of the justification for allowing it is that if you have
physical access to the box, all bets are off...  Throwing up a login prompt
doesn't really help security when you can just as easily do init=/bin/sh,
boot from a floppy or CD and mount up the file-system, or for a little more
effort you can pop the drive into another box, boot up on it's primary
disc, and modify away to your heart's content...

Sean
-- 
 Program *INTO* a language, not *IN* it.
                 -- David Gries
Sean Reifschneider, Inimitably Superfluous <jafo at tummy.com>
tummy.com - Linux Consulting since 1995. Qmail, KRUD, Firewalls, Python