Notes to self

[hirez]

Never ever bloody anything Ubuntu ever.

Comments

[badnewswade.livejournal.com]

Wha' appen?

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Getting recent versions of Puppet to even install on aged versions of Umbongleton is rather more hassle than it's worth.

[quercus.livejournal.com]

What's "aged"?

I have a perfectly functional server that kicks me every morning with an "I'm an October version and my lifegem is flashing" warning. Yet the newer versions have the shafted desktop, so it ain't going forwards. I might yet _downgrade_ this to the previous LTS, just to get rid of the dialogs.

[jarkman.livejournal.com]

Busman's holiday ?

[valkyriekaren.livejournal.com]

I thought Umbongleton was what they drank in Congleton. Shows what I know.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

They do indeed drink it in Congleton.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Yarp.

[steer.livejournal.com]

Heh.... not a fair test. I mean how *old* is puppet? Rather newer than the OS you're installing on.

[steer.livejournal.com]

If the alternative is Centos you will perform indecent acts on Shuttlework (Mark or John or both) for an Ubuntu install.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

It would be a much more interesting thing if John Shuttleworth was in charge.

[steer.livejournal.com]

Product releases with a bon-tempi backing...

[maluse.livejournal.com]

Linux Mint with xfce (based on Ubuntu) seems to be the best choice for an "It Just Works" system without broken desktop environments.

[solipsistnation.livejournal.com]

That's no excuse. Puppet is supposed to be flexible.

[steer.livejournal.com]

Urm... I kind of see what you mean in a twisted way. Puppet is supposed to be flexible -- but it makes a lot of demands for relatively modern libraries to install (unless you're willing to settle for a super old version -- which, let's face it, waht's the point?). Flexibility isn't much to do with it. It's always going to be a pain to install software that requires versions 5.7 and 3.2 on an OS which by default provides 4.3 and 0.9 because it's from a few years previously.

[solipsistnation.livejournal.com]

Right, but it's a management system. Ideally, all of the systems one is managing will be fancy new shiny boxes with the latest everything on them. Realistically, there's always that one thing that requires that old version, or that can't be replaced or upgraded for some ridiculous reason (software requirements; uptime requirements; management apathy, you know).

This means that either you get a bunch of New Hotness systems with New Hotness puppet on them and a couple of stragglers that still have to be managed by hand, or you use something with less stringent requirements, or an older version of puppet or whatever. (Or you statically link everything on another box and hope it works on the old ones! Yeah!).


...and that's why I only run cfengine 2.5. (Ah ha ha ha ha ha except I did for a long time at UCSC for pretty much this very reason. It ran on EVERYTHING.)

[arkady.livejournal.com]

Xubuntu works nicely for me. (Can't stand that Unity bollocks.)

[badnewswade.livejournal.com]

I use vanilla Ubuntu with LXDE and it's fine. MY problem is that when I upgraded to 12.04 LTS, it blew up one of my fave game programs. They just plain stopped allowing me to use the fantastic GUI frontend that MAME used to have (GXMAME), and replaced it with a really shitty text-based one... apparently simply because GXMAME is "old". Oh and also a lot of games no longer work on it. And I'm convinced the computer's slower.

Most OS programmers should be taken out and shot. I mean that's a foul worthy of Apple at their worst. If I want to run a certain program, I should bloody well be allowed to do it. What the hell kind of nightmare Big Brother OS goes around uninstalling random programs it doesn't like - without even asking first?

[steer.livejournal.com]

Ah... you're right. I think of it only in terms of cloud because that's the only reason I'm interested in it -- if it's doing stuff with actual metal that would be a huge pain. Sorry, my understanding of these things is actually pretty limited and context specific.

[steer.livejournal.com]

I just use the fallback gnome because I can't stick Unity -- so I run 12.10 without Unity. However, gnome 3.8 is introducing "Classic mode" as an alternative to all that Unity crap. Hopefully 3.8 will make it into Ubuntu 13.10.

(Presume by "shafted desktop" you mean Unity.)

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Hm... well, yes. And indeed no. If there's a set of terrible old boxes lying about it mostly seems to be because getting them into a state where they'd keep working was such a huge effort that it was easiest to leave them very alone. Which is, I think, more or less what's wrong with hand-tended servers. "Oh you can't touch that it's the [mumble] box and $business-unit throw a massive strop if they think someone's been playing." (Which actually means "$business-unit don't know anything about the H/W or OS, and if their favourite software in all the world goes funny then SOMEONE'S BROKEN SOMETHING.")

This is a shit way of managing kit.

Uptime-manship is also a sign of hand-tended servers. And unpatched ones.

Meanwhile, when the box falls off the end of any sort of maintenance, $business-unit won't have any of it and demand that everything still works like it did in the nineties.

When your maintenance partner is eBay, this is probably a Bad Thing.

[solipsistnation.livejournal.com]

Back in the day it was more "The Math Department does all their work on Alphas running DEC Unix 4.x because the fortran compiler is really good and newer ones and gfortran/g77 on newer hardware introduce errors and they will never ever get money to upgrade anything because nobody gives grants to the math department and two years ago they somehow got some cash and spent $80,000(!!!!) on a pair of giant Alpha boxes that they have to use basically forever because they spent that much on them."

It is, indeed, a pretty shit way of managing kit, but that doesn't mean you don't get stuck doing it anyway.

[hazeii.livejournal.com]

Build from source. Compile new code as needed. Add "init=/bin/sh" (or "1") to the kernel command line as needed.

Bit more effort in the short term. Less pain long term.

All these distro's are just trying to building a garden wall around you (by making the bricks so complicated you daren't touch it).

Your choice of bed.

[d-floorlandmine.livejournal.com]

[snork]