Your failure to plan (Was: Re: [cobalt-users] Re: cobalt-users digest, Vol 1 #279 - 20 msgs)

[Jeff Lasman <jblists@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

At 11:08 AM 2/7/00 -0700, you wrote:



> Not
> that price is an issue when we were losing thousands of dollars a minute. 
> But that's moot now
> since we've removed the Qubes from our environment.

Anyone hosting the kind of site on a Qube that can cost them thousands of 
dollars a minute is asking for trouble <smile>.  It's just not designed for 
high-power eCommerce hosting.  Which is what you'd have had to have been 
doing on it for it to be costing you thousands of dollars per minute.

>  And I will ban any use of them anywhere
> related to our company, or any  of our clients or partners in the future.

Certainly you should ban them for your company, if that is your 
desire.  But to decide for any of your clients and even your partners what 
they should or should not do?  I'm sure glad I don't want to be your 
partner or client <smile>, because I guess you wouldn't allow me to 
be.  Not that I think the Cobalt RaQ I'm renting is the greatest thing 
since sliced bread... but what gives you right to decide that for me?  I 
think if you approach your relationships with clients and partners by 
telling them what they have to do to deal with you, you'll be out of 
business soon enough.  Of course if you were recommending Qube's for 
high-power eCommerce solutions you'll be out of business soon enough, 
anyway <wry grin>.

> I supposed that wuold certainly be possible, but we still (have too) would 
> have to pull out
> the hard drive to recover the perl code we had on there.

With all that Sun and HP experience you've got, you never learned to back 
up your lowly Qube?  Still, though, for a high-stepper like you, removing a 
drive should be a piece of cake, shouldn't it.  So I guess you're just 
upset that the appliance you bought just didn't wash clothes to your 
satisfaction, did it?

> I was hoping that someone has designed some sort of feature 
> (intelligently) that would allow a
> more reasonable recovery method.

I was hoping that someone who would trust their 
thousands-of-dollars-per-minute business to a Qube would first spend the 
time and money it took to figure out if it would do the job for them.  And 
yes, that includes having a reasonable recovery method.  I've put a lot of 
systems into service.  I was the first person to document to Red Hat that 
their 6.0 eCommerce solution didn't create a working emergency recovery 
disk.  And I found it out while building the system.  Why?  Because I tried 
the recovery disk before putting one byte of important information on the 
system.  Believe me, if you use your HP and Sun boxes with the same abandon 
towards reasonable data security methods, you'll eventually have to get rid 
of them, too.  Oh, you can always go to IBM for their $10,000/month 
solutions.  Of course you can.  After all, you're making thousands of 
dollars a minute.  Even at the low end of the scale, we're talking 
$2,880,000 PER DAY in lost profits.  You can afford one of those high end 
IBM ecommerce solutions, can't you <smile>?

> We're instead going to stick with our HP and Sun equipment, companies that 
> seem to have
> actually thought out these issues.

All their thinking won't do you a world of good if you don't think before 
you implement.

> I understand the RAQs have console ports and the like, that would have 
> been much more
> sensible, but eventhat aside, the fact they (cobalt) don't provide 24 hr 
> support is certainly
> enought to keep our company from ever using their products in the future.

Had you checked them out in the past you would have realized that they 
didn't offer it, and you would have saved the cost of one computer PLUS 
$2,880,000 PER DAY in lost profits.  Think of it.  I guess that's why us 
system analysts make the big bucks <smile>.

> Such a shame though, a well.

Sorry to realize you're most likely not on the list anymore and won't read 
this.

<smile>

Jeff

--
Jeff Lasman <jblists@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>