Re: OT: Why you should not use Windows : issue 1

[Tim Lamb]

In message , T i m writes

Snip

Gentlemen, please can we back off from this powder puffs at dawn scenario:-)

[Clive George]

Or in a datacentre or other environment where you're controlling multiple physical hosts.

[John Rumm]

Not disagreeing in general, but the situation you describe happens in the windows market as well. I have had to abandon perfectly good (and in fact quite high end) peripherals when a windows upgrade rendered their driver support no longer compatible.

[Huge]

No kids. Hence no grandkids.

[Huge]

Not any more. KVMs are dark ages technology.

[Clive George]

I've still got people insisting on them. I'd have been happy to use the remote lights out, but they wanted proper KVMs for visiting engineers. They never got plugged in though :-)

[The Natural Philosopher]

The amusing thing is T i m is describing himself to a T there. If the cap fits ...

"the opportunity of switching between machines in a simple and reliable way, irrespective of OS and the state of the machine at the time" is of course exactly what virtual machines are designed to so.

But most trolls are in denial. and have NPD issues, so projection is second nature to them..

If you didn't respond to the idiot I wouldn't see his post so the anawer is simple, Ignore him

[T i m]

Of course and no one (here especially) was saying anything to the contrary I don't think. ;-)

Sure, as I have witnessed with a couple of people myself (but not actually suffered myself that I can remember), but in the Linux (fanboy) world, that would *always* be put firmly in the hands of the device manufacturer or software developer, not the OS! ;-)

Funnily enough, one such backwards compatibility I saw with Windows 10 was just now. A mate ordered a Bluetooth hand held barcode scanner to go with his W10 based shop till.

W10 spots the scanner over bluetooth alright but fails to pair at the passcode bit. W7 or my phone pair with it fine. It seems that W10 does things differently (to W7 and my phone especially ) but to be fair to the scanner, it only mentions support up to W8.1 (so it's my mates fault).

That said, the scanner *is* supported on every other version of Windows from XP to 8.1 (so that's spanning a period of 15 years) and no mention of Linux (or distro or version) anywhere, so who knows if that is supported (but of course it may well work etc). The problem lays in getting support (or a refund etc) when it doesn't work. In this case it was my mates mistake and so he can't *expect* a refund, and it might possibly be the same if you tried it on Linux and it didn't work on that either?

Cheers, T i m

p.s. Were you using Sketchup for your 3D drawings John and are you able (you or the std / free 'make' version) able to blend a curve in two directions please? I ask because a while back I offered to reproduce (draw - 3D print) a part for someone on here but knew *I* couldn't duplicate it accurately because it had such a shape.

[T i m]

Sorry, will do. I had hope there was light at the end of that particular tunnel but alas ... ;-(

But then he doesn't need me dissuading people from Linux (by me telling it as it is for me and many like me), he does that well enough on his own! ;-)

It's his ball and if we don't play what he wants he's taking it home!

Cheers, T i m

[Tim Lamb]

In message , The Natural Philosopher writes

snip

I read without understanding the extensive discussions regarding Windows/Linux. Most of it is way above my head. Tim responded to a simple point of clarification which was helpful to me but might have been easily Googled.

The group appears to include a high proportion of current or ex IT personnel which is useful if a bit daunting:-)

[T i m]

Talking of toasters ... daughter pops round her (85 yr old) grans the other day to 'catch her'' poking stuff out of the toaster with a metal knife. 'Oh, it was switched off at the wall' she told her.

Prior to that she was up on the draining board cleaning the tiles ...

The problem is she won't tell us what she needs doing so we can't do it for her ... plus she doesn't want to 'disturb us' (even though we are just round the corner and will generally pop round in an instant).

We have tried to explain just how more she would disturb us when having to call the ambulance, visit her in hospital (or worse) but she doesn't seem to worry about that?

Cheers, T i m

[dennis]

And some people don't believe in god.

[T i m]

That is of no interest to him Tim, as is clear from his paragraph above. What he is clearly stating is that you (or anyone) shouldn't be talking to me because *he* says so?

Now, the funny thing is that before he started the Windows thread(s) in this (d-i-y) newsgroup, I have never had any issues here or any other non-Linux newsgroups or forum. Strange that eh?

So, because he thinks I'm an idiot for not agreeing with him (along with many many other people who have tried Linux and found it lacking btw) they are also 'idiots' presumably and you shouldn't talk to me (just because he can't cope, even with his killfile)?

Cheers, T i m

[The Natural Philosopher]

Except tehse days you aren't. All of those are now VMed- usually in a hypervisor - so you have one admin machine that connects to them - usually remotely. Lets face it who wants too sit in a machine room with no windows?

Tyhe ONL:Y place I know of that still use KVM switches - I used one years ago to do what you decsrbe, but that was 20 years ago - is my PC supplier who BUILDS physical PCS and these are often set off doing RAM checks and teh like in parallel before being shipped out.

Needless to say half the time they don't work, because the KVM< switches don't report the monitor correctly to each machine, but its OK for DOS command line stuff.

ALL te corporates are going virtual machine big time. On blade is a lot less power and space hungry than 25 NT server and linux boxes, and does a better job, and can be managed remotely by anythinhg that can run te client code.

Domestically the same applies, VMs are simply better - they can do everything a discrete machine can more or less.

[Alan Braggins]

No-one _wants_ to physically go into the server room and find out why one of the racks of hypervisor hosts isn't responding to the remote admin, but it can still happen.

[Mike Tomlinson]

En el artículo , Clive George escribió:

We did both. At a remote site installed IP KVMs for use when staff on site working on the kit, and accessible via the internet when remote site unstaffed.

A lot of the kit was legacy and/or didn't have iLO so we needed an alternative solution.

Firewalled every which way, of course.

[Clive George]

Yes, I know about hypervisors. I've almost certainly got a lot more experience with these things than you.

You still need to control the physical host sometimes, and that's when the KVM is intended to be used. Though as Huge pointed out, actually the remote lights out functions are more useful, but some people haven't quite caught up to this yet.

Our KVMs work when they're plugged in...

"going"? "gone" is more accurate. The corporates are now going "cloud", ie Azure or Amazon.

Blades aren't the right choice everywhere - I'm using 2U 2CPU boxes as the sweet spot for hypervisors. More flexible, cheaper, and we have the space.

Domestically the laptops run windows. It works well enough, and they're not doing server-type tasks. We don't appear to have the same problems with crashing software that you have.

[The Natural Philosopher]

and you generally find there's a screen and a keyboard there to plug into it

Its very rare for a hypervisor to crash and if it does its reboot time anyway.

[The Natural Philosopher]

That misses the point: the point was to use a KVM domestically to run several machines: My point was that its pointless as a VM and one decent machine is a better solution all round

[Clive George]

You didn't phrase it that way, you said

"Now only found in legacy cases where the underlying Windows operating system is too unstable to run a virtual machine. Or the owner is too stupid to install and set one up."

I replied, pointing out an exception to your assertion, explicitly mentioning datacentres - which isn't going to be domestic. Rather than saying at that point you only meant domestic situations, you chose to argue with me. Now that you've discovered that you're arguing with somebody who knows more about this area than you, you're claiming you were actually talking about something else.

The sensible approach would have been to say "ok, there is a point to KVMs". But you'd rather wriggle.