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Ok – it doesn’t suck yet.

I’m sure I’m going to have my membership to the all-geek club revoked for that statement but saying anything else wouldn’t be totally honest.

I installed Win7, RC1 (I think – Build 7100) yesterday on the spare harddrive on my laptop just for grins.

First off I was amazed at the size of the download, almost a full gig smaller than Vista, must have been all that debug code they pulled out of it.

Second point was the install went smoothly and with minimal customer interaction.  When I look at a product and say “this is probably something i could hand my son (who, sob, is not technically inclined beyond how to load a game into the PS3) and tell him to run with, and expect that he’ll only ask a dozen or so questions.

The third things I noticed were the UI.  Surprisingly intuitive.  The “Windows Sidebar” has been replaced by an active desktop that actually works, you can drop gadgets anywhere on the desktop, which makes for the abiltiy to more logically place things based on your needs.

The old windows task bar has been replaced by something, not surprisingly, more mac-like.  Each application has a button, multiple windows within an application get grouped with the app.  Mousing over the application gives you a preview of all windows associated with the app, and mousing over the preview brings each window to the forfront in succession.  (It makes finding what you’re looking for in a desktop full of app windows much easier, since Win7 *STILL* doesn’t come with multiple desktops)

So far, so good.  I’ll follow up tomorrow after I start installing applications and see which ones don’t work.  (always the big fear, right?)

Someone needs to fire their PR department.  Their new commercial says nothing other than the fact that Microsoft is out of ideas in it’s quest for world domination.  (And that thankfully even billions of dollars can’t stop Bill Gates from getting old and fat either)

Hope everyone had a great new-year.

I spent mine stripping every last bit of Windows Vista off my desktop at home.

I played with it for a while, mostly to see what all the fuss was about.  Most of it comes down to yet another example of the dumbing down of America.

Vista has managed to so idiot-proof the software that only the idiots seem to be able to understand it.  This concerns me because Vista is in large part the user-interface of the future, that is, it’s what Microsoft is going to use it’s monopoly-power to force the world into.

So I went back to XP on my desktop and will continue to use it until they end-of-life it.  Then I’ll move to Ubuntu or another flavor of Linux, though I’m starting to hear rumors that certain patent-infringment cases may mean that free-Linux is going to be a thing of the past.

I couldn’t understand (with Vista) how a system with a dual-core 3.0Ghz processor and 4Gigs of RAM could run as slowly as it did.  I mean the difference between Vista and Xp is so noticible it’s amazing.

partly I’m suspecting that it’s all the DRM that Vista runs.  Not just music/media, but software as well.  Vista tracks your every move, suspiciously keeps track of every move you make, and boy does it discourage you from installing anything Microsoft doesn’t like and approve of.

Way too big-brother for me.

(/jg)

I’m not really bashing their workstations, i’m actually quite fond of Vista on my laptop.

However, when it comes to servers, I view being in an environment where Microsoft is the PRIMARY operating system by a factor of 20:1 as a form of torture akin to having my finger-naiils pulled out or being tied to a chair and forced to listen to “Barney” all day.

What I hate most about Microsoft – (and if I keep this up, I’m going to have to rename this site to Microsoft-Hates-Me.Com) – is that it can’t handle the simplest tasks.

For a split-mirror backup, whether it be TimeFinder/Mirror, TF/Clone, or TF/SNAP, the process is the same:

1.  Freeze the database / filesystem
2.  Snap the volumes.
3.  Thaw the database / filesystem
4.  Mount the volumes on your media server host.
5.  Back the filesystems up.
6.  Unmount the volumes from the media server
7.  Terminate the Snap session

Seems pretty basic.  Microsoft seems to have trouble with #4 and #6.  Seems this “Super OS” they’ve got can’t handle the idea that SCSI devices might go on and off the bus at different times. 

EMC gives a tool, TFIM (TimeFinder Integration Modules) at at least allows you to perform the commands that Microsoft doesn’t even make available, mount, unmount, flush, etc.   But god forbid you reboot a host while the SNAPS are inactive or the BCV’s are established (and thereby not ready to the host).  You’re screwed.

Can *SOMEONE* please write a decent SCSI driver for Windows?  Please?

I’ve been reading the TimeFinder Integration guide for SQL and Exchange – this is going to be FUN…. (not)

it would be nice if, at least from the SQL standpoint, they do transaction logging in the traditional sense, so that I could just snap the database, snap the transaction logs, and back the flat-files up.

What MS seems to want, is for you to snap the database and logs, and then mount them on a remote SQL system and back it up using the SQL tools, which is just about 10 more steps than should be required to perform this.

Why does Microsoft feel it necessary to complicate things so painfully?

I had posted a few nice words about Vista, but I deleted them when I found out that Microsoft has been bribing Bloggers with Brand new $2,300 Acer Ferrari laptops.

Where’s mine?

The article, on E-Week.com says that at least 7 bloggers have confessed that the nice things they’ve said about vista came after they got an early Christmas present.

it figures.  My system at home running Vista has been gradually getting more and more unstable, what I like to call “Random Weirdness.”  So Microsoft would have to keep the cash flowing in order to keep the good reviews going through Retail Launch.

But people who know better know that while Windows has cornered the desktop market, it’s about all they can do marginally well, and the only reason for that is that they’re still just about the only game in town, which keeps people from coding for Linux, Sun, or the rest of the open-source operating systems.

So until I get my new laptop, Vista sucks and I’d stay away from it.

You can see Long’s Original blog post at: 

http://www.istartedsomething.com/20061227/microsoft-free-ferrari/#comment-13562

 

Let’s face it, if it’s Oracle, DB2, or anything along those lines, I can snap a copy and back it up with my eyes closed.

MSSQL, being a pretend database, has me stumped.  I’m so used to archive logs that I’m not even sure how to use TF/Snap to back up the database.

This is my understanding.  MSSQL doesn’t do “Archive Logging” in the traditional sense.

In a “REAL” database system the process is as follows:

1.  You put the database into “Hot Backup” mode.  In Oracle this quiesces the data files and writes all changes to the transaction log.  (When you take the database out of backup mode, the transactions in the log are then played into the database)

2.  When the above is complete, you can issue a command in one form or another to switch out the last transaction log, which closes one file and opens the next one, and then back up the database files along with the closed transaction log files via whatever file level backup process you have in place, whether it be TimeFinder or just having NetBackup pull the files from that server.

At Disney we did just that, with DB2, and moved in the neighborhood of 250+ Terabytes to tape every night.

At a number of other sites I’ve done the exact same process with Oracle.

Enter MSSQL, a Playschool excuse for an RDBMS, and I’m stumped.  See – the problem is there is never more than one “database.LDF” file for logging.  How am I supposed to quiesce writes to a logfile when it never closes it?

Then add that to the process for rolling transaction log backups forward in MSSQL is dependent on the idea that you used the MS Backup process to back it up.  It seems to be completely unaware of file level backups of the database.

I’m at a loss here – any ideas?

I can’t even talk during the day because of the great sucking sound coming from our microsoft infrastructure.

From a storage end, it’s even harder, because natively Microsoft doesn’t have ANY tools to unmount a filesystem or quiesce a production volume so you can take a hardware based snapshot of it.

Of course they’ve introduced VSS, which is like saying that there is never any way but their way to clone a volume.

The main problem with VSS (besides it being a product of the limited minds at microsoft) is that it’s yet another stupid host-based application that requires system resources on the host when engaged.

VSS, and most other volume “Snapshot” providers, work in the same way.  The simplistic description is “Copy on first write.”

Let’s go over it step-by-step.

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