Ask stupid questions and you'll get a stupid answers, was: Technological advantages over Linux

Aryeh Friedman aryeh.friedman at gmail.com
Fri Jul 24 18:09:28 UTC 2020


On Fri, Jul 24, 2020 at 12:33 PM Ralf Mardorf <ralf-mardorf at riseup.net>
wrote:

> Whatever knowledge the user or even the hugest community has got,
> there's more or less nothing that could be done, when using restricted
> software. The user needs to trust business people, who could decide
> more or less what ever they want, at any time.
>

And said business people often decide on what to use for the most idiotic
reasons.   For example we just spent 8 weeks fighting with all levels of
our client's main hosting company (they are medium to large customer and
picked hosting company because up to now they have been very flexible in
the customizations we needed due the nature of the client's system [not
your standard hosting since it is a web front end to high end medical IoT
that is "rented" for short periods to clients of our client but used by
patients in everyday life for up to 30 days {you don't want to know some of
the idiotic things people have done to these devices ;-)}) over how best to
do backups of MySQL on a FreeBSD machine we use for the hosting.  The
entire software stack is fully supported by hosting company (or they at
least claim to fully support it) but when we asked that MySQL backups be
done with sqldump and/or DB replication from within the DB instance they
spent 7 weeks denying that it was needed because they did block level disk
backups (I would love to hear from any DBA who would trust such
backups!!!).   Then last week they said they couldn't do mysqldump backups
because it was a "unsupported method" on "unsupported software".
Translation since there  is no commercial support for MySQL and/or FreeBSD
from the original developers then no matter how good the community support
was they considered it "unsupported" (WTF!?!?!?!!!?!? I would say community
support is usually higher quality then vendor so called tech support which
does nothing but walk you through a predefined script and if the script
fails your SOL).  Another more cynical translation is "there is no one to
sue if the stuff @#$@#$ up!"

So instead of a great low cost, mature and very well supported/understood
config they recommended a multi-thousand dollar solution that does not even
solve the primary issues of DB backups!!!
-- 
Aryeh M. Friedman, Lead Developer, http://www.PetiteCloud.org


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