Sendmail is a simple functional Unix based mail server. It requires a small amount of knowledge to install and get running but once up; it runs forever. At my office we had a 5 year old server running on a 1.1 Ghz processor with 256 MB of RAM. On that box was a free distro of the Fedora project and a installation of sendmail. For 5 year it just worked. One time in 5 years it stopped working. It stopped working because some clown in the office moved our domain name to a new ISP and brought down the mail server. Other than that Sendmail did it's job. Sending mail. In fact in 5 years I would be surprised if it was rebooted more that 10 times.Recently the powers that be axed my box. Why? Because they don't understand servers without pictures. No mouse on the screen, no wizards or pretty icons that move. No trash can, widgets or start button?
"Are you sure this is a server?"
"Of course it's a server!"
"Is this the screen saver?"
"What?! No it's called a command prompt."
Welcome in the new era. A shiny bright clean Windows cluster. Two giant silver hulking Hercules. Both running Windows 2008 Server 64 bit with a Siamese brain that is the Windows clustering service. Each server sporting a dual quad core and 16 GB of RAM. You know what they do differently than my Sendmail box? Nothing. Send mail. That's it. Nothing new here. Only now we've got to install Symantec Backupexec in case the Exchange edge server configuration crashed. (My old backup? A single sendmail configuration file ftped weekly via a cron job.) Install anti-virus software as these little beauties are ripe for attack! (My old Anti-Virus? Non-existent) No sir. Pretty pictures, poor security and severely bloated power houses.
So now what? I put the last of my Linux production boxes out to pasture.
"What's going on?!"
"Sorry, no one is looking for a free stable OS and simple functional software that doesn't cost them a dime to install."
"Are you kidding?"
"Afraid not. You've been replaced with an Exchange edge cluster."
"Whoa! You're serious."
"Absolutely"
"Well, if I was you I wouldn't wipe my drives you might need me when they crash"
"I've already cloned you friend..."
Just in case!
2 comments:
Good grief. Corporate idiocy like this drives me absolutely friggin' bonkers almost daily. (In fact, this is the second time today.)
I guess people just are not willing to part with the notion that the more money you spend on something, the better it must be, and the hell with any other metric than the price tag. A Porsche costs more than a Lada, yes? Thus the way to make Linux successful would be to dress it up into a pretty GUI, put it in an equally prettied up box, and charge an arm and a leg for it. Hey, wait a minute...
Ohh!!! And you could then release a tablet PC as something new and hip!
HA!
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