response 327 of 480:

Dec 15 04:45 UTC 2006

Regarding #325; I don't know about that; a lot of the stuff that grex uses
now is fairly modern (relatively speak, of course).  Moving off of SunOS on
the Sun 4 was a huge leap forward in technology, literally catching us up by
about 15 years.  In many respects, it's now on par with other systems.
Judicious use of the money that grex has in the bank could further improve
the technology new-ness situation.

Actually, in some respects, I feel like staff is holding grex back
technologically: a lot of things are being done like it's still 1991,
sometimes paradoxically.  For instance, we're told at once grex hits its
hardware really hard, but at the same time told that we can't justify
something like hardware RAID.  Some of the things that have become almost
automatic responses as far as system administration goes are sort of shoved
out the window.  E.g., someone says, ``highly available storage'' you just
sort reflexively respond, ``hot-swappable hardware RAID.''  ``Reliable
memory,'' ``ECC.''  ``Chasis profile for colocation,'' ``rackmountable
case.'' ``Reliable backups,'' ``tape stacker unit.''  Certainly, some of
these things *do* make grex less interesting to those who might otherwise
be able to contribe really positively.