Monday 9th January, 2012
NixCraft is an excellent source of Linux/Unix documentation in itself, but this article lists 30 offsite sources of technical documentation. Some old, some new, most are good!
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Wednesday 7th October, 2009
There are various news sources which are reporting that the London Stock Exchange is moving from the Microsoft .Net-based TradElect to the GNU/Linux-based MillenniumIT system. In fact not only are they moving to this new system, they appear to like the company that produced it so much that they are actually buying it. As usual, the comments contain some of the more interesting viewpoints:TradElect never met its goals for trading speed, never managed to achieve its availability goals and indeed, managed to shut the LSE for an entire trading day, (this) was a complete disaster for both the LSE and for Microsoft, who had invested considerable time and expertise in underpinning the installation.I'd be willing to bet that the decision to deploy TradElect was one of those crazy decisions, where the techies were all saying, "No, don't do it, it won't work," and the management just ignored them and implemented it anyway. As usual.
TradElect has now been surplanted by a Linux + Solaris setup which has already met the latency goals that TradElect was supposed to provide is a massive loss of face for Microsoft in this area. Those who point to Accenture and assume they carried the can for this alone are ignoring reality.
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Friday 3rd July, 2009
The London Stock Exchange is abandoning it's Windows-based TradElect trading system. The system crashed in September 2008.
TradElect runs on HP ProLiant servers running, in turn, Windows Server 2003. The TradElect software itself is a custom blend of C# and .NET programs, which was created by Microsoft and Accenture, the global consulting firm. On the back-end, it relied on Microsoft SQL Server 2000. Its goal was to maintain sub-ten millisecond response times, real-time system speeds, for stock trades.
It never, ever came close to achieving these performance goals. Worse still, the LSE's competition, such as its main rival Chi-X with its MarketPrizm trading platform software, was able to deliver that level of performance and in general it was running rings about TradElect. Three guesses what MarketPrizm runs on and the first two don't count. The answer is Linux.
I'm sure someone got some nice lunches out of it while it lasted.
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Friday 3rd April, 2009
I fixed this after a week or so, but I forget how I did it. :-( I don't use MailScanner anymore. It's a fine product, but I find it to be overkill.
Rob. April 2015.
I ran a system upgrade (from etch to lenny) on one of my Debian servers today. There seem to be lots of people who have their own ideas about how to go about this, which is fair enough, there's more than one way to climb the mountain. In fact I deviated (very) slightly from the steps kindly provided in the official upgrade instructions.
I double-checked the official issues to be aware of for lenny. Nothing about MailScanner!
Monday 2nd March, 2009
This is a great collection of random Linux tips (57 in all). They were originally published in Linux Format magazine. The various tips are categorised into three levels of difficulty, easy, intermediate, and expert. Well worth a read.
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