The Changelog

Usenix is an interesting conference. Probably the best I've been to in years.

There are a lot of people here that maintain really, really big sites. I was at one talk where the presenter said "now this may work fine if you have 500 servers, and a bit slow when you have 1000, but will is still work when you hit 2000 or 5000?" And some audience members in another one talking about 30,000 machines.

Makes our 5 or so physical boxes and dozen or so virtual Unix machines seem a bit puny.

Then there were also people that were backing up about 5GB of data a day. Made our 400GB (native) tapes seem rather large.

I got to meet one of the Bacula hackers tonight, which was nice. I had lunch with a person that works in a large ecommerce company that is an all-HP shop. They have a lot of the same hardware as us, and are also pretty happy with HP.

One presenter asked, "Why do people buy Dell servers?" After a timid guess or two from the audience, he said, "because you boss made you." Nobody likes Dell here, and I understand why.

Lots of laptops everywhere. Thinkpads and Powerbooks, oddly enough, are the most popular ones in sight. A surprising number of Unix administrators are running Windows on their Thinkpads, but just as many have Linux or FreeBSD on them.

I'll post more once I get back home.