HP releases AdvFS under GPL-2

Tue Jun 24 10:36:14 EDT 2008

Thanks, Jerry;

I hear you loud and clear;  it is obvious to me that my age is a factor but
stability, maturity and reliability are not, in this job market.

The job market for IT up here is pathetic, thanks to mass layoffs a few
years ago from IBM, IDX, and other places, plus a hiring freeze and then job
cuts in state government, and hundreds of displaced workers all scrambling
for a handful of entry-level gigs.  Most remain un- or under-employed in
jobs like mine, working for minimum wage or maybe a bit more at places like
Walmart and Rite-Aid.

Some of us have done contract work off and on, but on a very uneven basis
and with no insurance or any other bennies.

So here I am, college degree, grad school, thirteen years of IT, decorated
combat vet, etc., and I work a cash register selling books or packing them
up or unpacking them for nine bucks an hour and when I'm not doing that I'm
doing stoop labor on this farm that would challenge a 20-year-old.  Lotta
people far worse off than me, so I'm not all weepy for myself but just a tad
angry that we're being written off so soon as worthless.

Sorry for the OT rant, folks.  I think I'm done here.

And thanks again for the years of Linux tips and advice, because, by jiminy,
that's all we have running on our little network here at the farm.

Old Farmer Dave
Pavilion Farm (1806)
West Montpeculiar, Vermont

On Tue, Jun 24, 2008 at 10:08 AM, Jerry Feldman <gaf at blu.org> wrote:

> (This is a bit OT, but...)
> Dave,
> I don't know what the job market for IT is in northern Vermont, but I
> have seen guys get jobs down here in the Boston area.  I've been
> contracting for 20 years, and only had 2 bad years after HP acquired
> Compaq and released all contractors. The job people were advising us to
> retrain. Instead I worked for the IRS for a while, had a couple of
> consulting jobs (one in a county jail in Maine :-). In my case I was
> able to go back to my group at HP (for half the rate I had been
> before).  Unfortunately many companies don't like to hire older people
> on a full-time basis. I know 2 people at HP with somewhat similar
> skills to yours were laid off and were able to get jobs within weeks.
> The bottom line here is that there are jobs available for people with
> your skills, but you may need to go further to find them, or you may
> need to change how you are looking. In other words, don't give up the
> search, use your networking skills to find some available jobs in your
> area.  Professional headhunters will tell you how to construct your
> resume to hide your age, if need be.
>
>
> On Mon, 23 Jun 2008 21:20:00 -0400
> "David Hardy" <belovedbold357 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > I've done simultaneous sys admin work with Tru64 UNIX, VAX/VMS and
> OpenVMS
> > from versions 3.5 through 7.1, along with Windoze from 3.1 through Server
> > 2003 and XP. And Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.0 and the desktop versions
> from
> > 6.1 through 9.0.  Plus network, desktop and DBA support.
> >
> > But now I'm about to turn 55 and so am utterly worthless.
> >
> > Thus working for minimum wage at an indie bookstore and on the old farm
> > here.
> >
> > Them was interesting dayz, but now not worth a pee-hole in the snow as
> fah
> > as jobs or any kind of career now.
> >
> > At least around here in northern Vermont.
> >
> > If I have the bad taste to crab about it to other Linux people, I get
> dissed
> > and dismissed.
> >
> > So be it.
> >
> > You all have my best wishes and hopes that you can continue to carry the
> > ball.  I've given up. Hundreds of resumes and dozens of interviews having
> > amounted to zip.
> >
> > Old Farmer Dave
> > Pavilion Farm (1806)
> > West Montpeculiar, Vermont
> >
> > P.S.  And my many thanks to those of you who have been ever-ready to
> answer
> > questions and problems over the years;  you will not be forgotten.
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > On Mon, Jun 23, 2008 at 9:00 PM, Ric Werme <ewerme at comcast.net> wrote:
> >
> > > Coleman Kane wrote:
> > > >On Mon, 2008-06-23 at 13:48 -0400, Bill McGonigle wrote:
> > > >> If so, it might be handy since ZFS isn't coming to Linux any time
> > > >> soon, AFAICT, and some apps react poorly to NFS.  Would it be too
> > > >> cynical to suspect that HP simply doesn't want to maintain it
> anymore
> > > >> but has customers who like it?
> > >
> > > >I would imagine that your last paragraph is pretty close to the truth.
> > > >Facing the possibility of either losing all AdvFS clients to other
> > > >systems (Solaris or Linux), they made the play to put it out under the
> > > >GPL.
> > >
> > > A number of HP customers with Tru64 systems were waiting for HP to
> > > put AdvFS and cluster support into HP-UX.  I doubt they were very
> pleased
> > > with HP's decision to can the project.  HP also canned most of the
> people.
> > > I suspect several customers moved into the "We'll run Tru64 as long as
> the
> > > machine still boots" camp after that.
> > >
> > > It may well be that HP is doing this to try to keep some of that
> customer
> > > base.  HP-UX has not done too well lately, AFAIK, so perhaps they're
> paying
> > > more attention to their big system customers.
> > >
> > > >Maybe it is indicative of a larger play by HP into the Linux ring?
> > >
> > > Perhaps.  HP-UX has some Veritas file system code, they can't put that
> > > into Linux, so AdvFS is certainly the best choice for that.
> > >
> > > While I worked on NFS within Tru64, I always appreciated UFS.  Small,
> > > fast (especially with Prestoserve battery-backed RAM card for
> metadata),
> > > very good locality and often would take a memory-mapped file that was
> > > written randomly and leave a contiguous file behind.  That's how
> > > the linker wrote a.out files, so it was a useful feature.
> > >
> > > The standard UFS drawbacks of large directories (don't do that) and
> waiting
> > > for fsck (Tru64 has very good uptime) were not that big a deal to me.
> UFS
> > > got along with NFS a lot better than AdvFS did.
> > >
> > > Big customers like AdvFS appreciated the multi-volume support (heck,
> > > TOPS-10
> > > did that in 1970), snapshots, and resizing.
> > >
> > > It will be interesting to see what happens.  When HP decided I was no
> > > longer
> > > necessary (too few NFS bug reports, did my job too well?) there were
> only a
> > > few people with AdvFS skills left.
> > >
> > >    -Ric Werme
> > > _______________________________________________
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> > > gnhlug-discuss at mail.gnhlug.org
> > > http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
> > >
> >
> > --
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> >
>
>
>
>
> --
> --
> Jerry Feldman <gaf at blu.org>
> Boston Linux and Unix
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