Upgrade Blues

I'm sitting at work right now. It's Saturday morning, about 7:45 a.m. Backing up my HP-UX server so that we can upgrade the O/S from 11.0 to 11i.1. Needless to say I'm nervous. Fortunately for me, we've hired one of the baddest Unix gunslingers in the area when it comes to Unix. He will assist, hell, he will do the upgrade and I'll sit here and watch and hope I pick up a few pointers. I can only hope that this will go easily. I don't feel prepared for this upgrade like I have in the past for Unix upgrades. In fact, this will be my first HP-UX upgrade ever! I've lived through some Ultrix, OSF1/Digital Unix/Tru64 Unix upgrades before, but never have I participated in an HP-UX upgrade. I keep trying to convince management that we need to consider a move to Linux eventually, to save money and take advantage of all of the benefits of the Linux world. The glaring example of this is the lack of the ability on the HP-UX to snapshot it's Vxfs filesystems without paying the "Man" some money. In the Linux world, it's all there for you.

Anyhow, I don't want to bore the vast majority of my readers with technobabble, hell I don't understand half of it myself anymore.

Just know this people, this DRM stuff you're hearing about when it comes to MS Vista, is a very bad thing for people.

For a philosophical perspective, I tend to be on the side of Richard M. Stallman, father of GNU and certainly can take a heaping share of credit for the development of the Operating System that we call Linux.

I would encourage my readers to check out a book about Stallman titled "Free as in Freedom" which can be purchased at O'Reilly Books or is available, for free, to be read online (click the links to begin reading).

Digital rights management is what I believe Stallman calls "Treacherous Computing" and I wholly agree.

'nuff said, start reading, I want book reports next week!