[besson3c]

It's interesting to me observing how various admins, developers, and other technical minded people solve problems - the sort of instinctual thinking that accompanies the thought process, the sort of products/solutions that are attractive, etc.

For instance, there is a group where I work that manages our Exchange servers. This, to me, would be a hellish job... I don't like the idea of being totally vendor dependent, and with some things being mysterious black boxes where support comes from one source (often awkward and inconvenient call centers). I don't like the idea of the supplementary technology and tools that we use being totally dependent on what the vendor will allow or permit. I hate being forced to use a particular piece of technology (e.g. Internet Explorer) to use the vendor's tools.

Since our group is responsible for working with open source tools, we are not nearly as vendor dependent, but we still can't completely escape this. For instance, our SAN requires IE to browse and diagnose problems. We work with F5 pairs for routing and load balancing. Our anti-spam software is a black box/proprietary product from Sophos...

On one hand, in some cases it is sort of nice being able to turn our brains off when we call for support and let somebody else sort out the mess. On the other, being on hold while there are fires to put out is a pain, dealing with their bureaucracy, etc. is a pain, feeling dependent is not always a comforting feeling.

Many web developers are the same way, preferring pretty little applications and various tools that sometimes serve as crutches. It is often nice to have little doohickeys to make life more convenient, but I often find that sometimes it is best not to be dependent on them and actually learn stuff.

What do you guys think? Have you experienced differing problem solving mentality? Do you feel the same way about being too vendor dependent? Have you ever felt that certain tools were becoming unhealthy crutches? Does this thread even make sense?

[besson3c]

I'll add that the difference in problem solving mentality from a businessney type not-so-technical person is often in stark contrast to the sort of problem solving mentality and solutions a more technical person will come up, so this dichotomy seems to exist too...

It's interesting to me, although I'm not sure I'm expressing myself accurately...

[Chuckit]

I don't feel they're mutually exclusive. I could, if I wanted, clean up the whole office by myself. It's not beyond my capability. But I'm still going to let the cleaning crew do it so I can spend my time solving higher-level problems and not getting bogged down picking up people's trash.

Beyond that, everybody who uses a computer is dependent on some black box or another. Sure, you can compile Linux from source, but I seriously doubt many Linux users actually know the source well enough to fix arbitrary problems they encounter in a reasonable amount of time. Even when it's open-source, the OS is basically a black box from the user's (and this includes admins — I mean "non-developer's") perspective. The same could be said for many other applications we use all the time (file managers, FTP clients, etc.). So do I think one more crutch is bad? Not necessarily.

[besson3c]

Originally Posted by Chuckit 

I don't feel they're mutually exclusive. I could, if I wanted, clean up the whole office by myself. It's not beyond my capability. But I'm still going to let the cleaning crew do it so I can spend my time solving higher-level problems and not getting bogged down picking up people's trash.

Beyond that, everybody who uses a computer is dependent on some black box or another. Sure, you can compile Linux from source, but I seriously doubt many Linux users actually know the source well enough to fix arbitrary problems they encounter in a reasonable amount of time. Even when it's open-source, the OS is basically a black box from the user's (and this includes admins — I mean "non-developer's") perspective. The same could be said for many other applications we use all the time (file managers, FTP clients, etc.). So do I think one more crutch is bad? Not necessarily.

I see your point and agree that some elements of computing are black box, but there are degrees of this...

For instance, we manage Cyrus IMAP. The mailbox format in Cyrus is a Maildir style "each message is a file" format which allows us to analyze these and search for stuff using standard Unix text processing tools. The mailbox format also consists of a flat file database, which is a choice of database standards (e.g. Berkelee, skiplist, etc.).

Mailbox administration is done through a tool called cyradm (e.g. mailbox creation, setting of quotas, ACLs, mailbox moves, etc.). This tool includes a number of Perl modules that are freely available on CPAN for doing these functions via homemade perl scripts. This allows us to do stuff in bulk, and gives us a means to trace problems too.

Tellimetry logging is available, but otherwise Cyrus relies on standard syslog logging, which allows us to have a loghost (other than the local machine) and for the log format to be entirely predictable.

Contrast this to a mail system where mailbox formats are proprietary, where administrative tools are whatever the vendor provides, and where logging and tracing is based on whatever the vendor provides... See my point?

[torsoboy]

From your thread title I thought you were talking about hardware. At my previous place of employment everything HAD to be Dell... no arguing that point over there. Servers were Dell, desktops were Dell, laptops were Dell. The machines were nothing special, but for whatever reason they chose to go Dell all the way even when they could buy the same thing for less expensive elsewhere.

With my business our hardware guy wont even *consider* buying a server that isn't supermicro brand. He also will not even consider changing suppliers regardless of the arguments about doing it (price, longer warranties, quicker delivery times, etc.).

It is pretty frustrating, but from the two places that I have been in contact with the hardware admins that just seems to be the way it is. The hardware admins I know are very biased towards a particular brand and/or supplier and regardless of their experience (or lack thereof) with other brands/suppliers will not consider changing.

Software is something different though... I used to work in an all Microsoft world (Windows, Visual Studio, MS SQL, Microsoft Outlook, ASP, IIS, etc.) and I didn't mind it too much. They all worked together nicely and we didn't have much problems. Now I work with all open source and free software (Notepad++ editor, FreeBSD servers, php, MySQL, phpMyadmin, etc), and I don't have a problem with that either. As long as everything works nicely together I don't really care what is used.