Thursday, October 05, 2006
10/5 SNR
- The latest SCO Me Inc. mobile app was officially released today. HipCheck is a sort of mobile system administration system: You deploy your swarm of HipCheck Agents on your boxes -- well, your Windows and SCO Unix boxes, anyway. The agents monitor a variety of system properties, and alert you if any of the monitored values goes outside a defined range. Apparently you can then trigger responses, although you don't get a huge range of possible responses to choose from.
This is not a terrible idea, but neither is it a terribly original one. When pagers first hit the market, I expect that within a week some clever sysadmin had a shell script set to send out a page if anything went awry. In his classic book The Cuckoo's Egg, Cliff Stoll had something like this rigged up as a basic form of intrusion detection, way back in the late 80's. It's close to 20 years later, and SCO's product doesn't appear to do intrusion detection, or any sort of security monitoring at all.
Basically it looks like their approach was to provide whatever info is easily available with a couple of simple Win32 API calls (or the Unix equivalent in case any of SCO's remaining Unix customers ever deploy the thing). I've looked over HipCheck's list of capabilities, and I have to say it's not terribly full featured. I honestly think I'd feel that way even if HipCheck was a product from some startup I'd never heard of before.
The product page gives a long list of things HipCheck can query for you, but quite a few are things that either don't change at all (system manufacturer / model) or which might change on a regular basis without it being a problem (IP address). The list of things HipCheck can watch and actually alert you about is quite small: Low disk space, an NT service starting or stopping, a monitored process exiting, and certain printer problems. That's it. That's all. I honestly think I could cook up something similar over a weekend, if I needed to, and I'm not saying that to beat my own drum. Lots of people could cook this up over a weekend. If I did cook it up over a weekend, I certainly wouldn't try charging money for it. I actually almost had to write something similar a couple of months ago as a favor to SCM, but I managed to pawn the job off on a script monkey in QA instead, since I thought it'd be a waste of my time.
I'm also perplexed about what market HipCheck is supposed to address. I'm having trouble imagining who the typical HipCheck customer might be, or who the product's competitors are. Clearly it's not a security product. So is it a configuration/change management product? Is SCO trying to compete with, say, HP OpenView, Tivoli, CA Unicenter, BMC...? That ought to be an, ahem, amusing (and short) competition. If we dismiss the token SCO Unix agent product, is SCO trying to play in the Windows-only management space -- and compete against Microsoft? Again, that ought to be amusing. - That's not the only news of the day, by any means. In an extremely unsurprising move, SCO's now begging the court to delay SCO vs. Novell until SCO vs. IBM wraps up. That sounds more than a little desperate, but I guess delay is all they've got at this point.
- Tony Lawrence tells the story of recently having to fix an ancient SCO Unix 3.2 box with printer woes. I peek at comp.unix.sco.misc on a semi-regular basis, and a surprising amount of the traffic is devoted to printer woes. Maybe that's part of why printer monitoring is a big part of HipCheck's meager feature list.
- A Google Video search for "SCO" is not overly fruitful, but there are a few video clips there from SCOForum 2006, plus a clip of Darl's appearance at Harvard a couple of years back.
- On c.u.s.m, a former regular stops by to remark on how light the traffic is these days. Because, well, he's moved over to Linux land these days, and there's not much reason to haunt the old SCO newsgroups anymore.
- Light though the traffic may be, c.u.s.m. is still a good source for info on things SCO Unix users care about. Like how to rsync your data over to that shiny new Linux box.
- Tim Morgan at IT Jungle has a typically quirky & contrarian take on the Unix vs. Linux vs. Windows marketshare wars. Contrarian because he leans a bit towards the Solaris side of things, and quirky because he also tosses the AS/400 into the mix.
- This item, contributed by yet another astute reader of this blog, requires a bit of explanation. One of SCO's BOD members, Ed Iacobucci, has a side venture called DayJet that's supposed to eventually be a sort of taxi or limo service, except with business jets. Which might be interesting, in theory, if I was a highly-compensated PHB instead of a less-highly-compensated worker bee, but no matter. Seems the new plane DayJet's hoping to use has run into some sticky technical difficulties, seemingly involving their LynxOS-based avionics software. Interesting bit here: LynxOS is a generally "Unix-like" proprietary RTOS produced by LynuxWorks, and said OS is sold alongside BlueCat, the company's real-time Linux offering. LynuxWorks isn't known to be a SCOSource licensee, and SCO isn't known to have ever threatened to sue LynuxWorks, and it's hard to say exactly where things stand between the two companies, if they stand at all. The LynuxWorks stand on SCO v. IBM, circa 2003, can be found here. This all sounds like a real conflict of interest for poor Mr. Ed. I wonder how he resolved it?
- Laura Didio hasn't had much to say about SCO lately, but she's awfully excited about Office 2007. She does identify the key longstanding problem in Office, however: Most users only ever use about 10% of the product's features. How do you make it so that that 10% is easy to find and use, amidst all the esoteric advanced crap nobody really undersands, much less uses? And how do you do that, without alienating everyone who's used to the product in its present form (as it's haphazardly accreted features over the last decade and a half or so.) If you've used GIMP or OOo recently, you can't really argue this is a Microsoft-only problem.
- From the Glorious OpenBSD Utopia of the Future (TM), we learn that Theo has declared war on Intel, since they're being surly and uncooperative with their wireless driver code.
- Solera Networks has a brand new COO, formerly of Novell. Bryan Sparks remains as Chairman.
- Also, it's "Cyber Security Awareness Month" in Utah right now. From the sound of it, the main focus is to discourage kids from bullying each other over the net. No word yet on what (if anything) the state plans to do about bullying in real life.
- SCO's former Canopy stablemate Altiris gets a mention in this piece titled Keeping a Safe Distance from Microsoft. Safe, as in Microsoft not getting greedy for your slice of the pie and crushing you like a grape, at least not for the time being.
- From HPCWire, a bit about SGI's effort to improve Linux and make it more scalable and whatnot, which is important to SGI these days since they're about to drive a stake through the heart of IRIX, their legacy Unix-on-MIPS product line. They even brag about XFS, one of the things SCO was whining at them about back in '03 when for a while it looked like there might be a SCO v. SGI suit. That's got to chafe Darl's shorts a little.
- And for Linux users left out in the cold, unable to join in on the whole iPod+iTunes nirvana thing, here's a possible semi-alternative. For Portland-area Linux users, maybe I should point out that the iRiver is (sorta) a local product, with US offices just across the river over in the 'Couve.
- Yet another mini distro, this time based on Slackware. W00t!
- 99% of the time, I think "Paul Murphy" (not his real name) is a hopeless bozo, and a hopelessly inept writer, but a recent piece about Solaris 10 isn't bad. Ok, so about half the article is an extended quote from someone else, so that probably helps a great deal. I'm suspicious of any effort to "improve" SysV IPC, which is inherently evil, but Sol10's Event Port mechanism sounds schweet. Now if only it was portable...
- The latest Merkey litigation: This time he's suing Delta Airlines & an organic veggie company for (allegedly) making his kid sick with E. coli O157:H7. This has been batted around on the message boards for a few days, but I'm not going to say anything snarky about it. O157:H7 is a nasty, nasty bug, and I wouldn't wish that on anyone. For whatever it's worth, I really feel for the guy in this particular situation. He's even hired an attorney this time, rather than going the pro se route, so it looks like he's treating this very seriously.
By brx0 @ 10:44 PM 
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Since all things Merkey are off-topic no matter what the subject, let the digression continue to devolve to that other pathogen (besides Jeffo) this brings up: E. coli O157:H7
This link came from a list we are on as a result of raising our own grass-fed beef cattle:
http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0922-26.htm
They make the claim that this strain of E. coli is not present in cattle fed on forage ONLY, and suggest a way to reduce its distribution.
Darl would probably know about this if he *had* any cattle.
Disclaimer: Less than 0.36% of our cattle use Linux on the desktop. SOB!!
-101
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This link came from a list we are on as a result of raising our own grass-fed beef cattle:
http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0922-26.htm
They make the claim that this strain of E. coli is not present in cattle fed on forage ONLY, and suggest a way to reduce its distribution.
Darl would probably know about this if he *had* any cattle.
Disclaimer: Less than 0.36% of our cattle use Linux on the desktop. SOB!!
-101
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