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| Subject: | [opensuse] Re: dregs of upgrading the headless via dreck DRACs? |
| Group: | Suse-linux-e |
| From: | Joachim Schrod |
| Date: | 9 May 2008 |
> Joachim>> [*] Dell's DRAC is Dreck, for those who know German.
> Sam Clemens> It's understood by most English-speakers.
>
> As someone who was born in the English speaking area of middle
> America, I wasn't familiar with its definition, though I related
> to the word "dreg" -- low value leftovers sediment or grounds
> left over at the bottom of a container, or the least valuable
> part of something.
>
> Google translate wasn't much help, translating german 'dreck'
> into English -- into 'dreck'.
>
> But Oxford says its slang from yiddish, most recently used in
> referring to merchandise that is shoddy or inferior in quality.
> (syn. 'schlock', 'shlock'); earlier seemed to mean 'rubbish',
> "dregs", or excrement (which are also 'leftovers' of a sort).
The most common translation of `dreck' to English is probably
`dirt' or `filth', usually used in a context where you want to
assert the meaning in a bawdy way. In modern German, it is a word
that is more often used in spoken than in written language, e.g.,
if parents rebuke their children if they come in dirty from playing
in the field in freshly washed clothes or something like that.
`dirt' is actually a very old German word from Low Germanic
ethomology (originally `drec'). Old English used it as `dreax',
meaning `decay' or `rubbish'. It has a common heritage with `dung',
swedish translated to `träck' and latin `stercus'. `stercus' is the
base line that led to `excrement', that's probably the reason why
Oxford names it.
> DRAC seems to be a name for a DellRemoteAccessCard -- something
> that seems like it "should" be a good idea. Too bad it's
> implementation is drek (crap?). There seem to be newer DRAC's
> (Versions II and III)... I wonder if they are equally drekky?
Yes, they are. None of them work properly. To often one has this
d*mned Java applet in one's browser and the console connection
simply doesn't work. (This is not an issue with the OS, it happens
both in Linux and in Windows; also with several JREs that we've
tried.) In fact, for our company server hosting providers,
availability of proper console servers (via ssh) got an important
decision factor some time ago. E.g., Strato has their
RemoteConsole, which is a Cyclades console server, AFAIK. Btw, I
can recommend Cyclades products wholeheartly, we deployed them at
several customer's data centers with great success.
But I also administrate (in my copious spare time :-) some servers
for Open Source activities, where money is scarce. E.g., I'm one of
the CTAN[*] admins, and our German server is colo'd at HostEurope.
While we're quite satisfied with their overall service and
technical quality -- we push 3+ TB of TeX software per month to our
users and have almost no technical problems -- their usage of DRACs
for console access is a real pain in the back. It takes away a
safety net that I got accustomed to in other circumstances where
more money is available. Major upgrade of these servers is always a
very carefully planned activity; where we first need to test it
locally to see if it will really work. (While that's standard in
the commercial world, volunteers working for an Open Source
Software user's group often don't have enough resources
(knowledgable persons and time) to do this properly.)
Well, enough rambling, just some thoughts from the trenches.
Joachim
[*] CTAN is the `Comprehensive TeX Archive Network', the network of
servers that make available all kinds of software around the TeX
typesetting system.
--
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Joachim Schrod Email: jschrod
Roedermark, Germany
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