The guy's a moron. Bad sysadmins exist. Film at 11.
First up, Mandrake isn't a server OS. Sorry, but it ain't.
On a server, Red Hat 6.2 to Mandrake isn't an "upgrade", it's a sign on your back saying "kick me".
On production servers, you DO NOT change your kernels without a damn good reason; in fact, you do not deviate from your distro-supplied kernel. This guy seemed to slap on every new kernel as they appeared, as evidenced here:
These problems continued as the kernel versions worked their way up through 2.4.11, which has a serious symlink bug that could lead to corrupted inodes. As of 2.4.13, things finally seemed to be cleaned up a bit. The kernel seemed to show more stability. Then we hit kernel 2.4.15.
What the fuck was he thinking of? This is his customer's
production server!
Also on production servers, especially your customer's production server, you buy a service contract from Red Hat or IBM or LinuxCare or me or whatever and when things get out of hand, you call in the real experts.
Yes, 2.4 was a bit of an adventure at times. That's true. What's also true is that the guy writing this article is a maroon of a sysadmin.
Sorry, Andy. Windows still sucks ass (I've been reading the installation procedure for Exchange 2000 and all I can say is "bwaHAHAHAHAHA!", details on request.)
Active Directory is still shit, doesn't scale and is easy to break; Windows on the desktop is still slow, hard to deploy, harder to manage and the most expensive thing out there, and Excel 2002 STILL doesn't let you select two ranges and have the one range be category labels for the other one on a chart. I know all this stuff because it's what I do for a living.
Sucks to be me, I guess.