/dev/dump

So, there has been some that have argued vehemently against the advertising policies of GoDaddy , and its ilk.  (See https://twitter.com/bdha/status/211210555577466881 for example of the complaints.) I have a different point of view.  What about sites that always picture a beautiful woman on a headset for their representation of tech support?  Should we also boycott them?  Would you prefer a site with an ugly  person answering the phone?  After all, it's a phone or text chat, so it shouldn't matter at all what the person looks like, right? Conversely, what about all the sites that use men  in their advertising? My hosting provider, bluehost.com , uses both .  Take a look .  Does the pretty blonde in glasses have anything to do with domain names or web hosting?  Of course not.  The guy wearing the headset for the tech support line isn't exactly hideous either, if you swing that way.  Are you likely to talk to this gu...

So, if you're like me, and you've been shopping for a new system lately because you're last one is dying or dead, you might see some fancy looking Intel E3-1200v2 Xeon systems.  (Why Xeon?  Because ECC memory is a good  thing.  I attribute some of my difficulty with my last system to using non-ECC memory.  Because its not ECC, I don't really know  whether the problem was in RAM or CPU, but I digress...) Great, so you pick out a E3-1240v2 Ivy Bridge CPU, and then you look for a System Board. I found the Supermicro X9SCA-F-O.  Looks like a sweet board.  The spec claims support for the E3-1200v2 cpus, and 1600MHz RAM.  It has a separate IPMI LAN support, as well.  Sweet!  (Look closer though....) So, package arrives from NewEgg, and you're ready to go. Assemble the kit.... if you're a software guy like me this might take a couple of hours. Power it on. Beep!  Beep!  Beep!  Beep! WTF does that mean!?  ...

So, I've been trying to setup a system that can build illumos-gate.  Because my old system had a memory DIMM fault, and isn't usable anymore. I thought, hmm... let me try something other  than OpenIndiana. Big mistake. Only OpenIndiana seems able to build vanilla illumos-gate right now. Why?  Because of external dependencies!   I tried building on OmniOS.  The stopper there -- Python 2.4!  On SmartOS, the dependency is IPS itself.  It seems only OpenIndiana is suitable for building stock illumos-gate. The problem is that our build is inherently very sensitive to the build environment.  It makes life incredibly unpleasant if you try to build on any system that is not configured exactly  as we specified. This, IMO, is an unacceptable situation. I will speak loudly against any  attempt to make changes that introduce further external dependencies.  The fact that some already exist is no excuse.  Every external depend...