(no subject)

[kirkcudbright]

In further other news, work(*) has switched its mail servers over to Microsoft Exchange, and they are strongly urging users to switch to Outlook, for easier virus propagation. Myself, I prefer to read mail on a box that I can ssh to from a character terminal. With rather a bit of help from meister, I got fetchmail, sendmail, and procmail all talking together nicely, and I can continue to use the same mailer I was using in the '80's. I feel mildly accomplished, since I'm not now, nor have I ever been a sysadmin.

(*)This is the same company that standardized on ClearCase instead of cvs for source control. ClearCase has some useful features, like acting as a live file system, and...and...something useful, I'm sure. But we're spending buckets of money on the licenses, and we have a group of people whose full-time job it is to babysit this thing.

Comments

clearcase

[totient]

the most compelling thing about clearcase is it can take an executable -- any random executable that some customer had installed -- and show you the view that made it, so you can debug whatever problem the customer is having.

and it deals much more gracefully with renaming and deleting objects -- particularly directories -- than does CVS, which makes refactoring a lot easier.

But you're right that the overhead is insane. It's not so much the license as the fact that you need a dedicated admin. That's crazy for any company of under 100 people, and questionable even for a big company.