Do you remember in the good old days, when Sun had this revolutionary thing called a Lights-Out Management, which was basically an overachieving serial console?
One of the really cool things about the LOM was how you could actually power-cycle the server. You typed the following commands: > poweroff > poweron And that turned the power off and back on again. Awesome! Very handy in the exceedingly rare event the system got itself wedged so hard that it required power cycling, which in those days was pretty damned rare. Now we have cool things like the X4500. That's a great big file server which essentially consists of a 4U-sized drawer full of disks. As an extra added bonus, they've made it extra-unstable! Where Sun servers used to never crash ever, now they explode messily if you look at them funny. What fun! And as a bonus, the new LOM now has greatly-improved, much-more intuitive commands! Why would you want to waste your time typing silly things like "poweroff" and "poweron" which any fool could guess? Now in the wonderful Age Of The Future, it comes with a variety of commands that requires you to hit Google when you get called at 2am to figure out how in the hell to power-cycle the server! There is nothing a sysadmin likes better, after all, than when groggy from being woken up in the middle of the night because one of the fucking fileservers has thrown a wobbly YET AGAIN, than having to grovel around a bunch of documentation about how to hook the LOM^WService Processor up to LDAP as if anyone would want to do anything as moronic as that in the vain hope that somewhere amongst all of that stool there might be some vague hint about how to FUCKING POWER-CYCLE THE SYSTEM. Of course there isn't--that's such a trivial detail that one is expected to be able to easily guess that the command to do so is "reset /SYS" rather than that confusing faffing about with commands with "power" in their name and a complete lack of weird and wacky pathnames to memorize. Isn't the future such a huge improvement over the past? --Dave
