[PLUG] Remote work on downed server ( Re: ANNOUNCEMENT: March PLUG Meeting: Anatomy of a Mailing List Meltdown )

[Ted Mittelstaedt]

-----Original Message-----
From: PLUG <plug-bounces at lists.pdxlinux.org> On Behalf Of Paul Heinlein
Sent: Monday, February 27, 2023 12:06 PM
To: Portland Linux/Unix Group <plug at lists.pdxlinux.org>
Subject: Re: [PLUG] Remote work on downed server ( Re: ANNOUNCEMENT: March PLUG Meeting: Anatomy of a Mailing List Meltdown )


>In this hypothetical exchange, a business owner who didn't realize that a single PC would make or break a significant customer relationship would in all likelihood not be in business for very long.

I have to disagree with this statement.  There are TONS of smaller businesses where they do indeed pass up significant customer relationships all the time and yet still remain in business.

It is just that doing this practically guarantees you will remain small.  As a business owner if you CHOOSE to do this I don't have a problem with it.  But you need to truly understand the risks.

A 1 person business can easily pivot, and pivoting is needed when dancing with elephants.  A 10 person company - not so much.  They need to grab every opportunity.  I've had a customer that size fail on me.  They expanded too fast and collapsed when an elephant stomped on them. (and it was the largest elephant out there - the US Government)  As a 10 person company they absolutely could not pivot.  They are now a 1 person company - and pivoting - under a different name.  Possibly diversifying might not have saved them given the industry they were in.  But it might have given them a rathole to flee into.  I dunno.

>It's not that I disagree with your assessment, but I don't back off my initial opinion that most IT decisions are based on risk assessment, not technology >assessement. The latter can inform but will rarely trump the former.

Buying an HP Elite or Pro notebook instead of their consumer grade stuff is not a technology assessment.  It's a risk assessment.

>Consider the business owner who is cash poor but relatively time rich. Keeping cash on hand can justify the owner's need to spend extra time keeping a >fragile set of systems working. I say "can," not "will" or "must," but I think the point is reasonable.

I used to think this way and indeed it's what motivated me to get into FreeBSD and Minix prior to that and TekUX prior to that.  The idea was simple - as a poor young man I had lots of time and little cash, so why not spend the time learning this "free unix" stuff

But what I learned is there's a point at which that tradeoff fails.   I recall many years ago wanting to run the "screens" program on TekUX just because I wanted multiple screens on a dialup phone line to a box.  I must have spent a month carefully teasing out how to compile it under TekUX until I finally ended up with a running binary.

We don't use that program now because you can open multiple SSH or Telnet sessions to do the same thing.

And even during the Dark Ages, I could have simply driven into the computer lab where the TekUX was located and done exactly the same thing.

Of course, all of that was for my own amusement so you can argue it both ways.  But, if I had been making money with that, I would have gone broke.

All of this is a lot more subjective than it seems on the surface.  It really isn't as simple as it looks and these assessments are more subjective than people want to believe.

--
Paul Heinlein
heinlein at madboa.com
45°22'48" N, 122°35'36" W