realpath(3) et al

[Jacques A. Vidrine]

On Tue, Aug 12, 2003 at 08:15:41AM -0700, Chris Odell wrote:
>  
>   Corporations - INTERNET Companies...
> 
>   If you look at the big picture, having a O.S. that has been audited
> for issues would actually be cost effective for them. Having to patch a
> machine that is in service causes downtime. 
> 
>   Lets see - 
> 
>   Each machine takes ten (10) minutes of human work to drop into single
> user mode and install new binaries/kernels   
>  
>   The company has one thousand (1000) machines
> 
>   That comes to ten thousand (10000) minutes, broken down to hours - 167
> Hours
> 
>   The average admin say is making forty five (45) dollars a hour - over
> $7000.00 - not including taxes paid by employer.
> 
>   So if one hundred fifty companies donated one thousand dollars (1000)
> it would save them downtime, payroll, and taxes.
> 
>   Just a rough estimate and my 2 cents

Not to discount your actual point (auditing for issues may be cost
effective), but this may be a poor example.  We (Verio) have huge
numbers of FreeBSD servers, but distributing an upgrade is fairly
painless... particularly if it is a new kernel.  We don't need
anywhere near 10 minutes of human time per machine.

I'm pretty sure other hosting companies (or other companies with
beaucoup servers) likewise have this corner of operations down to a
science.

Cheers,
-- 
Jacques Vidrine   . NTT/Verio SME      . FreeBSD UNIX       . Heimdal
nectar at celabo.org . jvidrine at verio.net . nectar at freebsd.org . nectar at kth.se