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Hi-tech tools: hammer & chisel

I’ve been glad to have some older tools sitting around in recent days, for doing those odd little jobs... but it seems that the ISS carries a few as well. It seems that spacewalk to repair a cargo ship will require the astronaut to bash away at the offending part with a hammer & chisel.

It seems incongruous to have a bloke bashing an object with a hard rock, in orbit a few hundred km above the normal hard rocks, but it illustrates a point: sometimes, the newest, trendiest toys are simply not appropriate for the job.

Many times I’ve set up a few simple little bulletproof services on a Linux box, & saved the owners thousands in licence fees alone on trendy but vulnerable software which they didn’t have to install any more. Oh, & a complete new server to carry ’Doze, because the trendy services required that & refused to run on Linux — & ’Doze wouldn’t do some of the vital stuff that the Linux box was doing.

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