Ultramonkey mentioned in Mar 2007 LinuxJ, p48

[Joseph Mack NA3T]

I would love to say that UM was mentioned in a competent 
context, but it's mentioned in an infommercial (presented as 
a technical article) on the "Coyote Point Equalizer" (p48). 
Since LinuxJ is a magazine targetted to technically 
competent GPL/opensource people I would expect that they'd 
at least tell you whether this was a proprietary box or not 
(it's proprietary, but you won't find out in this article). 
Even if the author doesn't think this is important to get 
this straight, you'd at least think that the editors would.

The infommercial is targetted to people who know nothing 
about load balancing (perhaps the author knows nothing about 
it either) and is mostly gee-whiz. He mentions Ultramonkey 
as an open source balancer, without mentioning LVS. I'm sure 
he doesn't know the difference. He says that the reason 
you'd want the $10,000 Coyote box with 20 NICs, rather than 
an opensource setup on a box with 2 NICs is performance. He 
doesn't compare the Coyote box with an opensource balancer 
running on the same hardware. Where are the editors here?

When LinuxJ last botched an article on load balancers, I 
wrote telling them that there were competent people 
available to review submissions, just by looking with 
google. They e-mailed me back saying something like "oh 
sure, we'll call you next time".

I've been thinking of discontinuing my subscription to 
LinuxJ. This just about seals it.

Joe

-- 
Joseph Mack NA3T EME(B,D), FM05lw North Carolina
jmack (at) wm7d (dot) net - azimuthal equidistant map
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Homepage http://www.austintek.com/ It's GNU/Linux!