A Case for Linux in the Corporation

_UnderTow_ writes: "Saw this over at Anandtech. It's a pretty descriptive account of a reasonably large corporation (7000+ employees) transitioning their network infrastructure over to Red Hat Linux. Has details of the company's initial move to NT, and their eventual move to Linux as the cost of licensing gets out of control."

Comments

Thousand linux cases here...

[joestar]

There are thousand cases of Linux uses in corporates (large and smaller ones as well) on MandrakeBizCases.com. Worth a look.

Re:I'm not a great NT admin, but...

[SuiteSisterMary]

But aren't individual machines supposed to have their own license numbers? With their new activation technology, isn't MS going to start making it impossible to slide on this?

No. Take any Microsoft product of recent; say, anything from office2000 up. Probably even earlier, but I can't say. Drop to a cmd prompt, and navigate to the setup program. Then do a 'setup /a' and watch, as in beautiful majesty, the software makes what is called an 'administrative install' which preconfigures the license key, company name, and all that stuff. Then it installs it to a designated location, such as a network share. Then, go to microsoft.com, find the Resource Kit page for your software, lets say Office 2000 again, and download the core tools. You'll likely find something called 'custom install wizard' which you run against this administrative install. This will then take you through from 1 to 40 wizard pages where you customize anything and everything about the install. When it's done, you get an MST, or Microsoft Setup Transform file. Then, using a command such as

\\myfileserver\myinstalls\office2000\setup TRANSFORMS=mytransformfile.mst /qa-

you'll get an install, preconfigured, no user input. Just progress bars. Then, using something like SMS, Zenworks, Tivoli, whatever, you automate the installation of these.