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Is Linux Used in Production Telephony?
jamesva asks: "The telecommunications industry is rapidly converging on Windows NT/2000 for all telephony and voice-related needs. Most ACD systems, virtual operators, and voicemail are being ported to Windows if they're not already running on it.
In the past, telephony apps have existed most
notably on OS/2, SCO, and even DOS. However,
free Unix (or unix-like) platforms have absolutely no penetration in this area, with seemingly no chance on the horizon.
The Bayonne app server from the GNU folks seems to be the one exception, but even then there doesn't
seem to much built around it or anyone using it. It reached a 1.0 release in September and was met with no fanfare. Even the
LinuxTelephony doesn't seem to have much news. Can someone prove me wrong? Why is this the case? I'm interested in finding out if anyone is using Linux (or any free OS) in a production environment for something like voicemail or ACD. These types of systems require high availability and reliability and Linux just seems like a natural fit."
I tried to install Linux and Slashcode on my homebrew hacked PBX telephony system, but then all my calls were being routed to goatse...
Either this is complete & total ignorance on my part, or, well, it's just complete & total ignorance. I thought that Large scale Unix based systems basically ran the switches, backbones/large servers behind Telephone/Telecommunication Networks. That's how the uber geeks found out about it, trashing for manuals to all of these VAX/VMS/UNIX systems, dialing in to them, and hax0ring their way in to screwing with their friends/enemies who may have flamed them on a local BBS. Am I wrong?
Avaya does this now, and they are porting more and more of there application VoIP services to LINUX, as well as Win2K like you said.
but a lot of solaris/sparc machines doing our telephony. The uptime is just too good on a *nix vs 2K.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
Linux being the DIY operating system that it is, people tend to write drivers for the hardware that they have. How many linux hackers have dialogic boards in their machines? At >$500, I doubt the number is very high. No drivers, no applications.
The first question I'd ask is: Are the applications there? If not, there it is.
You mentioned one application that uses Linux. There are probably many more that work under Windows, because that's probably what companies are developing for. More to the point, that's probably what companies are asking for -- "Give us something that looks like what we're used to for web surfing already!"
Now granted, within the past few years Linux's desktop has grown leaps and bounds beyond where it was -- but then, it wasn't there when these companies first started developing their apps, and wasn't an option then.
That, ultimately, is the issue.
This is Mark Spencer's most recent project. Same guy that did Cheops and started GAIM. Really cool stuff.
Within the last 6 months I went through a phone system evaluation process. I was focused on IP telephony to a certain degree, so it was limited.
I agree that most items are being ported to Windows (scares the heck out of me, it's one thing for your web server to be down 6 hours, try having your phone system down for 6 hours).
The primary area where new development was being done, that wasn't Windows, I found to be in VxWorks. This makes sense to me since a RTOS really is a better platform, and at the same time, bypasses all of the Windows worms, etc.
Ok, I give up, why you?
Digium. A GNU/Linux telphony company based in Huntsville, AL. They sell T1 PCI cards for GNU/Linux machines and distribute a free as in GPLed software PBX. Check them out!
Disclosure: No, I don't work for them, but I have had lunch with them and they're pretty nice guys!
A company called West Telemarketing is working toward moving over their VRUs (Voice Recognition Units) from SCO to Linux by integrating the Dialogic (Intel) drivers into the kernel.
From what I have heard, things are in Beta but very stable and soon to be moving forward to production systems.
-- Knowing too much can get you killed, but knowing who knows too much can make you rich.
Here at work we use a 3Com NBX 100 system .
I've FTP'd into it and it seems to be running some sort of a BSD variant.
I guess it could also run linux.. but I don't quite feel like pokeing around in our production telephone system.
I used to work for Lucent/AG Communication Systems. The project I was on, their ClientCare call center system (think big... an entire in and outbound call center solution for arbitrarily large companies), ran on Solaris and FreeBSD. We had Solaris for the big Oracle Parallel server DB and FreeBSD tied the little bits and pieces together such as the CSR clients [which ran on Windows], the ISDN line management, and the playback of our utterly annoying hold music. It worked rather well, in the end. I think they're still doing it that way.
Here's a link to the product itself: http://www.agcs.com/productsv2/CallCenter/works.ht m
#44
We only run unix os's with a few NT machines (mostly admin consoles) in our datacenter. The problem with putting a Linux box in production, we have platinum support from Sun. Every server is a sun box, and its standardized for backup, database and clustering. If we put a Linux box, it has to run it on sparc hardware, and we have to have special procedures just for this one box.
Its much easier to run GPL'ed software ported to Solaris, than to switch the OS. We in fact run many GPL'ed software packages, the cost saving is amazing. The backend software is highly specialized, and will not be ported to linux.
To make sure the software is locked in production, the developers put license strings for everything, and then they lock it down to IP/Domain/Hardware/os version/etc..
Sometimes you want the software to be written in house, but with the features, support, updates to software, its easier to write a check and get everything at once. If you want to know who the main players are, Nokia, Nortel, Software.com and Ericsson are the largest players.
For us it was a balance of Windows and Unix.
I used to work for a Fortune 100 software and hardware distributor that also has one of the highest revenue-generating sites on the Internet. We ran a all of our call routing and control services on Unix (can't remember if it was Solaris or HP-UX for those servers). BUT we then transferred all the post-event descriptive information to an MS SQL Server to do data mining against the data. Some people might have thought that MS software ran the whole show, since most managers would use the SQL app to see how their sales teams were doing, but the whole thing was in fact fed by Unix.
They probably *could* do the same thing under Linux, but I'd rather that they not do it. (The situation with Oracle on Linux is already too close IMHO).
VOCAL
Now I hope and pray that I will But today I am still, just a bill
The real bear in getting this to work was finding a modem suitable for use with vgetty; vgetty's docs list some voice modems known to work, but most of these are 5+ years old and $300 and up, if you can even find them for sale.
Clued in by a Usenet post, I found a modern modem that works: the 3Com 2976 Voice/Fax/Data modem. It sells in online stores for around $50. (Note that not all modems which purport to have voice functionality are supported, and controllerless "winmodems" are not likely to work.)
I also tried using Asterisk, but it wasn't really suitable for my voicemail needs. As I recall it did not handle disconnect detection very well, potentially leaving the phone off the hook for a long time. There was also a pronounced lack of any HOWTOs or detailed documentation available either with the program, with the PBX card I purchased from them to run the program, or on the Internet in general.
My sense is that Asterisk's creator actively discourages freely available documentation, in order to have people avail themselves of paid support. To his credit you do get one month of free support for the software and the card when you purchase the latter, and he was helpful in IRC when I spoke with him.
Let's see... Linux RedHat 7.1 and 7.3 for the Operating system, Oracle 8i Database, Oracle 9i Application Server, Oracle's integrated Apache, X.25/HDLC hardware/drivers. Collecting 100's of thousands of AMA/OCC/CDR/EMI call records a day from telco switches... DMS, 5E, EWSD, DCO, Softswitches. Loading the call records into Oracle, running statistical reports against the call records. Collecting OMPR traffic reports. Mediating call records, sending them to billing. Nope... I guess that Linux isn't involved in telephony at all...
http://www.nams.net/
doug@nams.net
65.0% slashdot pure
I can't speak to what software runs on phone switches, but I can speak as a user at the "medium sized company" level, and as a user I can say that the industry seems to work primarily with embedded boxes for telecom. When you want a switch you buy a switch, and it does what it does. Whether that switch runs linux or SunOS or VxWorks or some proprietary OS is pretty much irrelevant to you if it functions for you in its capacity as a switch. If linux is being used as the basis for phone switching equipment, people probably wouldn't know, unless they had some contact at the company who developed the switch. This is a traditionally very embedded market, where name recognition of an OS like "Windows" or "linux" or whatever is irrelevant to the function of the device. Telecom can be thought of as the ultimate high availability application. In all my dealings with telephone switches, nothing ever crashed or needed to be rebooted. EVER. Even when installing new hardware. This kind of high availability doesn't readily lend itself to traditionally end-user oriented operating systems. I suspect the reason linux isnt perceived as penetrating the telecom sector is because its not, and if it were, it wouldn't matter because people who set up and managed the switches, by and large, dont give a shit how it works, just that it works, that it works all the time and never stops working. :) If your job is to turn a nut, does it really matter if you use a wrench, pliers or your fingers as long as the nut gets turned?
This too shall pass.
Quicknet has a low - cost 1 port card that will do the trick with Linux and Windows drivers:
http://www.quicknet.com
Also check out Pika for 4 port cards with traditional analogue and VoIP capabilities with Windows and Linux drivers:
http://www.pikatech.com
Aslo check out the Bayonne project. Linux based Open Source telephony system with interfaces to Quicknet, Pika, and other cards:
http://bayonne.sourceforge.net/
leaders in this area until a few years ago (I haven't been keeping track, so they still may be).
But all the 3rd party vendors recognized that UnixWare was a sinking ship, and started asking the hardware vendors (DLGC, NMS) for Linux support. Why? Because it's cheap and it at least looks like the redheaded stepchild UnixWare never had. So with a little work, the 3rd party vendors have their app running on Linux.
Add into this the fact that Microsoft also recognized UnixWare was a sinking ship, and started marketing. Remember, it's all about developers developers developers. So many 3rd parties were confused and switched their app to Windows (partial rewrites) instead of switching to linux (minimal porting effort).
I think that for some people who ended up on Windows, there may be some displeasure with the reliability / quality. But I think they are probably outnumbered by the people who are having positive results with W2K/NT in these setups. The net effect is that Windows is gaining in this market.
Sounds like Cisco. Its a very strange solution... There are lots of "call Cisco before fiddling this knob" knobs throughout the interface. And the contracter that installed it at our former school was incompetent, so doing something like running multicast ghost caused the phones to completley freak out (different VLAN mind you, maybe they hadn't heard of the bandwidth reservation/QoS feature :)). They'd start rining randomly at times, but no connection on the other end, amongst other problems.
The PBX, ACD, and similar applications are not large scale. Such systems are often located at the customer's facility and sizes of 50 to 300 users are a huge chunk of this market. I've been out of this industry for almost ten years but the actual switches and routers tended to be embedded applications and then some form of PC would be used for monitoring, configuration, generating reports, etc. If the PC crashed a supervisor didn't get a report, and had to reboot and issue the print command again. Not a big deal. The embedded software kept running during all of this happily switching and routing calls.
Dialogic (now Intel) used to support SCO. Now it's Linux and Windows. Our app (fully automated telephony system handling IVR, call transfers, bridging, etc. features and a volume of over 10,000,000 minutes annually) runs on Dialogic/SCO but we're porting it to Linux. It's been reasonably painless - we're just testing extensively due to the platform change, Dialogic driver change from 2 to 5.1, etc. Downtime is not an option so our CEO will not allow the app to run on Windows (tee hee, how often do you see an enlightened CEO like that??).
There are some Linux CATI (not strictly telephony but call-center support) projects over at FreshMeat. Ericsson is using Linux in their "Carrier Class" systems. I've spent time with Vovida and Bayonne at LinuxWorld Expo and some Telephony conferences and they seem to be reasonably vibrant projects.
So yes, Linux is used in telephony.
~~~~~~~
"You are not remembered for doing what is expected of you." - Atul Chitnis
...even then there doesn't seem to much built around it or anyone using it. It reached a 1.0 release in September and was met with no fanfare.
So I'm supposed to bet the farm, our company, and MY job on recommending a 1.0 release of a pivotal tool that:
a) no one else uses
b) requires a massive $ investment to get off the ground
c) has only been out for 30 days.
d) has no support from the company that builds the call center respondent database.
Not likely.
If for whatever reason it craps out, we are out of business. I don't care so much about the operating system as I do the combination of operating system AND application. A crappy tool that runs under Linux is far, far worse than a good tool that runs under a properly administered Win2k OS.
Recommending Linux merely because it is Linux is a fast way to the unemployment line.
In addition to our WAN/LAN I also run a medium size phone switch (195 nodes / 16 IP Phones / 2 PRIs for switched access / 1 dedicated Long Distance T1). When you get to the corporate level you're buying a solution; not building one in house, because phones are essential to the day to day operation of the company. Period. I think generically when you say phone switch you're referring to everything telco past the demarc; switch T1s/PRIs, operate internal digital stations, provide analog lines, route calls, manage security, reporting/tracking/billing, Voicemail, Auto Attendants, Hunt Groups, Digital Faxing- the whole 7 layer enchilada. Few corporations are going to allow their IT departments to go the Slashdot way w/ so much on the line. A modern phone switch must reliably scale to thousands of nodes including IP devices, support Unified Messaging (receiving faxes & voice mails through PC), have reporting right out of the box, must be easy to use, and work on the first cut over. While the word 'easy' is certainly a very relative word- in my experience most geeks (a word of complimentary endearment in my vocabulary) can easily master telco while the reverse is not often true. Believe it or not, in the old days these were sometimes the roles of separate administrators / departments.
You're right that *nix is a perfect fit for all of this; remember Unix was invented at Bell Labs. The auxiliary applications are there; to support your phone switch you need to reliably record and report all activity across your switch for billing, acct. tracking, etc. I would guess that *nix runs the backbone.
If you'd like you can become a dealer for the company that claims to have 'the world's first Linux technology based voice processing' including Unified Messaging.
By the way I think that Bayonne is encompassed in the umbrella project of GNUComm; hopefully it's just a matter of time before someone finishes the Embedded Linux Phone Switch. As an incentive to anyone who develops and releases a free system: even used handsets cost big money for a particular phone switch; pick wisely 'cause you're most likely stuck with it for a little while. Caveat: you will most likely be pushed out of the market by softphones.
Since you're in the market and I just went through this myself contact me off list and I'll share my experience with Inter-Tel Technologies which is one of the fastest growing companies in the US (short version: no I don't work there and overall positive).
Great occasions do not make heroes or cowards; they simply unveil them to the eyes. -Bishop Westcott
Granted, a lot of what you said is subjective, and as you acknowledged, there is no point in arguing over opinion. Furthermore, I feel I understood what you said. In support of this, allow me to summarize your post: You a manager responsible for critical systems, and you absolutely do not modify your production environment without significant justification and complete risk-management.
..., etc.", but as "I do not have enough information about Linux and its tools to implement solutions for that platform". I firmly believe that _with proper procedures_ the appropriate Linux tools can be implemented in a risk-free way, its just a matter of knowing how to do it or knowing someone who does.
I don't think you're alone in that position. In fact, there are likely a number of Slashdot readers that are also responsible for business-critical systems. I even read an occasional story about businesses switching their mission-critical systems over to the Linux platform.
What this means is that even if you aren't comfortable with Linux, there are those in positions similar to yours that are, and they are growing their business in areas they could not otherwise.
It is possible that there does not exist a Linux application that could grow your business in any significant way. If the benefits of a change do not outweigh the effort involved, I admit it is a pointless modification.
However, if there exists a tool that could provably benefit your company, for example, by increasing profitability or decreasing the costs of operation, would you be biased against it because it runs on the Linux platform?
I am planning to start a business myself, and there is no part of it I would trust to the Windows platform. To use your words, I find it "loose, uncontrolled, and random". It does not suit my needs, and Linux does.
In closing, I interpreted your comment on the whole not as "Linux apps are too risky for me because of
I've been involved in many Large carrier switch control application platforms being delivered using Linux since 1994. Sprint was an early adopter in Asia. Hutchison Telecom also used Linux in their cellular network application switching platform. British Telecom deployed a worldwide unified messaging platform in 2000 that was controlled by Linux in the U.S.,U.K.,Japan, Australia, Norway, Spain, Italy and Germany. NTT used a Linux controlled calling card platform in Japan that ran well over 20,000,000 minutes per month. Embratel and Worldcom deployed the first carrier installed calling card platform in Brazil in 1999/2000 that was running a Linux based switch control platform. If I remember correctly the platform at Hutchison made it over 400 days without a reboot.
First and foremost I'm a wireless guy, landline is pretty much a black hole to me these days....
Telecom has been undergoing many changes at the lowest levels for a few years. Most UNIX systems in telephony are used as SCP's (Signaling / Service control points) / HLR's VLR's.. etc. A SCP will provide a service such as SMS, E-911, prepay, or something over the SS7 network. The SS7 network is at the lowest levels very similar to DAP, being a heavyweight protocol that requires its own circuits (ISDN, T1, ATM, etc.). While SS7 has been fabulous for creation of large and wonderful telecom networks it is becoming harder and harder to find people who understand even the basics of it. What's worse is the SS7 solutions of yesteryear (produced by say Lucent, NewNet, and Tandem) are no more. The newer SS7 solutions (say SignalWare, Distributed7, etc.) haven't really been able to cut the mustard. Things have been getting worse for a while, and people know it... but the fine people at ANSI and IEEE, Lucent, Nortel, IBM, and the like have come up with a solution. Make SS7 lightweight (I.e. IP based like LDAP).
Many things have happened in order to get SS7 (a very demanding protocol indeed) to work over IP. The first milestone was essentially dumping TCP for SCTP/IP. Much has been going on in this realm, the lk-sctp project has been busily cranking out code for the 2.5 series kernel, and will likely make Linux one of the first *NIX based operating systems to have a NATIVE SCTP implementation. Adding SS7 to the top of this is about as easy as creating an SCTP daemon.
While SCTP and the Sigtran suite of protocols (M3UA / SUA ) are moving ahead quickly there are other projects that are working on implementing a heavyweight implementation of SS7 - such as openss7, and even the PBX / softswitch project asterisk.
While all this may be nice and good, it may be worth noting that Inet Inc. has an SS7 network monitoring solution called GeoProbe. While some parts of the system run on a solaris server the actual cardcages and "proprietary" equipment actually run Linux. (at over 300k a site, that's a pretty big win for Linux).
As always I'd love to hear what's going on in other sectors of telecom with Linux.
Hmmm... A year ago I got a phone call from my US counterpart about a "PC" that was spreading Nimda.
Turned out that it was the PABX control system. It didn't run any virus protection software, because all antivirus software tested brought down the software.
Now, here's the horrible bit. The PABX itself is a solid bit of engineering, with an ASCII only bit of RS232 based interface controlling it. If those bits had even remotely been documented, anyone with experience with something as simple as expect could have coded up an interface to it in a day at most -- much less time than what was invested in bringing the Windows interface to it on line.
To this date, we're not using the advanced features of the system because just getting it to work right on the supported platform turned out to be too great a nightmare to offset the possible gains from it.
PABX interfaces are the prototypical illustration of why documenting the low level interface can benefit the advanced user without impeding sales of the "integrated" windows "solution" to customers who can deal with interfacing Windows stuff. We're as shortstaffed in Windows DDE skills as we are in low level Unix stuff, but if the RS232 interface had been documented, we could've assessed the risks and benefits of talking directly to the hardware and make an informed decision on which group should handle the PABX interface and which tools to use.
The PABX is basically on life support, because the bundled apps suck and implementing a simple toolkit that covers our basic needs is impossible for lack of docs. That, in management terms, is a "lose-lose" proposition.
Bert Driehuis -- All I asked was a friggin' rotatin' chair. Throw me a bone here, people.
I've worked for a few telephony companies in my time. . .two that stick out succinctly in regards to Linux are Priority Call (makers of Oryx) and Boston Communications (do the pre-paid calling back-end to most large cell carriers).
Priority Call (http://www.prioritycall.com) makes an uber-trunk-switch that does all types of cool stuff from one-number-anywhere to pre-paid calling to massive e-mailed voice-mail to web voicemail -- it is the swiss army knife of telephony (thier main competitor, BTW is Comverse). Priority Call has sold switches to the likes of Bell Atlantic and a lot of Mexican and South American cell vendors).
Anyway, their systems were passive-backplane PIIs (at the time) with Dialogic (owned by Intel) ISA-bus switch boards (Dialogic boards also have thier own bus to interconnect them to aide the ISA bus) and Mylex RAID controllers runnning 9 Seagate Cheetahs. They used SCO OpenServer because SCO was just about the only telephony OS 'back in the day' and it was pretty stable. As a side note they also legally used a fair amount of OSS in Oryx, including a hacked-up apache and ncurses.
SCO OpenServer, though, has not been actively developed on for a *long* time and not only does it show its age, but frankly it is just about the worst OS I have ever worked on (I don't mean to flame you OpenServer-lovers out there). Support was a bitch. Bug-fixing was a bitch becuase SCO was not longer developing OpenServer not to mention that later versions of OpenServer were hacks to old ones in attempt to add new features without the proper architecture. As much as I want to flame I'll leave my beef with OpenServer at that.
Needless to say the limitations of OpenServer were apparent and they found that *it does not scale* well at all. Thus, they moves their home-brew proprietary Oryx database to Tru64 using rack-mounted Alphaserver DS10s and kept OpenServer for the fron-end and switching to keep migration smooth (Comverse, BTW, uses Tru64 on Alphas -- which this whole push by HP to move to HPUX is going to really piss off a lot of telephony companies). For massive installs they used Sun Netra T-1s in a customer-specific manner.
Later, they finally realized that not only did OpenServer SUCK, but it was *expensive* too ($500 a copy). Thus they started to port to Linux and wrapped it into one massive migration strategy that included new hardware (Compact-PCI).
The fact of the matter is that people hate change. People complained about how Linux companies weren't doing so well not to mention that run-of-the-mill support people FEAR UNIX and the migration from the OpenServer database to the Tru64 was painful (had to re-do all the flow-chart-like step-by-step hold-my-hand this-is-how-to-use-unix cutsheets for some people)
My manager at the time (and the best manager I have ever had) sold Linux -- simply stated, "who cares if the Linux companies go under -- what is better security then HAVING THE SOURCE CODE TO THE WHOLE OS!). During the port, though, Linux had a few limitations that slowed the deployment:
1) OpenServer is such a hacked beast that porting to Linux from it was non-trivial.
2) Dialogic (the heart of the telecomm industry) did not make Linux drivers at the time. Thus they decided to move to NMS (Dialogic competitor) cards
that did support Linux as well as Compact PCI.
3) At the time Linux did not support hot-plug PCI which was one of the design specs and the main reason for moving to Compact PCI.
4) Not even NMS would ship source-code drivers -- only compiled modules. THIS IS A BIG THING as one can only run stock RedHat kernels or specific versions they support or else you'll get unresolved symbols or flakiness in the drivers. Face it, the stock RedHat kernel is *not* meant for telephony. Not only that, but the whole security argument of having the source code to the OS is negated because if NMS for some odd reason decided to stop developing Linux drivers then the company would be stuck with one version of Linux forever.
In the end it was not Linux's limitations that killed the migration but the fact that they rolled the whole migration into the massive hardware/software roll-over and when hard economic times hit and the person who spear-headed the project left, those that hate change won and the whole project was scrapped (some people think it is better to live with what you know versus venturing into the unknown, right?)
In summary, the things that I think would help adotion of Linux in the telecomm world are:
1) Above all else, open-source NMS or Dialogic drivers. People fear Linux companyies instability too much and if their vendor decided to stop supporting Linux it would screw them.
-OR-
2) A company come about that makes hard-core telecomm-grade switch boards with open source drivers that gives Dialogic a run for its money. I'm not talking about the "internet phone jack" guys, I'm talking about boards that can handle dozens on trunks (read T-1s). Dialogic used to be the main reason for companies not adopting Linux because they basically own the PC-based telephony market and they used to ONLY speak NT and SCO and trust me, as much as I hate to say it NT is better then OpenServer from a support and development point of view (although OpenServer is more stable then NT).
3) Keep moving forward with Linux on the desktop. Most people to this day *fear* UNIX and if Linux can be made common and user-friedly the managment types (and support types) that fear change will be less reluctant to let the engineers use Linux. It sounds convoluted, but this is how MS did it. Linux on the desktop indirectly helps all those who want to convince managment to use Linux a LOT as it shows that support costs will not be as high
as it is 'user-friendly' and they can hire monkey support cheap.
4) Linux clustering. Linux NEEDS good high-availibility open-source clustering. No matter how good your hardware is you can not get the telecomm "five nines" of uptime with one computer! A good first move would be a good filesystem that supports mutiple hosts sharing one fibre channel array.
Why do telephony companies migrate to NT/2000?
1) Tru64 is dead thanks to HP.
2) People are starting to fear that Solaris will go the way of Tru64 and future migrations are *very* expensive.
3) People fear UNIX and support costs are high due to this fear (need more geeky support people).
4) Dialogic only used to speak OpenServer and NT (I don't know if it is the same any more). NT is by far the lesser of the two evils in development and support (not reliability).
4) Managment fears Linux companies instability because they are thinking in the 'old school' support issue -- if a vendor goes under and you can't buy support your company is screwed. Please, educate them that HAVING THE SOURCE CODE TO THE WHOLE OS is teh best security. And please coerce NMS or Dialogic to make open-source drivers as their proprietary drivers negate the last argument!!!
As for Boston Communications, I did support for them and they used NT. That was one of the worst nightmares I have ever experienced. Try remotely managing hundreds of telecomm nodes all over the country over 56K frame-relay links using Remotely Possible (PC Anywhere clone). Not to mention the BSODs and managment blaming you when they could not report "five nines" to the carriers and thus had to pay them mucho $$.
Fundamentally, because FreeBSD is an Operating System.
As you've guessed by now, I subscribe to the train of thought that Linux is *not* an OS. Red Hat is an OS, Mandrake is an OS, Caldera is an OS, Debian is an OS. Linux is just a kernel.
Why is this an issue for me from a commercial point of view? Well, with FreeBSD, I get to go back to one group for any issues. The whole thing, kernel, binaries, packages, - the works - is managed and documented as one single entity.
If I go Linux, I've made a kernel decision. FWIW, I believe that the Linux nothing short of a bloody brillian kernel. What lets Linux down in my eyes is the operating systems that use it. I have to choose which one, then I need to be convinced that the vendor is committed, that the vendor manages the system well, that I'm not going to be faced with "we didn't design that part" finger pointing wars when I have issues...
I hasten to add that FreeBSD isn't, IMNSHO, the grand solution either. In fact, FreeBSD is annoying the shit out of me right now. I cut my teeth on BSD boxen way-back-when, I'm a BSD boy at heart. Still, as I intimated earlier, my home runs on Linux. I have Mandrake/Intel and Cobalt Qube/MIPS boxes as servers, and Red Hat for a desktop. There are no up/running BSD boxes of any description here.
Why? 'cos the Qube was a freebie \, Mandrake proved itself be be a good server in lieu of a suitable BSD, and Red Hat seemed like a good thing to play with for a desktop. FreeBSD got the arse because the interrupt code in the PCI stuff is broken, and the PCI-PCMCIA bridge stuff I need to make my wireless gear work, doesn't.
On the other hand, I can't afford to be so fickle at work. I need a whole OS with a strong design and project management behind it. That's why, as I said, Solaris, FreeBSD, HP-UX gets the vote. Two of those are commercial products with the incumbent entity-to-point-lawyers-at that senior management loves so much. The other has proven itself to me.
About the only thing I can think of is the fact that Linux distros generally install the kitchen sink, and FreeBSD prefers to make you add ports/packages yourself.
To be honest, that's something that I think most of the Linux based OS's do better than FreeBSD does. FreeBSD invites you to pick a generic build, and, as you say, installs the kitchen sink. Many of the Linux OS's offer much better control
At, I might add, the cost of speed. Scripting is the solution of course, but I can still have a good working FreeBSD system up and running (including custom kernel config and compile) in less time than Windows 98 can be installed (bad comparison, I know, but I raced a guy once, that's how I know!). On the other hand, I've had way too many two and three hour missions installing some Linuxes. Not good.
Is it some sort of "stability" issue? What kind of stability?
In a way, yes. It's the kernel -vs- whole OS thing, and the business-comfort that comes with it.
I find your ideas intriguing and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=3041
I sent this contact to Magee a while ago after a dinner conversation that floored me. The person was dropping hints at me for MONTHS about something happening, and one day, he told me that Avaya outright dumped NT/2K for linux on everything. Windows will be supported for basically as long as existing clients want it (years and years and years), but from now on, everything is linux.
I asked for a press release, and was pointed to an utterly forgetable announcement that never mentioned linux, or that MS was on the shitlist, it was sad. When I went back to the source, he told me that 1) yes it was the correct release, and 2) it was indead a total shift from one to the other. Like the Inq aricle says, it was not a snap decision, or a vapor release, it was developed, tested, and debugged for 18 months before it was... err.. not announced with no fanfare.
Overall, the products are quite real, you can buy them, they run linux, and have displaced MS. Yay. Next niche to conquer is......?
-Charlie