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Linux Is Cheaper
An anonymous reader writes "ZDNet is running a story on what a lot of us already know: Linux IS cheaper than Windows. This not because it is free. It is because Linux admins, although slightly more expensive, can handle a significantly larger number of systems than their Windows counterparts."
Its i18n, l10n, p12n, and c11n! I can have linux in any language I want without having to buy my operating sytem in a country that uses that language. Its translated in to many more languages too, around 90 are avalible for kde alone!. nynorsk was avalible for years before Micrsoft supported it!
Its still a bit rough (it could do with support for non gregorian calanders for example) but its proof that linux is for everyone everywhere!
The real merits is not because it is free, but because it gives you a choice and control!
"The obvious reason that Linux admins are better sysadmins (overall) and can admin more machines is because they're, er, mostly self-taught."
/..
Perhaps. Thing is though, Windows isn't exactly that hard to maintain. The company I work for has had between 15-20 people over the last 5 years and runs on a mostly NT-based network. Have we had our share of difficulties? Sure. Have we ever needed an admin to maintain it? No. Most problems have been resolved by the people who stumbled over them. We had a sysadmin up until a couple of years ago. When he left, I absorbed his responsibilities. Yet, I still have plenty of time to post on
I'm sure there's some truth to this in bigger companies, but Linux has been nothing but a problem for us here because the one person we have who can fix the problems is overloaded.
In the short-run, this can sometimes hurt a business, because the DIY crowd often like to build it themselves rather than buy it. But in the long-term (and with proper management), having a crowd of DIY people will save you a bundle. While the windows support staff are stuck trying to install MS-Word, the linux folks are fixing router problems, patching security holes and tuning your intranets.
Sex - Find It
Also rember that linux admins don't have to learn those Lies that they teach MSCE's. I have opened those book in the past only to find factual errors in how they represent windows. I KNOW they were wrong because I had to work around the problem under linux.
It's no wonder they cant' cut it. They have to learn about these lies once they have been hired. They have to unlearn what they have learned.
In the article, they talk about how a typical Windows admin can handle 10-15 boxes (sounds reasonable). But then they quote somebody who says his Linux/BSD/Solaris admins can handle 1,000 boxes. A thousands? This seems like an incredibly high number. Can anyone out there back this up? Can you guys really admin a *thousand* servers? Pointers would be welcome on how this is done...is it all perl/shell scripting?
Freedom Is Universal
Linux-Universe
You can't compare Linux TCO with Windows TCO, because Windows doesn't have one. You don't own anything with windows. Windows TCO is a myth and should be called Windows TCL - Total Cost of licenseship.
"Summary Ley you can under wine with success... and they are porting it!"
We're months away from having the screamernet version (i.e. render only, you still need a Windows machine to set up the animation/modelling etc) and probably at least a year or two away from a Linux version.
Which is fine. If Linux is a good OS that'll run Lightwave a year or two from now then I'll be happy to evaluate it.
Just to be clear: I'm not saying Linux is worthless, I'm saying that this zealousy over it won't solve anybody's problems. As a matter of fact, it'll probably cause problems. Most of my company frequents Slashdot. Let's say they were taken in by the hype and adopted Linux. Guess what? Expectations are high, which means that every little problem will be blown out of proportion. Before you know it, everybody's anti-Linux.
We're already having that happen today. Some of the engineers have been moved to Linux, and they're fussing over every idiotic problem that Windows just doesn't have. The worst part is having to look up badly spelt commands in order to figure out what to do. They're having to make compromises in order to get through their day.
If this happens on a grand scale, then what? You get the bigwigs around companies everywhere saying "What a nightmare. I'll stick with the company that understands our needs best."
Slashdot'd be smart to pull back on these worthless debates. Raise the bar too high and Linux'll never be accepted.
...last stat I heard was one MS admin for every 15 boxes and one Mac admin for every 150 ~ 300 boxes. It's called TCO, and one of the reasons a Mercedes can be less expensive over the vehicle's lifetime.
what it really comes down to is a CLI and a good scripting language. Now windows machines claim to have a scripting language but to use it effectively you have to go through a GUI not a CLI thus network admin of unix machines is not for the faint of heart. This situation gets worse when you start trying to configure services (web servers, etc...) that also have GUI interfaces rather than text configureation scripts.
On the otherhand admin of linux across a net is pretty darn easy. When you start getting into having your main disks not be the local disks life gets even simpler in Linux.
On the otherhand, I suspect that the better a desktop machine becomes the more GUI administration is going to be important on linux. Consequently it may lose some advantages in fleets of desktops.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I dont think being self taught makes a better admin. Being self taught can leave a lot of holes in SysAdmining. Having a good training class help give a better understanding on all the different features on Linux.
The Primary reason why a Linux Admin can handle a lot more systems then a windows is basicly because Linux and Unix is designed to be admined remotely and work well with shared configuration. And without the extra licensing overhead the systems can be duplicated very easly.
As the article said a good protions of the Admins are Solaris Administrators. So they have a good understanding of Linuxs features so switching to Linux is relitvly easy. And most of the Solaris Administrators have training as well.
The Only reasion why a lot MSCE seem to be dumb as bricks is more of the fact they they are on the reasioning that I am Certified so I know everything. While someone who is unsertified or without the extra Ego baggage are willing to learn from other methods and try new things.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Read the m-w.com definition--There's actually a long speil on the topic of "subjective". The definition that I like, and that pertains to this discussion is "modified or affected by personal views, experience, or background--a subjective account of the incident"-- The reason I chose this in relation to the discussion about cost is simply that depending on the person, certain expenses will matter more than others, and certain things will add up in more ways than others.
Person A sees Linux as being an awkward unweildy solution, and hires three people to oversee a single Linux Server because he/she/or-it cannot understand "command line" and "easy" in relation to eachother. Person A hires one person to oversee the Windows computer--hence, the cost of operation of the Windows computer is significantly less, and the Linux admins have a whole lot of spare time in which they can build robots out of spare parts, and play war games with Nerf guns.
Person B sees things in an entirely different light, and hires the same number of people, only the Windows machine gets the larger staff.
Person C is entirely competant and doesn't bother hiring anyone. Instead he converts the Windows server over to Linux and takes care of the job himself. Or maybe he converts it over to Windows. Whatever the story is.
In every scenario, the SUBJECTIVE opinions and ideas of the managerial staff is the sole reason for the higher or lower budgets per OS.
All things being equal, and with competant staff, the management cost is going to be lower for Linux, simply because of the lower cost of the OS, the software that runs under it, the increased performance-without-increased-resources issue, and any number of other issues.
In the "real world" where subjectivity reigns, the outcome of the situation will very likely be completely different, with different experiences depending on different people, the skillset of the people, salaries asked, etc. Call it the subjectivity of the Gods.
-Sara
I never understood the X is cheaper than Y argument.
Perhaps I'm responding to a troll here, but I will assume for the moment that you really don't understand the need for comparison.
Microsoft is in business to make money, and so is RedHat. Hopefully that's not a surprise. They are actually competitors, and in order to compete, and to generate revenues, they need customers to purchase their product. This is done by demonstrating to the customer that their product is better than their competitor's -- remember that customers don't have "perfect information" so advertising/marketing/education is needed. If customers already knew which product was best, then there would be no need to try and persuade customers (the merits of the product would have already done this).
Now, let's assume you're a business owner and you want to computerize your office. You're smart enough to realize that no solution will be perfect, but you still need something (if you never did anything because you couldn't find the "perfect" solution you'd go out of business pretty quickly). So what happens is you compare all of the products available to you, and you will decide, as best you can, on the "best" solution. Often cost is the primary factor, which is why Microsoft/RedHat/Sun want you to think their solution has the highest cost/benefit ratio.
There can be no one perfect solution.
While true, this answer solves nothing. If you're going to pound a square peg in a round hole, wouldn't you rather it be the cheapest/fastest/etc peg? If you can find the one round (perfect) peg, then you're ahead of the game...
I absolutely am aware that a lot of OSS titles are available for Win/WinXP, I use them on a regular basis as my job frequently requires my desktop OS to be Windows. They run wonderfully. The reason I choose to run them under Linux for my mother has more to do with "If I'm not running Windows-only Apps, why do I want to put this woman on a less secure system that she messes up on a regular basis by accidentally "deleting her modem" and other such motherisms. She is a typical "home user" of Windows. She knows enough to get into trouble, but not enough to get out of it. The WinXP Home edition (Which came with her computer) method of dealing with "user permissions" is meagre, awkward, and not something I want to deal with.
As for Remote Help/desktop, I refuse to leave those turned on, as I see them as a major security hazard when combined with a number of other "features" of Windows. Teaching my mother to turn them on and off or implimenting a similar method as the one I use for her to turn SSH on and off for me is a possibility, but one I don't really wish to look into because Windows boxes are very hard to lock down to a point where I'd feel secure putting a clueless 50-something year old women on with a always-up DSL line. Security concerns combined with the necessity to upgrade her to WinXP Pro (to prevent her from damaging her system with cluelessness), install Norton Antivirus ($40 or therebouts) and deal with various other Windows concerns... It's just not worth it for a system that she won't use. Particularly when you consider that Windows needs to be cleaned up and disinfected every year or so.
As for Outlook Express. Ugh. I used it once for a while, and disliked it quite intensely. If I was going to put her on any free email client, it would be Mozilla. She's quite happy with Evolution, however, and I'll leave it at that.
Linux is well within her budget, and it gives her a lot of confidence--she can't do anything wrong, outside of dropping the computer on the floor--so it helps her overcome some of her computer fears.
-Sara
in many organizations, especially government, lower expenditures are bad. my guess is that this holds true for many private corps too. i'm a teacher. every year my school is alotted X number of dollars for service Y. guess what happens at the end of the year to all unspent dollars. it goes back to the district. and next year, we get 95% X to spend. it is in our "best interest" to spend it all, and then some. in fact, our prinicpal has her dept. chairs come up with last minute lists months in advance, so that she can spend it before we lose it. does this suck? completely. so, anything that lowers costs will be looked upon as bad.
our district is a novell network. i have heard novell is a pretty good choice, but apparently, they screwed the pooch pretty badly. our win98 clients run dog slow, and need tons of maintenance. we have many problems, alot that just linger. so what do they do, hire technicians for every school. but guess what, ditrict level tech dept. gets bigger budget, tech admin has more stroke. you think he cares? no. he has no concern for costs. we have literally hundreds of old P120/32MB boxes, many purchased just to qualify for technology funds from the state. (don't get me started on that one!!)
i proposed turning some into X clients. hell, all the kids do is access internet type a paper or two. maybe put together a powerpoint show ( i teach 7th grade). of course the boxes go totally unused. in fact, 20 take up an entire lab. a complete f***in waste. i spoke to the district tech admin, showed him all that it can do, running X remotely from my classroom no less. he was shocked all i needed was $3K for a dual xeon server. he said no, primarily because he wouldn't control it. we would spend school funds, and we'd run it.
remember, that tco doesn't matter if you're not spending your money, and you have to spend it all.
My problem? I was perfectly gruntled, until some numbnuts came by and dissed me.
Repeat after me: Linux applications are not Linux. Gnome and KDE are not Linux. X Windows is not Linux. Linux is just the kernel.
:^)
I haven't had a kernel crash in several years now, on a machine I use daily. (I don't run development kernels, though
Tsunami -- You can't bring a good wave down!
Whereas you indeed made several good points, there are some in which certain amendments might be in place.
Remote Administration. Linux? X11 or VNC.
Who in their right minds would ever do *nix remote administration on graphic UI? In an environment like this, you have a separate test box with which you figure out and test all the things that need to be done. (Nobody rolls, neither in nor out, any modifications without first testing them.) Then you write a shell-script to accomplish this and put it up on a network-shared resource. As an admin, you have access to uid(0) account (possibly other than root) on every box. In a simple command, you cycle through all *nix boxes and set the box to execute the shellscript on a given time. You only give the authentication passphrase to your admin key once, and ssh-agent authenticates you to every box without further intervention. All *nix boxes upgrade to new, tested setups automatically at specified time. How do you accomplish this in a w32 network? And who would even need movies and/or multimedia for remote administration duties?
Automatic Updates & Patching.
I know personally people who maintain large corporate and university networks. They have a "local master" server that they use to mirror the updates. Once the updated packages are set on this box, all the client boxes are, again with short shellscripts or with automatic and timed events, set to fetch these packages and update to proper versions. Again, in an environment like you describe, no sane admin would ever allow machines to upgrade to untested versions. Automatic updates, directly from vendor's site would be a Really Bad Idea.
And by the way, the only linux distribution that requires constant recompiling, is gentoo. But that is not meant for enterprise desktops but for individual power users' home boxes. There really are things like dependency-tracking and binary packages for linux. (Debian and apt-get spring first to mind...) I would suggest you do your homework a little better.
The primary goal is not to individually administer all of the boxes, but set up batch jobs that do all the magic. Remote GUI may be nice when playing helpdesk but for real large-scale administration one should not even think about doing repetitive tasks over a remote display.
For the record, I find the study hazy and preposterous as well. It provides no solid figures, only some executive summary numbers. However, I hereby tip my hat to you. You made a worthy post with several VERY good points and aspects people either overlook or forget.
There is no such thing as good luck. There is only misfortune and its occasional absence.
But what happends when Linux's ease-of-use GUI gets so developed (the more and more popular it becomes) that we eventually end with the same problem of MCSE?
ie, know what button to click to fix it, but not why
Sigs are dangerous coy things
I know, flamebait, but I'll bite.
OpenLDAP with SSL works fine in my experience, never had a headache from setup to implementation. Active Directory does indeed work out of the box. But when third party tools need to interact with it or you need some schema changes, things can go to hell in a handbasket quickly.
Your argument about client policy management is referring to Windows client policy management. I will give that Windows is superior to Linux at distributing policies to clients, but we are talking about Linux across the board. You have a lot more power across the board when you don't have to rely on samba to accomplish things. Also, with NT4 clients (which is often unavoidable in Windows networks on a budget), Samba actually offers a bit more power and flexibilty when dealing with those 'legacy' clients.
Remote software installation better on Windows? You have got to be kidding. Some applications do work fine for doing convenient remote applications. Sometimes Terminal Services is required. I have seen apps that will only successfully install from the console (or, by extension VNC).
I'll admit the MMC is a decent remote administration tool, but I would not give it as much credit to say it is good at managing multiple systems at once. I haven't really seen anything under windows that is any better than anything under linux as far as managing groups of computers at once.
Remote administration under Windows is much more of a pain than any *nix. Almost anything can be done through ssh and the system doesn't care. For gui, all X11 windows are created equal, whether local or remote. X11 is a bit talky in terms of bandwidth, but it is rarely needed. Windows administration first off requires GUI to be forwarded. Second off, Remote Desktop frequently behaves differently from the console, making VNC a requisite practically for those apps that break in RDP world. Why the hell VNC would be needed for much in Linux is beyond me. I rarely have to use X11 even.
And to say Windows 2000 is kerberos with no dicking around is a travesty. Have you ever tried to use the built-in facilities for anything other than Windows clients, or try to get Windows clients to authenticate against an alternative LDAP/Kerberos implementation? They bastardized kerberos just enough to make it desirable to be an all-ms shop. That is their business, making non-ms interoperating with MS too clunky to try. For an all Windows network it is fine, but in that case it might as well be something proprietary, so kerberos is just a buzz word hinting at interoperability that just isn't there.
You seem to have been comparing built in facilities to third party applications when oit comes to Enterprise monitoring. I haven't really bothered to try many third party products when it comes to this area, and I'm not sure what *exactly* you mean by enterprise monitoring specifically, so I'll leave this alone.
And finally, with regards to automatic updating. No sane administrator trying to maintain a consistant environment blindly runs auto-update. One, you test out patches before giving the big ok to mass deployment. For another, Windows updates requires reboots 99% of the time for update package installation. That really makes reliabily sink. If you are really crazy enough to do auto-updates and trust parties outside your organization, you can easily use up2date automatically or apt as a massive cron job.
My final point is that clearly you are a relatively seasoned Windows administrator. I have been in that role too. Both times they let me go in favor of a cheaper administration who was 'good enough'. These replacements often have no idea how to fully exploit the features available in Windows. When talking with them, they never know that AD is an LDAP system, or even what Kerberos is. The only thing they ever do is vnc (yes *vnc in*) to the domain controller to modify user accounts not realizing the power of mmc to make it easier. That is the extent to which they interact with AD. These are the people who cannot by themselves efficiently manage larger networks.
And it is becoming increasingly hard for businesses to tell the good from the bad. The market is so saturated of people who were pretty decent and jumped at the 'get your MCSE with us' commercials, that finding good administration is hard. Linux scares these people by and large, so the market of Linux administrators is a lot more pure. If and when RHCE becomes 'hot' like mcse, you'll see a lot more junk Linux admins too...
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
I have just finished deploying twenty old (P133-300) computers in five locations for my current client. They all run Linux off of cds, with no hard drives. To upgrade, I send them a new cd. They never shut them off and haven't had a (software related) problem yet.
Someone else mentioned LTSP+Mosix. All of you Windows noobs should take a serious look at this project, and re-evaluate some of your prejudices about how to configure and administer a network of "desktops". The absurd amount of computing resources that an all-M$ setup requires (1ghz desktops, servers in every physical location, etc..) can be put to much better use just by expanding your OS horizons a little and giving Linux a chance.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"