Slashdot Mirror
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."
I have no doubt that Linux is cheaper in a lot of situations, but I am also sure that Windows, or indeed any other OS, is cheaper for some things.
There can be no one perfect solution.
That other Slashdot story that told us what a lot of us already know: Windows IS cheaper than Linux was clearly hokum. This'll finally shut those monkeys up.
Oh wait, the second sentence is Most analysts, if asked whether Linux has a lower TCO than other systems, will answer, "It depends."
Glad they wrote a whole article about it.
"If he thinks he can hide and run from the United States and our allies, he's sorely mistaken." Bush on bin Laden
How much more beating can this dead horse take? I feel like I'm watching Gilligan's Island.
"Derp de derp."
It is because Linux admins, although slightly more expensive, can handle a significantly larger number of systems than their Windows counterparts.
Th-they skirt over this point a bit too quickly. The obvious reason that Linux admins are better sysadmins (overall) and can admin more machines is because they're, er, mostly self-taught.
After all, how many great sysadmins spent years pouring over 'How to be a Linux admin' books, struggling to get their 'LCE' (Linux Certified Engineer) certificates? None. Unh. Yet that's exactly how Microsoft admins are raised.
Linux admins (and originally users) are experimenters.. that's why they're not on the MS platform. Experimenters make good sysadmins, because they learn by themselves, learn clever admin tricks through experience, and, er, don't just rely on a bit of paper that says 'I'm a good sysadmin.'
I'd be a bit weary about the point that Solaris admins can 'learn Linux' (ohh, unh) within a few weeks though. People from stricter UNIX disciplines think Linux is some, er, easy-to-learn UNIX renegade. (unh, unh) It ain't true folks, it's like deep and stuff.
mogorific carpentry experiments
If linux were (pretend for a moment, I know it's hard) more expensive than Windows in terms of operating and management costs, what I'd realli like to know is whether or not it would still hold its own. I'd be willing to bet in favor of Linux, since it obviously has the advantage in security/stability/etc... but there's the real challenge: take away the price factor and you'll see the real winner.
On Slashdot, we don't say "thank you." We say "that's enough..." -_-;
Sure linux is cheaper if you're running five hundred servers, but where I used to work, we had only five servers, easily handeled by one admin
--fetch daddy's blue fright wig, i must be handsome when i release my rage
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!
C'mon, folks. It's simple:
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
http://www.linuxartist.org/article.php?sid=126
Summary Ley you can under wine with success... and they are porting it!
include the cost of working out the TCO?
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
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
I have a linux web/mail server running for a local non-profit organization of which the exectutive director is a friend of the family. Their website is very small, and doesn't need to be updated often. It gets about 100 hits a month. :) If they need the page to be updated, they send me the new text, and I update it via SSH.
I have had that server running for over 5 months now, and I haven't needed to physically visit the server in 4 months. That was because of a power outage; not even Linux is more powerful than God
The point I'm trying to make here is that this nonprofit has no IT department, no sysadmins. They are mainly 50 year old ladies who are smart enough to not ask what the difference between RAM and hard drives. They have a low cost webserver running, which is freeloading on a broadband connection they already have. They don't touch the server, which lies in the corner of an empty supply closet.
Let's see... The article states that Linux/Unix admins USUALLY do cost more, but now they don't due to the tech slump. In other words, the TCO is lower because of all the out of work admins drove down salaries. Therefore, more sophisticated Linux/Unix admins are getting screwed.
Now answer the question, "Aren't you happy to hear Linux is now cheaper?"
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.
It is because Linux admins, although slightly more expensive,
I've said this before but, while the above statement is frequently bandied about, I do not see evidence of this in the real world. Indeed the majority of job postings that I see for Linux sysadmins offer salaries that are a fair bit less than similar positions looking for MCSEs.
Indeed, there are also several commonly used salary surveys on the net that seem to indicate that Linux sysadmins are paid less than their Windows counterparts. I've even seen a few stupid cases where positions requiring Linux experence and an MCSE certification actually paid less than similar positions requiring an MCSE only.
Is this only the case in my region or is it the case on a wider scale?
Many things are subjective, such as beliefs and experiences. But whether a particular type of sysadmin running a particular OS is certainly not subjective.
Now, it may be the problem is defined inexactly. And depending on how we fill in all the parameters to the problem we end up with different solutions. But this would make the solution relative, not subjective.
almost any problem you run into with Linux can be solved via google in minutes.
and i'm sure that if you compared windows to linux, with one admin, with equal skills in their area of expertise, it would be a different story. This could be justa lot of fluff that /.'er love, but it could be true. I'm not saying it is, but what I am saying is this articlue probably took in mind the typical windows *idiot* admin. I've worked with many in my time.
Is in the "utility" services; DNS, DHCP, Authentication, File Shares, WWW, Proxy and Mail (Unless your work uses Exchange). The services in a medium or small company can be run on one box as opposed to M$ software that has components that interfere with each other. Need a test server? a decent pc will do. Need a secondary DNS/DHCP source for a remote office? Something small setup here and shipped there with the "hook it up/turn it on instructions. That's where the saving are. I'd go as far as client server, but most of the ones that float past me are "MS SQL vXXXX" required. Like the commercial says, you can replace most of a datacenter with a rack full of linux, but can you replace a rack 'o linux with a rack 'o M$? doubtful and expensive..
~corporate tool, but employed~
"Lightwave availability strikes me as a pointless digression."
Hardly pointless. Replace Lightwave with.. oh.. any game ever made and suddenly a chord is struck with everybody who has a PC at home.
Be serious. People use their PC's to perform certain tasks. Windows has the best variety of mission critical apps out there. Linux has alternatives, but they're not always sufficient today.
It's great making your computer boot, but that's not what you bought it for.
what about from an overall business standpoint? it may be cheaper to administer, but what about other considerations...
.doc word processing documents, and .xls spreadsheet files, etc...what's gonna happen when a client sends your a power point presentation, and you're sitting there with your *nix box...
certainly there are more applications, etc, available to run on microsoft platforms then on *nix platforms...and since there are many more options for the microsoft platforms, it's easier to find one with all the options you want...how do you quantify this difference...
also, while i know some businesses have switched and do use *nix platforms, i'm willing to bet the vast majority of companies (especially non-hi-tech companies that still use computers) are microsoft users...therefore, the unofficial standard for most things is gonna be microsfot's format...unfair, i agree, but the truth more often then not...that's why everyone uses
obviously there are *nix alternatives to most of those windows things, but again, they're usually not as robust (er, i mean not as many features, because they're generally more robust in terms of not crashing)...
in any case, they may be cheaper in an overall "cost to administor" sense, but overall there are unquantifiable things that need to be considered...
note: obviously i'm a microsoft user, although i do have experience at past companies (and college) using both Unix & Linux...so, don't slam me saying i have *no* idea about them...i admit i'm no expert, but still...
"Facts are meaningless. You could use facts to prove anything that's even remotely true." - Homer Simpson
RFG's study, "Total Cost of Ownership for Linux Web Servers in the Enterprise," compares the TCO of Linux to Solaris and Windows. Robinson compared the cost of "processing units"--the number of servers that would be required to process 100,000 hits per day, and tracked the costs over three years. Linux supporter IBM commissioned the RFG research for the study paper.
Robinson compared Red Hat Linux 7.3 running Apache to Solaris running Apache, and to Windows running IIS. The comparison was all on x86 architecture, using a relatively small sample of 14 companies running mission-critical Web servers. The study found that Windows needed an average of 7.6 servers for a processing unit, Linux needed 7.4, and Solaris needed 2.2.
My Windows boxes require 0.5 servers for a "processing unit". This article is bullshit. Normally, I wouldn't take into account anecodtal evidence, but their results are so completely out of whack, I just have to call bullshit. Being off a bit is one thing, but being off by a multiple of 15 is another.
...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.
Meaning 4 of "subjective" from the handy-dandy dictionary on my desk says "peculiar to a particular individual". Therefore, which OS is cheapest depends on who you are, and by extension, what you're doing.
NTFS, while rather robust in its overall operation, CANNOT handle more than one improper shutdown without requiring massive amounts of repair and/or formatting
Really? That's funny... 'cause my computer, for some reason, won't shut down properly - I have to just yank the plug. I've done it dozens of times, and guess what - NTFS is just fine, no problems.
Lets not go making stuff up, eh?
Bunk...the users don't pay for admin costs nor do they answer to stockholders.
Users complain when their starting time gets moved or they have to park further from the front gate. The Manager that makes the decision never gets fired for making these kinds of adjustments. Done properly, it should be nearly transparent, just like moving a hub or adding more drive space.
Do you buy what car you drive based on price ? Of course not! That's why I love my Rolls Royce.
What does Lightwave have to do with anything? If you're using it to prove a point that not everything runs under Linux, you're correct. Most "consumer" or "small studio" apps such as Lightwave do not run on Linux. However, there are viable alternatives that sometimes (oftentimes) end up being better, more powerful, or beneficial in other ways. To counter your "Lightwave", there's Maya. Maya runs under Linux. A number of large animation houses use a Maya-Linux combination to keep costs down and increase productivity. Let's face it. Something that allows you to exit the GUI and render from the command line is a VERY good thing in terms of squeezing out as much out of your systems as you can.
As the article said, Linux keeps costs down as far as staffing goes. Instead of having 4 people on staff for Windows, 4 people for Mac, and 4 for Linux, you can pretty much fire the Mac and Windows admins, because Linux admins tend to be multiple-platform aware, so you get more for your money--even if you have to pay them more.
In addition to that, Linux is the most open and accessable platform. If something needs to be done on that platform, it pretty much can be done for free or implemented using an OSS solution, whereas with Windows you'll be required to either develop the resources in-house or purchase additional software/development services.
Yes, it's still a choice which one you want to run. But unlike Windows, it doesn't cost you anything to throw a copy of Linux onto your machine and dual-boot. There's no reason why you can't have a copy of Linux on the workstation of every person who might use it--you might even find that the copies of Windows go unused as Linux has come a LONG way in the past couple of years in terms of usability, compatibility, etc. You don't need to be a geek anymore--Windows often requires far more geekiness than Linux.
-Sara
If it ain't broke, don't fix it - according to the article.
And that is the problem with Windows. By the time i had gotten most of my servers to NT4, they were shoving Win2k down my throat. After i had gotten everyone onto Windows NT 4.0 workstation, i couldn't get it any more - i was forced to have W2k and NT4 Wkstn running side by side.
Windows, unless you just refuse to be able to run certain software, requires you to change everything every 2 years. Its a nightmare.
Mac OS X and FreeBSD wouldn't have required me to change so much stuff over the last two, years, and i don't see a big deal with the next few either.. while windows admins will HAVE to incorporate XP into the networks, because they will have no choice.
guns kill people like spoons make Rosie O'Donnell fat.
TCO means total, which includes down time, admin time, install time, admin/user training time, related hardware needed to deploy and licenses.
Not to mention books, travel to conferences, meetings to obtain buy-in, aspirin, caffine and therapy.
A President of linux consultancy says that linux admins can handle more boxes than a windows admin.
This study is stupid. As a rule, there are more windows admins than anything else, because that is what the market demands. As a result, there are more $30-40k deserving windows admins who would get their hands full with a lot of boxes. Still, if you need admins for a 100,000 hit a day web site (which doesn't sound all that high to me), you need to hire people who can roll out identical, customized machines in short time, have experience monitoring, and can batch updates, etc. You can hire a bunch of cheaper admins, who will install hotfixes one at a time, rebooting each time, or you can hire one or two good admins who can qchain em together, and reboot when all are installed. TCO is as much a function of management and hr's hiring skill as it is or anything else.
ostiguy
I think what needs to be clarified (which the article does not explain) is what a "processing unit" really is. Is it 100,000 static (non-changing) pages, 100,000 fully database-driven dynamic pages where each page needs a dozen SQL queries, or somewhere in-between? Let's not even start counting how many images a page may or may not have, their sizes, etc.
Ideally, the study itself has that information. But all we have here is a derived article lacking it.
TCO is always a murky thing to calculate. While it is obviously desirable to purchase something that costs less, errors always seem to sneak into TCO calculations that make them meaningless.
Astroturfer or Uninformed? Either way, I miss the way /. used to be, before guys like you arrived.
Give me NIS or LDAP and NFS, I will maintain tenfold the number of Linux workstations that you can with Windows and I'll do it in half the time.
Group policy? We've had that for three decades, funnily enough we're quite familiar with it.
Remote software installation? Our netowrk oriented multi-user OS is designed for remote maintenance.
Some of us here have spent our entire careers maintaining developer communites that wholey consist of Unix workstations. Our heritage is fully inherited by Linux.
If your company tried Linux on the basis of hype, it probably means they initially got hooked on MS hype too. I doubt either decision was made objectively or wisely. Did it occur to your Slashbot bosses that maybe they should have only tried Linux out on a few machines first? That way it needn't have caused any significant pain. Also, a newly deployed Windows system isn't that hot either. You're co-workers are comparing something that's probably had months or years of bug-fixes, tweaking, and workarounds to something they just adopted. NEWSFLASH! Everything sucks just in different ways. Like any tool, Linux can do the job wonderfully once it is learned. Of course, you'll mash your thumb a few times on the way. Here's another newsflash: You've had years to forget how much it hurt when you first started using it. Don't bs me otherwise. I cut my PC teeth on 3.1 and have cursed at every version up to and including XP.
Linux doesn't sound like a problem here. Quit believing hype and maybe you'll have better new product experiences.
Incidentally, Slashdot is not a monolith. We have 15 year old young minds who think every piece of OSS software is GPLed and anyone who makes money with it is a thief as well as 15 year old Young Republicans who think OSS is communism. I'm sure others can think of even more savory types who hang out here. Remember, the IQ of a mob equals the intelligence of it's stupidest member divided by the size of the mob. It's pretty useless to give it advice.
A number of games run under Linux.. linuxgames.com talks about some of them, and more can be found with a simple google search.
As for "tasks", I've found that my mother can make much better use of Redhat Linux 8.0 than she can of WinXP. Supporting it for her is easier as well--"Hi mom, turned SSH on for me? Great--remember that green piece of paper with instructions on how to give me your IP?" For her limited word processing needs (She writes a weekly article for a local newspaper), there's Abiword and openoffice. For email there's Kmail or Evolution, or any other number of excellent email applications. There's free solitaire games that she loves, etc. Windows--to get the same functionality for this woman--I'd have to pay quite a bit more. I'd have to purchase Microsoft Word and pay for a LOT of features that she can't use, Outlook--again the same, and download a number of buggy shareware games that would likely cause issues for her down the line.
It's not the "casual home user" that is tied to Windows. It's the office user whose environment requires MS-Office ONLY features that have not yet been implemented in the OSS solutions available on Linux. It's the user that has specific requirements as far as software, which in turn has specific requirements in therms of OS.
For the casual home user, or even for the middle-of-the-line home user, Linux is *wonderful*. For the advanced user? More of the same.
-Sara
windows IS completely scriptable.
Isn't this one of the main reasons Windows is such a problem on both the desktop and in the server arena?
Not just the scriptability (Mac OS X goes a long ways in this regard) but the looseness of the implementation, which is the big reason admins stay so busy patching, etc.
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.
Oen thing to note: the "less staff required" can often count against things in "managerial empire-building with lots of petty political power struggles" environments, which are unfortunately very common. Telling a manager "you'll need less staff" is not necessarily the best route to his heart, they might even take it as a threat.
No, that's not a healthy corporate culture. But in big companies and semi-states (a mainly european phenomenon where state-owned companies kinda-sorta privatise), it is a common one.
Choice of masters is not freedom.
What...don't you remember some of the old mac commercials? Better yet, how about some of the SNL spoofs...
"We didn't get bad computers....we got lousy Dads!"
The same thing with Mac users moving to Windows, and Windows users moving to the Mac, and Linux users moving to either platform--There are things that the new platform does not have, things that work exactly the same, and things that the new platform has that the old one doesn't. The trick is using the platform long enough to discover the workflow, and realize "Hey, this is really good for..." and "Hm. This isn't that great for .. and .., but I can make it work by doing a, b, and c."
Any company that moves to a new platform just because of hype is looking for a major disappointment, because NO platform today can live up to the hype of its supporters. First-time Windows users will find the Luna interface to be scary, certain things to be counter-intuitive, etc. First time Mac users will pull out their hair over certain permission-schemes, their eyes will ache from the animation and oversaturated bright colors and whites, etc. First time Linux users will type in "dir" and be totally confused as to why it doesn't behave like DOS.
After a while, any of these complaints go away--and the view of the OS becomes more practical. "Does it do what I need it to do?" "Does it work the way I need it to work?" "I know it's not the BEST in every area, but is it the BEST in the areas I require excellence in the most?"
Hype is a good thing and a bad thing. It gets the ball rolling, but it also encourages disappointment in those who absorb hype as 100% truths. Those who don't accept hype as an absolute truth, however, still exist--and they come over with realistic expectations and find many exciting things that exist on their new platform that they could only imagine on their old one.
A smart man will be a smart man, and a foolish one will be a foolish one. Guess which one will be disappointed. And guess which one the Linux community doesn't really want in the first place, no matter HOW nice it would be to have championed the Number-One OS of the future.
-Sara
And this is why windows admins don't understand how Linux admins manage that many machines. VNC is a bad hack that you'd only use if you needed cross platform remote display. You do realize that if you really needed to remotely run graphical apps, X programs are inherrently remote displayable. Not only that, but the power of linux administration is the fact that you *never* need to run a graphical program. If I have a farm of 150 web servers, I can make an httpd.conf on one of them and with a 3 line shell script (typed interactively on the command line) scp it to every machine on the network and restart those webservers. Or I could tie it to a cron job, or a script monitoring /var/log/messages for a certain event like a service going down, or have procmail do it when it recieves an email. Yes I know with the right packages and third party tools windows is scriptable as well, but its not designed around scriptability. The simplest way to permanently change the host name of a machine is still to go in with vnc (or terminal services, I have to be fair) and open up the network configuration dialog and change it. Which is easy, I admit. But over a slow network its infuriating. I can ssh in from a modem and edit /etc/sysconfig/network with vi and it'd be just as responsive as if I was on the local network. Again, I see the benefit of both approaches, but never would I personally want to administer a significantly large windows data center when a unix based solution was feasable.
Yes, pointless. The article is discussing the TCO of Linux vs. Windows (vs. Solaris) in a specific sort of web serving environment. The guy was claiming that he was unconvinced by the argument, which shows only that he didn't understand the scope of the argument. In short, he's not responding to the article, but to the somewhat misleading story title.
If you cannot run Lightwave on anything other than Windows, then Windows has the lowest TCO for that application. I get that. My advice still stands: Read the articles before posting. It's hard to hold a useful discussion when clueless folk who see "TCO" in the posting, and decide they already know both what the story will say and what their opinion is.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
Did we forget to factor in the time spent in writing your own drivers and coding just to get your widget to work on Linux? Put that to an hourly rate and then compare costs, especially considering Linux is far from user friendly to all but the more knowlegable sects of the PC community.
Besides... You actually paid for Windows?
You need a FREE iPod Nano
Replace Lightwave with.. oh.. any game ever made
;-)
;-)
Well, we were talking about costs in businesses here, so availability of games is hardly an issue, since the number one games played in offices (minesweeper, solitaire and freecell) come with any standard Linux install...
But seriously:
Windows has the best variety of mission critical apps out there
This is a nice broad statement, but it very much depends on what your mission is, wouldn't you agree? If you're for example in the business of developing Java-based software, Linux workstations are most certainly a nice cheap alternative. If your mission is education, the same thing may apply.
And please don't give me the "it will take ages to convert the users" story... as long as the sysadmins know what they are doing, anybody familiar with Windows can learn KDE in an afternoon... it took my girlfriend about an hour...
PageTurner Reader: open-source e-reader for Android with cloudsync. http://pageturner-reader.org
"Always in motion is the future" said Yoda. Decisions need to be "future-proofed". That needs flexibility. If you have room to manouver then you can react to the unexpected. Open source gives you that room to manouver.
Paul.
You are lost in a twisty maze of little standards, all different.
Well Total Cost of Ownership is differnt from cheap. Company A uses standard Compaq Desktop for a server and Company B uses a Dell Server but have the same HardDisk size, Processor Speed and Ram. While the Compaq Desktop is Cheaper then the Dell Server in the long run the Server will provide a better TCO (on the average) Because the server being more sturdly build will last longer without failures, and its case design makes it easier to access the hardware for upgrades and repairs thus reducing Downtime. So using a Server for a Server although costing more will have a better TCO.
While it is true you can buy yourself a Cray for Millions of dollers because it is one of the best systems out there but for most companies they need to get the job done first and do it with minimum cost.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
FYI, at one of the cited studies that stated that Linux's TCO was lower was sponsored byRedHat, another by IBM.
"It depends" seems to mean "It depends on who's sponsoring the study."
This is all fine and dandy but money isn't the object. It's about what you want to do and how you want to do it. If *nix does what you want and Windows doesn't then the choice is made for you. If they both do what you want but your people are more comfortable doing it in Windows then that's what you go with.
I'm not saying that money isn't a factor at all. Sure it is. But if money was the main factor in the decision for a company, and I were a stockholder in that company, I would be very concerned. If they were switching from Windows to *nix based on cost, I would have to wonder if their eye was really on the end goal.
In my case I operate a public safety system, a 911 dispatch center. Our radio consoles and recording system all use Windows NT and 2K. We KNOW it would be cheaper to use *nix. We KNOW the system would be more reliable. Our CAD system runs AIX and sets a great example to prove the point. All that doesn't matter one single bit. Why? First off it's propriatary equipment and only runs on Windows so we cant change it. Second we couldn't justify the down time for the change and operator training.
It's not about price or TCO. If that's what starts to drive the *nix community then they will lose big time. Focus on doing a job, doing it well, and making it a pleasure to do the job. That will win customers/users in the end, not price.
This comming from a man know by family and friends as a tightwad.
. Quit playing Monopoly with Bill. Switch to one of many non-Microsoft products today.
From the submission:
When a study is done that says Windows has a lower TCO, it's bashed as being obviously flawed because of this very attitude. We just know that Linux MUST be cheaper. But when a study is done that shows the opposite is true, it's hailed has obvious.
Forget the whales - save the babies.
Experience counts for a lot in a sysadmin, whatever the OS.
Author, Shell Scripting : Expert Re
AFAIK, you can't use the Lightwave UI on Linux (yet) - but one can use a linux cluster as a ScreamerNet render farm for Lightwave.
So, Linux already has its foot in the door.
Here's what NewTek says:
***"Many larger LightWave® facilities already have substantial Linux rendering resources, and they are eager to add this power to their LightWave® rendering arsenal," said Arnie Cachelin, NewTek's 3D development manager. Cachelin went on to say, "There are also facilities that require Linux rendering to consider using a package in their pipeline. Adding a Linux render engine to our Windows and Mac engines is just one more way we meet the needs of our customer." Cachelin concluded, "In the current economy, studios are increasingly cost conscious, so the opportunity to get an affordable state-of-the-art renderer into their pipelines is very appealing."
***
And if you yearn for new versions of your favorite Amiga raytracers, then Real 3D is available for Linux.
Choice of masters is not freedom.
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
I'll probably get marked as a troll by those linux zealot moderators among us, but oh well.
Not necessarily a troll, but I definitely disagree. And your attitude will likely get you troll status no matter how true or false your argument is. Anyways...
This "study" is preposterous. While Linux has a lower TCO in small lab or workgroup environments it is highly unsuited for real enterprise environments.
I think it would be the other way around. Small environments don't have the manpower for setup, but enterprise environments usually have to custom-build solutions no matter what they start with, be it Windows or Linux.
While Linux has many of the same feature analogs that Windows 2000 does, the Linux ones are usually incomplete or far inferior to their Microsoft counterparts and require a significant amount of time to install (In order to install software X I have to recompile these libraries too?!? But software Y relies on them, oh? I have to recompile that also?), maintain, and upgrade.
If this is your impression of linux, then you must be doing it wrong. You almost never need to hand-compile stuff nowadays. Most distributions not only have most of the stuff you need out of the box readily available, but have sane upgrade systems as well.
- A Distributed Directory Service. OpenLDAP with SSL? PLEASE! Active Directory works well, right out of the box.
And where exactly is your argument as to why LDAP doesn't work?
- Client Policy Management. Uh, I can install Samba and hack away to get ntconfig.pol to work, which is a seriously out of date policy scheme from the NT/9x days, or Active Directory.
I'm really not sure what you're saying here.
- Remote Software Installation? In Linux, whichever hack you choose, it's going to require a lot of administrator time. With Windows 2000, you've got the package installation via GPO's. Easy to setup, and you can automaticaly configure clients with software packages based on the organizational unit (eg. Lab 1 in building 4) they're in.
apt-get update; apt-get dist-upgrade
- Centralized Management Tools. There are a few crappy third party tools for Linux, but they suck, to be frank. With Windows 2000, you have the MMC tool. Heavily upgraded since the NT4 days, this tool allows you to generate custom toolsets to administer your entire organization from one window, if you choose. Just add a snap-in and go.
There's a number of centralized management tools that get the job done, although I agree they're not as pretty as some of the Windows stuff. They're not unusable though.
- Remote Administration. Linux? X11 or VNC. Windows? The excellet Remote Desktop/Terminal Services software. Much more stable, smoother (movies & sound via RDP anyone?), and not clunky.
Maybe you can argue clunky, but unstable? X11 and VNC are perfectly stable.
- Kerberos, with no dicking around, nuff said.
Yeah, kerberos is still a bit of a pain, but much improved in recent distros.
- Enterprise monitoring utilities. With Linux, you have things like BB and syslog, yippee. With Windows 2000, you have BB, but also excellent tools like Microsoft Operations Manager, and the numerous other network monitoring tools (like the cool ones from Solar Winds).
OpenNMS. 'Nuff said.
- Automatic Updates & Patching. I think Red Hat still has that crappy update utility, sucks if you've gotta update 50 servers that way, though. Microsoft? Software Update Services and Automatic Updates right now. Not the perfect solution, but much better than what Linux has going for it.
sudo apt-get update; sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
With an even moderately competent Win2k administrator a network can be almost completely managed from his desktop.
Wasn't the whole point that a moderately competent Linux administrator managed more servers well than a moderately competent Win2k administrator? It's not like they made it up, they did a survey.
One can even argue that, with a competent administrator for each, Windows 2000 can be made more secure (while still being perfectly usable). I won't even get into the whole debate about the number of Linux exploits compared to the fewer Windows 2000 exploits on Bugtraq, because that really doesn't mean much overall.
Yeah, a good administrator can secure either OS reasonably well.
When it comes to pure software price, sure Linux is cheaper. When it comes to the enterprise? Please! Linux can't compete, right now. Microsoft software appears expensive (and most certainly is overpriced), but when you figure in man hours installing, updating, and maintaining, salaries for those people, and downtime while you recompile app x and lib y and app z that depends on y, Windows 2000 starts to look very attractive.
I think the whole point was that even counting all those things you're mentioning, Linux came out cheaper. You can always make an argument either way, but the point is, they went to real companies and asked them about their costs.
WWJD? JWRTFM!!!
If you read again, the example they give has the Windows guy doing 10-15 (as you say), but the Linux guy is doing about 45. No one could admin 1000 boxes unless they were all perfect clones that net-boot (like in a cluster) where they just have to change one machine and issue a command to fix the rest. No one could administer 1000 different servers effectivly.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
There are now four kinds of non truths. Lies, damn lies, benchmarks, and Windows versus Linux arguments.
This sig no verb.
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.
Windows administration is enormously labor intensive, even if you set up everything the way Microsoft recommends you do. Windows administration (and Windows programming, for that matter) reminds me of the recent thread on games Everquest and the Virtual Skinner Box: you get the feeling that Windows tools are structured to dole out rewards to keep you playing, even if your skill level is pretty low. It's no accident that so many dialog boxes say things like "Congratulations, you have just..."; some accomplishment--to stick a CD in the drive and enter a serial number. The goal, after all, is to keep people buying and recommending your product; if it doesn't work effectively for them, that's OK as long as the customers don't notice and feel good about it.
As a result, "certified" Windows sys admins feel really good about what they are doing--they get a sense of accomplishment. But a skilled UNIX or Linux sys admin can often accomplish with a couple of commands in seconds what it takes the Windows admins hours to do.
Unlike Windows, Linux won't try to make you feel good or give you a pleasant user experience. It won't encourage you or compliment you. It's just a professional tool, and at that it's quite effective. What it will let you do is, given the same workload, spend more time on the beach (or posting on Slashdot, as the case may be :-).
Sure, but the type of person who could become a really windows admin is mostly likely the kind of person who would prefer to use linux anyway.
Just an opinion - can't back it up.
seem to ignore the costs of upgrading. They always assume that you buy your fixed number of computers and then operate them for a fixed task over a period of time. They never seem to take into account that later on you may want to add more capacity to your computer system. Or you may be forced into upgrading your software, which may require new hardware or OS.
; en-us;LifeWin
For example:
If for instance if your deploying any machines with Windows 2000 Server/Professional now, then you will only have two years and three months of mainstream support. What happens if there's a critical exploit discovered (or released) one week after that ? Tough, you should have upgraded your OS by now.
Or how about if you developed and deployed an online conferencing systems with Windows Media encoder 7.1 just a year ago ? Well unless you want to be using unsupported software, your going to have to upgrade the software you developed to Windows Media Encoder 9 before the end of this year.
And even if it's acceptable to your company to run unsupported software, it's going to become harder and harder to find legitimater copies of the software you need. For example Office 97 would suffice for my word processing needs, but Microsoft have stopped selling it, and most of the copies on sale now are illegitimate. How much would a Microsoft inspection cost your company ?
Btw support lifetimes here:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=fh
"Free software as in beer, copy protection as in racket" - Telsa Gwynne
I said it years ago and I still stand by it: if you have a lot of experience in one system, stick with it unless there's a major reason to switch (significant performance gains, etc...).
In an article written in 1997, here's what I said to a journalist:
[...] agrees there are other, better ways to choose a server than benchmark results. If you're doing CGI processing and database serving, get a fast CPU and "Go with the platform you know best." Why? "Every platform has its quirks, but if you know it, chances are you'll be able to optimize it and make it as good as any other." [...] "Benchmarks will never tell you what hardware/software to buy. They will tell you how effective your latest tweak has been."
They are always more "cost effective" and better. So there is one solution for every problem! I mean really why would Bill lie to us?
What kind of math are you using? ..oh wait...this was from a Gartner/MS troll...sorry, I was looking for logic in all the wrong places. :)
Sorry, can't resist.
I own ten cars and ten motorcycles. All used for same purposes.
Five cars need two mechanics to stay running (that's total two). Ten motorcycles need only one mechanic to keep them in warranty (that's one).
Each car mechanic costs $8.00 an hour and each bike mechanic costs $10.00 an hour.
Each car needs two hours of service per month...that is 20 hours, or $160.00 per month for my ten car fleet.
Each motorcycle needs only one hour per month service, so that is 10 hours or $100.00 per month for my ten bike armada.
In this case, less service hours, with more cost per hour equals less overall cost. Without detailing a combined desktop and server environment, nothing much can be drawn from this example, but at least I laid out my math.
I personally wish the whole 'Linux on the Desktop' argument would go away for a few years. I run linux on many machines. I'd never run anything else on them. But give me OS X or WinXP to do my 'user like' computer stuff, please.
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
Heh. My brother has come to live with me for a while, and with no knowledge of computers. He picked up linux really easily, and can use the command line pretty good. He went for a job interview, and they asked him if he could use windows. He said no, but he could use linux - the employer was like "what's that?"
Seriously, you're right, but have you ever tried to admin an XP machine through a CLI?? Heck, I can't even figure out what's wrong with the damn things when I'm sitting in front of them.
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
IMHO, where the story submitter says "This not because it is free", it should read "This not only because it is free". Being free as in beer helps reducing costs you know (not to mention being free as in libre). Licensing costs do matter.
This study focused on web servers. That's it. Those who act like it means that Linux on desktops or other applactions will also have a lower TCO and hence is superior are reading way too much into the study.
This begs the question - are the costs of operating web servers really that large of a cost of most businesses? Sure, it is for some - companies that sell web hosting, maybe some ecommerce companies, ect. However, for most businesses things like desktops, applications, ect are a much larger cost - and there is no evidence that Linux has a lower TCO there. It would seem much easier to find a linux guru or two to manage your couple web servers than the number you would need for desktop support over Linux. Maybe I'm just prejudice, as I used to desktop support.
I have blog like everyone else
Agh, for some reason that was posted anonymous. Meant to be me.
Taking that TCO stands for "Total Cost of OWNERSHIP" then this cant be applicable to windows, since you dont actually own a copy of windows that you buy, you merely have a revokeable license to use it.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Its not a complete solution, but take a look at rdesktop http://www.rdesktop.org/ , Its saved my life (or at least significant portions of my free time) many a time.
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.
Who in their right mind administrates a server using VNC? It makes no sense.
dominionrd.blogspot.com - Restaurants on
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"
Ah. I had a really quick look at redhat.com looking for more info on that redhat include copyrighted images, but I can't seem to find anything, so I revoke that statement.
Doesn't that say something about your choice of
operating systems?
If it does, then it says something about both WinXP and Mandrake8. Thus, I'm assuming it's a hardware issue - the computer just won't stay turned off, whenever I turn it off it'll start back up again (essentially, it treats every shut down as a restart).
Keep trolling if you want to, though.
This was true back in the day. Even in 1994-1995 when OS/2 was gaining a lot of ground, software reviews or even mentioning OS/2 compatibility in a hardware review was non-existant.
Now there is windows and office. No new software really comes out for windows anymore, and all hardware works pretty well. Not only are many other magazines reviewing hardware but how many sites do as well. I haven't used a magazine or one of their sites for a hardware review in years.
So, Ziff Davis is realizing that geeks actually like in depth reporting and make enough money to throw them $50 a year without giving a shit. Problem is, I still hate them for the pro-microsoft stance, even though its been nearly ten years...
I don't read or respond to AC posts
I'm a (primarily) Windows admin. I do agree that if you have an average guy, he'll be able to deal with fewer machines than your avg Linux admin. But the whole thing is scripting. Although I would NEVER want to deal with multiple hundreds of Windows machines by myself (which I know some Unix admins do), several dozen are easily managable.
Windows can be scripted to an extent, while less malleable than Linux, you can still automate a lot of tasks. Is Jonny MCSE gonna do this? No. Neither is some dork who bought a book and got an RHCE.
In the right environment, either system is easily managed and scripted (and even stable). But the number of "Windows Admins" drives down the price of us, therefore we have more men per machine.
I like music
If, by "poorly written applications", you mean Explorer, then your explanation is accepted. "Configuring (my) systems correctly" means disabling all forms of Windows "scripting". The benefits are null if the security risks are above a certain level.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
Do the words "bitch, bitch, bitch" mean anything to you? :)
It's been a long time.
Actually, lpd can run on windows NT. I'm sure there are good reasons for running LPD on NT, but short of the fact that setting up printing on samba is definately not easy, I can't think of one.
/me shakes his head...
What a red herring. Nobody concerned about TCO will be using said computer to be playing video games.
It's like saying that a wrench is inferior to a screwdriver because you can't turn screws with a wrench. Obviously, TCO is for applications that Linux CAN be used for, not some other task it can't be used for at all! I'm really wondering why you bother to bring up this point at all.
It's been a long time.
Books are only usefull to a point, there really is no substitute for real experience..
Also, by the time a book gets written, edited, published and distributed, the information isnt exactly up to date with the fast paced development in the computing industry.
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"You're correct, but the article is not about linux on the desktop."
Yeah I didn't realize that. And yes, I did not read the article. Part of the reason I responded was that I'm sick of this coming up. It's been well established that as a web server (and I assume mail server too) Linux is day and night superior to Windows. I've even jumped on that bandwagon. I built an Apache server for my company's site. When Lightwave's network renderer is available you can bet I'm going to get my old machines running again just to play with that. But I can't quite talk myself into using it to do my daily stuff. I've got VM-Ware, though. Hopefully the right distro'll come along...
"I personally wish the whole 'Linux on the Desktop' argument would go away for a few years. I run linux on many machines. I'd never run anything else on them. But give me OS X or WinXP to do my 'user like' computer stuff, please."
You and I share the same point of view.
"I'm really wondering why you bother to bring up this point at all."
:) I didn't read the article. I did read an article recently about Linux as a desktop OS. I mistakenly assumed that's what they were referring to.
Because I fucked up.
The basic plot of my response was "I'm sick of the argument, it's a waste of time, move on."
Cool. Carry on. :)
It's been a long time.
Its not just apache. The most expensive to run computers in the world are not operated by consumers. There are millions of computer out there than nobody but an admin will ever need to use. Those are where people save money.
unzip; strip; touch; finger; mount; fsck; more; yes; unmount; sleep
There is no command line option to do this, it cannot be put in a script. You would think it would be NET SHARE ... but this doesn't work in Win98. Hence Windows is not completely scriptable.
That maybe true if you're going to limit yourself to batch files. However Windows does come with Windows Scripting Host (yes even Win98). Creating network shares can be done using VBScript or any other WSH supported language.
Welcome to cfengine. Systems don't even have to be particularly similar.
-- The world is watching America, and America is watching TV.
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.
:-)
I'd have to say that the best way to do it is to learn something yourself and *then* go get whatever formal training you need in the area. That way, you're never lost and understand things, but your holes are filled in nicely.
OTOH, a good comprehensive book can do the same thing.
BTW, did you see the average salaries found in the study?
$68k for a Windows admin, $71 for a Linux admin. Speak up if you aren't making enough...
May we never see th
Disclaimer: I'm a developer, not a sysadmin.
:-)
While Linux has many of the same feature analogs that Windows 2000 does, the Linux ones are usually incomplete or far inferior to their Microsoft counterparts and require a significant amount of time to install (In order to install software X I have to recompile these libraries too?!? But software Y relies on them, oh? I have to recompile that also?), maintain, and upgrade.
What were you doing, using Slackware in a business environment?
A Distributed Directory Service. OpenLDAP with SSL? PLEASE! Active Directory works well, right out of the box.
I kind of wish both OLDAP and AD would die. LDAP is a travesty, and both OLDAP and AD have *awful* performance.
Client Policy Management. Uh, I can install Samba and hack away to get ntconfig.pol to work, which is a seriously out of date policy scheme from the NT/9x days, or Active Directory.
"When I use Microsoft administration methods, Microsoft's products are easier to use."
Wow. No shit. I'll bet it's hard to update Windows clients with RPMs, too.
Centralized Management Tools. There are a few crappy third party tools for Linux, but they suck, to be frank. With Windows 2000, you have the MMC tool. Heavily upgraded since the NT4 days, this tool allows you to generate custom toolsets to administer your entire organization from one window, if you choose. Just add a snap-in and go.
I was stunningly underwhelmed by mmc. It has a truly atrocious interface.
Also, if you're using MMC and you need to manage data that an existing snap-in doesn't manage, you're in for a lot more work than you were expecting.
Remote Administration. Linux? X11 or VNC. Windows? The excellet Remote Desktop/Terminal Services software. Much more stable, smoother (movies & sound via RDP anyone?), and not clunky.
You use a GUI to administer your systems? This might explain the limited number of systems an MS admin can handle.
- Kerberos, with no dicking around, nuff said.
Uh, huh. Try using it with or serving certificates to non-Windows clients.
- Enterprise monitoring utilities. With Linux, you have things like BB and syslog, yippee. With Windows 2000, you have BB, but also excellent tools like Microsoft Operations Manager, and the numerous other network monitoring tools (like the cool ones from Solar Winds).
From what I can see, MOM is nothing more than a network and node monitoring system. Big freaking deal. There's a *ton* of monitoring systems for Linux, if you can live with it not giving you a graphical network map. If you want that...Solar Winds' stuff is the closest analog I could find to the unparalleled Intermapper on the Mac, which is a truly incredible network monitoring tool. Scotty is ugly but very powerful.
Also, for each solution you're suggesting a new Microsoft product. I mean, how much of their stuff do you *buy*, anyway? It's starting to sound like Solaris admins and Sun.
- Automatic Updates & Patching. I think Red Hat still has that crappy update utility, sucks if you've gotta update 50 servers that way, though. Microsoft? Software Update Services and Automatic Updates right now. Not the perfect solution, but much better than what Linux has going for it.
You must have an unusually good history with these. On Windows at least, they tend to have a tendancy to leave nonworking systems in their wake. OTOH, I've never had a catastrophic automatic update to a Linux system.
Plus, with Automatic Updates configured to automatically download (but not install) your patches, you don't have to sit around in the middle of the night waiting for the downloads to finish for all 50 servers.
Umm...yes, and you can do this about eight million ways on every Linux distro I can think of. That's like saying "I have a web browser on *my* platform."
With an even moderately competent Win2k administrator a network can be almost completely managed from his desktop.
So Windows is almost as nice to manage as Linux? I don't buy it.
One can even argue that, with a competent administrator for each, Windows 2000 can be made more secure (while still being perfectly usable).
Hmm. Let's see. Registry permissions. IIS running with crazy-stupid privileges. ActiveX. Software easily accidentally misused by users, like Outlook. A lack of ability to chroot. No, I've got to say that Win2k isn't going to be made "more secure" with a competent administrator on each.
I won't even get into the whole debate about the number of Linux exploits compared to the fewer Windows 2000 exploits on Bugtraq, because that really doesn't mean much overall.
And yet you did manage to mention it. And there's the minor little detail that Bugtraq is referring to an *entire distro*, not an operating system. RH provides an order of magnitude more servers and software with a release than MS does with Windows. If you take all the security exploits for all pieces of Windows server and application software (which would be an equivalent metric) and count those as well, Windows is much worse off. But I won't mention that.
When it comes to pure software price, sure Linux is cheaper. When it comes to the enterprise? Please! Linux can't compete, right now.
Probably not at your place, because you're not experienced with the damn thing. Wow. Maybe we should take a Solaris admin that hasn't seen a Mac before and ask him whether it's more cost-effective to use Solaris machines or Macs.
May we never see th
I think he means that if the system fails in the middle of a transaction, then reboots, then fails while rolling back or forward ("repairing") that transaction, damage can occur.
I'm a little dubious, because it's not that hard to design a system that doesn't do that, and it would be stupid not to.
OTOH, I also didn't believe that MS would trust the a remote machine as to the length of a local machine's password when comparing the characters of a password in Windows 95 and 98, until I saw this in action.
May we never see th
But you will soon
There are also Linux apps that don't work on Windows.
So while you have a point, the majority of commonly used apps exist on both or have equivalents on both. And with a TCO argument undercutting Microsoft's biggest argument for using their systems...
May we never see th
Try setting your system not to "always restart on power loss" (name is prolly different in your BIOS) in the Power Management or APM/ACPI section of your BIOS and see what happens.
May we never see th
Why not.
I manage a couple of hundred boxes. Once you're past 10 or so, everything has to be automated and architected in a scalable manner anyway. Once you've got that bit right, you can manage 50 boxes as easily as 10 and 500 boxes as easily as 50 and 5000 boxes as easily as 500.
For some hints and tips check out:
http://www.infrastructures.org/
BTW, this kind of attitude to system management, along with no license Linux, this DOES mean that the Windows system administrator is dead as a long term job proposition.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
Don't f*cking tell everyone!!!!
It does rock though, doesn't it. Tie it in to your NIS/NIS+ netgroups stuff, CVS config management repository, drive from a SQL rdbms and put a nice Zope based front end to the database.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
If a study is trying to compare two or more products, and it *claims* that that is what it is doing, then that is *ALL* it should be doing. When it also tries to take on the additional task of defining what the typical business is like, it is making implicit claims outside the scope of the study, without people realizing it. And that's the problem I have with all TCO guesses (I refuse to call them "studies) I have seen - they start from the mythical assumption that there is a "typical" company, define parameters for that "typical" company, and then compare TCO's under those allegedly "typical" circumstances. By picking different parameters as "typical", they can swing the result any way they like.
What I really wish these studies would do is start from the assumption that there will always be some cases where Foo beats Bar and other cases where Bar beats Foo, depending on the circumstances. (which is always true because someone imaginative can always come up with bizaare circumstances where even the most ludicris product comes out on top. "The Drive-across-town-and-talk(tm) network messaging protocol is over 100 times faster than video conferencing in the circumstance where your company is in a city that is currently experiencing an all-day power outage.")
Then the *interesting* thing for these studies to do would be to find what those conditions are and make a list. ASSUME there will be cases where one side wins and cases where the other side wins. The job of the study should then be to FIND those circumstances and make the comparasin by listing the circumstances that tip the balance. Then the reader can get useful information because the reader knows which of those circumstances fit his company. The tech magazine doesn't.
(So in the infamous Mindcraft study from a few years back that claimed IIS was faster than Apache-on-Linux, instead of just making that claim and leaving it at that, state the circumstances that tip the balance: If you want to spread the network load over multiple network interface cards on one webserver machine, and are serving only static pages, and serving heavy traffic, IIS on NT was faster, but if the circumstances are the same as above but you only want to use one network card in the machine, Apache-on-Linux was faster. When the load was small enough not to flood one NIC, we didn't notice any appreciable difference. - Then it would be an excercise of the reader to decide if they are in the very small group of people that are running a site where the speed of the NIC is the major bottleneck.)
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
Breaking News:
The Sky is Blue and the Pope is katholic.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
I can only listen to people ask "How do I use Linux exactly like Windows?" so many times. The answer is "You can't".
I assume that if you, and all of the Windows administrators who are informed enough to frequent Slashdot, are intelligent enough to configure and support the crap that Redmond produces, then you are just a step away from utilizing the benefits of Linux. It frustrates me to hear people ask about Linux on Slashdot like they have never heard of it before.
In my case, talking the client into Mosix was not possible, because they were unwilling to dedicate a server to each of their small remote offices. The "slow WAN links" that someone else mentioned were good enough for their Windows option, and are damn well good enough for transferring word processing files in Linux also.
When I said: "Linux- No licenses, runs from read-only filesystem on old hardware (that they were going to throw away)", they said "Great". Granted, some of them say things like "We want Windows", until I pop in a Knoppix CD and show them that Linux has "windows" too.
As for network appliances, I am too young to actually remember anyone using them. I presume it was because they cost as much as PC's and also required M$ (and Citrix?) licenses to run. Linux blows that paradigm out of the water. They have just enough programs to do their jobs and not the ability to fuck things up. Everything runs from the CD, not over a "slow WAN link". I send them updates in the mail and administer their user accounts from one server in one location.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
You probably need to change some setting for ACPI possibly APM. Since this happens with different OS's its most likely your BIOS's settings. When i had the same problem i didn't understand any of the ACPI setting so i read about it to discover my computer was setup to not do anything when the power button was pressed.
unzip; strip; touch; finger; mount; fsck; more; yes; unmount; sleep
They always are redundant when others are modded higher after.
What we see depends on mainly what we look for. -- John Lubbock Now search for that bug slave!