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A BSD For Your PHB
Kelly McNeill writes "The reaction one gets when attempting to get a manager in a corporate environment to consider an alternate operating system can sometimes be likened to a typical dilbert comic strip. Joseph Mallett contributed the following editorial to osOpinion/osViews which suggests that if you present the case properly, your pointy haired boss will make the right decision when choosing a Unix operating system to run the business."
Just do what I do, don't tell him.
your pointy haired boss will make the right decision when choosing a Unix operating
And what is the "right" descision?
Choosing BSD over Solaris or HP-UX because it's almost free at the point of acquisition?
No, I haven't RTFA and my "boss" doesn't have pointy hair either.
He does, however, make business descisions based on whatever makes the best sense for the business.
While doing this within one organisational unit completely screws with your TCO (now instead of sitting smugly every time there is a Linux exploit, you now have to patch servers every time there is an exploit on Windows/Linux/FreeBSD/OpenBSD/....), having different departments or different companies have different distros.
If you really need fault tolerance, having two redundant systems running different software is an excellent idea if you're willing to pay for that level of support.
You can also avoid the monoculture effect by making your "strain" subtly different, for instance prelink lets you randomise the addresses in memory of dynamically loaded libraries making automated exploits harder (since all the addresses changed), or using something like gentoo where you compile everything from scratch with subtly different USE lines, or optimisations.
Even recompiling your kernel with certain options can change the machine enough that common automated exploits won't work.
This is why the proliferation of Linux distros are a good thing, you can have some level of diversity by installing different distros without getting so much diversity that you your support costs go through the roof.
Portability of Linux means you can run Linux on intel and powerpc chips causing almost all automated exploits to fail, but only requiring a recompile as far as software is concerned. This can be a good solution for having two servers in a load balanced, failover cluster by having each server running on a different architecture.
In general, Windows doesn't have these advantages, Windows isn't portable across platforms. Windows doesn't let you recompile large chunks of the OS with different options, Windows only has a limited range of "Editions" and different editions are usually unsuitable for running the same task. Windows is often lacking equivilent software (How many replacements for exchange are there? How many Linux MTA/MDA/MAA's are there?)
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I agree completely, in general, that managers should not be allowed to pick OS's. Nevertheless, in reality, at many big companies many services will be run on big money vendor platforms that are all commercial OS's. Big companies love big companies and they love to give each other huge contracts. That's the way of the world.
K.C.
Why help the stupid ?
/. is getting insane.
um... because as part of the IT staff its part of your job?
If the PHB is tech illiterate yet still insists on making blind purchase decisions, let the punk shoot himself in the foot. You can always find a better boss elsewhere, or save up and launch your own business with _your_ skills and computer savoir-faire. Just be loyal to your paycheck until opportunity comes knocking.
You let "the punk" shoot himself in the foot, and needlessly spend $100k and there goes any semblance of a good reference for your next job... talk about bridge burning. And save up and start your own company??? Yeah, lets everyone do that because of management's choice of operating system. My god the rhetoric of
If your boss can't tell the difference between a 2 million$ investment + tech training, and a 0$ investment + tech training, then you should just smile and cash your fat check because there is no salvation for such math flunkies.
its obviously a lot more complicated than that, don't you think? Or in your opinion is everone running win2003 server over BSD total morons? Theres a time and a place for everything, and if you ask me your zealotry will get you in some serious career trouble sooner or later. Best of luck, man.
Here's to finally giving Bush his exit strategy in November
Why? Because it doesn't have a little graphical paperclip saying "Would you like to install the OS?"
OpenBSD's installer is absolutely the simplest OS installer I've ever seen. The only "difficult" things is that you have to partition the hard drive yourself, unlike the Linux/Windows world, where the installer just wipes your drive, and installs one single huge partition.
You need to elaborate. Are you talking about unsupported hardware? If so, the only thing OpenBSD didn't support in the old days, was my sound-card, and not only is that not an issue for a server, but soundcard support has much improved in the past couple years.
If you has some "incompatibilites", I'd be even more interested. OpenBSD has been better than any other OS at automatically detecting all the hardware, and setting it up (at every boot-up no-less). I was astonished to see that everything just came up and was working, when I had come from a Linux background, where everything took hours of manually selecting your hardware, fiddling with module parameters, editing config files, etc. Hardware that I though was impossible to get working together because of my Linux experince (eg two soundcards in one system, multiple IDE controllers, etc), was up and was working automatically.
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Sigh, I knew I was going to get flamed for this. Here goes:
...
You just put in the CD/Floppy, select upgrade
I was trying to uprade from source, since the upgrade from CD reproduced some interesting errors, which I don't have the time to go fish from the mailing list archives. And while this was a single machine, relying on a physical medium to keep a large # of boxes (as for desktops in a large company) up to date won't cut it. In that respect, I've rarely had problems with FreeBSD's buildworld.
Now are you going to leave? Does this make slashdot any less useful? Or are you just whining
Why whining? I'm posting my experience and some reasons. Why the fuck is it that the moment you try to shaer with people why you did/didn't do something, it's whining? I found a solution and got on with it.
What problems? Start listing... I have
-OpenBSD-sparc on my SS20 kept locking up mysteriously. This was not due to memory/hardware/power problems (tested & replaced repeatedly) and was reported by a number of people without a solution ever being discussed.
-Several interesting changes to security settings and pf rules that cost me hours of diggign through various configs (and no, it wasn't obvious from the docs.) I hate operating systems that think they know better than I do how secure they should be.
The list goes on. Maybe this really was just the luck of the draw, and I know "things happen", but in my case I just had too much grief with the damn thing on too many different occasions. I just didn't have the time to spend knob-dicking around getting my boxes to work with a deadline to meet.
Look, my point was "use what works". I'm sorry if that got lost in translation.
Cole's Law: Thinly sliced cabbage
The article dismisses NetBSD as a server platform because it's more suitable for a heterogeous hardware enviroment (i.e. because it's portable). That seems like a huge non-sequitur to me. It may be true that Open/Free is a better plaform for servers for all I know, but that can't be the reason, can it?
You don't need the physical medium, you just need the dozen large tgz files. You could upgrade a running system if you wanted... although the kernel upgrade would require a reboot before you'd get new functionality.
I've NEVER had problems with OpenBSD's upgrade method: cd
I'm not saying you are whining because you aren't using OpenBSD, but because you are complaining about what an individual who happened to be on an OpenBSD mailing-list happened to say to someone. You say it like it was a reason you aren't using OpenBSD... Which is why I invited you to stop using Slashdot, since there's plenty of flames here to go around.
Security settings? What would that be? I've used OpenBSD for several years, and the only security setting I can think of is kern.securelevel, which is pretty standard... FreeBSD has exactly the same thing, and Linux's runlevels are very similar. Is that what you are talking about?
As for the PF rules, it's just a config file. Nobody is second-guessing you on anything. You have to create a pf.conf yourself, the existing one is just an example. There's nothing else you could possibly have had to modify, so I fail to see the problem you had with it.
Well, the only thing I've heard from you so far is that you had a mysterious lock-up on SPARC. Well, those things do happen from time to time. If there was no patch out for the problem yet, you could simply have reverted back to a previous version (only 6-months old, still fully supported) until it was resolved.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant