Slashdot Mirror
Using Debian in Commercial Environments?
sydb asks: "I am currently persuading my employer to try out Linux. We are heavily dependent on IBM software technologies just now, and it's a very conservative operations organization. As a challenge, I am trying to persuade them to use my preferred distro but there are hurdles: IBM doesn't officially support Debian as a platform, though I have anecdotal evidence that most of it can be persuaded to work (with alien etc). Does Slashdot have experience shoe-horning Debian into this kind of scenario? Most importantly, how have things gone getting IBM support? My rationale for pushing Debian boils down to its vast array of packages available to apt-get, easy upgrades, apt-get itself, and the overall quality and consistency of the system."
PS: No, I am not an HP employee.
We're running Debian on several xSeries systems. At first, we were having problems with server lockups. While it turned out to be a problem with the XFS file system, IBM supported us by swapping out just about the entire server.
They won't support the software, but they will support their hardware running it.
I used to work for IBM in the division that developed DB2 for Windows, OS/2, Linux, and various Unicies (but not OS/400 or other "big iron" systems) three years ago, and worked on code for DB2 v6 through to v8.
At that time, our Linux testing was primarily against Red Hat and a few others (from hazy memory, Turbo Linux, Red Flag, and one other I don't recall at the moment). Debian was not tested at all for any of their products. Red Hat was their primary focus, and seemed to be the Linux platform most of the developers ha on their desktop systems (although a lot of the Unix development was actually done through AIX-based systems).
Things may have changed since this time, but I haven't seen any outside evidence of this. Do you really want to try running these applications on platforms and with packages that the original vendor hasn't done any testing with? The IBM products you mention are not cheap -- why risk having them break by running them on an unsupported platform?
If you're a big account, talk to your IBM account rep and tell them you'd like to move to Debian. You'd be suprised how much IBM will do for a big account (or, at least, would do when I was there).
Yaz.
What do you mean by "doing everything the Debian way"? Are you saying Debian doesn't adhere to the FHS? Or are you just saying that -- while complying with standards relevant to a *nix -- it does things differently than RedHat or SuSe?
If you're simply saying that it does things differently from RedHat, then who says that the way RedHat does things is "the standard"? As for "special config tools", etc, why are Debian's config tools "special Debian config tools", and RedHat's config tools not "special RedHat config tools"?
It seems to me that your either saying that Debian doesn't adhere to standards (such as FHS), which would be a good criticism (even though sometimes standards are wrong), but in which case I'd want some examples; or you're saying that it doesn't do things the "RedHat" way, which is like complaining about it because all of its programs aren't in C:\Program Files.
PS: Personally, I use Gentoo.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
I, too, am in a heavy IBM Websphere and DB2 environment and when we bought new hardware I looked into upgrading the distro from Red Hat 7.3.
First, the install on Debian isn't smooth. I tried the latest stable Debian as well as some updated packages that I knew I'd need. I installed Websphere and had some problems. Stuff worked, eventually, but it was a pain that I wasn't willing to deal with on an ongoing basis (fixpacks and such). Java GUIs were particularly troublesome, although the web console is really all you ever need. Java problems worried me a lot.
I tried Suse and Red Hat's enterprise offerings, which I had been given demo disks for, as well as their free counterparts. One major hurdle with Red Hat was that there are some major Java threading issues with RHEL 3.0 and Red Hat 9 and above, so I'd be stuck with RHEL 2.1 or RH 8. I decided to go with Suse 8.2, which is supported as a development platform (no free Linux is supported for production use).
What I found on my distro adventures is that IBM supports anything, but they do complain about it. For instance, even our old environment had RH 7.3 while only 7.2 is supported. During my Debian install it was IBM who helped me get it working. When supporting these distros they constantly question the Java version and go through a checklist of software versions to make sure everything's ok. But like I said, they will support it.
While I have gotten bad support from IBM before, overall they are much better than any other company I've had to deal with on an ongoing basis. They really do try to help out. A couple times I've had some idiot at their help desk so I asked to be transfered to someone else, but other than that they've been great.
The global economy is a great thing until you feel it locally.
I've used APT for RPM and to be honest it didn't work properly - the dependency information just wasn't right. I don't get this problem with Debian.
It's also about the number of packages in the release. Debian is several times the size of either RedHat or Suse. We don't want to spend time compiling software and building RPMs, we just want to get on with doing our job.
Yours Sincerely, Michael.
Let me be specific.
This machine will need:
* A DB2 client
* Maybe run WebSphere for the testing of in-house scripts
* A Tivoli Storage Management agent. Or maybe not, there are other ways to have backups, like syncing to another machine.
The question is about adjusting management mindsets and dealing with IBM in what I expect to be a very small number of support calls. It's not about choosing the right technical solution, because I have ample justification for Debian being the right technical solution.
Yours Sincerely, Michael.
We don't have a working system, this is a new system for a particular job.
The only IBM software we need to use in "production" is a DB2 client and probably a TSM agent. We could avoid the TSM agent.
We would probably want to run WebSphere on it for testing purposes - testing of scripts before they reach the environments our developers use.
My concerns are more about persuading management that an "unsupported" distribution could be a goer, and what I expect to be a small number if contacts with IBM support.
So I understand your thinking, but in this case it's misplaced.
Yours Sincerely, Michael.
Call IBM Global services. You'll be surpised what they support.
For the right price, they happily support Oracle [from a competitor] running on Solaris [from a competitor] and Ingres [from a competitor] running on NT [from a competitor].
I think you may be talking to the wrong group in IBM. If you guys have the cash to pay them, they'll gladly support Debian (though possibly through a partner company).
They test new packages and software to death before including it into the official version. The current official version of Debian is Woody, and it uses version 2.2 the Linux kernel. I mean really, you don't get more conservative than that. There is something to be said for using older well tested software. Debian is such a solid founation, it is the basis for many other distributions such as Knoppix, Libranet, Xandros etc.
Comparing Debian to Mandrake, Suse, Slackware or even RHEL I think you will find that Debian it the most cautious about adopting new versions of core libraries, graphics system or the kernel.
http://www.ibm.com/linux
I agree. Debian is wonderful, I use it at home, I use it at work. If your work is expecting to get Enterprise level support, you can get Enterprise level support for Debian with HP.
However, it sounds like your Enterprise has already standardized around IBM. As good as Debian is, I can't see how it's good enough to lose an enterprise support agreement, even if it's just a few machines.
Maybe you can threaten the sales people to go to HP if they don't amend the support contract to include Debian. They probably will know you're bluffing, but it might help.
----
Open mind, insert foot.