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."

Comments

Conservative and don't like Debian?

[Anonymous Coward]

Imagine if you tried to introduce them to Gentoo! They'd probably faint.

Re:Conservative and don't like Debian?

[mrchaotica]

Hey, that sounds like a plan! Upgrade all the systems while they're asleep!

Re:Conservative and don't like Debian?

[the arbiter]

"sydb". What are you thinking? Seriously?

You have a working system. What is your rationale for wanting to change ANYTHING, much less your OS?

You've paid (if my own workplace is any indicator) at least tens of thousands of dollars just for the IBM support (which is superb, if you're running approved software).

You probably are using other software, all of which you've paid support contracts on.

All these contracts will become null and void if you should do something completely insane, like switching your DE to a distro that is not supported.

Well, go for it, it's your career. I'll say this, however. If you were employed at my workplace, and suggested such an insane course of action, you wouldn't be working here for long.

Re:Conservative and don't like Debian?

[sydb]

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.

Re:Conservative and don't like Debian?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's bullshit that IBM doesn't support Debian. With partners IBM happily supports Debian.

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).

Re:Conservative and don't like Debian?

[the arbiter]

Ahh. Well, now at least I see where you're coming from...it's not job suicide month, at least.

Looking at it from management's point of view, I'd still be very skeptical. A promise that you'd be personally responsible for maintenance, fixes, patches and "surprises" might do the trick, although I know (from personal experience) that I would not be allowed to do it in spite of those reassurances. For good reason...I have responsibilities other than patching an experimental system, and could find myself in over my head very quickly.

The end result would be...mission not accomplished. And that's an unacceptable outcome to management. Plus, those developers...you give them a bad environment and you'll never hear the end of it.

Good luck.

Re:Conservative and don't like Debian?

[XSforMe]

You might be able to convince them based on the licensing and service costs. Try making it a business case, exposing how much would it cost to have inhouse support for Debian vs Novell support for Suse. Be realistic, don't be quick at dismissing the costs of inhouse support for Debian. If you can, get some of the folks at IBM to back the feasability of the case, telling that, though unsupported, they dont forsee any trouble.

Depending on how critical the production end of your environment, you might be able to pull it off. Always bear in mind if for any reason the tested scripts will not run on the production end, the excrement will be flying your way. This decision might come to haunt you later if you keep your current employer.

Re:Conservative and don't like Debian?

[Lucious]

IBM provide complete end-to-end Linux Support. They support all major Linux based Operating Systems including Red Hat and SUSE on all hardware platforms. Linux is a key component of IBM's future vision and current reality of "On demand Infrastructure Services" They also certify and support all of their own software on Linux.

http://www.ibm.com/linux

Re:Conservative and don't like Debian?

[gujo-odori]

I also worked at an ISP that ran its mail system on IRIX and migrated it to Debian, and our experience was nothing at all like yours. While I no longer work there, they are still running Debian and to the best of my knowledge (which is pretty good; I still keep in touch), they have delivered 100% mail system uptime since migrating to Debian, something we were not able to do with our SGI boxen.

Partly on the basis of that experience, I moved from running RH on my workstation to running Debian, and I've never been sorry about that, either.

Our migration from IRIX to Debian was a complete success because of two things:

1) We had, collectively, a lot of talent on Linux;
2) The sysadmin put in charge of the project had a lot of talent and experience on Debian; the rest of us had most of our experience in Solaris, BSD, and Red Hat. The IRIX guy had moved to another department by then.

What was the difference? Not lack of talent, I think. It sounds like you know what you are doing. Perhaps a matter of choosing appropriate hardware, though. We didn't screw around with ATA RAID (this was in the pre-SATA days, but that wouldn't have mattered) or anything that was less than server grade. This was a mission-critical system, and we used only server-grade hardware that was known to be very well supported.

The hosts we used were six dual-CPU rackmount cases running SCSI disks (RAID 1) for the OS install, and all the important stuff was on SAN (RAID 5 there).

Everything was absolutely bulletproof. How bulletproof? We installed Woody, with the 2.2 kernel (this was the late 1990s, and 2.4 was still experiencing some growing pains) and it worked perfectly right out of the box.

As I noted at the top, they are still at 100% mail system uptime to this day, to the best of my (fairly good) knowledge. They are still running Debian Stable.

Many other people can tell you stories just like this. Debian most certainly has a place in a shop that needs to get things done, a place that can perhaps only be taken by FreeBSD (with the possible exception of Slackware, Debian Stable is the only Linux distro I've ever used that can match FreeBSD for stability, or at least come very close).

I'm not saying you don't know what you're doing, I'm sure you do. You're probably a better sysadmin than I am. However, I do see one thing that you did wrong. You chose (or perhaps the customer's budget chose for you) what some people would call "toy hardware." Debian Stable often isn't the best fit on the block with that stuff. But if you had been using a proper server box with SCSI (or at the least parallel ATA; I *still* don't like SATA support under Linux much), I think it would have been all right.

One other thing I would have done differently is this: as soon as I found that I had problems with the hardware and the distro I had chosen, one or the other would have been jettisoned. For a server application, it would have been the hardware if I had the latitude to make that decision. Even today, a server you need to depend on should use SCSI disks (I'm still partial to Adaptec adapters) and known top-quality parts.

With all due respect, while building an identical machine in your lab was the smart way to do it, investing hundreds of hours into making Debian work with that hardware was not. It would have been cheaper to *buy* a proper box and just *give* it to the customer. Alternatively, if that hardware was cast in concrete, early on you should have chosen a different distro, one that is focused on a single hardware platform and that places more emphasis on supporting the bleeding edge than on rock-solid stability for tried and true equipment. Debian is not that distro (not to say it doesn't work fine on most stuff; I install Debian Sid on Frys' sale-quality hardware regularly without incident).

I would advance the idea that Frys sale-quality hardware (such as SATA-RAID) has no place in a shop that needs to get things done. You probably won't ex

Dear slashdot

[Mike Hawk]

Despite the fact that my employer has a software environment that they are comfortable with, and that I have very little to gain and everything to lose, I have moved my software evangelism to the workplace. Can you help?

Re:Dear slashdot

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes... try Debian. The answer to a question no one asked.

Re:Dear slashdot

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually my employer was quite happy running Windows servers and rebooting weekly. (They were comfortable.)

Now that we have switched our servers to Linux they wished we could move more.

Re:Dear slashdot

[sydb]

They have in the past been comfortable with their software environment but now money no longer flows like water. They are now realising that proprietary Unix comes at a cost, and it's becoming hard to justify.

Whatsmore, the overhead of a highly regimented IT operations organisation is more and more apparent. There is a balance to be struck between every technology meeting the corporate checklist, rubber stamped by all and sundry, sticking to the tried and test, and actually being able to implement change quickly enough to keep up with business realities.

Please don't answer my question so tritely. I think it is a reasonable one.

Re:Dear slashdot

[sydb]

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.

Re:Dear slashdot

[citog]

Interesting, you've gone from

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).
to
It's not about choosing the right technical solution, because I have ample justification for Debian being the right technical solution.

So, your anecdotal evidence is now ample justification? I would say Mike (great-grandparent post) is right on the mark with his comments.

Re:Dear slashdot

[j3110]

I have to comment on this...

There are plenty of good business reasons to want to use Debian... the very same reasons you or I use it.

1) Security updates are done quicker than recompiling/manually installing (The competition is catching up).

2) Software installation to a new machine will take less time on a Debian system because it will update to the latest versions automatically instead of applying patches over the original install (competition is catching up).

3) More software packages prepackaged means that there are fewer custom compilations/installs, which means installing/upgrading client machines will take less time.

4) Setting up your own APT server means you can distribute your own upgrades internally, and even package non-standard software yourself. This means you can write one install/setup/upgrade script for oracle, and have it automatically propogate through the network instead of installing it on a per machine basis.

Every one of these points saves time. If a company is under pressure right now to save money, applying some of that presure on IBM might be a good way to get the ball rolling toward getting support for Debian. IBM only supports SuSE and RedHat because that's what everyone else uses. There is enough room in the market for another supported distro, especially one as easy to support as Debian.

I wouldn't sacrifice support, because that would put your job on the line, but I would lobby them to ask IBM to support Debian. If enough people in your position do, they'll add it to the supported list. You might want to have them run a test on the next server upgrade/install by installing Debian on it. If that means that IBM doesn't get service fees for that server, and you tell them so, then they'll start paying attention. You're company can always switch a single, not-so-critical system to a supported platform at any time without a significant loss. You just have to convince them that the potential economical gains are significant enough. If that server sits in the corner doing it's job without anyone touching, they'll start to see the wisdom. If you suggest something like a single server as a test bed, they'll see it as more of an experiment to try to save money, and if it fails, it probably won't be your job, but if it succeeds, and you implement it company wide and save a lot of money, then you will probably have eliminated a need for your job, and your boss will get a raise from the portion of your no longer needed salary. :)

Re:Dear slashdot

[tchuladdiass]

A few things I've learned from deploying Linux in the enterprise (some of these may not apply to everyone, depending on how large the enterprise is)...
1) An installation needs to be supportable. This does not mean that you can get tech questions answered quickly via IRC or mailing lists. This may or may not mean the availablity of a hotline to call when everything hits the fan, and you are loosing big bucks every hour. It most definetly means that you can get install third-party software, and when that software hickups, you can call the vendor and have them help you, and not tell you they don't support your installation choice. Support also includes an assurance that someone has a _financial incentive_ to provide timely security updates and bug fixes for the product.
2) An installation needs to be repeatable. Which means that installing a distro that doesn't baseline their releases won't cut it. What I mean is, some distributions come out with a version, say 11.2, and will put out a series of fixes in the form of a couple updated package files every week or so. Thus, if you set up a server today with versin 11.2 and all current fixes, then next week if you do the same thing you will get a slightly different install. So what is needed is for the distro to have the concept of maintance levels, or patch levels, which defines a line in the sand so that you can at any time install 11.2 patch-level 13 and it will always be the same. (This also makes it easier for patches to be reviewed and signed off on by your patch-review board).
3) An installation needs to have a good chance of being maintanable by someone off the street. There are more enterprise-class unix admins out there than enterprise linux admins (that is, at least 5 years experience supporting a minimum of 50 systems that are in use 24x7 with stirct uptime requirements). And since most enterprises and their vendors are going with one or two linux flavors, a shop has a better chance of getting an admin in a pinch if they go with one of those two major linux players. And just knowing how to troubleshoot and upkeep linux in general isn't enough for a production system. Any linux distro has it's particulars that you don't want someine learning about during a crisis.

Unfortunately, most distributions fail one or more of these tests (or other tests that I didn't mention). For example, with Redhat Enterprise, their only supported methods of updating are to use up2date, which grabs the latest patches for all installed packages (which means you can't baseline), or you have to grab the patches one-by-one. If you download their update CD's, they don't provide an easy way to apply all the fixes (rpm --freshen doesn't cut it, cause sometimes you run across a patch that has prerequisites that the previous version didn't have, and rpm doesn't automatically resolve dependancies. Of course, there is always autorpm, autoupdate, apt, and yum, but these aren't part of the base distro, so you aren't guaranteed of it always working with that distro).

Re:Dear slashdot

[nzkoz]

As a linux 'advocate' working in a large IBM customer (top 20), I feel your pain. However, give up on debian.

Seriously. If you try to run this stuff on anything other than an IBM-supported distro will start to refuse your support calls, charge extra for incidents and basically make pricks of themselves.

Your best bet is either:

1. Use Redhat or Suse
2. Use Whitebox

If you're already paying for DB2, Websphere *and* tivoli, you're looking at a few million a year. What does redhat cost, ~1k, just pay it. From there you can advocate JBoss/Tomcat instead of websphere, Postgresql instead of DB2 etc. etc.

If you run IBM stuff on another distribution, who do you think will be up against the wall when your fixed price call out suddenly becomes a ~$1k/hr (lab rates) fix?

Re:Dear slashdot

[killjoe]

" Yeah, apt-get, but then what happens when apt-get goes wrong and there's no support contract?"

First of all if you are using stable (and a corporation should) the chances of apt get going wrong are just about null.

Secondly you could buy a support contract. Just like you could buy a support contract from MS.

Finally this is OSS. You can get support even though you didn't buy it. The debian community is especially clueful and helpful. Chances are you'll get better support for free then the first or second level droid at your other company. In most cases you should solve your problem in less time then it would take to escalate it with MS.

"new one has no support contract, and the new one goes wrong, it's all YOUR FAULT. If you use the existing system, with a support contract, and it goes wrong, it's the fault of the contractors, or whoever installed it, not you."

Maybe where you work you can simply say "it's Microsoft's fault" and go home. Not where I work. Your ass is on the line when the server goes down. No ifs, ands or buts about it.

simple

[linuxislandsucks]

Ask them to read and point to Bruyce Perens previous papers and work.. he was the former head of Debian/GNU and now heads the UserLinux project..

just goolge the name and you will find his website with the paper links..

Or the hard way.. start your own business and demand it as per your ceo status.. I went the hard way :)

Getting what you pay for

[MORTAR_COMBAT!]

In general, you're buying IBM software because you can call them up, tell them "it don't work, nosirree" and your contract says they get to send out some engineer(s) and make it work.

If they support your environment.

The gains you might think you'll get by using Debian are absolutely not worth losing your service contract, which you've likely already paid for. There's nothing horribly wrong with SuSE or Redhat, both generally supported IBM environments. If you succeed in getting your boss to install Debian, you're on the process of going up a river without the proverbial paddle.

Re:Getting what you pay for

[Zweistein_42]

I would tend to agree with this viewpoint. It seems to me we are talking about a commercial environment, not enthusiast shop or basement. Anecdotal evidence of what Slashdot readers have successfully installed on their laptop or home (and I've played with Debian successfully on my T30 too:) has no bearing on this decision.

If your company, as it appears, uses IBM software/hardware, it prefers to pay some (ok, a LOT;) extra $$$ to have the peace of mind of having a large, monolithic corporation a phone call away:). As a hacker, you'll adapt easily to SuSE or RedHat (sure, we all raise hell about the differences, but let's be honest here;). As a company though, and especially a "conservative" one, they'll have -much- harder time adapting to a different model of doing things. In all honesty, sounds like you might be doing them a disservice by offering what is, in the end, an officially unsupported OS. Do you want to be the one who inadvertently nullifies their support contracts (no matter how unreasonable their requirements may be)?

You need to think beyond what you would like to play with, and extend your viewpoint to all the possibilities and risks your company might encounter in the years ahead. If they're more comfortable knowing somebody is guaranteeing, supporting, and in the end, taking the blame for their software/hardware, then it's a strategic policy you should follow.

There's little other then deception to persuade them to use Debian, if they are the type of company you describe.

Re:Getting what you pay for

[discogravy]

i love debian, but am in total agreement with this post. consider also that suse/redhat can be retrofitted with apt-rpm (or yum or whatever it's called now,) if you really really really really want apt -- but if you're running this in production, are you really going to be using apt on the machine a lot? I know that apt-get is only really useful on stable machines for security updates and on testing/unstable for OS/bleeding edge stuff. Which, if you've paid for service, security updates should be part and parcel with the service. And if you're running testing or unstable in a production environment, you deserve all the trouble you will get, imo.

I know!

[blankslate]

... just skin it up like XP and don't tell them?

Your rationale vs. their rationale

[Dancin_Santa]

You want to put Debian on the systems because of the vast array of software available for it.

They want to run IBM solutions because they can trust that the few apps that they actually want to run on the system will run with no trouble.

The trouble here is that you want Debian on the systems for your own selfish reasons. They want to run their systems as reliably as possible. Since this is a business and not a college dorm room, the business case will always win out.

Debian is a fine distribution. But no company in their right mind would go through a migration just so you can install the latest and greatest software via apt-get. You see, they've already got the software they need running on the system.

Debian - harder to support

[otisg]

I cannot speak about the IBM support, but I can speak about using a less main-stream Linux distro, such as Debian in a serious, commercial software development shop. What I found was that a lot of time was wasted on getting some of the more complex applications to work on it (e.g. Oracle 9i), while getting the same sw to run on something more 'standard', such as RedHat, was a bit easier. In fast-paced environments where every developer's day counts, this does matter. This experience is a bit over 1 year old, so maybe (hopefully!) things have changed since then.

Why dont

[kevin_conaway]

you focus on whats best for your company and ultimately your client by using the right tool for the right job instead of trying to hammer the proverbial square peg (Debian) into the round hole? Sorry to not really answer your question but hobbies and personal preference shouldnt take the place of a better solution (e.g. whatever distro of Linux IBM prefers for their hardware)

if it's just apt....

[levl289]

apt has been ported to RedHat.

I went through this same discussion at my company, as Debian is my preferred distro as well. The thing is, beyond the distribution scheme, I really don't get to experience the true differences between the distros, as I'm usually running an unstable release anyways.

The link above also documents creating an apt RPM repository - we did this at my company, and to be honest, 99.9% of my gripes with RedHat went away completely.

I'd suggest looking into apt for RPM, it fixes a lot of the problems, and doesn't introduce those posed by a totally new distro on your production boxes.

Re:if it's just apt....

[sydb]

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.

Debian + Commercial

[starling]

Wouldn't that result in some kind of explosion?

demo

[mr_burns]

I would say that what you want to to do is set up a technology demo. Put a server together doing a task using debian. The reasoning being that you have expertise in debian, so it reduces cost of the tech demo if you do and support what you know.

When it comes time to decide on an actual rollout they have to make a decision to go with a distro that they know is proven in their environment, or go with what IBM pitches.

But in either case, what you're doing is making the haters defend on two fronts: the vendors pushing for one linux and you pushing for another. With the debate being "which Linux" it stops being "why Linux". It's a win-win.

Go HP!

[Schreckgestalt]

Go HP, they support Debian.

PS: No, I am not an HP employee.

Let's use something unsupported.. that'll go over

[Kope]

Ok, I love Linux. I use it at work. I work in a really big, international company.

Here's my take . ..

If it's not supported/approved by IBM and you are dealing with IBM then find out what they support and use that.

Why?

Because 1) it's easier, and 2) you want to succeed.

Your job is not to move the organization. Your job is to make your boss look good. IBM is very very talented at making their customers look good at very reasonable prices. You will make your boss look better with IBM's willing help than by trying to fly it yourself.

Apt-get is nice and all, but frankly, support is nicer. If you don't understand that, btw, then you are not experienced enough to be making the decission on what to move forward with. I'm not saying this to be an ass . . . but simply because it's true. Moving them to Linux is smart, but moving them to something the hardware vendor doesn't support is stupid

RedHat is more appropriate

[tedhiltonhead]

Everybody get your fire-retardant suits on for the ensuing flamewar...

The core differences between distros are package management, the version of the kernel, and the version of libc. Debian might work fine for what you want it to do, but a subtle problem might occur that you didn't catch during testing, due to a version difference. I've found that shoehorning, as you mentioned, is generally a bad idea. Shoehorn too much, and your feet will hurt.

Given your conservative environment, I think RedHat's Enterprise Linux product line is more appropriate. RedHat can sell you a commercial support contract, and they promise software updates for 5 years. Also, future Linux admins are more likely to be familiar with RedHat, which avoids needing to learn Debian's quirks. Also, IBM or other commercial software (like Oracle) is more likely to be supported on RedHat.

IBM has helped us out...

[Howard Beale]

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.

Re:IBM has helped us out...

[buddha42]

Hey look a perfect example of why support can be so expensive. People like the parent waste a ton of IBM's time and money on what turns out to be a cock up on their end.

Conversley, if there's a bug in the default xfs setup in the default redhat kernel, IBM calls up redhat and says "fix it" and redhat says "sir yes sir I love you sir would you like coffe with that".

It doesnt get thrown onto some mailing list, argued about for a few days, crammed into somebodys bugzilla or wiki, opened and closed three times, moved catagories, sit through a developer moving appartments, ignored by an irc channel with 60 idling people, dissapear into usenet, etc.

99% of someone saying they "offer support" is just the fact they they have the balls to say "we're so sure this works we're prepared to accept the dent supporting it will make in our budget". For instance with redhat, the very fact that nearly all their customers can file a support request with them now, means that if they didn't have a damn good product, they would lose all their money to support costs. Plus, when there are genuine fixes to be made, they can use their margins to hire full time programs to fix exactly what their customers need fixed pronto... not when some package maintainer gets around to it. You'll notice this is why a metric fuckton of open source projects have @redhat.com email accounts on their credits page. You'll also notice that redhat's commitment to the GPL is near debian like, they even buy other software products and gpl them. When you're paying redhat to support your linux, you're actually in a large part paying them to improve linux to a point where it needs less support.

I didn't mean to turn this into redhat praising, but merely to counter the insane, annoying, and far far to prevalant attitude around here that redhat is "screwing" anybody with their pay model or "turning their backs on the community". If anything paying for redhat is the easiest way I can think of to support linux development (especially the kernel).

Distro fights

[Anonymous Coward]

I've had the same conversation in my workplace, when deciding upon a distro to standerise on. It was a tossup between SuSE and Debian.

It eventually boiled down to a single point: SuSE had commercial backing from Novell. Debian is purely a community-maintained distro. If we built a server for a customer, and then that customer decided they wanted to buy support for it, the only safe answer was to use SuSE or Redhat... and frankly, none of us (including the management) liked Redhat a whole lot.

At the end of the day, you need to ask yourself a few questions:

1) Are you happy supporting %DISTRO linux?
2) Are your management types going to be happy with it?
3) Are your customers going to be content with it?
4) Is it compatible with commercial packages? (Really important... although you might be able to shoehorn say, Chilisoft onto Debian, do you really wanna do that across a couple of hundred servers, and then end being responsable for manual updates or whatever?)

Easy answer...

[LnxAddct]

In all seriousness, go with Red Hat, you won't regret it. They have the best support I've ever had to deal with and their enterprise line is the most consistent, stable, and feature filled distro that I've seen for the enterprise. I use Debian on personal servers, and while it's a great distro, and Debian stable is *extremely* stable, it is not anymore stable then Red Hat. Also, most enterprise applications are geared towards Red Hat. Alien is a nice utility, but sometimes craps out on me. You'll have no trouble finding RPMs of any major application on linux. Also, I love apt-get as much as you do, but yum is great, up2date is nice(although I rarely use it), and apt for rpm is awesome, although I'm not sure what its like on RH's servers, i've only used it on Fedora. Apt-get should not be a major point in your decision considering that once a server is up and running, you should rarely ever have to install or modify many things (other then security update, which RH handles nicely). IBM can't support Debian's repositories anyway because they have no clue what is in them and they have no jurisdiction over their distribution. Just spend the money on a good corporate server and I assure you that you won't regret it. It will also keep the higher ups happy, and if the shit ever hits the fan you can just toss the problem to Red Hat, who are btw very good and very quick at solving damn near any problem in the world.
Regards,
Steve

sandbox it

[Chuck Bucket]

make a sandbox running Deb on your network to start showing them what it can do. this is what I did at my work, and it worked. Currently CVS and the Build machine are running my Linux distro of choice; Gentoo, for mainly the same reasons you mention.

RHCE's aren't going to do what we can do with *our* distro's, it's more than just LInux to us.

CB

Why?

[Mullen]

So, you need to ask these questions to yourself and your co-workers:

If you have a stable working enviroment, why change?
Is this move going to be cost effective?
Is the distro I use going to be the proper one?
Why am I really using this distro? If you say, because it is the one I use at home, then you need stop this project right in its tracks.
How easy is it to manage this distro in my enviroment. Running "apt-get upgrade" on 500 servers is not do-able.
Is there proper management software out there for my distro/platform of choice?
Does my software I need even run on my distro/platform of choice?
What about support for my software on my distro/platform of choice?
Can I keep my system software in sync across all servers?
Can I easily manage the distro install process?
Can I trim down the install time?
Can I make the install process automated?

These are just the basic questions you need ask. Don't get stuck on one distro. Be flexable and look around. Redhat or Gentoo or something might be better choices.

Notes from a former IBM employee.

[Yaztromo]

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.

Never thought I might say this...

[diggem]

Stick with the supported platforms, son. Dink around with your favorite distro on your own box(es). I've gone one dedicated FreeBSD 5.1 box and one dual boot windows/Debian testing box. I wouldn't think of pushing Debian branded linux in favor of something like RedHat. With RedHat or SuSE you've got a substantial corporation behind you. Not just the distros but the companies who support those platforms as well.

There's plenty of help on the internet at large, but they arent paid to have an answer to you in any amount of time. They don't even have to answer your questions at all. In fact they could simply call you a tart and a fop and go frig yourself or something strange like that instead.

Evangelize Linux, to be sure. But stick with what's supported. You'd rather have IBM or RedHat to point a finger at when it doesn't work rather than sitting on your thumbs and trying to explain to your boss once again why Debian was the superior choice.

Shoehorning

[ceswiedler]

The fact that you're talking about "shoehorning" Debian in, using "anecdotal evidence that most of it can be persuaded to work" should answer your question.

This isn't a PHB issue, either. Anyone with a real production system should be scared off by language like that.

what do you mean?

[dh003i]

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.

Simple question

[joke-boy]

Say for the sake of argument that you talked them into it. And say that a week later, you decided to quit. How screwed would your company be, in terms of maintaining the solution you implemented? If the answer is "not at all", then your proposal is a fine thing. If your answer is anything else, then it's a bad idea.

Doing something like this is just like trying to use Perl or Python (or Java or whatever) in an all-C/C++ shop for the first time. It may be the best solution for the problem you happen to be solving. But if the company doesn't consciously maintain a knowledge base in the "new" technology, any of the new work is essentially dead once the author leaves. Same thing applies to a new OS, a new third-party app, or whatever.

The best technology solutions are maintainable, extendable, and reusable. And the most common error is to overlook maintainability.

We've Actually Done It

[DaGoodBoy]

We have had a government contract that required Oracle 8i for odd reasons. Debian still has available the older libc versions needed for Oracle 8i. I don't if any current versions of RHEL or SLES support 8i, but I know Debian + the older 1.1.8 JDK allowed the Oracle installer to run and work with minimal shoe-horning.

The other Debian box we built for this application was for running Tomcat with the Sun JDK pushing a web-based reporting tool. We were able to demonstrate how Debian supported removing all unrelated packages (including compilers) and lowered the security profile lower than their Solaris boxes. (They still used telnet, God help them) The demonstration worked and the server is running Debian in production on the [redacted] government network.

Don't push it. We recommend Debian because of access to the build/distribution system and the ability to craft custom loads for specific purposes (point-of-sale, thin client, rich client, etc.). Controlling the build/distribution environment is a bigger issue than many people realize. But we really support anything because after a certain point, Linux is just Linux.

Comment on DebianPlanet about how we do it

We use it in our business and support it for our customers. No problems here! Go Debian!

shoe horning is part of the problem

[Anonymous Coward]

The reasons you cite for using Debian are contradicted by your stated approach. The reason that apt-get and dpkg are strong is the features they have vs rpm--using alien squanders any advantage you may have gained by going with .deb .

You find yourself using terms like shoe-horn, this should be an indication to you that the shoe doesn't fit.

I have done exactly what you want to do

[digidave]

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.

Re:I can't agree with you.

[wobblie]

You could not be more wrong. Production environments require stability, period - not the latest glitz. Most Sun shops are using Solaris 8 - it's ancient. Most windows shops are using Windows 2000. Conservative and stable is debian's strength. The reason Red Hat is such a mess is because they keep changing shit, and the wrong shit into the bargain. Worse yet, they put "enhancements" and bug fixes into up2date, which is in my opinion a big no no. I've had up2date break systems more often than update them. You point was?

Please contact your IBM sales rep

[metamatic]

Many of us inside IBM would like to see at least one free distribution supported. However, IBM won't support Debian unless there's customer demand. You're a customer, so demand it. Keep demanding it.

Except Debian is only REAL OSS

[mabhatter654]

The article has a GREAT point...there's no reason that companies shouldn't persuade a large company like IBM to add Debian to it's supported list...

It's truely free and fully open source, support is just about as good as Red Hat or Suse [again unless you're willing to paybig bucks], forward and backward releases are supported fully...no pressure to upgrade on a company's timetable, and software compatiblity is of the highest level... In a nutshell Debian IS Linux!

What's needed in the general OSS movement is to get more corperate interest in the grassroots OSS movements... Personally, I'm a Suse fan...because they have some great IBM hardware ports [like iSeries/AS400!] but realistically, distros like Gentoo and Debian are the future of software...companies like RH & Suse are attempts to strap "traditonal" lock-in software business to OSS/Linux... they are bound to fail...and leave you holding the bag. The beauty of Gentoo and Debian is that anybody can bolt anything they want on to the very stable bases...and when the base changes it's easy to work the changes into your custom software...they are DESIGNED to do just what most companies need!!!

As far as stability and compatibility, isn't it an open joke that the current version of Debian Stable is pushing 3 years old...I'd call that a pretty reliable standard base...better than ANY of the corperate Linuii.

Keep the Debian all Open and you're fine

[bADlOGIN]

As soon as you have a problem, you get the following conflicting and impossible solutions:

Debian Philosophy says: "Just recompile your app from source"

Commercial interests says: "Just use a supported distribution for our application"

The best thing you can do is keep the Debian box all stuff that complies with the Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG) and you'll be fine. If you need something that's no in Stable or not a late enough version in Stable, check out http://backports.org for expanded/updated packages. My last job used an old dual proc P3 running Woody to host our development "all-in-wonder" box - CVS, Bugzilla, CVSZilla, Wikki, development intranet web pages and some supporting tools. We used an rsync via ssh to a Solaris box w/ tape for nightly backups. It worked like a champ for a small team (4 devs, 1 manager & an occasional tester) without blinking. I'm sure would have scaled up at least 5 times that before the hardware we were running it on became the bottleneck.

Why try for Debian? You will fail.

[Saeed al-Sahaf]

Why try for Debian? You will fail. But you **MAY** win with Red Hat, and then move to Debian LATER.

Re:Why try for Debian? You will fail.

[jdreed1024]

Why will he fail? Assuming it's linux on intel hardware, there really isn't a huge amount of difference between distributions.

Um, no, Not even a little bit. It doesn't matter if you think Debian is the greatest thing in the world, or something you found at the bottom of your garbage can, there's one key difference.

Imagine some updated package broke all your applications. And your quarterly statements are due tomorrow. And the CEO is touring your server farm. And the planets are aligned infavorably. And it's Friday the 13th. Let me show two different scenarios:

Employee: Dear Redhat, your latest package broke our applications. Please fix it.
Redhat: Um, ok, we're looking into it.
Boss: What's going on?
Employee: I've reported the issue and taken the action item to follow up with Red Hat. They're working on it.
Boss: Carry on.
Employee: Um, look harder please, remember we're paying you all this money for Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
Redhat: Ah, ok, I think we've found the problem. We'll try out a bug fix and get back to you.
Boss: Well, is it fixed yet?
Employee: Not yet, but Redhat says they believe they've solved the problem.
CEO: What's going on here?!
Boss: Well sir, we ran into an issue with our latest upgrade, but the vendor is on it, and we'll make sure they get us the fix.
CEO: Good work. Carry on.
Redhat: Here's an updated RPM, try this.
Employee: Hey, that worked, great.

And the alternative:

Employee: Dear debian-users@lists.debian.org, the latest package broke our application. Can you fix it?
Random Dude 1: Uh, no, but you can. That's the beauty of Open Source.
Employee: But I don't really know much about kernel hacking so I...
Random Dude 2: Look, if you don't like it, maybe you should go back to Windows.
Employee: Hey, I like Linux, I'm just not in a position to track down this kernel panic that happens whenever I...
Random Dude 3: You get what you pay for, people are doing this for free.
RMS: The HURD kernel doesn't have this problem.
Employee: What's the HURD?
Ken Brown: The HURD is a stolen copy of SCO UNIX. Duh.
Boss: So, is it fixed yet?
Employee: No, but I'm learning about ideology and wanking.
Boss: Did you just say wanking? And why aren't you following up with the vendor?
Employee: Well, there's not really a vendor so much as a bunch of guys talking about whether or not it should be called GNU/Linux.
CEO: What's this about there not being a vendor?
Boss: I don't know sir, I certainly didn't approve this.
CEO: Well, who installed software without a support contact.
Employee: I did, sir.
CEO; Tell me, employee, can you say 'Would you like fries with that?'
Employee: I can.
CEO: Good. You'll need it.

Re:Why try for Debian? You will fail.

[dbIII]

Um, look harder please, remember we're paying you all this money for Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
Redhat: Ah, ok, I think we've found the problem. We'll try out a bug fix and get back to you.

This fantasy is brought to you by someone that has had little to do with software vendors.

I myself have had to wait SEVEN MONTHS for a single line of code to be fixed in a piece of geophysical software with enormous subscription fees and not a large pool of customers (ie. we are a major chunk of their income) - that is after seven months after I pointed out that the two output variables should be zero so that the software could plot out charts. The entire piece of software was designed to generate and output charts, but it was broken in a way that meant it took another twenty minutes per plot (third party GUI software, plus someone to trim the charts) for around fifteen plots a day for seven months before a single line of code (which was printing some variables to a file as ASCII) was fixed.

There are plenty of other stories like this, everywhere.

You are as unlikely to get sacked for using debian as you are for using linux in the first place.

I'm just not in a position to track down this kernel panic that happens whenever

But you are - you have no business using any breed of *nix in a production environment is you cannot do a kernel upgrade - a solaris admin that hasn't installed a patch is the a work experience guy. If it needs redhat libraries you can use them on whatever breed of intell linux it is, and often on other platforms as well. Even gnome, initially written with no thought of portablility in mind, happily compiles on Solaris - and here you are saying that something with the same kernel and libraries is too much of a risk?

Re:Why try for Debian? You will fail.

[Minwee]

Or...

Employee: Um, look harder please, remember we're paying you all this money for [Operating System]
[Any Vendor At All]: Ah, ok, I think we've found the problem. You're running software we don't support. Now go fix it yourself and stop bothering me.

How about this instead?

CEO: What's going on here?
Employee: I unwisely installed a new package on our production server without testing it first. I'm just in the process of removing it and going back to the old version. Everything should be back up by the end of our maintenance window.
CEO: Good. Let me know how it turns out and why this won't happen again.

Paying a lot of money for a support contract is no excuse for being careless. If your server absolutely has to be running tomorrow, then keep it running. I don't care if you use a cold spare, restore from a backup or try to fix it yourself, but I do know that if I told my boss that I couldn't be bothered to find a solution and was sitting in my butt waiting for a vendor to fix it for me instead, I would soon be out of a job. And I would have earned it.

Being a sysadmin means you always have a backup plan. Having someone to point your finger at does _not_ constitute a plan.

No, Debian is the ultimate conservative distro

[kjj]

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.

Re:No, Debian is the ultimate conservative distro

[chrisopherpace]

apt-get install kernel-image-2.4.18-1-586tsc 2.2 is the default, but specifying bf24 on the boot prompt will install 2.4. And yes, still using the stable tree. Debian isn't *THAT* out of date, I use stable on my servers, and testing on my workstations.

Not always the way it is

[cbreaker]

I work in a Windows shop. Well, okay, we have a whole IBM AIX side of the company that runs the Peoplesoft stuff, but for all the rest of the company it's Windows. We tie peoplesoft and pretty much everything else you can think of into Active Directory. It works.

But there's places where I can see Linux boxes excelling where other software falls short. One of them is our Spam "solution." It was very expensive and it doesn't work for shit. 80% accuracy, maybe. Lots of false positives. In 2002, it was really cool shit. But that's the problem - things change fast when it comes to certain things like Spam and when you pay $50,000 for a license to filter spam you don't want to upgrade or change softwares every six months.

Enter OSS - My (*gasp*) spamassassin+dspam+amavisd-new is easily doing 99.99% of the spam with extremely low occurances of false positives. Is it supported? Nope. Wait, yes it is. I SUPPORT IT.

Some companies are all about support, support, support. They don't trust their IT staff, they consider them expendable. I don't work at a company like that. They put weight in our abilities. If you can make a good case for an OSS solution, one where you can support it yourself and train others, it will be seriously considered. Apparently there's other companies like this too, since a lot of places are running Linux now and not all of them use RedHat Enterprise.

Notes from a current IBM employee who uses Debian

[swillden]

If you get a chance to talk to anyone from IBM, make it clear that you'd really like Debian support. Then use a supported distro. Really, this is the best advice you're going to get.

I like and use Debian on all of my computers, including my company-provided T40 laptop. I do it because I like it and because I'm willing to put in the extra time it takes to make it all work. And it does all work, including DB/2 and Websphere and Lotus Notes and bunches of other stuff.

But I still wouldn't recommend it.

Why do I do it then? When I started using Linux on my laptop (my primary workstation), the only officially-supported desktop operating system in IBM was Windows 95. Given that there was no official IBM Linux distro, I picked what I liked, and I struggled through all of the issues to make it work. I stick with Debian because (a) I like it and (b) it's not clear that migrating to the internal (Red Hat) distro would save me any time, 'cause my system works great.

However, if I had to install a new Linux image for work right now (instead of just migrating my old Debian image), I'd go with the standard build, mainly so that I'd get support, and so that every non-Free app I have to install wouldn't be such a pain. I've always run unsupported desktops ever since I worked at IBM -- the OS/2 load they gave me when I started back in 1997 lasted two days -- but it has of late become more and more painful in direct proportion to the amount of internal Linux support, ironically enough.

So my current opinion is that if you're running commercial software on production systems, you should use a supported distro, which means Red Hat or SuSe, pretty much -- and not just with IBM software. Those are the platforms that are supported by all the vendors of commercial Linux software.

Support

[Gleef]

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.

Debian is the most _stable_ distro.

[Confessed Geek]

Nope. Point out the very most important fact: Debian Can Not go out of buisness, change its buisness model or decide it wants to charge you 1K for your next upgrade. It also has about 1.5 - 2 years between releases so you don't have to constantly play catchup. It is PERFECT for a conservative environment.

What have you been smoking?

[hopethishelps]

Employee: Dear Redhat, your latest package broke our applications. Please fix it. Redhat: Um, ok, we're looking into it. (...) Employee: Um, look harder please, remember we're paying you all this money for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Redhat: Ah, ok, I think we've found the problem. We'll try out a bug fix and get back to you.

Either you live in some alternate universe in which vendors work on bugs for individual users, or you've been smoking some exceptionally strong weed. Or, possibly, you don't have a clue.

I don't believe in alternate universes.

15+ debian servers for 4+ years

[RisingSon]

...and no problems. Our entire group is all debian. Our (10) desktops are unstable. We've ran into maybe 3 or 4 issues with unstable over the last 4 years, but they were all easly resolved. Servers are currently woody (with a few backports). We haven't run into any "you're not running Redhat?" problems.

We're mostly developers, which is probably what made us attracted to debian in the first place. We have a developer in our group that wears the sysadmin hat (ducks) but he is both a black-belt problem solver and a good admin. I enjoy the anal-retentiveness of debian-devel and its great to see so many minds focusing on a project.

We put a lot of faith into Debian. Our servers run all of our models and our execution platform, which trades enough securities every day to put my face on MSNBC if something goes horribly wrong.

We do use 3rd party libraries in our software development, and as far as they know, we're running Redhat like we're supposed to. I have yet to have a conversation with someone in tech support that is really a Linux guru. I'm not going to claim to be one, either; however, the code I support is only used by my group. The people I usually talk to in support are usually developers, too. If our group had to support 3rd party executables, then Debian probably wouldn't work so smoothly.

All these negative comments about Debian have suprised me a little bit. Perhaps I don't read /. often enough. And no, I probably wouldn't recommend Debian to any of my peers outside my company. But I don't think "Using Debian in Commercial Environments?" is a ridiculous question, either. It can work without a headache for a troop of coder monkeys writing in-house software.