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EWeek Details Linux to Windows Migration
nakhla writes "Even though we always hear stories of companies migrating from Windows to Linux, eWeek is running a story describing several companies that have migrated from Linux to Windows. Among their reasons are inadequate support options, application compatibility issues, stability problems, and the added cost of troubleshooting."
I think the biggest problem is microsoft... They purposely try to lock everyone in by making everything as incompatible as they can. Then they go and release half ass tools that have half the functionality to make it appear as though they care.... where is the open standard docs for winfs... now that ntfs support for linux has reached a useable level they need to hurry up and lock us in again.... utter bullshit
Sometimes the majority just means all the morons are on the same side.
Actaully I never said I couldn't imagine a Linux solution that didn't exceed the performance of a Windows solution. Both operating systems are far enough along that there really isn't a difference in how well they utilize system resources (well, maybe Disk I/O a little, but that's it). I prefer Linux because of the flexability it gives me. Such as when we deployed a mail filtering system for a school district we work with. It was an old PowerPC G3 that they hadd sitting around, 300 MHz and 128 MB or RAM. It has an uptime of over 400 days and handles over 20,000 messages a day.
But anyway, I stick by the fact that I can't imagine a properly deployed Linux solution underperforming a properly deployed Windows solution.
From the article: There was a limit set up within the program that said you can only order 'x' amount of products within one transaction," Roy said. "When one of our guests went over the limit, it crashed the whole store. We then had to manually identify the erroneous credit card charges.
Ok, more a comment on the reporting than the situation, if the store crashed because of this error, surely it's a software issue, i.e. the e-commerce package they were using borked. I would imagine (read like to think), the underlying OS was ok.
For me it's a bad example, they could have well installed on a Windows base and had the same problem.
until I find /usr/bin/msword in my $PATH, that's a reasonable thing to do.
Cretin - a powerful and flexible CD reencoder
Remember this from 2003?
"Microsoft has seen a 300 percent increase in the last three months of the number of Web sites hosted on its recently launched Windows Server 2003 software--with a considerable amount of the new business representing migrations from Linux, according to a survey published this week."
http://www.wininsider.com/news/?5483
Then a few months later it turned out they'd simply paid a domain holding company to hold domains on Windows server. A few months later they switched back.
Sounds like they've paid a few companies to switch for the PR value. It's difficult to imagine that companies switch, then profess their previous bad decision to the press.
Actually, that is the issue ... If dont dont have any good Ford dealer around, you'll go for the Toyota. In most case the important difference is the human factor and not the technology. Technology by itself is never the solution ...
So : start teaching Linux to everyone and you'll get the needed support in about 5 years ...
I worked at Amazon in 2001 when Amazon switched from Solaris/Tru64UNIX to HP Netservers running Redhat Linux, if Amazon hadn't done this the company probably would have gone out of business as the IT costs of the proprietary UNIX systems were too high. Were there problems with this transition? Well yes there were, we used to joke that the website for HP's technical support for RedHat on the Netservers was www.google.com, because God knows that HP was clueless about Linux at the time. But as time passed we killed off a lot of the bugs that the system had and ended up with a very reliable infrastructure.
Linux support is getting better and better thanks to companies such as IBM and Silicon Graphics who realize that if they want to compete in the Linux market that they have to sell real Linux solutions, they can't, as Sun does, and HPaq did, tell customers that they have Linux solutions available and then attempt to push them onto systems running their proprietary versions of UNIX, bait and switch just won't cut it.
For now Linux is cutting into sales of the proprietary UNIXes just as Microsoft Windows NT started to do 10 years ago, but as Microsoft continues to get bad press over security flaws in their OS, and as ship dates for Longhorn continue to slip, and as the price of Microsoft operating systems inches ever skyward while the licensing terms become ever more onerous (and as my sentences continue to run-on...) Linux is going to start taking over a lot of the server space that Microsoft currently owns. IT is becoming a commodity, if two IT vendors can both make the case that their product is going to work for a company then the vendor with the lower cost is going to get the contract, the days of "no one ever got fired for buying IBM" which in the 90s became "no one ever got fired for buying Microsoft" are coming to a close. TCA is going to win the day and customers aren't going to care if the system is Longhorn, UNIX, Linux or the new BlargoVAX 666.
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
So, our favorite supplier of vagisil chose a ISV who went out of business, switched to another ISV who didn't know how to support their old software, and is a model of how to run a business with Microsoft software.
Our second (and final) example of all the swarms of companies running away from Linux comes from Mountain High Ski Resort.
The people at Mountain High are a prime example of people who really should be using Microsoft Software. Some of the more classic examples include:
- "The Linux system could not handle the layers of information needed for internal control of the resort."
- Roy also had concerns about the security and reliability of the system [that had no budget for setup].
- "There was a limit set up within the program that said you can only order 'x' amount of products within one transaction," Roy said. "When one of our guests went over the limit, it crashed the whole store. We then had to manually identify the erroneous credit card charges."
Now, that last item is the kicker. I don't care if you are running your site on $500,000 IBM servers-of-doom running NASA tested software that is Guaranteed 100% bug-free. If you design any kind of commerce site which not only crashes when someone orders too many products, but brings down the rest of the server AND makes erroneous credit card charges to multiple accounts.... You need to behead your programming team.And now, one final bit of the article put here just for humor:
Karma: SELECT `karma` FROM `users` WHERE `userid`=138474;
Actually, he is lying. From the article:
..."
"...to help migrate its Web sites to Windows Server 2003, Internet Information Services 6.0 and SQL Server 2000.
The move to Windows was "seamless and efficient. The costs to move were minimal as compared with the alternative of developing a new set of sites," Case said. "We have not had an outage in **two years**, where
Sorry, it's 2004? Windows 2003? 2 years uptime?
You've hit on something here. The only way I could possibly learn Linux is through... my Cygwin environment at work, and my OS X Powerbook. For all the comments I've read on Slashdot regarding Linux training, the "right way to do things", and arguments about which distro is the best to learn... it seems like there's just confusion about what constitutes learning and 'when you know enough'. That's what certifications supposedly are for, but I think mere mention of the letters "MSCE" sends chills down developers' spines. I would like to think I'm learning, but knowing I could always fall back on the GUI sorta makes me feel like I'm "cheating" :-)
If Linux is going to take off, this type of situation is just one of those 'baby steps' that Linux will have to go through while the technological community-at-large creates some sort of structure for Linux. In the meantime, this article was an interesting anecdote, but I'm pretty sure more than a few companies are quite happy with their Windows-to-Linux move.
Now to try to get Linux SysAdmin certification... wait...
-Rob
Marriage doesn't have to suck!
"..this is EWeek. All the shills that are fit to print (except S.V. Nichols, he's a cool dude)."
Didn't Enderlee write for eweek? I
Of course ZDNET has already picked this up and is featuring it on the front page.
MS sure knows how to manipulate the press you have to give them that.
Speaking of which Darl recently said that online magazines would soon start to tell the SCO side of the story. I would expect Eweek and ZDNET to start those any day now.
evil is as evil does
COBOL actually has a place... What I can do in 200 lines of COBOL to run through and process business data would take 2000 in Java or C++... its absolutely insane. COBOL has some good features, its switch implementation is just incredibly cool.
The lack of local variables and the necessity to define exact sizes of all variables along with type is a pain... But on the other hand, that explicit declaration can help in data validation. A product code thats 3 letters, 3 numbers? AAA999 as your picture clause, and the system simply will not accept anything else, and you dont' have to write any validation code to enforce that. I'd still kill to get local variables however. But when I do cobol, I mark the globals pretending to be locals with a comment for what routine they go with so I know to not use them elsewhere. Would be useful to actually have them in the routine, but meh...
True, and one of the switch-backers didn't understand that because one particular application running on Linux fails, then the whole Linux idea fails.
"There was a limit set up within the program that said you can only order 'x' amount of products within one transaction," Roy said.
There was a limit set up within Windows that said you can only leave your computer running for 49.7 days straight... This isn't better, but it ain't worse either.
After 3 days without programming, life becomes meaningless
- The Tao of Programming
Hrm...Well, I'm the low, low man Jr. Linux/BSD admin. You know, the guy that does the "monitoring" adding of accounts and is permanently on call.....yeah, I'm that guy. I'm making around 50 so maybe I am right on track. Still, I think my company would spend a lot more on licensing just for the sheer amount of machines we have out there in the datacenter.
Be Safe! Sleep with a Marine. Semper Fi!
This is going to sound really dumb (I'm posting as AC because I don't have an account, not to save myself from embarassment)... but at home I run a little Apache server off my main Windows box (yeah, I know. Bad idea. But my second machine is a sometimes-on media machine I'm working on), and for me it's a lot easier to use than Linux, mostly because of the troubles of learning Linux + learning Apache. A long while back I tried to shift the webserver to the little computer (before the media project I'm doing now)... installed Red Hat, tried to get Apache to work, kept getting access errors... then totally destroyed the system by messing with the folder permissions program (chmod? it's been awhile...).
But in Windows, I just set up a directory wherever I want, use .htaccess, and start the service.
Personally, after so many stupid errors on my part using Red Hat a few months ago, then trying to install dual-boot (existing)W2K with Gentoo and Yoper (one the options confused me and I knew I was going to screw something up just by editing the USE= flag, the other I installed LILO without reading anything on it, screwing up the boot and.. egh. basically instead of RTFM I just assumed Yoper would try to, y'know, *help* me a little), I'm happy enough using Cygwin. I don't do that much with Linux programs anyway other than a few little quickie things on Sourceforge like cack, or playing with Knoppix derivatives, so it suits me fine.
{sigh} yes, but in the real world of interoffice politics and internecine warfare, admitting that you need help is an admission of defeat, which is considered a presumption of incompetence. A bad thing when you're trying to keep your underlings from taking your job.
The problem is that these questions need to be answered up front, before a line of code is compiled. Proper project planning involves one simple determination: can we handle it ourselves, or will we need additional expertise? If the latter, then time and money needs to be budgeted to find a competent consultant (or new employee(s)) to handle the work. Sounds like the people in the article just jumped in with both feet, burned a few toes off, and only then did they decide to do a proper job. Either way, the problem wasn't Windows or Linux, it was lack of sound project management.
But again, from the political angle, when have you ever known a project manager responsible for a failed program to say, "Yeppers. I screwed up bigtime. No doubt about it." No, what happens is that fingers are pointed in random directions and blame is slung by the handful until enough of it sticks to something that upper management will accept as an adequate scapegoat. Happens all the time.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
The database was limited to the platform, as I understand it. The ISP/Host used Linux. Thus, any "enterprise" database would have to be one available on Linux. Oracle is not, now, the only database available for linux. It wasn't the only database available in 1995 either.
There's a deeper piece of FUD there: Oracle on Linux "about 9 years ago"? Oracle was not available on Linux 9 years ago (that being 1995.) The SCO version of Oracle could be hacked into working under linux using ibcs, but it's far from optimal or stable. The first native versions of Oracle started rolling out for linux in the '97-'98 time frame.
(The article leaves more questions than answers.)
This sort of thing doesn't surprise me at all; it's a normal part of the growth path for tech companies. At the beginning, you're swimming in techies and the company's choices reflect it. Since they have smart people but (usually) not a lot of cash, you choose products based on a combination of price and technical merit. Linux (or *BSD) on PCs usually works quite nicely. They develop innovative in-house solutions for the problems that they face. The company is successful because they're faster and more flexible and generally *smarter* then the competition.
The problem is that eventually the company will grow up. The smart people will leave for new startups, and the management will be replaced with bean-counters. The technical staff will become mostly middle-rung support people without a lot of design experience, and the cool, fast, cost-effective stuff that the founders build won't make any sense to the new folks. They won't know how to manage it, and the very concept doesn't fit into their mental model. If it breaks, who do they call for support?
At this point, the company no longer sees itself as "cutting edge" or even particularly high-tech. It sees itself as part of a stable industry and starts trying to look just like all of the other companies in the industry.
So what happens? They end up swapping all of those "hard to use" Linux systems for a big pile of Windows (or Sun, or maybe AIX) boxes, and they pay a fleet of consultants to keep things running. They pay Oracle or Peoplesoft or SAP or someone $5m for software to manage their business, and then they spend another $15m on hardware and consultants to get it up and running. And, generally, it takes them years to actually get it to work as well as the home-grown stuff that it replaced. But hey, they have someone to yell at, so they're happy.
It doesn't always go like this, but I've seen enough of it.
So, don't take Linux to Windows migrations as any sort of statement about Linux. Read them as a statement about the company doing the transition, and how they view their relationship with technology.
If people go in, guns blazing, looking for a cheap buck and not considering the issues, then yes, they will get burned, and go crying back to Microsoft.
... the ones who told you they could program and then produced this sort of crap.
In one of the examples, they said that the system was brought down because there was a hard-coded limit on the number of purchases you could make in 1 transaction. I fail to see what this has to do with Linux. I would be blaming the idiots who designed the site this way
It's unfortunate that these idiots' stories will be the ones picked up my Microsoft & Sun in their battle against Linux. Hopefully the rest of the world have the sense to spot the fools amongst the professionals.
A few iptable rules to limit who can login via SSH and you can forget about rebooting....
until somebody discovers a vuln in qmail, or mime-defang, or qmail-scanner, or whatever, that can be used to provide a low-priv remote shell. And, it's not like you'll always be able to predict it.
Good security is like an onion - you layer it. You start with a good, stiff firewall. You use secure software, run with the least priveledge possible. File permissions are carefully attended to. You remove un-needed software, maybe de-install the compiler. You make sure your kernel is up to date and PATCHED. You have numerous backups going back in time at least a few weeks, off-site if it's important.
When you run a kernel with known vulnerabilities, you effectively remove one layer of the onion, making it that much easier to be compromised.
True, if there are NO kernel updates, you don't need to reboot. But, there has been at least one kernel issue within the last 400 days...
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
I respect the decision of the two companies (not several as claimed by the submitting astroturfer) to switch back to windows, but there are some huge flaws in both decisions that make me wonder wehther this is not some piece of MS funded anti-Linus FUD.
Firstly, the first company, in NY, claimed, that they switched to Linux and Orcale nine years ago. I'm not sure about the timing but Orcale had, AFAIK, no Linux offerings that long ago. It's possible that the database backend came about when Orcale offered it's first Linux versions back in 2000, around 4 years ago.
If the guy was worried about the lack of Linux know-how in his company, why on earth did they even go for Linux that far back, in 1995, when Linux was nowhere near as stable and powerful as it is now? Why didn't the guy look for Linux expertise in the mean time. You cannot tell me, that by 2002, when they started their move back to Windows, that profeesional services, both for Linux (Red Hat, SuSE pro services) and Oracle (who by 2002 had moved their entire development over to Linux and for which there would have been mountains of support available). By 2002 there were multiple DB's available, MySQL had started becoming very powerful, PostgreSQL was there, and DB2 had been migrated by IBM which is no slouch when it comes to support and services.
To me it sounds like an extremely incompetent manager who went with the ASP hype in 1999 and 2000 only to get burned when it collapsed, instead of recognising, as he should have and as a competent manager would have, that the ASP model involves big risks. Why on earth didn't he just look for another one with better financials (did he even bother to look how well the ASP was doing?)
Pathetic.
Secondly, in the case of the second company, it sounds similar or even worse. The fact that their system (inhouse aparently) had major design issues. "Not designed to support x transactions per second in the programme" sounds suspiciously like a scalability problem that could have been either fixed by a reasonable programmer, or by a distributed system.
His concerns about security is pure and utter FUD given that 2002 was the year of Nimda and Code Red. The fact that the system went down for a day points to slackers not taking into account failover solutions or backup systems.
None of these desicisions say anything about Linux, but they do say a lot about the incompetence of managers and the willingness of certain so called IT news outlets to act as paid mouthpieces for a company in Redmond.
I have to be honest and say I'm not a huge fan of Linux in general. I recognize it's useful in some situations to be sure, but overall I'm not a big fan. Even further, I actually like Windows (Win2K and XP only, nothing before them!), independant of my feelings about Linux. I've had scant few problems since Win2K came around, yet I've actually had an unsettlingly high number of problems with Linux in various cases.
The only reason I say those things is so I can say what I'm about to say... This article struck me as a couple of Microsoft shills too. I wouldn't be at all surprised if we find out in a couple of days that these two companies were paid by MS to switch, probably had a large force of MS-supplied consultants to help, and that it wasn't as smooth as they claimed and their reasons for switching weren't the fault of Linux at all but of their own lack of expertise.
I cry foul very often when I think MS isn't being treated in a fair way (meaning when they get ragged on when I don't think they actually deserve it in a given instance). And I'll get on the faults I see in Linux just as fast, but it's got to be fair both ways, and this article strikes me as not being legit.
If a pion (n-) collides with a proton in the woods & noone is there to hear it, does lamdba decay into the source pa
Gee... its too bad to hear that their costs went up. Perhaps the solutions they deployed were not well thought out? It would certainly seem so from the inconsistencies mentioned in the article. Folks who say that they have been running a one year old OS for two years in production, folks who blame their web application's instability while performing inserts on the underlying OS-- these are not the folks I would hire to architect my system. Nor would I solicit their opinions if I wanted any advice on how to deploy a system.
Too many people think that Linux/FOSS is "magic pixie dust". It isn't. But it is not Linux that burned these "inovative" people. Their own mistakes did. This is an uncomfortable fact for any manager... they want someone to blame besides their department. Someone outside who can take it... someone like IBM or Microsoft. "You never get fired for buying IBM...Microsoft... CISCO..."
In the end, if the product fails or does not work as advertised, you just blame the vendor and it is accepted because "everyone else uses them". Linux is not "the standard", so you must take it in the pants if something goes wrong.
And that is the real reason why these folks went back to windows. They are now comfortable again, they can blame their failures on someone else and not take responsiblity for them. Their careers are now safe!
Where I work, we have replaced almost all of our servers with Linux. We run our own web-based custom enrollment and billing system on linux. When we started development, Microsoft used to bring us brownies every week. They kept trying to convince our CEO to go back to Microsoft-- going over the CIO's head. When they sat down and did the final cost comparison with our CEO and CIO-- they admitted they could not match our numbers and left. We have not had brownies since. Too bad, they were very good brownies. Microsoft spared no expense. I'm sure they were paid for by those people who went back to windows, as Microsoft is not a charity.
As for our company, we would have never been able to afford to develop our intranet application had it not been for the availibility of FOSS tools. But insourcing requires capable folks who take responsibility for their actions, and that is missing in the corporate world. Thus everything is outsourced to someone else- to spread the blame.
I call BOGUS. The fact that he pointed out an XP Pro "Desktop" that does a "heck of a lot more than e-mail processing" with "Servers just as long"; without acknowledging the fact that XP has only been out for 2 years[ish] and that EVERY SERVICE PACK REQUIRES A REBOOT.
Like I said, I call F R A U D.
This poster sounds like a high-school student that's really into his Boss's XP install.
Don't think that a small group of dedicated individuals can't change the world. It's the only thing that ever has.
True, if there are NO kernel updates, you don't need to reboot. But, there has been at least one kernel issue within the last 400 days...
If you had paid attention, you would have noticed that the exploit mentioned was x86 specific. The person with the 400+ day uptime mentioned earlier that they are using a PowerPC-based machine.
One of the few reasons I like running externally facing machines on a non-x86 based machine - does anyone bother writing exploits for PowerPC much less Alpha?
Off-topic, but... as a Linux lover who once upon a time drove M1A1 tanks for the US Army, I hate to think of smearing Linux that way. A better tank analogy would be the Israeli Merkava (nice innovative design) or better yet, the German Leopard II tank. We trained along the Germans with their Leopards, and they were so much better then our M1's, it was kind of .. demoralizing. Anyway, whenever I hear 'like an M1 tank' I think back to our fuel-gulping lemons.