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Australian Government Agency Moves Towards Linux
An anonymous reader writes "ZDNet Australia is reporting that Centrelink, the Australian government agency responsible for distributing social security payments, is investigating Novell's Open Enterprise Server as a method of consolidating huge chunks of its network. Centrelink's national manager is quoted as saying: "We have to look at remote access, virus protection, security. Linux has those capabilities but we have to assure our more senior executives that these boxes have the same level of security and protection as the commercial products""
Centrelink is actually the union of about half a dozen systems inherited from previous government agencies. Some of the systems run on mainframes, some on Novell, who knows what else. All of these systems don't really talk to each other well, and integration problems have been a nightmare for quite some time.
It'll be interesting to see precisely what they're planning to migrate to Linux.
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Everything Centrelink does is web based anyway. All they need are some mid end desktops running and firefox and they'd be set.
When I dealt with them I was sitting there thinking: Hmmm Internet Explorer under Windows 2000. Fairly expensive and a waste of a software license if you ask me. I also remember thinking that this department would be the ideal place for a large linux rollout simply because they have no need for standard (read: Microsoft centric) apps like word and excel because everything they do is Web server/client based with all the heavy stuff on the backend servers.
"And then I visited Wikipedia
Linux is a pretty common platform here at the Bureau of Met., but I guess that's always going to be the case in a scientific organisation. It's certainly not thought of as strange, though.
http://melbournephilosophy.com/
The UK plans to run it nuclear subs on Win 2000 http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/09/06/ams_goes_w indows_for_warships/
Please rtfa. They don't use Windows anyway.
All these 'WTF? Linux as secure as Windows? Hahahaha' comments are completely offtopic. If you actually read the article you'll find that the current systems are Novell, Solaris and Lotus based. Linux is the easy option for migration, and Microsoft is barely even in the running.
When i worked at Centrelink they were about to replace ibms z390 os with ibms linux solution.
They were also talking about replacing heaps of other legacy systems with linux solutions. I saw a few linux kernel developer/tester jobs pop up as well.
To all you fools bitching about Centrelinks service, six million Australians get bludge money 2-5% have problems, but please keep complaining about the FREE money that is given to you, there is a TONNE of private corporations bidding on the tenders that Centrelink is currently holding. If they succeed in securing them, then you'll have something to bitch about...
There are other examples of big Aussie Govt agencies going against the Redmond beast. I know for a fact that the NSW Govt is pushing open source/open standards software.
-- james
We're both correcting the parent post, but I'll just tighen up your response:
(Novell services, GroupWise, eDirectory, etc, etc, AND the SUSE Linux services, postfix, apache, use yast and all that).
The key change being "AND". There is no restriction on using both the traditional Linux services and the Novell offerings. The kernel is regular SuSe Linux, everything else works be it from Novell or all the SuSE stuff.
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