Slashdot Mirror
Where Is The Plug-and-Play Linux Office System?
cdlu writes "Where oh where is the plug-and-play Linux business computer? Robin Miller asks the question and makes the case for starting a business to sell a self-updating networked Linux system for small business. Any takers?" (NewsForge and Slashdot are both part of OSTG.)
... and they come pretty close, with the best installer in the market, and a very easy-to-use setup. Why is it that the snooty Linux gurus always pooh-pooh Linspire anyway?
On the other side of the coin:
Where is interop Linux/Windows groupware? You'd think that IBM would be all over this with Lotus Notes but there's nothing. I realize that you can get something to work with some duct tape and string but the out-of-the-box solution would complement OpenOffice well. It is one of the few things missing.
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
..and something that most of us have been doing for years, whether the customers know it or not.
I don't know about the rest of you, but I have stock systems that I go with, both hardware and software wise. I get a customer order, I already know which systems I'm going to use ( hell, I have ghost images of the damn things ). It's just a matter of what extra software packages they'll need.
There's another aspect of this, and one that people can't quite grasp: Customers want to feel special. I don't care how much they belly ache about wanting it fast and cheap and good ( heh ), they want to feel like they are your most important customer. On the opposite side, most IT contractors are cock-chokers, and will spend as little time on the customer as possible. You see the potential problems arising from this situation?
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
... then you don't need any security updates.
Really. Lots of business desktops don't need
full Internet access.
It's ironic that somebody who is trying to address one of linux biggest problems- user friendliness -is being flamed and compared to that very same product. I'm not saying the service is good or bad. I don't know. And neither do half of you, but we're associating it with Windows- a bad comparison to begin with -anyway. What's hugely ironic is that you have to pay for a service to get an open source product that user friendliness to begin with.
And for God sakes, people, you can turn the windows auto update manager off. If that's your biggest bitch, go whore yourself somewhere else.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
Most of the small business owners I speak are reluctant to migrate to Linux (or *BSD) because of the perceived lack of business oriented software. They are perfectly happy with the Linux offerings today when it comes to setting up things such as firewalls, print servers and backup mechanisms.
As a specific example, a small handful of these businesses run some very specialized sales tax tracking software. (Think stores that sell both taxable and tax-free goods.) Conceptually, the software is trivial. However, the software is so old that the minimum recommended operating system is DOS!
Let me be more clear. Sure they can run it in a DOS emulator on Linux. That's not the problem. What they want is "external support" for that particular configuration, and they don't have the time or the patience to chase down dozens of Google leads, whenever a problem comes up. They'd rather pay (and expense) for a dedicated vendor, but the market is too small to support one.
I have spoken to accountants who plan to move to OSX as soon as all of their accounting software gets ported over. I believe Peachtree has taken this step. I'm not sure about Quickbooks or some of the more specialized packages. If these companies sold Linux specific, supported, and certified editions, they would move.
They would even still move if you simply "repackaged" existing software for Linux and provided support for the Linux specific issues (and acted as a go-between for the other issues).
That said, I doubt businesses are looking for a zero-administration box. I sincerely doubt they want one that's administered remotely, unless this company was willing to assume the legal risks and obligations. If they break the box when you're trying to submit quarterly financials, will they pay the penalties?
Then update comes along. New configfile format that requires an update. New configfile also requires some configuration, like say. Your Ip number.
/* Hah! */
then you either update automatically, and miss that leftover "die" in the config, or you don't and reboot the machine.
in any case, it requires intervention, or you're off in the cold.
no, Gentoo , as good as it is, isn't the automagical solution to everything. please don't tout it as if it would be, all cases like this require an administrator to do it. A Good Linux in this case would be deploy once and wouldn't require updates for a Long Time.
It would be a small and specific set of packages, and only Just That. When the update comes along, an updater-tool migrates all changed configs. And all things
The plethora of alternatives that Debian, Gentoo, Fedora and others supply invites more complexity. keeping things simple means less work on updating and less administrator effort.
I didn't do this, now did I?
Call it Offix Linux.
Suns Java desktop system is like that. I would highly recommend that the sysadmin removes all references to the install cd or any other source other than his dedicated ftp server. That server better be locked down tight.
With that said, these will work with yast (the jds is based off os suse, as well as novells offering). The solutions are out there, but they are designed for the office only, and great care should be placed in testing the patches before they are posted on the server for the users to automatically download. Hell, that could be done with a cron job and a script.
Stop signs are only Suggestions
One thing about most main-stream Linux distros that has annoyed me a lot is that they don't seem to support dynamic DNS (which most corporate environments that I know of use). In particular, a parameter usually needs to be passed to the DHCP client to "send the hostname" (which allows the DHCP server to update the DNS records). This parameter is almost always off by default. On Redhat this is just annoying; you can turn it on fairly easily. On Ubuntu and some other Debian-based distros, this is a royal pain in the ass.
By comparison, Windows makes this very easy. Windows also doesn't insist on equating the hostname to localhost (i.e. putting hostname in the hosts file pointing to 127.0.0.1), which is very broken behaviour IMHO. Localhost = loopback = 127.0.0.1. Hostname = primary interface = some other IP. I understand the reasons why the distros do this, but there are adequate workarounds which should be used instead.
It's called the "stateless" computer.
/home. Think about knoppix.
e lessLi nux.pdf
Think about read-only OS. Think about local disk access just for the
Now imagine:
1. You buy PC with a ethernet card with PXE-or-similar-technology support and a blank harddrive.
2. You drive to work with PC in car.
3. You plug PC into local network.
4. The PC boots off of ethernet, loads kernel, initrd downloads parts of the OS needed to boot system.
5. You log into PC.
Completely plug-n-play.
Check it out.
http://people.redhat.com/~hp/stateless/Stat
This technology will make Windows administration look as obsolete as a single high school dropout running around with a handfull of windows 3.0 floppies in order to build a 300+ user network.
And it sucks ass. When you delete a message in email you can count to three before the screen updates. Very very poor responsiveness..... It is horridly slow, even on a dual processor G5. It lacks filters for email, and spellcheck is not through yet. Also you have to tell it which applications to open attachments with, no preconfiguration in this area at all.
Did I mention the horrible slowness of it yet? I keep hearing that java apps can be fast, but then something like this comes out and I thrown right back onto the "JAVA APPS SUCK" side of the fence.
music lover since 1969
Actually I have been thinking about an auto-update system of some sort for quite some time...
/etc/init.d/yum. This will be dependent on the set cron schedule on when to check and pull updates. This will also depend on the set "exclusions" in Fedora's yum settings.
To force myself to learn Python, I'm thinking of setting up a Python daemon that will listen for an "administrator" machine that pushes commands that a company's SysAd wants. For example, if that person has deployed Fedora machines as the main desktop for an office, the normal options for auto-updating are:
1. Start, by default
2. ssh into each machine (or run around the office) and login and "yum update" all the machines.
What I'm thinking is a daemon that listens for commands that an administrator might want to push. Not just updating, but any commands (have all machines download the main yum.conf or whatever other config). So each client listens, me as Admin types something like "command-push 'yum update'" and all clients start updating like crazy.
Stuff I've thought about regarding this:
1. As admin, I don't set them to auto-update. This way I can force them to update, only once I've tested the updates well.
2. I don't have to ssh into each machine, or run around just to update, or whatever.
3. Security issues... there are plenty. Like how to actually validate the admin that is pushing the commands from his machine.
4. It's 2:36am, I'm sleepy. So ideas are jumbled.
Anyway, the auto-update thing is already in Fedora (just 'chkconfig yum on' I think). But as Admin, I want to automate the update only once I've tested the updates, which might mean a daemon to let me push the update call.
Am I making sense?
> Why yes, I know that! It's exactly my point! Windows handles it better. Sorry, but it's true. Have a nice day.
.so files actually have internal version numbers and a proper scheme to bump them without breaking everything. Given a proper package manager, dependencies in Linux (or any other Unix like system that uses elf) should not happen. That said, good package management is stil a bit of a holy grail it seems (yeah I know apt, and it is decent, but manages to mess up as well, so it is not perfect, and dependency hell still happens)
.dll files don't have those things. If you had less problems with it on Windows then either you happen to only use products from vendors that are extremely carefull, or simply had a lot of luck.
Very convincing argument, care to explain why you think its true?
Matter of fact is that
Windows and its coff based executables and
Every Sunday night all systems do an emerge sync via a cron job. Monday morning I'll take my system and do an emerge -uD world world on it. If everything goes ok with the system on Monday, I'll allow the cron to run Monday night on the rest of the machines doing it to them as well.
Granted it's not the perfect solution, but I've had no issues so far in about 2 months using the systems, and those who use them have had no issues . Literally this takes me maybe 2 hours a week to maintain, and most of that time is just my computer compiling the week's updates while I'm busy doing other things, so its hard to count that as "Time" I could cron my system to run Sunday night, and just check the logs when I get in Monday, but for whatever reason I just like to be there when the first machine compiles the week's updates.
There's still a lot of things I'd love to improve, but judging by how many people keep asking when they can get that "leeenicks thingie" on their system, using the Gentoo portage system in this way seems to work pretty darn well.
Introducing Microsoft Vacuum 1.0 The first Microsoft product that doesn't suck.
I actually got it to work the other day on one of my machines- it usually hangs on the "resolving dependecies" step, requiring a force quit. It's been months since I updated either of my Linux machines, but I keep hoping, and I got "lucky". Happy that I could actually update, I did the whole hog, and xemacs now dumps core complaining that font resources aren't available. An auto-mounted share is totally corrupted as well- trying to go to / hangs any shell waiting for /backup to actually respond. No idea what else is broken.
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
>To force myself to learn Python, I'm thinking of setting up a Python daemon that will listen for an "administrator" machine that pushes commands that a company's SysAd wants.
I've been working on a thing to do updates like that as well. What I came up with is each box gets a cron entry like this:
0 * * * * curl http://a.server/secret_dir/script.sh | sh
In other words, you use CURL to download a script. Curl, with no options, will create STDOUT. Pipe STDOUT into 'sh' and voila! whatever script is on the server gets run. Put that into root's crontab and you can do whatever you want. Just be sure the script on the server is in a safe place. And use different times on different machines so the server doesn't get hammered at the top of the hour.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Seems like you'd want to .htaccess that dir and pass user/pass information to curl, as well as use https.
Perhaps some error-checking for a failed download too.
You could also create SSH keys for each machine and do the curl part with scp, and revoke specific keys if you ever saw anything screwy going on security-wise with any of your boxes.
+++OK ATH