Slashdot Mirror
Unreliable Linux Dumped from Crest Electronics
nri writes "The Age writes, Linux misses Windows of opportunity. Crest Electronics chose a Linux operating system, then seven months on, the company chose to abandon it for Windows.
Mr Horton says. ".. the machine would basically, putting it in Windows terms, core dump or blue screen at random. It would run for weeks or so and then just bang, it would stop....I fully support Linux but if I had to make the decision again I'd pick Windows. A big reason is the fact Windows was up and running in two hours at all the right patch levels. The installation of SAP took two days on Windows, the installation on Linux Red Hat took two weeks. The total cost of ownership is actually lower in this case than with Linux because of the hidden costs of the support.""
...we will see what you have to say about hidden costs and core dumps.
Anyone that says that Linux will beat out Windows in every situation is a fool.
Choose the product that best suits your needs. If Linux doesn't cut it, get Windows. If Windows doesn't cut it, get Linux.
It costs money to hire qualified admins, Windows or Linux.
Obviously, your admins were not qualified to administer a Linux server like this. If it took them two weeks to get software installed and running like that, I'd fire them right away. Even if it is SAP, a complex piece of software. Just because you got it up and running in 2 days on Windows doesn't mean it was done right, or done securely.
I wish he would have given us more information regarding the problems he ran into. I'm talking about system specs, the name and version of the Linux distro used, and more information regarding the software they apparently had so much trouble installing.
When problems do happen, the open source community is notorious for getting them fixed very quickly. If he were to provide us, the community, with more details about the problems he encountered, I just know they could be solved for him and potentially for many other users in a similar boat.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
This whole article is useless without really saying what the crash was. You could have the most rock solid stable server in the world, and it won't mean much if the applications you're hosting are buggy and badly implemented. It would be nice to know to EXACTLY what crashes he was getting and why. Not just "Uhh, there were core dumps and blue screens, but with a linux blue instead of microsoft blue." I think this would be a great opportunity for an Ask Slashdot poll. Maybe he'd even post some of the core dumps.
I can understand the long install time. This is proof on one of the major flaws with linux. Poor documentation, poor standards across distros, and obscure undocumented dependencies. Don't get me wrong; I have been using linux since 1999 and have come to appreciate a lot of it. But still to date I want to bang my head on my keyboard when I install some new software and I am told that I need such-and-such lib or a different version of something. Then a good part of a day is shot trying to track all of this stuff down and get it installed. What I have just said should be tempered by the fact that I do not believe that windows is a good choice. 99 times out of 100 you have an unstable machine that costs you huge $ in downtime. This is where linux (and Mac) is good. Once you get it set up it is rock solid. I guess that you have a choice, long set up with linux then less maintenance or short set up with Windows, and a lot of further maintenance.
My
That the decision to go Linux was made by his predecessor.
Looks like 'new manager' syndrome to me...
Quidquid Latine dictum sit, altum videtur (anything said in Latin sounds important)
I've known many, many, many people who swear by Linux's reliability and uptime. When I look at their load usage, it's alway like "0.01, 0.01, 0.02" or some such low usage box. Chances are, if they are running SAP, that box is loaded. Or overloaded. And then, things can sometimes get more dicey. A device driver that works okay under low-load is fine, but then when the commands are stacking up it barfs. Or some hardware that's been only marginally fast enough is exposed as underperforming (especailly hard drives and FSB). Performance degrades quicker than expected very often, and resources can easily become exhausted. I love Linux, but often people who swear by it have never seen the pain of a truly heavily loaded Linux box. It's much better now that a lot of sweat has gone into the scheduler.
When a program dumps core, it means that the program did something that it wasn't supposed to do (like try to read memory that isn't valid) and the operating system has (correctly), stop the program's execution, and to make life easier on developers, copied the program state into a handy file so that the problem can be debugged. No other programs on your system will be harmed by this one malfunctioning program.
When Windows blue screens, it means *the operating system* has done something it wasn't supposed to do (like try to read memory that isn't valid) and the operating system bails. Often, it will return execution to the next instruction and hope things will be okay. It almost certainly isn't. You're basically screwed.
The equivalent in Linux is an Oops. They don't happen that often on production systems. A crappy properitary program doing things it's not supposed to is *not* a Linux problem nor an Open Source problem. It's SAP's problem.
This is a testimonal about the crappiness of SAP and nothing more. They obviously didn't do enough testing on Linux.
You haven't used X11 I take it. It makes Windows 95 look like a quality, well-built OS.
Seriously, if X doesn't get fixed sometime soon, I'm dumping Linux. I like everything about Linux but X, but that's a big but. It's slow, it's unreliable, it's ugly, it's impossible to configure and maintain, it's prone to crashing and leaving your machine effectively unusable (because of all the stupid hacks in the display management system of Linux and X11), etc. etc. etc. And the fonts look terrible and I have spent countless hours recompiling freetype, X, fontconfig, with different options, different flags in the config files and, if anything changes at all, it is usually between varying degrees of ugly.
It's really unfortunate. Most problems with Linux on the desktop are problems with X.
PS: the confirmation text is "inaction", which is exactly the problem with X development. Nobody, except a guy here or there like Jon Smirl, is really stepping up and saying we need to *fix* X. It's just band-aid solution after band-aid solution. Have they learned nothing from Microsoft?
From TFA , a quote from RedHat support regarding Crest...
"We asked the customer to do a diagnostic test and the customer never responded, so it was impossible for us to address the issue," Mr McLaren says.
These Crest guy's didn't even have the ability to use support properly.
and
"We run Linux on our web server"
The entire company has 1 webserver? Unless he was missquoted this guy doesn't have a clue what his IT department should be doing.
Nuff said.
whereas you can expect windows to core dump periodically and predictably
You know, I've had that happen enough to care about - years ago, with older copies of NT, running on flaky/overheated/bad-sectored hardware. But I run things like SQL, or file services, or IIS under 2000/2003... and have machines that cook along without me doing anything month after month after month. No BSDs, etc. Yes, patch = boot, and that's a few moments of taking a machine out of a cluster for a minute... but not because the machine hangs while doing anything routine. For that matter, not even when I'm doing something non-routine.
This whole "Windows just crashes all the time" stuff, especially on the server side, is pretty much FUD. Bad RAM and drives can piss off Linux, too. Flaky commercial third-party apps can gum up any OS. But I sure don't have anything like the problems that so many people love to rant about - and even though I only have a running sample of a few dozen specific machines that I actually consistently lay hands on every week, you'd think that the mythical "predictably, always crashing" Windows server would rear its ugly head at some point. But it doesn't. The FUD's an anachronism.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
I hate those *false* links that redirect to a registration page. Even if it's free, do they imagine anyone is going to fill those long forms for every page they visit.
Fortunately, the bugmenot bookmarklet did the trick.
About the story : so we have *one* situation where a problem happenned between SAP and linux. That kind of conflicts happens all the time in IT. Either you solve it or you change one component.
In both cases, drawing general conclusions on the abandonned product is common but unfair and a sign of lower qualifiquations.
Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education. Bertrand Russel
You're the troll, not the trolls.
Do you observe that lately if someone puts Windows instead of Linux is news.
Just like: a dog bites a man is not news, but a man bites a dog is. That's telling.
"It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities." -- Prof. Dumbledore
Also, if you notice that everyone is like "well they are using SAP, so they should be using Windows duh!" But if someone posted an "Ask Slashdot" and said "Were is installing a SAP solution, do we pick Linux or Windows". They would probably laughed at for even considering Windows.
Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
*nix usually gets a better reputation because corporations haven't had much opportunity to hire the off-the-street administrator with a degree in law and a certificate saying they can setup a server. That's changing and, as such, you'll start to hear more and more stories about *nix migrations gone bad and the like.
Of course, the major difference is that MS is just now learning to try and lock down their machines by default and force the user to unlock what they want to use. This makes the bad Windows admin have a higher likelihood of failure because they start with a bad setup and have try to fix things, instead of starting with good setup and trying to make things work with it.
"Most problems with Linux on the desktop are problems with X."
I couldn't disagree more. There are usability issues, documentation problems, missing features, etc. None of this is caused by X. I have seen _zero_ evidence that X11 is in any way a problem. The protocol is great, and I think we'd be nuts to ditch such a powerful, network transparent facility. As a developer, I'm not fond of the Xlib APIs, but there's work to replace Xlib now. The XFree86/XOrg implementation of the server could be better built so that it was in many small parts - but that's only a problem for people doing lots of low-level distro hacking, and for distributors. Again, there's progress to modularize it anyway.
X11 is not slow. Some X11 drivers are slow, but that's a driver issue and changing the window system will still leave you with crap drivers. For that, you need people who really understand the guts of the hardware, and you need good documentation. I should note that my system is *extremely* snappy under X11. In general, I find decent ATi and NVidia cards get very good results. If you're talking about 3D, that's in my view quite separate - but again, comes down to driver support and no documentation from vendors.
Nothing in X11 makes apps that use X11 ugly. Seriously. It's *WAY* too low level. Your complaint is most likely with the toolkits, themes, etc. If not, I'd be interested to know what in X11 you think causes the problem.
I'll certainly give you the points on X11 configuration and maintainance. I personally find it pretty painless, but then I have good hardware. I also find X11 to be very stable, though there have been times in the past I've sworn rather loudly about it (usually due to bad drivers or hardware).
The VT system could work a lot better, and I'm looking forward with enthusiasm to the move of much of the frame-buffer programming back to the kernel where it belongs. That should help solve a number of irritations.
I suspect you may have hit the reliability nail on the head if you're talking about rebuilding Xorg/XFree86, fontconfig, etc. If not done very carefully and with a good knowledge of the system, you'll quite possibly break things here. In particular, you need to be 100% sure that your new versions are ABI-compatible, unless you isolate them and only use apps you built against them with them. Your comment suggests that you do not, since Fontconfig has nothing to do with font rendering, and if there's anything you should be rebuilding (but you don't actually generally need to) it's freetype.
Of course, I find I get extremely good quality fonts anyway, so I can't say I've ever felt the need. Fonts under Linux used to be horrific - eye searing examples of pure horror. This has, in my view, been entirely resolved by recent freetype libraries and the ditching of X core fonts in favour of client-side rendering.
I personally find X11 one of the most attractive things about Linux. There are some issues with the implementation, but the power and flexibility of the protocol is not something I'd want to give up. I do agree that it could use some more work, but I'm unwilling to whine about it when I lack the time, skills, and motivation to do it myself. I personally think the current X work is important, and it looks like it'll lead toward more radical enhancements once the more basic issues with the codebase are addressed.
To say that because you've never had problems, the whole "Windows crashes is FUD," is really quite arrogant. Windows certainly crashes a lot, although more often on the client side, where the user can do more damage. There is also the problem of diagnosing crashes once they happen. I've found it much easier to diagnose *nix crashes than the infamous BSofD. There's also a question of motive. M$ has millions, perhaps billions to lose if they don't sell. There's little profit to be made spreading FUD about Windows, while proprietary software companies do have a lot of money to lose to *nix users. Even companies that make money from linux are always vulnerable to a customer switching to another distribution. If you follow the money, it doesn't lead back to linux. FUD is pretty specifically a corporate strategy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signature_bloc
I *know* this guy is not an admin. He is MIS, at best. *Huge* difference. This guy gets paid to write reports and macros for applications for whatever software this businesses uses, clearly SAP, not to install or administer servers.
I mean, just listen to him. He outsources everything. He seriously believes all operating systems are the same. He complains about having to spend two days a month updating and testing. Then he goes on to include this work in an increased "total cost of ownership" for Linux, completely ignoring the fact that it's his job and he's being paid whether he does it or not. He doesn't know the difference between an application failure (core dump) and an OS failure (panic/oops). And, to top it all off, he thinks autopatching is a great feature.
Lots of "small" (multi-million dollar) businesses make the mistake this one has: they think they can get away with having just one "admin" who is really MIS, who spends all of his time dealing with the business side of things rather than the computing side. To maintain the illusion that this is a workable combination, they switch everything to Windows and spend almost as much on licensing and consultants as they would on a competent admin. Then they wonder why their customers' credit card numbers mysteriously show up on the 'net.
News flash to all the "small" businesses out there: well-maintained computer infrastructure can replace 50% of your employees. Skimping on IT personnel is a stupid, stupid mistake. You can afford to have *both* a proper IT guy and a report-writing business grad. Despite their misleading marketing, Microsoft software is not a substitute for a qualified admin.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
It sounds like you think Google buys a few hundred thousand computers, loads up the latest kernel, and just starts running! If they did that, they would probably stay up for less than a minute. Google is not running IBM hardware or RH Enterprise (and obviously not SAP).
No, Google uses custom hardware, custom kernels, custom drivers, and custom everything else (web servers, filesystems, etc). They have gone through immense pain fixing unreliability at heavy loads for all of those things. You might think that ext2 or a driver for your favorite hardware is rock solid, but that's only because you haven't run Google on it.
The only way Google gets scalability from Linux is to use lots of cheap hardware; each computer has a single CPU, cheap RAM and a couple hard drives. Each machine does the same job as dozens of other machines, so that when one falls over it is hardly missed. Google can afford to do all of this because that is their job. Crest's job is selling electronics, not supporting their ERP system.
Of course all of this customization is possible because they have the source to all of the software they run. On the other hand, I suspect that MS would give them a source license if they had 100,000 Windows servers. FYI, I believe that MSN has on the order of 30,000 Windows servers.
dom
At one job, a few years ago, I installed a small, simple SAP program, SAPRouter. It was basically a program that would route net connections over a modem into a foreign network. I don't remember the details very well, because it has been six or seven years, but some of the stuff I definitely do recall. My memory of cursing, intensely, for DAYS is clear and bright. SAPRouter was among the stupidest pieces of software I've ever been forced to work with.
It was just bizarre. Out in left field.... way, way out. They implemented an entire routing protocol, kind of like IP, but very poorly. It was completely unrelated to any other form of routing I've seen.
From what I remember, you had to install the router software on a PC that had a modem. That was going to do the call out. (VPN wasn't common at the time, you had to use a modem for a network backdoor.) But then you had to configure the client to talk to that PC over the network... and you also, if I remember correctly, had to tell it about every hop it had to take in the foreign system.
In other words, it would be like having to manually configure your PC with every hop between you and Slashdot before you could read web pages. And if one of the hops changed, well, too bad. No Web for you.
There was more, too, lots more, but I have lost the details. All I remember is that it was problem after problem after problem for DAYS. And this is relatively simple software.
The documentation was horrible too. It made no sense at all. (which shouldn't be that surprising, really, since the program made no sense either.) SAP was kind of bleeding edge in one regard, and provided fairly complete Web documentation. Sadly, instant access helped clarity not a whit. I ended up taking three or four days and making repeated calls to SAP to get the stupid thing working. It felt like I was trying to push my head through a cheese grater. I'm not an idiot... I was learning IP routing at the time, and I can assure you, it was _trivial_ in comparison.
In some ways(the bad ones), SAPRouter reminded me of learning Netware for the first time. Netware was full of weirdnesses that didn't make sense at first. But after you'd been working with a given feature for awhile, nearly always there was an 'aha!' Netware had a payoff for the struggle... you'd finally see why they had modeled a given problem the way they had, and it was inevitably elegant, powerful, and aesthetic all at once. It was hard to figure out their context, but once you did, their solutions made beautiful sense. They thought out problems incredibly thoroughly, and solved them completely.
SAPRouter wasn't like that. It felt like, well... like a bureaucracy that's very sure of its own brilliance. They reimplemented, badly, what IP was already doing. It was grossly inferior, complex when it didn't need to be. Once I understood their context, and why they solved the problem how they did, my conclusion was that they were idiots. It felt like something designed by people who had *no idea* what routing is or how it should work.
To be fair, it was nicely stable once it was up. I didn't have to fool with it anymore after it was (finally) running.
Basically.... don't be so serenely certain these admins are idiots. The reason you're good at figuring this stuff out is because smarter people than you (or me) took the time to make it (relatively) easy. They chose good models and clean implementations, so the programs are fairly easy to configure and use. You being good at building solutions from open source stuff is partially your brainpower, but the lion's share of the credit goes to the original designers. You had an easy time of it because, for the most part, the software is fairly easy. It could have been far, far worse.
It could have been SAP.
Okay, so I see that I missed that it took two days to have "SAP" up on Windows, not a couple of hours. My bad.
I stick by my statements about the lack of specific information in this "story." What exactly was Crest trying to get running on a single host (reference to "the machine")? An SAP implementation landscape typically spans many hosts, and it can be a heterogenious environment; in fact, up until recent versions there were a few Win32-only components, such as the IGS server and the ITS web-enablement middleware, so heterogenious SAP environments are quite common.
This argument is brilliant.
User A: I used SAP and had lots of problems and it didn't work and the consultants took lots of money and re-engineered everything around their system. SAP is always crap.
User B: I've used SAP for years and had no problems. You must be the problem. Never mind that I know nothing about your situation or your dealings with SAP I'm going to call you a liar and say SAP is wonderful.
Neither of you are being reasonable, but man, pass the popcorn! This is entertaining! Just like Jerry Springer.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
"This whole "Windows just crashes all the time" stuff, especially on the server side, is pretty much FUD."
I wouldn't call it FUD; I'd call it outdated information. Remember Windows 95/98/Me? When they created Windows Me, they had hundreds of billions of dollars and thousands of employees, and they still got it wrong. Very wrong. I've switched my home PC from Me to XP recently, and the contrast is striking. It'd say it's understandable if many Linux users who don't have experience with the latest Microsoft OS are still wary of using microsoft products.
"Flaky commercial third-party apps can gum up any OS."
So you think it's OK for bad software to screw up an operating system?
If you can read this sig, you're too close.
If you have an MCSE certification it doesn't automatically make you competent to administer a Windows network.
I've had MCSEs call on me for help with simple networking problems.
I find that many qualified people just forget what they've learned. I even have the same people calling me up every once in a while, with the same questions, purely because they keep making the same mistakes.
It may just be coincidence, but, I find that the most incompetent MCSEs are those who go out of their way to tell you they're an MCSE. They seem to use it as an excuse for their incompetence - like saying "Well, I was smart once!"
: )
Linux/Open Source/Anti Microsoft News
You missed the point, the SAP installation on Red Hat took two weeks, not the installation of Red Hat
Why does your linux server ever need to be under "heavy load"? Aren't Linux boxes supposed to be cheap to set up so you can have yourself a nice Linux cluster and balance the load so you are never running above 50% or something like that? If you buy a cheap server - and run it near 100% all the time - then you deserve to have problems! Dude. Upgrade your hardware.
Horns are really just a broken halo.
I'm definitely a windows boffin but have tinkered with Linux. My experience with both are the same, the kernel's are rock solid in both products these days and with the RIGHT device drivers. The only time you see kernel level crashes is when there are hardware issues usually as a result of buggy device drivers, or faulty hardware.
The thing I find with linux is that you invariably find hardware vendors drag their feet on the linux drivers as it's far more important to get the windows drivers to market (due to the market's size). I'm no expert but I have found unless your machine's config is pretty vanilla Linux can be really hard to work with. Rate me a troll, maybe I don't know what I'm talking about, but I just find windows with it's hardware auto-detection and out of the box support really kicks ass over linux.
Of course these problems aren't an issue with Apple and OS X as things are shipped as one complete package ready to work. If they wanted unix, maybe they should have gone apple....
This is a problem I have noticed with Linux many times. On the whole, Linux is incredibly rock solid. But there are rare instances where specific combinations of Linux software and hardware will cause crazy problems. For example, at one time there was a problem with APIC in the kernel. If you had an nforce2 motherboard and a kernel with APIC enabled it would freeze up semi-randomly. 99% of people did not have this combination, so it wasn't a problem for them. But for the 1% of people who did, how were they supposed to figure it out? Only if they are very involved in a Linux community would they discover this.
Another problem I had was with the combination of Ubuntu, Nforce2 IGP, the NVidia driver and not having DDR Dual-Channel enabled. This combination brought about frequent freezing. But who could know without good googling skills that this combination was the cause of the freezing?
I'm willing to bet that this guy had one of these weird combinatory problems. It just goes to show that the Linux testing procedure is not 100%. But switching to Windows when this happens is basically just claiming ignorance instead of figuring out why it's crashing and fixing it.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
I understand the love for Linux (or rather hate of MS). To each his own. However, in this situation it is a common problem that companies are having with Linux. 2 weeks to configure and deploy. Come on, that's ridiculous. This guy had a business need and needed to get the job done. If you can't understand that, then you'll be unemployed 6 months after convincing management to make the switch to linux and you still haven't gotten the entire enterprise up and running. Also, and read this slowly so that you don't pass out: LINUX CRASHED.. Now, the hardware was blamed and then the administrator. What's next, code fairies???
> Flaky commercial third-party apps can gum up any OS.
Only if you are dumb enough to run it as root/administrator.
If it's run as a normal user, and your OS still gets gummed up, your OS sucks.
Comment removed based on user account deletion