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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.""
Odd that the Windows terminology for the blue screen of death now seems to be the standard term for a computer crashing. Or maybe that's not so odd.
(please don't mod this as funny, I am very serious here.)
What amazes me is that they had IBM hardware and RedHat Engineers working on this and it still didn't work. I've installed Linux servers for 10 years and rarely have experienced such problems. Usually it was the hardware or my screw up at the center of it all.
:-D
Besides the reference they were running IBM hardware, I wonder what their configuration was. That's the tough part of these kind of articles. Very little information and a conclusion. Sure it was IBM certified hardware and it was ruled out as the problem. Perhaps the RedHat engineers simply screwed up. Not like that couldn't happen
"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.
I wonder why they never bothered to respond to RedHat. If it was important then they would have worked with the Vendor. I'd like to see someone work with ANY Operating System and ignore their vendors help. With these tidbits of information, it's difficult to take such a conclusion seriously.
Has Comcast disconnected your Internet account? Same here. You can read about it at http://comcastissue.blogspot.com
That's very true. SAP is a very complicated application and it takes an extreme amount of patience both to install it and to keep it working correctly. In other words it takes an administrator who knows how to interpret the SAP documentation and then follow that documentation in a very, very precise manner. I've installed SAP Enterprise on RedHat 2.1 more than a couple of times. The RedHat portion of the installation is so easy that I cannot imagine how anyone could screw it up. It's really the steps following the RedHat installation where an administrator can get into trouble. This includes memory settings and some really crucial environment variable additions in the system profile. Get one of these wrong and a SAP installation will quickly turn into a major headache. But if the instructions from SAP are followed step by step, then the whole process can be done in about 6 to 12 hours (depending on the speed of the machine). We currently have 5 SAP systems running on RedHat Advanced server 2.1 and I cannot ever remember an outtage that was related to an issue at the OS level. It has been a rock-solid stable set of systems that require little intervention. The SAP documentation is so stupidly complicated that one literally has to spend days reading it before attempting an installation. If these admins tried to shortcut that process, then obviously made a mistake. Thanks, - J. Haynes Helena, MT
I live in Brisbane, and the area where Crest is situated is renowned for power supply problems - only the best UPS's will help. I'll bet that the guys who "fixed" the problems with WINDOWS supplied a new UPS with their gear.