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Windows Drives Company To OpenBSD
Barry Lyndon writes "Computerworld reports that the nightmare of windows is driving PriceWaterhouseCoopers, one of the world's largest accountancy and business consulting companies, to OpenBSD and open source in general." From the article: "'My predecessor spent too much [so] I was told not to spend any money.' When asked what argument he used to convince management to use an open source solution, Uemura said: 'They didn't have an argument because they said don't spend any money.' 'They trusted me,' he said. 'The whole office was relying on one domain controller which was dying.' Uemura said a lot of work was done 'behind the scenes'. 'My experience is that if something has to be done, just do it - don't ask! They will thank you later,' he said."
I wish I could pull this off at my current gig...
Hurray!! BSD is alive and kicking again!!
I was installing a new disc with FreeBSD on it, and cut my finger on the side of the disc. Ow! Six months later I'm getting a test and I score positive for HIV. That's what I got for using BSD. Free as in beer, free as in AIDS.
Even if the software is free it seems to me that the most expensive thing is always the developers, training, implementation, etc.
~S
My experience is that if something has to be done, just do it - don't ask! They will thank you later
- Famous last words?
BSD is free and great but there's still costs for retraining, reconfiguring, and ferreting out things that don't quite work the same way as in a Windows environment. Good luck, PWC, and please share your results about this switch!
... not the entire company. That would've been big news. Still good though :)
From TFA:
IT managers who want to deploy an open source solution but are worried about company politics should go ahead and do it without asking, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC) Japan IT manager Mark Uemura.
That sounds like a FANTASTIC idea. Just come in one weekend and change the entire network over to BSD without running it by anyone. Why bother with the pesky work of drawing up a well-structured arguement for what you want, and then run it by the people who sign your check? That would be highly irrational IMO...Screw politics, they'll thank you when it's done - With a nice pink check.
...the domain controller is dying.
'My experience is that if something has to be done, just do it - don't ask! They will thank you later,' he said." ------ Or later they'll fire your ass for thinking outside the box / not getting approval. It's really a question of if you want to cover your ass, or if you're sick of working your ass off. Yes, it all comes down to your ass, so you get to decide how you want it treated ;-)
Not for much longer if Ballmer reads this story.
There will be chairs flying through the room...
Seriously the Just Do It type attitude will more often than not lead to an IT disaster and subsequent loss of job scenario. Adding or changing architectures needs to be managed and approved. It just isn't smart not to go through the entire development lifecycle and not to get senior leadership involved right off the bat. You may think that implementing this new, cool architecture will be great for the company, but you might not know you are breaking something in the process. What about legal issues? You might think oh I will just install X copies of freeware Y and then it turns out that the software isn't free to corporate users... Stick with a lifecycle set of processes, good change management and make corporate leadership get involved so they semi-understand the possible pro's and con's of what will be done... Otherwise be prepared to get slammed if something goes wrong and you didnt do due diligence up front...
News Reporters Make Tasty Polar Bear Treats!
'My predecessor spent too much [so] I was told not to spend any money.'
Should have reniced him to 19
PWC was at the heart of the Enron scandal, collapse, and they've had to make huge cuts and corporate changes to try to emerge from the fall-out. Microsoft would probably just as well not be associated with that kind of slime.
My experience is that if something has to be done, just do it - don't ask! They will thank you later,' he said."
This is not the norm. 99.9% of managers will go with the flow and do what everyone else is doing for the sole purpose of avoiding being accountable and responsible for their own actions.
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
If the IT people know Unix, then the free Unix-like operating systems will work well for them. In many cases though, the applications dictate the platform. OpenBSD works great for some tasks, but it still has limited support from ISVs. Can't beat if for firewall applications.
if something has to be done, just do it - don't ask! at PWC ?? This guy is not going to last long. The problem with Big Bussines is that change is never well received, even if for the good. A lot of ISO and other regulatory crap make change a real PITA. But then, he might just get lucky.
please excuse my apathy
I think you must compare the time spent implementing some BSD variant against the time spent trying to keep that cranky PDC up and running... Add in the provided budgetary numbers, and then factor in the level of disaster if the controller goes out completely.
It was a joke! When you give me that look it was a joke.
My experience is that if something has to be done, just do it - don't ask! They will thank you later,' he said."
yeah, that's also a good way to get fired.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
maybe you're just a fucking idiot and can't understand how to run a real OS ... ?
Yes, along as your solution works. Everyone has a skill set, and just because you play around with (alternate OS) at home doesn't mean you can just bring it into the business. Bringing a company (or department) to its knees just because you wanted to try XYZ is going to be job (or career) suicide.
Not that I think most people would do that, but it's just a warning.
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
OS brands aside, one system admin has the power to completely restructure the IT infrastructure in a huge, multinational accounting firm with no prior approval? This may be a good report for Open Source, but for PWC, it is a bit embarassing, IMHO.
Either that, or he's overexaggerating the accomplishment and he really just replace the OS on a few PCs and a server. The phrase "one domain controller" tells me that this is not a large environment. I wonder what the home office thought of this little stunt.
Public use of any portable music system is a virtually guaranteed indicator of sociopathic tendencies. -- Zoso
Whatever, I'll believe it when ask for something in OpenOffice format.
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
Sounds like a good plan, although I'm wondering if my unemployment check will cover my current quality of living.
Is this guy fresh out of school, or what? I direct him to this useful resource.
Now that's something you want to hear from a financial company.
This guy must be truly good to put his ass on the line instead of his manager's. If the boss doesn't sign off on it, I don't do it.
This guy better stay with this job. I'm not sure most employers would appreciate such a cowboy mentality. He's just lucky it didn't blow up.
I guess they do need to save money considering they are losing clients. It appears that many companies are moving to smaller accounting firms to cut costs and saying no the the "Big Four" (Deloitte, KPMG, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC) and Ernst & Young).
br>BSD is free and great but there's still costs for retraining, reconfiguring, and ferreting out things that don't quite work the same way as in a Windows environment. Good luck, PWC, and please share your results about this switch!
Sure, but you do this with Windows every two years anyway, right?
It appears PWC is after stability, not just the software humming along smoothly, but controlling their upgrade path rather than leaving that in the hands of the goofballs in Redmond who leave profit to drive dubious innovation.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
even though I'm a staunch linux user, it's good to see that a big company is switching to open source. Nice to see more and more companies doing this. Hopefully it could seriously stimulate the oss community :)
ignorance will killus all --eric
"'My predecessor spent too much [so] I was told not to spend any money.' [...] 'The whole office was relying on one domain controller which was dying.' Uemura said a lot of work was done 'behind the scenes'."
Do they work for free? It doesn't take a lot of work to replace a domain controller.
From the article it seems to me that they are mainly moving the servers to OpenBSD, not the actual workstations. From a user point of view this should be seamless, with their existing programs still working for the large part. As for the retraining cost; it seems the guys in charge already are fairly well versed in the OS, so retraining cost should be minimal.
Right, now thats said lets have no more of this "what about the hidden training costs?" and "will the programs still work" which seems to be the ususal comments for any switching to Open Source solutions.
sorry but if this is the worlds largest in their industry then they have the cash to repair/ upgrade their current infrastructure. worlds largest running off ONE domain controller? what they are in a single office? I highly doubt it.
as for the article, it soulds like a single person acting as IS/IT which is also highly suspect in any company that is the worlds largest of anything.
I'm calling shenanigans! this is not truth but someone's made up story.
I love linux, but to gut the place and change to something dynamically different that will not run any of your current software is very fishy.
Why would they do their taxes on a firewall?
Cypherpunks: Civil Liberty Through Complex Mathematics. Those who live by the sword die by the arrow.
So they replaced some (not all) of their backend systems with OpenBSD systems. Primarly security systems (firewalls) because Checkpoint on the windows systems was not working real well.
There is a significant DUH factor there.
Now it would have been real news if they had replaced all their backend systems as well as their desktop systems with open source alternatives. That is serious news. But no, like most companies out there they just have a mix of unix like systems along with their Windows based servers. It would be interesting to know if there is any company at all that runs purely Windows systems (or for that matter purely unix like systems). I doubt there are any. So running a mix of systems is pretty much standard. Sure the percentages will vary. As such this is not really big news.
Wake me up again when they have switched all their clients or even a significant portion of their clients to open source alternatives. That will be real news.
(And believe me, you wouldn't just switch a bunch of employees over to BSD on a shoot-first basis without having your ass mailed to you with the personal belongings in your desk.)
From the article:
2) This is a firewall in Japan.
3) What PricewaterhouseCoopers uses for tax accounting is not something you want to be doing your taxes with.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
A big 6 or 8 accounting firm is bascially an example of corruption and incompetence. Who cares what they do. They will be indicted sonner than later for who knows what legal infraction. And of course the penalties nver match the crime.
'My experience is that if something has to be done, just do it - don't ask! They will thank you later,' he said.
It's easier to get forgiveness than to get permission.
The OpenBSD move was on the server side, not client side.
They will still do their taxes on the windows clients.
Nothing like checking the facts.
How long until he is raked over the coals for asking an OpenBSD question thought to be "stupid"?
My experience is that if something has to be done, just do it - don't ask! They will thank you later
Certainly you've heard: "It's often easier to just do it and ask for forgiveness later than to get permission."
Sounds like experience talking, to me.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
They're talking about backend systems, not end-user machines.
My username does not make me Apathetic. It's irony, get it?
What does Linux has to do with this? He uses OpenBSD. If you read the article you would know that they still use Windows on their workstations so they can still use what ever tax software they used earlier.
The really fun part of this article is that they need to put an OpenBSD firewall in front of their checkpoint firewall to keep it safe.
This has to be the worst advice I've ever heard anyone give. Not only is this stupid from the standpoint that nobody will be aware of a change which affects a critical system, but if it breaks, it will all come crashing down on YOU. Making a move to opensource can be a good idea, but not this way. Not if you like your job.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
Hardly - you've mixed them up with Arthur Andersen.
PwC actually benefited from the Enron scandle, in that it picked up some of the now defunct Andersen's practice. Furthur, PwC split off their consulting biz and sold it to IBM. http://www.computerworld.com/managementtopics/outs ourcing/story/0,10801,70769,00.html
Will the nightmare of OpenBSD then drive them to suicide?
That's overreaching, and I say this with complete ambivalence to all operating systems.
"This isn't a study in computer science, its a study in human behavior"
one system admin has the power to completely restructure the IT infrastructure in a huge, multinational accounting firm with no prior approval?
I see that no one has RTFA yet. It doesn't appear that the whole of PWC is changing to BSD.
Only PWC Japan.
Next question - how big is PWC Japan? Is it a small boutique accounting firm or
a big player like in many other countries?
Have you ever actually used OpenBSD? If you have, then you would know that it's a massive time and money saver. Why is that? Because it just works. It's a well-engineered product. Your risk of security issues is virtually nil, and the support from the mailing lists often rivals that of anything from Microsoft or Red Hat.
.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
...or bad.
This guy just mentions servers, mail problems, and the like, but still all in the server side of things. My guess is that he simply tried to stabilize the whole thing by making the servers, which handle the whole show, stable. A good start, and I mean that it is only that. While people have posted here about the company migrating completely to open source on the side of their TAX applications, well, that might be a little to extreme as of now. This Uemura guy did say that it was a Windows shop, but he didn't say if he was referring to the datacenter as the whole shop or to the entire company.
Of course, if you can get enough of the big companies to switch to OpenSource there will be, eventually, a growth in the development of application for open platforms as well as applications that once were single platform switching to a multiplatform model.
Is just a matter of how much you can sell to companies that have OpenSource "shops." If there is a market, then, of course, you get to sell something.
Have a good one.
===== "Every head is a different world so don't invade mine you FREAK!" smartSAGA said
And that's great! Since a financial company did it, large software houses can no longer say "Yes, it's free (as in beer) to use, but eventually you'll have to pay more to get competent Open-source techies and invest in more/different hardvare that if you just went with Our Solution(tm) all the way."
And that is how you gain mindshare - not by making a bunch of extremenly technical reports saying how it's better then everything else, but by hitting them on the wallet.
The downside is that because of using such "cheap" software, some other techies working for large software houses can get underpayed or sacked. We'll just have to see what the net balance gets to be.
-- Sig down
Anything at all would've been better. And I'm sorry, but not even Microsoft recommends running a domain with only one domain controller. The article didn't say why it was failing, but if it were hardware, putting a new OS on the same hardware (for example) won't make much of a difference in uptime. Oh, and they need to get some fricken' anti-virus software!
I recall a couple of similar situations where switching the server to and OS/OS was the best answer. The first time, it was a startup ISP (back when everyone dreamed of starting an ISP) who suffered the same problems as described in the article. The problems were limited to the mail server and it was simply unable to keep up with the load it was given. I took a machine of far more modest capacity, installed Slackware on it, set up mail, ported over the user list and it all became quiet almost suddenly.
Another case was when I took a job as SystemsAdmin for an ATM service company... similar situation except a bit worse... they had this bizarre mail server/proxy server thing running on a Win95 box. I almost wet my pants when I saw it. I built another handy-dandy linux box, updated everyone's proxy settings to "off" and set them up with NAT and everything was running smoothe as a baby's butt... again, almost completely sudden quiet. It was very rewarding.
These were all back-end systems that people don't see but use frequently. And only when the stuff you've got ain't workin' is when this sort of strategy (as described in the article) is a good idea. I think it would be a completely different story if they took something that worked and made this tremendous change... that'd be noticably stupid.
To avoid getting burned?
Be a real patriot: Question authority. Think for yourself. Formulate your own conclusions.
The whole office was relying on one domain controller which was dying.
PWC can't afford a cheap-ass PC, ($200) and windows 2000 server with a few licences ($2000)? What a bunch of idiots.
I bet this guy gets fired real soon for shooting their IT consulting business in the foot.
Just do it? They'll thank you later?
Nice advice, for someone who doesn't even follow it:
"My predecessor spent too much [so] I was told not to spend any money." When asked what argument he used to convince management to use an open source solution, Uemura said: "They didn't have an argument because they said don't spend any money." "They trusted me," he said. "The whole office was relying on one domain controller which was dying." (emphasis mine)
IT Manager at Consultancy Office != IT Consultant.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
They replaced a bunch of firewalls running on Windows with a firewall running on OpenBSD. So? It sounds like Captain Obvious finally paid them a visit. Windows works great a ton of things, but being a network device is not one of them.
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
Did anyone actually READ this article?
This company just replaced some of their windows firewall servers (running checkpoint) with OpenBSD. How is this a story? Where's the nightmare?
Quoted from the article:
"most of the migration to OpenBSD was replacing network security devices with Intel servers"
Hahahaha - I get it - joke! Funny. Except you confused Andersen with PwC. All accounting firms had trouble after the Enron fiasco, by the way, which was one of the reasons PwC split of it's consulting business.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/2035803.stmOk, I don't as a general rule respond to these Windows vs Linux in the back end stories, but I have to on this one. The line in the first page says it all: 'The whole office was relying on one domain controller which was dying.'
This has *nothing* to do with Windows being teh suq. Rather, this has everything to do with the previous admin not knowing what he was doing. You don't run an enterprise shop with one DC (be that either NT4 or AD.) You have numerous DCs, and leverage this new fangled concept called redundancy. AD in a large scale corperate environment works just fine, I've seen 200k+ user networks using AD, and it scales fine. Many of these shops also use Exchange for their mail, and with a proper (and not disproportionately high, I might add) number of servers, everything runs smooth as silk.
This sounds like far less a case of the Apps being responsible, and more like a case of some "admin" who didn't know his ass from a hole in the ground being put in charge of a system far larger than he could handle. If I ever see anyone pull out this site as a case study in FOSS/Windows, I'm going to laugh in the presenters face, as they clearly don't understand the software.
And I do mean you. Do some research before you start with the condescending attitude asshole.
0 51024113247
You'll find Mr. Uemuera's response here:
http://www.undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20
For this guy, things worked out. Maybe it's more like "just do it if you know what needs to be done and are sure of your success".
Then again, there are some managers who dislike anything that's not their idea or at least didn't require their blessing. If that's who you work for, though, I'd say get the hell out and find someone who rewards productive risk-taking and successful initiative. If you're the *head* of your IT department, you should be given a fairly serious amount of control over how things are done, *especially* if you've been tasked with taking over a high-cost failure, as this fellow was.
I suspect our friend here had perhaps a bit more buy-off from upper management than it appears. He was probably instructed to "fix it, don't spend money, and don't bother us with the details". Does the fact that he succeeded without a load of bureaucracy bother you, or is it the adoption of OpenBSD ( no problems with corporate use there, BTW ) that bothers you?
Again, I'm agreeing with you generally- going it alone is often a poor choice - but inaction is fairly often worse than action, and it's hard to argue with success. People tend to view successful execution of an independent plan as "initiative". It's only "insubordination" if you fail. The lesson? Don't fail.
Let the "hack PWC" battle begin! (This is a joke, of course)
>>> ""My experience is that if something has to be done, just do it - don't ask! They will thank you later,' he said.""
Now that's the spirit! Coming from a Big 4 accounting firm. Is my tax dodge legal? Don't ask! Where's my fee! The partners needs new Hummers!
(Although I have a feeling that internal IT at these firms tends to get thrown in dark basements and told to fend for themselves.)
That being said, just as "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM",nobody ever got fired for setting up name service, a mail relay, or a firewall on a BSD box.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
Age-old adage of corporate beauracracy once again rearing its head.
If you want results; just do it.
If you want to tread water and waste time, then by all means keep going to those meetings!
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
The point of this story is that PRICEWATERHOUSECOOPERS started using OpenBSD! This is a BIG FOUR accounting firm! Every IT exec in the world can now say "If it's good enough for PWC, it oughta be good enough for us." So this is a big win for open source.
PWC advises many Fortune 1000, Global 1000, what have you on IT issues; there is a chance that this sort of internal use of open source software will lead them to recommend use of OSS to their clients. The C-level decision makers are talking to PWC and others, and probably not reading Slashdot.
"Lack of technical competence coupled with the arrogance of power, as usual, leads to no good end."
The comments here crack me up. There's nothing that says "I'm not very good at my job" like posting "OMG I would get fired if I did that!"
That's why the guy in TFA just got a raise, and you didn't.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
There's something to go on the home page. "Only broken once, and poorly run companies can switch to it when they're screwed!"
What I found so distasteful in the article is how the new guy gets to discredit the previous person in his role. No one ever got fired for buying Microsoft. Maybe spending too much money and lack of a service attitude from IT was a problem, but buying Microsoft was not.
I worked at one company where one of the senior managers died unexpectedly. Wouldn't you know it, the other managers would blame the dead guy for just about everything. That went on for about a month.
I've lived through the wrong-end of the "just do it" attitude. My manager (at the same company from above) praised my "initiative" and "ownership" for years. Then she did a 180 and started giving me grief for implementing the things she approved. Then I did the perp walk. I later found out she lost the budget/political battle with another department and somebody had to go. Never again will I ever contribute as much as I did to that company.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
http://www.undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=200 51024113247
BTW: When he said, "just do it", he's not talking about informing management; he's talking about informing/surveying USERS. He's meaning, "Don't bother trying to convince users, instead, just tell them the procedures have changed, and this is 'The New Way' (TM) to do things. They'll do it, find it better/faster, than thank you"
Shamelessly stolen, so don't mod me up.
Mark T. Uemura (IP 221.249.159.51) (mark.uemura@gmail.com) on Tue Oct 25 14:18:17 2005 (GMT)
It's unfortunate that reporters such as this guy would sensationalize
a talk by carefully crafting his story from bits and pieces mostly
taken out of context. So, in all fairness to my firm and to those who
were not present, I feel compelled to set the story straight.
First off, the story is not an interview even though it may come across
as such. The title is rather sensational but I certainly wasn't
desperate. There were problems and they were fixed and our team was
just very resourceful in doing so.
Gedda writes:
> IT managers who want to deploy an open source solution but are worried
> about company politics should go ahead and do it without asking,
> according to PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC) Japan IT manager Mark Uemura.
No, this is taken out of context. What I said was that we had very big
and important changes that we needed to make in order to restore network
and application stability. My reference to just going ahead and doing it
referred to making the necessary changes behind the scenes. It wasn't
about company politics and it wasn't about migrating services from Windows
to OpenBSD. My experience was that we did ourselves a disfavour by trying
to inform and explain to users and management the technical reasons for
the changes that needed to be made. In fact, all of the pushback had
nothing to do with OpenBSD. We needed to migrate from an old Domain
Controller with a corrupt Active Directory to a new one. We also
introduced the concept of working on Application Servers in Terminal
Services to take advantage of server power for resource intensive
applications that ran very slowly on users' PCs. So, the push back was
related to things like "you'll have to login to this new Domain rather
than the old one from tomorrow onwards." or getting users to change the
way they work and use applications running on a Terminal Servers for speed.
In the end, when all was sad and done, users and management realized the
difference that we had made; no more downtime or data loss. Furthermore,
they've never had everything running so smoothly and as efficiently for
as long as they could remember. Their IT problems went away as a result
of our efforts and the decisions that we made.
In fact, all of the migrations to OpenBSD were either behind the scenes
where the users were oblivious to the changes. Well, almost oblivious.
Often times we would get "Hey, the Internet is really fast today, cool!"
or "Man, can you guys like spill some coffee in the server room or
something? We're not used to this much uptime. It means we can't go
home early anymore!"
In those cases where users did have to interact with OpenBSD, it was
always well received and positive such as moving off of a very slow VPN
for remote access on to a quicker and more user friendly alternative
such as port forwarding applications through OpenSSH.
> Faced with an unreliable network, Uemura went ahead and migrated systems
> from Windows to OpenBSD on the premise that management would trust his
> judgement.
Once again, migrating services to OpenBSD was not an issue. So long as
we did not compromise security in doing so. Generally, we did so to
improve security and that's what OpenBSD is famous for and yet ther
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
FTW = Fuck The World?
...is this color scheme. Blood Red and Slashdot Green does not mix well together.
My eyes!!!
I am going to disagree....
What PricewaterhouseCoopers uses for Tax accounting is exactly what I want to using.
My guess is that with the right people using this software I would get a lot bigger tax refund.
I won't even mention that vast numbers of developers that have to write proprietary software because we've cut ourselves off from off-the-shelf software (which, incidentally, is already as good as most of the stuff we write, and far better supported).
I really don't like Windows. The dumbest command line window on the planet. The whole patronising way the OS treats you. The lack of easy personalization. Prior to that I'd been using FreeBSD and it really felt like a step back. But though I don't like it, I grudgingly have to accept that when I worked for a Windows based company things went much smoother. Network downtime was minimal. Plug-and-play really did seem to work, at least for ordinary devices like mice and displays. And we still had access to many good OSS tools such as Python and Perl. Going back to an open source OS has turned out to be a much more painful transition than the transition to Windows.
Whenever I read news stories about our company I cringe. I find it annoying when we're briefed before a conference (say) on what we are and aren't allowed to say to other people - in particular we're asked to lie about what software we use. It's clear that many decisions are made in this company based on the fact that nobody wants to pay for licenses for software but they don't mind paying to recruit extra people to write the software they could have gotten off-the-shelf because it increases their department size and hence power within the company. (And other decisions are made based on which vendors the CTO plays golf with: I think that's why we have such an awful network.) In fact, I once went to an industry conference on OSes for our industry. We had a company having success using Windows. It was clear that the rest of the conference didn't want to hear anything we wanted to say - they were basically a lynch mob to try to force everyone to switch to OSS so we could provide a unified front to our vendors to get them to switch to OSS operating systems.
So whenever you read that a company is switching OS bear in mind that it's just as likely to be part of political maneuvering within the company as it is likely to be a rational decision.
If I had to choose a free operating system for my financial instituion I would hope it would be openbsd which is geared at 95 percent security and 5 percent functionailty. Not 1 percent of user friendly-ness. Openbsd should be used alot more in financial institutions by people that know what they are doing. Openbsd has more security based code than any os and if you say otherwise then you have obviously never tried it. It has the ability to setup more redundancy than any OS. Openbsd isn't a desktop OS for the masses either but I guess thats your freebsd plug ;)
Buggy software that affects your entire company will cost you much more in downtime, missed due dates, frustration, hatred of IT and quality of life. From the article:
Then PWC was hit with a virus affecting network traffic and the Checkpoint firewall was running at 100 percent CPU capacity which was effectively a denial of service. "So we had to put an OpenBSD firewall in front of Checkpoint," he said. "We saved seven salaries worth over one year. It was so dramatic they gave me a big raise and I was promoted from system administrator to IT manager. And because of the savings we get more productivity out of old hardware."
TCO fact, baby.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Seems to be more so the case with PWC.
The corporation I work for has PWC as their Sarbanes-Oxley auditor. As soon as someone did this, the first question asked by them would be "Where is the Infrastructure Control Review? Security Control Review? Whats the access control procedure? Where was the process?!" Particularly for something as significant as a firewall.
3) What PricewaterhouseCoopers uses for tax accounting is not something you want to be doing your taxes with.
Why not? It's on my list of things to do, right after retrofitting the controls from a F16 onto my bicycle.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Not spending any money on your IT infrastructure is a poor decision, regardless of the OS. No open source solution will solve that. It takes money to keep good people and keep any system running correctly. Arguements aside of what's cheaper, better, faster, whatever.
This sounds like half of the story. Either there was a good reason he had no budget, or it was just saving money in a stupid way. But I don't care how much you like any OS. Anyone who would haphazardly switch any OS in an enterprise class system, without even obtaining permission, is simply dangerous and undeserving of a budget. The problems mentioned at the end of the article are a great indication of why it's a bad idea to do it without planning. The problem he should have solved is working at a company that doesn't want to support IT.
This has to be one of the poorest examples of a good use of open source software. Do you really want to cater to a company that will be that cheap? Whats that budget going to look like next year?
This would be true of any company where the directive is to fix problems without spending any money. Now, money could have been spent to stay on Windows and have a reliable network. As much as I do not like Windows, it can be designed for a stable environment (believe me, I have seen nice all-Windows networks with excellent MTBF). Here we have a case of someone familiar and comfortable with OpenBSD using it to cheaply (freely) fix Windows issues, which may have been correctable with patches, updates, upgrades, or equipment replacement (low resources, etc).
If I could dupe tools and was told to fix a Windows network without spending any licensing or hardware dollars, I would do the same. This is far different than saying Microsoft forces you to go open source. Looks like management decisions forced this worker to choose a non-Microsoft solution based on expenses, and OpenBSD won simply because he knew how to implement it.
Click here or here.
Unless it fails, then you will be blamed.
However in my opinion, open source fails far less then Windows...
This is sooo Slashdot. The headlline says PriceWaterhouseCoopers is going open source, and then when you actually read the article it turns out to be some small office in PWC-Japan! I'm sorry, but PWC-Japan's IT manager a) isn't going to save any money in the end, and b) this isn't the start of a domino effect.
--Colin Jensen
colinandbethany.com
The guy said he deployed FreeBSD servers and saved the equivilent of SEVEN Salaries.
Despite that, the MS fanboys start talking about "training costs", "reconfiguration costs", ad infinitum...., in their desire to explain why one should never install open source software. Never once did they consider that the savings mentioned included all the costs they supposed would nullify any OSS installtion.
I did this three years ago in the back-end and it has saved us ten's of thousands of dollars and an untold amount of network down-time!
...
Now I am about ready (balls about big ehough) to do it on the desktop.
Crunch!
If you read carefully, you would have noticed that Checkpoint was not eradicated in the first place because of office politics of the kind M$ types typically use:
"Microsoft just happens to be one of our clients and Checkpoint is our standard firewall," Uemura said. "Checkpoint on Windows was unmanageable but after a few months of using OpenBSD we were told to put Checkpoint back."
When Chokepoint failed, it was kept in place, safely behind OpenBSD, where it would not choke or make it's advocates look too bad. A fanboy can say, "Checkpoint provides some vital protection OpenBSD does not have yet," and he'd be right. Of course, needing Checkpoint because you have Windoze on the desktop is a good reason to dump windoze on the desktop. The duh factor was all forced from above.
This guy managed to get the job done after repeated Windoze failures and cost overruns. That's something that's sure to embarrass the fanboys, but it's something that has to get done sooner or later. You might be awake when it happens, but by the time that happens in big dumb companies like PW, it will have been done everywhere.
The end result was the man on the spot managed to save 7 salary years worth of downtime and heartache and got himself a raise.
Three cheers and good luck! Microsoft is sure to get him fired over this, but they were probably looking to get rid of him for doing his job so well. Just check out the bullshit here, like this and this. No big deal, the bottom line talks and he'll soon have job offers from many fed up companies that do NOT have microsoft as a client where there's much less DUH going on.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Er, for the people that didn't get it ... FTW == For The Win
Linux == crap
BSDs == rockz0r
I used to think Linux was cool -- then I turned 14.
the other managers would blame the dead guy for just about everything
Heh, that's the way it is on any large-ish project. If a developer leaves, then suddenly they've had a hand in just about everything, certainly everything that goes wrong.
Functionality not complete? "I think Bob was going to finish that."
Build breaks? "Yeah, it was some of Bob's code."
Printer out of toner? "I think Bob changed that last."
This typically starts as soon as the cube vultures have departed, and lasts until the next developer leaves. It provides a convenient scapegoat, and helps to ease project tensions.
Just junk food for thought...
i fear troll.
Netcraft confirms it: PriceWaterhouse Coopers is dying!!!
I am Spartacus
First of all, Checkpoint on Windows is a big joke. Everybody who'se involved in managing checkpoint firewalls knows that. Next to placing an OpenBSD in front of it, I would very much consider a loadbalanced CheckPoint cluster running on Nokia/IPSO. However, this of course costs money.
Next to that, congratulations on keeping up with the OpenBSD release cycle. I wish him all the best with replacing the external firewall and (for now) half of the backend servers every 12 months to stay up2date unless his team is able to backport patches. Since the initial migration of half of the backend took 5 months, I assume that once the other part is migrated, he can already start thinking about upgrading all those servers once again. I hope he has a foolproof upgrade plan.
Production systems should be deployed in such a way that they need the least amount of maintenance/patching. Try going back to a manager telling them that every 12 months, you "have" to upgrade a large part of the production backend servers because the support for the OS you chose has just ended.
Don't get me wrong, I consider OpenBSD as a great alternative, but I would have gone for another OS which isn't EOL every 12 months.
If your thinking something like QuickBooks, then you're in luck because these programs already exist. Check out these projects:
Quasar:
http://www.linuxcanada.com/
http://freshmeat.net/projects/quasar/
Compiere:
http://www.compiere.org/
and of course there is GNU Cash:
http://www.gnucash.org/
...to live in a world where you have carte blanche, no accountability, and no process auditors to report to.
In my world substituting infrastructure without due diligence and approvals gets you fired.
Wow. Years back, as a 3rd and 4rth grader, my brother was an avid jogger (5-10 miles daily.) . He was interviewed by the local neighborhood paper... When asked why he ran, he said it relaxed him and he could think. The quote in the paper: "I go for the glory.. I do it for the trophies and stuff."
Why would they do their taxes on a firewall?
Masochism?
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
This just sounds like a small office where the existing network wasn't designed well or grew beyond it's original intent. I've been to many companies that have horrible windows setups usually done by the only computer savvy person because they didn't have a real admin. redesign the network and get the correct products and configure them correctly and that fixes everything. this guy just did it with OSS instead of windows. Not a huge deal.
gb2/b
Where would you like to go today...sir?
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
>> The whole office was relying on one domain controller which was dying.
We want to see netcraft reports for that!
- Arwen, I'm your father, Agent Smith.
- Well, you're just Smith, but my father is Aerosmith!
It really depends on who you work for - whether you work for the micromanaging type who hires IT specialists then micromanages them (rather than letting them get on with what they are paid to do, and him getting on with what he's paid to do) or whether you work somewhere which actually allows you to use your hard earned experience.
Change DOES need to be managed. Systems MUST be planned. However, in my situation, that's what *I*'m paid to do. Fortunately, I work for people who trust my judgement. That has meant we have saved significant amounts of money on hardware and licensing (for example, using OpenBSD instead of CheckPoint - CheckPoint is software that is rented at great expense. The savings by using OpenBSD on the firewall paid for the hardware in less than one year).
But some of it is just do it. When I'm talking about 'just do it' - allowing part of the business to expand by having IT facilitate this expansion, rather than retard it (by waiting on lengthy capital expenditure proposals to go through buying a CheckPoint firewall for a new network, instead of just using OpenBSD on hardware that we already had).
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Take the above quote for example... I just DID what you described- several times in fact to several editor windows and then back into the browser. I didn't hand-type this, just copy and paste. Cut and paste doesn't work like in Linux like Windows does it and if you apply the Windows rules for things, sure it's "Broken"- but X11 cut and paste DOES work largely as expected and across windows. Heck, it even works across the wire in a remote context either through telnet, ssh, or NX initiated windows- I wouldn't be able to do the work I do on a daily basis any other way. What you're describing doesn't simply happen- hasn't happened in years in all the distributions.
Considering that SuSE can pretty much handle ANY supported display configuration with SAX, including resizing the desktop and all, and has been able to do so since well before 9.0, I find this one excessively hard to believe- and if it IS true, your bunch is using hardware that doesn't map to what is officially supported by SuSE in the first place. You are using unsupported hardware for your display adapter. No major company or even a medium to large sized company would actually DO things in like that- hardware that isn't supported is replaced before a migration to new software is performed for an employee. I didn't catch who you worked for, but if it's someone that's a "flagship", they're embarassingly sloppy. Try again, this one's just waaay too hard to swallow as it is.
Okay... What you've just described is...
- Everyone's machines are defective.
OR...
- Everyone in question is using the same common application and IT is locking up, because it was poorly written or you've got server related issues along with poor code design.
OR...
- You've got something slam-dancing all the machines out there in a DoS type problem. Something that's causing the collective of workstations to eat up CPU cycles like they were candy.
In any event, what you're describing is NOT the norm- don't be blaming Linux for it, blame the people deploying it; that is, if you're telling the truth here in the first place. You might be, from your perspective, but sadly, the reality of things doesn't match what you're claiming. It just doesn't.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Doesn't IBM own PWC? So, wouldn't it make sense for PWC to "suddenly" decide to dump Windows in favor of BSD/Linux/anything but Windows?
I'm sorry, but I have worked for quite a few large companies and we never had a problem with our DC's or Network. Sounds to me like this guy was put in a position and instead of reconfiguring the mess someone else made, he went the easy way out and just created a whole new network. I have no problem with LINUX. We currently use both at my company, but to make it sound like Windows was the problem is false. It's the administrators fault for an unstable network environment. They are to blame, not Windows.
you should have already taken steps to replace them now, rather than waiting for them to fall down. It'll be a lot easier to try and deal with getting replacement keys if you can prove you actually own them when you aren't under pressure because the service is down.
You're operating on an agenda (Get linux in here to replace this windows shit). If you're so sure that the Linux solution will be better than the current solution, why haven't you migrated them all over now, while it's NOT an emergency, instead of waiting until it's a fire that needs to be put out. That would be the rational, thinking approach. Preventative maintenance is always going to be preferred to a jury-rigged job to get the services back while the users are screaming for your head.
Mr. Uemura posted a fairly long de-sensationalizing clarification on the OpenBSD Journal (http://www.undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20 051024113247). It was more interesting than the Computerworld article...
A lot of their consulting work in the dept at PWC I applied for deals with hacking an array of different boxen, be it Unix, Linux, BSD, Windows. Don't be too shocked if this trend continues.
Therefore I have been experimenting with other Alternatives, such as Apple's OSX Server. OSX to my surprise is an organized way of working with Unix. So in the past months i have been learning how to use OSX Server and have polished my skills into using it in "Hybrid" Environments, with the most excellent results.
One of my clients was a Windows Shop, It took me several months to convince them to change the server into OSX. The prerogative was simple: Apple offered us the perfect growing up environment for a company of 20 something employees that could get as big as 50 in the next couple of years. How? Well Apple's Xserve and Unlimited Lic. OSX was the key. When I presented them with both investing plan's, which consisted of a Dell Server and Windows, and an Xserve and OSX, it basically came down to a 17k dollar investment to do with the Dell, Windows and all its licencing, and 4 terminal stations. In comparison with the Apple Equipment, the Xserve (2.0Ghz PowerPC, 1gb ECC, 80gb sata hdd (expandable to 3 hdd in sata raid 0)) and OSX Unlimited + Apple Remote (Unlimited), It only went up to $11,075.00. When I presented them both quotes, and told them that with the mac we could have interoperability with Windows XP pc's accessing the server as well, better security, easier configuration and other options, the company decided to take the dive and went the Apple way. Recently they had 20 more employees added, in which this would have meant an increase in licencing of over $2000, the company kept hiring and keeps growing without any problems and the IT Structure is solid. For applications, we Use Quickbooks 2005 for Mac and Quickbooks 2005 for Windows XP, Office for Mac and Office XP for Windows (althought we are going to change to Open Office 2.0 in December 2005). The reason we have a couple windows machines, is for some industry specific applications that we cannot find on mac, so we use them on windows. Everything else is run on the macs with no problems.
I want to add that the Remote Desktop of Macs is an awesome tool. I can make OSX Deployments far more easier than it is in Windows Server Environment. The next client im going to work on this week, Im going to propose the same change, in a bigger scale... I know ill be successfull because the previous client is in love with his system at work.
Nom de dieu de putain de bordel de merde de saloperie de connard d encule de ta mere.
The other solution is to prepare a prototype solution, which you test in your own time, and make sure that it provides everyone what they expect from the old system. If it works then you probably have something substantial to show as evidence. Oh and if its solves some other problems at the same time, while not creating more then that is even better.
One other thing that might be handy in some companies is to document the process, or at least the general set up.
Just note that while some managers will accept that you have a better solution, some will get upset that you trumped them, so you might suffer in spite of your success. This is where you take the approach: if it fails, you will accept the blame, and it works they get to take the credit - the people in the know will know the truth. Politics sucks, but sometimes you just have to play the game.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
No one ever got fired for buying Microsoft.
Fired? No, they just lost their job when the company went belly-up.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
"Uemura said PWC chose OpenBSD, an operating system he is comfortable with..."
"My predecessor spent too much [so] I was told not to spend any money."
Seems to me the reasons they switched are spelled out pretty plainly in the article -- Uemura was a *nix person and OpenBSD was free. Yet somehow the abstract of the article claims PWC switched because "Windows was a nightmare".
Yes, there was mention in the article that their Windows servers were bouncing alot. But the main reason given for the switch was to "spend no money". I suspect if Uemura had not been a *nix type and instead was a good Windows admin he could have fixed the problem without spending any money by instead properly configuring and patching the Windows servers.
The more you regulate a company, the worse its products become.
That OpenBSD is "ready for the desktop" ?
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
Katanas are used to cut others. The wakizashi is used for Seppuku,as well as cutting others that get too close. See the wikipedia article on Seppuku for details...
Think global, act loco
Doom!?!?! Just kidding...
"Who are you?" "No one of consequence." "I must know." "Get used to disappointment."
Actually tutorials help you get a system running that you don't really understand and aren't able to debug once it breaks.
The feel I get from this article is a company that is not running its IT correctly. I have a hard time thinking that the PWC IT person mentioned is in a major data center but rather a small branch office....
"one domain controller, and it was dying"? Huh. I didn't think you could set up a single PDC?
The previous guy overspent so the company deploys OSS on the fly just because its free? Sounds like poor engineering to me.
Virus attack? How can that be in this day and age? IDS/IPS, Firewalls, email scanning/filtering, and client AV makes virus outbreaks a non-issue for most companies.
Checkpoint firewall (notice, not plural), at 100% so they put another firewill in front of it? Most corporate datacenters have redundant firewalls on each pipe not a single firewall.
Price Waterhouse Cooper is covered by SOX and GLBA, as well as acting as a SOX/GLBA auditor. I am certain that they know "how" to run a datacenter. What is described in the article is a prime example of how not to operate in a professional data environment. I can't imagine that their IT is this poorly managed, but stranger things have happened.
My experience is that if something has to be done, just do it - don't ask! They will thank you later,' he said."
Indeed, I was told a little gem from a family friend:
It is much easier to ask for forgiveness than it is permission.
I have found this to be almost universally true (although break glass only when needed).
I got a beowulf cluster of domain controllers at home!
Usually Windows drives me to drink.
Thanks, I'll be here all week. Tip your wait staff.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
I think that's the real truth. They've scrapped their Windows domain boxes and replaced them with openBSD machines that run like domain controllers. Probably run their SMB shares on Samba as well. I refuse to believe that a shop like that simply swaps out their desktops on whim.
but if it is broken, then you absolutely have to fix it. That is your job. No need to ask permission under those circumstances.
Oh well, what the hell...
Twitter, you're a petulant cock-gobbling sycophant to Linux Torvaldyos! Quit taking DP from ESR's and RMS's feculent cocks and why dont you try to stop sucking quite so much? Get out of your parents' basement and see the real world - maybe then you'll see how pathetic you sound, with your neverending stream of bullshit about how Microsoft is stalking you. Wasn't it you who said that Microsoft believes your insane ranting is actually a threat to them, so they PAY PEOPLE to reply to you on Slashdot? No sir, I don't get any money. I do it for the love. Someone has to go up against your paranoid whining. So get back in your cage and shut the fuck up already.
'The whole office was relying on one domain controller which was dying.'
I dont believe that a large corporation like PWC will use only one domain controller. Hell when I worked for a small 40 employee company we had a backup domain controller as well. Hell if you use OpenBSD or Linux or Solaris and you dont setup any redundacy you will end up in a quagmire.
What is he going to say next? That he had SQLServer installation and the databases all in the C: drive as well?
In the end its not what OS/platform you use, but how well the system architects and administrators know their job.
.... when you have never been in a situation of real danger.
/. teenager.
I will not presume you have not been in such a situation, but I have been under situations in which we were losing 10 mega bucks per hour, due to total computer meltdown, the consequence of somebody being "daring".
In other ocassion I had 100 machete welding, angry, threatening peasants protesting in front of the office because we have screwed the maps that marked their plots in a land privatization scheme. Some brave Sys Admin had decided to make a run of the maps and, taking an iniciative that was not his to take, he sent them to the regional Land Registry Office. A broing, slimy, progress stopping middle manager had told him to wait for some data that was still missing, just in case, just to check. Well, the coward was right.
In yet another occassion I was tasked to redo a reporting system for a big University (300000 students back then) from COBOL to ALGOL (many moons ago). Other programmers had screwed this kind of work in the past, which led to demonstrations, burning of buses and jolly generalized violence. The steady hand of a manger that did not take stupid risks helped me to deliver this without a hitch.
Cowardice, as you call it, is not such when the stakes are high. A measured conservative, documented (and yes boring and unappealing) approach to complex systems is the way to go.
Your cavalier attitude may have real consequences for real people, but hopefully you are just a small time Sys Admin (I took lots of risks when I was administering 5 machines) or an
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
.... doing that can land your sorry ass in jail, no matter how wonderful your solution to a problem is.
So keep your advice to yourslef if you have limited experience of the wider IT world.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
or the next /. poll (the EULA on has ivy growing on it)
... drink ... jump out window ... kinda sorta unix(ish) OSX ... beowulf cluster of Timex Sinclairs ... go postal ... go back to abacuses (abaci?) ... OpenBSD
Windows drives company to...
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Yes, 'baby' - too bad there is absolutely no way to save '7 years worth of salaries' by getting rid of Windows - for the simple reason it's simply not that expensive. He saved money by getting of Check Point, which is very expensive (though I don't know about running it on Windows...) Check Point (well, NGX CCSA) works fine on HP-UX.
Hey, maybe I'll tell management at my company to get rid of Vignette and use some two-bit PHP blog project for our publishing? We'll save '5 years worth of salaries', the company will go down in flames and I'll get my ass fired. TCO fact, baby.
Sorry, but your post is so ridiculous I couldn't believe I was reading it.
Why does everyone rejoice when like 2 servers are converted from Windows to an open source solution?
That's precisely why nobody takes you zealots seriously.
It's unfortunate that reporters such as this guy would sensationalize a talk by carefully crafting his story from bits and pieces mostly taken out of context. So, in all fairness to my firm and to those who were not present, I feel compelled to set the story straight.
First off, the story is not an interview even though it may come across as such. The title is rather sensational but I certainly wasn't desperate. There were problems and they were fixed and our team was just very resourceful in doing so.
Gedda writes:
> IT managers who want to deploy an open source solution but are worried
> about company politics should go ahead and do it without asking,
> according to PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC) Japan IT manager Mark Uemura.
No, this is taken out of context. What I said was that we had very big and important changes that we needed to make in order to restore network and application stability. My reference to just going ahead and doing it referred to making the necessary changes behind the scenes. It wasn't about company politics and it wasn't about migrating services from Windows to OpenBSD. My experience was that we did ourselves a disfavour by trying to inform and explain to users and management the technical reasons for the changes that needed to be made. In fact, all of the pushback had nothing to do with OpenBSD. We needed to migrate from an old Domain Controller with a corrupt Active Directory to a new one. We also introduced the concept of working on Application Servers in Terminal Services to take advantage of server power for resource intensive applications that ran very slowly on users' PCs. So, the push back was related to things like "you'll have to login to this new Domain rather than the old one from tomorrow onwards." or getting users to change the way they work and use applications running on a Terminal Servers for speed. In the end, when all was sad and done, users and management realized the difference that we had made; no more downtime or data loss. Furthermore, they've never had everything running so smoothly and as efficiently for as long as they could remember. Their IT problems went away as a result of our efforts and the decisions that we made.
In fact, all of the migrations to OpenBSD were either behind the scenes where the users were oblivious to the changes. Well, almost oblivious. Often times we would get "Hey, the Internet is really fast today, cool!" or "Man, can you guys like spill some coffee in the server room or something? We're not used to this much uptime. It means we can't go home early anymore!"
In those cases where users did have to interact with OpenBSD, it was always well received and positive such as moving off of a very slow VPN for remote access on to a quicker and more user friendly alternative such as port forwarding applications through OpenSSH.
> Faced with an unreliable network, Uemura went ahead and migrated systems
> from Windows to OpenBSD on the premise that management would trust his
> judgement.
Once again, migrating services to OpenBSD was not an issue. So long as we did not compromise security in doing so. Generally, we did so to improve security and that's what OpenBSD is famous for and yet there's so much more.
> "PricewaterhouseCoopers is a Windows shop but we were forced to use open
> source," he said. "I inherited a real nightmare with servers going up
> and down. There were e-mail outages and on top of that there was a bad
> relationship between our users and IT."
Well it's either replace Windows with Window for Internet facing servers or find a more secure alternative that didn't have to be patched and rebooted so often. Bringing back network and application stability was important to the business as much as increasing security wherever it was possible to do so. I feel that stability is a result of good security.
We concentrated on network perimeter security. Hence anything that was public facing was considered so long as it satisfied
Not a drop of BSD in the US data center
OpenBSD is really cool. The latest release brings some great new features. It's now possible to have a *fully* redundant firewall/vpn box. (support for keeping filter, nat, queue, ipsec states sync'd on all nodes, support for takeover of failed device, support for interface trunking for layer2 redundancy...) It works very well and it's a snap to setup since everything is in the default install. Mark Uemura is giving a talk about this at PacSec this november in Tokyo. Here are slides from an older one he did.
Don't let the door hit you in the butt on the way out!
The Rapture is NOT an exit strategy.
.... in Japan!
Software proprietors love to frame the debate on money. This keeps software proprietors in the running for gaining, or in this case, maintaining a client. Microsoft is perfectly willing to give copies of its proprietary software to people gratis in order to keep them divided and helpless. There's plenty of money to be had with support contracts and upgrades down the road. This is why Microsoft's rep was so interested in framing Massachusetts' problems around document preservation and future reading on the argument of how much the project would cost the state. If you haven't heard the discussion for yourself, you should listen to it.
Massachusetts wasn't concerning themselves with software acquisition just yet. They made this very clear in their discussion. But it appears that PriceWaterhouseCoopers is. So, it becomes relevant to point out that framing the debate on software acquisition around the freedom to run, share, and modify computer software is a superior argument to the cost of the software. Alas, the open source movement doesn't encourage anyone to think about software freedom; that movement's message focuses on software development chiefly to businesses that develop software. Talking about software freedom to all computer users has been the long-held ground of the free software movement.
Digital Citizen
No, it's called initiative. If you are working some place that forbids the use of your initiative find somewhere else to work, you'll be much happier.
:) The users, clients and management don't care, they just want it to work. If it works, you'll get anything approved. The Sys Admin is impressed with the reliability and flexibility. I'm happy because my life just got easier... and the move away from IIS has begun!
:)
A recent example... where I currently work I needed PHP installed on a production IIS web server. The Sys Admin wouldn't allow this. To get around this problem I convinced him to allow me to add a linux box running Apache to the production network, as we had a spare server available. Two months after this happened, theres now two linux boxes running Apache with more coming soon
The down side to showing initiative and taking responsibility is if you make a bad choice you might be looking for somewhere else to work anyway
" if something has to be done, just do it - don't ask! They will thank you later,".
If you have a good relationship with upper management, go for it. For most of us though, that's a great way to get terminated with cause.
Don't get me wrong, I have no hate for OpenBSD... but if you flip a divisions network backend overnight before telling anyone... Well, PWC must be a fairly tolerant bunch, as I cannot think of one employer I have ever had that wouldn't have wanted at least some sort of analysis or plan undertaken first.
Twitter, you're a petulant cock-gobbling sycophant to Linux Torvaldyos! Quit taking DP from ESR's and RMS's feculent cocks and why dont you try to stop sucking quite so much? Get out of your parents' basement and see the real world - maybe then you'll see how pathetic you sound, with your neverending stream of bullshit about how Microsoft is stalking you. Wasn't it you who said that Microsoft believes your insane ranting is actually a threat to them, so they PAY PEOPLE to reply to you on Slashdot? No sir, I don't get any money. I do it all for the love. Someone has to go up against your paranoid whining. So get back in your cage and shut the fuck up already.
Don't you mean the iJobs Nano?
This Like That - fun with words!
My grandfather used to say that it's better to ask for forgiveness than for permission.
2 cents,
Queen B
HDGary secures my bank
Re: Computerworld: Setting the story straight... (mod 15/17)
by Mark T. Uemura on Tue Oct 25 14:18:17 2005 (GMT)
It's unfortunate that reporters such as this guy would sensationalize a talk by carefully crafting his story from bits and pieces mostly taken out of context. So, in all fairness to my firm and to those who were not present, I feel compelled to set the story straight.
First off, the story is not an interview even though it may come across as such. The title is rather sensational but I certainly wasn't desperate. There were problems and they were fixed and our team was just very resourceful in doing so.
Gedda writes:
> IT managers who want to deploy an open source solution but are worried
> about company politics should go ahead and do it without asking,
> according to PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC) Japan IT manager Mark Uemura.
No, this is taken out of context. What I said was that we had very big and important changes that we needed to make in order to restore network and application stability. My reference to just going ahead and doing it referred to making the necessary changes behind the scenes. It wasn't about company politics and it wasn't about migrating services from Windows to OpenBSD. My experience was that we did ourselves a disfavour by trying to inform and explain to users and management the technical reasons for the changes that needed to be made. In fact, all of the pushback had nothing to do with OpenBSD. We needed to migrate from an old Domain Controller with a corrupt Active Directory to a new one. We also introduced the concept of working on Application Servers in Terminal Services to take advantage of server power for resource intensive applications that ran very slowly on users' PCs. So, the push back was related to things like "you'll have to login to this new Domain rather than the old one from tomorrow onwards." or getting users to change the way they work and use applications running on a Terminal Servers for speed. In the end, when all was sad and done, users and management realized the difference that we had made; no more downtime or data loss. Furthermore, they've never had everything running so smoothly and as efficiently for as long as they could remember. Their IT problems went away as a result of our efforts and the decisions that we made.
In fact, all of the migrations to OpenBSD were either behind the scenes where the users were oblivious to the changes. Well, almost oblivious. Often times we would get "Hey, the Internet is really fast today, cool!" or "Man, can you guys like spill some coffee in the server room or something? We're not used to this much uptime. It means we can't go home early anymore!"
In those cases where users did have to interact with OpenBSD, it was always well received and positive such as moving off of a very slow VPN for remote access on to a quicker and more user friendly alternative such as port forwarding applications through OpenSSH.
> Faced with an unreliable network, Uemura went ahead and migrated systems
> from Windows to OpenBSD on the premise that management would trust his
> judgement.
Once again, migrating services to OpenBSD was not an issue. So long as we did not compromise security in doing so. Generally, we did so to improve security and that's what OpenBSD is famous for and yet there's so much more.
> "PricewaterhouseCoopers is a Windows shop but we were forced to use open
> source," he said. "I inherited a real nightmare with servers going up
> and down. There were e-mail outages and on top of that there was a bad
> relationship between our users and IT."
Well it's either replace Windows with Window for Internet facing servers or find a more secure alternative that didn't have to be patched and rebooted so often. Bringing back network and applicati
-- "At Microsoft, quality is job 1.1" -- PC Magazine, Nov. 1994
Netcraft confirms: The domain controller is dying!
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
So after installing and using this free software which allows them to continue spending no money - are they giving any thought to funding it's development?
Oh no, now he's soo pissed. You can tell that by counting the 'fucktards'. Never seen so many before, omg.
I wonder what makes PwC Japan imagine that they can manage a phalanx of OpenBSD servers any better then they can manage Windows boxes? Seems to me they hadn't done a spectacular job of this up to the point Uemura made the decision to throw his hands up in the air, blame the platform, and embark on a brave new low-cost OpenBSD adventure.
Snaps to him, but a decent IT organisation wouldn't have gotten themselves into that position in the first place. Is it any surprise that there was a "...bad relationship between our users and IT"?
Downtime and data loss are management and operations issues - these days very rarely are they the direct result of the platform...
How many developers spend time supporting proprietry third party software that their software depends on? How many times do users complain that the program is broken but it's not your code at all. I've seen this with installers for third party dependencies, before my code even gets installed! I've had good projects with highly reliable code suffer problems because of one third party module, and I've even written wrappers for that third party module to detect and work around misbehaviours while keeping the same public interface! (Adding two polygons fails, so try UNION, that failed, try XOR, ...)
Developing in Dot-Net you rely on the available documentation. With Java you get the SDK sources too and can debug into them to see what's really happening. I know which I prefer.
So they had piss poor firewall software and blamed it on Microsoft.
That is just wrong.
I'm not saying Windows is perfect, but I have never had problems like that and I have 40 servers running Windows 2003 and
they are upgraded and with a proper firewall and updates to software I never have to worry.
Whatever, people will think whatever they want to think.
Open source is fine, but I think it's mainly become an anti-microsoft political statement instead
of pushing towards quality and focusing on security.
HOw many anti-Microsoft people on this forum do not have some adgenda of dethroning Microsoft?
Almost every person on here has some anti-microsoft (anti business adjenda), it's like cockroaches.
At first I laughed when he told me, but now I fully understand the value of that philosophy.
...to go back and check my post for the part where I said "stupid n00b".
Can't find it? That's because it ISN'T THERE. Now go play in traffic, OK?
FreeBSD is my favourite OS bar none. Ubuntu Linux similarly rules
:D
However, of late Debian has been quite good.
Of course these OSes beat all WIndows releases hands down in my opinion.
Oh and I'm new here and kind of feel overwhelmed by slashdot's.... sprawling-ness
...you obviously have some serious issues if you get so worked up at someone else over your own fucking mistake.
Other news you will never see reported on slashdot: "Other 99,999,999,999.4 companies still just fine with MS Windows."