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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."
... not the entire company. That would've been big news. Still good though :)
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.
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
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
(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:
Nothing like checking the facts.
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
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.
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
There is no need to run the Novell client anymore. We run Netware servers all over the world and no one uses the Novell client to connect to the services on them. They have iPrint, iFolder, and the Zen gina for connecting to a middletier server that is used to push applications and manage workstations. None of that is needed, but it makes the client management relatively painless.
It seems that, with the miniscule pricing of eDirectory, there is not much incentive to develop and manage a separate bundle of LDAP services and tools. The problem often comes back to ignorance from the market, who do not realize the current offerings from Novell. Instead, the discussions is always about Novell products circa 1995, about the same year that Apple was going out of business.
Everyone took a hit after Enron. It's called a "chilling effect".
And THIS sort of behaviour won't fly under Sarbanes-Oxley ...0 2/nf20020215_2956.htm
http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/feb20
EVeryone has their ass exposed to some extent.
Sorry - but this is the kind of thing that just doesn't stand up. If you replace the Windows boxes in an IT dept. you're gonna have to update Standard Operating Procedures, Business Continuity Plans and licence documents. I don't know why IT techys would be allowed to handle the MS licencing issues all by themselves - this is definitely in PHB territory. (OK - Mom's basement may not be such an exacting environment ;-) ) And all of the time we're talking *infrastructure* services, Domain Controllers, File/Print servers etc - you certainly can't do this realistically without having to tell anyone on *application* servers. This kind of approach is typically the kind of thing that gets you hated when you leave a position - they suddenly discover that you have told them nothing and they are left second guessing a whole host of things that you might have set up. It's a nightmare- and just about the worst way, IMNSHO, to get any companies to get a handle on the real reasons why FOSS might be a good idea - you're going to leave them with an undocumented mess, which will cost them 10 times what "doing it properly" would have done, and the impression that FOSS is just a bunch of undisciplined geeks that can't behave themselves.
Try NetBSD... safe,straightforward,useful.
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...
OrangeSpyderMan is your reply directed at me?
"But follow some good practices" certainly means to document things. We are talking here about IT professionals.. not some kid who thinks he an IT manager because he works with computers.
http://www.hawknest.com/
Read his reply to the article @ www.undeadly.org
0 51024113247
Re: Computerworld: Setting the story straight...
by Mark T. Uemura
http://www.undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20
More interesting reading his reply about the article than the article itself.
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
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.
The downside is coming into work on Monday and being handed a katana with the understanding you will "do the honorable thing."
Generally, the person with a Katana is the second. His job is to behead the suicider as he disembowels himself with a Tanto so that he doesn't embarrass himself by whining.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
Don't forget to cover non-technical issues, such as how long it will take for users to adjust, and how easy the adjustment period will be.
But a large portion of your network is probably invisible to your users.
For file and print servers, there are no non-technical issues, unless you are doing something more radical like going from Windows File/Print sharing ot Internet Printing Protocol, or the like. What does it matter what OS your web servers run? What does it matter what OS your RDBMS servers run? Your IT department may require a little training to do basic tasks on it, but it is not like you are training every user of the organization, and IME, the productivity gains even in the short run will outweigh the training costs (it can be done a little at a time too if necessary).
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
More often than not, the advantage to having the source of the API (lib or OS) that your application is calling is not so that you can fix a bug in that lib or OS, but so that you can see how the API really works rather than how it is documented to work. Quite frequently documentation is wrong, or out of date, or omits certain assumptions the API developer made about the apps that would be calling it.
I've fixed many a misbehaving application because I could see where invoked code differed from its design or documentation. Tough to do with closed-source.
-- Alastair
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
Windows support is now a blue collar occupation. Its a trade, not a profession. To manage UNIX they will either have to have had prior exposure to it at work, or they got taught it at college.
My brother started out as a cook, then as an operator on a large IBM site. Now he does windows support. I guarantee that he will never get unix. He could learn it if he has to but I can't see it happening.
http://michaelsmith.id.au