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Ask Slashdot: NT to Linux Migration Costs?
Alex asks:
"How would one go about calculating immediate costs and
tangible benefits of migrating an NT/Novell IntranetWare
LAN to Linux. I am not talking only about long-term
benefits as in more uptime, fewer crashes, robustness,
etc., but if I could use fewer and cheaper boxes for file,
internet and print servers. What could I say to a company
about the immediate benefits?" What about the costs
associated with retraining? What pitfalls do NT admins have
to worry about when moving to Linux?
In terms of hardware, you really aren't going to be saving anything because you will need to have two servers in place while you do the migration. One with the old NOS, and one with the new NOS.
Also, most of the cost of a good NT/Netware solution is in terms of redudancy and backup. Good server platform such as Compaq with a UPS, redundant power supply, RAID-5, DLT drives, etc.
There is a huge support cost if you need to go to all the client machines and reconfigure anything.
The biggest cost is likely going to be the administrative time sorting through all the damn files and trying to figure out who they belong to and set file permissions accordingly.
I sort of disagree. If you have staff that only know one thing (like NT) then you are probably already in a world of hurt.
It's this kind of shop where the admins tell users who are having problems that sometimes things "act wierd" and they aren't sure why.
Most good admins have experience on as many platforms as they can get their hands on, and are really experienced on at least two.
Most sysadmin techniques and practices apply on all operating systems.
I prefer NT apps, as I do not want some one who has no idea how the application should be used controlling my application.
In Science and Tech, this is a big problem..By running the apps locally I am not constrained by network going down or bandwidth problem..At the rate IT is shoving stuff down our throat, I will put the corporate computer aside and bring my own one to do my job as best as I can do and not according to some IT guy who thinks he knows all about my application and loads the vanilla flavour of it..
Screw Sun for bringing the NC hype...I will stay with NT..it aint bad..It does my CAD stuff without crashing..Unix/Linux box..let me make coffee..due to so many sharing a server...
I support both NT and unix Sci/Tech apps.
I prefer supporting unix because it blows NT away when the system is remote.
I can get on the users system, poke around, trouble shoot things (X cross country is slow, but it works), do remote installs of software etc., and spend the weekend with my wife instead of traveling (at least once a month I thank god for unix).
I don't care if the app runs localy on the users SGI workstatation or remotely on the server. We have both "types" of users. All I care is that when the user "fixes" something I can get at the system and set things right......
While this doesn't address the immediate question: the real and tangential
:-), I seriously tried to work with
costs associated with a move from NT and/or Netware to Linux, you must
also consider the cost/benefit ratio.
[Note: I know next to *nothing* about Netware. Particularly later
versions. So what I'll address is NT vs. Linux.]
What do you stand to gain in the long run? Linux is widely reported to be
far more stable and, all else being equal, much faster than NT. I can't
argue as to the stability issue because, in my limited experience with
both Linux and NT, both have been quite stable. But I *can* speak to the
performance issue.
Two machines: an H-P 200MHz PPro server with 128mb and Ultra-SCSI drives
vs. a 3+ year-old Sun Sparc 1000e with 4 50MHz processors, 512mb, and just
SCSI-2 drives. The Intel box was running NT4 Server, the Sparc box
Solaris 2.5.1. Both were connected to the network backbone at 100mb/s.
There were about 200-250 seats in the enterprise (it varied). A mix of
Windows 3.x, 9x, and NT boxes and Unix seats. And some QNX clients as
well.
The NT box had almost nothing difficult to do other than play PDC, WINS
server and browse master. And Exchange Server for a whopping 15 clients.
The Sparc box was playing file and print server (both NFS and Samba),
license server for something like a dozen applications, Lotus Notes server
(about 125 seats), SMTP and POP3 mail server, PC-NFS server, Web
(Intranet) server, MySQL database server, NIS+ server, bootp/TFTP server,
INN server, primary DNS server, and who knows what-all else.
The NT server had to authenticate only for the 15 or so people that used
Exchange. The Sun box authenticated all the rest. And remember: the Sun
box did *all* of the file and print serving.
So the NT box, in relation to the Sparc box, was *quite* lightly loaded!
When we dumped the NT server and let the Sparc box (via Samba) take over
as WINS server and browse master, much to everybody's surprise: network
performance on *all* of the Windows boxes actually improved drastically!
This in spite of the fact that the Sun box, during working hours, rarely
shows an average load of less than two--with all four CPUs frequently at
or near 100% utilization.
The NT server, during the time I was administering it, frequently was on
its knees. (Probably mainly because of Exchange Server.) I regularly
received complaints from the NT workstation users about network
operations timing-out. Haven't received a one since letting the Sun box
take over.
One might be tempted to point-out that we're talking about a 4-processor
machine vs. a single-processor machine. But keep in mind the difference
in server load: approximately 15 clients vs. approximately 200? Not-to-
mention the difference in number of server tasks, etc. And the fact that
50MHz Sparc processors and SCSI-2 drives aren't exactly state-of-the-art
as compared to what the Intel box had.
And unlike some people I could mention
the NT box to get it to perform well. I spent a considerable amount of
time studying NT and fooling with it. *And* we hired a top-notch
consulting firm to work with us as well. The NT box *was* tuned. (So was
the Solaris box.)
One other data-point: my old lap-top. A lowly Dell Latitude 486/50 with
36mb of RAM. When I used to demo multiple tasks, graphical- and disk-
intensive, running on the box, experienced Windows people used to guess
that it had at least a 75MHz or 100Mhz Pentium in it!
The up-shot? My *guess*, from these experiences, is that any capable 'nix
box will easily out-perform a Windows box in either server or workstation
roles. I *suspect* that a Linux server in place of the Sun box would
yield similar results. Particularly with the improved SMP support in
Linux 2.x kernels.
I could be wrong, of course. The above comparisons certainly aren't
"scientific method" by any stretch of the imagination. But they seem
compelling to me.
The cost/benefit issue: end-user productivity, of course.
The above discussion assumes a 'nix server serving Windows clients. If
you go to an all-'nix environment, there are additional cost benefits to
be realized. One of the most compelling of these being administrative
costs. Since 'nix can be run in an enterprise environment with little-
or-no "local context", workstations are *much* easier to install and
configure. And when one goes belly-up, as will happen from time-to-time,
all you need perform is a vanilla re-install and reconfiguration. (If you
wanted to be slick, and had a lot of workstations--enough to justify the
exercise--you could even "clone" a vanilla install, install or restore
workstations from that, and customize things like host name, IP address,
etc. [Say, from a custom question-and-answer shell script.]) And remote
administration is far easier.
Utilization of "thin client" technology, such as X-terminals, eliminates
even these exercises.
In my experience (some ten+ years administering a wide variety of Ms-DOS,
Ms-Win, and 'nix boxen), there is no comparison: 'nix out-performs Ms-Win
from both a cost and performance standpoint. Even in an all-commercial-
products (e.g.: Sun Sparc Solaris and commercial apps.) context.
i don't know how big your company is but i would start small. say a print server on a friday afternoon that you can keep your eye on. then a small file server. the goal is not to switch right away but to see how they hold up with your workload. This is how most companies i have seen start. As far as internet services nothing beats linux, if you know what you are doing you could switch your "internet servers" over a few weeks and no one will know.
one thing to keep in mind is while you can telnet to any linux box there is no widspread management system or nds for linux available yet, caldera has some support, but it will be coming out soon for everyone else. I would keep the novell serevrs for nds alone. once you can drop your linux servers into the tree things will be easy going. but also don't fool yourself into thinking you can replace nt if you invested heavily in things like exchange, IIS, and SQL. These days everyone wants linux to scale to the moon but for now be happy with the basic things it can provide you. and a few months from now when everything is running smoothly you will have the "return' you are looking for.
I'm currently involved in an NT to Linux migration. I can't tell you what company this is for, but I will estimate for you the costs of this migration.
:-) Each machine in the cluster is a quad P-II Xeon with 1 GB RAM and 100 GB RAID hard drives. The system is kept together by two very hard working full-time staff. These two people are effectively on-call 24 hours a day. It has a team of six people in total managing technical and web design aspects.
Firstly - the service. The service is a popular European web-based application, mainly targetted at business users - shared email, calendaring and that sort of thing. It has a user base expected to increase to several million in the next year. It currently runs on a small cluster of NT servers fronted with a Linux/Apache proxy server (the Linux proxy server is another story - we use mod_rewrite to work around a number of bugs on the NT software
Starting a few months ago, I was employed to migrate the software entirely to Linux. For this, I have myself and one other person full time and a number of support people ordering and building kit. We started out by designing a scalable database back end and then we rewrote all the dynamic NT scripts in Perl. We are using Apache + mod_perl as the platform to run it on. Rewriting the scripts in Perl took two months. We are now spending a month in a closed beta test of the new system, and expect to spend another month importing all the users and their data across from the old system. Four months in total.
On the hardware side, it came as a pleasant surprise to find that we could get away with relatively low-end hardware on the Apache web servers. We are currently specifying single Intel P-II 450 systems with 512 MB RAM and 8 GB drives. Our scalability tests indicate that each of these machines can handle the load from around 100,000 subscribers (that's subscribers, not active concurrent users).
The expensive bit is the database. The nature of the web application we have developed is that it has enormous data storage requirements. We archive and store a lot of information on behalf of each of our subscribers. Because there is no high quality database solution for Linux yet - by which I mean no database which offers parallel servers and failover - we are using a popular commercial database on a commercial Unix. This is by far the most expensive part of the system. It looks like we will be paying the best part of $200,000 just for the database / 1 TB storage / back up solution.
Even though we are based in Europe, we have not had any trouble employing bright Linux experts straight out of university. Linux users tend to be a lot smarter than NT users too, since (at present) most people presenting themselves for jobs as `Linux experts' have had to take the initiative and strike out on their own. They are usually more motivated too for the same reason.
Some quick lessons learned: (1) You must make sure you employ people familiar with Linux. (2) It helps if management are behind you on this. Where I work, management have stated that they never want to see any more NT systems deployed. (3) The biggest technical problem to adopting the new system was converting all the old data (in NT proprietary formats) into open formats. If you have a lot of data, then this is a very important cost to factor in. Luckily if we decided in the future to move from Linux to another platform, then we would not have to pay this cost again.
Posted by sach:
Funny you should mention that. Myself and some other "migrated" users have been addressing that very need. We are putting together a website who's main goal is to aid M$ based administrators in migrating their services from NT to linux. We hope to have the beta site running by the end of the summer. There should be a formal anouncement some time in August.
Of course it's amateurish. (Thank God) If it wasn't amateurish, they would have started charging for premium services, drastically changed the UI a couple of times, and sold the subscription list. Be careful what you wish for.
In my experience Slashdot has been very upfront about problems and changes. Rob's been busy recently which explains the outages and lack of timely notices. While it would be nice to have a slightly more "professional" slashdot (and yes, I would be willing to pay for it) it is hard to see how the site can change without losing its soul. I'd rather have a great service with a few outages than a commercial warzone with un-interrupted service.
--
"L'IT c'est moi!"
I'm a former Exchange admin for about 200 users. (No, we didn't convert; I quit.)
:-)
:-)
It really depends on what you are using. Exchange provides many services in one package. Most of them are easily replaceable; calendar functions are the one major exception. This will hopefully change, too, once the IETF calendaring system catches on, but until then, you'll need some replacement for that if you use it.
Also, make sure that when you replace technology that you have buy-in from management. Change always brings in friction, especially if it's perceived to be harder to use. So be sure to do lots of user testing, previews, benefits analysis, and the like, especially with anything that is going to look or work different from the user's point of view.
Given all that, here's an example gameplan:
- Switch all users to open protocols. Use IMAP and SMTP for mail, LDAP for directory services, NNTP for discussion groups, etc. Hook all of these into the Exchange box for now. This is the stage to eliminate all of the user issues - training, usability, etc. Make sure that everything is set up to be compatible with the Linux way of doing things; for example, refer to public folders by their NNTP names instead of their "pretty names". This is also the stage to introduce the users to replacements if you use them; for example, roll out Web-based calendaring or group discussion stuff now (on the Linux box, of course), as well as new clients if you're switching from Outlook.
- Start replicating all those services on the Linux box. Hook them together if possible; for example, have your Exchange public folders do a NNTP news feed to their equivalents on Linux, and have the LDAP server synchronize with Exchange's directory through some means (X.500 if you can hack it, or Perl script pulloffs in a pinch).
- Set up addressing so that the Linux box and the NT box are equivalent; that is, "user@example.com" just works, no matter where the actual account resides. A good way to do this is to make the Linux box the "gateway" for all mail, and set up an aliases database to forward for all the Exchange users. We actually did this for a different reason: we wanted a fairly safe "buffer" between the Internet and the company's E-mail.
- Now start setting up your first users - the "beta team". Make sure they can get to everything and do everything they need to. Especially look out for interoperability issues with the Exchange users.
- Once all roadblocks are out of the way, start migrating the rest of the users. If you've done your job right, the move should be transparent from the user's context - the only thing they should notice is how much faster and more reliable everything is.
Once you're done, things should run a lot more smoothly. We had several groups of users using Linux E-mail servers instead of Exchange; they had much less downtime than the Exchange users. Granted, they only had at most 20 users each, but they were also running on 386/40 systems with 200 MB disk and 8 MB RAM; had we the hardware we needed to run Exchange, we could probably have supported 1000 users.
I'm MCSE #27994, and was once enamored by NT, now I refuse to touch it. I reluctantly agree, NT types as a group aren't as sharp as most others in computer work. So that can be an issue. However, some are OK, here's what I'd recommend, looking back on my conversion:
- as countless others have said, start modestly. Ideal would be recycling an older generic PC (not Compaq server or laptop) as a simple Samba server. Have an NT admin install Redhat 5.2 with default "server" option, and just make it an extra place to store files. If there are problems getting Samba going, use it as an "FTP dumping ground" for archiving stuff you may want to keep around. Then get Samba going.
- Point to zero-cost fileserver for the admins to use. That's win #1.
- get a subscription to Linux Journal for the admins. The enthusiasm of the writers and the sheer coolness of what's happening with Linux worldwide will start to infect NT folks too.
- Figure out what NT servers are reaching end of life, etc. Get a rough forecast on new web servers needed, etc. Match them up: instead of a costly *new* server for NT/IIS, show how the capital budget won't take any hit at all if servers are recycled into Linux boxes.
DoxPrint's a middleware tool I wrote to translate Network Neighborhood prints to Novell Netware prints. Should help with any migration attempt, considering you can leave all your (working) Novell print queues as they stand and move your clients to the exact same state they'll be in if you choose to move to another print platform. DoxPrint, with a *tiny* amount of coding(I'll even build it into the next version if you like), can allow one point of access to Netware printers, Samba printers, NT printers, and even Appletalk printers. Check it out, it might help ya.
http://doxpara.netpedia.net/doxprint.html
Once you pull the pin, Mr. Grenade is no longer your friend.
IMHO, you are rolling several very different questions into one. That is, as network service models to be analyzed,
*nix vs. {NT, Netware}
Linux vs. {NT, Netware}
NT vs. Netware
Linux vs. NT
Linux vs. Netware
cross many domains and will yield different answers depending on the problem to be solved and the way the questions are phrased.
In my experience, for example, NT has about 3x the resource cost of Netware in a large departmental environment (200-400 corporate users in 1-2 locations, 20% mobile users). But administration costs for NT go up exponentially as the number of sites and mobile users, while Netware administration costs go up linearly with the same variables.
So if you are trying to convince me to replace NT with Linux, you need to demonstrate that in the equation c = n ** p (c = cost, n = number of sites), p is
But if you are trying to replace Netware with Linux, you are going to have to prove that p
Others have made the argument about NDS, so I won't beat that one to death. But please keep in mind that if you haven't administered a large corporate network, you shouldn't knock NDS until you have used it.
sPh
I don't really think you'll gain that much by replacing Novell with Linux. Now, I'd cheerfully swap out NT for Linux all day, but I can't imagine that you'd get anything but headaches in swapping out Novell.
:)
Caveat: I haven't used Novell since the 4.11 release, as I moved off into NT administration after that. And I have not used a Novell TCP/IP network yet. However, I serviced A LOT of 3.12 servers and a few 4.11.
The reason I like Linux so well is the same reason I like Novell: it works. It works well. It doesn't crash. Novell is just as reliable as Linux, in my experience, and maybe more so. Generally speaking, the only way a Novell server is going to fall over is if the hardware dies.
Now, I have seen unstable Netware installations, but invariably they have been hack jobs by administrators that didn't know what they were doing. A properly administered Netware network is granite solid.
In my mind, Linux's primary advantages over NT are reliability and open source. If something is wrong, I can always fix it with Linux if I'm willing to put the time in to really understand the problem, and once I fix it, it will stay fixed. However, in general, Novell is easier to figure out and it also stays fixed. You do give up a lot of control of the system, but in general Netware works the way Microsoft wishes NT did -- most of the time you don't need bit-level control because it's not going to break.
Novell also thinks their problem solutions out thoroughly. Their print queue is a good example of this. NT sort of has some of the same functionality, but it's a lot easier to maintain complex print structures in Novell and it's a hell of a lot easier to route around problems. Linux's print queues are postively archaic by comparison. You more or less have to build one by hand, and magic filters are a pain in the butt to figure out. Now, you can do more with Linux and print queues: once you understand it you can do just about any neat hack you like. But for most of us, Novell's approach is better. You can start printing with a minimum of fuss and go from there. Linux makes you jump through friggin' hoops to get everything configured properly. That's true of a lot of solutions in Linux.
Novell requires technical skill but has excellent documentation, is much more consistent, and is built with the big picture in mind. You can make HUGE networks with Novell. Most Linux apps aren't designed with the same kind of scalability in mind. They are often written by people with experience with small networks who have an itch. There aren't nearly as many working with really big nets, so there aren't nearly as many good solutions to the BIG problems. Novell is in the business of charging lots of money for solutions to the BIG problems, and they provide excellent, thoroughly-thought-out ones, too.
In my opinion, you'd be best off leaving your network core on Novell. Use Linux, but use it alongside, not in replacement. If you need the whizbang TCP/IP capabilities, or want to deploy a free web server, then you can plop down Linux boxes wherever you like. And when NDS for Linux ships, you'll be able to glue the systems together very closely with a minimum of fuss (apparently).
This is the strategy we have taken. We don't mind having Samba and NT next to each other. (we have no Novell in my present job, which is rather a shame.) We try to run most Internet-related protocols on Linux(we'd use BSD but I haven't learned it yet), and run Microsoft stuff on NT, and everyone stays happy. Samba interoperates nicely in a network with a PDC already in it.
There just is no sense in throwing away your existing investment unless it is too costly to maintain. Linux will certainly help save on maintenance costs once you grok it, but the upfront learning costs are steep. Amortize those by doing little pilot projects until you really know what you're doing. Someday, you may wake up and find that Linux is the center of your network -- but you also might not. And that's okay.
Remember, Open Source isn't going away. It's here for the long haul. You don't have to make this an either/or battle. It's not NT OR Linux, it's NT AND Linux. Take advantage of Open Source where it can help you, and try to give back and make it better. If you insist on making it a war, someone has to lose, and it could be you. If there is no war, then there can be no loser.
-- Ron
One day, it might even support reading NetXRay and other network analyzer files. It's kind of rough right now, but it does work. About the only serious thing it's missing to compare with NetXRay are all the nice aggregate traffic analysis reports, and the network usage meters. Right now, it's just a protocol decoder.
I'm not the original poster, but I've recently set up a Samba server regularly serving more than 100 users. We've just recently tested and upgraded the machine to use Samba 2.0.4. It acts as a primary domain controller. These are all NT boxes that are connecting.
.10
It's running on a Dell Poweredge 4300, Dual Processor with 512MB RAM. The reason the machine is so hefty is because it's also serving IMAP for these same 100 users, print serving about 20 printers, handling a web E-mail application, apache, DNS, and lots of other miscellaneous duties. This is on a 100 MBit network.
The nice thing is that we can put all of these applications on one server, maintain backups and all, and the reliability stays right up there. We can run as many applications as we want, and we're nowhere near using up the CPU time. Most of the time the load average stays below
The server has been solid. We've had a few problems with corruption of the data recently. Hopefully this was just due to the beta MegaRAID driver in some of the 2.2.x kernels. Also, there have been a couple of problems with the u.washington imap daemon and Netscape, but we've been able to work around most of them.
Other than that, the server works flawlessly. There have been no problems with Samba, and we've had 30 day uptimes (would have been lots more, except we needed to do a hardware upgrade), and we've had no reliability problems with Linux.
This isn't a migration, however. This network was an upgrade from Novell, and these NT clients were purchased so that the client would have a managed architecture.
I won the contract since I offered better rates than the NT consultants they talked to and they liked the consulting work I did earlier. One big factor was the fact that they didn't have to pay licensing fees, which easily would have doubled the cost of the project.
The client is happy. They have an NT network that works. I don't get called about the machine in weeks at a time. Their staff has learned to use the utilities under Linux to manage Samba, and had no trouble learning a bit about Unix permissions, the samba configuration file, and smbpasswd, smbstatus, etc. It really isn't that hard to learn this stuff, and once you know it, it becomes easy to manage the network from anywhere.
They have a few remote offices, but those offices each have a Samba server set up. Maybe in the future we'll synchronize passwords across the whole company, but there's no need for it right now. The corporation is large, but is by no means huge, and most of the company is in the office in New York.
I admit this is a somewhat uneducated opinion. I've used linux and samba occasionaly, but am by no means an expert.
One thing I like about Netware is NDS. On anything but the smallest network you just can't beat NDS for managing users, groups, etc. I'm sure utilities exist for performing the same tasks in Samba preventing the need to manually edit the conf file. But we're still talking a flat file database at the lowest level. This can never compare with a directory service. Although I've heard rumors of Novell porting NDS to Linux. That might be a great combination.
I guess the main point is that if your current administrators are diehard NDS fans (like myself) convincing them to switch to Samba for file services will be a hard sell. You have to have the "*nix mindset" to put up with the quirks of a unix like os. I'm working on it, but I've still got a long way to go 8 )
My .02
Steve
The CAD stuff my users do wouldn't even begin to run on NT. Without a distributed file system and a server farm, they would spend 90% of their time waiting for their sims and rendering to finish.
A lot of the engineers have no clue how the apps should be installed. So they are set up in DFS. They have no idea how their machines should be set up, so we have an image that we can push out to any one of our 2400 machines.
So now our users can concentrate on designing their chips and making the company money instead of playing with the way the tools and machines are set up. They get to do what they do well and don't have to worry about the environment.
Several tangible costs have emerged at my company, where I've been spearheading exactly this (an NT/Novell migration, or part of one, to Linux):
* The consultants we hired recommend one NT server per major service (accounting software, company database, email server, etc.) As we develop the need for more services, we'll either keep investing in new machines (or use potentially unreliable cast-off desktop machines).
* This leads into the second item -- as a diehard Novell house (before I showed up), there was no internal support structure for NT, so we hired consultants. This is a measurable, ongoing cost. Since most Linux advocates are what they are because of familiarity with their OS, there's often less need to dip into outside pools of talent for such a migration.
These can't necessarily translate into hard numbers -- but I doubt anyone else's experience can equate to a budget entry for you.
Nothing worth doing is worth doing today.
Most of Slashdot's problems start when Rob decides to add some new features. You need to remember that Rob isn't on the budget of a large corporation (or any corporation for that matter), and that he only has one box serving the entire Slashdot.
Had this been a large corporation, there would be some backup machines that could be instantly swapped.
---
Funny to see this question growing up to the level of Slashdot. We had exactly this situation two monthes ago. Yesterday we scrapped the last NT box. Now we are working in a Linux/Netware/Solaris/AIX environment.
;)
Imediate costs and benefits? Well implementing Linux is a tremendous headache. But results overcome expectations.
We are a group divided by three/four teams with 30 people around and serving a whole University network. We had a very interesting place around here called "Internet classes". Some sort of Internet Cafe without coffee. It consists of 70 workstations, several servers of different types and serving more than 2500 users of a wide range of professions and knowledge. The stuff here is quite serious. It is mainly IBM and Sun hardware and it costs a Hell of money.
We started the whole thing on a Solaris/Novell/AIX/NT environment. It didn't work. For 6 monthes we were turned to janitoring constantly a system on which NT was giving tremendous headaches. Things became a major crisis after a serious crash that stopped work for nearly a week.
Some of us lobbied to see NT replaced. After the NT Armageddon's day we got green light to deliver something on Linux in a month. It was Hell. We had problems and problems and problems. But we came with something two months ago.
Results? It is working. Last week we destroyed the NT image that we kept in any case. The last NT box had oxygen cut yesterday at 16:30. People are facing a system several orders more complex than before and are not deeply concerned about it. Some even love it.
The fearful "We want NT back!" didn't last more than a week. Crashes, hangups, coredumps happen but it is several orders of magnitude less than before (some of these new boxes worked nearly two monthes round'clock. A powercut spoiled things).
Do people fear such primitevenesses like the commandline? Yes. But soon they will start (re)using it because there are things that do their job much better than their desktop brothers.
Before we were forced to stick users to "one desktop, one environment". Right now we have a mega-crazyness here where each one chooses the working environment he likes most. And changes the environment as he likes. Before we had a cracking epidemics here. Now we have hackers digging up deeply on the system and helping things grow up. Before we forced everyone to accept the administrative fascism of having a restricted set of apps. Now security is based mostly in supervision. We allow people to do almost everything with their systems as users of a classic UNIX environment.
Right now we have not only a reliable network where people have finally the chance to work. Right now things are overcoming expectations. These two classes are no longer "cafe's". It is Linux Heavy Industries. It is a place where Internet lives not only of browsing. Some users turn their environments to full-fetched working horses. Others use it on developing apps for Internet. And all of us have seen a tremendous boost on development overall. We now are growing things and not janitoring like before. Meanwhile teams are getting free to care for areas that were not touched during the NT hiatus.
Besides we are now planning the future. We are trying to implement things such as clusters here. As an experiment we joined the RC5 contest. Amazingly we are getting a good place over there. There are plans to implement Coda or a huge webcacher based on Squid.
Want to turn to Linux from NT? Take attention to these permises:
You have to take some good time on tuning your hardware. Even in "smooth" installation may hide a lot of "features". And a good careful tuning may turn a rather "slow" machine into something amazing.
Check all those apps over there. Linux is still quite loosen on configurations. And that's a HUGE +. You have a very good chance to fit things much more to your requests.
Office apps are a big problem in Linux. But our world doesn't end here. Try to find a middleterm. When users will note everything else, they will stop whinning and start to hunt you for even more.
If your main language is not english you may find a problem. But most of it is pure cosmetcis. The final result is more rewarding than NT.
Linux is not beautiful. Because power means rawness. And its up to the user to paint it. When he gets there don't get scared. Everyone has a Picasso inside.
Linux crashes. Programs crash. However you have a wide field to maneuver. Even dealing with commercial "crazy" apps is much easier and there's a bigger chance to find solutions.
Take time. The most important is to make a good pre-installation. Get everything you have and try to make the "box of your and their dreams". Check and test it carefully. And then give your users a "gift".
They will cry over you. They will ask your head. They will pass near you and imagine that see you with a rope on your neck they'l be willing to push. But it will not last long. If things were made carefully and well-planned, then NT will be History in a few weeks.
Get a small development team around you. That's very important. Linux is growable and fetching things to specific needs gives a powerful boost on work. If there are no chances to get a developer then roam Internet as much as possible. Even a small sh script may improve things a lot.
Beware. In a few monthes you may note that you are no longer a network administrator...
Excuse me, but that was uncalled for. Contribute if you wish, but keep your comments to yourself if you have nothing really constructive to say.
On the topic of the question at hand, there are a whole bunch of issues to consider:
- Man hours. Make no mistake, even Unix veterans will have to spend a significant amount of time migrating the system from Novell/NT to Linux.
- In some cases, setting up Samba similar to NT permissions can be troublesome. Definitely look into a good tool to configure Samba. SWAT, the web frontend is nice, but may not be enough.
- If the LAN is just serving user home dirs and such, that's not difficult. If you have web based apps using MS propietary tech, you'll be in for a rough time porting that stuff. I hope you've gone with standards.
What are the short term benefits? Well here's a couple:
- No more per seat licensing/connection garbage.
- Very efficient use of hardware. I've seen NT servers slow down significantly when screen savers start. *SIGH* Of course, the screen saver should not have been enabled in the first place and it was promptly disabled but still...
- Bug updates are free, frequent, and if one has a bit of programming knowledge, possible to do/aid debug on one's own. Try that with MS Service Packs.
- Free software everywhere. Nuff said.
- Easy remote configuration, with X Servers, Telnet, FTP and other very useful methods. PCAnywhere just doesn't compare.
- Proven, useful web tech.
- With this more efficient hardware, you can have failover systems implemented (if you don't already, I hope you do). I have a little AMD 586 133 (P75 equivalent) with 16 MB of RAM and an ISA 10 MB Ethernet that can push 750+ KB/s to multiple clients over Samba.
Make no mistake, this isn't going to be a week-long thing. Plus, Netware is a nice NOS to start with. But there are several good reasons why Linux is gaining steam, and acceptance in the IT biz is another indicator of it.
Like other people have suggested, start small and work up.
Numerous studies back you up. The biggest cost of any system is the man/women power behind it. For complex Oracle installations, this can be more than 50% of the total cost.
It seems that the average small to midsized shop is barely scraping by on WinNT, and that's with the enormous MS training programs and documentation. Expecting underpaid, underskilled admins to migrate you to Linux is going cost a lot of money, IMO.
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Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Could you post how many users you have hitting that Samba PDC, and what kind of network you have.
Samba's useful, but I haven't met anyone who's had the guts to put it smack in the middle of their NT infrastructure. (And, some sort of network directory is needed. Individual password databases won't fly in even the most screwed up NT enviornment.)
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Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Basically, you describe reverse-engineering the installer. I've been through this in the old days (with WfW that used much more comprehensible INI files), and it wasn't pretty and a very bug prone process.
And while you can get this to work fine for simple, self-contained programs, forget about it for more complex programs such as Netscape Communicator or Microsoft Office. As far as I can tell, there is no documented list of Registry keys that these apps need, so you are going to have to use a Registry monitor and try to keep track of 100s of keys yourself.
If you've seen Intellimirror (in Win2000), they've accomplished the same thing by essentially allowing you to run the installers automatically. However, no existing installers work under this scheme.
Complicating this is that the default Registry permissions are not-to-secure, and tightening this up is inevitably going to break some applicaitons unless you are very careful.
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Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Reading posts like these really depress me, but I know that's true in many, if not most environments.
Chalk it up to totally retarded (or defunded) IT departments. They won't deploy a standard hardware/software package that works, and they won't support you if you do it yourself. Of course that leaves their internal political support at about zero, so forget about improving the budget to fix the situation.
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Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
That's a facinating account, because an equivalant NT setup would probably need at least 3 servers (PDC+mail, BDC+file/print, webserver).
However, 100 users is a pretty small NT domain, and it sounds as if you only have one site. What I'd love to hear is "I'm using a Samba PDC with 1000 users and 5 sites, with a combination of Samba and NT BDCs and NBNS (WINS) servers at each site." When that's true, NT looks to be history for most small-to-midsized shops.
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Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
- figure out what dll's and registry entries the software wants/makes and where it expects them. This is the toughest part.
- create a repository for dll's on a server and share it.
- have all users use a mandatory profile. Add the used menu structure in this profile, as well as the neededuser-registry entries. Have your environment path include the repository you created.
- If needed, system registry entries can be added by either running a remote registry update in batch, or a run-once like configuration, which can be implememted through the profile
- test, twiddle, fiddle, test, test, test
:-)
It's not easy, true. It will cost you a lot of time. true. And all of this makes it practically only interesting to actually do when you have to do a large roll-out. But, as i stated before, it's only for a small part an problem with NT. It's much more a problem with the software vendors who do not document or tell you what dll's, registry entries and such are needed for their apps to run. Once they would do that, the biggest time-consumer in large roll-outs would be eliminated.----------
'We have no choice in what we are. Yet what are we,
but the sum of our choices.' --Rob Grant
----------
'We have no choice in what we are. Yet what are we,
but the sum of our choices.' --Rob Grant
It seems to me that the main cost would be if your server went down when you switched over cuz you (or someone else) did something wrong. I wonder if you mean replacing your current hardware with cheaper hardware...or just putting linux on your current hardware. If you have a decent server-hot swapable drive or at least removeable drives-set up linux on a remote box on a removeable hard drive, write the kernel for the server box then slide the hard drive into the server. It ought to switch over nicely.
It also depends on your current hardware. Do you have SMP systems with big RAIDs? Or single processor systmems with a few SCSI hard drives? Or less? Linux doesnt SMP too well but NT is pretty good at it. From what i understand ext2 isn't the best FS for a large RAID (it's not the best for my tiny 2 gig). If you wanna switch to a free *nix go with FreeBSD or OpenBSD (for lots of security). FreeBSD handles SMP rather well and it's FS has never given me many problems, but you could probably use UFS (Unix File System) for a RAID and put the kernel and such on a smaller drive. If you want LOTS of power and corporate support go with Solaris, on an SMP system it really shines.
Theres lots of alternatives to linux, pick one and move cautiously. I wouldnt suggest changing the user workstations over to linux without first giving all the users a good intro to linux and unix in general. This can be quite costly because it requires them to learn on the job and therefore not really be working or to work overtime. Xwindows and Gnome-CDE-KDE are nice for new users, but without a good understanding of how unix works they'll be lost.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
I know that with UNIX there are also license issues. NT has those too. We use Microfocus COBOL, and they have per user license, but then again so does M$. M$ has per machine license, ie you need a license per each machine. Where UNIX is is usually per named user or per number of concurrant users.
going to UNIX could save you if you have users that do not always use the same machine all the time, or users that login from home.
going to Linux could save you as it would run most if not all of your NT hardware, and one copy could be installed on EVERY machine with only one liscense.
The biggest problem is your NT admins. How willing they are to learn Linux after getting there MSCE (assuming they are MSCE). Most may leave the company I'd imagine, especially if they paid for there MSCE themselves.
if Your NT admins can 'truly" trouble shoot a network then learnign Linux / UNIX would not be that difficult as long as they are willing to think "outside the box".
Only 'flamers' flame!
I think this problem rolls right back to NT. It doesn't provide a common interface for application programmers to do just this.
In UNIX, all application software and libraries can be put on an application server where they are already mounted on the clients via NFS. The user directories are usually centralized on a server, and all of the affected users can have environment variables or configuration scripts set up at once. This makes things really easy to install for multiple users, and the application designers don't have to worry about it. They just write applications. An added benefit, is that the users don't have to worry about what machine they are using. They can just as easily log on to another workstation if the one they are working on fails. All their applications are there along with any customizations.
If you are against the network application setup, you can use rdist or something similar, as mentioned in another post. There are many ways to accomplish this feat in UNIX, and they are all out there for you to choose from.
The application developers should worry about making an application that works well. Let the OS worry about the rest. There is no reason it should be that much of a problem. UNIX has been multi-user capable for a long, long time. Unfortunatly, the basic design of Windows did not consider multiple users. This is becoming a greater problem as the world becomes more network centric. Microsoft will continue to release workarounds and proprietary interfaces where they have to, but things will just keep getting more and more complicated to manage. I believe that an OS designed for multiple users will eventually take over. Which one? Is is created yet? I can't say, but Windows is doomed to obsolecence just like DOS. MS needs a new OS without all the backwards compatability (read backwards thinking) if they want to compete in the future.
Actually, it is easy (no sneering :) I tried to figure it out months ago, it's not hard, but the problem is that there's just no step by step procedure outlines. So I made one. See http://socrates.mps.ohio-state.edu/~ccunning/samba .html. That simple procedure is all it took for me, can't guarantee results for everyone :) One word of caution though, access restrictions aren't really well implemented yet.
I suggest that you try a couple of Linux dists, and also the *BSDs as well, before settlig on Linux. Why not educate on admin of unix, while running you're current system. open source solution for you're company, and you can see how long time it would take to get a system up and running. I doubt it would en incredible amount of time for sysadmins to learn unix. So educat one so that he can teach the others.
This is interesting,
Most of the time I see cost savings in terms of
how much can I save by not moving to NT from a
costly Unix. It is more difficult when you can't
use the 40K per box savings argument. One place I
see as a major savings is in applications support.
I currently support 400+ Design tools on several
Unix platforms, my peers who are supporting
similar tools on NT are not even close. NT likes
things to be local, it likes things to make
registry changes instead of environment vars, it
likes dll's in places they shouldn't be and most
applications refuse to be a 'Network only'
install. The more applications and the more people
you support the worse the problem gets. I can
install a Unix tool for 1 person or 1000 at the
same cost. NT tools that want to touch the
registry require overhead for EVERY customer.
-SOTTEK
The Samba documentation will tell you that a Samba box can act as a PDC (which you need if you want NT-style centralized password verification, which is by default on for NT clients), but it is unsupported and undocumented.
/dev/fuckingdie.
I spent a lot of time banging my head against this with Samba, trying to figure out how to get it done, without really knowing the intricacies of NT administration. My boss had little sympathy: "Just tell it to do password verification" he would sneer, thinking to himself: Fuckin' dumbass.
Then my boss and I went to LWCE (the first one), and heard a talk by the main Samba guy. He talked about the great lengths MS has gone through to keep the password verification APIs secret. The Samba guy had gone to Microsoft conferences, had met with one of the head NT server guys at MS, had tried unsuccessfuly to get answers out of him. The MS guy had turned red and scampered out of the room. (Well, that might have been exaggeration.) MS has put a lot of effort into obfuscating things so that no one else on the planet can make a replacement NT server (because competition in unamerican). This has made it really really difficult for the Samba folks to make effective password verification routines. (BTW, my boss ate his words for thinking I was an idiot for not getting PDC stuff running.)
So the long and short of this is, if you want to do password verification for NT clients, you'll have to keep around a spare dinky little NT server box to verify passwords.
Hopefully people will flame me, saying "You idiot! It's easy to set up a Samba PDC!" But unless they actually POST HOW TO DO IT (hint), kindly redirect them to
"Whatever happened to fair use?"
-- Duff-Man
As far as I can tell, there aren't too many situations where NT or NetWare or Linux/Samba is going to offer much more hardware bang for the buck than the others. Differences of 10-20% don't mean much until you get into fairly large servers.
But one thing I've noticed is that when we buy an NT server, we always end up specifying a bigger one than we really need, if for no other reason than to make so the installation and reboots go a little faster. I'm not talking about crashes, just routine reboots that we're inevitably forced to do for minor configuration changes. When your servers are lightly loaded, as ours are, there can be actual cost savings using Linux.
But the hardware costs for such servers are usually less than the cost of the people who manage them. That can cut both ways. On the one hand, there are plenty of people who can keep a simple NT network up and running, and it's harder to find people with Linux experience. But one of the best-kept secrets about Linux is how incredibly easy it is for a competent person to manage. My NT experience vastly outweighs my Linux experience, but when an NT server gets cranky, I still get cold chills. On a Linux box, I calmly look at the log files, and usually find the answer pretty quickly. Samba's SWAT web admin tool is killer, far easier to use than anything in NT.
So, it all comes down to people. If you have people who are sharp, who understand what's really going on while they're clicking "Next... Next... Finish," then they should be able to do a lot more neat things in a lot less time with Linux.
Much also depends on how the company accounts for costs. Smaller businesses often ignore support and admin costs ("We have 3 people in our IS department, and they're on salary, so nothing's really going to change our costs.").
One other consideration, is that it's often useful to think not in terms of migrating but of integrating. It's relatively easy to pop a Samba server into an existing NT network. Keep doing that, and eventually all you'll have on NT is a PDC. So think of file services and authentication services separately. Linux can be used as the workhorse file-spitter-outer, while you maintain some other system, whether it be NIS or NT or, in the future, NDS, as the authentication system and user database. (hmmm... couldn't Samba use PAM to authenticate against a Novell server?)
I'd have to agree with this. Linux is a wonderful operating system, and I'm a big fan of it and use it (almost) exclusively. However, if you've got a solution in place that works, and Linux knowledge at your workplace is sparse, a complete, across-the-board migration would most likely cause more headaches than it cures. If your organization is willing to put up with NT and it's working for you, then stick with it, at least in the short term.
On the other hand, if NT is causing serious problems that need to be addressed, you can start out by deploying Linux in a limited capacity. Convert over a couple of servers as testbeds, and get your administrators familiar with their day-to-day operation. This can introduce them to the benefits that Linux provides. Once that's done, you can gradually roll your remaining NT boxes to Linux as the administration crew gains experience.
Good luck!
We're going down, in a spiral to the ground
I would start small .. maybe a webserver here..
a dns server there.. Etc. Make sure the staff gets
a lot of good traning and make sure they run linux
on their desktops. You will probably need to hire
a bunch of consultants to help you and teach your
staff the basics. Going from unix to NT is okay..
but IMHO going from NT to unix is a HUGE learning
curve. As far as cost? Hmm well training your
entire staff bigtime, time associated with making
the transition, a support contract for your
inexperienced admins, maybe some hardware replacement issues (not everything is supported)
I wouldnt attempt to introduce the entire company to linux. (servers only). The avg worker would freak out trying to use linux to do their job after using winnt.
I LOVE linux.. but going from NT to linux will
be a BIG nightmare in the beginning.. but become
much easier then admining NT over time. I guess
what you really have to ask is.. is the time you
would invest in the beginning be worth it in the
end? Is stability and reliability a KEY component
in your environment?
I run a small ISP with less bandwidth than Rob has (1/3 of a T1) and my web pages slug around a bit when I have a full rack of 24 users signed in. /. kicks for what he has resources to put into it. Mastercard only goes so far :) I have 2 servers side by side - my "main" web server runs NT with IIS (PII 233 with 64 MB RAM)(http://www.main1.net and all sites that host on our advertising banner) This server is the reason I was dragged kicking and screaming into this "damned cryptic command line gibberish operating system that can't work because it's only $40" called Linux (Red Hat to be exact). http://home.main1.net is on a pentium 120 with 16MB of RAM, Linux 5.2 with Apache. Which would crash first on a heavy load? Don't know - both have light load (and the linux box has little on it for web pages) Which do I like to use now? NT only because I use Windows on a "every waking hour" basis and when I'm not using Windows I'm using a Mac. Which am I sold on as being "sturdier"? Linux. Every little change I make to the NT server seems to require a reboot. Linux I added a doohickey to sendmail to weed out Melissa and it only need a kill/HUP -3xp or whatever that command was on my cheat sheet that I typed in an it somehow worked. And NO reboot either!
I think it may be too premature to look at migrating from NT to Linux right now. What is needed is concentration on Linux-NT coexistance and working together. Linux will have to put the foot in the door by getting in as Web Servers, Proxy Server and File and Print Server. Co-existing with NT. Over time as SysAdmins get used to Linux and also understand that Linux is better than NT they will shift to Linux by pointing out the robustness and cost effectiveness of Linux. This will also earn them brownie points for reducing the cost of IT in the organisation. It should be their idea.
I work in an office where NT and Linux coexist. We plan to use Linux as a proxy server. We are also getting a linux based web server. We are not moving desktops to Linux yet. But you can bet that over time we will slowly but surely.
O this learning! What a thing it is - William Shakespeare