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More Mission-Critical Linux
A reader sent us a Datamation article talking about the use of Linux by Southwestern Bell. That's right-if you are in MO or KA, your phone call made it through thanks to Linux. Good press is always nice to see.Update: 09/02 12:06 by H : Yep, I'll admit it. I'm an idiot. Kansas is KS, not KA.
i live in kansas and i think this will make the phones unstable cuz linux is a slow bugged virus infested OS made by crakers. this is my o pin yun. if you disagree then ur dumb!!! z3r0kewl453@aol.com mail me!!!
When the phone calls always go through and a bill arrives every month without fail (yuck!) I doubted it was the hyped borg software of a Big Evil Software Company behind it all. Unlike a certain naval destroyer that had a "invalid entry" that crashed the *entire network* the phone company seems to be put together with common sense, not marketing. Nothing like peer reviewed software watching all those switches.
OK. That was a troll.
"Keeping them running, however, has required only about one-tenth of one percent of his group's system administration time. Kessell calculates that his department has had to hire one less technician, at an average salary of around $40,000 a year, because of Linux' reliability."
Read "Linux costs jobs in Kansas." Certainly if I were a Windows Consultant, I wouldn't want to dry up a potential cash cow by installing a remarkably stable and reliable operating system on a customer's computers. Not when I can continue to rake in those big bucks fixing their system every few weeks at $120+ an hour.
OK. That was a troll too.
"This is partly because, in many regards, Linux is still an immature operating system, says Potter. Symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) support for Linux, for example, only became available earlier this year."
Um, excuse me? I've been using it for close to 3 on my dual pentium box. Please don't quote crack monkies in the future.
I know this was a sarcastic post, but I guess the non-sarcastic point to make here is that Linux, for all of its good points, is definitely an outsider in most companies. Not necessarily ill-thought-of (esp. in the IT depts) but IT departments are not the only ones involved.
...
That's why it's interesting when big companies (or small companies, for that matter) have evaluated Linux (and probably the other obvious choices made by MS, or other versions of UNIX) and said "Hey, we'll go with choice B, which is cheap and has lots of good features!" rather than choice A, conservative and ubiquitous.
I think even people who like the MS OSes would find this an interesting piece of news. The status quo isn't as interesting
It's neat if a person lives to be 120 then jumps straight into Paradise; much less so when a person dies at 79 of long-known causes. Eh?
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
"...none of the Linux systems has ever failed." ;)
Geeky modern art T-shirts
Also, Linux did not get SMP support earlier this year. It got BETTER SMP support, but it had it prior to this. Or maybe I'm mistaken and the company I worked for last year just imagined that they had a dual ppro-180 running linux (which did report both cpus). Other than a few nits I think it was an excellent article overall. I really love the part about linux saving them adminning time and cost. Especially since microsoft is spewing FUD about how Linux might cost less upfront but requires more money do admin.
-matt
IIRC the kernel shipped w/ RedHat 4.2 (had to be something in 2.x right?) had some potential jiffy wrap around bugs that occured at 465 days or so on intel. I think the problems have been fixed by now, I just hope they've tested these systems or else they might get it hard in a little while. Although the bugs weren't always serious, afaik the only reported problem was uptime reporting 0days of uptime after 465 days.
-matt
Now, now... You forget that Hemos also failed grade school geography as well as spelling and english... :-)
BTW -- No offense intended Hemos, I am just kidding.
at an average salary of around $40,000 a year
Wow, they find cheap technicians. Around here (only about 3 hours from KC) you can't touch a decent tech for less than about $45-$50k. That also doesn't figure in benefits or expenses (a computer, a phone, a desk, etc) related to having an employee. The salary is just one factor (albiet a large one) in the cost of an employee.
Two things - the article said, near the end, that they were able to hire one less technician because Linux never failed them. Hmmm. If Linux takes over, then there are going to be some techs out of business (mostly MSCE's, but still....) Next - WE SHOULD ENCOURAGE WINDOWS 2000. Nothing else is going to give use Linux users a sea of free hardware - PII MINIMUM for W2K. I can still run Linux fine on a Pentium 233 MMX with a 4 gig HD - but those will be almost free after W2k comes out.
Just some thoughts..........
http://www.bombcar.com It's where it is at.
Fellowship 9/11
I was also amused to see that they are running Red Hat 4.2. Assuming they got that detail correct :)
A lot of people don't run recent distributions on production machines because they don't want to tinker with a working system (one can certainly debate the wisdom of that). Another thing to consider is the lead time between when stories are written and published. When it comes to webified versions, there is sometimes a lag between when the online version appears and the print version (to help keep the paper circulation going I guess).
WHY THEY DON'T RUN NT
I understand, sir. We'll dispatch the police to your house just as soon as we reboot. Please stay on the line, sir. Is the murderer nearby? Yes sir, I understand, but please stay on the line, we're rebooting. Please hold! Scandisk is still running. It'll only be a bit longer. OKAY, THERE'S NO NEED TO SCREAM! Please stay on the line. Sir, I'm sorry, it looks like we've got a problem here... a registry corruption. It won't boot. Can you hold a bit longer? Sir? Sir? What was that screaming sound? Oh, hell... blue screen again.
As this article correctly points out, the failure occurred in the application -- not Windows NT itself. The divide-by-zero condition caused the program to go into a tight loop, which made it unresponsive to other applications across the network that depended on it. The result was a chain reaction that evidently froze control of the propulsion system. Also, if I remember correctly, the failure of the NT application did *not* cause the ship to be towed into port, although it did force the ship to idle at sea for several hours while the network was rebooted -- the towing incident resulted from some other, unspecified failure related to the use of on-board LAN technology, in which NT may or may not have been the culprit.
Shortly after these incidents, they were reported in a single article (Computer Reseller News, I believe) at moderately competent detail, based largely on the complaints of the "whistle blower" mentioned in this article as well. But that one CRN article was summarized with diminishing fidelity in several other editorials, which were then widely replicated thanks to the magic of syndication, and the incident eventually became the part of Windows folklore in mutated form, along the lines of "the main server blue-screened when the navigator punched in a new course".
It hardly seems fair to blame NT for an application failure. Moreover, the complaints about the Navy cutting costs by using NT seem targeted instead at the broader isssue of replacing expensive, but reliable, fault-tolerant systems with commodity and LAN-based technology, rather than an attack on NT itself. As described, this type of failure could have happened just as easily if the on-board systems had been running Linux.
The problem is, as soon as the engineers sign off on the testing and verification, Bill Gates walks through the lab and says "Make it more like the Mac."
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Still and all, there's this to consider. Skip straight to the bottom paragraph, where you'll find a small raspberry for Redmond. From Boeing.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Ease on over to the FAQ and you'll see that they're running their forms, filters, database, page generation, and page server all on a single PII 450. And they get enough hits to squash even a medium-sized commercial site merely by posting a link to a story there.
How many Proliants with 4 CPUs and 4 NICs would it take to bear that load under your favorite OS?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade