Re: [Samba] Horrible Linux/Samba vs Windows political battle - can you help?
On Tuesday 20 September 2005 02:49, Gregory A. Cain wrote: > Greetings, > > I am currently the IT Manager for a 30-person architectural firm. About > 5 months ago we hired a new employee. He is quite good at what he does. > He is also extremely opinionated, particularly when it comes to computer > software, including server software. > > I'm running the office server functions on RedHat, Fedora and Trustix > servers. He has managed to convince my boss that there are serious > problems with these servers and with Linux in general. After having > worked here for over 14 years, I would have hoped my boss would have > more trust in my choices. > > In any case, I now find myself in the position of having to defend my > position here. My boss has gone as far as to hire an independent > consultant to evaluate our whole network infrastructure, simply on the > basis of the new employee's statemenets about the worthlessness of > Linux. I do not relish being put in this position, however I'm going to > take a stand. > > If there is anyone reading this who works in the field of architecture > or engineering, and with CAD or BIM software, who is using Linux as your > server software, I would sure be appreciative it if you could write a > testimonial for me to help me convince my boss that migrating from Linux > to MS would be a horrible mistake. A small example of what problem I have with MS right now on my part-time job. I have small database application written in MS Access. It was working just fine for years on a NT4 box. Now a new computer has been bought, and I installed Win2k + SP4 on it (I need to use USB, can't stay with NT4). Also I installed Office2k + SP3. Guess what. That app mostly still works, but report generation throws really obscure errors on me now. The very same Access database, if I copy it to another box with Win2k and Office2k, works flawlessly. Can this happen with Linux? Yes, and similarly obscure things did happen with Linux for me. But I have the source for EVERYTHING. I tracked down and fixed problems with Linux when they appear. Now how in hell am I supposed to track that down in Windows world? Database source, which I have, is fine (it's really trivial), but how can I look into Office or Windows code? With disassembler?! Looks like MS won over me again with "Just reinstall everything" motto. But "Just reinstall everything" is a lame solution. It's for kids playing with their home PC, not for real world business critical stuff. Maybe that employee of yours thinks that it is ok, but [s]he is wrong. Bugs must be found, understood, and fixed, not worked around. P.S. An example of bug unfixed for years: NTLDR cannot boot an NT if NTOSKRNL.EXE (or whatever) is past 4Gb from disk start. I disasmed the thing. It's simply a math overflow in the loader. How many years MS needs to fix it? [And if it fixed in XP (I didn't check yet), don't say me "see? they fixed it!" because it's too damn slow. It should have been fixed around NT4 SP3 time.] We in Linux fix easy stuff like this one within maybe weeks, if not faster. -- vda -- To unsubscribe from this list go to the following URL and read the instructions: https://lists.samba.org/mailman/listinfo/samba
RE: [Samba] Horrible Linux/Samba vs Windows political battle - can you help?
Gregory, I am the System Manager for a 45 person Consulting Engineering firm that is spread across three locations. We use Samba to provide file/print and authentication services for the entire company. I have one PDC and two BDCs tied together over three VPNs to make it all work. We still have one Windows 2000 server in our network, but that is to support a couple of License Managers for our CAD software and to maintain Anti-Virus on our desktops. It does not serve any other purpose than that. (In fact we've thought about running these services from inside a VMWare virtual machine on one of our Linux boxes.) We moved from a Windows NT/2000 server controlled setup about 4 years ago. Quite frankly, we haven't looked back. We've enjoyed higher stability and performance from the Linux setup. Our Samba servers are running RHEL3, but we're moving those to Debian during our Christmas break. The only problem that we've had is support. By that I mean, I can pick up the phone and call any Computer Consultant firm in the city and get someone who "knows" Windows. I can't do that for Linux. But what that has made me do is become a better administrator in the first place. I do more research, testing and planning now than I ever have. I found that I was using the outside support as a crutch. Now I'm not. Don't get me wrong, the support isn't non-existent - just look at this mailing list. But it's just not as easy to procure and waiting is almost always involved. Will we ever go back to Windows? Who knows. But I do know one thing. That move will cost us a ton of money. Right now on Linux, I'm getting file and print services, e-mail, content filtering for e-mail, firewalls, routers, on-site and off-site backups/archives and VPNs mostly for just the cost of the hardware (we use Scalix for E-Mail). I dont know if this will help convince your boss that he can trust your decisions, but I hope so. -- Kevin L. Collins, MCSE Systems Manager Nesbitt Engineering, Inc. > -Original Message- > From: Gregory A. Cain [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > Sent: Monday, September 19, 2005 7:50 PM > To: samba@lists.samba.org > Subject: [Samba] Horrible Linux/Samba vs Windows political > battle - can you help? > > Greetings, > > I am currently the IT Manager for a 30-person architectural > firm. About > 5 months ago we hired a new employee. He is quite good at > what he does. > He is also extremely opinionated, particularly when it comes > to computer software, including server software. > > I'm running the office server functions on RedHat, Fedora and > Trustix servers. He has managed to convince my boss that > there are serious problems with these servers and with Linux > in general. After having worked here for over 14 years, I > would have hoped my boss would have more trust in my choices. > > In any case, I now find myself in the position of having to > defend my position here. My boss has gone as far as to hire > an independent consultant to evaluate our whole network > infrastructure, simply on the basis of the new employee's > statemenets about the worthlessness of Linux. I do not relish > being put in this position, however I'm going to take a stand. > > If there is anyone reading this who works in the field of > architecture or engineering, and with CAD or BIM software, > who is using Linux as your server software, I would sure be > appreciative it if you could write a testimonial for me to > help me convince my boss that migrating from Linux to MS > would be a horrible mistake. > > Also, if you know of any other resources that might be > helpful to me, I'd greatly appreciate hearing from you. > > ANY help would be MUCH appreciated!! > > Thank you. > > Greg > > > -- > To unsubscribe from this list go to the following URL and read the > instructions: https://lists.samba.org/mailman/listinfo/samba > > -- To unsubscribe from this list go to the following URL and read the instructions: https://lists.samba.org/mailman/listinfo/samba
Re: [Samba] Horrible Linux/Samba vs Windows political battle - can you help?
We are a large Tool and Die facility in Canada, our network hosts multiple segments connected via private fiber, and wireless building-building bridges. We have around 70 office computers including an engineering department dealing with large 3D and 2D CAD/die designs and CNC files. Our second plant houses a dedicated MySQL server, which logs and maintains records to/from an automated production line (robotics). We have been for some years now depending on FreeBSD on our servers. While it's not Linux, it does share a common open-source regime and does utilize many of the same apps. For now, let's put the FreeBSD vs. Linux discussion off to the side, as we're basically the same in terms of running samba. I'll give you a bit of the history, as we migrated slowly into the open-source world, largely due to sceptism in the same manor as you're encountering now, except in our case - it was our company's president who was the advocate of Microsoft's stuff. We started here about six years ago with a single 486 40mhz PC to run sendmail and nat forwarding for internet access. The little 486 got to the point where we were transferring absurd amounts of data over it, yet it never actually gave out on us, (for software reasons anyhow). That little 486 proved to our management, that FreeBSD had a viable existence on our network. Later that year when a large power surge baked the hardware on the machine, and the office had to go without for a friday afternoon... you'd have thought we took away the office lighting or something. That Saturday morning we were given top-priority to build/get some replacement up fast. Needless to say a new machine VERY quickly replaced the old one, with a little more hardware-power the very next day. At this point we'd still have been relying on Novell Netware for our file/print services. The use of the FreeBSD machine began to grow though. It seems that with new hardware resources available, we could and wanted to do more. With each new idea, and with each new request to IT, we found new uses for our FreeBSD box, from MySQL and Apache, to embeded apps written using mod_perl on our intranet... to squid and some custom apps for monitoring and limiting internet access. With each new application however, the machine became more and more taxed. This machine was a single AMD K6-350mhz machine with 768megs of Ram, and though it started with less, ended with an 80GB, a 60GB, and a 20GB ATA disk. This machine is still in service today, allthough it has new drives and updated software installed - it is our squid proxy/accelerating machine. Needless to say... a new box has since replaced it. Earlier this year, we evaluated a Microsoft-Based Server solution, utilizing Windows 2003 Server Platform. The hardware requirements on the email side of things alone were insane. Exchange wanted a minimum of 2GB ram, and some pretty heavy cpus on a machine totally dedicated to nothing else but email, (as the old creed goes 'NT can be good at any ONE thing'). So our end solution would have required three new servers and still relied upon our gateway/firewall on the FreeBSD box. The hardware cost alone being close to double that of our current situation. The other drawback (obviously) was cost; we were looking at licensing costs from $40,000.00 upwards to $100,000.00 if we included maintenance/upgrades for 3 years. Yet oddly enough, cost was not the biggest reason we neglected to run with Windows Server, or at least not the biggest one. Bear in mind it was our company president who was the Microsoft Advocate in our case. In the end, we gave the decision to our President, with our strong advice to take the money we'd have to put into licensing costs and instead put it into better hardware and an all-around network upgrade, and save the larger portion for other business needs. The management type always like to be told they can save money for other needs - even if money's not the issue... it will be at some point. Our primary reasons for open-source/samba vs. windows became: #1 - We simply could not run the same processes nor do things the same way we have been in the same ways, with Windows. Procedures would be forced to change, capability and ability would be limited to the scope which Microsoft sets out. In our case this included a lot of custom email routing, while possible with Exchange... took a LOT more work to do. #2 - Custom programming. A large portion of the database-driven apps we created and utilize here everyday are run over the company intranet and we written making use of many great open-source utilities which are simply unavailable as such on windows, (in some cases, there are proprietary or commercial versions of products which could be adapted to work, but why adapt something else to work when you already have something that DOES work). Even, if we were to completely re-write everything we had, it would have to be written in a langu
Re: [Samba] Horrible Linux/Samba vs Windows political battle - can you help?
On Tuesday 20 September 2005 2:56 am, Tomasz Chmielewski wrote: > Gregory A. Cain schrieb: > > Greetings, > > > > I am currently the IT Manager for a 30-person architectural firm. About > > 5 months ago we hired a new employee. He is quite good at what he does. > > He is also extremely opinionated, particularly when it comes to computer > > software, including server software. > > > > I'm running the office server functions on RedHat, Fedora and Trustix > > servers. He has managed to convince my boss that there are serious > > problems with these servers and with Linux in general. After having > > worked here for over 14 years, I would have hoped my boss would have > > more trust in my choices. > > > > In any case, I now find myself in the position of having to defend my > > position here. My boss has gone as far as to hire an independent > > consultant to evaluate our whole network infrastructure, simply on the > > basis of the new employee's statemenets about the worthlessness of > > Linux. I do not relish being put in this position, however I'm going to > > take a stand. > > > > If there is anyone reading this who works in the field of architecture > > or engineering, and with CAD or BIM software, who is using Linux as your > > server software, I would sure be appreciative it if you could write a > > testimonial for me to help me convince my boss that migrating from Linux > > to MS would be a horrible mistake. > > perhaps it would help us if you told which statements he said about "the > worthlessness of Linux"? > and why he claims Windows would be superior over Linux in your case. > > what our company does at the moment is quite reverse - migrating our > customers Windows to Linux, or just setting Linux in new locations, as > it has better value and is easier to manage. > > -- > Tomek > http://wpkg.org I don't work in an engineering or archtectural firm, but I hope this will help anyway: I manage a busy 45-person financial services firm. SInce we're a lender, and thus scrutinized not only by customers and a board of directors, but also by regulators in every state in which we do business, reliability, stability, scalability, and security are all paramount to us. Some might say I gambled on Linux, relying too heavily on it in a high-profile environment. However, several years of working with it and following led me to believe it would do all that was asked of it. And, since our system was built when we first started the business, we stood to save lots of money we could plow into other aspects of the business. We have eight servers in our current set-up: one Windows 2003 server, and seven CentOS Linux servers. The one Windows server is there only because of the accounting software we use (it hasn't been ported to Linux ... yet). The Windows server does act as the system's PDC. The Linux servers act as: file and print servers, mail server, web server, database server, application server, fax server, secure FTP and VPN servers, and firewall. Samba works beautifully to allow us to access shares on the Linux servers from our Windows XP desktops. Road warriors connect quickly and securely via out open source VPN. Our systems are backed up to tape using a commercial backup software running on Linux. If I've ever had a problem with these systems, and there have been few, my own intelligence and ability to research (I'd need to rely on that in a pure Microsoft environment, too), and help from the community get me through nicely. I've achieved the reliability, stability, scalability, and security I was after without sacrificing on the quality of the programs I've installed and use. Our end-users are virually unaware of the back-end systems we use. Frankly, they don't care, as long as they "just work". And, they do, day-in and day-out, for over two years now. I'm not trying to evangelize here. I have business needs that have to be metright away with the good products. I also don't want to knock Microsoft; I do use its products. However, they're no more reliable, stable, scalable, or secure than our Linux servers. In fact, our experience is that they tend to be less so. Nor are they an more easy to maintain. Finally, If I'm not convincing enough, read almost any publication these day (general circulation, not just trade jouranls), and see how many companies, from the Fortune 500 on down, are using Linux in their shops. And, for mission critical purposes. The likes of IBM, Oracle, etc. wouldn't be involved with Linux if it we'ren't a great product here for the long-haul. Hope this helps. I'll be happy to provide my full name, title, and company off-list, if you need. Dimitri -- To unsubscribe from this list go to the following URL and read the instructions: https://lists.samba.org/mailman/listinfo/samba
Re: [Samba] Horrible Linux/Samba vs Windows political battle - can you help?
On Tuesday 20 September 2005 07:49, Gregory A. Cain wrote: > If there is anyone reading this who works in the field of > architecture or engineering, and with CAD or BIM software, who is > using Linux as your server software, I would sure be appreciative it > if you could write a testimonial for me to help me convince my boss > that migrating from Linux to MS would be a horrible mistake. I have a _customer_ who does CAD work and steel fabrication in a northern suburb of Perth, Western Australia. Needess to say, running their office from the same wires as arc welders and rail cranes doesn't do wonders for reliability, to say nothing of having steel fines contantly blowing through into the office, and the computers therein. They use SaMBa for their file server (everything-server, as it does email and other stuff as well) and have never had a problem with it. I have another client whose problems I posted about a few days ago. Their SaMBa server shoves data at over 9MB/s over a 100Mb/s LAN, roughly 2.5x faster than a Windows 2k3 box doing the same thing. For those who feel the urge to make constructive suggestions about the problem I posted, Windows 2000 clients behave the same way, that is, file I/O through Windows Explorer or smbclient roars through, but running an app off the server is agony (an absurd number of 512-byte and 40-byte SMB requests, almost all of them on the EXE file). I've used regedit to explain to an XP client machine that it really, really needs to cache and use OpLocks, to no obvious effect. I've switched on (and off) everything related in SaMBa, marked files and shares read-only and so on, likewise without obvious effect. Cheers; Leon -- http://cyberknights.com.au/ Modern tools; traditional dedication http://plug.linux.org.au/ Member, Perth Linux User Group http://slpwa.asn.au/Member, Linux Professionals WA http://osia.net.au/ Member, Open Source Industry Australia http://linux.org.au/Member, Linux Australia -- To unsubscribe from this list go to the following URL and read the instructions: https://lists.samba.org/mailman/listinfo/samba
Re: [Samba] Horrible Linux/Samba vs Windows political battle - can you help?
Gregory A. Cain schrieb: Greetings, I am currently the IT Manager for a 30-person architectural firm. About 5 months ago we hired a new employee. He is quite good at what he does. He is also extremely opinionated, particularly when it comes to computer software, including server software. I'm running the office server functions on RedHat, Fedora and Trustix servers. He has managed to convince my boss that there are serious problems with these servers and with Linux in general. After having worked here for over 14 years, I would have hoped my boss would have more trust in my choices. In any case, I now find myself in the position of having to defend my position here. My boss has gone as far as to hire an independent consultant to evaluate our whole network infrastructure, simply on the basis of the new employee's statemenets about the worthlessness of Linux. I do not relish being put in this position, however I'm going to take a stand. If there is anyone reading this who works in the field of architecture or engineering, and with CAD or BIM software, who is using Linux as your server software, I would sure be appreciative it if you could write a testimonial for me to help me convince my boss that migrating from Linux to MS would be a horrible mistake. perhaps it would help us if you told which statements he said about "the worthlessness of Linux"? and why he claims Windows would be superior over Linux in your case. what our company does at the moment is quite reverse - migrating our customers Windows to Linux, or just setting Linux in new locations, as it has better value and is easier to manage. -- Tomek http://wpkg.org -- To unsubscribe from this list go to the following URL and read the instructions: https://lists.samba.org/mailman/listinfo/samba
[Samba] Horrible Linux/Samba vs Windows political battle - can you help?
Greetings, I am currently the IT Manager for a 30-person architectural firm. About 5 months ago we hired a new employee. He is quite good at what he does. He is also extremely opinionated, particularly when it comes to computer software, including server software. I'm running the office server functions on RedHat, Fedora and Trustix servers. He has managed to convince my boss that there are serious problems with these servers and with Linux in general. After having worked here for over 14 years, I would have hoped my boss would have more trust in my choices. In any case, I now find myself in the position of having to defend my position here. My boss has gone as far as to hire an independent consultant to evaluate our whole network infrastructure, simply on the basis of the new employee's statemenets about the worthlessness of Linux. I do not relish being put in this position, however I'm going to take a stand. If there is anyone reading this who works in the field of architecture or engineering, and with CAD or BIM software, who is using Linux as your server software, I would sure be appreciative it if you could write a testimonial for me to help me convince my boss that migrating from Linux to MS would be a horrible mistake. Also, if you know of any other resources that might be helpful to me, I'd greatly appreciate hearing from you. ANY help would be MUCH appreciated!! Thank you. Greg -- To unsubscribe from this list go to the following URL and read the instructions: https://lists.samba.org/mailman/listinfo/samba
