Poll of sorts-

[Charles H. Root, III]

Hey Gang,

In less than three years, the Unix/Linux installed base at ASG has grown
from zero to:

15% of all workstations
25% of all data system servers
60% of dialer system

I've always preached a technology agnostic philosophy... Don't drink the
kool-aid and don't take the pill. Otherwise you will find yourself blindly
worshiping at the temple of IBM, Microsoft, Sun or whomever. Even worse, you
may become trapped by a proprietary system that is painful to leave. My
approach has always been "the right tool for the right job at the right
price."

Here's some of what we are doing with Open Source.

Most of our employees run Citrix sessions. We are now rolling out Linux
based PC's or thin clients that have nothing but X Windows and the Citrix
client on them. I can utilize old Pentium II's, buy or use old computers,
and don't have to pay a Microsoft Windows License fee. I've saved the
company $15K - $20K on XP licenses and about $75K on PCS. Almost $100K in
one year. Our CFO loves me!

All DNS, FTP and web functionality have been migrated to Red hat 8 and
Fedora Core 3.

We have built an HP WebJetAdmin server running Red Hat 8 that monitors all
printers across the enterprise. If a printer gets a paper jam, is low on
paper, toner or has any type of error it automatically e-mails my Help Desk
team. When you empower yourself to be proactive, you can stay ahead of the
support curve and fix problems, often times, before your users know there is
an issue. Since we receive e-mail alerts, sometimes our techs show up just
as a user says something like "Hey, I was just about to call you!" Our user
base thinks we are heroes!

We also built a Near Line Storage (NLS) server running Red Hat 9 with Samba
on an old server we had laying around. This unit contains seven folders...
One for each day of the week. In addition to backing up all end user data to
tape every night, another jobs copies that day's data into the appropriate
folder on the NLS server. Now I have the last seven days of end user files
backed up on a hard drive!

If you send your backup tapes offsite to Iron Mountain or somewhere safe
like we do, then you know it's a pain (and expensive) to recall a tape from
storage when an end user blows up a spreadsheet and needs the file restored.
When your Help Desk gets a call like this, you normally would tell them
something like "I'll call you in four hours after we get the tape back and
restore the file."

With my solution, our Help Desk staff can restore the file from the NLS
server during the support call! Thirty seconds versus four hours... The
problem is solved before the end user hangs up! Again, our users think we
are heroes!

Phase two of our NLS plan is to make these folders available to end users in
a read-only format that mirrors what they are allowed to see on our main
file server. In this scenario, end users can restore their own files and
never call the Help Desk. Oooh yeah... works for me!

We are using a FreeBSD server to run scripts that accomplish scheduled tasks
via telnet on an old legacy green screen system.

We grabbed the source code for VNC and created our own application that lets
us shadow end user sessions for QA and tech support purposes via a web based
front end.

My point is look at all of your business needs and see what makes the most
sense. If you can utilize Open Source like we have at little or no expense,
you can pull off some high visibility projects that make you look like a
genius.

The right tools for the right job at the right price!

Good luck,

Charles H. Root, III
Chief Information Officer

Account Solutions Group
205 Bryant Woods South
Amherst, NY  14228-3609

v: 716.564.4991
f: 716.564.4331

www.accountsolutionsgroup.com

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-nflug at nflug.org [mailto:owner-nflug at nflug.org]On Behalf Of
Dennis Ruzeski
Sent: Thursday, March 10, 2005 10:18 AM
To: nflug at nflug.org
Subject: Poll of sorts-


I'm curious about something--

How do you all use Linux? Are there many people on the list that use it in a
corporate/enterprise environment or is it more for desktop/home use?

I've only been to a couple of meetings, but they seem to center more around
'Linux as a Windows desktop replacement', which is great since Windows
sucks, but I'd like to see more meeting topics revolving around things like
high-volume system administration, tuning for performance and uptime, and
Linux in the enterprise. Anybody else that would like to do things like
this?

--Dennis





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