Poll of sorts-

[Dave Yearke]

> 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?

We use it widely here in UB's Science and Engineering Node. We have several 
large labs of Linux workstations, plus several moderately-sized compute 
clusters. We don't have very many Linux servers at present; our servers tend to 
still be mostly Sun Enterprise systems running Solaris, as they have proven to 
be stable and robust (some are almost seven years old, and still performing 
their jobs adequately). Another person on the NFLUG list, Jason Lasker, has 
built a full KickStart infrastructure, so we can install and upgrade systems 
quickly, efficiently, and consistently, and has customized RHEL3 in many clever 
ways to meet our particular needs. I've done quite a bit with hands-off and 
networked-based administration, using home-brewed scripts and utilities, and 
active maintenance on these systems is pretty low.

Truthfully, our client/server environment has illuminated, at least to me, one 
of the few weaknesses of Linux: Some network services are not as well-developed 
as they are on other Unix-like operating systems. For example, the Linux 
automounter does not support direct mounts well or host-based mounts at all, and 
other network services will spontaneously stop responding. I suspect that this 
is because the focus of Linux development has been either on (a) standalone 
desktop systems, or (b) standalone servers doing things like serving web sites. 
I could be completely wrong, here, but that's my guess.

> 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?

Jason and I would be happy to demonstrate some of the procedures and practices 
we use. We won't claim that they are necessarily the "best" ways, but they work 
well for us. Sometimes, we use surprisingly low-tech approaches to 
administration, because often times simple is better.

By the way, I guess I'm _way_ in the minority on this list, but I don't think 
Windows "sucks" (please understand, I'm not singling you out, but I see a lot of 
comments like this on this list). I've been using and administering it for 
years, and despite its problems, it meets certain needs very well. In fact, we 
have a strong focus here on making Linux, Solaris, Windows, MacOS, and other 
operating systems play nice together, because they all meet certain needs and 
accomplish certain goals. We'd be happy to provide examples on some of this as 
well, if there's interest. For the last few months, for example, I've been using 
Cygwin on my Windows XP laptop, which gives a full Unix-like environment under 
Windows, complete with a full X Window environment (and GNOME on the way).

-- 
                      Dave Yearke, yearke at eng.buffalo.edu
         "We are, after all, professionals" -- Dr. Hunter S. Thompson