OT: Why Oh Why

[Thermodyne]

Originally posted by minipol:

quote:

---

Originally posted by Thermodyne:
Linux does some things well, but I wouldn't want to manage several thousand Users with it.

What, you would rather do that with a win machine? Linux has one big advantage over windows and it's that it enables you to use older hardware for usefull things. So an old pentium machine can still run as firewall, fileserver and webserver. Try the same with windows and you'll fail horribly. That's what i like about linux, all my old computers now still do something in my LAN.
Another example: i have a Primax scanner. Worked great in Win98. Then i switched to XP Pro and it didn't work anymore since there where no drivers available. I then found a program that worked with my scanner in linux so now i can switch to whatever distro, my scanner still works.
I'm not saying win is bad but they always try to force you to buy new stuff and i don't like that. Hell they don't even support their own stuff: my sidewinder II joystick isn't officialy supported on XP Pro.
Anyways, for servers, linux is the way to go. Then can handle a bigger load than windows on machines less powerful

---

From an enterprise point of view, it will be replaced before it gets that out of date. On the
network that I support, we have clients that run 95 and 98 of all flavors, and we have 2K and XP. We also have thin clients that run CE. This all runs on a NT domain with 2K member servers and a 2K based Citrix farm. We have 22 field offices on frame relay and prolly that many more single unit offices on dial up. The equipment in the Data center will run 2K or 03K with no problem. The workstations run what they were purchased with. We also run an AS300 with UNIX. Firewall, switches and routers are all Cisco. My TC’s have no ram and no HD’s. Almost half of the workstations are 400 cel’s with 32megs of ram. They all run windows with nothing more than the occasional hardware death and the usual PITA group
problems. I can drive any one of the PC’s right from my desk, and if the TC’c have a software
issue, a re-flash is few key strokes away. On most days, the net techs are just sitting on their
butts. If it wasn’t for blind Users and the PITA’s, we could support it all with one tech. Why would we want to go with Xnix? What will it give us? And don’t try that cost per unit stuff on me. I can buy a lot of windows for what a tech costs per year. Not to mention what the PITA
group would grow to. I think Xnix has its place, and it will help improve the standard of the
industry, but I think I’ll keep paying my 17 bucks a unit for XP pro.

[minipol]

In your case it might not that interesting to change since you don't seem to have older equipment and you get your windows cheap. But here (Belgium) a license costs a lot of money as does all the other software. So why would i want to spend so much money on an OS, an office suite and some tools (winzip, parition tool and so on) when you can get that all for free?

I rather use that money for something else. Linux isn't harder than windows to maintain. It might take you longer in the beginning if you don't know the os so basically you go through the same learning curve as when you switched from dos to win.

But you are right when you say they both have their uses.

[Thermodyne]

The main issue we would have is with the server based network. When a change occurs we benefit from work done by the venders. We also benefit from a wait and see attitude where we let others work out the bugs. While this sort of debugging occurs in the Nix world, it is not as well organized as it is in the windows world. Also, the Nix world is not really a server based model. Nix tends to rely on apps on the workstation. Which is not so bad until update time rolls around, then there is a massive amount of hands on. With our system an update to say
Office XP would require software to be installed on the farm only. The user would have it at
log on with no added strain on the bandwidth. There is also the issue of interconnected software. We have an app that holds a db that is what we are there for. We have 2mil invested
in it and 1/2 a mil worth of support contracted for each of the next three years. It generates
email by interfacing with our exchange server. And authenticates by using our NT domain
controllers. Were we to change to open source on either of these, it would be COD all the way. If it would be done at all. At this time they support Windows w/Java and there is a Version that can be run on Sun systems.

[minipol]

Java runs fine on linux too. And about the server farm: are you saying that linux isn't that easy to setup thinclients? I thought that was the hole purpose of unix/linux. You have a server and a couple of terminals are connected to that server so people can work on it. I've seen a lot of info on this. There is even software that allows to cluster a number of servers so this would even make it easier.

[Thermodyne]

Originally posted by minipol:
Java runs fine on linux too. And about the server farm: are you saying that linux isn't that easy to setup thinclients? I thought that was the hole purpose of unix/linux. You have a server and a couple of terminals are connected to that server so people can work on it. I've seen a lot of info on this. There is even software that allows to cluster a number of servers so this would even make it easier.

The farm is 7 Citrix servers. And Citrix is designed to run on MS and serve up MS apps.

[PvK]

My preference list is based on my own needs and experience setting up small LAN's for personal or small office use mainly for game playing and development.

If someone already has experience with an OS and doesn't hate it, then using what they know how to make do what they want will of course be an appealing choice. Personally, I have no reason to want to learn what all I would have to do to get Win 2K Server to not run all sorts of crap I don't want. Even if I believe the incredible claim that there is "one" registry setting which will remove all unwanted crap features from Win 2K Server (which reg key is this?!?! I'm thinking "hmmm... HKEY_CURRENT_CONFIG\System\CurrentControlSet\Contr ol\Class\{4D36E96A-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}\0666\DontDoBloatCrap), it seems like it'd just be a more expensive Version of Win 2K Pro, for my purposes, and even Win 2K Pro with all patches still has issues with some games and nVidia graphics cards, while bare bones Win 98SE has no such issues and seems to boot and run much faster as long as you don't let lots of annoying apps stuff the registry full of crud.

PvK

[minipol]

Originally posted by Thermodyne:
The farm is 7 Citrix servers. And Citrix is designed to run on MS and serve up MS apps.

I heard about Citrix but i don't know it. I'll have to check that. So you basically install apps on the citrix servers and then people can connect via a terminal or stripped pc to one of those citrix servers to work?