Comments inline...
Cheers, Guy > -----Original Message----- > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > On Behalf Of Hetz Ben Hamo > Sent: Friday, January 20, 2006 15:45 > To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Cc: Efraim Yawitz; linux-il list > Subject: Re: Microsoft propaganda > > Hi, > > > Not any more biased than Red Hat's "White Papers" which showed the total > > cost of ownership for Linux was far less than Windows because the > > sysadmins were pimply faced kids who would work for next to nothing if > > you did not mind giving them the morning off to attend high school. > > I hardly think so, read on why.. > > > The reality of life is that a good sysadmin, makes a decent salary, and > > UNIX (which in some markets includes Linux) sysadmins make a lot of > > money, no matter what operating system they support. Good MS infrastructure technologists do not complain about their salary too > Here's an example: at my work (TheMarker) I (alone) admin all the > Solaris and Linux servers, and there are around dozen Windows machine > which are administrated by 2 sysadmins. I administrate more machines > than the windows sysadmin guys do, and my salery is definately not > much bigger than theirs. It's about quality of sysadmins. I have experience of administering much larger server deployments spread all over the world on my own. Not long ago I had an offer for administering a ~200 server internet facing Microsoft OS based web farm and I was far from being intimidated by those numbers. It is also about automation and skills. The main problem is the management which feels comfortable hiring a bunch of brain-dead how-to-for-dummies-followers instead of investing in people capable of performing much better (and getting higher salaries). Having a good *nix sysadmin and a bunch of crappy MS wannabes is like comparing apples and oranges. > > In the next few weeks, I'm going to add a dozen (or so) new HP servers > with RHEL 4 (hmm, am I the only guy who deploys RHEL 4 in > production?), and I'm setting them all by myself (using most machines > installations with kickstart). You can bet that according to my > calculations, setting them up with all the stuff I need to setup there > and administrate those machine will be way shorter with RHEL 4, and > these machines WILL generate revenue to my employer as soon as the > software is up and running. Please define "as soon as possible". Given that I have an established server build process, requirements, OS components and roles; and using tools like HP Rapid Deployment Pack, Proliant Support Pack Scripting Toolkit and RIS or ADS (HP tools are free, RIS/ADS come with OS) you might need 1-3 days to prepare the deployment environment and configs and deploy the dozen servers in a matter of several hours without those quirky tools like Ghost (block-based, as opposed to file-based, imaging solutions for servers are evil and are not flexible) and without the need to deal with SIDs as mentioned. On the Linux front you will still have a hard time to automate the hardware configuration: RAID, iLO, etc - all those are easily automated with the tools mentioned above. > > I did a small calculation here, how much time it will take to install, > setup and configure the OS and the applications with Windows, and to > me it looks like it will take at least 1 more week, which means a week > less revenue for my employer if they would choose Windows instead of > Linux. I have quite a bit experience with deploying both RHEL 3/4 and W2K/W2K3 on HP servers. Trust me: using the right tools combined with some knowledge, deploying Windows is not a bit slower (and from my own experience - much faster) than Linux. > Sometimes cheaper works, even if the open source solution even if > doesn't have all the bells and whistles that the closed source > application has (look at Samba for example). Having been involved in deploying Samba for research business unit in a large enterprise, I can only say that Samba is NOT enterprise (or medium-size business) ready. It has too many bugs and I have already been bitten when the community was helpless and the developers were not willing to patch. It took me almost a month in debug level 10 and analyzing the network traces to find some workaround having to do with lousy Kerberos integration. Guess whose messages went unanswered: http://groups.google.com/group/linux.samba/browse_frm/thread/1c6c40a01a4e722f/172c54916c27e532?lnk=st&q=guy+teverovsky+Samba3+and+forest+trust&rnum=1&hl=en#172c54916c27e532 http://groups.google.com/group/linux.samba/browse_frm/thread/382d5f2b1fc75f29/d745c2876a78cbfd?lnk=st&q=hpl.hp.com+samba+windows+krb+ads&rnum=2&hl=en#d745c2876a78cbfd
