Alvin wrote: > A lot of questions in the annual user survey concern cloud computing. I > administer some small businesses and use Ubuntu in most of them. Maybe my > biggest client will one day use a personal cloud, and I applaud the efforts, > but I can 't help but notice that other things are left in the cold. > The survey wants to know how Ubuntu Server is used. I'm curious about the > results and really wonder how many Ubuntu clouds there really are, in > contrast > to file, web, terminal and other servers. > > I'd like to give an example of how we are using Ubuntu in one company and > where it could be put to use in the future, along with the issues > encountered. > The reason for this is that I think there is a lot of room for improvement > outside the cloud. > > We're a prepress company with a mixed network. > - 3 Solaris Servers with Helios. > Why not Ubuntu? > - ZFS (does not need much explanation) > - Helios, A commercial application to provide file and print sharing for > Macintosh. > - [bug 462169] "nmbd dies on startup when network interfaces are not up yet" > These run Samba and are NFS servers. > These machines are an example of what stability should be. No serious bugs. > > - 3 Ubuntu Virtual Hosts > These run Karmic. They are basic installs with ubuntu-virt-server installed. > They do suffer from some problems. > - [bug 460914] "root device is sometimes not found" > - [bug 446031] "static network interfaces do not come up at boot" > - [bug 470776] "NFS shares do not mount at boot" > - [bug 491273] "netfs storage pools are not autostarted" > - [bug 444563] "udev errors all over the place" > Aside from that, IF they want to find the root drive, are set to DHCP, and > libvirt-bin is restarted, we can run virtual machines. > kvm runs well, but I'm scared of reboots. > When Karmic was just released, we used separate /boot on all servers which > also rendered them unbootable. [bug 462961, fixed] > Due to the above problems, I would love to have some sort of boot log [bug > 328881] > > - 4 Ubuntu Virtual machines. > These run Jaunty because of the above bugs and because of a regression [bug > 224138] "No NFS modules in karmic 32-bit" > 2 of these machines run our most important commercial production software. > kubuntu-desktop is installed on them and the users use XMDCP to work on > these servers. > Users also run rdesktop from here to get to Microsoft Word on a MS Windows > Terminal server. > They do suffer from some problems. > (I'm not mentioning Kubuntu stuff. It's not that bad) > - [bug 366728] "LD_LIBRARY_PATH not loads from .profile" > - [bug 374907] "libmotif3 crashes" > - [bug 251709] "Caps Lock does not work in rdesktop" > - [bug 86021 or 234543] "XDMCP does not work without reverse dns, or with > the basic /etc/hosts" > > - 1 Debian based commercial router/firewall/mailserver > Ubuntu could do this, but we're pretty happy with this machine. > > - There are also a lot of Windows Servers, virtual and physical. These will > probably never be replaced. > > - The clients run Kubuntu, Windows and Mac OS 9/X. The Kubuntu machines are > XDMCP server and normal workstations. > > Sometimes you hear: "it's open source. Don't complain and fix it yourself." > That's partly true. I'm not a programmer, but I was able to patch libmotif3 > to > solve the crashes. > The kind people in ubuntu-bugs also managed to convince me that I could > package the new version of openmotif myself and put it in Debian. Maybe I'll > learn how to do that, so that bug can at least be closed. I can understand > that there is not a lot of interest in this package, but we need it and will > probably need it for some time to come. > What I can't understand is that there would be no interest in NFS. Is > everyone > using samba between unix machines these days? > > This is a real-life scenario. Is it common? I don't know. It's not free of > struggles as you can see. So, this is a plea for quality. Cloud Computing > might be very important, but please don't lose sight of the little guys who > just want some 'classic' servers. > > Links > ----- > Ubuntu Server user survey: > http://ubuntu.com/server > Bugs, "In order of apprearance": > https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/462169 > https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/460914 > https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/446031 > https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/470776 > https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/491273 > https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/444563 > https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/462961 > https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/328881 > https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/224138 > https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/366728 > https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/374907 > https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/251709 > https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/86021 > https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/234543 > > IDK what's with the 'hey brah' subject line, but you probably shouldn't be using an LTS-interim release like karmic or jaunty for the business. You will run into more show-stopping bugs. I prefer RHEL for business, but whatever.
And for the firewall you might want to think about moving to OpenBSD. -- Joe McDonagh AIM: YoosingYoonickz IRC: joe-mac on freenode L'ennui est contre-révolutionnaire -- ubuntu-server mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-server More info: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ServerTeam
