Delicious Schadenfreude from London

[Samuel Thurston, III]

On Wed, Oct 7, 2009 at 2:11 PM, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> I have done this:
>
> 1. Told to use Windows server "because we use Windows here!"
> 2. Deploy LAMP app as WAMP.
> 3. Told to increase performance with no extra hardware.
> 4. Swap OS out underneath for Linux.
> 5. Performance doubles or triples.
>

This reminds me of my old programming job.

I requisitioned IT for a linux testing server.  I was told no, "we run
windows here." I had adopted a machine that had been marked for
sale/destruction and set it in a corner of my office, installed
Debian, and forgot about it for a while, except for using it for an
occasional testing server.

One day we had a company-wide network outage and a conference of
everyone who knew anything about computers was called with the
executives.

Exec: what's going on?
IT guy: I think the exchange server crashed and we'll need to call in
some consultants to rebuild it.
DBA: It's probably the ADS is corrupted, since it's on the same machine.
Me: shouldn't we look at the possibility of a virus?
IT guy: It can't be a virus.  Norton didn't find anything
Me: That doesn't mean anything.  Just a minute.

I walked over to my desk, fired up a console to my snort box, and
started googling patterns off the log file.  Within a few minutes I
had 1) found the virus, 2) gotten a removal tool and patch from
symantec, 3) burned several copies of the disc for use.

Exec: how did you do that? our computers are all down.
Me: not my little linux box.
IT guy: but, but, I never provisioned a linux box!!!
Me: [blank stare at IT guy]

All the rest of the tech staff and execs spent the day running the
removal tool machine-by-machine before reconnecting the 200+ machines
to the network, while i spent the day reading slashdot in lynx and
watching the snort logs for any machines that were showing signs of
infection even after they were reconnected. I got a nice raise after
that.

> So here's to open source on Windows!

Might depend on which Windows Server you had underneath.  I had decent
performance with WS2k3.  The one big problem Apache had there was that
the threading support was hosed, at least as recently as 2004.  I
don't know if they've fixed that or not.

> If your devs are doing all .NET, use IIS. If not, use Apache on Unix.

How mature is mod_mono? is anyone using it in production?  I
understand it's not feature-complete, but 99.9% of .NET apps don't use
all the features of .NET so I wonder how bad it could really be.  In
my (again, anecdotal) experience OSS reimplementations of MS Protocols
tend to outperform the MS products. I'm looking at you, Samba.