On Bugs and Linux Quality

[Daniel Mons]

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Slawek Drabot wrote:
| Based on the observations made, what do people here see as the biggest
pros and cons of using Linux, and specifically Ubuntu in a commercial,
corporate environment?

For me personally, speed and reliability are the biggest pros.  What do
I mean by "speed"?

I can roll out fairly complex networks using a Linux environment in a
very small amount of time.  Take for example a client of mine that was a
startup visual effects studio.  They needed a centralised authentication
system that would allow authentication services for workstations running
MacOSX, Windows, Linux and SGI/IRIX, high speed file serving, cross-OS
permissions control, VPN access, routing and firewalling, secure
wireless network,  and a host of other services (databases galore, wikis
for knowledge bases, etc) for a network of 20 users/workstations, 4 very
large servers and with a decent sized renderfarm and management nodes.

Under a proprietary OS, this would have taken ages.  I've seen smaller
networks with less features and a single OS base take a month or more to
roll out.  Particularly when you consider you need to waste a huge
amount of time on license procurement, software asset/licensing/serial
management, auditing of licenses to ensure you are not over or under
licensed, etc, etc.

I managed all of the above by myself in under 5 days.  The whole studio
was up and running on a production film within 30 days of the green
light, which included hardware purchasing and installation, the software
stuff above, and the rest of the administration style activities that
normally happen.

I used free software like LDAP, SASL, Samba, BIND, OpenVPN, NFS and
others to build the core features which allowed all of the systems to
plug in without worrying about OS compatibility.  The testing performed
was minimal and most things "just worked" regardless of attached OS.  On
the long-term scale, it allows the studio owner to scale his network
well over 100 times in size with no extra software cost at the server
side.  It also meant that we could build in redundancy early on without
the need to worry about further licensing restrictions and time delays.

I've since worked on similar projects where there has always been an
insistence to use proprietary software as the base.  Typically this
means Microsoft Windows Server and Active Directory.  Invariably the
result is the same: permissions and user mapping fail when dealing with
cross-platform networks (MacOSX and Linux systems don't play as nicely
when compared with a standard LDAP system), DNS systems are more
difficult to manage, systems like Exchange are limiting in their
scalability, performance, and extensibility, and the time to roll out
these networks is always blown out by software license management.  One
I was a part of recently took several months to complete, and had fewer
features than the 5-day affair I mention above.

And I'm not even going to start talking about the dollar cost (I hate
terms like "TCO", as they are far too hand-wavy and belong in the realm
of pointy haired bosses only).

The "reliability" part has been fantastic.  The network in question has
been functional for 1.5 years now, and we are planning various upgrades
and extensions that are going to be equally as trivial to implement
thanks to the redundant nature of the network, which in turn is thanks
to the free software driving it.

- -Dan

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