Earth Computing

[Alvin]

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