Using Debian in Commercial Environments?
Posted by
Cliff
on Tue Sep 07, 2004 06:45 PM
from the distributions-in-the-enterprise dept.
from the distributions-in-the-enterprise dept.
sydb asks: "I am currently persuading my employer to try out Linux. We are heavily dependent on IBM software technologies just now, and it's a very conservative operations organization. As a challenge, I am trying to persuade them to use my preferred distro but there are hurdles: IBM doesn't officially support Debian as a platform, though I have anecdotal evidence that most of it can be persuaded to work (with alien etc). Does Slashdot have experience shoe-horning Debian into this kind of scenario? Most importantly, how have things gone getting IBM support? My rationale for pushing Debian boils down to its vast array of packages available to apt-get, easy upgrades, apt-get itself, and the overall quality and consistency of the system."
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Using Debian in Commercial Environments?
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Conservative and don't like Debian? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Conservative and don't like Debian? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Conservative and don't like Debian? (Score:5, Insightful)
You have a working system. What is your rationale for wanting to change ANYTHING, much less your OS?
You've paid (if my own workplace is any indicator) at least tens of thousands of dollars just for the IBM support (which is superb, if you're running approved software).
You probably are using other software, all of which you've paid support contracts on.
All these contracts will become null and void if you should do something completely insane, like switching your DE to a distro that is not supported.
Well, go for it, it's your career. I'll say this, however. If you were employed at my workplace, and suggested such an insane course of action, you wouldn't be working here for long.
Re:Conservative and don't like Debian? (Score:5, Informative)
(http://sydb.dyndns.org/ | Last Journal: Friday October 19 2001, @01:10PM)
The only IBM software we need to use in "production" is a DB2 client and probably a TSM agent. We could avoid the TSM agent.
We would probably want to run WebSphere on it for testing purposes - testing of scripts before they reach the environments our developers use.
My concerns are more about persuading management that an "unsupported" distribution could be a goer, and what I expect to be a small number if contacts with IBM support.
So I understand your thinking, but in this case it's misplaced.
Re:Conservative and don't like Debian? (Score:4, Informative)
Call IBM Global services. You'll be surpised what they support.
For the right price, they happily support Oracle [from a competitor] running on Solaris [from a competitor] and Ingres [from a competitor] running on NT [from a competitor].
I think you may be talking to the wrong group in IBM. If you guys have the cash to pay them, they'll gladly support Debian (though possibly through a partner company).
Re:Conservative and don't like Debian? (Score:4, Informative)
(Last Journal: Tuesday September 07 2004, @10:56PM)
http://www.ibm.com/linux
Re:Conservative and don't like Debian? (Score:4, Insightful)
Looking at it from management's point of view, I'd still be very skeptical. A promise that you'd be personally responsible for maintenance, fixes, patches and "surprises" might do the trick, although I know (from personal experience) that I would not be allowed to do it in spite of those reassurances. For good reason...I have responsibilities other than patching an experimental system, and could find myself in over my head very quickly.
The end result would be...mission not accomplished. And that's an unacceptable outcome to management. Plus, those developers...you give them a bad environment and you'll never hear the end of it.
Good luck.
Re:Conservative and don't like Debian? (Score:5, Insightful)
You might be able to convince them based on the licensing [suse.com] and service [novell.com] costs. Try making it a business case, exposing how much would it cost to have inhouse support for Debian vs Novell support for Suse. Be realistic, don't be quick at dismissing the costs of inhouse support for Debian. If you can, get some of the folks at IBM to back the feasability of the case, telling that, though unsupported, they dont forsee any trouble.
Depending on how critical the production end of your environment, you might be able to pull it off. Always bear in mind if for any reason the tested scripts will not run on the production end, the excrement will be flying your way. This decision might come to haunt you later if you keep your current employer.
Why try for Debian? You will fail. (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://nojailforpot.com/)
Re:Why try for Debian? You will fail. (Score:5, Insightful)
Um, no, Not even a little bit. It doesn't matter if you think Debian is the greatest thing in the world, or something you found at the bottom of your garbage can, there's one key difference.
Imagine some updated package broke all your applications. And your quarterly statements are due tomorrow. And the CEO is touring your server farm. And the planets are aligned infavorably. And it's Friday the 13th. Let me show two different scenarios:
And the alternative:
Re:Why try for Debian? You will fail. (Score:4, Insightful)
I myself have had to wait SEVEN MONTHS for a single line of code to be fixed in a piece of geophysical software with enormous subscription fees and not a large pool of customers (ie. we are a major chunk of their income) - that is after seven months after I pointed out that the two output variables should be zero so that the software could plot out charts. The entire piece of software was designed to generate and output charts, but it was broken in a way that meant it took another twenty minutes per plot (third party GUI software, plus someone to trim the charts) for around fifteen plots a day for seven months before a single line of code (which was printing some variables to a file as ASCII) was fixed.
There are plenty of other stories like this, everywhere.
You are as unlikely to get sacked for using debian as you are for using linux in the first place.
But you are - you have no business using any breed of *nix in a production environment is you cannot do a kernel upgrade - a solaris admin that hasn't installed a patch is the a work experience guy. If it needs redhat libraries you can use them on whatever breed of intell linux it is, and often on other platforms as well. Even gnome, initially written with no thought of portablility in mind, happily compiles on Solaris - and here you are saying that something with the same kernel and libraries is too much of a risk?What have you been smoking? (Score:5, Insightful)
Either you live in some alternate universe in which vendors work on bugs for individual users, or you've been smoking some exceptionally strong weed. Or, possibly, you don't have a clue.
I don't believe in alternate universes.
Re:Why try for Debian? You will fail. (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://www.neverwhen.net/)
Employee: Um, look harder please, remember we're paying you all this money for [Operating System]
[Any Vendor At All]: Ah, ok, I think we've found the problem. You're running software we don't support. Now go fix it yourself and stop bothering me.
How about this instead?
CEO: What's going on here?
Employee: I unwisely installed a new package on our production server without testing it first. I'm just in the process of removing it and going back to the old version. Everything should be back up by the end of our maintenance window.
CEO: Good. Let me know how it turns out and why this won't happen again.
Paying a lot of money for a support contract is no excuse for being careless. If your server absolutely has to be running tomorrow, then keep it running. I don't care if you use a cold spare, restore from a backup or try to fix it yourself, but I do know that if I told my boss that I couldn't be bothered to find a solution and was sitting in my butt waiting for a vendor to fix it for me instead, I would soon be out of a job. And I would have earned it.
Being a sysadmin means you always have a backup plan. Having someone to point your finger at does _not_ constitute a plan.
Debian is the most _stable_ distro. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Conservative and don't like Debian? (Score:5, Insightful)
Partly on the basis of that experience, I moved from running RH on my workstation to running Debian, and I've never been sorry about that, either.
Our migration from IRIX to Debian was a complete success because of two things:
1) We had, collectively, a lot of talent on Linux;
2) The sysadmin put in charge of the project had a lot of talent and experience on Debian; the rest of us had most of our experience in Solaris, BSD, and Red Hat. The IRIX guy had moved to another department by then.
What was the difference? Not lack of talent, I think. It sounds like you know what you are doing. Perhaps a matter of choosing appropriate hardware, though. We didn't screw around with ATA RAID (this was in the pre-SATA days, but that wouldn't have mattered) or anything that was less than server grade. This was a mission-critical system, and we used only server-grade hardware that was known to be very well supported.
The hosts we used were six dual-CPU rackmount cases running SCSI disks (RAID 1) for the OS install, and all the important stuff was on SAN (RAID 5 there).
Everything was absolutely bulletproof. How bulletproof? We installed Woody, with the 2.2 kernel (this was the late 1990s, and 2.4 was still experiencing some growing pains) and it worked perfectly right out of the box.
As I noted at the top, they are still at 100% mail system uptime to this day, to the best of my (fairly good) knowledge. They are still running Debian Stable.
Many other people can tell you stories just like this. Debian most certainly has a place in a shop that needs to get things done, a place that can perhaps only be taken by FreeBSD (with the possible exception of Slackware, Debian Stable is the only Linux distro I've ever used that can match FreeBSD for stability, or at least come very close).
I'm not saying you don't know what you're doing, I'm sure you do. You're probably a better sysadmin than I am. However, I do see one thing that you did wrong. You chose (or perhaps the customer's budget chose for you) what some people would call "toy hardware." Debian Stable often isn't the best fit on the block with that stuff. But if you had been using a proper server box with SCSI (or at the least parallel ATA; I *still* don't like SATA support under Linux much), I think it would have been all right.
One other thing I would have done differently is this: as soon as I found that I had problems with the hardware and the distro I had chosen, one or the other would have been jettisoned. For a server application, it would have been the hardware if I had the latitude to make that decision. Even today, a server you need to depend on should use SCSI disks (I'm still partial to Adaptec adapters) and known top-quality parts.
With all due respect, while building an identical machine in your lab was the smart way to do it, investing hundreds of hours into making Debian work with that hardware was not. It would have been cheaper to *buy* a proper box and just *give* it to the customer. Alternatively, if that hardware was cast in concrete, early on you should have chosen a different distro, one that is focused on a single hardware platform and that places more emphasis on supporting the bleeding edge than on rock-solid stability for tried and true equipment. Debian is not that distro (not to say it doesn't work fine on most stuff; I install Debian Sid on Frys' sale-quality hardware regularly without incident).
I would advance the idea that Frys sale-quality hardware (such as SATA-RAID) has no place in a shop that needs to get things done. You probably won't ex
No, Debian is the ultimate conservative distro (Score:5, Informative)
Comparing Debian to Mandrake, Suse, Slackware or even RHEL I think you will find that Debian it the most cautious about adopting new versions of core libraries, graphics system or the kernel.
Re:No, Debian is the ultimate conservative distro (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://hnsg.net/)
Dear slashdot (Score:5, Funny)
(Last Journal: Wednesday April 27 2005, @11:26AM)
Re:Dear slashdot (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Dear slashdot (Score:4, Interesting)
Now that we have switched our servers to Linux they wished we could move more.
Re:Dear slashdot (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://sydb.dyndns.org/ | Last Journal: Friday October 19 2001, @01:10PM)
Whatsmore, the overhead of a highly regimented IT operations organisation is more and more apparent. There is a balance to be struck between every technology meeting the corporate checklist, rubber stamped by all and sundry, sticking to the tried and test, and actually being able to implement change quickly enough to keep up with business realities.
Please don't answer my question so tritely. I think it is a reasonable one.
Re:Dear slashdot (Score:5, Informative)
(http://sydb.dyndns.org/ | Last Journal: Friday October 19 2001, @01:10PM)
This machine will need:
* A DB2 client
* Maybe run WebSphere for the testing of in-house scripts
* A Tivoli Storage Management agent. Or maybe not, there are other ways to have backups, like syncing to another machine.
The question is about adjusting management mindsets and dealing with IBM in what I expect to be a very small number of support calls. It's not about choosing the right technical solution, because I have ample justification for Debian being the right technical solution.
Re:Dear slashdot (Score:5, Insightful)
IBM doesn't officially support Debian as a platform, though I have anecdotal evidence that most of it can be persuaded to work (with alien etc).
to
It's not about choosing the right technical solution, because I have ample justification for Debian being the right technical solution.
So, your anecdotal evidence is now ample justification? I would say Mike (great-grandparent post) is right on the mark with his comments.
Re:Dear slashdot (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://slashdot.org/)
1) An installation needs to be supportable. This does not mean that you can get tech questions answered quickly via IRC or mailing lists. This may or may not mean the availablity of a hotline to call when everything hits the fan, and you are loosing big bucks every hour. It most definetly means that you can get install third-party software, and when that software hickups, you can call the vendor and have them help you, and not tell you they don't support your installation choice. Support also includes an assurance that someone has a _financial incentive_ to provide timely security updates and bug fixes for the product.
2) An installation needs to be repeatable. Which means that installing a distro that doesn't baseline their releases won't cut it. What I mean is, some distributions come out with a version, say 11.2, and will put out a series of fixes in the form of a couple updated package files every week or so. Thus, if you set up a server today with versin 11.2 and all current fixes, then next week if you do the same thing you will get a slightly different install. So what is needed is for the distro to have the concept of maintance levels, or patch levels, which defines a line in the sand so that you can at any time install 11.2 patch-level 13 and it will always be the same. (This also makes it easier for patches to be reviewed and signed off on by your patch-review board).
3) An installation needs to have a good chance of being maintanable by someone off the street. There are more enterprise-class unix admins out there than enterprise linux admins (that is, at least 5 years experience supporting a minimum of 50 systems that are in use 24x7 with stirct uptime requirements). And since most enterprises and their vendors are going with one or two linux flavors, a shop has a better chance of getting an admin in a pinch if they go with one of those two major linux players. And just knowing how to troubleshoot and upkeep linux in general isn't enough for a production system. Any linux distro has it's particulars that you don't want someine learning about during a crisis.
Unfortunately, most distributions fail one or more of these tests (or other tests that I didn't mention). For example, with Redhat Enterprise, their only supported methods of updating are to use up2date, which grabs the latest patches for all installed packages (which means you can't baseline), or you have to grab the patches one-by-one. If you download their update CD's, they don't provide an easy way to apply all the fixes (rpm --freshen doesn't cut it, cause sometimes you run across a patch that has prerequisites that the previous version didn't have, and rpm doesn't automatically resolve dependancies. Of course, there is always autorpm, autoupdate, apt, and yum, but these aren't part of the base distro, so you aren't guaranteed of it always working with that distro).
Re:Dear slashdot (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.koziarski.net/)
As a linux 'advocate' working in a large IBM customer (top 20), I feel your pain. However, give up on debian.
Seriously. If you try to run this stuff on anything other than an IBM-supported distro will start to refuse your support calls, charge extra for incidents and basically make pricks of themselves.
Your best bet is either:If you're already paying for DB2, Websphere *and* tivoli, you're looking at a few million a year. What does redhat cost, ~1k, just pay it. From there you can advocate JBoss/Tomcat instead of websphere, Postgresql instead of DB2 etc. etc.
If you run IBM stuff on another distribution, who do you think will be up against the wall when your fixed price call out suddenly becomes a ~$1k/hr (lab rates) fix?
Re:Dear slashdot (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://slashdot.org/)
There are plenty of good business reasons to want to use Debian... the very same reasons you or I use it.
1) Security updates are done quicker than recompiling/manually installing (The competition is catching up).
2) Software installation to a new machine will take less time on a Debian system because it will update to the latest versions automatically instead of applying patches over the original install (competition is catching up).
3) More software packages prepackaged means that there are fewer custom compilations/installs, which means installing/upgrading client machines will take less time.
4) Setting up your own APT server means you can distribute your own upgrades internally, and even package non-standard software yourself. This means you can write one install/setup/upgrade script for oracle, and have it automatically propogate through the network instead of installing it on a per machine basis.
Every one of these points saves time. If a company is under pressure right now to save money, applying some of that presure on IBM might be a good way to get the ball rolling toward getting support for Debian. IBM only supports SuSE and RedHat because that's what everyone else uses. There is enough room in the market for another supported distro, especially one as easy to support as Debian.
I wouldn't sacrifice support, because that would put your job on the line, but I would lobby them to ask IBM to support Debian. If enough people in your position do, they'll add it to the supported list. You might want to have them run a test on the next server upgrade/install by installing Debian on it. If that means that IBM doesn't get service fees for that server, and you tell them so, then they'll start paying attention. You're company can always switch a single, not-so-critical system to a supported platform at any time without a significant loss. You just have to convince them that the potential economical gains are significant enough. If that server sits in the corner doing it's job without anyone touching, they'll start to see the wisdom. If you suggest something like a single server as a test bed, they'll see it as more of an experiment to try to save money, and if it fails, it probably won't be your job, but if it succeeds, and you implement it company wide and save a lot of money, then you will probably have eliminated a need for your job, and your boss will get a raise from the portion of your no longer needed salary.
Re:Dear slashdot (Score:5, Insightful)
First of all if you are using stable (and a corporation should) the chances of apt get going wrong are just about null.
Secondly you could buy a support contract. Just like you could buy a support contract from MS.
Finally this is OSS. You can get support even though you didn't buy it. The debian community is especially clueful and helpful. Chances are you'll get better support for free then the first or second level droid at your other company. In most cases you should solve your problem in less time then it would take to escalate it with MS.
"new one has no support contract, and the new one goes wrong, it's all YOUR FAULT. If you use the existing system, with a support contract, and it goes wrong, it's the fault of the contractors, or whoever installed it, not you."
Maybe where you work you can simply say "it's Microsoft's fault" and go home. Not where I work. Your ass is on the line when the server goes down. No ifs, ands or buts about it.
simple (Score:3, Insightful)
(http://www.jroller.com/page/shareme/Weblog | Last Journal: Tuesday September 03 2002, @07:25AM)
just goolge the name and you will find his website with the paper links..
Or the hard way.. start your own business and demand it as per your ceo status.. I went the hard way
Getting what you pay for (Score:5, Insightful)
If they support your environment.
The gains you might think you'll get by using Debian are absolutely not worth losing your service contract, which you've likely already paid for. There's nothing horribly wrong with SuSE or Redhat, both generally supported IBM environments. If you succeed in getting your boss to install Debian, you're on the process of going up a river without the proverbial paddle.
Re:Getting what you pay for (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.nikola.novak.net/)
If your company, as it appears, uses IBM software/hardware, it prefers to pay some (ok, a LOT;) extra $$$ to have the peace of mind of having a large, monolithic corporation a phone call away:). As a hacker, you'll adapt easily to SuSE or RedHat (sure, we all raise hell about the differences, but let's be honest here;). As a company though, and especially a "conservative" one, they'll have -much- harder time adapting to a different model of doing things. In all honesty, sounds like you might be doing them a disservice by offering what is, in the end, an officially unsupported OS. Do you want to be the one who inadvertently nullifies their support contracts (no matter how unreasonable their requirements may be)?
You need to think beyond what you would like to play with, and extend your viewpoint to all the possibilities and risks your company might encounter in the years ahead. If they're more comfortable knowing somebody is guaranteeing, supporting, and in the end, taking the blame for their software/hardware, then it's a strategic policy you should follow.
There's little other then deception to persuade them to use Debian, if they are the type of company you describe.
Re:Getting what you pay for (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://freebsdwiki.net/)
Not always the way it is (Score:5, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Tuesday December 12 2006, @07:54PM)
But there's places where I can see Linux boxes excelling where other software falls short. One of them is our Spam "solution." It was very expensive and it doesn't work for shit. 80% accuracy, maybe. Lots of false positives. In 2002, it was really cool shit. But that's the problem - things change fast when it comes to certain things like Spam and when you pay $50,000 for a license to filter spam you don't want to upgrade or change softwares every six months.
Enter OSS - My (*gasp*) spamassassin+dspam+amavisd-new is easily doing 99.99% of the spam with extremely low occurances of false positives. Is it supported? Nope. Wait, yes it is. I SUPPORT IT.
Some companies are all about support, support, support. They don't trust their IT staff, they consider them expendable. I don't work at a company like that. They put weight in our abilities. If you can make a good case for an OSS solution, one where you can support it yourself and train others, it will be seriously considered. Apparently there's other companies like this too, since a lot of places are running Linux now and not all of them use RedHat Enterprise.
Support (Score:5, Informative)
(about:mozilla)
However, it sounds like your Enterprise has already standardized around IBM. As good as Debian is, I can't see how it's good enough to lose an enterprise support agreement, even if it's just a few machines.
Maybe you can threaten the sales people to go to HP if they don't amend the support contract to include Debian. They probably will know you're bluffing, but it might help.
I know! (Score:5, Funny)
Your rationale vs. their rationale (Score:5, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Friday December 24 2004, @08:49PM)
They want to run IBM solutions because they can trust that the few apps that they actually want to run on the system will run with no trouble.
The trouble here is that you want Debian on the systems for your own selfish reasons. They want to run their systems as reliably as possible. Since this is a business and not a college dorm room, the business case will always win out.
Debian is a fine distribution. But no company in their right mind would go through