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From: brian@aljex.com (Brian K. White)
Subject: Re: No longer supporting Unixware / Open Server
Date: 30 Jan 2004 04:57:13 -0800
Message-ID: <60bd4c6b.0401300457.684f9207@posting.google.com> 
References: <bv7gbp$i40$0@206.25.50.11> <60bd4c6b.0401281042.5c267059@posting.google.com> <soXRb.46152$U%5.240446@attbi_s03> <60bd4c6b.0401281947.4d66ece@posting.google.com> <cz2Sb.179512$na.292957@attbi_s04> 

joe@blahblah.invalid (Joe Dunning) wrote in message news:<cz2Sb.179512$na.292957@attbi_s04>...
> On 28 Jan 2004 19:47:26 -0800, Brian K. White <brian@aljex.com> wrote:
> 
> >joe@blahblah.invalid (Joe Dunning) wrote in message
> news:<soXRb.46152$U%5.240446@attbi_s03>...
> 
> >> On 28 Jan 2004 10:42:47 -0800, Brian K. White <brian@aljex.com> wrote:
> >> 
> >> >
> >> >And people wonder why I refuse to allow linux into the professional
> >> >work environments I'm responsible for? Happily though, I happen to
> >> >already know that your attitude is merely one of a very vocal but
> >> >happily very minor minority.
> >> 
> >> How many posts have I seen on this newsgroup justifying SCO 
> >> installations as "in the best interests of my customers"? Now you say 
> >> that you absolutely refuse to allow Linux into the ">work environments 
> >> I'm responsible for". No technical justification for this, just your 
> >> opinion on the attitudes of Linux users. Well, that's really a good 
> >> justification of the best interests of your customers, isn't it? 
> >> 
> >> I mean, obviously Google, Amazon and others are suffering from their use
> >> of Linux aren't they?  Yet, you believe you know better than the IT
> >> managers of those companies. Oh, yes, that's the way of the future: 
> >> absolutely refuse to allow Linux installations. I wish I had your 
> >> foresight.
> >> 
> >> Brian, you have shown that you are merely an SCO zealot.
> >
> >google amazon et al, can afford to have full time 24/7 on-site IT
> >staff that can immediately deal with the vagaries of life with linux,
> 
> Linux does not need 24/7 support. If you think that you are showing your 
> ignorance. On the other hand, I don't see any SCO installations in 
> Netcraft's list of machines with longest uptimes. 

You are right it doesn't need 24/7 baybysitting. It only needs
attention when it crashes or gets holed. The rest of the time, yeah,
it's fine.

And it has already been pointed out how silly and irrelevant netcraft
is to this discussion. Just like the also irrelevant google example, I
happen to be talking about boxes that operate in a completely
dissimilar context than google or any other public web server, which
are the only types of boxes that can ever even show up on netcraft.
The back-room boxes and factory floor boxes and data-logger boxes and
point of sale boxes etc... most of them don't even see the internet.
Yet they have some of the longest uptimes you'll ever see in person.
Certainly the consistently longest average uptimes if not the longest
absolute.

> >and to highly customize their linux installations to minimize those
> >vagaries in the first place. The "technical justifications" are many
> >and I rarely get past the first one or two before a client decides
> >"Never mind I don't need that!" in those instances when they ask me to
> >explain our particular choice of OS. Yes, I do tell them the PRO's as
> >well as the cons, no I do not invent or even exagerate the cons, yes I
> >have used and continue to use linux myself enough to be quite
> >knowledgeable about it from first hand experience.
> 
> So we are to believe that you honestly tell your customers about the 
> pros and cons of Linux vs. SCO yet you  also state that: 
> >> >.... I refuse to allow linux into the professional
> >> >work environments I'm responsible for? 
> 
> These two statements cannot be reconciled. You have shown your true
> attitude here: you have some irrational bias against Linux and you are
> most likely doing your customers a disservice when you advise them.  
> Either that or you are lying about not allowing linux into "the
> professional work environments [you are] responsible for"

I don't contradict anything. Please only accuse me of saying that
which I have said, and not that which you have read between the lines.
Whenever I get to decide, that is how I decide. When I don't get to
simply specify, and in the even rarer cases when even my
recommendation is overridden, I am productive and helpful and provide
excellent linux service. And frankly, the gap is closing and the
decision may soon reverse. Linux is getting better and sco is getting
worse (if you factor in the organization you have to deal with as part
of the total package, which I do. the actual software is still top
notch but who knows when the management will manage to screw that up
finally by dictating bad design to the developers to satisfy backwards
or even incomprehensible goals.)

Most recently a customer a few months ago wished to install a linux
box and samba was going to be the main purpose for the box. It needed
to be very reliable because their core business app was actually a
windows app that needed a central server to hold database files that
all pc's update. I recommended, in this order:
1) sco server with the sco version of the app and no more binaries
running on pc's accessing data over the lan via mapped network drives,
instead all data & bins running on the server and pc's just running
terminal emulators.
This would have been 1000% faster than what they were used to.
2) If you stay with windows version of app, then stay with a windows
file server, just beef it up and strip it down and lock it down so
nothing is running on it but antivirus and windows itself to provide
the file shares.
Unix, while generally superior to windows in most any way, would most
likely be a little more prone to unexpected or unusual problems if
used in this way because in the end, an smb server is an add-on thing
to unix and even the best ones don't precisely exactly duplicate
windows's behaviour 100% and with this form of extremely heavy traffic
made up of lots of little rapid transactions from many pc's to the
same files at the same time, it's just asking for trouble.
3) if you insist on a unix server for this, then make it sco +
facetwin for reliability and the astonishing facetwin lifetime free
actually knowledgeable support and the general lack of need for it in
the first place, or possibly linux + facetwin to get linux's better
disk performance and facetwins impeccable stability (but understand,
sitting on top of linux instead of sco, it can only be just so
reliable)
4) if you insist on linux + samba I am perfectly capable of setting it
up and resolving any problems, but I predict problems and the time
spent fixing them may approach or surpass the cost of the sco+facetwin
option.

He ended up doing 90% of the job with reckless abandon all on his own
and then calling me when in the middle of his first work day they
suddenly started having a flood of problems and the app wasn't working
at all and data was being botched up left and right from all the
failed writes...

In the end he pretty much lucked out. I resolved an obscure (but
reasonably well documented and not apparently new) issue with
fundamental differences in the way a windows box locks files and
records and the way unix does, and the various subtly different
behaviours that can optionally be specified in samba to try to satisfy
applications that fail when moved to a samba share, and it didn't take
me all day, and he didn't end up having to re-key in too much data.

I don't consider that a linux success story. I consider it a close
call and I garuntee it wouldn't have happened had my first or second
recommendation been accepted. It was a gamble that paid off. Most of
my customers do NOT want to gamble with their business if there is any
possible way to avoid it. And actually, the gamble is not over until
that box goes 4 or 5 years without a burp until finally some peice of
hardware starts to fail the way all the sco boxes have been doing. I
predict failure there for sure. But his theory there is "when this
cheap box dies I'll just restore the data from backup onto a new cheap
box" and what the heck, as long as the backups are known good and as
long as the setup of a box remains simple, maybe that's not an
inefficient plan.



> 
> Even other posters on this newsgroup don't agree with you. How many
> posts have we seen from multiple posters in this very newsgroup who say
> that that SCO is dying and they are migrating customers to Linux.
> 

What has that got to do with anything? I myself have been working on a
pet project off & on for over a year to put together a freebsd based
replacement for our current sco based package, but *not* because of
cost, which is what I daresay is the reason most people migrate from
sco to linux. It's because a large part of what made me proud to sell
and service sco has gone away in the last year, which was the history
of the company. I used to be able to say to a client how dependable
and long-standing the company was and assure them without blinking
"You are in good hands with them, no surprizes, whenever you need
something they will be there to supply it and at pretty much the same
terms as now and in the past". No way can I say that now. They may in
fact still be around and supplying upgrades and extra users & extra
cpu's etc... for my whole remaining career, but I don't know that so
it's moot. Based on this last year all I know is that "anything could
happen"

> >I don't think I'm too upset about what you think I've shown, since you
> >have shown merely that you do not think. Certainly you can't debate
> >your way out of a wet paper bag.
> 
> You can say that, but unsupported statements have zero value. On the
> other hand, I have shown above how you have contradicted yourself --
> destroying any shreds of credibility in the Linux/SCO issues that you
> might have once had. Your response: you resort to a crude ad-hominem
> attack.

It would be wildly impractical for me to provide a general ledger tape
of all the failed and suceeded experiments over the last several years
just to provide you an account of incidents that lead to my current
opinions.  I'd basically have to go and re-enact them all only this
time filming it all. So I won't
Notice that I do not ask you to support any statements about linux's
dependability. I don't need to. I actually use both sco and linux and
you can't say anything that would undo the first-hand comparison I
have simply and plainly witnessed. (And I assure you, it's not a linux
knowledgeability issue. Being 34 and picking up unix kind of late, I
am among the first wave of people who initially learned unix more on
linux than on anything else. Hopefully that sheds a little perspective
on my stances.) Conversely, have you used sco much?

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