undertakingyou

Linux in the enterprise may have one big hold back, a lack of qualified professionals. James, the network admin at SLCC, brought up the point that even if you do get Open Source software up and running in your enterprise the guy that actually sets it up and knows about it leaves and you don’t have an admin any more.

To some this may be a valid point, but I would disagree. Linux has built in documentation with ‘man pages’. Take that coupled with the community knowledge which is shared via forums, wiki’s, and irc channels and there is a wealth of information only a few keystrokes away. If that isn’t enough companies like Guru Labs offer training on just about anything to do with linux administration. Still want more? Specifically someone to point the finger at? Then this is the perfect place for companies such as Red Hat and Novell, which sell their admin services as well as entire enterprise solutions.

Now I have Admined smaller business systems, 50 to 100 users. And the guys I was chatting with are dealing with 60,000 users. But really, every enterprise is already using a certain amount of Open Source software. And the only excuse that anyone can’t be a linux professional is that they can’t read, type, and they’re lazy.

So, continuing the last post. Open Source Software is already tried and tested in the enterprise arena. BIND for DNS. LDAP and Kerberos are used for central authorization (these are the technologies under Microsoft’s active directory). Samba for network shares and network printing. Apache runs 50.4% of the web. MySQL database has 40% market share for developers and 33% for deployment. Then there is squid, a popular proxy server and proftpd for an ftp server.

In addition to these software pieces, many appliances run on *nix kernels and utilize various Open Source technologies. SLCC uses a Barracuda spam filter that runs on a linux kernel and uses a combination of proprietary and open source software to filter spam. Likely that this includes SpamAssassin and ClamAV. It also uses LDAP.

So with all these tried and trued open source products why is it that linux is not ready for the enterprise market?

So today I was talking to a few of the network guys at SLCC. We all had Mac’s and were talking about that and I said that I used linux. They laughed and said that linux is nice and all if you have time to hack on it, but they had an enterprise to run. We chatted for a minute more but it got me thinking about linux in enterprise.

First, they said that they needed stuff to just work out of the box.
Well, what doesn’t work? Within half an hour I can have a linux server installed with a database server, and web server running. With another half hour I can have DNS, and DHCP going. A little more time and a samba server can be set up serving network shares.

Now I have never set up LDAP or Kerberos, but I’ve heard than it is easier that setting up Active Directory and I have set one of those up.

So what does it take to just work? You can’t set up any machine without some sort of configuration. So, if ‘just work’ing is to plug it in, and then configure and run, my thought is, what doesn’t ‘just work’ with linux in the enterprise?