gnhlug-discuss digest, Vol 1 #819 - 5 msgs

[Dan Jenkins]

Chris Brenton wrote:

>  On Sat, 2004-02-21 at 19:46, Travis Roy wrote:
>
> > I'm sure we've all run into the boss that won't let you put linux
> > on a server because of the way it's developed.
>
>
>  Funny story, I was called in to do a security audit on this network's
>  Windows environment. Apparently they had a wicked unstable
>  environment till they hired in this hot shot sys admin. The guy put
>  up a fuss about me being there and *did not* want me auditing his
>  servers. A meeting between him, the CFO, the COO and myself almost
>  came to blows and him getting fired. When I logged on to the first
>  server I figured out why. He had converted the entire environment
>  over to Linux running SAMBA (even duplicated the screen saver) and no
>  one was the wiser. All they knew was the servers ran faster and no
>  longer kept crashing. :)
>
>  And yes he passed my audit as he was patched and up to date. ;-)

Funny and sad. Sad to have to resort to deceit to improve performance 
and stability.

Some years ago I was forced into a similar situation - though it turned 
out much better.
The customer had to convert to Windows NT 4 from SCO Xenix. The system 
was crashing
regularly (almost daily). We got called in to make it stable. For 
temporary testing purposes, I
put in a Linux Samba server and transferred the file shares to it. (It 
was Turbo Linux, IIRC, at
that time a RedHat 4 equivalent.) We took the NT server back for 
testing, and eventually did
uncover some flaky hardware. By the time we got the replacement parts 
from the manufacturer
and got the server repaired and NT reloaded and configured (it had 
gotten trashed by the flaky
hardware),  some weeks had gone by. The customer did not want us to 
change anything until
month end and then fiscal year end came. Two months later they finally 
were ready to put the
new server in place. They were so happy with the stability and couldn't 
afford downtime,  so we
just copied the contents of the hard drive with Linux into the new 
server (after erasing NT).
They were back up in a half hour. They used it for another five years.

-- 
Dan Jenkins (dan at rastech.com)
Rastech Inc., Bedford, NH, USA --- 1-603-624-7272
*** Technical Support for over a Quarter Century