312. Larry Smith
January 7, 1999
lcs@zk3.dec.com
Trying again...I can see no real choice here. Linux is more stable than any MS product, fully as much so as any commercial Unix. It is nearly as fast as most commercial Unices at most tasks, is faster, occasionally even substantially faster at others. It is complete - which NT is not - and can be readily administered without a local monitor, which NT cannot. Like a commercial Unix it can be twiddled and adjusted while still running, seldom requiring the "reboot for changes to take effect" syndrome of NT. Applications can easily address the needs of multiple users while NT still fails to easily deal with more than one single user - and applications can be easily installed and de-installed without imperiling the OS. Each time you install an MS application you take the chance of having it perform a silent upgrade on your operating system. Not a good route for stability! And aside from all the foregoing, NT can cost upwards of $1000 a seat, and MS is seriously considering going to a "service" fee requiring annual payments in order to continue using their OS, and Linux is cheap with support and free without. Are the Indian ISP's so rolling in money that they can seriously consider paying so much money for an OS with the drawbacks of NT? Or for a commercial Unix whose operation may not be distinguishable from Linux? People, I am an employee of Compaq, working on and supporting Digital Unix, nee "Compaq Tru64 Unix". It is a powerful, sophisticated, nearly unbeatable, truly 64-bit OS, certainly far, far superior to NT. I do believe it is the best OS you can get at any price. But I don't think it makes sense for Indian ISP's to buy it when they can get Linux for nothing. But let me assure you of one thing: a few years down the road, when some of your ISP's are groaning under the load and being asked to handle ever-growing numbers of users of ever-larger amounts of bandwidth, you are going to need an industrial-strength, fully-supported OS. It will be possible - even easy - to upgrade from Linux to Digital Unix. But if you go the NT route, you are slaves of Microsoft. If you thought the British were bad, let me tell you, it will take more than a Gandhi to get rid of Bill Gates.

311. Doug Olson
January 7, 1999
dolson@bethel.edu
I am a network manager in an environment where there are NT, Novell, and Unix Boxes. Novell is playing a diminishing role here so I won't bother with it. We have seperate staff that manage each of these environments. I have observed that the NT folks tend to run into the most problems of all the groups. I have seen that NT definitely costs far more time (which equals $$) to manage. Trouble shooting on NT seems to take more time and be more difficult to do than with UNIX. User and account management tools are not efficient to use. Point and click doesn't cut it with 6000 users. Another issue is reliability. We have UNIX servers that have been running for years without reboots due to crashes or other problems. I doubt the NT servers have ever gone much beyond 2 to 3 months, with an average uptime much less than that. It is my opinion that Microsoft is building an OS that is inherently less stable due to the fact that they are moving more and more functions of the OS into kernel space for performance gains whereas conventional wisdom proposes moving as much functionality to user space to increase stability and security. I would recommend that UNIX be used for any sort of mission critical applications.

310. Larry Smith
January 7, 1999
lcs@zk3.dec.com
I can see no real choice here. Linux is more stable than any MS product, fully as much so as any commercial Unix. It is nearly as fast as most commercial Unices at most tasks, is faster, occasionally even substantially faster at others. It is complete - which NT is not - and can be readily administered without a local monitor, which NT cannot. Like a commercial Unix it can be twiddled and adjusted while still running, seldom requiring the "reboot for changes to take effect" syndrome of NT. Applications can easily address the needs of multiple users while NT still fails to easily deal with more than one single user - and applications can be easily installed and de-installed without imperiling the OS. Each time you install an MS application you take the chance of having it perform a silent upgrade on your operating system. Not a good route for stability! And aside from all the foregoing, NT can cost upwards of $1000 a seat, and MS is seriously considering going to a "service" fee requiring annual payments in order to continue using their OS, and Linux is cheap with support and free without. Are the Indian ISP's so rolling in money that they can seriously consider paying so much money for an OS with the drawbacks of NT? Or for a commercial Unix whose operation may not be distinguishable from Linux? People, I am an employee of Compaq, working on and supporting Digital Unix, nee "Compaq Tru64 Unix". It is a powerful, sophisticated, nearly unbeatable, truly 64-bit OS, certainly far, far superior to NT. I do believe it is the best OS you can get at any price. But I don't think it makes sense for Indian ISP's to buy it when they can get Linux for nothing. But let me assure you of one thing: a few years down the road, when some of your ISP's are groaning under the load and being asked to handle ever-growing numbers of users of ever-larger amounts of bandwidth, you are going to need an industrial-strength, fully-supported OS. It will be possible - even easy - to upgrade from Linux to Digital Unix. But if you go the NT route, you are slaves of Microsoft. If you thought the British were bad, let me tell you, it will take more than a Gandhi to get rid of Bill Gates.

309. Randy Gordon
January 7, 1999
randy@integrand.com
Linux

308. Saikat Dey
January 7, 1999
saikatd@yahoo.com
Linux+Apache, period.

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