315. Matthew Berg Prasad Chavali
January 7, 1999

prasad@rajahmundry.net
UNIX
Being an ISP, we found out how flexible UNIX can be over NT. After investing in 4 NT Servers, we finally wised up and started bringing in UNIX.

314. Sam Williams
January 7, 1999
samurai@acm.org
I have used either Unix, Linux, and NT during the last 10 years. I am currently working in the US as an Senior IS Staff Specialist with a focus on Unix. I also have the distinction of designing one of the first Burrough's A-12 to Unix server conversions in the Midwest 6 years ago.

I realize that India is just starting to build their infrastructure, but I believe great caution should be observed especially considering the breadth of the decision. My recommendation is to stay away from Microsoft NT. There are several reasons for this. First, NT doesn't perform well under a reasonable ISP type load. Robustness has been documented in the media many times in the last year. Second, NT has some dangerous security problems. Third, when problems have been identified with the OS, Microsoft frequently makes you wait for Server Pack releases. Fourth, improvements as seen in Windows 2000 could still be more then a year away. Fifth, the total cost of ownership is a lot higher then most accountants would like you to believe.

Several close working relations are NT support personnel. They constantly tell me horror stories about install a simple fix that inadvertently forces a complete re-install of the OS and application data. I use NT on the desktop, and find that if I have a system with a CPU at 233 MHZ or higher with 128Mbytes of memory or higher then the performance is reasonable.

On the other hand Unix scales well. In the biographic info at the top of this note I mentioned a migration project that I designed. The company that is running exclusively off Unix is approximately a 500 Million dollar / year entity. Performance is great and the ability to synthesize your own solutions is great.

I will assume that India is going to want to keep their enterprises working at peak efficiency and the lowest possible cost. Linux is the option that you should consider. It is low cost and is in use the world over by ISP's that have had no problems whatsoever with performance or scalability. Linux can use commodity PC's, or if necessary run on new Ultra Sparc or Compaq Alpha systems if high performance is needed.

I think it's important to note that your on-going licensing costs with Microsoft will consume vast quantities of money that may be difficult to produce each year. Buy today and you may not see it coming tomorrow. The company I work for has licensed Microsoft Office software on a metered batch basis for years. Microsoft just changed this policy and our licensing costs for this exact same software will go up by $1,000,000.00 / year. The expenditure came as a complete surprise, but if we continued to use this software we had to pay. We are a Fortune 300 company. Imagine how must they made on just the Fortune 500 companies with this change.

On the other side of the world from India there exists Mexico. The Ministry of Education in Mexico had a 5 year plan to connect 140,000 schools to the Internet. Because of licensing issues they elected to use Linux for not only firewalls and servers, but desktop systems as well. Linux is a solution that would allow India to produce a highly reliable environment at a reasonable cost. Please consider it for the good of the country. Regardless of how someone feels Microsoft has been wronged in an article, you must look at the issue logically and with a discerning technical eye. Microsoft will not solve your problem.

Finally, many people assume that because you are buying from Microsoft you will have a company that you can take legal action against in the event of a project failure. Read the licensing agreement from MS. They are only ever obligated to pay back the cost of the product!!! So if you lose $1,000,000.00 because of failed environment, the only potential liability is the few thousand dollars you spent on the applications or OS!!!!

Consider the options sensibly and with great regard for who and what you are interfacing with. India has enormous technical expertise. Finding a Unix support infrastructure may be easier there then any where else in the world.

Good Luck !!!!

313. Matthew Berg
January 7, 1999

wdomburg@pce.net
Some people here seem to be forgetting that a lack of

desktop applications is //NOT// an issue here. An ISP has a limited set of server applications that it needs to provide - DNS, web, and mail. Anything beyond that is icing on the cake. Linux or *BDS would be the ideal choice here. DNS is handled by named, mail by sendmail, and web by Apache. In every case, the most popular applications for the job are available. There are some other considerations that make Linux the superior choice here, such as the availability of popular commercial products in the realm of databases

and active content. Alaire's Cold Fusion server being

one example, as well as the ASP server extensions available for Apache.These products may not be NECESSARY, but many developers make use of them; they would definitely be a plus for web commerce applications.

 The other aspect that makes Linux the more attractive option is support. Irregardless of what some people may think, Linux support is widely available and of very high quality. Yes, much of that support structure is in the realm of usenet or e-mail, but these issues are addressed by the people WHO WROTE THE APPLICATION. The same is also true for *BSD, but due to the smaller userbase it is not quite as available. And, if you require commercial support, standardizing on a single Linux vendor and buying a support contract is certainly an attractive option. Not to mention third-party support services which, due to the availability of the source code, are not hindered the way third-party support organizations for commercial products are.

The price of course cannot be beat. :)

But the last and probably most important point in favor

of free software is the reliability of the tools and

applications. For a paper on this, go to

ftp://grilled.cs.wisc.edu/technical_papers/fuzz-revisited.ps

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