Re: How To Abandon Microsoft

tomstdenis_at_gmail.com
Date: 09/25/05 

Date: 24 Sep 2005 20:49:41 -0700

Mxsmanic wrote:
> For example, if your time costs the company $50 per hour and you spend
> an extra day working to get Redhat up and running over what you'd
> require to make Windows work, you've cost the company roughly the
> amount of money that Redhat would save over Windows in licensing. So
> the only possible reasons for being forced to use Redhat are that you
> are very poorly paid (and thus your time isn't worth much), or your
> company has an irrational attachment to software that actually costs
> it more money than Windows.

I'll take another stance at this [and throw some fuel on the fire].

Both redhat and windows suck.

Gentoo is where it's at.

1. No license fees [or licenses]
2. Stable, easy to work with GNU/Linux distro
3. Works on all x86 [including 64-bit and SMP], PPC32/64, ARM and
SPARC
4. Contains ebuilds for basically anything you can think of
5. Trivial to clone [remember this one for later].
6. Has a sensible build system that handles dependencies AND can
configure stuff based on simple user selectable flags [e.g. support for
algos and services]
7. It's free.

Anyways, this is where it becomes cool.

You want a rack of say a DNS/DHCP/NAT/Firewall/WWW/FTP/VPN servers in
one or more boxes (with or without redundancy).

Soo....

You build and configure one Gentoo box. Takes ~10 hours. (but not
supervised hours you can do other things as it's 95% automated).

Now you clone all the other boxes. Takes 3 minutes per box.

That's right.... less than 10 minutes per box and they can be up and
going with the latest [patched] software.

You paid $0 for the software.
You paid 10 hours for the install.

Wow.

Now let's look at Windows setup...

You pay 400$ for the software.
You pay 2-3 hours per box to setup and install patches on.
You repeat the cost PER box.

Now let's look at the Redhat setup...

You pay 349$ for the basic ES install.
You pay 3-4 hours per box to setup and install patches (up2date is slow
as ***)
You repeat this cost PER box if you count on getting support (you can
clone but I wouldn't).

... mmm I'd rather pay 500$ to have one person setup a master Gentoo
box and just clone it. Then turning on/off services on each box [e.g.
bind, apache, whatever] is trivial. And since each box has the EXACT
SAME INSTALL they're interchangeable and can be highly redundant [e.g.
good].

Upgrading software is simple too. If you don't change your package
list or USE flags doing a "emerge sync ; emerge -uD world" cycle will
produce the same results. You can alternatively use binary sources and
compile once and install many if you care to save power and some time.

If done correctly [e.g. do updates at the same time] you'll end up with
the same box. Alternatively you can update the master every month,
test it, clone it onto all the other boxes and be set.

So stop being a fucking pushover and give a real distro a try. If you
really know "thing one" about maintaining a rack full of computers
you'll come to love Gentoo.

Of course if your only experience is the "one box, one windows"
syndrome many "IT guys" seem to enjoy then ... well of course you're
praising sweet sweet bill.

Tom

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