Re: Free software companies and stock options

[Prakash Advani <prakash@xxxxxxxxxx>]

My two cents!

Yes I agree that setting Linux to work well can be an uphill task but
trust me setting up any UNIXes can be a nightmare! Linux is far far
easier and most of the time you know whats going-on beneath.

What I really like about UNIX's and more so Linux, is that once you set
it up it hardly requires any maintenance.

About other Unixes. I have spent 6 months trying to get tcp/ip working
well under SCO only to realise that there was a bug in the TCP/IP
module! and to make matter worse, SCO at that time only support 3
network cards which included ne2000 but ne2000 clones didn't work!

About the setup at Chip, even though I convinced Gourav Jaswal, Kiran
was entirely responsible for setting it up.

Regards
Prakash

Kiran Jonnalagadda wrote:
> 
> Amarendra GODBOLE wrote:
> 
> > But rebooting a corporate server, on which say people from 'n' no. of
> > cities where the corporation has its branches, might be working
> > is _DEFINITELY_ a _BAD_ idea.
> > Think of the loss in productivity of, say yahoo, if their servers go down
> > frequently.
> > If a server has to be reboot to fix the problem, then the very purpose of
> > it being a server is defeated. :-)
> 
> I'm referring to a corporate intranet server where the number of users
> ranges from 100 to 500. Few will notice if it goes offline for a few
> minutes.
> 
> And rebooting is better than it not working at all.
> 
> My point simply was that Linux is *not* as reliable as is made out to
> be. Taking an example case:
> 
> I setup a mail server for CHIP magazine (the chip-india.com domain) in
> around July last using fetchmail 5.0 and qmail 1.03 (based on Red Hat
> 6.0). This was a multidrop (virtualdomain) solution meant as a
> replacement for QuantumLink Communications' shoddy PostMaster product.
> 
> Now qmail is very finicky about following SMTP standards. If someone
> tries to violate them, qmail will simply refuse to accept the message.
> One of these SMTP requirements is that messages should have lines
> terminated with CR/LF, not just LF in Unix style.
> 
> One mail client, WorldMail standard, IIRC, didn't follow this standard,
> and someone using this tool sent a mail to someone @chip-india.com every
> few days. fetchmail would download this message then send it to qmail
> via SMTP, which would promptly reject the message. And fetchmail would
> crash with a SIGPIPE.
> 
> The problem confounded me for a few months. I simply couldn't figure out
> why fetchmail was crashing with SIGPIPE. I checked updates.redhat.com,
> but there no update since fetchmail 5.0. I mailed fetchmail-friends, and
> ESR responded with a one-liner that my MTA was broken.
> 
> So every few days I had to check if fetchmail was crashing, then telnet
> to the POP server, delete the offending message, and start fetchmail
> again. I could not take a single day off (including week-ends) during
> this period because if fetchmail crashed again, no one else knew what to
> do. And this wasn't even my job. I was a writer, not an administrator. I
> had volunteered to setup Linux, the "wonderful, robust, scalable"
> operating system, and it had in return chained me to the mail server.
> 
> Then one day, a few months later, I found an update to fetchmail on
> freshmeat (a site I had recently discovered). It turned out that there
> had been numerous updates since 5.0 and the bug that my fetchmail had,
> had been fixed before I even setup the server (via the "forcecr"
> option). But updates.redhat.com had never bothered to carry it. You can
> imagine how furious I was then.
> 
> The same machine is still the mail server, now controlling all of
> jasubhai.com, chip-india.com, crn-india.com, nc-india.com, drchip.com
> and lunateks.com. It doesn't have problems anymore, there's been
> virtually no maintenance done for many months, and my uptime goes to
> about 70 days until there's either a power failure or some moron pulls
> the plug (Ctrl+Alt+Del at the console is disabled).
> 
> But the point of all this is: Do not expect a smooth ride if you're
> planning to move to Linux. No distro I've used so far has worked without
> extensive customisation, and I've *never* gotten things running the
> first time I tried. My mail server still has problems with IMAP (hint:
> if you're serious about IMAP, keep a good distance from UW-IMAP (which
> RH comes with). It sucks).
> 
> Tools like linuxconf are particularly dangerous. linuxconf has almost
> always messed up my system's configuration. I once used it on
> zdnetindia.com to change the timezone from EDT to IST. The thing didn't
> give me a way to pull down the combo box using the keyboard. I finally
> gave up and canceled my way out, and linuxconf went and deleted all the
> aliases on eth0. I was left wondering for many minutes why telnet to
> port 80 of zdnetindia.com was giving me "no route to host" instead of a
> more reasonable "connection refused".
> 
> I would still prefer Linux over anything else including Windows
> (*horror*), but I've learnt that there is only one way to use Linux in a
> corporate environment: OUT SOURCE!
> 
> Do not try to be smart ass and get Linux running in your company. Make
> sure that you either have a qualified team that will be available *all*
> the time, or out source the job to a company like FreeOS.com (Prakash
> Advani incidentally, was originally responsible for convincing Gourav
> Jaswal to put crn-india.com and later chip-india.com on Linux instead of
> buying another expensive license for PostMaster). Trust me, it will save
> you a lot of pain.
> 
> --
> 
> Kiran Jonnalagadda
> http://lunateks.com
> 
> baby.sh: while true; do echo "^G^G^G^G^G"; sed -e 's/food/poop/';
> sync; sync; sleep 15; done
> 
> ----------------------------------------------
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-- 
Prakash Advani 	Chief Executive Officer	  FreeOS.com
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