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Grassroots Linux grows
Citing reliability and scalability, IT leans on Linux to extend systems on the cheap

JULY 1998

Linux is like meatloaf -- not the rock star -- the '70s dinnertime staple that homemakers used to extend the grocery budget each week. At many companies, IT departments are quietly using Linux in a broad range of situations that call for a reliable system on the cheap. It's an extender that breathes new life into old hardware without generating additional purchase orders or budget increases.

And for many Linux fans that is what makes it so deliciously subversive. You do not have to ask the boss if you can use it.

If you do have to ask the boss, the issue of support usually surfaces quickly. As open source freeware, the various Linux implementations come with limited support options. Red Hat offers 30 days of free phone support for customers, but after that most users rely on the Internet for troubleshooting.

At one Los Angeles-area trucking company, the accounting department was immediately leery when the IT department wanted to use Linux to replace a Windows NT server.

"They were worried about support and the fact that it was free. They said `how good can it be if it's free?'" says Gary Shelton, network administrator for the 250-employee company. To soothe the accounting department, Shelton finally went out and paid $49.95 for Red Hat Linux at a local computer store.

The Linux server that originally ran NT provided print and file services for about 10 users at the headquarters. Under NT there were lots of problems with reliability, Shelton says. Now the 100-MHz Pentium box runs the Samba file/print utility on Linux instead, and Shelton is looking to move more servers to Linux, including an AIX system. Support hasn't been a problem at all, and user complaints about printing and files have evaporated.

Though there are scores of Linux implementations in corporate settings, it is mostly those in small to medium-size companies who are willing to stand up and pledge their allegiance. For example, Richard Cichelli, president of Software Consulting Services (SCS) in Nazareth, Penn. is a strong Linux supporter. With just more than 50 employees, SCS makes advertising pagination systems for newspaper publishers across the United States. Integrating these systems into the mishmash of computing equipment that most newspapers run their businesses on is no mean feat, Cichelli notes. Linux is a key component in SCS's arsenal because of its reliability and scalability. Cichelli says his company plans to build Linux servers based on 4-way Pentium hardware with 1GB of RAM.

Support is a non-issue Cichelli says.

"With Linux, if you have a problem you go online and it takes 20 minutes to get an answer. Nothing could be better," Cichelli says. Support from both Microsoft and SCO pales in comparison. "Getting a solution is a fifty-fifty proposition, despite the fact that we pay developers fees."

OPEN SOURCE MOVEMENT. At some sites, support is a non-issue because they have enough in-house expertise to solve any OS problem that crops up. At Inland Trucking, a distributor of heavy truck parts based in Overland Park, Kan., Linux fits with the company's general move toward open source software. For IS chief Dave Bennett, Linux is not meatloaf, it's ground chuck. Bennett runs a lean, mean operation that relies heavily on Linux.

"We're very frugal in our approach, and free is good. We take an inexpensive route to do what we need to do in IS," Bennett explains.

The company is quickly moving toward making open source software a check-list item.

"It has to be open and it has to be definable and what we're starting to lean toward is that the source code has to be available," Bennett says.

Bennett's seven person IT staff is expert in operating systems including NetWare, OS/2, NT, AIX, and Solaris.

"We don't use Microsoft very much. Our experience has been that products like Windows 95 are fine for desktops but not for other uses. NT just isn't a mature enough product yet," Bennett adds.

Inland Trucking's IT staff builds all of the 350 employee company's applications in-house. The team built its own version of Linux and is currently using the operating system to boot up network computers in its 25 field offices. The move to NCs came as part of a modernization push that Bennett has overseen for the past few years. Bennett wanted to avoid putting PCs on every desktop because he wanted to avoid the accompanying maintenance headaches. The goal was to have easy- to-maintain client systems in the field offices that could support images of truck parts.

"We wanted to have pictures of parts and that was impossible with a green screen so we started looking around," Bennett says.

At first the company settled on Sun's JavaStations.

"We bought them and then we waited and waited for the working version of Java for the hardware," Bennett says. When the wait grew too long, Bennett went with NeoWare's At Work Stations instead. Throughout the next 18 months, the plan is to deploy At Work Stations on all of the company's parts counters and in their managers' offices.

Linux is used to provide quick boot-ups for the At Work Stations.

"Linux is fitting in very well for us. We needed a way to load the operating system on the NCs. We took some old 486 laptops with 8[MB] to 12MB of RAM each, and we use them in each store to do the boot-ups." Bennett estimates that each server costs $350 to $400. "The savings are tremendous for us."

CONTENTIOUS INSTALLATIONS. But while Linux fans applaud the ad hoc online support, others are not so convinced. David Fisher is chief engineer at Fisher Research, in Rochester, N.Y. His company manufactures one-off machines for the aircraft industry. Although Fisher avowed that Linux is a huge benefit to the computer community, he was somewhat frustrated by his experience with the operating system. Installation proved to be a major hurdle for Fisher, who experimented with both Caldera Lite and Red Hat 5.0. He found the installation process confusing.

"In both cases, the manual didn't match the software. It could be much more user friendly," Fisher says.

And the prospect of getting free online support from a community of users didn't appeal to Fisher either.

"I don't want to have to go looking for answers. I don't want the answers to exist in the first place," Fisher emphasizes.

At Cisco Systems, the infiltration of Linux into the IT department at the networking giant has had its ups and downs. At the San Jose, Calif., headquarters, Ben Woodard, enterprise print software architect and administrator, and his partner Damian Ivereigh oversee 70 print servers worldwide. Seventeen print servers are located at the headquarters and handle 10,000 print jobs each day. A majority of these servers run Linux. Just three years ago, most of the print servers at the headquarters ran SunOS and the system was a mess, Woodard says.

"The problem wasn't with Unix, the problem was that no one was taking care of the system," Woodard explains.

At the time, the print servers supported Macintosh, PC, and Unix workstations. Getting print services running smoothly across all three groups was a complex affair. The eventual solution was to have all the clients spool through the Unix print servers. It worked well, but the servers were getting overloaded, Woodard says. At about the same time, Cisco bought Stratacom and they needed new print servers. To save money and increase reliability, the print services group bought four Hewlett-Packard Vectra machines and installed Linux on them to serve up print jobs for the newly acquired company.

"We immediately solved the capacity problem at both places," Woodard says.

But this Linux success story almost had an unhappy ending. About one year ago, Silicon Valley experienced a huge power outage after a powerful rain storm. The power outage brought down two of the five print servers at Cisco's headquarters. At the time, Woodard and Ivereigh were running three Sparc 20s and two Linux boxes. When the power came up they found they had lost two Sparc 20s running SunOS. Management, however, assumed that the Linux boxes had gone down and ordered them replaced.

"They said `take out the Linux servers, they're not reliable,'" Woodard says. Fortunately, an e-mail explaining that it was the SunOS servers, not the Linux boxes that had gone down convinced management to let the Linux servers stay.

"Since then we've been very happy and there's been no further discussion," Woodard says. In fact, Cisco is extending its use of Linux for print servers globally in conjunction with online technical support available via the company's intranet.

The internal technical support staff is trained to use the Web for print server administration. The site allows the support staff to delete print jobs, stop and start queues, and generate reports.

"Everything we need to solve problems remotely we build into the Web server," Woodard explains. Standardizing on Linux and using the Web for support makes maintenance easier both locally and in the field.

Reliability and scalability are the biggest advantages to using Linux, along with the cost, according to Woodard.

"It makes for a very scalable solution and with the way we're growing, that's a great thing," Woodard says.

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