Migrating to linux
As you may know, I’m on a new business, that’s something like bringing a company back to the present days, technologically speaking.
Since it will be quite hard to “attack” the software part and since the technologies that I’ll use will be all open source, I’m working to give my coworkers proof about the actual value and reliability of OSS technologies in general, replacing windows boxes with linux ones.
The aim is: if it has worked when switching from windows to linux, it would probably work when we’ll switch from VB to Java.
It’s a matter of trust. If they don’t trust me, I’m not the right man for the job.
The first thing was setting up a decent networking. I’ve found an old and noisy box, perfect for such critical tasks such as DHCP and DNS ;)
So everybody now has a fully qualified hostname, with Bind caching DNS queries.
Then I’ve chopped the Vista server. Wait a minute: Vista server? Yes. It’s a Dell box, bought right after the release of Vista: it was cheap but equipped with the most useless operating system ever.
I have proof (even if it’s too long and boring for writing it down here) that it has the useless networking ever: something like a hardcoded limit of 5 TCP connections… and people cracking it to surf the web faster… can’t be real…
Well: chopped. Samba is doing the job right now: faster (and therefore more productive) and cheaper. Indeed I’ve found another old box, plugged in two brand new hard drives, set up software raid 1 and voilą: 30 megabytes is the average memory occupied.
How many Gs do you have on your Vista notebook!? Ahahah, bye bye!