Debian Enterprise (not a Starfleet metaphor)

[Will Lowe]

>   1. Has anyone here run Debian for critical work -- say as RDBMS or
>      part of a cluster of application servers, webservers etc. -- or
>      read of that being done by others?  Or maybe as smart firewalls,

Yes, all of the above.  We have ~800 Debian boxes at work as web
servers, MySQL boxes, application servers (custom apps, mostly in
perl, C and Java), firewalls, routers, footstools (sometimes that one
runs FreeBSD), monitoring stations, and whatever else.  No desktops
though, 'ceptin' for mine and a few developers.

But we're probably a special case -- two members of our team have been
Debian users for 6 or 7 years, everyone else has a fairly high clue
factor, we've trained our Engineers to build .debs, etc. ... 

> *) the next admin we hire will know Redhat

Hmm.  But if he's any good, he'll probably also know Solaris, and/or
FreeBSD, IRIX, AIX ... at some point the basic knowledge required is
all the same.  You know this, I know this ... sometimes management
needs to be told this.

One of the reasons we have a small headcount/server ratio is that each
head in the count has a high clue factor.  So far we've found this to
be more effective than having a large number of folks each with less
clue.

> *) we often have some piece of proprietary software that says it
> will only run on RH X.Y.

This is Debian's greatest weakness so far.  Even if we could just get
official Oracle support, that'd solve the problem for an awful lot of
folks.

I'm kinda hoping that RedHat's new licensing scheme will help here --
one of the major benifits of linux is low cost, and from the pricing
I've seen RedHat ES licenses may cost almost as much as the hardware
it runs on, EVERY YEAR.  Most finance departments hate recurring
costs, but it will take a few years probably for this to kick in.

> *) it is hard to beat anaconda + kick start.  DAMN HARD!!  Sure, once it is 

FAI works quite well.  Takes a little while to get working quite
right, but beats the pants of off Solaris-style Jumpstart -- except
that PC hardware is braindead about netbooting while Sparcs do it in
their sleep, but that's not FAI's fault.

I haven't tried anaconda and kickstart, so maybe they are better than
FAI.  But FAI is workable; two admins built 180 servers in 2 days
recently at work. Admittedly, we have fairly standardized hardware.
But build yourself a custom kernel with everything as a module and use
initrd ...

> *) RH makes releases.  Debian will get one out some day.  Maybe.

This is less a pain than it could be from the admin side of things --
admins are in the business of trying to get things to change *less*,
typically.  Of course, if you have psycho engineers who want the
newest Perl module the day it shows up on CPAN, you have your work cut
out for you.  But you would with RedHat, too.

We run woody at work, backporting debs from unstable as needed, and so
far we're up to maybe 20 or 30 packages backported.  Again, we don't
have desktops -- woody is an absolutely horrible desktop.

-- 
					thanks,
		
					Will