28 May
2005
28 May
'05
9:58 a.m.
Hi,
On Sat, May 28, 2005 at 10:49:02AM +0200, Patrick Useldinger wrote:
I have a question for all of those who use Linux at
work. I am aware
that there are 2 major "enterprise" distros which are of course RedHat
and Novell/SuSE. Besides those, Mandriva, Ubuntu and especially SunJDS
all have commercial offers.
But which distros are _really_ used (on servers) here in Luxemburg, or
in Europe? Is RedHat also dominant here?
Do companies always go for commercial solutions, or are the
non-commercial ones catching up (I heard of Debian being used on a major
site in Luxemburg, and also being used in Munich)? If so, how is support
organised?
The point of my question is not to find out what one should use at work,
but what is actually used, i.e. what decisions companies have taken in
the past. I suppose it is best not to mention the companies explicitely.
This really depends on the applications being used - if you're
going to have to use certain proprietary software which is
certified (and supported) only on very specific platforms (distro,
CPU architecture), that's what you'll have to use.
Examples would be CheckPoint FW-1/VPN-1 (older RedHat), Veritas
NetBackup (in our case also an older RedHat), SeeBeyond e*Gate
(where we switched to MS since the Linux version really wasn't
properly working, despite lots of qualified help from the support
- sure, for such an expensive product there's really no excuse).
Oracle afaik is certified for both RedHat and SuSE... there's
loads more examples, often industry-specific stuff.
These are also softwares where you do need external support
from time to time (it's often hard to get decent docs/tips/help
online).
For everything that's pure FOSS, we use Debian GNU/Linux though
(slowly moving from Woody to Sarge now) - we've got the know-how
inhouse (or via Internet), and need the external support for
hardware only. Apps are all the typical things, from email to
web to database (mysql/postgresql), fileserving, dns etc. etc.
Greets & hth, Eric