Date: Fri, 17 Dec 1999 04:46:44 +0200 From: Giorgos Keramidas <charon@hades.hell.gr> To: John <papalia@UDel.Edu> Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Need to justify FreeBSD vs. Win2K Message-ID: <19991217044644.A7320@hades.hell.gr> In-Reply-To: <4.1.19991215224130.009ed100@mail.udel.edu> References: <4.1.19991215224130.009ed100@mail.udel.edu>
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On Wed, Dec 15, 1999 at 10:49:43PM -0500, John wrote: | Hey all, | | I've been helping my old boss to design a WAN for the company. What it | will consist of is three offices connected by Frame Relay. All main | servers centralized to one office, the other two to be remote. The remote | offices will have fileservers/routers. The main office will have: Your best chance to having them at least thinking about what you're suggesting is always to show them some 'real' thing; i.e. with the information that you presented here, design some network topology diagram with the BSD boxen and the other computers neatly arranged and a small description of what each one can do. IT managers tend to be sensitive on direct monetary earnings too. Show them how a single BSD box can be a router and firewall, and how another one can be a mail and web server at the same time. Take care to present in clear and very illustrative terms how a BSD box can take the load of several NT boxes, and still function like a charm. On machines where security is a concern, present the relative merits of each operating system (NT vs. BSD), and try to be honest. Do not start a quick and dirty `NT is unsafe' raving thing, because you'll get them to be defensive right from the start -- and that's where you lose. | I need help justifying one against the other. Any thoughts? | | Here's the needs: | - Ease of maintenance | - GREAT stability | - High security `Ease' of maintenance is something that means different things to technical staff, and higher IT management. It's all a matter of how one defines the word `ease'. Do not fail to note that for someone trained on BSD, NT is not as easy as one might initially assume. Of course, this is still true the other way round. Stability is also something that you need to present with actual case studies. Thank goodness, the servers of .freebsd.org are good starting points, and those who are using FreeBSD for their servers (see the relevant links in http://www.freebsd.org/) will provide you with more data to stand up to your point. As far as security is concerned, I do not know of any real-world cases but I'm relatively new to FreeBSD (since I've been using it for about 5 or 6 months now) and I'm sorry but I can't help in any way. | If I walk, they really don't have an IT guy. The one they have is | supposed to be an "NT guru", but I had to explain to him what a hosts | file is for. I don't hold much hope for him lasting long. Do not in any circumstances over-emphasize that. It will probably get them thinking that they can not find someone with adequate knowledge of BSD if you are later going somewhere else, and that is the same as saying that they will be locked in BSD with no one to support them. This is not a good thing at all, IMHO. | My concern is that they install an MS network now, and spend an | eternity doing upgrades and security patches on a monthly basis, with | the every present fear of MS turning off the support (ala Win3.1 --> | win95). This is a very good point, and you should not fail to explain this fact to your managers. Make sure you make them understand that FreeBSD does not make one go through this insane upgrade-once-a-week race, and that it can work for a looong time without you having to spend too much time on upgrades. This will give you that little extra bit of time to concentrace on more important things than simple upgrades, and they will probably quickly realize why this is important. | My thougths were that with a well configured and well documented | FreeBSD network, they'll be running solid until a) the first breakin, | b) the first major crash which will probably be a hardware failure, and not just a patch that made internet explorer unstable,if not unusable... | c) a security upgrade is necessary (like the recent need to update | RSAREF2), which is usually published and fixed as soon as possible... | or d), we're up to v.6.x-stable, and they're running 3.x-stable, and | a new port comes out that they REALLY need that only runs on the | newer versions. which is a truly rare thing to happen, unless you have a constantly changing environment, and if it happens is as easy to fix as a reinstall of everything just because windows 2016 does not run on windows 2001... | Any thoughts of how to reason this out with them, or where I might | find more information? Try the sites of those who actually use FreeBSD until now. You can find many links for that in http://www.freebsd.org/ [sorry for not providing a more direct link, I'm offline now that I'm writing]. -- Giorgos Keramidas, <keramida@ceid.upatras.gr> "What we have to learn to do, we learn by doing." [Aristotle] To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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