A bit lost Windows or Linux? 1

[JRBeltman]

Hi All,
I am a bit lost (also in which forum to place this).

The situation is simple,
at work we need to change to a complete new server system, because the current one is falling apart (even the doors fall of the servers!)

So where to go?
I am wondering: Linux or Windows?
What do I need?
1. MS SQL servers for the database (no option here).
2. Mail, internet and everything that comes with that)
3. File/Print.
4. A backup solution that can be restored easily quickly and anywhere with any kind of equipment.
5. Email must be worldwide accessible.
6. Remote working (thin clients orso).
7. Easy management and central.
8. Everything else that I can't remember at present.

So what can do this?
I am familiar with Windows and feel safe going for that solution. However I have read about Linux and am keen to get into it (doing my certification course now). But am scared and uneasy that I will not be able to manage it and/or that it will not be what I expect it to be.

I have had two proposals writen, one for Linux and one for windows. The latter looks a lot better, but those people have been in the business for a long time whilst the others have like 5 years and are a small company.

Where to go?
Help???


JR
As a wise man once said: To build the house you need the stone.
Back to the Basics!

 

[Tarwn]

<somewhat offtopic>Well, I hate to be classified as an "anti-microsoft zealot" simply for having a difference in opinion, especially since I am not, but so be it. I'd advise you to ignore the previous post (jwenting's) as he posted inaccurately about several things as well as not bothering to supply supporting facts for his suppositions.

I understand that MS SQL Server is a requirement, but I want to respond to the previous poster's flamage.
In many applications MySQL can be a perfectly suitable replacement for MS SQLServer. The same can be said about any of the Open Source alternatives that have been listed. It all depends on what applications your company is currently running and what dependancies they have, both from a features standpoint and a capabilities standpoint.

If your currently running MS SQL Server with no stored procedures and not using the replication functionality and so on, than MySQL could probably replace it quite easily. Another option that might do an even better job is PostgreSQL. Either of these can be connected to existing things like ASP pages with minimal changes.
Suggesting the MySQL is only good for "a personal website or ... Slashdot" is really a point in it's favor considering that means it can scale from a negligible number of hits to an extremely high load (I don't know exact numbers, but the sheer load of users clicking on articles posted to Slashdot is commonly known to crash other web servers, some enterprise level corporations or media sources). Now I don't know that Slashdot really uses MySQl as it's backend, but if that is true then I think that is definately some good points in it's favor towards load handling requirements.
</offtopic>

Sendmail is a real pain to set up, I think nearly everyone who doesn't do that 24 hours a day is going to agree there. However, once it is setup you have a lot of options for email clients, spam filtering, backups, etc that aren't available with an Exchange system. The upside of Exchange is that a lot more tools come built into it to begin with, requiring less configuration on your end. I haven't seen numbers for capabilities so I can't compare Sendmail's 250,000 to 500,000+ emails.hour to Exchange, but i think you would agree that it definately isn't a tiny mail server.
And lets not get into licensing fees:

http://www.microsoft.com/exchange/howtobuy/enterprise.asp

Here is sendmail:

http://www.sendmail.com/

Now, as to the allegation that it is hell to set up and administer (etc, so on). Yes it can be a real pain to set up a Sendmail server. yes it can be a real pain to administer a Sendmail server if you set it up badly. But then, what isn't a real pain to administer if you set it up badly? How about SQL Server with a default blank password up to a year ago?
However, if you get it set up right, administration is fairly easy and downtime is negligable. Another advantage here is that you don't have to reboot your servers to restart your email server. Even if you did just install a bunch of add-ons.

Webservers are available built-in to Windows (IIS) or as free downloads (Apache). Your only limitation is if you choose Linux you can't run IIS. Apache will run on either.

File/Print sharing has been covered I think. Personally I think setting up a domain and file sharing services is easier from a Linux box then a Windows box, but that could just be me.

Backing up with Linux should be fairly simple, everything in Linux is an accessible file, so to backup all you have to do is make a copy of those files, then tar them into an archive. This could probably be handled with a simple bash script run on a schedule as a cron job.

Email Accessibility: this is not dependant on your OS, it is dependant on how you configure your Mail Server and how you configure your firewall(s).

Remote Working: Terminal Services will work for Windows, as Will half a dozen other products. I think I saw a terminal services client for Linux somewhere at one point. VNC is useable from just about any OS, tunnelled through SSH it would probably be more secure then most.

Centralized, Easy Management: Depends on what you plan on managing. Webmin for Linux will let you manage all the services on a server through a web browser on a non-standard port (using SSH and user/pass authentication for security). You can manage specific services, even down to rebooting the box (which you shouldn't ever need to do).

Anyways, as I said it all depends on what your hard and fast requirements from the software and systems are. One advantage tat I didn't se anyone else bring up isthat the hardware requirements for Linux are generally a lot better than the ones for Windows. Plus you can minimize running tasks and installed applications that you wouldn't normally need, allowing you to stretch your RAM, CPU, and HDD's a lot farther.

I have a small home firewall, mail server, file server, etc set up on an old Gateway 733 Celeron. Granted it's not enterprise level by any stretch of the imagination, but everything runs fairly smoothly. Windows Me took over 10 minutes just to get to the desktop, 2000 croaked during install. I didn't bother trying XP because that machine has less then half the minimum requirements for memory. But it keeps humming right along running the latest linux kernel.


-T

[sub]01000111 01101111 01110100 00100000 01000011 01101111 01100110 01100110 01100101 01100101 00111111[/sub]
Help, the rampaging, spear-waving, rabid network gnomes are after me!

 

[spookie]

mySQL is nice for small things like a personal website or an anti-Microsoft site like slashdot, for serious business applications it's just not enough.

Adding to the Tarwn's posting, i would like you to recollect the fact that, site like yahoo having probably 20 million or more hits per day uses MySQL.



--------------------------------------------------------------------------
I never set a goal because u never know whats going to happen tommorow.

 

[JRBeltman]

Adding to this:
Is Google not fully running on clustered Linux servers?

JR
As a wise man once said: To build the house you need the stone.
Back to the Basics!

 

[Tarwn]

Was searching for something for another post and ran into this, figured it was better then simply saying MySQL was [more] capable then SQL Server:

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,3959,293,00.asp

[sub]01000111 01101111 01110100 00100000 01000011 01101111 01100110 01100110 01100101 01100101 00111111[/sub]
Help, the rampaging, spear-waving, rabid network gnomes are after me!

 

[gwinn7]

Tarwn,

Interesting article and I am not surprised! One thing that did surprise me was no mention of PostgreSQL. PostgreSQL is a database platform that deserves attention and seems to rival Oracle in features, which MySQL does not.

Here is an excerpt from from an article:

"If you're looking for a database to prop up a Weblog (see 'Blog Rolling Competitions' in the January 2001 issue of Web Techniques) or portal, you'll find that many such packages rely on MySQL. It should be possible to port them to PostgreSQL, but if you're looking for a turnkey package, chances are you're not interested in doing too much porting work.

If you're migrating from Oracle, Sybase, or Microsoft SQL Server, I suggest PostgreSQL. Like those databases, PostgreSQL has triggers, stored procedures, and a rich set of built-in functions (including many functions for date manipulation). Also, PostgreSQL procedural language is easy to learn if you're familiar with Oracle's PL/SQL and SQL Server's Transact-SQL."

You can check out this article...

http://www.webtechniques.com/archives/2001/09/jepson/

There are minor pros and cons in using either database, but I think Postgres deserves as much mention as MySQL.

Gary
gwinn7
A+,I+,L+,N+

 

[Tarwn]

I agree, I have been seeing more and more comments lately about the capabilities of Postgres, I just wish someone would do an honest and large coverage set of benchmarks that included it. Hmm...if I had Oracle I could do a MySQL, Postgres, SQL Server, Access, Paradox one fairly easily, plus pull in other stuff from SourceForge if I see anything else popular. I think if I would have to see at least the following to consider it a good coverage benchmark:
DB's: MS SQL Server, Oracle, DB2, MySQL, Postgres, Sybase, ...am I missing any major packages?

I think it is unfortunate that TPC doesn't include MySQL at the very least....then again the price of joining as a member is prohbitive if your talking about a group of dvelopers (as opposed to MS, IBM, Sun, Sybase, etc who are members).

[sub]01000111 01101111 01110100 00100000 01000011 01101111 01100110 01100110 01100101 01100101 00111111[/sub]
Help, the rampaging, spear-waving, rabid network gnomes are after me!

 

[cdlvj]

MySQL has come a long way in the past year, and is getting better and better. Tarwn you missed Informix. Having worked with all of the others, IMHO, Informix is one of the better ones.