RE: Debian in Academic and Public Organisations
I forgot to mention that I recently installed Debian on an old Sparc station
here after Solaris crashed and burned the root partition on the SCSI drive
.... why will always be a mystery - (and one which I haven't got time to
solve). After a few initial installation problems, I got the floppy images
to work and the machine has been running smoothly for a couple of weeks now.
At the moment it's just running as a Web server ... debian's web space is
actually just a bunch of symbolic links to the Web pages on the Sun
partitions that weren't f#*&#(d after the crash.
tks
Andrew
-------------------------------------------------
Andrew McRobert LLB B.Sc(Comp. Sci)
IT Officer, School of Law
MURDOCH UNIVERSITY
Perth, Western Australia
Ph: [+61 8 9360 6479]
Fax: [+61 8 9310 6671]
e-mail: mcrobert@central.murdoch.edu.au
"The lottery: a tax on people who are bad at math"
-----Original Message-----
From: box@hordak.nauseum.org [mailto:box@hordak.nauseum.org]On Behalf Of
Robert Norris
Sent: Monday, August 07, 2000 4:39 PM
To: debian-user@lists.debian.org
Subject: Re: Debian in Academic and Public Organisations
Here at Monash University in Australia, we use both Solaris and Linux.
Solaris
is used for most mission critical services, but most of the time we use it
because we need the grunty Sun hardware that it comes with it.
Linux is being used more and more within the IT department. We've found it
especially good for 'farms' of machines (eg web proxies, mail, etc). It's
also being used as a 'black box' at remote locations - offers web proxy,
DNS,
SMTP, etc for people with flaky connections.
The two Linux-related projects I'm working with involves two services - web
proxy and mail exchanger. The original implementor of the web proxy farm
(setup
some time ago) chose Redhat for the machines. A couple of years on, and they
work - but need quite a lot of hand-holding.
The mail exchanger stuff I'm currently working on now involves Debian and
Postfix on a bunch of extremely tasty boxes (Intel Hudson servers - RAID
cages,
hot-swappable power supplies, that sort of thing). Although not in
production
yet, they've stood up to everything I can throw at them.
As far as Linux is concerned, its been very pro-Redhat around here for a
while
(probably because its the most common) but people are starting to realise
that
Debian just works and pretty much takes care of itself.
Debian is my personal favourite mostly because of the ease of maintenance. I
have three Debian workstations on my desk, each with uptimes of over a
month,
and the only time I've had to reboot is to install a new kernel - never for
any other upgrade. It also runs my personal web and mail server.
I've also set up Debian for my family (who know nothing outside Windows, and
not even that very well) to use as a masquerading gateway. They live over
500km
away from me so I only get to visit twice a year. Last time I was there it
had been up for over a year, and apparently that was only because someone
pulled the wrong plug out of the wall.
Debian just works. And if I ever get around to trying Debian Sparc, maybe I
can
get rid of Solaris on those Sun boxes ;)
Regards,
Rob.
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