> Are your management people the sort who make up their minds and then don't
> accept further input? The picture you draw sounds to me like you're dealing
> with some pretty unreasonable people, and that takes more than marketing to
> crack. I'm personally resigned to the fact that there is a certain section of
> the market that only moves when it's forced to (cf. NT).
Yes, to an extent this is true. They also raz me a lot about how much suggest
Linux as a solution to some of the problems we have. But it is because they
have to promote/convince their managers.
>> another
>> 256M to the box, and it would be fine. Money wasn't in the least an issue.
>
> ???
>
> Sign me up to work for _your_ company!
>
> Do these guys have such extensive resources that nothing makes any difference?
> Again, if that's the case, then what _would_ Linux have to offer them?
It could very well have taken over the DHCP services instead of having to
convert to NT when the Sun boxes shit on themselves.
Seriously, the people at my level, and one or two levels up wouldn't mind so
much, but if the COO, for example, found out we were using an 'unsupported'
product for _anything_ the shit would hit the fan. Its a large company, so
there is a good deal of bureacracy, but we even had a hard time purcasing the
$500 caldera package to do simple Internet security exploit testing...
There is another group that does hardware/software support, and trying to cross
group boundaries for a product that there is no available training, support
(known support, from a company that everyone has heard of), stablity,
reliability and finally responsibility would be pretty much impossible.
And who wants to configure a corporate web server by using vi, when Netscape
provides a graphical interface? And what about using ipfwadm to set up a
firewall?
I realize there are commercial versions available for most of these (except for
anything other than the most basic Netscape web server) but the "Powers that Be"
don't have any idea where to purchase such stuff, and many times it run by
another very small company. What would it take to get the TIS people to port
Raptor to port their firewall? Has RH approached them!?
This is all despite the fact that we are already a pure UNIX shop on the
Internet side, and mostly UNIX on the intranet side. Not only pure UNIX, but
almost entirely Sun, which is practically the same thing as Linux.
>> Has RH given any thought to marketing a `Server Version' and `Workstation
>> Version'? Not distributed seperately, but perhaps as an install option.
>
> I like this idea too. The current "package cafeteria" is great once you know
> your way around a bit, but I've often thought that it could be abstracted out
> another level. In addition to the server/workstation distintion, I wouldn't
> mind seeing a "bare bones" option to install just the very base stuff that
> the system needs to function, possibly as a subset of the "server" section.
> I've had to go over a couple of fresh RedHat installs and yank stuff in order
> to make them truly minimal, and I'm still not sure I ever succeeded.
That is a good idea as well. It would be nice for firewall installations, where
you only want the bare minimum installed.
After thinking about it some more, I have some other ideas to clarify what I was
talking about.
By providing a `Server Setup', you could perhaps provide a different
installation, where it would ask questions specifically relating to server
setups, like IP Forwarding, network monitoring packages, specific server
packages, like DHCP, NTP, etc.
Then market it this way -- "RH 6.0 Provides 29% performance increase when
configured identically to NT and running DHCP".
And finally, there is the issue of "Linux is a moving target!", which is
somewhat true, but not nearly as much as it was even just a year ago..
Dave
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