[NCLUG] Ousting Exchange

[DJ Eshelman]

Good god, I've let loose a monster with this thread, haven't I?  Not that it
isn't all important - but I think in general everyone can agree that with a
Windows-based server you're locked into a bad cycle every few years but with
Linux it may just be as simple as upgrading the Kernel and a few other
supporting packages.  For me, it's totally about ease of doing just that -
which honestly has kept Linux out of the SMB market in the past 5 years.
It's depressing, but what can you do.  Aside from our web, DNS and email
servers, we now have exactly 0 clients using Linux for any kind of business
critical functions and it's depressing...

I don't know how many of you out there are in these situations - but
Microsoft has made things pretty darn easy when it comes to things like
Active Directory and Exchange.  Administration has become extremely simple
to where you don't have to be a sysadmin to be a ... well, to be a
sysadmin.

I've just not been seeing the Linux community respond to this and it's a
real shame!  I mean, we had an edge 5 years ago, and maybe I'm wrong on this
- but it really seems like once people caught on to how easy it is to
integrate Active Directory and Exchange, Novell and whatever flavor of *nix
servers just got the boot in favor of this easier administration and
integration with standard apps.  Maybe I'm soapboxing too much here, but if
the community wants to be taken seriously in this market there needs to be
some serious work done on the front-end technologies to go with the very
solid back-end of the Linux kernel.  I think about it every time I reboot a
Windows 2003 server because the Virtual memory has over-fragmented and the
system is running at a crawl.  Microsoft is winning the battle not because
of a superior back end- but because of their front-end!

So, back to my original question - how can we, as Linux supporters,
respond?  What is out there to compete?

-DJ

On 4/29/06, Sean Reifschneider <jafo at tummy.com> wrote:
>
> On Fri, Apr 28, 2006 at 10:50:48PM -0700, Matt Taggart wrote:
> >As dannf already pointed out, the above are wrong.
>
> Good to know, I was wrong about that.  A year should be plenty of time to
> migrate to the newer version.
>
> >I don't understand this sentence. How is this different from,
> >
> >"You have to deploy RHEL3 until RHEL4 is released, and you have very
> little
> >time to test RHEL4 until RHEL4 actually comes out."
>
> Because if you are running RHEL3 and they roll RHEL4, you have about 8
> years to upgrade to RHEL4 before you will no longer have security updates.
>
> Thanks,
> Sean
> --
> Nothing like a river-boat cruise at 3am to make a person realize how
> great life can be - as long as they have a boat.  -- A. Wyskowski, 2002
> Sean Reifschneider, Member of Technical Staff <jafo at tummy.com>
> tummy.com, ltd. - Linux Consulting since 1995: Ask me about High
> Availability
>
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