On Friday 15 September 2006 04:03, stephan beal wrote:
That's unfortunately not true. i spent 18 months working as a contractor for German bank between 2005 and early this year, and there's no way in hell the internals of the bank could have run solely on Linux.
Nonsense. There are many banks (and other mission critical venues) running strictly linux.
The bank was a Solaris house, and it needed to be. i know linux is stable and solid and fast and all of that, but Solaris is STABLE. (In almost 7 years of working with Solaris, i think i've seen 2-3 system crashes.)
I was one of the first internal IBMers to use Linux for a mission critical in-house cluster... the machine was actually a four machine Beo-cluster (distributed processing similar to Beowulf) that ran for three years 24x7 with no down-time except for the one physical move the machines made. The systems *never* crashed and were *never* rebooted... except for the one time when we replaced the buildings main transformer and we were without power for 15 minutes while they switched in the mobile generators. I was using a stripped down version of RedHat 5.2 which ran the 2.0.36 kernel. Those machines were, well, *STABLE*.
There are of course other, often more political reasons, for running a closed OS, especially at a bank where "just hack it" is NOT an option, and you aren't allowed to install any packages which have not been approved by the security team.
Just *hack it* was not an option on my cluster either... only I had root... and no one... no one... signed on to that system or did anything to it...except me... and it ran for a very very long time. You must remember that just because Linux is open doesn't mean that you can't *close* it as a system administrator for security and/or political reasons.
In 1995 i remember telling several people, "Unix is dead. Windows will replace it within 5 years." Three years later, of course, i was eating those words. How little i understood of what really lies under the hoods of many large corporations, keeping them purring on a daily basis - old-fashioned, commercial ($$$$) Unices.
Wrong again. Thousands of commercial installations are now running Linux ... and here is the main point... not that BSD, or Solaris, or AIX or... blah blah blah isn't still good, but rather, is it cost effective. Linux has now come to the point where it matches the commercial *nixes and yet is far and away more cost effective. The enterprise editions of Suse (or RedHat) are capturing the market.... its just a matter of time and critical mass now. -- Kind regards, M Harris <><