evilrouters.net

i originally wrote the following on 23-dec-2004:

well, i finally got something i’ve been wanting for a while… a dedicated linux server at work.

for a while now, we’ve been running a not-too-critical service on linux and it’s been stable and reliable as hell, but it was running on an old 400 mhz desktop-class pc. finally, it had a hardware failure (i knew it was only a matter of time) and it happened, of course, on the first day of a three-day out-of-town trip for $work. $boss got it straightened out and got the hard drive moved to a new, more modern box, and i was able to tell him over the phone what to do to verify that everything was working properly.

anyway, shortly after that he asked me about a dedicated server, which i definitely wanted. so now we have an hp server running debian gnu/linux in the datacenter. this is a huge step for our campus, since up until now we’ve been primarily a windows-only shop (with the exception of an old novell box or two still lingering around). i like windows and while we never have a problem with the majority of our applications and services i’d love to be able to migrate whatever i can off of windows and onto linux. it’s so much more stable, has fewer problems, and i’m much more familiar with linux administration than i am windows administration.

i’ve been adding a few things to the server already and need to migrate that one $critical_service over, but that won’t be difficult. luckily, the semester is over and there aren’t many students around, since it will result in downtime. i know i hate when a service i’m relying on is down, so i do my best to minimize downtown for everybody else.

anyway, got me a new server. woohoo!

boy, how things change in three and a half short years.

when i started out at this organization, we had that one linux box and that was it. today, we host a number of web sites running apache on red hat enterprise linux. those sites are backed by mysql databases running on gentoo. authentication, authorization, and accounting on our wireless networks is handled by freeradius on red hat enterprise linux. in addition, we have a number of “internal” services and homegrown applications that run on linux servers as well.

more and more of our critical services and applications are running on linux, and windows can’t even come close to matching the reliability and stability of the operating system.

as an example, i have a debian gnu/linux box running syslog-ng that is the syslog server for all of our network devices. it’s uptime just surpassed 500 days. take that, windows!