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  the Software View: Linux, open sorcery. (Part VI)

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Now, dear readers, on with this week's episode of the Software View!

EVERYBODY SAMBA!

The new, industrial-strength, open-source Samba file system (SMBFS) translates Microsoft Windows to Linux. How do you best integrate Windows into an existing Linux environment? If you're hoping to mix Windows into a Linux environment, two approaches are available to you. You can install a Network File System (NFS) client on each Windows machine (usually paying licensing fees every step of the way), or, you can install a server process on your Linux hosts to make them understand the Server Message Block (SMB) protocol that Windows users use to share file and printer resources over NetBEUI networks.

For most networks, making Linux talk SMB is a lot more straightforward than making all the Windows desktops talk Linux. You'll be glad to know that one of the freebies delivered with a typical Linux release is a utility called Samba, which makes light work of the Linux/SMB protocol interface that enhances the compatibility and the inter-operability of the two operating systems. With Samba, Windows users can mount a Linux directory as a network drive and treat it exactly like any other drive listed in the Windows Network Neighborhood dialog. However, Linux doesn't crash and it doesn't cost as much to support compared with Windows. The Samba server lets you publish files from your Linux server to Windows clients on your local area network. Samba is packaged as part of most major distributions of Linux.

Red Hat Software uniquely simplifies the use of a Windows-hosted printer. It uses Samba to connect across the local area network (LAN) and to pass the file (filtered if necessary) to Windows' print queue. This approach works very well, and you can specify the remote printer either at installation or later through a graphical utility.

Your Linux servers can also connect with the Apple Macintoshes on your local area network through AppleTalk. There is also a Linux utility called NetaShare, which WaveTop's Gary Nichols calls "Samba for the Macintosh." With NetaShare emulating an AppleTalk network share, a Macintosh user can map to Linux drives without any extra steps. In other words, Linux's out-of-the-box connectivity is the simplest of any variety of Unix, and is better than that of most commercial operating systems.

APPLYING LINUX

In addition to Linux distributions, you can find a few Linux-specific business applications on the market. Applix (Westboro, Massachusetts) ships a personal productivity and office-automation suite called Applixware for Linux, which includes a word processor, spreadsheets, an HTML authoring tool, a module for relational database access, and an object-oriented application development tool. Applixware 4.4.1 consists of Applix Presents and HTML Author, ApplixData and Applix Builder.

MAKING WAVES

WaveTop moved from Microsoft Windows to Linux to achieve better performance at a lower cost. The company has been hanging ten ever since. Riding atop the Linux wave. In 1997, when Gary Nichols took his network administrator post at WaveTop (in Phoenix, Arizona), he was charged with taking care of fifty Windows servers. Well, he took care of them, all right.

"I decided I would covertly change everything over to Linux," he confesses. Nichols wasn't all that enamored of the performance he was getting from WaveTop's Windows boxes, so he figured he'd bring some prior Unix experience to bear. His plan was to build a test server using Linux, and then port the various WaveTop applications over to the Linux server. Once that was done and the Linux test was working fine, Nichols picked a quiet morning and switched the IP addresses between the test machine and an existing Windows production server. "Nobody could tell the difference," he says.

Life went on as usual (but with markedly better system performance) at WaveTop's corporate headquarters in Phoenix, Arizona - and that was a good thing, because the servers Nichols was stealthily swapping over to Linux weren't just keeping little business necessities like the accounting department afloat. They were arguably the entirety of WaveTop's core business.

Knowing that the WaveTop venture would carry some financial risk, its parent company, WavePhore, gave the start-up a limited budget. Because this money had to stretch far enough to cover a whole farm of serves needed for all that Web crawling, the machines acquired for the start-up weren't anything to write home about: Pentium 166's with 32 Megabytes of RAM and 3 Gigabyte hard drives.

If you know your way around Windows even a little bit, you know that a 32 Megabyte configuration is asking for trouble. If he didn't know it already, Nichols almost certainly figured that out after spending a little time with the Windows servers he was charged with maintaining. "People ask, 'Why did you even attempt to run Windows servers with 32 Megabytes?' Well, when you have a budget and you need X number of machines to do X number of jobs, you've got to play within that realm. From an IS manager's perspective, that's just reality," he says.

Nichols says that the Windows servers' performance was mediocre when he came on board, and became downright lousy as soon as the workload increased. "It got to the point where you'd start waiting two seconds between pages, even on the local network. Form submittals from users registering with the service started to take up to a minute." Like any good administrator, Nichols fired up Windows' built-in resource monitoring utility, Perfmon. "Doing Perfmons on a couple of systems showed me we were running out of swap space." In other words, not only was the 32 Megabytes of physical memory in use, but the virtual memory created by paging ranges of memory out to disk was also overtaxed.

Suspecting that the tasks he was performing on the servers shouldn't be all that demanding, and thinking that Windows consumed an awful lot of system horsepower to provide niceties he didn't need (like the graphical interface), Nichols decided to experiment.

"I took another box - the same hardware configuration - put Linux on it, and used the Apache web server. I loaded up Perl modules that work with Apache. Then I copied all the CGI requesters over to the Linux machine, got it up and running, then went in and switched over the IP addresses.

"The load on the Linux box was half of what it had been on the Windows box," Nichols said. In fact, WaveTop's Linux test server was able to store all the running processes in memory, rather than having to page things in and out of disk storage. Having tasted Linux success, Nichols started knocking off his Microsoft's Windows servers one by one. Now, all of the servers at WaveTop run Linux.

ZERO ADMINISTRATION

Though he has a fair-sized group of servers to take care of, Nichols says network management hasn't been an issue. "When I think of ideal administration, I imagine a machine that, once I've set it up to do what I want it to do, I can walk away from. I'd like the machine to send me an e-mail if there's a problem." He says Linux gives him that kind of reliability; his servers never send him e-mail.

What administration there is goes more quickly and is more straightforward with Linux than with Windows. "There are too many Windows chores that require you to reboot the server, and rebooting a Windows server takes a long time when you're sitting there trying to get on with your work." With Linux, he points out, you're likely to do nothing more than stop the daemon you're reconfiguring, then restart it instantly.

CHEAP WARES

Not having to spend much time at the console is a nice bonus, but the big winnings from switching to Linux come in the form of cold hard cash. Nichols reckons he's saved money in three areas. First, he needs less hardware to get the job done because his Linux machines are more efficient. Second, he performs less administrative maintenance on his Linux farm then he performs on the Windows machines. And finally, Linux and associated software (such as the Apache web server) cost him nothing to license.

Nichols figures he would need at least ten more machines if he still used Windows - which means he has saved at least $20,000, even with a conservative estimate of equipment costs. But even setting aside the savings in administrative cost and support time, Nichols says it's important not to sell short the convenience of not having to deal with Windows' infamous blue screens of death. Finally, supplying machines with Windows Server licenses adds up. "Our licensing was running $500 here, a $1,000 there. I'd much rather spend $30,000 on getting an assistant than on keeping my machines legal."

Perhaps the most significant savings, though, are those that WaveTop will realize as it grows and uses more equipment. If you estimate that equipment costs about $2,200 per server, and that Windows server (and associated software) licensing adds about $1,000 to that side of the equation, scaling up with Linux will cost approximately thirty percent less per server than with Windows.

SWITCHING HORSES (MAMA'S PERL)

Moving applications from the Windows machines to the Linux boxes was simplified by WaveTop's initial decision to program most of the automated tasks in Perl. Created in the late 1980's by Larry Wall (now the lead programmer at O'Reilly Publishing) as a fast tool for manipulating and printing text system reports, Perl has become a widely portable programming language in computerdom; Perl also jumped to an early lead as the language of choice for creating small scripts that output Web pages on the fly, by way of the Web's Common Gateway Interface (CGI). Perl's report-formatting heritage is well-suited to the CGI task, where the primary objectives of almost all scripts include delivering a page in HTML - just another report. Perl also makes short work of tasks such as crawling through Web sites, converting URL's so that they link to local copies of files, and so on.

Perl arrived relatively late on the Windows platform; its roots are in the Unix community. So it's not surprising that porting CGI applications from Windows to Linux should be straightforward.

Initially, WaveTop's scripts were run using standard CGI, as had been the case with the Windows servers. Later, to further improve performance, Nichols took advantage of Apache's ability to use an embedded version of Perl. In this arrangement, scripts called from the Web server are run in the same memory space as Apache (an architecture very similar to Microsoft's Internet Server API and its Active Server Pages extensions of Internet Information Server).

Nichols describes the move to Linux as trouble free. "There just haven't been any significant problems with Linux." Looking at WaveTop, three things are clear. First, Nichols doesn't feel like Linux is a compromise he's made to save money. He actually prefers the Linux approach. Second, the savings are significant. Third, and perhaps most important, WaveTop is not an isolated case. Linux isn't just the darling of ISP's in search of a cheap Web server to use for cutting corners.

Based upon my search for information on companies that use Linux as their operating system, it seems that Linux has gained a lot of respect in business computing circles. Small, aggressive companies (ISP's in particular) are proud of the good use they're making of Linux. It works for WaveTop and plenty of other businesses, and features more and more commercially supported application software. And Gary Nichols thinks it makes sense for just about any business to consider Linux before throwing another Windows box onto the network.

SUN SHINES

In December of 1998, Sun Microsystems, Incorporated announced widespread support for Linux on its hardware. The Palo Alto, California-based vendor had been quietly working with distributors and a select number of Linux community representatives to port Linux to its UltraSPARC processor. The initiative, unofficially called UltraPenguin, mainly involved Sun hardware and not the Solaris operating system.

This wasn't Sun's first attempt to cooperate with those supporting the popular alternative flavor of Unix. In November of 1998, the company committed to helping port its Java Development Kit 1.2 to Linux.

"We consider anyone who is using Linux to be in the open standards camp and making good things happen, especially since there is such great interoperability between Linux and Solaris," said Robert Novak, Sun's group manager for Power Workstations. "It offers a really strong alternative to Microsoft's Windows."

Besides technical assistance, Sun provided loaner machines for testing, executives said. Solaris engineers were available to assist distributors, they said. "It's more our concern to make sure they get the support they need to make sure Linux runs well on all of Sun's platforms."

Sun expects Linux support to be most critical for its entry-level Ultra 5 and 10 workstations, particularly in vertical markets such as education, said Barbara Kay, line manager for desktop software. White-box value added resellers (VAR's) that purchase Sun boards and processors also are expected to embrace the UltraPenguin project, she said.

Sun added a Linux area to its Web site with "a pointer to where folks could go and get reference copies of the SPARC version of Linux," Novak said. The site also offers links to major distributors and VAR's offering Linux services on Sun hardware, he said.

Steve Gaudet, owner of DCG Computers, is excited. The VAR sees tremendous opportunity to expand beyond the base of its current white-box business. "Sun's support just shows the importance of Linux and the growing demand for it," he said. "We expect to do a lot of business on UltraSPARC."

WIDE OPEN SPACES

With the spectacular initial public offerings (IPO's) of Red Hat and VA Linux in 1999, the Linux operating system cobbled together by Finnish programmer Torvalds and countless hackers went from a vaguely anti-capitalist crusade to big business (as of mid-December in 1999, Red Hat had a stock market capitalization of $17 billion; hardware maker VA Linux was at $7 billion). Hard evidence that Linux is a threat to Microsoft's Windows, as these valuations portend.

MAY THE SOURCE BE WITH YOU

The Internet became the means for a new model of how software is created. The open, shared development of code produced some of the key underlying technology of the Internet, such as the open-source Apache Web server and the Sendmail message transfer agent, but it is the Linux operating system that has carried the torch for the open-source software movement. Beginning with graduate student Torvalds' first posting of code in August 1991, Linux has provided a free and reliable Unix-type operating system that made many early Internet services possible.

Most surprisingly, it now is encroaching upon the turf of Microsoft, challenging the notion that software is owned and controlled by vendors and giving users more control over what is in the software they use.

"The real, long-term significance is that it gives us some hope of solving the software quality problem," says Raymond. "It is now clear that the way forward lies through open-source and not around it."

OPEN-SOURCE TIMELINE

1969 - Unix, a free operating system, is born at Bell Laboratories.
1975 - Open-source programming tools start rolling with Stallman's release of the first Emacs editor.
1979 - Eric Allman releases the pre-cursor to Sendmail, dubbed "delivermail". The product quickly becomes the dominant mail-transfer agent on the ARPANET.
1981 - Jim "Button" Knopf (PC-File, a DBMS) and Andrew Fluegelman (PC-Talk, a telecomm program) simultaneously launch the shareware concept.
1983 - TCP/IP protocols are adopted as military standards. Virtually every TCP/IP stack today is a derivative of the open-source Berkeley Unix networking package.
1983 - Stallman conceives the Gnu's Not Unix (GNU) Project and "copyleft" - a copyright that grants unlimited permission to copy and modify software.
1987 - Larry Wall uncorks the Perl language, now at the heart of most common gateway interface (CGI) scripts on the Internet.
1988 - John Ousterhout debuts open-source scripting language Tool Command Language (Tcl).
1990 - Danish coder Guido van Rossum invents Python, yet another popular open-source scripting language.
August 1991 - Linux inventor Linus Torvalds releases a very limited initial version of his open-source operating system, Linux 0.01.
December 1993 - The Berkeley Standard Distribution (BSD) version of Unix is released.
December 1993 - Andrew Tridgell debuts the first release of Samba, software that lets Unix and Linux systems act as file and print servers on Windows networks.
March 1994 - Linux 1.0 is released.
April 1995 - Trying to improve upon NCSA's http daemon, the newly formed Apache group releases the first version of its open-source Web server.
May 1997 - Raymond's "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" essay is first presented to the Linux community.
September 1998 - Linux gains respectability when computing bigwigs Netscape and Intel invest in Linux distributor Red Hat Software.

THE LinuX-FILES

Vendors will not be able to compete with Linux because they have a smaller number of developers. Some users believe the rise of Java-based applications makes Linux more attractive because Enterprise JavaBeans could be used as middleware in Linux environments. Raymond argues that Linux will continue to evolve faster and further than proprietary software until it becomes one of the world's most trusted programs.

This is an operating system and a community of software developers that have flourished despite many setbacks and difficulties. Linux will remain free and unrestricted, as will the GNU components that lend it stability.

Young, of Red Hat, says Linux is in a marathon race, not a sprint. Indeed, the question in the minds of millions should not be "What can Linux do for you, but what can you do for Linux?" Says Young, "There is a whole industry that has to be built and it's going to take us ten years to do that before we are in a position to be perceived as an acceptable alternative each and every time to Microsoft."

Sincerely,
Mark Kuharich

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