Mindbridge Saves "Bunches of Money" In Switch To Linux

While Mindbridge didn't start out as an open source company, it has since managed to save what they can only describe as "bunches of money" by switching to Linux. "Today, Mindbridge has repurposed itself as an open-source-friendly company, and revamped its infrastructure to run completely on Linux and other open source software. 'Having deployed [Linux servers] to our customers, we turned around and said, we can do the same thing internally and save bunches of money. We began a systematic but slow flipping of servers from the Microsoft world over to predominantly Linux — although there are a few BSD boxes around as well,' Christian says. 'It's to the point that today I only have two production Windows servers left, out of 15 or so.'"

Re:obvious

[Anonymous Coward]

How can a first post be marked Redundant?

By being a redundant observation about Slashdot.

Do you think this is the only topic where that comment has been made?

Re:This story has no credibility

[belmolis]

They're a Linux company. They're telling us how great Linux is. They're not giving any details.

No, they aren't a Linux company. They don't sell Linux and their own products are not Linux-specific. The article says that they started out as a Microsoft shop but switched most of their servers to Linux after observing their customers' good experience with Linux.

Re:Real company - just 15 servers?

[u235meltdown]

FTFA

CEO Rick Puckette is enthusiastic about the change. "When we were using Microsoft, we had a lot more than 15 servers," he says. "We had upwards of 50 or 60 that were becoming difficult to manage. So as part of this open source initiative, we also chose a virtual machine called Xen, which allows us to put multiple machines on one physical server, to consolidate." Puckette says that Mindbridge evaluated other virtual machine software, including VMware, but Xen was "very cost-efficient and pretty bulletproof.

Re:Headline

[eln]

Seriously. This article is basically "Guy with 15 servers converts 13 of them to Linux." 13 whole servers. Damn, Microsoft must be quaking in their boots over this one.

This story is utterly pointless.

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Not too bad for little guys

[Feyr]

easily is stretching it a bit but kerberos was designed for just that. in fact, AD is just a Borgified kerberos (just enough so it's incompatible with every other krb servers)

Re:Not too bad for little guys

[pakar]

Filelevel security? Referring to file-permissions and such? Well then, just go with ACL's and you have the same functionality on a gnu/linux system, or any other *nix OS.

File-sharing... NFSv4 is starting to get very good now but maybe not there yet, so go with NFS and automounter, if you want a bit more security just add a ipsec-tunnel and let you NFS traffic flow... You could probably also add some additional security to this by having the clients use keys stored in the LDAP and received when the user logs in..
Or if you want something with a per-user login you can always go to Samba and use the CIFS protocol...

Network security? Domain user-accounts? Configure the clients and/or the servers with LDAP/Kerberos authentication. If you want you can even configure them to authenticate towards a Windows AD domain...

This is the beauty of such systems.. You can do just about anything your mind can think about, and automate it all in some easy scripts...

We just fixed a quite nice thing in our computer-lab at work, and it is so simple.. Backup and restore of simple system images, and it even works for windows systems..
When we have configured a system we just boot it via PXE and do a dump to a NFS share of all the disks in the system and then we have a good backup.. When we then want to restore a system we just simple boot it again via the PXE and chose restore and it restores everything.. All required for this was one tftp-server/dhcp-server/nfs-server, generic kernel image that supports all the different disk-controllers we are using... Simple embedded ramdisk that enables us to mount a nfs-fs dd the images to disk and about 200 lines of shell-scripting...

Don't bash down on things you don't know much about, at least without having the phrase 'to my knowledge' somewhere in the post..

Re:choice quotes from TFA

[SpooForBrains]

"Can such a person exist? A system administrator who has to get used to the idea of command lines?!"

Only a very bad one. Knowing how to write a decent .bat script is required knowledge for a Windows sysadmin as far as I'm concerned.

Re:Not too bad for little guys

[Feyr]

AD has a directory service part, but i seem to remember microsoft considering it as their whole auth stack, and it uses their borgified krb5 to auth the machines

also, if you want to argue about directory services only, AD is just a borgified ldap with lots of non-standard extensions