By Tom Adelstein

The success of Mozilla's Firefox and Openoffice.org's productivity
suite has breathed life into people's aspirations about Desktop Linux.
As a result, the vast majority of articles published today focus there
and ignore the strides made on the Linux server. Unlike the Linux
server of the past, today's version supports rocket science and its
gains far exceed those of the Desktop.

As a former editor-in-chief of a Linux news site, I had the unusual
privilege of finding out from our own logs and from colleagues the
approximate number of unique visitors dropping by the major US Linux
news wires each month. Back when I started using Linux, John Hall of
Linux International estimated that the operating system had two million
deployments globally. At the time we thought the number a little high,
but we accepted it.

Today, we see twice that number or approximately four million unique IP
addresses reading articles on Linux news sites. That does not include
sites outside the US, Slashdot or Digg. So, a significant number of
people read articles about Linux and they represent only a percentage
of all its users.

Unfortunately, we failed to determine the demographics of Linux
readers. We simply had difficulty finding out what kind of readers came
to our site. We didn't know if our visitors represented CIOs, CTOs,
developers, Linux users or the just curious.

We did find out that pure Linux articles received more than triple the
number of page views as articles about Open Source companies and their
technologies. We also made a living off of another kind of story.
Anything that appeared as a threat to that monopoly in Redmond garnered
ten times the number of page views as the most read Linux articles.

Getting to the point, when we sorted out the type of Linux articles
that went through our queue, Desktop Linux had a whopping 90 percent of
the stories. Either people stopped writing about the server or Linus
has it in hiding. The Linux server's press agent let it get over
shadowed by the desktop.

What about the server?

I refer to the current Linux infrastructure play as the "New Era".
Linux has matured rapidly and far surpassed the expectations of the
smartest analysts I know. Basically, the Linux server kicks butt.

The advancements also come quickly. Some long-time Linux system
administrators I know, have some difficulty keeping up with all the
advancements and innovations today. Sometimes, they argue with me about
why I would do things the way I do them. Inevitably, they go ahead and
try something new with an accompanying "wow, that's neat!"

When I began using Linux as a system integrator, we had only a few
places to operate. Those included serving web pages with Apache,
managing DNS, relaying email as a MTA, interfering with NT 4.0 using
Samba and developing applications with Richard Stallman's wonderful
compilers, tools, etc.

We had a mature 2.035 kernel and from where Linux started that seemed
remarkable. But, we did not have a journaling file system, had lousy
multi-processor capabilities and little to no desktop. We lacked
deployment tools, a real web browser, a reasonable productivity suite
and our hardware compatibility stunk. That's not to diminish the
remarkable efforts of the people who gave a big part of their lives to
Linux. It's just where we stood in comparison to AIX, Solaris, HP-UX
and some others back then.

So, as I discuss the applications and tools freely available for Linux
now, please understand where I started. The old days of pride around
the 2.035 kernel look continents away from here.

What's new?

Linux has a dominant position in enterprise computing. Many mainstream
applications used on Solaris, for example, have made their way to Red
Hat and Novell Linux. Aside from the scientific tools you see on the
Space Shuttle and 256 node clusters that run sonar arrays on nuclear
submarines, Linux runs the largest web sites in the world. The problems
that plagued distributed directory services have gone away and run on
large blade server farms. These represent a tiny fraction of the uses
of Linux.

Linux not only works for enterprise computing, it also gives smaller
users a decided advantage in the marketplace. Linux levels the playing
field for small to medium-sized businesses and lets them compete with
the big boys. Everything from ERP systems to customer service apps run
on Linux and puts those applications in reach of the little guy. That's
what helps propel its adoption, which analysts put at 40 million
deployments.

To exemplify my point about the little guy, just recently, I configured
a Debian server with Xen 3.01 getting it production ready in two hours.
The majority of that time involved compiling code. I doubt I could have
afforded the software if I used proprietary goods. And I got to use
some advanced computing applications.

So why did I need Xen virtual machines?

I needed to deploy several applications including a secure LDAP
directory with mail, a secondary DNS server, several virtual web sites,
a content management system and a database driven federated identity
management system. The virtual servers helped me put those into
production without having to buy expensive hardware.

In the old era, I would have dedicated a separate server to each of
those applications considering the number of users involved. In the new
era, we can use commodity hardware add gigabytes of RAM and additional
disks to achieve higher CPU capacity on a single machine without
creating more server sprawl. Xen made it affordable for me to get into
business.

Last month, a friend of mine, Falko Timme, wrote a howto about setting
up a load balanced high-availability Apache cluster using free
software. He used Debian Sarge, Ultra Monkey's Heartbeat and
ldirectord. Ultra Monkey uses software primarily from Linux Virtual
Server and Heartbeat. Falko set up a five node cluster and to keep from
having to match hardware, he used Xen on different kinds of server
hardware. In March, Falko wrote another tutorial for building a five
mode MySQL load balanced cluster using the same technology. He did all
of this with commodity hardware.

Falko also writes howtos on howtoforge.com about technology like MyDNS,
a server that uses a MySQL database as a backend instead of Bind or
djbdns flat files. MyDNS simply reads DNS records from a database and
does not require a restart when DNS records change or when you create,
edit or delete zones. MyDNS provides a major advantage to organizations
that deal with massive numbers of domains. It runs on Linux.

Just two years ago, we faced a number of problems in the Linux
community deploying large numbers of Linux systems. We felt like
paupers attempting take on even medium-sized projects like the City of
Munich. If you wanted deployment tools, you had to buy the expensive
closed source tools. Today, all that has changed.

>From a project started at VA Linux a few years ago, Brian Finley and
his team has produced a robust tool for automating Linux installs,
software distribution and production deployment. The tool known as
SystemImager allows deployments of ISP and database server farms, high
performance clusters, computer labs, and corporate desktop
environments. SystemInstaller, a related project, can install a system
with any Linux distribution. It works with SystemImager and
SystemConfigurator, an installation and management application
framework. Together the tools work to build clusters. Oh, did I mention
it's free software?

Linux also shines in the area of high performance, high availability
computing power. For example, the NASA Center for Computational
Sciences (NCCS) at the Goddard Space Flight Center deploys HPC Linux
clusters designed to increase throughput for applications ranging from
studying weather and climate variability to simulating astrophysical
phenomena. Linux supplements NCCS architecture designed to scale to as
many as 40 trillion floating-point operations per second (TFLOPS) in
its full configuration.

According to Forbes, Linux runs more of the world's top supercomputers
than any other operating system. In fact, at this writing Linux runs
60% of the top 500 super computers on the planet. According to
departments heads at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in
Livermore, Calif., Linux runs ten of their machines, which are all on
the Top 500 list, including Blue Gene/L, the world's most powerful
supercomputer, and Thunder, which ranks fifth.

And that's just the start of the conversation about the Linux server.
It manages water wells in Jordan, provides logistics and supply chain
applications for governments and businesses and more. From a small
server running the ext2 file system with supposedly zero scalability,
the Linux server has come a long way. And while I use Linux for my
desktop, the server intrigues me most.

Interested?

Ask yourself if you would like to work with any of the above projects
or technologies. Demand exists for the skill sets involved. Do you
consider yourself trained and ready to get started? Do you have the
system administrative skills to function in the new era in the above
environments? If not what should we do?

The game has changed and if we want to move forward we will need some
familiarity with the new advances and innovative technologies emerging
from the Linux camp. Since most of us Linux guys learn this stuff
ourselves, perhaps the time has arrived for some mid-career change
over.

I don't see any of the folks at the Open Source Development Lab slowing
down, so time's a wastin! To use a term we probably invented in Texas.
OK, back on topic.

Moving forward in the new era requires a choice. If you choose to move
forward, remember that free software only requires a download. If it's
free you can use it and you do not have to ask anybody's permission.
Great documentation exists to get started. So as many people say,
enjoy!

__________________________
*Free Software-Free World*
**Open Source-Open Minds**
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