windows TO *NIX MIGRATION

[Fairlight]

The honourable and venerable Bill Campbell spoke thus:
> 
> I can't speak to the differences in processing speed, but the time
> recovered not having to deal with anti-virus, and the other ``features'' of
> Windows and the continuing expenses related to them could be huge.  Most of
> our Filepro customers are running them on either CentOS or SuSE Linux, with
> typical uptimes measured in years, and no dedicated IT staff to babysit
> them.

When did you get hot-swappable kernels implemented?!  :)  I had an argument
with Alan Cox about the lack of hot-swap kernels and was at one point told
to do it myself if I wanted it.  They never saw a plausible reason to
implement it--which I felt was a mistake for mission-critical enterprises.

Point is though, how are you updating things that absolutely require a
reboot, and obtaining "years" of uptime?

> You could run Windows in a VMware virtual machine on a Linux box to handle
> things like this if necessary.

Or I've seen SuSE Enterprise 10 running under Hyper-V on Windows Server
2008.  I actually admin two of these.  I don't recommend the solution for
technical reasons, but it wasn't my call--I wasn't even actually asked.
I'm just responsible for the linux virtuals.

> The SQL-Ledger program does something similar, but uses LaTeX templates to
> generate pretty reports.

LaTeX is da bomb.  And I don't use that vernacular lightly.  :)  I wish I
remembered more of it.  I would get back into it, but frankly PDF is just
plain easier to deal with these days.

mark->
-- 
"I'm not subtle. I'm not pretty, and I'll piss off a lot of people along
the way. But I'll get the job done" --Captain Matthew Gideon, "Crusade"