Linux: Not ‘lack of support,’ but better support for industrial engineering company

There’s a cliche sales line, used to overcome customer objections, that goes, “I know how you feel. I felt the same way, but what I found was that …” The IT people at BSL Ltd. in the UK could well use that line when talking with people thinking about migrating to Linux.

“Our early thinking was that we were moving from supported systems to apparently unsupported systems, which is why we initially moved very cautiously into the migration,” says Gary Madeley, BSL‘s technical infrastructure manager. The initial, cautious move was made in the mid-’90s with the migration of the company’s backup system to Linux. The industrial engineering products company has since moved almost all of its other systems to Linux.

“Our experience over time has been exactly the opposite,” Madeley says about his concept of support. “There’s been a number of occasions where we found faults
in the (former) operating systems we were using.” The suppliers either refused to acknowledge the problem was to port of their Unix OS or program “or they
insisted on us supplying them with more and more information about the problem. And then they spectacularly failed to resolve the issues. We still have a number of outstanding issues today.”

In other words, far from being the fault-tolerant system the supplier advertised, “which it may well be as far as the hardware is concerned, unfortunately the operating system crashes. It’s no longer a non-stop system. So we’ve got a number of
issues where they failed to be fixed and yet we pay them a lot of money to provide full support.”

The BSL’s experience with “unsupported” Linux has been rather different. “Although we’ve had no formal support, in Andy (Logan, BSL’s technical analyst programmer and ‘the guy who pushed us into using Linux’) we’ve got our own internal support, we’ve got somebody that’s studied it and embraces it and understands it in great detail. And in terms of getting third-party support, he has been able to get vital support from
the many user newsgroups.

“We’ve found faults with Linux,” Madeley says. “When we’ve found them, we’ve reported them to newsgroups and — quite the opposite to our experience with formal support contracts where they refused to accept the problem, or if they do fix it, it’s not for two years — with Linux we’ve had 10 fixes come back within the hour.”

He also prefers the Open Source concept. “We’ve been able to find patches directly and resolve problems in the same day.”

Logan says he “pushed” BSL into using Linux in about 1995 when the company was “looking into the Apache Web server and the book we got on it had a copy of Slackware Linux on the enclosed CD. It was the 1.2.3 kernel.”

“I remember at about the same time,” Madeley adds, “a friend of mine downloaded a copy from the Net and put it on his PC. And I thought it would be a good platform to use for some of the applications we had on the mainframe Unix systems and put them on the PCs. We started by migrating a backup program.”

“We always like to be aware of what’s happening in IT,” saya George Haynes, business systems manager. “We went with Unix in the mid-’80s. We’d been using computers for our accounts since the ’70s.”

They’ve become increasingly confident with Linux, to the point that in the six years since those first tentative steps towards migrating, “we’ve used Linux for increasingly mission critical systems,” says Madeley.

“We started off very cautiously. We were aware it was a free OS and had no support, allegedly. So we were concerned originally not to use it for any mission critical applications. We began by migrating some of the applications like the Web server to start our intranet and the back-up program. Then we moved on to use it for a mail server. So one by one we picked applications. It’s been entirely Unix to Linux because
until very recently we haven’t had any Windows NT server applications. We do have a few now for various reasons where it’s beyond our control.”

Another expression of that cautious approach, Logan says, is continuing on a stable kernel path. “A big question we faced was whether to stay with the 2.036 or go to the 2.2, and we decided initially to stay with 2.036 until only very recently. The question was stability of the kernel. And that’s how we’ve progressed during these years, staying with kernels until we’re as certain as we can be that the newer one is as stable.”

He is a devotee of the kernel mailing lists. “If you keep up to date with those lists, you’re going to get a feel for how stable a new kernel is,” Logan says. “For example, with the new 2.4 kernel, it seems people are still having problems with that. So I’m happy to stick with 2.2 for the time being because at the end of the day it’s stability that’s important above all else.”

Eventually came the big step for the company, taking the management information system, which was developed in-house, over to Linux. “That was quite a landmark
decision because that was a very important program, approaching mission critical status. because if the system is unavailable, people start to complain,” Madeley says. “It’s not quite mission critical in that the business will survive without it, but staff would be operating blindfolded.”

There’s now only one application that hasn’t been ported over to Linux, and wouldn’t you know it, it’s one of the backup systems.

Haynes says the company feels comfortable with Linux at this point. “Increasingly we’re taking these steps because every time we’ve done it, it’s not caused us any troubles at all, I say (while) grabbing on to a piece of wood, touch wood.”