The selling point for WhatifLinux, Broughton says, is that it’s both comprehensive and up to date. “We hope to save a lot of system administrator time, because of lot of their job is spent looking around the Web for alerts,” he adds. “If Linux continues to grow, there will be more and more issues for the system administrator to take care of.”

David Winchell, CTO of Acrylis customer and potential partner Mission Critical Linux, says he appreciates the real-time information WhatifLinux.com provides. “If an alert is posted to some obscure Web site, the sysadmins don’t have to be constantly looking for it,” he says. “If there’s a hole, it can be fixed right away.”

With the product tied to your whole network, you can also make updates en masse, Broughton says. “Imagine you have 50 machines to update,” he adds. “You can have 50 people do it themselves, or you can give a system administrator some central authority to do it.”

The subscription-based WhatifLinux.com, launched in April, has a graphic-based console sysadmins can use, or they can elect to have alerts emailed. Corporate pricing starts at $100 per server per month with volume discounts available, and the North Chelmsford, Mass.,-based Acrylis plans to soon announce a pricing level for individual users.