RE: [PLUG] microsoft lost

[Jeff Dean <jdean@ieee.org>]

At 10:23 AM 4/5/00 -0400, you wrote:
>I will have to agree with this, I am an avid linux lover, I preach it with
>the best of them.  But stability in an OS depends directly on who is
>supporting the system.  If you dont know what you are doing, then you will
>find that your systems will come more and more unstable as you do more to
>"Fix" it.  Sure it is a learning thing, but if you do not maintain a Linux
>box it too will crash on you too.  
>-- 
>-Rune

While I generally agree with this providing competent admin to yield a
stable system, NT, or at least the NT+W32API+Apps landscape, is responsible
for some of the negative opinion floating around regarding stability.  For
example, in my experience, we had multiple NT servers, including 3.51SP3,
3.51SP4, 3.51SP5, 4.0SP1, 4.0SP2, and 4.0SP3 running Notes Domino 4.5,
4.51, 4.6, and 4.62.  One of the configurations included a Domino cluster,
and we ran on Compaq and generic hardware with a load of about 500 users
over about three years.  With that mix, our general experience was that
Domino+NT simply became unstable after a couple weeks.  Either it would die
on its own, freeze with no other symptom, or even run normally but fail to
exit.  Often NT would also become unstable, refusing to shut down or
getting sluggish.  With a 100GB hardware RAID partition holding the Domino
databases, big crashes like this meant that we first had to endure a
lengthy NTFS repair/reboot cycle, then wait for Domino to repair the
databases as well.  We'd often find ourselves down for an hour or so during
production hours, making us very unpopular with the users, and making
NT/Domino unpopular with us!  We did all the service packs and recommended
MS patches and kept Domino up to date, but nothing really changed this
behavior.  We never were able to find anything wrong with the
configuration, and it ran cleanly during the first week or so of uptime.
Domino on HP-UX seemed to run cleanly, though our experience there was at a
remote site and somewhat limited.

With NT, we dropped back to the old "reboot it before it bellies up again"
routine, using a weekly planned boot cycle.  When we implemented a Domino
cluster we no longer had to come into work at 7:00AM because the Notes
clients would fail over to the still-running cluster partner. 

I left that job before switching to Solaris as the favored Domino platform.
 Up to that point management suffered from Microsoft Myopia, and admittedly
most of our available admin support was raised in the PC/MS/Novell world.
They finally did see the light, and while I would have loved to recommend
Linux, Lotus had only just announced a Linux version of Domino server, and
after their horrible support of Domino on Alpha/NT we didn't believe their
Linux support would meet our needs (come to think of it, none of their
support met our needs, so we dropped the contract!).

Let's hope W2k is better.  Regardless, if I were deploying a Domino server
now, I'd go with Linux unless there's experience in the community that says
not to do so.


Jeff Dean
jdean@ieee.org

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