Selling BSD

jogega writes "There is an article at OnLamp that gives some advice on how to sell BSD solutions commercially. It talks about the best way to present your solution, get the job done, and most important show that BSD is a very strong alternative in the market."

Don't be a zealot.

[TrumpetPower!]

Mr. Lucas makes an excellent point: just because you might have the superior technical solution--one that would be everything the company needs and cost no money--it won't do you much good if The Powers That Be have closed minds.

Opening closed minds takes a looong time. Dont' try to do everything all at once, and don't nag while you're doing it.

b&

Re:Don't be a zealot.

[redwing25]

I agree completely. The higer-ups think that since something is free has has to be a worthles, pieced together system.

Maybe we should tell them that it will cost thousands of dollars, then use BSD and pocket the money. Hey, whatever it takes!

Rob

walk the walk...

[JDizzy]

I agree with the author.... but I would like to share some of the experiences I have on this subject.

First off, I'm a junior level unix admin... The older more polished guys I work with tend to keep me at bay since I'm young. Well, to make this story short, I built-out a few FreeBSd servers to backup the main email servers, webservers, and DNS cache.

In effect I choose to install BSD in only the places that I can leverage all the positve things, and none of the negative itmes. For instance, since our email servers would go down all the time, I added my backup mail server to the mix, and it took over the deliver of email before anybody knew the main server was down.

Since BSD cost nothing except the hardware it is install on, I further compounded the issue with my boss. He loves to play mind games with my budget. When I told him I was using a free Operating system he almost got mad since he didn't have the cost leverage with me. My boss really loves to play mind games, did I mention that? Anyways... I repeted the the above several times, but with different various services, and each time it was a FreeBSD to the rescue situation.....

I can name several situations tha tI had a cheap bsd box installed on sub 1000K hardware, dong the job of a failled enterprise server that cost serveral orders of magniture more cash.

This is the way Open source will penetrate the datacenter... it has to prove itself..

Another example of walk the talk

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not your normal OpenBSD geek, wear a tie most days, and operate the Checkpoint firewall for a few thousand node network. When it came time to upgrade our DNS server, the consultant that helped with the firewall installation had pointed me towards OpenBSD. I had been installing it on old hardware, and after getting comfortable with it, set up a DNS server that showed them it could be done. Result: went from an aging DEC Ultrix to two Dell 2400s running OpenBSD.

Next the Windows Server group was trying to get the entire campus on DHCP, and were failing miserably using the Microsoft solution. I thought, why not see if I could do that, and in the process, discovered that OpenBSD already had the DHCP server software in its base install. In two days I had a running DHCP server on a Compaq 350mhz Server I borrowed from the server group, and was able to serve DHCP addresses to any of our 15 campus network segenmts. Result: in a meeting the Big Boss said, well I guess we'll go with his (mine) solution. They were prepared to spend $70,000 to get it going.

Next came windows 2000 and active directory, and the MS server boys tried to set up a DHCP/dynamic dns server, and well, as you can see, we got the DHCP part right away.

The cool thing that happened, while at SANS in New Orleans this January, the Sendmail vulnerability was announced. I needed to upgrade my sendmail and was a 3 hour flight at best away from the office. As luck would have it the Hotel I stayed at in New Orleans had Ethernet connections in the room for $10 per day, so I VPNd back to the office, remotely upgraded the OpenBSD system software on three servers, downloaded and installed the port of the latest Sendmail and restarted them all. Viola! no more vulnerability and I enjoyed sending an email saying that we were protected. Logs showed Sendmail probes within the day.

Comparing that with the Microsoft group that is good at upgrading their server, because that is what they do.....again and again. I just checked and of the now 20 OpenBSD machines I administer, for IDS, f/w logging, DNS, DHCP, performance graphing with MRTG (my boss's boss checks the MRTG graphs constantly on our 10 Meg Internet link and the 160 remote dial in lines, "hey! what's that spike?" ...) many have uptimes over 200 days.

So use which ever one you like, Free/Net/Open, you won't be sorry. btw, if Checkpoint FW-1 was offered on OpenBSD, we would use it too. I'm too busy to build a firewall using pf to take it's place right now.

And in case you were wondering, code talks, personalities make for good /. posts, but don't matter in the day to day world of getting my job done.

Re:Another example of walk the talk

[F2F]

bash-2.03$ uname -a
OpenBSD sucky 2.6 GENERIC#696 i386
bash-2.03$ uptime
8:28PM up 485 days, 20:12, 2 users, load averages: 0.08, 0.08, 0.08
bash-2.03$ ifconfig -A | grep inet | wc -l
37

that machine does nothing but firewall and redirect to internal hosts, it has something like 8 megs of ram and no hard drive :)

despite the obvious bragging value, this box clearly shows that using a free software solution does _not_ result in extraneous maintenance costs

:)

Re:Another example of walk the talk

[zentex]

aww c'mon! you're slinging FUD everywhere...

(dont get me wrong) I preach BSD everywhere it's needed, but I prefer to use a 2K server for DNS/DHCP in a corporate environment (just cause it's easier :-)

...those Windows "administrators" must have been dumber than dirt. It's a no brainer to setup DHCP (read: point click, "oh my god becky!, it works"), and DNS (which has dynamic built-in under WIN2K) is a little harder, but if you can pour cereal into a bowl and then pour milk into the *same* bowl, you can set that up too.

Your relevancy of DHCP and DNS holds no water, you should be beating those who call themselves "administrators" for being stoopid.

How to thwart BSD and stay Linux or Win32

[gruntvald]

Just subscribe your boss to an openBSD mailing list, any one will do, then ask a question about the filing system, or SMP, boot loaders, or journalling, or security, or, in fact, anything NIH. Rest assured that the juvenile response will destroy any possibility of switching.