From: Geoffrey S. Mendelson (gsm_at_nonexisting.hamakor.org.il)
Date: Sat 21 Jan 2006 - 20:54:00 IST
On Fri, Jan 20, 2006 at 03:45:25PM +0200, Hetz Ben Hamo wrote:
> Depends. I've seen many sysadmins who admin Windows networks who get
> pay around 6K-10K NIS Bruto!
That's in Israel. A market near and dear to our hearts, but tiny in
comparison to the real world, e.g. the U.S., the U.K. or the E.U.
I also know Linux/UNIX sysadmins who make that kind of money here too.
> Here's an example: at my work (TheMarker) I (alone) admin all the
> Solaris and Linux servers, and there are around dozen Windows machine
> which are administrated by 2 sysadmins. I administrate more machines
> than the windows sysadmin guys do, and my salery is definately not
> much bigger than theirs.
Again that's the price you pay for living in Israel. When the job market
crashed, it crashed and has yet to recover. There are a lot more jobs
than there were 2 years ago, but they pay 1/3 of "the market" in 2000.
> In the next few weeks, I'm going to add a dozen (or so) new HP servers
> with RHEL 4 (hmm, am I the only guy who deploys RHEL 4 in
> production?), and I'm setting them all by myself (using most machines
> installations with kickstart). You can bet that according to my
> calculations, setting them up with all the stuff I need to setup there
> and administrate those machine will be way shorter with RHEL 4, and
> these machines WILL generate revenue to my employer as soon as the
> software is up and running.
I can't deny or support that claim. Solaris also supports kickstart,
is free on machines with one or two processors, is (grudgingly) open
source and comes with support from Sun, which is many people believe
is better than support from Red Hat and "the internet".
> I did a small calculation here, how much time it will take to install,
> setup and configure the OS and the applications with Windows, and to
> me it looks like it will take at least 1 more week, which means a week
> less revenue for my employer if they would choose Windows instead of
> Linux.
Why? You set it up once, copy the system images with ghost, run a program
from Microsoft to fix the SIDs and if necessary the activation codes
(depends upon a whether you have single system or multisystem activation
codes.
I'm not saying REHL isn't a good deal for you, or your employer, but
other operating systems have kept pace, including Windows server.
> I totally disagree. When was the last time did you actually check
> RedHat prices?
I've never kept track of them. Sorry.
> I just bought a 10 pack license for RHEL 4 ES, and it costed me $3K,
> including subscription for their RHN for a year. I could have get it
> cheaper through other channels, but the purchase was approved by the
> management. You might want to take a look here for some official MS
> prices (http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/howtobuy/licensing/pricing.mspx),
> and judging by this page, I would have paid around $10K JUST for the
> OS, which means I saved my employer $7K!
Here that means something, in the U.S. $7k is the cost of one month's salary
and benefits for a sysadmin, in Silicon Valley, it dosen't even cover the
salary.
> Of course, I could have cheated, buy a single RHEL 4, install a simple
> YUM and spread the updates to the servers, but you get my point.
Or used CENTOS or White Box Linux and done it for free.
> Give me a break! I have seen some records numbers when it took them
> about 6 DAMN MONTHS to fix some serious security issues. Just few
> weeks ago with their WMF security issues, MS was so slow, that it has
> been advised to use some non official patch in order to prevent this
> security issue, while MS took their time to release their security
> update.
So they don't always fix things quickly. I'm not familiar with that bug,
a quick web search shows that it's a client problem, not a server issue.
> In the Linux case, if there's no official redhat RPM ready by the time
> it's out (extremly rare situation), you can almost always find some
> other distributor package, extract the SRPM, get the fixed patch,
> change the SPEC file and rebuild it to your distribution, and I have
> done this before (I suck at C/C++ programming, trust me on that!). It
> wasn't that hard.
Sometimes. BTW, are you going to post the source code on you web/FTP
site. The GPL requires you to. Most people don't bother and no one
has hasseled them, but there is no exclusion, if you make a source
mod, you have to make the source code available.
> And then, there's another thing, DAMN REBOOTING. With Linux, at worst,
> you stop the service, start it, and you're done (unless it's a kernel
> issue, which is extremly rare). With windows, it will nag you to hell
> and back to reboot the machine almost every time it replaces some
> crappy central DLL or whatever, and in big corporations, rebooting
> requires you to create a procedure, notifying, make backups etc..
Big corporations have those procedures in place, they have to. As for
rebooting, you can stop and start services under Windows.
> Yeah, go blame a company which had ZERO knowledge what to do with a so
> fast developing OS. They had to listen to their customers, ISV and IHV
> until they learned that putting a new distribution every 6 months
> without any long life support will hurt them, so they divided it to
> Fedora and RHEL, and added 5 years support and patch for each RHEL
> they release (and then it was copied by SuSE and Mandriva, but thats
> another issue).
I will blame them and just did. They pushed real hard to get Linux into
the server market. On one hand they created lots of work for highly paid
sysadmins. On the other, they created a lot of people who won't touch it
and made a lot of good will for Microsoft.
> And in big corporations, a live demo version and a simple cost
> analysis paper really helps a lot, I've been there few times already
Me too, and I have friends who are technical USER managers in the
U.S. Most of them can't even get a Linux system in the door for a demo.
One of them actually got a Beowolf cluster in for one specific application.
As soon as the MCSE assigned to support it can get it to stay up for
more than an hour at a time, his engineers will get to use it.
What they won't do is hire a Linux trained sysadmin. The UNIX ones are
all too busy supporing their Solaris and AIX systems. :-(
> Sometimes cheaper works, even if the open source solution even if
> doesn't have all the bells and whistles that the closed source
> application has (look at Samba for example).
Samba is a great product and it has been around for a long time. I was
using it on an System V 3.2 UNIX system in 1995. It's made everyone's
life easier in a mixed windows/unix environment.
In fact it's so good, that no one I know is rushing out to try M/S's
free NFS server. :-)
Geoff.
-- Geoffrey S. Mendelson, Jerusalem, Israel gsm_at_mendelson.com N3OWJ/4X1GM IL Voice: (07)-7424-1667 IL Fax: 972-2-648-1443 U.S. Voice: 1-215-821-1838 The trouble with being a futurist is that when people get around to believing you, it's too late. We lost. Google 2,000,000:Hams 0. ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to linux-il-request_at_linux.org.il with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail linux-il-request_at_linux.org.il
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.7 : Sat 21 Jan 2006 - 21:06:20 IST