Re: tlug: newbie...well, potential newbie

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull@example.com>]

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tlug note from "Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull@example.com>
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>>>>> "Tim" == msk  <jp000415@example.com> writes:

    Tim> via a 128k line.  I will buy one more computer to use as a
    Tim> web/mail/dns server (I hope these can all fit into one
    Tim> machine!) and I s'pose the file server has to be a separate
    Tim> machine?

Depends on loads and security.  If you're thinking of eventually
maintaining a full Usenet spool, that will need a server of its own.  If
you're worried about what might slither in over that ISDN line, you
want a firewall host with the file server on a separate machine inside
the firewall.  If neither of those is that much of a concern (they
probably aren't unless you already are thinking otherwise), one PPro
with 500MB for the main OS functions including mail and print spooling
will do the trick; add GB as necessary for the file server.

    Tim> I have heard that linux is a powerful networking-oriented OS,
    Tim> so I was thinking of having the server(s) run that.  Is it
    Tim> recommended to set up a file server, web server, etc. for a
    Tim> small business all on linux?

Sure.  Get any recent issue of _Linux Journal_.  There's a column on
"Linux means Business" or something like that.

    Tim> What are the things linux is particularly good at and what is
    Tim> it quite poor at?  Is the learning curve incredibly steep?

Linux does networking very well.

Linux is cheap and fast.  Stable versions are stable.  Linux is highly 
customizable, both in terms of adding packages and reconfiguring the
kernel itself (more on that later, don't panic).  Support is free and
often extremely high quality, but often slow or non-existent.  You can 
buy support however.  Linux is very wide-spread, so somebody has
probably already done your application and would love to tell you
about it.  New hardware and so on gets supported rapidly, and you
don't have to wait for the OS vendor to send you an upgrade.  (The
free support for true hardware bugs is generally excellent; most of
the people who write drivers for Linux do it for love.  All they ask
in return is that you do your homework before reporting the bug.)

Linux is standard across platforms:  you can run Linux well on Sparcs
and DEC Alphas as well as Intel boxes.  Soon PowerPC and M68K support
should be available.

But ... Linux is hard to configure for a Japanese environment.  This
is improving, but it is not yet a matter of simply untarring a big
archive and rebooting.  I doubt anybody else is doing much better,
though, in the sense that Linux inherently lives in a multi-platform
environment, and there is no single standard for Japanese processing.
*If* all your PCs can be MS, then Windows is probably going to work
better.  But if you need to mix and match anyway, as you say you do,
it will probably cost more time and effort to get started, but in the
end it will probably be equally effective.

Linux is slow to get proprietary stuff - Netscape and Java
capabilities both lag compared to Solaris and NT versions, for example.

Linux will not improve your office applications; if you're using MS
Office, no reason to change.

    Tim> I have heard that linux can be a real bear to set up,
    Tim> configure, maintain.

If you go with RedHat or Debian, it is very easy to set up the core
functions on standard hardware.  Any given day of the week, somebody
on this list is installing a new system.  From scratch or over an
existing system.  What are the core functions?

    - Kernel, shells, X windows, programming languages (C family,
      especially), utilities.
    - Networking above hardware level (TCP/IP and up).  Network servers
      (news, ftpd, WWW, remote login) and clients (ftp, news,
      netscape) and on and on.
    - Text processing (editors, TeX, troff, SGML, etc).

Hardware can be a problem: printers, network cards, video cards,
modems.  What else is new?  Ask around about experience and whether
there are reliable drivers.  Ask people how to find out what hardware
is supported.  Eg, there's been a recent thread on printers.  For
practical purposes, Linux supports printers with Postscript file ->
ghostscript -> lpd printer spooler.  So I tell people "look up what
Ghostscript supports; it's in the Ghostscript makefile."  For network
cards, it will be in the kernel source.  And so on.

Make a list of what you want to do.  Find a Linux system or CD
somewhere, and go look in /usr/doc/faq/howto.  There are lots of files
labeled stuff like "Printing-HOWTO".  That will tell you how to do
printing, some printers with histories of trouble, etc.  If you have
something on your list that _doesn't_ have a HOWTO, ask somebody about 
it.

Most of this stuff is as simple as saying "rpm --install Dance.rpm", 
and you can be Dancing 10 minutes later.

What's hard is what's hard on all systems: administration.  File
system organization - if you're not careful, an upgrade can overwrite
your custom configuration file, or you'll just plain lose files in a
huge directory tree.  User relations - keeping John out of Mary's
files, or Ralph from hogging the printer.

If you want to use your Linux system as a gateway to the Internet for
your LAN, configuration can be hard.  But, again, this would be hard
no matter what system you use, and Linux is more flexible than most
proprietary systems.  And Linux does provide the tools you need to do
this kind of job.

    Tim> Are the rewards worth whatever hassles are involved? I've

We all think so.

    Tim> been pretty much stymied trying to get my macs and peecees to
    Tim> talk to each other w/o spending a small fortune on licensing

Samba (a freeware implementation of clients and servers for
Microsoft's SMB networking protocol) works great for me for sharing
with PCs (although I haven't used it to share a printer yet).  I
believe there is an implementation of SMB for Apple, too.

To sum up: I think what you should do next is make a shopping list of
functions the system should do.  See what you can find in the HOWTO
list.  (I think http://www.sunsite.unc.edu/linux/Doc or something like
that should work; if that doesn't work, start at the top of Sunsite
and work down.)  Things that are in the HOWTO list are there because
lots of people want them, and for the same reason they generally have
pretty good packaging under distributions like Debian and RedHat.

If it's not in the HOWTOs or FAQs, then ask on the list.

HTH

-- 
                            Stephen J. Turnbull
Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences                    Yaseppochi-Gumi
University of Tsukuba                      http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp/
Tel: +81 (298) 53-5091;  Fax: 55-3849              turnbull@example.com
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