Mike Warot

Linux converts don't always come in groups. Among IT folk, they tend to come one by one. Case in point, Mike Warot, a reader I knew for insightful comments and fun ideas (for example, see "It's all like... what?" here in UpFront). Mike's experience is a good sample of what must be happening in countless shops, even though each is different. - Doc Searls

I'm a one-man IT staff in what used to be an Windows shop. Today I have two machines on my desk, the one I just let run is Ubuntu. It just runs, 24x7, and it's there when I need it.

The change came once it became apparent we were going to have to put our Windows servers behind a firewall, I decided to use Linux to make a firewall. I used Red-Hat and EBtables to create a transparent bridge, to avoid having to re-address our servers, and let everything keep it's public IP address. This was nice because it still wasn't NECESSARY to have a firewall, it was just an extra precaution at the time.

That worked well for about a year, until I got worried that I wouldn't be able to restart it. Then that a friend told me about IPcop in his work with non-profits. IPcop is a VERY easy to configure and maintain Linux based firewall, which does a great job in almost all circumstances. I used IPcop for a year or so, until problems with multiple internet connections forced me to seek a better solution.

At the same time I put in the IPcop box, I learned (eventually) two very important facts about Windows 2000 Servers and the internet: 1) If your domain controllers have multiple subnets to choose from, they will get confused and not be able to find each other (meaning users might not get to log in!); and 2) If you followed common sense and used your real domain name for your Windows domain name, you were FUBAR because active directory then puts all of your local addresses in the DNS, and you can't remove them (or the domain stops working again).

This required another Linux box, for DNS services to the world. It's running Fedora Core 5, but I'm about to replace it because I don't know how to update the DNS to fix the current exploit. It'll get replaced with a VMware virtual machine running Ubuntu. (more about VMware below) I now have an Ubuntu box with IPtables (or is it IPchains, I always forget) which connects us to our three internet connections.

With the proliferation of servers, VMware's offer of free VMware server was a godsend. And I've since learned that Linux makes a far better host than Windows does. So I've got some of my VMware servers running on Ubuntu, with Windows and other things inside them.

Ubuntu has made it pretty easy to set up a new machine. Not that Red Hat was that hard. But with apt-get, installation of almost any program is trivial. I use an editor called joe to do editing when I don't have Xwindows set up (on some of the older servers)... and it's just...

sudo apt-get install joe

...and I'm up and running.

I'm not a guru, but I've learned enough over the years to get around. Linux offers a wider set of tools than Windows ever could. Bottom line: Linux is amazing, and getting better all the time.