“First, a little background. I initially spoke with John Flores,
a system administrator with the University of Texas at San Antonio,
earlier this year for a broad SearchEnterpriseLinux.com article on
Linux support. The article focused on the good, the bad and the
ugly of working with commercial Linux distributors, as well as with
the alternatives like CentOS and Debian. It was also a comparison
of the past, present and future of Linux support as a whole. Flores
and his data center–like many data centers today–were at a
crossroads. He was using Windows NT as his domain controller, but
it was update time as a few Dell servers were past their prime and
new ones were set to be introduced in the summer of 2006. ‘We had
an old Dell 6300 that was to be put out of service… it was what
was running the NT 4.0,’ Flores told me. ‘Rather than move NT 4.0
to a new server, we were looking for an OS that could put onto a
new server and it was going to be either Linux or MS…'”