Another sad NT story via the Philadelphia Inquirer:
" Why are people turning to Linux? Its price is certainly appealing: You can pick up a copy of Linux on a CD-ROM for $49, or download it for nothing off the Internet. But just as attractive is its reliability. "It's typical to see Linux servers running for months at a time," said James Capp, president of Keystone Programming, Inc. in Harrisburg, which has sold Linux systems to dozens of companies in Pennsylvania.
For companies that are used to working with Windows NT, that kind of reliability can be a real eye-opener, says Buck Fleming, president of LinuxForce, inc. in Landsdowne.
That was the case at the Delaware Country Daily Times, where Fleming's company installed a system running Windows NT to put the newspaper's classified ads onto the Web in 1996. " Every week, something was wrong with the system, and somebody had to go there and fix it," said Fleming. "I used to get calls regularly in the middle of the night. It drove me crazy."
Chris Fearnley, the head of the Philadelphia Linux User Group and now LinusForce's senior vice president of technology, suggested replacing Windows NT with Linux. For a year, Fleming resisted the idea. "If it's free, how good could it be?" Fleming recalls thinking. "It was too wild for me to even consider."
In late 1997, Fleming gave in, and replaced the $62,000 Windows NT server at the Daily Times with a $1,200 Linux system. The Linux system proceeded to run without interruption for the next year -- 357 days, to be exact -- until it was taken down for an upgrade. " |
