hello,
I have been using slackware for my development machines and implementing it for my embedded systems under very brillient advice and guidance of people like drkstr.
I have started to like slackware very much due to its power and symplicity. I am perticularly impressed by its customisable features which makes it so close to being almost a self made distro.
I however now need another advice on a new dimension.
we have recently got a big customer having a large enterprise setup.
it is actually a hospital and requiring our company to develop the entire enterprise level system for managing the hospital and also hosting its web applications including but not limited to forums and communication portel between associated docters.
so inside the Premise, there will be the server handeling about 500 computers and a huge database.
and the same server will also handle the web application.
I am going to put a application server serving the enterprise needs liek the java servlet and ejb container.
and this application server too is going to be a linux machine.
Please advice me from any experience or case study if slackware fits the needs?
I find slackware so easy to administer and maintain that if it is suited for such a setup and if previously such setups have been successfull then I will go for it.
thanks.
Krishnakant

The first and foremost 2 questions:

1) What database are you planning on using/will you be using? If
it's Oracle, DB2 or another commercial player you won't get support
if the distro isn't certified.

2) Some places want something that they can hold liable and get
SLAs from. If you're confident that your company can do SLA-type
agreements for Slack, there's no better thing to do. If you can't,
go with one of the commercial big-wigs, e.g. SuSE Enterprise Server
or RedHat Enterprise Server.

As for the enterprise java beans: the biggest obstacle will have to
be RAM and CPU hunger ;} ... the leaner the underlying distro, the
better for the monstrosity.


Cheers,
Tink

There's 2 criteria you need to be aware of:

1. If any of the software you are using is a commercial software (think Oracle for example), then it's probably not certified for Slackware. In that case, you'll have to use a certified distro so that you can get support. That's unavoidable.

2. You won't find many Slackware skills in the professional market, so you'll have to make sure that you build the required skills in your company. That may be a huge task and responsibility which you need to take into account.

Otherwise, it'll be the unavoidable SUSE and Redhat. If cost is an issue, you can look at CentOS.

I will be using mysql 5.0 for database
and jdk 1.5 as the jre. will be using jboss for ejb.
now the second thing I want to clearify is that I have a good team of linux users else I can even aford to have the support bought from a third party.
all I want to know is streight and short.
given my enterprise needs of handeling the details I presented in my first email, not to mention the load my server will take and also that fact of handeling 500 computers, should I trust slackware for performance?
I am going to compile a custom kernel for use with slackware for this particular need.
the server has 1 g ram and a intel 2.6 ghz processor.
now will slackware fit my performance needs as an enterprise server?
thanks,
Krishnakant.

Straight and short - YES.

As I said - if the hardware is up to the task Slack won't stand in its way.
It does produce less overhead than both SLES and RH in terms of resource
usage by the OS.


Cheers,
Tink

My buddy has a small company of 10 people I believe it is. I got him into slackware a little while back with me as I took this plunge. He's been using it at home, and he actually wants to start, slowy, but to bring it into his company. One person a week is the goal.

fortunately, there almost all the same pc bought from Dell so loading should go pretty good.

They only do software like openoffice, printing, and would keep one windows pc to do their quickbooks and inventory for the time being before they switch over.

How does slackware work for small businesses. He's going to buy 10 stations from Pat, but I'm confused on openooffice. He has to license that too right? But where? When you buy slackware, does Pat kick money back to KDE or does my buddy have to do that? I'm not really sure how he does this.

None of the software on the Slackware CD requires you to pay back or contribute money to any other entity (KDE, Linus or whatever) in order to use it. When you buy the Slackware CD set, it is to support the further development of Slackware, not to pay any license fees. If you use downloaded Slackware ISO images for installation of Slackware on your business PC's and don't send any money to Slackware, Inc. this is entirely legal.

As for OpenOffice, there are no license fees attached to this either. If you want commercial support, that is where you have to start paying money.

Cheers, Eric

Thanks Eric for clarifying that.

I'm gonna relay that to my friend, and have him talk to his accountant. Normally, if you have an operating expense for upgrades, etc that is usually to some extent a deduction for most small businesses. Which is even all the more better, he might be able to pay and get a write off at same time.

Let me warn you that besides the distro you use, that doesn't looks like the proper machine to handle over 500 clients on a database, web and mail server.

I recently installed on slackware 10.2 w/ a custom 2.6.13.5 kernel, a web server (default apache w/ php and mysql), ftp server and a qmail server with ClamAV + Spamassassin.

Just with ClamAV and Spamassassin, I can tell you the damn machine (1 gig of RAM, 2 x 3.2 GHz Xeon procs with 2Mb L2 cache each, 2 x 78 gigs SATA disks) is really busy mostly just by handling the mail. Here in this enterprise the fight against spam became a priority and I was asked to replace the old qmail server (that was a plain qmail installation on Red Hat 9 that already was here when I came in) with this one in order to stop or at least do something to handle spam easier. Boy only around 3% of 10,000 dialy mails is proper mail, the other are viruses or spam

PS: the server handles around 110 mail users.

Sounds like you have some bad luck with email.

Last year when the main servers were down for repairs, I had all of the clients on a network I was running (somewhere north of 100) using a 300 MHz machine for their daily email, and had no problems. Maybe you need to start looking into some blacklists or something for spam, that seems like an absurd amount to be getting on the server, even in today's world.

But I do agree that for DB use, it might not be up to the task, though without more information on what exactly it will be doing, none of us can give a definite answer one way or the other.

Yup, that was at the beginning. I was using Spamhaus's SBL and XBL as well with spamcop.net and the Open Relay Database. But they started to block authentic senders (mostly by spamcop) and users started complaining that they were losing expected mails, so I dropped spamhaus and spamcop, just kept the ORDB list. Now every spam is handled and rejected directly by spamassassin, but that's quite a load to do, I see it every day in the memory and CPU usage logs

Though users are happy as the spam delivered is tagged and reduced quite a lot. If my users are happy, so I am too.