Alright, I'm needing some help from any IT professionals out there that may have been in my shoes at one time.

I am an IS Manager for an engineering firm. I'm stuck in a position where the co-worker that supervised the last server upgrade (before I was hired) is still currently employed by the firm and a die-hard Novell "admin". I also have the Electrical Engineers right out side my office singing the "good graces" of everything Microsoft. They constantly go to my boss (a non-techy) and ask him when we are going to Win2K Server. Not suprisingly, I have worked on both of those and *NIX. I prefer BSD Unix and Solaris by a long shot.

Even though they act a little insubordinate at times, I have a heart so firing these people isn't an option. Since Solaris seems to be in most legitimate UNIX backoffices, I'd like to see what some of you guys say when constantly harrassed why we choose UNIX over MS and Novell. Remember this is a professional office so I need hard evidence to back your comments. Currently, I can defend rather easily against NT but the perceived difficulty of UNIX (to my unfamiliar co-workers) and reliability of Novell, make it a nightmare to peacefully migrate everything over to UNIX from the old Novell servers. The only luck I've had so far is installing BSD on all new servers without anyone's knowledge. (I know it sounds bad, but trust me, I was hired to manage this department so you have to do what you have to do.)

Your input would be appreciated.

Here is an obviously good argument against M$ servers:

SQL slammer worm, read about the 6 month old security hole that it exploited and the patch that was so complicated even M$ admins didn't bother to apply it until it was too late.

Hmm.... lets see. (Apply to all different *nix's out there)

1. Its Robust.
2. Customizable to your own needs. ( Company and Individually )
3. No License Fees.
4. Source code is readily available.
5. Secure.
6. Less vulnerable to viruses/attacks.
7. Don't have to wait for patches if you program or got a team of programmers that are familiar with making their own patches/updates. ( That's if you got source available )
8. You can get most applications for free with everything mentioned above along with them.

I could probably think of some more but its time to go home now...

I am not all that familiar with Novell, so I will toss this back as a question to you (or anyone else that cares to toss in their 2 cents).

How easy is it to install a program like tripwire on Novell? A program that tells you when important files have been altered, signifying a possible hack.

and what about an IDS (Intrusion Detection System)? You can get lids for linux for free and with it enabled you can remove the possibilty of the ocassional "rm -rf *" in an important directory. Someone would have to deliberately turn off lids protection to do this.

It may just be that I haven't come across it yet, but I haven't seen these for Windows either.

I can't even imagine a LIDS like program trying to hide an entire directory (like c:\winnt\system32) from all users (including administrator). Ughh. that would be ugly I'm sure.

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Jeremiah

The most interesting part for Novell admins is they don't even consider Intrusion Detection as necessary on Netware. I chuckle everytime I here that.

To my knowledge Tripwire is not available for Novell.

Hey tricky, those are great points that I've used often to fend off MS, but for Novell, unfortuanately, #'s 1,4,5,6,& 7 don't apply our environment. Some would say if it ain't broke don't fix it which is kind of how I justify having a mixed backoffice environment, but the Novell servers were installed undocumented so fixing performance issues is a real bear and the 400MB service packs every 4 months doesn't set well with me either. Having to make two sets of scripts for every task isn't very fun either.

Thanks guys. I'll keep plugging away at those Novell servers.

If you really want to feel sorry for me we also have an NT server that is "administered" by the electrical engineers. They don't even want me to touch it. Apparently they don't touch it either because I'm always picking up their "problems" with my weekly security audits. They don't even back it up. Must be a "NT Admin thing" that I just don't understand.

I'll add my .02 cents.
1. l0phtcrack. Wanders over to the server, finds out the password for the admin account. This can be done by anyone with an account. This is also freely downloadable software that anyone can find, and use. "Ease of use" indeed.

2. Age of platform. Unix has been around longer, growing longer, than any other common server operating system. I'll get you hard dates if you need.

3. Speed of *nix over MS. You can run a router/server/dhcp/whatever on a 200.00 computer. Can't say that about Win2K.


4. Microsoft uses Unix.

You might want to go here


http://www.kirch.net/unix-nt/#ms-solaris


and check out the very well-written comparison between NT and Solaris. Most of those things written there, though based on NT, still apply today.
There is much more, and better documented information than I could give in this short response.
I'll be happy to help you out more, if you need, and provide you with as much data as I can.

Thanks for the link. Has some good usable info.

Very funny you should mention l0phtcrack. I used a linux CD just yesterday to recover an NT Workstation admin password because "somehow" all usernames were deleted. Yes, it was the handy work of those pesky electrical engineers and not so suprisingly he had no idea how it happened. Glad linux could save the day for them,...AGAIN!

The life of a lowly IS admin.

No problems. Always glad to help take MS down a notch. Let me know if you need any more information...

Build a test lab, unix based, call it an educational system, and put your opponents on it for about two weeks under the guise of finding problems. That should take care of any complaints of stability. Better yet have them build the test lab, but make sure you give them a unix guy. The best way to convert someone is for them to do it themselves. Experience is the key.