On Mon, 2004-12-27 at 11:40 -0500, Greg Folkert wrote: > On Mon, 2004-12-27 at 09:18 -0600, Alex Malinovich wrote: --snip-- > > But I do absolutely agree that for mission critical systems, stable > > should be the only real choice. > > With or without backports? Or hand compiled packages? or Third Party > (read as non-Debian) software that needs non-Debian package (as in not > packaged by Debian Developers for Debian)?
A mission critical system definitely should not use backports and definitely SHOULD use security updates. Hand compiled packages are left to your discretion. Sometimes they are necessary, but are you confident enough in the software and have you tested it thoroughly with an identical test system for a prolonged period to make sure it won't break? Third-party software should observe all of the considerations for hand-compiled packages. Further considerations in the case of commercial software include warranties and certification of the software. If the software does break and brings your business to a grinding halt, what will the vendor to rectify the situation, and how quickly will they do it? Keep in mind that most vendors will only certify to big-name distributions like Red Hat and will not support a Debian installation. This is always up to your discretion, but if my job were riding on a system staying up I certainly wouldn't risk using commercial software on an unsupported platform. > To what extent do you see, MISSION CRITICAL SYSTEMS being? an example > please. A mission critical system is a production system which handles a major and important portion of the production process. In a previous life I worked in the IT department for a large steel company. Mission critical there meant any of the production line computers. If any of these fails, the entire line needs to be shut down. The cost of this is in the MILLIONS of dollars and that is not even considering lost profits and lost materials. Just to stop the line and start it back up is in the MILLIONS. THAT is mission critical. One of our clients at my current job runs their business almost exclusively through faxes. They have 6 servers, each handling 4 fax lines, and they go through roughly 4000 faxes in a typical day. A downtime of 1 minute could translate to 24 lost or delayed faxes, each to or from a very important customer. That's mission critical. Needless to say these boxes are all running Woody. A web or mail server for a company that does not rely on e-commerce would be non-mission critical in my opinion. A Sid system in normal operation can easily provide 99.999% uptime or better. That's roughly 9 hours of down-time in a year. (One of our file servers running Sid has been up for 480 days, so far in '04 it's at 100% uptime.) A Woody system should be able to do 99.9999% or even 99.99999% uptime. 1 hour or 5 minutes of down-time in a year, respectively. -- Alex Malinovich Support Free Software, delete your Windows partition TODAY! Encrypted mail preferred. You can get my public key from any of the pgp.net keyservers. Key ID: A6D24837
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