[Unix-help] Unix-Users January Meeting Notes

[Robert M. Lang]

Hi,

Apologies for the delay getting this out. These are the meeting minutes
for the January Unix-Users usergroup meeting where we talked about RedHat
licensing. The February meeting minutes should be mailed out early the
week of the 23rd.

Regards,
rml
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UNIX User Group
Meeting Minutes
1/15/04

Fifteen attendees plus IS&T staff.

Group Business
========================================
The UNIX/Linux user group meets every third Thursday from 1:30 to 3 
in the N42 Demo Center.
The mailing list is unix-help

Overview of current Linux services
=========================================

Proxy Server
----------------------------------------
Dan Logcher of IS&T gave an overview of the Linux proxy server 
service available from IS&T.  Once you're signed up, you receive an 
entitlement and a two line script that you run to downlaod the 
updates.

Up to 87 servers are using the service out of about 1000 licenses.

To sign up, contact Dan at dlogcher at mit.edu.

Which direction now?
----------------------------------------
Bill Cattey gave an overview of the changes that will occur once RH 9 
is desupported.

Some rough numbers from attendees:
80% running Red Hat 9
20% running Red Hat Network
100% keeping their systems up to date somehow*
50% planning to do something by April 30, 2004
0% have had a drop disabled due to a compromised machine (in the last 3 years)
20-30% also running Fedora

* somehow means that they either/or:
- download source and build new updates
- maintain a deparment update server
- pay for an update service such as Ximian Red Carpet
- site has created a hand-tooled solution
- one site has an internal department network with no outside connectivity 
  on which site does no patching

Do you feel that you must do something about an update service?
------------------------------------------

The looming deadline of April 30, 2004 has about half the sites concerned 
about support plan after that date. These sites all listed cost as a major 
factor in contiuning support. Low or zero acqusition cost is one reason many 
of these sites have migrated away from proprietary Unix systems.

How many Linux machines do you have?
--------------------------------------
Listed by department, the breakdown is (approx.):

          Workstations     Servers     Respondant
          ------------     -------     ----------
IS&T           1              4        Dan Logcher
IS&T           5              0        Alex Prengel
Math          100            10        Not SUre
EAPS          100             6        Linda Meinke/Will Heres
LNS           200             0        Stu Galley/ Sean Thompson
Whittaker      3              0        Tom Cavin
Aero/Astro     40             1        E. Paul Warren
Space Res.     15             0        Kieth Bayer
Ligo Group    145             0        Not Sure
Space Res.    350             0        Demitrious Athens

Approx. totals  are 1200 workstations and 25 servers.

The assembled group also mention computing clusters. Tech Square Partners 
(Greg Shomo) indicates that there are probably 1250 of these computers in 
use at CSAIL and thatEAPS has another 400 or so machines in compute clusters.
Further, almost all in attendance are certain that this count represents about 
one-third of the Linux computers used in research on campus.

Licensing
---------------------------------------
Moving target.  Decisions with regard to pricing will be made asap 
within IS&T and communicated to this group via the mailing list as 
soon as there is concrete information.

Current pricing model
----------------------------------------
1. Under 40 servers or 80 desktops
best to pursue individual licensing
RH Enterprise workstation - Educational $25 license and support per machine
server $50 no matter who owns the machine

2. Institutional machines over 80 machines and 40 servers:
Individual
$2500 to get proxy server, then any individually-owned machines can 
access the service for free. Institutionally owned machines cost $25 per desktop, $50 per server

Institutional
$2500 to get proxy server.  Then $7 times the number of employees to 
site license for client or server.  At this point it would be about 
$70,000 for MIT.

Comments
----------------------------------------
Fedora seems to be releasing kernel updates very frequently.
A local MIT cache of Fedora might be a useful thing to have.

Moving all RH 7 to Gentoo - 1. pedigree 2. boots with small footprint
Debian 4 on a couple of servers that don't have to integrate with 
desktops.  They use it for mail, web, and afs.  (Good on the server 
side).
Mild interest in SUSE, depending on whether or not it maintains good 
commercial support.

All sites are particularly interested in advance notice of IS&T plans in this
area. The interest is mostly budgetary concern as sites are trying to plan for FY '05.

Another concern about RedHat is that the rapid change in marketing by RedHat 
Inc. makes some folks wonder what the pricing model will be for years 
subsequent to FY '05. For the immediate future (perhaps two years out), RedHat
appears to be the most viable option.

OpenAFS
--------------------------------------
January 22 is the target date for the announcement of OpenAFS for 
Linux.  This is a repackaging of OpenAFS with installers, 
documentation, etc.  This is an implementation of OpenAFS 
for RH9.