Free software sometimes has a special, magical purpose - it fixes problems created by non-technical people that happen to be the holders-of-the-purse-strings. Because, when you have a budget of zero dollars and the owner (boss) says "we need email", what are you going to do? Pull a NT4 installation out of thin air? Waive a magic wand and POOF it does SMTP and POP and IMAP? Make email come through the air into your server without a phone line?
Red Hat 5 was a godsend during a dark period in my career. Here was the person who signed my checks saying "we need this and I'm not paying for it, end of discussion", and expecting it to happen...somehow. It took - no joke - 2 weeks to convince him that dialup internet was necessary for this to work, so he capitulated and finally paid for an account.
It was baptism by fire. I taught myself how to administer both this and Windows NT 4 at the same time, while attempting to modify someone else's program (that we had bought the source code for) to shoe-horn it into a set of requirements that the program wasn't designed for.
In the end, between 32 hour marathon non-stop don't-eat don't-sleep make-400-floppy-disks sessions, and the constant head-banging of trying to be not one but two systems administrators and a programmer all at the same time...somehow, it worked out. The sales program stabilized, the Red Hat install was downloading email (via fetchmail) regularly, email was going out, and it even doubled as a network print server.
Along the way I learned:
- that Microsoft's marketing was just that, marketing. There were many things that were hyped but just not there on NT 4's release.
- Sometimes, it's not the hardware, it's the software. The NT 4 install ran on a IBM PC server and was, ah, twitchy at times, but it worked. The Red Hat install ran on what the head accountant charitably described as "a piece of (censored)" 486 that they thought was flaky; they literally wanted to throw it out. That flaky 486 box went on to out-perform the top-of-the-line multi-Pentium IBM PC box regularly. The NT server had to be rebooted about once a month, or it would eventually just "seize up", and there's no greater motivation for reboots than a 250lb boss with anger management issues pounding on your door hard enough to possibly break the hinges. The 486 recorded an uptime of over 220 days before a power outage took it down. The proof is in the pudding, and that's what sold me.
- There was a little-known bug in NT4 that could, under the right circumstances, cause the server to blue-screen by simply pressing Ctrl-Alt-Del at the right time (edit: at long last, found it: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/163874 has all the gory details). Microsoft has quietly made the KB's for these into "unpersons", i.e. you can't find them easily...but they were there, and there are a few graybeards out there that know what I'm talking about. Kinda makes sense really, I mean it's bad for sales if you let people hear that you can crash your server by using only keypress combination available to you to log in. Let that sink in for a second - pressing the secure key combo resulted in a server simply crashing, if you did it at the wrong time. I did it...once...and never did it again, after the boss just about came unglued. After that, I always waited for the login graphic to appear. (this issue was quietly fixed in SP2 or SP3, can't remember which one...)
- I also learned (from that event) that if you trusted Windows to do what it advertises itself as capable of, it would eventually burn you. After that little experience with the keypress thing I was always on my guard. Good thing too - because several more issues appeared, each of which would have been a major grief if I had trusted the software to do what it was "advertised as capable of".
So:
I started with Linux because I needed a tool to literally stay alive, i.e. put food on the table and keep a roof over my head.
I stayed with it because, when I've hit a wall in Windows that requires resources I don't have, Linux is there to pick up the slack.
