Federal Aviation Administration Saves $15 Million by Migrating to Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Business Wire 2006 ^ | 04/26/06 | unknown

[N3WBI3]

OSS PING

If you are interested in the OSS ping list please mail me

[Incorrigible]

I wonder if there is a way to automate pinglists, where you could feed a script the article number, and it would generate a ping message automagically.

Time to convince John that FR should be reprogrammed using .NET Frameworks 2.0, SQL Server 2005 and Atlas.  Could build in some really cool stuff then!

 

[Golden Eagle]

I don't know what those central systems were but FAA uses a lot of Solaris at individual airports/strips. I know somebody that works at one and I'm SURE he would have told me if it had been changed to something else.

[N3WBI3]

Red Hat Certified Engineer

One of the best certs out there 100% practical not multiple guess! Its also multi-tiered meaning you may not score high enough to get the RHCE but you may get the RHCT (Red Hat Certified Technician) which is a great cert for admins..

[blowfish]

They base almost every decision on what's the absolute cheapest, and free software is as cheap as you can possibly go.

Fortunately, 'cheap' != 'low cost'.
Knowing what I do about OpenSource platforms, I will feel no less safe.

[zeugma]

If you see this message the answer is yes.

[antiRepublicrat]

That's one of the worst things about the government. They base almost every decision on what's the absolute cheapest

One of the worst things about government is that it rarely keeps itself to the standard of what's cheapest that will accomplish the mission. They just saved $15 million of my tax dollars, so I'm happy.

Oh, I forgot, you prefer subsidies to IT companies in the form of the government always paying more than it needs to, and you don't mind that the taxpayers get stuck with the bill.

I for one know I won't feel any safer next time I'm flying!

Just be glad they didn't go with Microsoft. There was a Microsoft system in air traffic control that required regular restarts to keep running. They were normally scheduled every 30 days to avoid the bug (which blew every 49.7 days), but someone forgot and the machine restarted itself right in the middle of operations, threatening air traffic. It was a problem with using Microsoft's RPC and GetTickCount(). They didn't have that problem when it was running on UNIX.

[Golden Eagle]

I guess you haven't heard about all the problems Airbus has been having with their various uses of Linux?

Rebooting Your Airbus

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1620586/posts

[zeugma]

Contact me if you'd be interested in post #26

[antiRepublicrat]

Time to convince John that FR should be reprogrammed using .NET Frameworks 2.0, SQL Server 2005 and Atlas. Could build in some really cool stuff then!

What benefit could that give over simply expanding his current free software setup vs. the cost of retraining, reprogramming and purchasing?

[ShadowAce]

I wonder if there is a way to automate pinglists,

Probably, but I think it would have to be on the server side, rather than the client side.

[Incorrigible]

What you save with "free" software you lose in development time and effort!

[VOA]

bump

[antiRepublicrat]

What you save with "free" software you lose in development time and effort!

First, not necessarily, and second, you lose in retraining and rewriting. In this case the cost of licenses plus retraining (for JR) would probably exceed the cost of adding some desired functionality using the open source tools he's familiar with, or simply downloading and modifying an existing open source application.

Microsoft likes to use costs of migrating from Microsoft when doing Linux TCO studies, but street does go both ways.

BTW, I say this as a .NET developer.

[fremont_steve]

Byte you tongue!!!! ;-)

[antiRepublicrat]

Probably, but I think it would have to be on the server side, rather than the client side.

This could be done with a Firefox extension:

1. Create XML files of ping lists
2. Create a dialog that accepts a story number and which ping list
3. One of:
   • Knows how the POST works and submits the proper data (you can get this by watching the POST of any post you make)
   • Browses to the page, finds the "post reply" button, clicks it, puts your ping list in the To:, writes some text, and submits

The reason Firefox would be easier than Perl is because all the authorization is already set if you use the cookies.

[zeugma]

reply #26 was done with curl. it's basically a one line shell script.

[N3WBI3]

Unix is getting eaten away at both ends 15 years ago MS did not have an OS you would run an enterprise database. All this talk about how Linux and Linux alone is ignoring this question..

What was Windows Server Footprint in 1996? Ten Years ago MS IIS had 5% of the web server market, today IIS is running at about 33%. I am relatively certain that you will see similar behavior for Mail Servers, DNS Servers, and the like. All this talk about how Only Linux is hurting Unix is a joke..

[N3WBI3]

Whay would you need all that crap to make the ping list automated

[VOATNOW1]

Linux has come along way in the last few years. That, and the fact that it is UNIX based is a big plus for stability and security to boot (har har). The "geek toy" days of Linux are long gone as a growing number of large corporations are adopting this OS platform.