kanotix.com :: Thema anzeigen - Linux on the Corporate Desktop: Success with Kanotix

kanotix.com

General Support - Linux on the Corporate Desktop: Success with Kanotix

cleary - 17.07.2006, 08:06 Uhr
Titel: Linux on the Corporate Desktop: Success with Kanotix

I work for a company called De Bortoli Wines in Australia. We're a manufacturing company (winemakers if you hadn't guessed Winken

) with 10 sites Australia-wide (3x wineries, 2x Vineyards, 5x Sales Offices) plus several International offices in the US, UK and Europe.

About 2 years ago we went live with our first Linux Desktop in the production environment. The format we settled on was a LiveCD for ease of updates, administration and resilience. They were initially used to replace the dumb telnet terminals a lot of our staff were using for data entry, in order to give them the extra functionality (web browsing, office suite etc) of a Windows PC without the extra administration/maintenance overheads.

The first release was based on Morphix since it provided the easiest build method (conceptually) out of the LiveCDs I tried. Unfortunately work on the Morphix project slowed until almost stopped, and it no longer met our needs for newer hardware support. The second project tested was a custom hybrid of the Kubuntu 5.04 LiveCD environment and Morphix - I decided it was not supportable. I also tried Knoppix 3.9, which looked ok, except for a major issue with swap file usage when running with the 'toram' cheatcode (the machine would simply hang when swap was required) - this was a fatal flaw because it meant that I had to run disparate versions of linux between our early hardware with 1GB of ram (which required the swap to function properly), and our newly purchased hardware with 2GB of ram (98% of users would not meet that 2GB ram limit in normal use). Also several attempts to try and bring visibility to the issue and get it resolved amounted to nothing.

Enter Kanotix - lots of activity, excellent response times in the forums, open development. Plus it did not have the same issues with swap usage as Knoppix.
I customised the 2004-04 rc15 release for my environment (Kano, I know you don't recommend the use of rc releases in production, but there was no indication of when the final release would be out and we had to get a release of our own out) - it was perfect. Rock solid, supported, easily customised, well documented scripts and custom packages. Our desktop linux usage climbed from ~15 machines in the company to >50 representing over 33% of our total desktops. It's been stuck at this point for several months while we resolved a major file locking issue which existed between Linux Clients and samba file servers (it has been resolved in the last week after ~1.5yrs of trying to get an answer - client requires 2.6.17 or higher kernel and server requires samba 3.0.23 or higher).

As a result, I'll be looking to build a new remaster from the most current Kanotix release, with the view of adding some extra features for my environment including authentication against an LDAP directory, and the file locking resolution.
Once completed, this release will push our usage to ~ 80% of our desktops over a timeframe of about 2 years.
Since all our desktop software is either cross platform (OpenOffice, Firefox) or delivered via a web interface (Domino Web Access, dotProject, ERP via telnet/ssh), the Operating System running on the client is almost irrelevant. As a result, there is a good chance the Linux desktop usage will be even higher than 80%, since the speed of these machines running out of a ramdisk is magnitudes faster than any of our Windows desktops and this is something our users have been noticing.

I'd like to thank Kano and all the Kanotix developers (that includes all the users who test it) for their contributions to what I have found to be one of the most stable LiveCD distributions available, as well as one of the best examples of the Open Source software development model in action.
I would like to try and involve myself more with the testing (and possibly development?) of Kanotix as soon as I get around the whole IRC thing which I'm very unfamiliar with... I'll get there, I'd like to do this next De Bortoli release right Winken

So I guess the main point of this post was to say Thanks, as well as give some visibility to environments where Kanotix is currently being used (possibly somewhere you didn't expect Winken

)

Keep up the good work Smilie

Cathbard - 17.07.2006, 08:44 Uhr
Titel:

Nice to see another Aussie. Welcome to the club.

Roughnecks - 17.07.2006, 16:23 Uhr
Titel:

good news, that Smilie

but i have a stupid question... Winken

did i understand that right: you boot the computer with the cd and you have customized it to authenticate users over the network and give them access to their home directories on the server?

kenyee - 17.07.2006, 18:39 Uhr
Titel:

Glad to see another Domino user too Winken

cleary - 18.07.2006, 00:08 Uhr
Titel:

Roughnecks hat folgendes geschrieben::

good news, that Smilie

but i have a stupid question... Winken

did i understand that right: you boot the computer with the cd and you have customized it to authenticate users over the network and give them access to their home directories on the server?

No - at the present moment, they boot straight into the desktop (like normal kanotix) and authenticate as required - email, erp, samba shares, proxy etc.

I'd like to remove the need to authenticate everywhere by having it authenticate against our domain at logon. Home dirs will probably remain static ie the ones on the LiveCD to avoid issues with people mucking about with their profiles Smilie

I assume it's just a matter of starting kdm at the right time and making sure all the nss-ldap and pam-ldap stuff is setup.
It's going to get a little more complex, because we don't authenticate our branches on the domain, only the head office site so I'll need to have it detect whether it's in a branch or not and configure as req'd.
It's currently doing this site detection for timezones anyway (Perth, Brisbane, Adelaide, NSW are all different timezones and it configures on boot accordingly), but I suspect the authentication thing is going to be a little more difficult Winken

kelmo - 18.07.2006, 02:06 Uhr
Titel:

Wow, cool. Nice to see Kanotix being used in the office on a large scale.

I hope one day I could be involved with something similar, however I have a hard time convincing even my own employer of the great virtues of a nice Linux network.

Kel.

cleary - 18.07.2006, 02:21 Uhr
Titel:

kelmo hat folgendes geschrieben::

...
I hope one day I could be involved with something similar, however I have a hard time convincing even my own employer of the great virtues of a nice Linux network.

Kel.

Perhaps this link could help in your persuasion:

http://www.misweb.com/magarticle.asp?do ... d_months=0

That's the top 5 CIOs of 2005 as voted by MIS magazine - check out who got "Most Innovative" and why Winken

(Bill is my manager btw, not me - I'm the development team he's referring to :p)
What blew me away was that we managed to get that sort of recognition when we have a total PC fleet of about 150, compared to the tens of thousands of desktops being supported by the other CIOs in the article Geschockt

I guess it depends on your implementation, and requires a lot of planning - but there are obvious benefits.
I think even if you never implement a single linux desktop it's worth putting measures in place now that will reduce the importance of the Desktop OS for the future Smilie

t-bone - 18.07.2006, 18:41 Uhr
Titel:

Excellent news and great job getting Kanotix set up, Cleary!

schnorrer - 19.07.2006, 01:41 Uhr
Titel:

Cleary, If you want remove the always authentification for the user, just let them do the 'Autologin' at startup with a 30 second delay.

Roughnecks - 19.07.2006, 09:39 Uhr
Titel:

schnorrer hat folgendes geschrieben::

Cleary, If you want remove the always authentification for the user, just let them do the 'Autologin' at startup with a 30 second delay.

i think he is talking about authentifications for mail and terminal services

drb - 19.07.2006, 11:06 Uhr
Titel:

Why the 30 second delay for 'Autologin'?

drb

cleary - 19.07.2006, 23:10 Uhr
Titel:

Roughnecks hat folgendes geschrieben::

schnorrer hat folgendes geschrieben::

Cleary, If you want remove the always authentification for the user, just let them do the 'Autologin' at startup with a 30 second delay.

i think he is talking about authentifications for mail and terminal services

Correct

(...and fileservers/CMS/dotProject etc) Smilie

Swynndla - 19.07.2006, 23:23 Uhr
Titel:

Hi cleary ... I'm ignorant about wine ... what's a sweet (but non-fruity) wine that I could look out for in New Zealand that's made by De Bortoli Wines?

cleary - 20.07.2006, 00:13 Uhr
Titel:

Swynndla hat folgendes geschrieben::

Hi cleary ... I'm ignorant about wine ... what's a sweet (but non-fruity) wine that I could look out for in New Zealand that's made by De Bortoli Wines?

I'm not a wine drinker either I'm afraid Verlegen

Have a look on our website, there's a pretty good description of most of our wines (you should be able to find most for sale in NZ, we have an office there too) Smilie

http://www.debortoli.com.au/196.0.html

Swynndla - 20.07.2006, 00:33 Uhr
Titel:

Hmmmm I might see if something like this is available:
http://www.debortoli.com.au/uploads/med ... rew_01.pdf

... sweet/small body Winken

michael7 - 20.07.2006, 00:39 Uhr
Titel: Cab Sav

I love Australia wines, especially Hardy's Cab Sav. I will look for yours next time I'm shopping and hopefully, I'll soon be raising a toast to De Bortoli.

DeepDayze - 20.07.2006, 13:32 Uhr
Titel: RE: Cab Sav

Would DeBortoli wine be available in US?

mzilikazi - 20.07.2006, 14:45 Uhr
Titel:

Haha you winos! Wouldn't you know that this post would deteriorate from a "Kanotix rules" post to "where can we get some wine" post. I can't believe you guys..........

I found it on the internet! Winken

http://www.wine-searcher.com/find/de+bo ... lack+noble

Now I haven't bought wine online yet so I can't recommend any of these retailers.

Oh and awesome to see Kanotix deployed in Australia! Smilie

markb - 20.07.2006, 23:29 Uhr
Titel:

cleary hat folgendes geschrieben::

I'm not a wine drinker either I'm afraid Verlegen

You work for De Bortoli and you don't drink wine?! What a waste Geschockt

Thanks for the interesting post. I'm another Aussie and long time fan of Kanotix.