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Major Linux Deployments 115

Posted by michael from the double-time dept.
bstadil writes: "In the early days of Linux' entry into the mainstream (late 1998) Slashdot covered interesting wins for the OS like Burlington Coat Factory. Maybe its time to do it again. Within 48 hours Linux has made two HUGE inroads that merits mentioning. The first is the announcement of Home Depot plannig 90.000 Cash Registers running linux and Telia in Scandinavia replacing 70 Sun servers + Solaris with one IBM mainframe running Linux. One machine serving 800,000 internet accounts." ZDNet has a few more details.
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Major Linux Deployments More

Major Linux Deployments

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  • You make it sound as if Home Depot is the only company that does drug tests. It's more common than you think. I don't have any statistics, sorry, and right now I'm too lazy to look some up. :-D

    Heh, have you ever worked in a retail environment? I have. I've worked with "the 16-year-old running the cash register...stoned." It's Not Good. Yeah, you might think that, gee, you're just there making money from The Man(TM) and you'll do the marginal work it takes to get your money from The Man(TM). Maybe it's because I worked in a retail environment in a small town, but the funny thing is, people start to associate you with that business. If you just do the bare minimum for The Man(TM), people start to talk. If you go out of your way to help, yet again people start to talk. :-) I used to work with a kid who'd show up stoned all the time. Amazingly enough, the kid could *sell* when he was stoned. Unfortunately, he was willing to cut just about any deal to get a sale when he was stoned. It was bad only because I had to work with him. People seemed to think I was guilty by association. :-)

    My point is this. In my experience, after the initial drug testing, most businesses only test for a reason. I guess Home Depot goes further. Is that a problem for you? Then don't shop there and don't work there! If everyone felt that people should be able to smoke pot, Home Depot wouldn't have any business.

    BTW, nice troll. :-)
  • I went to Home Depot to order a sheet of Formica for a project and not one person in the store knew how to order the stuff. They had samples and catalogs, I just couldn't buy it. I waited for almost an hour while they paged everyone in the store. I ended up going to Menards.

  • Yeah, they do so much for the community--such as keeping their employees in poverty, supporting right-wing organizations, forcing mom-n-pops out of business through predatory pricing, receiving corporate welfare through their (some)drug-free workplace program, and jacking up the price on plywood after a hurricane takes out half of Florida.

    The relationship between (some)drugs and workplace injury has not been credibly established. However, a recent study on driver impairment shows that the top three factors are:

    sleep deprivation

    alcohol

    other drugs
    Ahem. Why don't employers test for alcohol? Because the Drug-Free Workplace Program offers federally-subsidized discounts (up to 50%) on Workers' Compensation premiums for companies that do (some)drug testing. The politicians have somehow convinced America that alcohol is not a drug! As far as I know, (some)drug screening only occurs in "the land of the free". Ironic.

    So, next time you're in a Home Depot, beware of employees who may be drunk to ease the depression from wage slavery, or who are sleep-deprived from having to work a second job to make ends meet




    I'd rather be a unix freak than a freaky eunuch
  • You and sirwired have the same flaw, "provided security is good enough". I know how the unit is made. I was just saying, don't put all your eggs in one basket, no matter how disjoined and reliable the basket is.
  • While I don't typically like mandatory drug testing, I can understand why a hardware store like Home Depot might want to do so. There are employees driving forklifts, cutting wood and any number of other things. The last thing I want is someone drunk, rolling, dosed, stoned, etc. running into me with the a pallet jack or forklift.

    However, I don't care if someone at taco hell hands me my food while drugged up, as long as they wash their hands after using the bathroom!

    They're going to support Linux, and they do quite a bit [homedepot.com] for the community
  • Ugh, ok, lets not even think of terms of hacking, you take your one boat (and sorry, rowboats is a bit brutual when discussin sun servers, they are fairly nice.) But when um a natural disaster, oh say, a large storm knocks a wall on your one box, tell me you would have rather had a couple sites of equal, load-balanced, and mirrored servers then, especially when dealing with "800,000" accounts.
  • Methinks you are not aware of VM.

    VM stands for "virtual machine." It gives the impression of running on a real piece of hardware. VM is so good at virtualizing the machine, it was used for OS development. (It really started as an internal OS development tool, not a standalone OS.)

    A hacker working on one virtual machine can't trash a different virtual machine, or the root machine (which may also be virtual). It's like process protection, but extended to the entire OS environment.

    390 series hardware uptime is measured in years. There is so much error checking and redundancy. They rarely go down for hardware problems. And when I say rare, I mean many years, as in 10 or 20. (Sorry, I don't have the exact number handy, but it is bigger than the age of many /. readers.)

  • I had this problem too: it just came out of nowhere. I fixed it by going in to the control panel's font section and specifying the exact fonts that I wanted, overriding the defaults.

    HTH

    David
  • I never thought I would see the day when a whole gaggle of geeks would celebrate a big bunch of Sun boxes replaced with an IBM mainframe, but I guess shit happens.

    LOL.... yeah... Big Blue is no longer the enemy. It's funny how things change over a couple decades. WRT the single point of failure you might have a point but I seem to recall reading somwhere where the S/390 is pretty much as reliable as they come. You have to pay for it but the IBM hardware is probably beter then Sun's with regards to reliability. (Even though I'm a Sun fan IMHO this is true)

    "In the early days of Linux' entry into the mainstream (late 1998) Slashdot covered interesting wins for the OS like Burlington Coat Factory.

    Yeah, not to sound like a jerk but that's when slashdot was really cool. Now it seems that being mainstream has watered it down a bit and altered the personality. Ah well, nothing stays the same I suppose.
  • I have to disagree on one point, when recently installing SUSE 7.0, my son's comment was "God, this is easier than windows 98"
  • Then, the new KDE 2 is sweet. Gnome looks also great, but I'm more of a KDE fan myself (please don't flame me on this, is a matter of personal preference). Maybe they don't have the ease of use of Macs yet, but they're close.

    I think this is part of the problem with GUIs and the attempts to implement them. People think a GUI is all that is needed for ease of use. More thought needs to go into it though. For example Mac OS places CDs and Disks, that are inserted into a drive, on the desktop automatically. I think this is superior, in terms of ease of use, to the way that Windows makes you go to the particular drive and click on it to acces the CD or Disk. There are hundreds of decisions like this one that affect the ease-of-use of the OS which are beyond having a good looking GUI. It is also important that the GUI be very powerful and allow you to do pretty much anything that you can do with a CLI. If the GUI doesn't do this then it is simply a pretty picture to look at.

    the only thing that's holding it back is the lack of powerfull, easy to use applications.

    I was actually going to get into this on my first post but decided not to. I guess I'll get into it now. Yeah this is a big problem for Linux and it is a very hard one to reconcile because of the philosophy behind linux and open source. Easy to use software is usually made for consumer platforms which right now linux is not. It is usually made by companies trying to make a profit too. While it is yet unknown if real sustenable profit can be made from open source software most for-profit companies seem to have made their mind about it. They think it is not a viable option. Since the crowd that uses linux is for the most part willing to use vi or emacs instead of M$ word, the for-profit companies think that no matter if their product has a different approach on a task or targets a different use the Linux crowd will use a free solution for another problem if the solution is close enough to the one needed. Since there are geek tools available in Linux for almost all problems companies dont think they can make inroads into the GNU/Linux market. Adobe probably thinks "Why port Photoshop to Linux since they will just use GIMP instead?" Photoshop could be a better product (I don't know if it is or not I use neither program) but Linux users will probably stick to GIMP. After all Photoshop costs $600 and GIMP comes with many distributions. So for-profit companies are afraid of open source, and they do have reasons to be afraid. They feel more comfortable with close source OSs because they are part of the old boys network and play by the old boys network rules. If you look around the few big companies "embracing" open source are harware companies which have been resenting the profit margins that software companies get and the leverage this gives them in the stock markets.

  • I can sympathize with coworkers who pawn off work. Unfortunately, they don't need to be drunk to do this.

    If a person was drunk you'd think that would show up in there prior experience, and perhaps the drug test. Sure they can sober up for an interview or a drug test, but how are you going to find that out in a credit check?

    Secondly, we already tell private businesses how they must conduct hiring practices. In particular, how they may not conduct it. I'll argue that it's good to have anti-discrimination legislation. I've talked with hiring managers who say it's illegal to ask a company listed as a reference for more than dates of employment, and salary/wages. This is to prevent blacklisting. So if you can't get that information, which would be much more directly relevant to a hiring decision, why should you get the highly indirect/speculative and personal financial background of a candidate?

    Further, companies and organizations have a right to keep trade secrets, and such, but why privacy? Companies and organizations are by nature far more exposed to the public than people are. For instance, financial statements are public in the case of corporations, and some companies. In short, private businesses aren't as private as you may think, but people are, and need protection.

  • This sounds like a colossal maintenance burden. I mean, I guess it's easier to maintain 30,000 installations of Linux on one machine than 30,000 machines, but it has to be harder than maintaining 30,000 accounts on [less than 30,000] installations of Linux. Does each user get his own root password? What happens when the next version of SuSE comes out?

    You are missing the point. Every user gets their own virtual computer to play with. They have root on their own computer. But they do not have root on anyone else's virtual machine (nothing to do with java :-) In fact, they cannot access other people's machines at all. Basically, it's almost as if every user had their own physical box hosted at Telia.

    Telia does not have to maintain any of these virtual machines. All they need to do is create one when a user signs up. After that, the user has complete control over their own box.

    This is really cool. But the real question is whether it's cost effective. 1500 individual boxes would be definitely several orders of magnitude faster than a single mainframe.
    ___

  • Home Depot's adpoting linux-based POS (point of sale, a/k/a cash register) systems isn't that big a suprise. They already run a *nix as their back end (if you go into a Home Depot, notice all those terminals with "TTY (some number)" stickered on top throughout the store. From observation, their current POS systems aparently run a Windows 3.x (or NT 3.51) system and moving to linux is just a smart move (make all your systems pretty much alike).

    IBM, on the other hand, is a VERY big thing. A great many stores use IBM POS systems. Most run either IBM's 4690 OS (a DOS-like system) or Windows NT 4. I wouldn't mind seeing the next version of 4690 OS being more *nix-ey... I work for a large supermarket chain and we use all IBM systems: 4690 on the POS system and RS/6000s running AIX for the back end systems. They're both more than 99% reliable.
  • As I see it, the biggest win is that IBM would never have sold this machine if Linux hadn't run on it. No way would the client have been able to run it cost-efficient if he had to pay for thousands of OS/390 licences. This is why IBM is pushing Linux. Let someone else maintain/build the OS, we'll help them for free and in the meantime we sell hardware and services.

    Indeed: Win, win, win! :-)

    Thimo
    --
  • the only thing that's holding it back is the lack of powerfull, easy to use applications.

    This will change when KYLIX ships

  • Actually, with or without the Linux, they only need a license for one copy of OS/390. With the Linux, they are just running each copy of Linux as a separate task under OS/390. Without the Linux they would just be running something else. Now, for the something else they might have needed hundreds or thousands of licenses, and that could run into some serious money - mainframe software licenses are expensive like you can't believe. A copy of PKZIP on a mainframe costs something like USD $30,000 a year for the license (it depends on the specific box). So, you're correct on your basic point - Linux is the reason they are able to do this economically.
  • I've been reading about Home Depot in the computer trade rags for years, every time they're mentioned it seems like it's something new. First it was widespread javastation deployment, then that fell through, so it was Windows CE. Today I see it's Linux. I almost wonder if they are deploying anything, or just perpetually in the planning stage.
  • I have no doubt that the Linux deployment at Home Depot will be a success.

    What I will be watching is how the Java client runs on all of those POS devices.

    Will it really have the speed required for that type of application.

    I once wrote a POS applications in C for Siemens Nixdorf. It's amazing what thet registers go through and how they get beaten (physically) by the users.

    It would be a shame if this Linux deployment 'fails' because Java doesn't live up to is marketing!!

  • What is the most likely result of the following; Home Depot, Burlington Coat Factory and Musicland adopting GNU/Linux based POS systems:
    #1) Teams of internal developers making CVS submissions to various projects, bugfixes and kernel hacks?
    #2) Donations to various GNU/Linux or Free Software projects that are 'in line' with the financial where-with-all of these organizations considering the $ 'saved'
    #3) The VP of IT of each company gets a massive bonus for saving The Company money. The whole Board of Directors buys another Mercedes.

    I hope it is Case#1 or Case#2. We know that it takes alot of effort to convince people to 'get' the reasons and value of Free Software. One of the major flaws of the GNU license (IMHO) is that there is not method or action for people who have no intention of 'contributing' to A) Admit they dont care to participate or B) Mechanism for compensation for the efforts of others or C) insert-your-idea-here-similar-to-above

    My fear is that Free Software is going to turn into a subsidy system for Big Business... the least they could do is say Thank-You.. or send RMS, Havoc, Linus, Alan Cox, a discount card. They (and thousands of others) have saved these companies from the M$ Tax surely they 'owe something back.'

  • concidering that a PC's I/O ability is nothing to write home about I think the S/390 would actually provide a improvement in speed.
  • Somewhere out there, some old timers once dismissed as "dinosaurs" must be smiling. A flock of 70 boxes got replaced by a single S/390 mainframe. All hail big iron!
  • Je desolé!
    Ursäkta!
    Excuse me!
    Urskuld!

    Didn't know. I'm quite issolated from what happens in my former home region (I'm from Swerden, where it'
    s really Felia, the Hell Labs, since they are the old state-owned monopoly, which owns like all wires...) (I've moved to France)... Oh, that sounds great...
  • These developments are certainly interesting, but I will point out that wide-scale deployments of open source systems is not a new thing! As of a year ago, IBM had shipped at least a quarter million NetStation (now NetVista) thin clients to large companies, and they run... not Linux, but NetBSD. (Unfortunately IBM doesn't mention this much.)

  • ... but I was in a Home Despot, er, Depot last week and I could have sworn the little floor terminals and POS systems were HP pizza-box workstations. The GUI certainly didn't scream MS (more like (n)curses). I can imagine that unix thin clients (virtually dumb terms) make a lot of sense for this use (high reliability (hw and sw), low power consumption, ease of development). True, x86 hw is cheaper than proprietary unix hardware, and win32 probably costs less in bulk than HPUX or whatever, but then how much revenue do you lose when all the cash registers BSOD?

    Now up steps linux, a POSIX environment than runs on cheap x86 hardware and is available for free with a full suite of programming tools. Switching is definitely not a hard decision to make if you're already using a Unix-terminal-based solution.


    --

  • And having Linux in cash registers benefits Linux because...?

    Because someone installs them. Someone maintains them. Many of the store drones get a little more comfortable with Linux (or at least hear the word), and if they go to buy a computer of their own, they know there are alternatives to Windoze.

    This is a big gain relative to the 85% of the population who figure microsoft is to computers what the local electric company is to electricity: the only game in town.

  • Drug testing is pretty standard procedure in those types of jobs. Don't forget that they have people carrying around saws and driving forklifts and such. If you prefer to have someone that smokes crack driving a forklift with a load of bricks over your head, be my guest. Also, noone forces people to work for Home Depot so it is, as a private company, their right to test for illegal substances.

    Anyways, let's just go back to the linux conversation that this article is about. I think it is a good move, but to the end users they probably won't see a whole lot of difference as it's just a shell as much as anything else they use. I do remember being able to get the handheld scanning devices to go to a DOS prompt at Sam's and Walmart. That was pretty cool. :o)

  • And having Linux in cash registers benefits Linux because...?

    Simple answer: It doesn't have any benefit for desktop users. Do you normally think about the various embedded OSs that are used in cars and industrial facilities?
  • I tried to buy a 3/8" 20 threads per inch nut there for my car shocks (the old shocks had a thicker thread bolt) and the moron employee either didn't want to help me find the part, or he didn't know how to find the part. They're really going down hill...
    "Titanic was 3hr and 17min long. They could have lost 3hr and 17min from that."
  • It seems you (and many other readers) are not familiar with the S/390 (or z-series) platform.

    1. Yes, it is one box, but that does not mean, that gaining access to one server gives you the ability to access other server in the box, provided your general security is good enough
    2. One of the few components in this box which is not redundant is the CP-unit it self, which have a MTBF around 60 years(!)
    3. From a hardware point of view it doesn't matter is the box runs VMS, OS/390 or Linux in it's VM's, but for the Linux community this is yet another step towards world domination ;)

    --
  • I did not read the article yet, but when they say adding a server, are they adding an additional virutal server under the same instance of apache or websphere, or are the adding an additional virtual machine? True, its hosted on on physical server, but in my experience, IBM likes to break things apart into virtual machines.
  • I ordered SUSE 7.0 for PPC and am supposed to get it today. We will see if it is easier to install than Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X. I have installed Windows 95 on a few computers and i never had any trouble doing it. it took a lot of time but i had no trouble. maybe i was lucky. Mac OS was way easier to install though.
  • If there's a natural disaster of that magnitude (i.e., enough to take out your average data-center building). Remember, this is a business and things have to be cost effective. Someone, somewhere sat down and crunched the numbers to figure out what the chance of some freak accident was and the cost of having only one installation vs. two. I'd bet a whole tonne of money that your solution was a hell of a lot more expensive than the risk.
  • As long as the deployment isn't a total distaster it'll be a real good thing both for linux (running on *big* systems), *and* for IBM

    I vaguely recall reading Linux Possibly Ported to IBM Mainframes [slashdot.org], which raised the possiblity of running more than one instance of Linux. The eWeek article quotes an IBM exec. as saying, "Telia will initially host more than 1,500 customers through individual Linux images, with near-instantaneous scalability up to 30,000 images."

    This sounds like a colossal maintenance burden. I mean, I guess it's easier to maintain 30,000 installations of Linux on one machine than 30,000 machines, but it has to be harder than maintaining 30,000 accounts on [less than 30,000] installations of Linux. Does each user get his own root password? What happens when the next version of SuSE comes out?

  • Another big point is the speed at which the VM's can communicate with eachother.
  • I was just saying, don't put all your eggs in one basket, no matter how disjoined and reliable the basket is.

    That isn't necessarily always the best policy. Redundant systems are more complex, and potentially introduce additional failure modes. If you've ever had a inline UPS fail for no good reason while the mains was OK, you'll know what I mean.

    Besides, a really serious system will have a disaster recovery plan, presumably including a standby site of some sort.

  • From my point of view, you need A+ security no matter wether you're running 1500 virtual servers in one box or 1500 physical servers.
    --

  • I agree that this increases prestige for Linux. Mainframes have gotten an extremely bad reputation for several reasons that Linux would address.

    1. Ease of use: Mainframes have historically been hard to use and/or interface with. Anyone who has worked with MVS or what is now known as OS/390 and next Z/OS would remember horrible things. Examples are JCL (Satan's version of a batch file or shell script), Record based file systems such as PDS's, VSAM datasets, and the like which either can't or are hard to directly copy or interface with, and must be preallocated before use. No GUI interface, and limited command line capability in ISPF. There is an X Windows capability via the UNIX services layer, but applications and utilities haven't been ported there much.

    2. Culture--This is good and bad. Mainframe programmers tend to be very disciplined. They can also be resistent to change (ie. stubborn), slow because they're disciplined or because they're just slow.

    Yet these are just the OS and cultural problems. This is what mainframe architecture gives and has given almost since conception.

    1. Reliability. If your DASD(permanent storage), CPU or other device goes out, you can take it off line, and replace it without taking the system down. In some installations, IBM will automatically be notified of this failure and send out a service person to replace it without even a phone call. Try that with an INTEL box of any kind.

    The architecture is also very stable, in that the instruction set hasn't changed much over the years. This allows it to be perfected as it grows. You can still run programs from 25 years ago on today's systems (at least in many cases), without recompilation (though it won't be fully optimized).

    2. Scalability. Yeah, it's a single box. But even in its infancy it had a processor complex with the option of containing multiple processors, each of which has been designed for this purpose. You can also many mainframes and form what IBM calls a sysplex. Processing power can also be partitioned into what is known as LPARS, meaning multiple (possibily heterogenous)operating systems can be running simultaneously on the same system. Processing power can be split in a specified proportion, not necessarily equally. They also won't interfere with each other because it is not done at a software level.

    All this gives Linux a reliable hardware platform, which in turn makes Linux look more credible.

  • Once Bush gets firmly ensconced in office, it will be latent homosexual tendency testing, liberal testing, and differently thinking testing.

    Why stop at "thinking differently" ? Bush will be after anyone who can think, out of sheer jealousy

  • Though I'm sure this will get modded down, or at least receive nasty flames.

    Companies want someone to blame when software fails. They want to be reassured that their software is good. They pay thousands of dollars for this reassurance. Now, what's sounds more reassuring..software produced by a company used by 90% of the world, traded publicly..or software created by a few guys in their spare time for free. In the case of free software, they basically receive it with no guarantee it will work properly. Most companies will not gamble in this way. It's corporate culture, and that's bigger than most governments, much less the comparably puny "free software" movement. Indeed, look at telia going with IBM, and you bet IBM is providing support for all the software on the machine. It may be linux, but i doubt it's the same thing most people on /. use.

    Furthermore, most software companies arent going to bother porting their software to linux or developing for it. Why? Because of the linux culture. Linux culture is based around the GPL, which is about as business-friendly as communism.

    That's right, the GPL is the licensing equivalent of Communism.

    Now before you turn your ears (or eyes) off, realize the similarities between them. I'm not anti-free software, and i'm not anti-communist. They represent moral plateaus, and i think free software is excellent. But no company will ever base their product line, or even dedicate that many resources, to developing for a culture that's based around the GPL. It enforces that software must be free. Business is about making money. Therefore, something inherantly free, does not go well with the profit-needing business. This is why corel, adobe and other big names are dropping their linux programs. This is why companies like red hat are sliding into danger..investors have realized the fundamental flaw of combining making money (business) with something you cant legally make much money with.

    So how does this all tie together? Well since big companies are going to barely support linux, if at all, other companies arent going to want to invest their critical systems in software that's unsupported by other big companies. This will all limit the migration to consumer desktops. Consumers will want to use the same software they use at work.

    And that's the catch. Linux will always have it's place, as it should, but it will never dominate. And it's just downright dumb to base your business off it.

  • everything sucks about telia except this
  • IBM did put a lot of work into the S/390 port, and there is work at IBM at improving Linux on PowerPC (including compiler work for GCC). So, it's not totally free for IBM, but with all of the base Linux work done, it does save a lot of cash...

    --
  • Still better than any Menards...

    --
  • Victoria's Secret doesn't need a mainframe. Everyone knows that all the users of their site are palm pilots.

  • Jack of all trades, master of none.
  • I'm not realy sure if this is good news or bad, because as any swedish person knows - Telia isn't known for the good decisions they make, rather the opposite...
  • Actually I used to work on a mainframe myself. OS/390 v2.4-2.8. And yes, I have used JCL rather extensively, and have found it do what you say--but not much more. It's a very precise way of executing files, and crude file management. Compare that with shell scripts which don't require column alignments and a // in column 1. Its advantage is simplicity in reading once you understand it, because you can't do much with it. OS/390 is a really good OS internally. I just don't like everything being limited to units of 8 characters (PDS member names, portions of a DSN,etc). You also can't beat it for programs like RACF for power. With the Unix System Services (which includes vi!), it's gotten a lot more flexible and enables easier porting of UNIX programs. However, I've done admin work on them, from setting up RACF classes, users, TCP/IP stacks, some SMP/E, parmlib setups, etc. Reliable? Definately. Powerful? Usually. Easy? Almost never. Overall though, the architecture and design would make most people here on Slashdot feel in awe of it. Incidently, most of these complaints don't apply to VM, which is what Linux first ran on. I think I saw an article saying IBM got 40,000 partitions running. I stopped working on them because my product didn't want any more Unix type work done, not because of hatred. I respect them quite a great deal.
  • So they will probably be switching to BB corporate POS system. And since BB sells a lot of MSFT PC's...it won't be linux. Still got Home Depot though.

  • Ever see uptime figures on an IBM mainframe?

  • oh great!! (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    hi all (george here)

    this is a TIME BOMB in the making, i think that this spells the end of all internet access for scandinavia!! when the telia mainframe goes down as it eventually will because it is running linux, they will need techs to fix it and bring it back up!! but then nobody will be able to go in and fix it because scandinavia is cold and nobody has any coats because the burlington coat factory's cash registers all crashed!!

    sure they could build heated tunnels from the homes of tech workers to the mainframe itself but to do that they would need lots of building materials and where will you find them!! home depot!! but GUESS WHAT, you can't buy anything from there becuase they're cash registers don't work either!! oh woe is all of us if linux is to be used!!

    this may be the end of western civilization

    your bud
    -gbd
  • s/foo/bar buddy. Hard to say that is more obscure than the Edit version. NB that if there is whitespace in one or the other of your strings, that is no problem in vi:

    s/several times easier/far more primitive

    If there are slashes, no worries, use any other character as a separator:

    s!batch/shell!bourne shell

    This exact same command set applies in vi, ed, sed, perl. (Well, you have to close your parentheses with sed and perl: s/foo/bar/.)

  • Altered expectations (Score:4)

    by Stickerboy ( 61554 ) on Thursday December 07, 2000 @07:57AM (#575296) Homepage
    The reason why Burlington Coat factory was such a big deal was because Linux, at that time, was a relative unknown to high-level IT management.

    Any kind of enterprise-wide deployment a few years ago, be it Butt Scrapers 'R' Us or IBM, would have been celebrated, and rightly so, as a milestone for Linux adoption.

    Nowadays, with all of the overexposure from the mainstream media on down, enterprise deployments have become ho-hum. I think most of us are now waiting on widespread consumer adoption as the next logical wave-maker for the Linux community.
  • So perhaps the cult is not such a cult afterall! What would be nice is to see it used for more than cash registers (which is what b.c.f. did) and see it make it into a fortune 500 destop roll.
  • It's sad to see...
    Before I start.. I'm going to use the words "get it" in a way ESR dose not.. so don't jump...

    It's sad becouse amoung companys Sun "gets in" in terms of technology. Posably one of the few left who really do.

    On the other hand they don't "get it" in terms of market.

    Sun aims at the ultra high end and while that in itself is a good plan they leave no exit.
    As computers get more powerful fewer will need the ultra high end. This means fewer will need to pay for Suns most expensive servers.
    Why buy a $10,000 Sun when a $600 Compaq dose the job?

    A server needs to reliably deliver data to thousands of people at any given moment. Nothing more nothing less.

    The simple fact is Linux dose the job.
    Yes if someone attacks the server Solarus handles it better. On the other hand it dosn't make any real diffrence what the server dose during those times. If nobody can reach the server it dosn't matter how well it reacts.. or if it reacts at all.

    Sun has allready cut off it's own exit and there is no turnning back.

    The mass market servers are here. It's only a matter of who's mass market server will rule the day... MacOs, Linux, BSD, or Windows NT/2K

    Sun is the next Amiga... a good company with a great product dying purely due to poor busness planning
  • Replacing that many Sun boxen with one IBM/Linux box? cool!

    Okay, where's their surplus? I wanna get me some new Sparcs!

    "Titanic was 3hr and 17min long. They could have lost 3hr and 17min from that."
  • #4) More Linux hype.. "We saved money using Linux.. Totall cost of what?"

  • Even more of a win for IBM (Score:5)

    by Mike Connell ( 81274 ) on Thursday December 07, 2000 @07:53AM (#575301) Homepage
    The best thing about this (from my point of view), is not Telia going with Linux, it's IBM selling a big chunk of machinery with Linux on it. As long as the deployment isn't a total distaster it'll be a real good thing both for linux (running on *big* systems), *and* for IBM, *selling* - for money using linux. Hopefully a few of these types of sales will help cement IBMs commitment to both linux and open source...

    Win win win!

    Mike.
  • OK, thanks, I didn't know that, because I couldn't find it in the man page. vi is a very good editor, but has a far steeper learning curve. That's what I was objecting to, the original poster saying that mainframes are hard to use, when Unix is just as difficult in different ways. The white space is just to separate the command 'change foo to bar' is what it translates as.
  • Home Depot?

    Isn't that the hardware chain that proudly announces that they drug test their employees?

    Yeap, it's not just 20 hours of minumum wage work a week, it's your entire life. If you try drugs, or even be in the same room with someone smoking pot, you're out of there!

    I guess it makes sense, you don't want the 16 year old running the cash register, to press the wrong button because they're stoned. Makes me want to run out and support them.

    I would have thought that with demeaning, invasice and controlling attitudes like that, they'd be running Win2k.
  • Forgot one thing. c 'confusing syntax' 'simple syntax' would be the way to avoid white space problems on ISPF.
  • This is a good move for them. Not that I care how much money this must be for them, but how much help this gives to the Linux movement.

    Not that I care much for IBM mainframe hardware, but I think running Linux on these boxes are a great way for companies to get some more life out of their hardware for (minimal) cost.
  • I switch to FreeBSD. Damn I'm such a moron.

  • Where did the 800,000 accounts come from? I read that the 390 would have 1,500 web servers in essence. Since it is really just one big server acting as 1500. And then there is the quote in the article saying now it will only take 5 minutes to add a server. YOU AREN'T ADDING A SERVER. You are basically creating a new directory. So yes it is quicker but you take some resources away from the other servers. Also while 390's do not go down if this guy does talk about impact now. I mean true more than likely she will never fail as the 3 million redundant levels of everything page IBM before anything fails, but if it does go down you just had the equivalent of 1500 servers go down. oh well.

  • at first... (Score:4)

    by gedanken ( 24390 ) on Thursday December 07, 2000 @08:00AM (#575308)
    at first the 90.000 Cash Registers seemed like a lot until people realized that the actual number was 90 with with 3 zeros after the decimal.

    note: i am aware that some countries use decimals instead of commas.
  • Who knew ASCII art could be so absolutly vile? Jeez, I'd prefer a "PenisBirdGuy" post over that.

    Time to start browsing at [Score: 2, Highest First]. What a pity. I held out as long as I could.

    On a more, "On-Topic" note, massive deployment of embedded Linux systems in zero downtime environments is a breath of fresh air. When Burlington did it, it was special because it one of the first deployments of Linux as retail point-of-sale machines. Home Depot is smart to follow suit, but I don't that this event is a particular landmark. RedHat is a multi-million dollar company, Linux has a huge buzz in most computer journals that were, until recently, Microsoft-centric. There are millions upon millions of Linux users, a larger number of them every day, and we herald Home Depot for deploying Linux systems.

    As caustic as this sounds, I really don't think big business should be appluaded for simply getting with the program. It's not as if Home Depot has done anything particularly interesting or innovative to the Linux OS itself.

    When they GPL Home Depot, let me know.

  • How about pre-forklist driving anger testing? You certainly don't want someone who just broke up with his girlfriend driving a forklift around.

    And maybe sleep-deprivation testing? Sleep deprivation is one of the biggest reasons for automobile accidents, yet you don't see the sleep deprived as public enemy number one.

    Drug testing is just a convenient PR ploy, IMHO. Once Bush gets firmly ensconced in office, it will be latent homosexual tendency testing, liberal testing, and differently thinking testing.
  • Although you do have some points here, I have to correct you on some issues. First of all, the latest distributions of linux are _very_ easy to install. In my case, Mandrake 7.2 flied through instalation process. And unlike Windows 98 it recognized automatically ALL the hardware in my computer (printer, soundcard, CD burner, etc). This is a big step in the right direction, it was the first time I didn't have to fiddle with config files... in 5 years of Linux usage.

    Then, the new KDE 2 is sweet. Gnome looks also great, but I'm more of a KDE fan myself (please don't flame me on this, is a matter of personal preference). Maybe they don't have the ease of use of Macs yet, but they're close.

    So I bet it'll happen soon... the only thing that's holding it back is the lack of powerfull, easy to use applications.
  • Now let's see MS claim that NT scales better than Linux. NT scale from "large workstation" to "small server". Linux now *commercially* scale from embedded devices and hand-helds over cash-registers to mainframes and supercomputers.

  • Great news. (Score:4)

    by len(*jameson); ( 202702 ) on Thursday December 07, 2000 @08:32AM (#575313)
    Not only is this cool from a technical standpoint but it's tough to underestimate the value of news like this from a PR standpoint. These kinds of things, when discussed around the pointy headed management kind of get Linux in there in a subconscious sort of way that says "Oh ya, that thing that runs that ISP in Europe somewhere for 800,000 users. Must be pretty good."

    Not only that, but Europe is so much more sexy than home depot. Next thing we need is some mainframe installs at Victoria Secret!

  • Re:Single Point of Failure (Score:5)

    by sirwired ( 27582 ) on Thursday December 07, 2000 @08:33AM (#575314)
    Different images in an S/390 / z900 are separated from each other in hardware and the VM software. The only way to circumvent this would be to somehow gain access to the VM control programs. You can be damn sure that these folks will be air-gapping the console and admin systems from public networks. VM controls cannot be accessed from the systems VM runs, period. (IIRC, this restriction is enforced in hardware.) In addition, the images cannot access the resources (storage or memory) of each other unless explicitly configured to do so in VM. The restrictions are good enough that mainframes have been running the same OS architecture for decades and I do not recall a single security breach of this nature.

    SirWired
  • I'd have to agree with you there. The mandrake 7.2 install is much easier than any install I've done with windows. It did fail to properly recognize my soundcard, but I think that I may have confused it by having both a on motherboard card and an ISA card in place.The only serious problem that I've had with my Mandrake 7.2 install is that KDE2 wants every font to be LedFixed. This is a very large, very ugly font and it makes me want to shoot my computer. Does anyone know how to fix this problem? Help me please!
    _____________


  • I do see your point about the single point of failure. In this scenario, I still think it's a blessing and agree with mr. rat bastard. Especially in the case of a natural disaster. Let's imagine an avalance comes along and totally crushes the hosting facility. If these guys are smart, and all indications sugggest they are, they've got the whole file system frequently backed up off-site. The surviving employees of telia can simply call IBM and have them put another one of these beasts online at some temporary hosting facility (oh, maybe exodus or some place). Then they can restore the file system from backup and have all 30,000 'imaged' machines running in probably a few hours. If you had 30,000 physical boxes, this process would take considerably longer. Not only would it require you to get your hands on 30,000 computers right away, but they would need approximately the same specs as the ones that got smashed in the avalanche.


    This architecture really abstracts the whole thing such that you're not having to deal with 800,000 accounts in a restoration emergency.



    Seth
  • Best Buy is buying Musicland [yahoo.com], the parent company of Sam Goody which is also mentioned in the original article as one of the largest POS Linux deployments currently in place. Maybe Best Buy will be switching to Musicland inventory system. Then maybe Best Buy will start selling Linux boxen, or at least boxen with no installed OS, so we can save on the Windows tax. That bring those eMachines down to practically nothing, of course, you wouldn't be able to claim the MSN $400 rebate if you weren't running Windows.

    By the way, isn't ICL's slogan: "We put the S in POS" B^)

  • Why, ever heard of the Lemming syndrome ?
  • WRT credit checks by employers: Are you sure they aren't just making sure in debt up to your neck so they know for a fact that they can jack you around as much as they want, without fear that you'll walk since you will be desperate to keep up on the payments?

    As far as this or any other hiring practice affecting my decision to shop at Home Depot... I'm more likely to be (positively) influenced by the fact that they are a major supporter of Linux than I am to care that the people who work there are subject to privacy invasions. Maybe if the workers unionized or organized or supported politicians with brains, it wouldn't be a problem. But after much reflection I have decided that the average American deserves exactly what he or she is getting.
  • Lets see, what could happen in Home Depot with stoners working there? A little song from MST 3K comes to mind. "They tried to kill me with a fork lift... Ole!"
  • Check out this site for companies using Linux: http://www.linuxbusiness.com/en/caselist.html
  • ...and those same inventory computers were also once the registers. However, a town ordinance wants the customers to see the receipt as it's being made, so a pathetic IBM Java POS program replaced the good old monochrome monitors. Damn. Those IBM machines (which are basically stripped-down Aptivas: K6-2 300MHz with 32MB of RAM) run NT4 (service pack 4; that's old). The POS program is written in Java and runs in JGui. Meanwhile, across the street Best Buy is using the same machines for their register system, except it's a program from ICL (one of the POS system giants), and it's written in C/C++!

    So, next time you make a run to CompUSA, praise the AIX terminals, and scorn the IBM POS POS (Point of Sale Piece of S#!&)

  • Re:Hurray For Linux (Score:4)

    by plover ( 150551 ) on Thursday December 07, 2000 @12:01PM (#575323) Homepage Journal
    Desktops aren't the only place Linux needs to be.

    The company I work for is (unfortunately) going to roll our POS platform out on eNT. We get to give Microsoft at least $1*10e7 for the privilege, and they still have no idea how we're going to cram this whole monolithic Win32 app into these pathetically small 120MHz 586s with only 16MB RAM and 1.2GB.

    And nobody wanted to hear Linux when it was suggested, offered, and screamed. "It's just not Microsoft, and our corporate direction is Microsoft." and the ever popular "Well, we have a lot of resources we can tap into for Windows support." Never mind that the AMOUNT of support required drops exponentially...

    If that's our corporate direction, we need a new corporate compass. Sheesh.

    John

    P.S. Mozilla 0.6 [mozilla.org] rocks!

  • Now let's see MS claim that NT scales better than Linux.

    I'm afraid it still does.

    NT scale from "large workstation" to "small server". Linux now *commercially* scale from embedded devices and hand-helds over cash-registers to mainframes and supercomputers.

    Well, not quite. It's not that Linux is driving this big huge mainframe, a more accurate picture would be that the mainframe is pretending that it's 30,000 minicomputers, each of which a single copy of Linux is familiar with. I don't see why NT, with heavy tweaking, couldn't do the same thing. Configuring those things would be a pain though.. there's only so much that ghost could do. ;) I'm still not sure that would be that much a problem though.

  • Re:Hurray For Linux (Score:3)

    by plover ( 150551 ) on Thursday December 07, 2000 @12:12PM (#575325) Homepage Journal
    Oops, forgot to mention that there's an article in Information Week [informationweek.com] describing Musicland Group and Home Depot's plans for Linux POS, including the money saved. (I submitted the story to Slashdot before I saw the current artcle.)

    John

  • Anyone else here get schitzy at the thought of putting all your eggs in one basket like Telia's done? Granted, I'm not at all familiar with their past implementation (i.e., they could have had all 70 machines doing different things, with no fail-over between them at all), but it strikes me as being a bad idea. Well, a "spooky" idea at least.

    Of course, maybe I'm too young (at 33 no less! :-) to remember the mainframe days very well, but in my recent experience these days, big iron always has a little buddy somewhere waiting to help out when a boot drive fails, a router blows, whatever. I guess I'm just not used to one big box doing everything. I just can't get away from the notion that three smaller machines behind some sort of load balancing deal is better than one big machine doing everything. It just makes more sense to me.

    Oh well. So much for thinking outside the box. Anyone got a VAX for sale?

    -B

  • > I'm afraid it still does.

    It still *doesn't*. It happens to outperform Linux 2.2 at a particular niche, namely medium-small servers (4-8 cpu ia32 boxes). As soon as you move above or below that that very limited range, NT fall behind Linux, or simply cease to be an option. This is the exeact opposite of being "scalable" means outside MS marketing department.

    > It's not that Linux is driving this big huge
    > mainframe, a more accurate picture would be
    > that the mainframe is pretending that it's
    > 30,000 minicomputers, each of which a single
    > copy of Linux is familiar with.

    Gee, you are describing the way VM *works*! Are you saying that IBM's range of VM based mainframe OS'es aren't running on mainframes after all?

    > I don't see why NT, with heavy tweaking,
    > couldn't do the same thing.

    Of course it could, first "tweak" would be to port NT to the S/390 architechture.
  • > Jack of all trades, master of none.

    :-) I'm sure MS marketing will find a new slogan for discrediting Linux, but I doubt they will chose that one!
  • Listen, genius... Unless some boneheaded sysadmin for some bizarre reason decided to physically connect the admin systems to the "outside world", (this would have to be explicitly configued in the I/O Control Program), the security is foolproof, period. End of story. A breach of the control systems by user images is physically impossible. The system hardware simply would not allow it, no matter how the program was written.

    I did not say, "provided the security is good enough." The security already is impenetrable, right out of the box (er... crate). No OS patches, no BugTraq-reading. The trusted sysadmin would have to break it on purpose to do anything. And if you can't trust your sysadmin, clustering won't help.

    It is far more likely that a clustered system would utterly collapse than this one "basket" would. Here is an anology: Let's say you have one billion dollars to move from point A to point B, in $20 bills. You can either load the bills into a fleet of NYC street taxi's (with the doors locked), or into a truck armored (and weaponed) like an M1A1 tank, and four completely redundant engines. Which would you choose? Multiple, unreliable, boxes that have been proven notoriously hard to secure; or one single, easy to administer, rock-solid box, with security that has been proven over decades to be bullet-proof.
  • I'm too busy making money selling Linux to big companies to rebut your claims. Sorry.
    -russ

  • Felia (Score:3)

    by redhog ( 15207 ) on Thursday December 07, 2000 @08:02AM (#575333) Homepage
    > Linux is not designed to support a wide range of different software applications, but excels with fairly straightforward tasks such as giving access to Internet sites.
    So webserving is straightforward, and I can not run Quake and GIMP on Linux, I guess?

    Anyway, for any scandinave, Telia switching to Linux is no big deal, since Telia is the devil itself anyway (Like AT&T in the US I guess?) :) But it's nice to see IBM shipping a supercomputer w/ Linux, using their new hack to run several Linuxes under VM:s...
  • Won't it be fun when someone figures a way to hack them using nothing more than their own barcode scanner... I'm sure all this Cue Cat hacking will come in handy here... Just think, put one of your own home made bar codes on a purchase, and when it is scanned 10% is taken off the sub-total.
    With the comming of photo quality printers for every home, distribution of these barcode images would proliferate like, ummmm, MP3's...
    Now if only we can convince the Home Depot to carry computer parts we will all be happy...
    On another note with the Home Depot... I just got a call from my lawer telling me that The Home Depot has settled out of court with me for a whopping $1500 to compensate me for the broken finger one of their employees was kind enough to give me.
    All this aside, I would imagine that having Linux on their cash registers would be a first step towards the Linuxing of all their computer systems... I guess this could allow them to change prices on the fly... Someone updates the cost of a hammer in Tulsa and across the Home Depot network, the increase ( or less likely the decrease) in price is instantly updated on all their cash registers...
    Of course, I will want to get my hands on one of these Linux cash registers because I need one that can preform complex boolian operations, to sort out the tax structure here in Canada, as well as keep me entertained through a full T1 internet connection.
    Who'd a thunk selling screws could be so complex... Will we now have to refer to the Home Depot cashiers as Cashflow System Operators?...
    Hmmm CSO has a nice ring to it...

  • more users, world domination, etc. (Score:3)

    by _|()|\| ( 159991 ) on Thursday December 07, 2000 @08:36AM (#575337)
    And having Linux in cash registers benefits Linux because...?

    Software, free or proprietary, needs users in order to thrive. 90,000 cash registers nationwide in a high-availability situation is a lot of users.

    I gather from the TechWeb article that Home Depot contracted with Red Hat for some or all of the work on these cash registers. It's not clear whether HD and/or RHAT have made the changes for the "stripped-down version" of Linux available. Other businesses may be able to benefit from their work.

  • Re:Once again article is different from post on he (Score:3)

    by bstadil ( 7110 ) on Thursday December 07, 2000 @08:08AM (#575338) Homepage
    You ask "Where did the 800,000 accounts come from? ". The article reads: The Linux win, which is expected to be announced later on Thursday, will mean that all of TeliaNet's 800,000 private Internet customers in Scandinavia and 1,000 corporate clients, will be serviced by a single supercomputer in Copenhagen
  • If Linux is used in registers, there has to be some form of UI, even if it's not one that is really seen. I'd be more apt to think that they'd be using X, everyone from the DMV (at least, here) to the grocery store has been installing new registers and/or customer service terminals that use a GUI, and if this is indeed what they are doing, they could add to development. Remember, if the registers are all Linux, there could be use for the server being Linux, or at least something UNIX. If the server is something UNIX and the company writing the Point of Sale, for the Linux box, is also writing the store management and region management software for the inventory control, accounts payable/receivable, payroll and other HR, etc, then they might want to develop it ALL on the same platform. It would be cheaper for the developers, they don't have to purchase costly development tools, and everyone develops for the same platform so workarounds or methods for one app could be applied to another. Depending on the contract that Home Depot has with the software developer, it could be easier to maintain the system too, since remote management tools actually work for Linux. This at least means that app development will occur, and likely some tweaks on window managers, video drivers (depending on what kind of stuff they want to use), and possibly installation of some of the GPL or at least free office suites, to let these managers use their adminstrative computers for basic stuff like word processing and spreadsheets, which could also be integrated into the system. There are lots of possible benefits. They might just not seem incredibly obvious.
    "Titanic was 3hr and 17min long. They could have lost 3hr and 17min from that."
  • ? ??9 hacker on one good box is going to bupkiss against Big Iron- this would be akin to attacking the moon with a slingshot. An article was linked off of here a few months ago about the successful porting of linux to an IBM 390. The thing has INSANE bandwidth, zero downtime, is almost totally faultless, and on top of that, the Linux system images can be restored on the fly. You could hack one instance, but you'd still have to bypass the mainframe security in order to bring down the system.... and you have to be physically ON SITE with a hammer to do that. A mainframe doesn't NEED to load balance, unlike the Mere Mortal machines so far beneath it- these things are built to handle loads so severe that the slashdot effect looks like a gerbil fart.

    I think the company made a fabulous decision- I'd rather have a Battleship than a fleet of rowboats with rifles doing the same job.

  • It's no big deal (Score:3)

    by dingbat_hp ( 98241 ) on Thursday December 07, 2000 @08:46AM (#575344) Homepage

    This is Big Blue Iron we're talking about, not a bunch of individual PCs that just happen to be stuffed into a single rack [crystalpc.com].

    30,000 Linux OS images on a 390 is no harder to manage than those as MVS images, and not that much (sic) harder than a single one. Sure, there's a lot of user accounts to manage, and a mainframe port brings in complexity issues that aren't important for a one-per-desktop box, but you certainly don't have issues like 30,000 individual root passwords. It's a hell of a lot easier to admin than a Beowulf cluster.

    Lots of users with their own image of a shared (and protected) OS is what mainframes are all about.

  • This is more than just creating a new directory. When a new "server" is set up, it will get separate instance of Linux, completely separated from all other images. From the point of view of the customer, they will have the whole machine to themselves. If they want to rm -rf /, it isn't a problem for any other image. This is the big strength of a VM-based system. Also, the unbelivably flexible load balancing software can be configured to give a certain image an absolute allocation of system resources, (I/O bandwidth, CPU cycles, memory, whatever) and you can be positive that you will always have it. Any shortage of capacity can be anticipated far ahead of time and fixed in short order by setting up a Parallel Sysplex of multiple boxes. (After you have somehow exhausted the huge amount of internal on-the-fly expansion capacity.)

    Also, it is FAR more likely that something like the power company or the outside net connection will go down before the mainframe itself fails. These are designed for ZERO downtime. So a company deploying one of these is far more likely to lose sleep worrying about external systems than the mainframe itself.
  • As a mainframer I would just like to point out:

    1) JCL is not equivalent to a batch/shell script, more like a control file that tells a program what files to use, so is more like, say, smb.conf. Try telling me that that is easy to use. The closest thing to (g)awk on the mainframe would be Rexx, which, although not perfect is a no-brainer to get things done and has almost no learning curve (unlike anything Unix-related). And things like the ISPF Edit facility is several times easier to use than vi or Emacs e.g. want to change one string to another: 'c foo bar'. What's the vi equivalent? Dunno, and I can't find it in the extremely confusing man page, although it will be some 733t gibberish no doubt. ISPF help is a lot easier to navigate. ISPF does a have a GUI facility, but few companies are prepared to fork out for it.

    2) Generalisations like that are exactly the same as saying that Unix coders all have huge bushy beards and wash once a month whether they need it or not.

    OS/390 is several orders of magnitude better than Linux, but it costs a great deal.

    1) Got to agree. mainframe hardware management is superb.

    2) You've contradicted yourself here. Mainframes can very easily be clustered together.

    In conclusion, you obviously last worked on a mainframe when IBM was still getting used to not being a monopoly, the improvements in software and general attitude to customers from when I first started 11 years ago is great.
    Last thing, don't think I'm anti-Unix (I'm posting this from Linux), I just get annoyed when people forget all the irritating things about Unix when they criticise mainframes.
  • that is also dictates what you can do OFF the clock as well. Say a responsible user gets off work Fri night, goes to a concert or movie, smokes a joint, relaxes and has a great time. Monday morning, when your perfectly straight again, able to safely work with dangerous equipment, your going to test positive. Testing positive != stoned.

    I'm just pissed (pun intended) because they just started random drug tests here - should I play employment roulette tonight? Current strategy - wait untill tested, then party like hell.

  • I wonder if they thought at all about 'single point of failure' issues of putting all the power in one big box?

    ]-R/-\])!!!!111!!!!1!!

  • Everyone on Slashdot knows that..


  • Well, when living in Denmark Telia isn't [yet at least] the devil itself, because that position is taken by Tele Danmark that used to be state owned, but now is owned by some American corp.

    Therefore Telia is actually helping provide some competition in an otherwise competition starved country and as the purchaser of the S/390 system is actually Telia DK I am clapping in my little hands :-)

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