Because we were told to "make it work". We weren't given a budget so we couldn't go out and buy something off the shelf. And we didn't see an open source tool that could combine all of those functions into a single easy-to-use interface. Regardless of what existing tool we started with, we would have to hack on several other systems just to make it work. Rather than reverse engineering 4-5 different software tools and hacking them all together into one interface, then figuring out how to connect it to our billing and customer support systems (also built in-house by other teams), it made sense to just code it up from scratch. This way we could customize it to support the requirements of support, sales, and management staff, as well as support however many facilities, locations, and staff members (with varying levels of access) as necessary.

Another vote for the home-brew option.

I built the web interface that we are using at work to track server information. Due to the fact that it was built completely from scratch (using Perl, that language that so many people claim is dying a slow painful death), we were able to customize it to integrate into a number of other systems such as equipment locations, IP address management, Nagios service monitoring (currently monitoring over 13000 services), server bandwidth usage tracking, internal issue tracking, etc. We are using it to track nearly 10000 servers across 6 facilities in 4 different cities.

I ran into the following issues:

The upgrade process - I couldn't upgrade using the command line and had to use the GUI, which was very annoying...

Encryption - When booting my system, the system apparently complains that one of the partitions is unable to be mounted. This is before it tries to launch the crypto stuff. When I enter the crypto key, sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. If it doesn't work, I have to drop to the shell, run "cryptdisks stop", then run "cryptdisks start" before it lets me go forward. It still complains about the swap partition (not encrypted, so it is tied to another issue), even though it successfully starts swap. All this, of course, is after I had to force the system to wait long enough to let me type in the crypto key (I had to add "tries=99" to /etc/crypttab)
I ran into the following issues:

The upgrade process - I couldn't upgrade using the command line and had to use the GUI, which was very annoying...

Encrypted partitions - When booting my system, the system now complains that one of the partitions listed in fstab is unable to be mounted. This is before it tries to launch the crypto stuff. (In Jaunty it just asked be for the crypto key without complaining about anything.) When I enter the crypto key, sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. If it doesn't work, I have to drop to the shell, run "cryptdisks stop", then run "cryptdisks start" before it lets me go forward. It still complains about the swap partition (not encrypted, so it is tied to another issue), even though it successfully starts swap. All this, of course, is after I had to force the system to wait long enough to let me type in the crypto key. (I had to add "tries=99" to /etc/crypttab before the system wouldn't try to boot without my /home partition...)

VPN - On Jaunty I was using nm-applet because knetworkmanager didn't support PPTP properly. Jaunty somewhat supported VPNC, but only when launching it from the command line. I tried using knetworkmanager on Karmic (hoping they have worked around the issues), but I am still having problems. It now allows me to configure the VPN connection (I couldn't do that at all in Jaunty), but I can't start the VPNC VPN properly. Well, actually, I can start it, and can connect to the VPN, but knetworkmanager doesn't recognize that it has started (knetworkmanager doesn't change the status and won't allow me to stop the VPN). The only way to stop the VPN is to manually kill the VPN processes from the command line.

Laptop lid close - When closing the laptop lid in Jaunty, my screen would shut off and the screen saver would start. Now, when closing the lid, the screen does not shut off.

Laptop suspend/resume - When closing the lid in Jaunty, the system would automatically suspend to RAM and power down, and the screen would be locked upon resuming. Now, closing the lid gives mixed results. The system does not always suspend to RAM. Before I started playing with the power settings, if I closed the lid after starting the screensaver, it would not suspend. If I closed it without starting the screensaver, it would *sometimes* suspend properly, but if it actually suspends to RAM it would take forever to come back.

Honestly, if these issues don't clear up soon (i.e., by next weekend before I go back to work), I will have no choice but to wipe my system and revert back to Jaunty.
VPN - On Jaunty I was using nm-applet because knetworkmanager didn't support PPTP properly. Jaunty somewhat supported VPNC, but only when launching it from the command line. I tried using knetworkmanager on Karmic (hoping they have worked around the issues), but I am still having problems. It now allows me to configure the VPN connection (I couldn't do that at all in Jaunty), but I can't start the VPN properly. Well, actually, I can start it, and can connect to the VPN, but knetworkmanager doesn't recognize that it has started (knetworkmanager doesn't change the status and won't allow me to stop the VPN). The only way to stop the VPN is to manually kill the VPN processes from the command line.

Laptop lid close - When closing the laptop lid in Jaunty, my screen would shut off and the screen saver would start. Now, when closing the lid, the screen does not shut off.

Laptop suspend/resume - When closing the lid in Jaunty, the system would automatically suspend to RAM and power down, and the screen would be locked upon resuming. Now, closing the lid gives mixed results. The system does not always suspend to RAM. Before I started playing with the power settings, if I closed the lid after starting the screensaver, it would not suspend. If I closed it without starting the screensaver, it would *sometimes* suspend properly, but if it actually suspends to RAM it would take forever to come back.

Honestly, if these issues don't clear up soon (i.e., by next weekend before I go back to work), I will have no choice but to wipe my system and revert back to Jaunty.