Legitimizing Linux

Jon "maddog" Hall

"Mr. Hall, I have only one question...". It happened to be a question posed to me by the Director of the computer center of Sao Paulo University. He had just finished telling me about the way they used the Linux Operating System.

It seems that São Paulo, Brazil is the second largest city on the face of the earth, joined from several other cities. As a fast-growing megalopolis, the University had far-flung campuses, and on each one of these campuses existed some portion of the University's administrative staff. Each administrative staff used Windows 95, and from time to time, not only would Windows 95 crash, but it would refuse to reboot. This caused some member the systems administration staff to have to jump in a car, drive for an average of four hours (rush-hour traffic in New York City is a breeze compared to São Paulo), spend 10 minutes fixing the Windows problem, then drive for four hours to get back to the campus - a full eight-hour day to repair one problem. After much deliberation, the staff of the computer center formulated a policy of putting Linux on each and every Windows 95 computer, then giving the user a boot floppy with an emergency boot procedure on it. When the user of the computer called the center, they were told to insert the floppy and boot Linux. Then the administrator would ftp to the Linux system, transfer a whole new copy of Windows 95 into place, and reboot the machine.

I thought that this was rather a unique way of solving a problem, until I started talking with other systems administrators at other schools. "Oh, we have been doing much the same thing for a year or so," one sysadmin told me, "but we use it to re-install a new copy of Windows to our lab machines every night, to help keep down trojan horses." Other system administrators did it just to bring the machines back to a "known state", still others to deliver new text material for each day's laboratories.