Sanjeev Shrestha

I work as a project manager/Team Lead and also look after Systems and Networks. Looking after Systems and Networks is not my primary job there but I like to tickle with Networks and Systems.

Our system had been infested with lots of viruses and it is natural when we use Microsoft windows in almost all the systems. This infestation, really introduced the slag in projects. So we decided to switch our systems to linux. (We knew linux is secure and least infested by viruses and worms)

One fine morning of Saturday we set out to remove all the windows OS and install Linux in almost all of the systems. We still needed few windows OS, as we have applications that run on .net framework.

We have 10 systems that are used within my team members that was to be migrated. The number though small (10), meant 10 fresh installations of Linux that could take almost a day for few people with few Fedora DVDs to install and configure the system with networks. So we decided to use DVD to install the system in 2 PCs and for others we Used network install. Network installation was tough. indeed! but we managed to install the system with USB drive and Cobbler. (I did not know about Cobbler the day before). Luckily our systems supported PXE boot. So it was easy after few hours of self study and search through internet. We managed to install other 7 system from Network.

After all successfull installation (except for 1 PC), we managed to install network. We use static IP given to us by our ISP so installing a DHCP meant more incoming  problems so we decided to use static IPs for our system. We switched off the Network Manager, switched on the network services (This is necessary if you use Static IP otherwise your ip configuration is lost on every reboot.), configured our IPs, Configured  HTTP, FTP, Mysql other servers in our central development server. So we are ready to roll in linux (Fedora 9 Sulphur).

We tested our systems it was working all right with the freshness in the air. This felt good!

All well,  untill we faced a small problem with firewalls and http configurations. We were not able to browse our local server through IP. That was bad! So we decided to set up a DNS (bind) Server for easy browsing of local sites. This was how we came up with our internal TLD (.bd) that would be suffixed in every development stage for every projects.

This .bd is not related to TLD of bangladesh by any means, it is just a simple acronym for braindigit and is used for our convenience only. These .bd sites are not browseable outside our intranet.

So bind was setup and few primary zones were created for testing. All good till this part.

Yes we migrated to Linux and we felt good about it. But still, there was a huge problem ahead. Development tools. My team had been accustomed to Adobe Dreamweaver and other windows tools for long, so they wanted something similar to Dreamweaver in linux too.  I used eclipse since long so it was easy to decide the development IDE. And we have eclipse in linux too. So I advised all my team members to use eclipse. It will take some time for them to get accustomed to eclipse but for now this is solved.

We still needed few more applications to collaborate and work in central server. This was tough one. We hardly used SVN, CVS for development internally and setting up CVS, SVN server was though easy but useless, unless the team get accustomed to SVN or CVS. This was a huge problem. We thought for a while and I asked for suggestion from my team. As a response, they wanted something similar to windows. A folder browsing through IP (I don’t know what it is called exactly. maybe Network sharing). I knew this can be done with SSH but using SSH every now and then for development that is ridiculous and stupid (in my view). So to remedy this problem, I created NFS shares for most of the used folders in central server and mounted these folder in every team member PC. Yes I used fstab. So now they are happy developing directly in central server.

I know this solution is stupid but we need to get running quickly so this was the work around.

We set up streber for our small project collaboration. We have openfire for internal collaboration.

So we have successfully migrated to Linux in machines but we need more time to migrate completely to Linux in thoughts.

This is my first experience with Linux in workplace and I feel good that I took the initiative to migrate to Linux. I am not against Windows or Gates. This is only a quest for better and stable system and ofcourse environment.

I will write about all the installation steps I took to setup central servers, setting up NFS and creating a working development environment in my later posts.

Till then Happy Reading