How to do more with less

The story began in the mid-eighties with a mini-computer running UNIX, a Novell file server, and a one-man sysadmin infrastructure.

From 1993, those servers were progressively replaced by Linux-only ones. In 1995 we installed the /very first/ Linux Web server of the Belgian Federal domain, and in 1998 (a 'first' at least in a Belgian administration) our Library Department was working in a Linux-only environment.

http://www.br.fgov.be/RESEARCH/INFORMATICS/tutorial/intro/history/survey_98_index.html

<http://betula.br.fgov.be/RESEARCH/INFORMATICS/tutorial/intro/history/survey_98_index.html>

Now our computer room is filled with 3 racks of servers, mostly at the 2-8 cores and 2-16 TB level, using cluster tools and grid-computing.

We will present our field experience about :

*

  the hardware side (economy to use off-the-shelf hardware and even
  older one, like the refurbished 486 as X-terminals ten years ago);

*

  the administration side (ease to automate actions with shell
  scripts, including simple cluster tools, no frequent reboot
  required : up to 500 days of uptime);

*

  the software side (very low cost for high quality software,
  stability, diversity...);

*

  the security side (no viruses, high stability of the servers);

*

  the human side (the most difficult one; easy with good-will
  people, difficult with new incomers not sharing the FLOSS culture
  and asking for what they only know : MS, Word...;

*

  ODF case

http://fkft.eu/2008/papers/empain.pdf