Getting Linux in the Door, an Experienced Evangelist's Guide

November 4, 2003 OLUG Meeting

Presented by Aaron Grothe, CISSP

Overview

Overcoming Inertia

Linuxsalesmanship

Low Hanging Fruit

Examples

Open Source Software as a Door to Linux

Overview (cont)

BSD, Linux's older cousin

Releasing your Code, Open Source style

Biggest Mistakes I've made

Resources

Q & A

Overcoming Inertia

There is a reason the status quo is the status quo

“Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM” - Some idiot

"Humans are allergic to change. They love to say, 'We've always done it this way.' I try to fight that.” - Admiral Grace Hopper

You're not going to “save” everyone – Speech class example

Overcoming Inertia

Biggest Issues, raised today

SCO

Groklaw http://www.groklaw.NET

Merits of Case, IANAL

Will be decided in the courts where it belongs

Legal Indemnification

Developer threatening to sue Office 2003 users http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/10/27/1067213195363.html

Indemnification only goes up to cost paid for software in most cases

SCO's Samba stance, http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104_2-5098610.html

Overcoming Inertia

Biggest Issues, raised today

Red Hat Linux dead?

Fedora project moving forward http://fedora.redhat.com

Red Hat Enterprise Linux still available

Other distributions available

Who do we sue?

Have you actually sued anybody?

Have you read a EULA?

Linux or GNU/Linux???

Are you a communist?

LinuxSalesManShip

Couple of quick notes adapted from http://zgp.org/~dmarti/linuxmanship/ guide to Linux sales man ship

Accuracy – I don't know is a fair answer

Benefits vs. Buzzwords

Sell to the boss

Sell positives rather than negatives

Hundredth Monkey Phenomenon

Low Hanging Fruit

Firewalls

Proxys

Web Servers

Snort/IDS

Etc

Firewalls

Packet Level

Iptables/netfilter make an excellent packet level firewall

Distributions such as IPCop and Smoothwall do an excellent job of providing an easy to use firewall package

Circuit level

Dante is a good Socks implementation

Proxys

Squid combined with tools such as SquidGuard and/or Sarg can provide a good tool for reducing bandwidth utilization and possibly implementing fascist policies

DansGuardian

Web Server

According to Netcraft Apache now serves 2/3 of the web http://apache.slashdot.org/apache/03/11/04/024222.shtml?tid=126&tid=148&tid=185&tid=95

SNORT/IDS

“Snort runs better on Windows than Linux” - somebody at a CSF meeting

Snort/Hogwash were made for Linux

My company's current setup 2 Dell 350s with 2 dual Ethernet cards – feeding to a Dell 2650 with MySQL/Acid database

ETC

FTP servers

SSH servers

Application Servers (Jboss, Tomcat)

Mail Relays

VPN end points

Recovery Tools

Knoppix

Security Toolkits

Knoppix STD

LAS

Honeynets

Examples

Large Company

Snort/IDS System

Oracle monitoring system

Oracle 9i client libraries

Perl/DBI

Karma http://www.iheavy.com

Computing Farm

Abinitio parallel cluster

In house DB Server

Warehouse boxes running large database

Examples

Large Company (cont)

Custom Red Hat 8 only supporting Citrix ICA

Desktop replacement – my desk ;-)

Automated security scanning tool

Connect direct client

Custom app support

App ported from Solaris accessing Oracle database running on Solaris box

SAS

Several recent acquisitions have lot of Linux

Total Number of Linux boxes - 150+

Examples

Large Company – Possible Future

Replacing Solaris Oracle DB machine with a Oracle 9i RAC configuration

Replacing legacy Solaris NFS server with a Linux NFS cluster

Moving more of inhouse DB systems to Linux solution

Hogwash – IPS system for legacy systems that are difficult/impossible to patch

Automated Security Toolsuite

Examples

Small Company

Microsoft Windows/Novell infrastructure

Mission come in add to infrastructure not destroy anything

Linux based firewall IPCop

Squid/SquidGuard/Sarg Proxy

Snort IDS system using SecurityFocus' web reporting

Simple ftp server for offering mpeg downloads

Examples

Small Company (cont)

Potential Next Steps

New mail system postfix to reduce vulnerability window

Linux File & Print server to replace Novell infrastructure

Open Source Software as a Door to Linux

Mozilla/Firebird are arguably the best browsers available for the Microsoft Windows Platform (Yum!!! Tabbed Browsing!)

Mozilla Mail/Thunderbird are more secure than Outlook Express

OpenOffice 1.1 rules

Gnu Win CD http://gnuwin.epfl.ch/

The Open CD http://www.theopencd.org

BSD Linux's Cousin as a Step

The BSD variants (OpenBSD, NetBSD, FreeBSD, Darwin) are all fine Oses

Flipping between Linux/BSD is usually not a large technical issue

OpenBSD has had excellent IPV6 support for quite some time

IPFW was probably better than IPChains

Some companies feel they get along better with the BSD license than the GPL

Releasing YOUR code under an Open Source License

Understand the implications of this

TuxRacer

SSH/OpenSSH

Mosix

Interbase

What does the GPL really say?

Isn't Red Hat violating this with E/S? (No)

Releasing YOUR code under an Open Source License

Partial Open Source

Xandros

Dual/Tri Licenses

Open Office - GPL/SISL

QT - GPL, QPL, Commercial

Cygwin – GPL/Commercial

Releasing YOUR code under an Open Source License

Non-commercial use license

Sleepycat

How to make money at it?

Do you need to?

A couple of ideas.

Open sourcing non-core code “Embracing Insanity: Open Source Software Development”

A few of the Biggest Mistakes I've Made

Heimdall Linux

Abit dual celeron motherboard

Linux NFS server

IDE CD-rom drives with the 2.2 kernel

Upgrading to 2.4 before 2.4.9

Venture/Vulture Capatilists

At the Company I Work for Now

Trying to map Oracle on Solaris to Oracle on Linux – box for box

Pushing Linux where another O/S would work better

Resources

Netproject's migration guide

Excellent migration guide

http://www.netproject.co.uk/docs/migoss/

Windows to Linux application Guide

http://linuxshop.ru/linuxbegin/win-lin-soft-en/

Knoppix

http://www.knoppix.net

Distributions

http://www.distrowatch.com

Resources

Sourceforge

http://www.sourceforge.net

Freshmeat

http://www.freshmeat.NET

Damn Small Linux

http://www.damnsmalllinux.org

Linux Advocacy Howto

http://www.tldp.org

Resources

Cathedral and the Bazaar – ESR

http://www.catb.org

Open Source: The Unauthorized White Papers by Donald Rosenberg

Excellent book from 2000 before the bust

Published by IDG, yes the dummies guys

Q & A

Thanks

2003-11-04T10:37:22