Government Crosses the Floor for Linux

[Richard <nospam [at] zetnet.co.uk>]

Hello

Network News arrived this morning and on the front page the headline
and leading story says.......

Government crosses the floor for Linux

The UK Government has rolled out Linux to host its web sites and
dumped its existing Sun Solaris servers. The Government last week
said it had chosen Linux to host its 85 web sites following
recommendations from the Central Computer and Telecommunications
Agency (CCTA), which advises the Government on the use of technology.
The decision not to replace the Solaris web servers came after
extensive internal testing of Linux. Mick Morgan, Government
Information Service systems manager said that Linux proved to be cost
effective: Solaris had been used since 1994 and originally we didn't
plan to drop it. But the hardware replacement would have been
expensive. Linux on Intel made much more sense pragmatically, he
said. All the Government's web sites are now served from five Dell
23000 Dual Pentium II 450MHz boxes, each with 27Gb hard disks. The
CCTA opted for Red Hat 5.2 and Apache 1.3.3 web servers.

Morgan said that Linux road tests proved its suitability: It can
handle the job and it is easy to add another server. We just took an
empty machine and installed it. Linux was chosen because we were
familiar with it, and Red Hat because we just happened to have copies
of it lying around. He added this demonstrated the flexibility of
Linux and said, If serving web pages is your enterprise then it's
enterprise ready. Mark Raphael, the program manager at Meta Group,
said Linux is already gaining recognition as an enterprise OS in
certain sectors: Linux is seen as enterprise ready as a web server.

I think if it had been me in that office I'd have used Definite
Linux 7.0 with it's 128 bit encryption built in :-)

Thanks

Richard
Sheffield UK

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