daverea.com

In past lives, I’ve had the occasion to do a bit of computer consulting – and a handful of those consulting relationships have persisted to this day. In some cases, I helped people set up their home PCs, shake off malware infestations or set up wireless networks. In others, whole client-server networks were built up for small-town businesses that weren’t up for paying big-city prices.

Tonight’s story is about one such network: a pair of client PCs, strung with 100 megabit Ethernet to a shared file server, at a lawyer’s office in a town of 2,595 people. The firm epitomizes small-town business: one attorney, with some part-time administrative help, housed in an office space that was – at one time – the town’s first Savings-and-Loan. The old vault is still there, guarded by a big, black, squeaky metal door with a long-since-frozen lock and a musty plaster-clad interior about the size of a walk-in closet.

Several weeks ago, my lawyer client called me to let me know he’d decided to move his practice into his home. While he’s not at retirement age yet, it’s drawing slowly nearer. The case load is tapering off, and his lease is finally coming to an end. Could I get him moved and set up in a home office?

That I could isn’t particularly relevant to this story – but what we moved certainly is. My friend’s workstations run Windows XP, and after being isolated from the big scary Internet for their entire lives, they’ve actually managed to stay operational and reliable for several years. They started out life as Windows 2000 boxes, and were only upgraded to XP ’round about 2005.

The server, on the other hand, runs Red Had Linux 7. That’s right, ladies and gentlemen – “Valhalla”. When my then-room mate and I set out to build it, version 8 of our favorite distro had yet to be released, and the term “Fedora Core” was just a gleam in RedHat’s eye. We purchased a secondhand IBM 300PL desktop PC, mostly because it was the most-reliable thing we could imagine at the time. After touring the Monroe County 911 center, and seeing that this venerable Pentium-3-powered beast was all they used there, we figured Big Blue must have got something right when they crafted the 300PL. A 30GB hard disk and a Travan tape drive later, we sharpened our cron pencils and built a server.

Recently, I packed up that dusty, faded-beige machine along with the rest of the computer gear in the office, and headed up to my friend’s home. Amazingly, with a whopping two hours’ worth of cumulative maintenance effort in the last seven years, the 300PL is still going strong. No bit rot. No service updates. No crashes. It just trudges on, running a version of Samba that’s got to be at least a major release old, and dutifully committing each day’s work to tape late every night.

My friend, whose business rests on the foundation of reliability he has in this server, is one member of a very, very large group: people who are Linux fans and don’t even know it. He loves his server as much as he needs it, because it keeps his precious data safe. He doesn’t care that it runs Linux; he just knows it’s always there when he clicks the G:/ drive and looks for his client’s files. He’s far from alone; in fact, he’s in the company of everyone who adores their TiVo, or depends on their TomTom or Garmin GPS unit, or who enjoys using services like Google or Amazon, or who owns a shiny new T-Mobile G1.

The next time you hear someone tell you that Linux is a toy for college students and computer scientists, or only has a place in corporate datacenters, or is in some way an “experiment”, think of this story. And maybe tell them about my attorney friend, or about my office – where Linux runs the server and the workstations, and we’ve all been playing nicely for years now.