LinuxWorld: Reporter's notebook

Can't we all just get along?

Bill Hilf, the head of the Linux/open source lab at Microsoft is leading a technical session at LinuxWorld. Microsoft made its debut at the show last year with a booth. But this session marks a first for the software giant. "I've gotten a lot of e-mails and questions from customers [about running a mixed environment]. And so we said, "OK, let's do this session," says Hilf.

In the session, titled "Managing Linux in a Mixed Environment ... At Microsoft," Hilf will go over the strategies and tools he uses in his lab, which includes about 300 systems running Linux, Unix and Windows. The biggest thing to think about is management tools, he says.

"Everything from patch management to monitoring your systems to protecting your systems, to setting configurations of your systems and network - you want to be able to do that all from one spot without having to a buy a $10 million management framework."

Regulatory compliance issues make management even more important. "Say someone has to do HIPAA or Sarbanes-Oxley compliance or security policy compliance and you need to look across all your servers. That's hard to do in a mixed environment when you have different tools for different technologies," Hilf says. "So you want to have centralized tools or at least common tools that can work across Linux, Unix, Windows, Macs."

Authentication also is important, Hilf says. "We had a nightmare problem. Because we run so many mixed systems our password management strategy across all those servers was very manual. It literally would take four days to reset the passwords," Hilf says. "So we figured out a way to integrate Active Directory into our environment. Now not only is there a shared password, but you can log in using your Active Directory credentials."

Hilf says he can log in to his Windows machine "and then I can remotely go into any server in my lab without having to put in a user name or password because I'm already authenticated to the domain and all of my servers recognize that domain. It's super powerful technology."

Hilf worked with Active Directory integration specialist Centrify to create the technology, but he says how network managers create the integration is really up to them. "It depends on what's in their environment, but I would expect a lot more powerful features from us and from our partners in this space.

The whole truth and nothing but the truth

One of the big themes at LinuxWorld this week is the open-armed embrace of Linux and open source by the major systems vendors. The big guys have all been talking Linux love for some time. But this year it seems to be even more of a group hug with some real world displays of the affection. IBM, for example, is rejiggering its whole approach to Linux, moving beyond Linux as a platform for server consolidation to Linux as the foundation of on-demand business. And it also is giving back to the Linux community, contributing code to the Apache Software Foundation's Geronimo application server, for example. HP announced support for more than 200 open source applications on its NonStop systems. The list goes on. But at least the executives are being honest about why they're so interested in open source: "There is an opportunity for us to make some money by providing support for people who put value [in open source]," says Steve Mills, senior vice president of IBM's software group.