Experiences Supporting Linux at DESY Hamburg

Overview

In the commercial market Linux running on commodity PC hardware is reaching critical mass. But compared to the already supported UNIX flavors at DESY it introduces more than the difficulty of a new UNIX operating system: The challenge was and still is to satisfy the support requests with a minimum effort of human resources so that the low cost for the hardware should not be compensated by high cost for the support. This could be achieved using a hands-off network-based installation mechanism which takes less than one hour. The resulting system has the same functionality as other supported UNIX flavors at DESY.