|
The Linux operating system is a UNIX-like OS that supports most of the "traditional" UNIX services, plus a lot more. A Linux server can be configured to provide HTTP, FTP, SMTP, POP, DNS, and DHCP services,
plus act as a file or print server, using Samba to emulate the Windows LAN Manager environment.
Linux is quite fast - on equivalent hardware, it will run much faster than Windows NT. Linux uses far less memory and computing resources than Windows NT does - an operable Linux server can be run on a
486/DX4-100 with 16 MB of RAM.
Linux is robust - in a typical production environment, it is not unusual for Linux servers to be up 24 hours a day for literally months without being rebooted. There are cases where servers have been turned on,
configured, and placed on a network, and then literally forgotten about.
We are currently working on an enterprise version of Linux, based on the Red Hat 5.2 distribution, that will support literally thousands of users. The underlying library code is modified to use database calls instead of using flat files (such as /etc/passwd). The net result is that (1) we can support many, many more users than the typical Linux installation can, and (2) we can provide better security, because all the requests are filtered through the database interface instead of the file permissions layer. We'd also like to produce a web interface to all the data in the database, allowing administrators to add/delete/change data via the web.
We plan to channel most services requests through the database - SMTP, POP, login, DNS, and DHCP have been identified as candidate services, but any service that reads flat files for
data is a candidate for conversion.
The database we are currently developing on is MySQL, which is an extremely fast, open source commercial database. We have written the code to access the
database in such a way that if a user wants to use a particular database, the lower layer code to interface with the database directly has to be rewritten, but the upper layer code and all the utilities code remains
intact.
We'd like to speed up the development work, but that takes investment capital - currently, all the work is done in our spare time, away from work. If you are interested, you may
contact me at [email protected].
|
