Location: CrawshawSchool
Time: early Winter start time of 7pm
Shay !McAuley? from the Hamilton City Council gave a presentation on the use of Linux within the City Council, followed by a question-and-answer session.
This was a very interesting meeting, giving us a lot of insight into what looks like a tightly run networks operation for the city council. Thanks a lot Shay!
The general trend is to move from Windows clients and Solaris/Linux servers to just Windows (frontend) and Linux (backend). There are still Legacy library apps on Solaris, but the trend is to having the applications running on a Java platform on a Linux cluster (RedHat Enterprise edition). Standardised hardware and disk imaging allows servers to be replaced by spares with a minimum of downtime. Linux running on the Compaq servers gives more bang for much less buck than the solaris platform and support it replaced.
Combination of reasons given for linux use:
The city council has a large wide area network, comprising many sites:
Most of the sites are linked by fibre. The NOC is also connected to the central city closed-circuit fibre network and the traffic lights network.
Lots of VLANs. Helps immensely in quickly locating suspicious behaviour/disabling ports. Most machines are on an internal private range --- city council is returning 508 addresses of out a 512 IP address allocation from APNIC.
Future Plans:
see also OldMeetingTopics
One page links to MeetingTopics.2004-05-24: