Pioneering Linux in a production environment

[Rich Braun]

I heard from the system manager at Pioneer Global (now called Verio
Northeast) that the old wizard.pn.com system is getting decommissioned
in December.  It started out in August 1994 as the main news server on
a 486DX2/66 with 32Mb of RAM.  It began serving web pages soon
thereafter and began virtual-hosting with Apache in August '95.  The
Apache deployment was first in the region, to my knowledge, by a
couple of weeks--this was a major moment in web history, since it
enabled ISP's to sign up commercial accounts and register domains with
practically zero equipment overhead.  Quickly I concluded I didn't want
to be in the high-volume, low-margin website registration business, but
it was an interesting challenge to get it set up in the early days.

In the fall of '95, wizard.pn.com ran out of steam under the increase in
netnews volume, so I upgraded it to a Pentium P133 with 128Mb of RAM.  I
think that's the current configuration, and it has 6 SCSI drives with about
15Gb of storage.  The new owners of the company went with Sparc Ultra
servers and is beginning to phase out older gear.  Yet, aside from occasional
hard-disk failures, the legacy of Linux at Pioneer Global is one of high
availability and solid, high performance.

Linux will live on indefinitely in the form of the old UUCP server,
uu2.pn.com, which I built shortly before leaving the company in August
'97.  It started out as rkbhome.jti.com, a 386DX25 with 100Mb disk and
4Mb RAM, in December 1992 running version 0.98pl5.  In January '93 I
upgraded hardware to a 486DX33 with a 1-gig disk and 16Mb of RAM.  A
couple months later I came up with the name 'pioneer' for the system, and
adopted the 'ci.net' domain name as part of an initiative called Community
Internet which provided news and email service to members and activists
interested in making Internet accessible to the public without barriers
of economics or technical expertise.  (The next year, PPP wars started
in earnest with the launch of TIAC, Shorenet, and a host of other providers
locally and nationally, so the civic aspect got lost in the whirlwind of
commercial activity--hopefully I'll be able to get back to civic networking
once my life quiets down a bit!)  Pioneer.ci.net was a 486DX2/66 with 32Mb
of RAM at the time I decommissioned it in September '97, almost 5 years
after launching it.  (Actually, it's still powered up but not online.  Guess
I'll leave the electricity on for another week or so, until the official
5-year mark is hit!)

I checked uptime on the other Linux server over there, ts1.pn.com, and it's
205 days.  That's a PPP server which is likely to get decommissioned and
replaced with something from Cisco if my guess is right.

For those who are wondering what happens to someone who builds an ISP and gets
burned out supporting it 24 hours a day for 3 or 4 years, here's what happened
to me...  In February, I signed an agreement to sell the company to Verio.
They took a few months to bring in new management, and I worked during the
transition for 6 months.  Then I dropped out of sight for 3 months, during
which I worked on fixing up a 90-year-old Somerville house--ask me the SKU
number on anything at Home Depot, I've been there 200 times by now--and have
resurfaced as a senior network integrator at GE Capital.  (Warning, advertising
pitch:  mine is a new group of a half-dozen network guys looking for WAN/LAN
deployment work at mid-size to large companies, please give me a chance to
look at your RFP's for projects in '98--our office is in Boston but we can
do projects like 100BaseTX upgrades, router/switch replacements, Frame Relay
installations, and NT/Novell/Apple/Unix server upgrades pretty much anywhere.
Oh, and my boss always wants me to mention the lease-financing group.  And
I'm always on the lookout for talented new-hires.  Ah, I'm descending into
undesirable sales-pitch SPAM.  End unpaid advertisement.)  Undoubtedly I'll
be sneaking Linux boxes into various corners of GE as I figure out where
to tuck them.

One of the interesting things about all this history of Linux and the Internet
tied together is how the industry is getting fragmented.  At a talk for
entrepreneurs last month, one of the VC guys mentioned a study done by one of
the big Silicon Valley venture funds.  It's a set of binders called "10,000
Niches", and details ten thousand different angles on the Internet being
converged on by more than that number of companies in the software, hardware,
and service sectors.  It's totally unprecedented, on a scale bigger than the
early days of PC's when there used to be myriad competitors in that arena.
Even though at first glance one would think there'd be no room at all for
long-term profits running a company with that many competitors, VC funding is
increasing rapidly for Internet-related companies.

Something different has happened with the Unix market, despite its
ongoing growth and its long-time ties to the Internet its history has
paralleled since the early '70s.  Every player except Sun and Linux
has pretty much dropped out; Digital has played a strong hand but the
recent Intel deal (to outsource fabrication of the Alpha chip) is
likely, in my opinion, to hand 98% of the remaining commercial Unix
market to one company, Sun Microsystems.  Sun is quadrupling the size
of their employee base here in Massachusetts in a new facility, I
hear, and the rest of the Unix players are fading.  Meanwhile Linux
has continued building a track record, and has been made freely
available to enough commercial users that it's going to be around for
a good long while.  The Microsoft juggernaught has attracted pretty
much all desktop applications development from other platforms,
including Linux and Solaris.  The open question remains this: will
Linux remain a preferred server platform for Internet applications, as
Microsoft and Sun set their sights on this segment of the industry?
And, whatever happened to IBM and DEC, have they gone away for good?

-rich