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The trouble with IT is that the whole business is couched in euphemisms. For example, Linux "is a great Web server". Now what does that actually mean?
In the reverse-speak world of technology, it could well mean that Linux is no good for anything other than Web serving.
Take network interface cards, or NICs, for example. I don't know about you, but I expect a server to be able to run with more than one NIC. It doesn't sound overly demanding to me, but I'm clearly out of step with the rest of the world on this one.
It's not that I want to use some extremely low-cost network card, "the card with no name" that anyone in their right mind would instantly recognise as being unsupported. Actually, I am trying to use two Intel 82557-based NICs, although I occasionally throw a 3Com into the mix just to see if the old king of the LAN is any better served than Intel.
In case you don't get very close to the hardware, both NICs are as common as muck, if you'll forgive the expression. Yet whether I try Red Hat Advanced Server 2.1, Suse Linux Enterprise Server 7 (SLES7) or just about any other enterprise version of Linux, the resulting servers are unable to use two NICs without some serious first-aid. In some cases, they cannot even use one NIC unless I disable the other, and in really extreme circumstances I can't disable any of them at all.
I even tried Suse Linux Enterprise Server 8, which works with two NICs, but for some reason that I did not have time to understand, that particular combination of hardware and software crashed twice in four days. As we use the two strikes and you're out policy for that kind of behaviour, SLES8 was summarily removed from duty. Ironically, the same hardware had been running SLES7 for about a year without a hitch.
By the time I had searched the Web for a few hours, it became obvious that the 2.2 series Linux kernels had big problems running with two Intel NICs. It seems there are also difficulties with NICs from other vendors.
Intel even went to the trouble of providing its own version of Linux driver software to fix the problem. Unluckily for me, I'm using 2.4 series kernels, and couldn't figure out how to install the Intel driver without lots of work. Even worse, as I had originally installed SLES7 from a pre-production set of disks, there was a problem using its automatic update wizard.
So where does that leave Linux Web servers? Clearly, Apache is the market-leading Web server, and Apache is used almost exclusively on Unix and Linux systems. So Linux really is a great Web server.
However, anyone who wants to run with two NICs should probably focus on the very latest versions if they don't have a doctorate in software development. In the end, I upgraded SLES7 to Suse Professional 8.1, which supports two NICs without a second thought. I had already tried upgrading to SLES8, but oddly enough SLES8 cannot upgrade a system running SLES7.
I guess that's a sign that things are changing. Linux used to be a great Web server, and now it can also use two NICs. Now that must be what is euphemistically referred to as progress.
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