Copyright (C) 1999 by Steve Litt. All rights reserved. Materials from guest authors copyrighted by them and licensed for perpetual use to Troubleshooting Professional Magazine. All rights reserved to the copyright holder, except for items specifically marked otherwise (certain free software source code, GNU/GPL, etc.). All material herein provided "As-Is". User assumes all risk and responsibility for any outcome.
Yes, we pay a few bucks for redistributable Red Hat or Debian, and we get a file server (Samba), web server (Apache), mail server (sendmail), dynamic addressing (DHCP), and the full lineup of TCP/IP apps including telnet, ftp, traceroute. We get high quality programming languages such as C++, C, Java, Perl, Python, and TCL/TK. The last three are especially important as a high speed development "glue language" with which we can take existing Linux executables and fashion them into a custom app. In about a day. And of course both Perl and Python have modules to support XML.
We get PostgreSQL, and can quite easily obtain others including MySql, db2, etc. We can quickly obtain free software DBI::DBD to talk to the top 20 or so most popular DBMSs through Perl.
We get a bunch of text and GUI editors, which, while in my opinion not as good as the editors in the Windows world, are good enough to keep a rapid development pace.
We get the lynx and Netscape browsers, the Netscape Communicator authoring tool (which was used to create this page), all sorts of email clients. Yes, we Linux people have it great.
But what about when we need to troubleshoot entangled, monolithic black boxy Windows systems? That's where our luck runs out, isn't it?
No. We're still the fortunate ones. Because we can bring in our little Linux notebook and use it as test equipment. That's right -- spend 10 minutes renumbering it, setting it hard or DHCP, maybe tweaking Samba a little. Plug it into the existing network, and look around. Go into promiscuous mode and look at packets. Run smbclient and see whether the problem is on the server, or on the Windows 9x clients (which are really lame at recognizing changes in their network neighborhood). Maybe run dnswalk (separate downloadable, but Free Software), the DNS equivalent of a "smog check".
Need to give them a quick little app? Write it in tcl/tk or Perl or Python. If their windows setup doesn't have tcl/tk or Perl or Python, download it for them. It's Free Software, even on Windows.
And the coolest thing of all is you can (with the proper desktop software) copy and paste the results into an html doc you author on Netscape Composer. So not only do you solve the problem, but as a deliverable you leave an html solution report.
Can't afford the Linux Notebook? Many can't. So take a ready to be retired PC and load it with Linux. Sure, you'll look a little funky wheeling it in, but network gurus are supposed to look a little funky.
We Linux people have the Troubleshooting Tools, no matter what OS we're troubleshooting. We can get in, solve the problem, and get out while the Windows crowd is still discussing who to blame.