Fedora 7 VS. Debian Etch Business Card - You’ll Never Guess Who Wins

In an attempt to save money, the agency I work for is in the process of migrating a lot of mission critical components to virtual environments. The Virtual Infrastructure implementation is an excellent idea, when carried out properly.

The IT department is also in the process of implementing the ITIL framework. ITIL is basically a set of best practices that result in lower costs to the department and better customer service to our clients. Part of the framework involves a Central Data Repository; an area technicians can quickly find information pertaining to incidents and/or problems. What better application than Mediawiki? After sharing this idea with a colleague in another bureau within the department, he agreed, and was even kind enough to give me space on his disaster recovery server. This is when everything turned into a heeping pile of manure.

Failure to adhere to the ITIL framework lead to a huge uproar that ultimately resulted in a loss of all the work put into configuring the virtual server, installing Debian, Lighttpd, Mysql, Mediawiki, etc. So, back to square one. A service request is sent to our Server Team at 9:30:09 A.M. on 8/22/2007 with the following text:

“This request is for a Linux VPS with the intention of running the recently approved software, MediaWiki. Please create a virtual server using the Debian business card image available at: http://www.debian.org/CD/netinst/ The server itself will require less than one gig of hard drive space, and shouldn’t require more than 512MB of ram. Please enable SSH access and provide server information/credentials via encrypted email once setup. Please ask any questions or include any comments within this request.

Thank you for your time.”

Take note of the meek resources I’ve requested: a gig of hard disk space, and half a gig of ram (Did I mention I love Debian?). At 10:54 A.M. the same day I received an update asking what I’d like the hostname set to. My response is sent within 6 minutes, and the ticket’s status is changed to IN PROGRESS. How exciting!

8/23, 3:49 P.M.:

It’s now day 2, and I’ve yet to hear anything. An update is requested.

8/28, 9:01 A.M.:

5 days later, a reply from the Server Team! “working this today.”

9/5, 1:31 P.M.:

Another update is requested.

9/7, 8:20 A.M.:

No response to 9/5. Another update is requested.

9/10, 9:45 A.M.:

A reply! “looks like we are getting the virtual machine image from security team.” New Status: DEFERRED

At this point, I’m becoming very discouraged. A request that takes 15 minutes to complete is now approaching day thirty with ZERO progress…

9/24, 1:26:40 P.M.:

“Will someone please update my request? It’s more than 30 days old, now.. Thank you.“

9/26:

A number of emails are exchanged between the server and security teams.

10/4:

No updates since the 26, so I change the request to a: NEW REQUEST in hopes someone will DO SOMETHING. Later that day, a technician marks the ticket as NOT STARTED, which is hilarious considering all the dialog within the request.

A couple more weeks pass with several update requests and little to no sign of progress.

10/22:

The ticket is finally marked completed and closed.

Shortly after, I received an encrypted e-mail that includes the server’s IP, a user name, password, and the root password. Fire up putty, login to the server:

# ps -auwx

WTF? anacron, atd, auditd, autofs, cups, dc_client, dc_server, dhcdbd, gpm, hplip, irqbalance, jexec, judzu, mdmonitor, messagebud, mingetty x6, on and on and on, WHAT IS ALL THIS CRAP, and WHY is it running on my server? This can’t be Debian…

# uname -a

Linux hostname.***.******.****.** 2.6.22.1-41.fc7 #1 SMP

Fri Jul 27 18:10:34 EDT 2007 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux

eeerrr, this can’t be real, someone please STAB ME.

# df -H

 Filesystem	Size	Used	Avail	Use%	Mount /LogVol00

 		20G	3.7G	16G	14%	/

 /dev/sda1	104M	20M	80M	20%	/boot

 tmpfs		530M	0	530M	0%	/dev/shm

Fedora 7 was the name, system stability and efficiency wasn’t the game. Obviously a bloated desktop type installation, consuming close to four gigs of hard disk space, running over 40 processes with a 400+MB memory footprint, even without X-Windows running. Two months and this is how they honor my initial request? Some bloated, cheesy, commercialized, damn near useless distribution with four gigs of crap a server would never use? And this was setup by our SECURITY TEAM? Someone, please, explain the logic behind running irqbalance on a single processor, or even the logic in having SIX, yes SIX mingetty terms running. This just wouldn’t do.

I emailed the gentleman that sent me the credentials asking if he would replace this Fedora Crap 7 image with the Debian image located on the disaster recovery server mentioned above. He basically said, “Sure, no problem. As long as it’s Fedora 7.” My reply:

“No, it’s not Fedora 7. The Fedora image provided was consuming 3.7 gigs of available hard disk space. Gnome, the x-windows environment, several GTK+ libraries and other useless packages were unnecessarily installed. Fedora also has a memory footprint over 400MB at startup, decreasing overall efficiency and performance. I attempted to remove as many of the unnecessary packages as possible, but the yum package manager has very limited, poor I should say, functionality compared to aptitude. The image provided is a desktop installation instead of a server installation. What makes a desktop Linux installation with close to 4 gigs of software that will go unused more secure than a historically rock solid, stable, secure OS that requires less than 500 megs?”

A response via email just wouldn’t do, so he decides to come to my office and explain why this situation isn’t worth losing his job. Just recollecting all these events have upset me, so I’ll stop here. Stay tuned for an update on the Mediawiki’s progress, there’s some real humor involved in this one