This quick guide is based on true story, and is contributed to the community with the intent to be helpful to the department, office and enterprise Managers, network Administrators and support Staff, and Small Business Owners.This guide provides general guidelines and ideas for migration path that provides you a non-interrupted work of all your staff during the migration process, moreover it shows some important psychological aspects of such migration so that you both ensure the successful migration from human point of view (your staff) and at the same time extent of their skills so that they are MORE comfortable with their new environment.
Authors' oppinion about GPL and BSD is his personal vision, but the migration steps are not contradictive with other philosophy (GPL for example) and you may still follow this guidelines although ignoring the BSD-related parts. Not all technical aspects are 100% covered, however such path is proven working (based on true story), so you can advice for further details with a support team, network administrator or rely on your UNIX skills.
1. Choosing the right UNIX.
There are lots of options for choosing UNIX. Most of them coming from the OpenSource world. In most cases a commercial UNIX is more incompatible or hard to build the tons of free apps coming from the OpenSource world. Many of this apps are helpful so you would either have to spend a lot of time of hacking to rebuild your commercial UNIX where you could possibly damage something and lose the commercial support you paid for. OpenSource UNIXes are therefore more friendly to the free apps. When choosing your UNIX you must consider the ability to update easy your apps and have something to keep the integrity of yuor system (or keep such integrity yourself). If you always download the stuff yourself and compile you are risking the system unless you are willing to spend lot of time on regular basis to keep system integrity yourself.
RPM-like binary is a good option however you are dependent on distro compile options and availability of all packages. RPM source sounds better, but not best, and again the availability problem.
Here you find BSDs and especially FreeBSD with richest ports collection on the net. There are also a couple of Linuxes out there like Gentoo that copied what BSD did. If you have some legacy linux experience already it is a good time to switch to something more real like BSD UNIX. Some people may feel trolling here, so I leave this option to you to choose between the pioneer in ports and the real UNIX - BSDs or the UNIX immitation - Linux.
If you don't have UNIX experience choose Linux it will be a easy option, choose a distro with RPMs because they will take care of everything.
Author note: People adviced that probably for Linux newbie probably Debian with aptget would be also an easy option, however author does not 100% agree with this because a newbie would not feel comfortable with console while strong RPM based distributions (like RedHat and Suse) have GUI utilities for automatic and manual upgrade with just point-and-click manipulation.
2. Preparing the migration.
Make a local file server - a UNIX based one with Samba. Create accounts for all users, and have them save all files in this location, best is if you apply a rule that no file exists that is saved on local machine except if it's just something temporary. It is imporant to understand that in long term such centralization of your data provides you with more flexibility and better organization of your files, also such concept will give you better mobility and scalability because one user can always sit on another machine or you can always add a new machine to your office and start using it with little or no configuration.
Prepare a backup script to be safe if something goes wrong with your server, if you cannot do this have one admin to do it for you. You also will need a old machine to serve as your router, here FreeBSD wins. A old box with FreeBSD will also provide you a built-in and proven best firewall and VPN for your network, with easy configuration (at least easier than Linux) scripts for your Firewall, VPN or NAT. Some people just prefer this little devices that serve as router+switch + eventually wireless, however a old machine + BSD is a better option if you want to have better control.
Users that don't understand anything about console, scripts and UNIX at all can continue operating on their XP boxes, but will be ready at later point to migrate to Mac or other UNIX like FreeBSD (if you are good enough to configure the desktop to be enough familiar and install familiar apps (kde+moz+OOo helps)).
- "Migrate to Unix, Page 1/2"
- "Migrate to Unix, Page 2/2"
