The Linux Extremist

It’s been a rough week. The next 6 months of my working life will involve getting my company off the Microsoft diet and onto Open Source; in the meantime, it’s time to lift that poisoned chalice and chug-a-lug.

Living with an e-commerce application running off of Microsoft technologies has made me grey before my time. Even as I sit here and calmly type in my blog at 9:30 at night, I have to maintain a Firefox tab focused on the website. Every few hours, I test the search facility and make sure it’s responsive.

Admittedly, these are extreme circumstances, when Microsoft is not just bad, it’s hideous. The code is classic ASP rather than ASP.NET. The server is running Internet Information Server 5.0 on Windows 2000; there are issues with it which Microsoft says only an upgrade to IIS 6.0 on Windows Server 2003 will solve. Sadly, we are doing this as an interim measure, but until the upgrade occurs, the struggle to keep IIS crashes to a minimum goes on. At the moment, it’s my life: when a crash occurs, there is an automatic reboot, but sessions are lost in the process. As the server is running business critical applications, this can cause trouble for customers, and these customers call me. Some plead, some get angry, some are just plain rude; I have to deal with them all, counsel patience and fix what I can in the meantime.

Still, I find myself looking at Netcraft.com perusing through server uptime records, in particular I look at servers belonging to previous employers. My favourites are those that are running FreeBSD; these days, seeing that a server I had built hasn’t needed a reboot for over 500 days is like being a child looking into a toy shop window at Christmas and realising that one is only going to get underwear and socks again.

There comes a point where it gets to be too much. It’s a 3 day weekend in Britain, thanks to the Bank Holiday on Monday. So for me, it’s time to get on a plane tomorrow and to leave the world behind.

Don’t get me wrong, I love technology. Here in my home, unlike at work, it’s all in perfect order, largely because Windows is banished; my inventory of computers is three Ubuntu PC, one Fedora Core 5 laptop, and one PC BSD desktop. All make using my 8 MB broadband pipe a joy. But somehow the joy is diminished by having to keep that blasted tab open on the Microsoft server. So now that a three day weekend has come, it’s time to leave it and the world behind; to get on a plane and fly away for a bit from the joys and pains of living with technology.

I am going to my girlfriend’s place in Germany. She has no ADSL. She has one Windows laptop; considering my feelings about Microsoft lately, I am not tempted to switch it on, particularly since her link to the internet is AOL. In effect, the thread connecting me back to the Net will be very slender indeed. It also means, however, that I am letting someone else worry about the Microsoft server for a change. Tomorrow, I will arrive to see the smile of my beloved and we’ll have a lovely time. I will wake up on Sunday morning and realise there’s nothing I can do about work at the moment, shut my eyes and fall back to sleep, and dream of West Sussex and of our solution one day running off of FreeBSD or Linux and the phone at work going strangely silent.

Being technically minded has its privileges in spite of numerous people asking for technical assistance. But I keep thinking about the phrase, “leave the world behind”. Sometimes, one has to do so for the sake of sanity. However I will remember Microsoft’s contribution to driving me to this end; I will also remember with love and gratitude the refuge that my girlfriend provides.

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