Practical Technology

for practical people.

January 9, 2003
by sjvn01
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SCO Linux 4 – Ready for the Big Time

SCO, formerly Caldera, have taken the lead in bringing UnitedLinux consortium’s UnitedLinux server operating system to the reseller market. And, that’s big news. SCO Linux 4, SCO’s version of UnitedLinux 1.0, may not look that different from OpenLinux. In fact, it really just looks like a typical-albeit stripped down to the vital server basics-Linux server distribution. Which, when you get down to it, is exactly what it is. But, that’s the point

UnitedLinux is an attempt to create a standard business server Linux with common file directory conventions, command options, installation routines and high-end options like clustering and shared memory multiprocessing (SMP). The main idea behind UnitedLinux is that when a customer buys a UnitedLinux branded distribution he can be certain that any UnitedLinux applications will run on it without tweaking.

As resellers know, common business application and operating system compatibility is far more important to customers than having the latest and greatest file system. So it is that SCO Linux 4 has more in common with business operating systems like Windows 2000 Server or Solaris 9, than well-thought of, but end-user oriented, Linuxes like Debian or Slackware.

That’s not to say SCO Linux 4 isn’t really Linux. It’s Linux from top to bottom with a 2.4.19 kernel, KDE 3.03 and BIND 9. For the server trimmings it comes with up to date (as of January 2003) server programs like Apache, Samba, and NFS. SCO Linux 4.0 also comes with such mail essentials as Sendmail and Postfix and such developer necessities as gcc, cpp, and Tomcat.

If, however, you’re looking for a Linux with multiple Web server choices and every last new Linux program known to Freshmeat.net, you’re looking at the wrong distribution. SCO Linux 4 contains the most popular business Linux software choices and that’s about it.

In fact, if you know your Linuxes well and you look hard at UnitedLinux, you’ll find yourself thinking this look a lot like SuSE’s SuSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 7.0. And, you know what? You’d be right. SLES 7 is UnitedLinux’s immediate ancestor.

What’s different about UnitedLinux isn’t so much the technology as the idea of providing business with a single common Linux server platform. With a common Linux platform, the UnitedLinux companies, and their major ally IBM, hope that independent software vendors (ISV)s take a permanent seat on the bandwagon. So far, it seems to be working. Borland, Computer Associates, NEC/Siemens, PeopleSoft, Progress Software, and SAP are all supporting it.

The Business of SCO Linux

In turn, this means, the four UnitedLinux companies-Conectiva, SCO, SuSE and Turbolinux–hope that Linux will move out of the popular, but low revenue, business of Web site hosting and file/print servers and into the much more profitable world of application and enterprise servers.

Of the four companies, only SCO is making a serious run at the North American reseller trade. Turbolinux is only a Far East play now. Conectiva… well, I know they want the Latin American market, but they seem to be making a hash of it.

Other than SCO, only SuSE is making a serious attempt at the business market, and that’s only in Europe. For all serious business purposes, SuSE is dead in North American market. That said, since they still have a US presence in the consumer space, you can still expect to find customers who want to consider it. Their lack of a viable reseller channel though means North American SCO partners won’t have much to worry about. European SCO vendors, though, are going to have their work cut out for them.

For us in the States and Canada, though, SCO Linux real competition is Windows 2000 and .NET Server, a point that SCO’s reviewer guide makes exceeding clear. SCO Linux also targets the major server Unixes-AIX, HP-UX and Solaris. The only Linux, it competes with is Red Hat’s Red Hat Advanced Server (RHAS).

SCO, having finally learned that OpenServer is here to stay, is wisely not targeting its own Unix market. As most of you already know, OpenServer is solid as a house and, it’s one of the safest operating systems out there according to the English security research house, mi2G (http://mi2g.com).

The Right Stuff, The Tech Stuff

To make SCO Linux 4 do its stuff, you’ll need at least an Intel 486, with 64MBs of RAM and 500 MBs of disk space to give it a try. But, that’s pointless. To do the jobs SCO Linux 4 is meant to do you’d need a minimum of a high-speed AMD Athlon or Intel Xeon with 512MBs of RAM and 40GBs of hard disk and up.

But, to really see UnitedLinux strut its stuff, with advanced features like IBM’s open source Memory eXpansion Technology (MXT) and large memory support so that even on Intel 32-bit architecture, UnitedLinux can address up to 64GBs of RAM with up to 4GBs per process, you need high-end servers with gigabytes of RAM and a Storage Area Network (SAN).

Since I don’t have one of those in the office (darn it!), I tested SCO Linux 4 on a HP Pavilion 512N with a 1.4Ghz AMD Athlon XP processor with 512MBs of RAM and an 80GB hard drive. By UnitedLinux standards, that’s barely getting into second gear.

Even so, some things quickly became apparent. One is that SCO Linux 4 is easy-I mean fall off a log easy-to set up. With more two decades of setting up server operating systems under my belt, I’ve never seen one this easy to set up before. In fact, I’ve found most desktop systems to be more difficult to install.

In large part that was because SCO’s Webmin and Usermin, Web-based administration programs are very easy to use. We also found, though, that YaST, the UnitedLinux default administration suite, also worked well.

For fine-tuning, though, they weren’t perfect. Both use KDE 3’s built-in Web browser, Konqueror 3.03, for their interface. And, I found that Konqueror consistently broke during some setup installations. For example, it always broke during some stages of setting up Samba, the Windows NT compatible file server. I was able to get around this by using Samba’s own SWAT administration tool. From some early experiments with Mozilla 1.01, the other supplied Web browser, it would appear that it works more reliable with the Webmin and Usermin administration tools.

While I didn’t test performance as such, I did run some informal tests of how fast it ran compared to Caldera’s pre-UnitedLinux Linux, OpenLinux 2.4. I found that on the exact same machine, SCO Linux 4 and its applications ran faster.

And, for lack of a better term, it ran smoother than its predecessor and other Linux distributions. There were fewer glitches. Yes, Linux is more stable than its competitors, but we all know programs that need fine-tuning before they work well enough for business. Well, on SCO Linux 4, there were simply fewer fit and polish problems.

That’s pretty amazing for a 1.0 release. Of course, if you look really closely, you can see a lot of bits and pieces still labeled SuSE rather than SCO or UnitedLinux, but for practical purposes of getting the job done, it runs remarkablly well for a 1.0 release.

Still, nothing is perfect and neither is SCO Linux 4. The biggest problem I found was that there is no graceful way to upgrade from OpenLinux 2.3. In talking with SCO, I discovered that it wasn’t just my own klutziness getting in the way. The only way to ‘upgrade’ OpenLinux, or any other Linux for that matter, is to back up your data and configuration files and restored them after letting SCO Linux 4 blow away the existing Linux system. If you’ve invested a lot of time in getting your Linux setup just so, be ready to re-do a lot of it.

So, in short, if you’re upgrading an existing business installation, make sure you have up to the second backups and allow for lots of time for bring the system back up to production level. Otherwise, you’re going to have one really ticked up client on your hands.

UnitedLinux representatives tell me that upgrade paths from older Linuxes will be made cleaner. But, with the possible exception of SLES users, I doubt that will happen. By its very nature UnitedLinux resets all those little, but vital, Linux file placements and settings to one standard way. And, that way, again with the exception of some of SuSE’s Linuxes, isn’t the UnitedLinux way. In the future, however, one SCO Linux 4 is in place upgrading SCO Linux Upgrade service, will go much easier.

How Much?

SCO, SuSE, and Turbolinux’s UnitedLinux-based distributions are available today. Connectiva is, in January 2003, lagging behind. For the North American reseller market, SCO took a quick and immediate lead and there are no signs that it will have significant competition from the other UnitedLinux companies in the near future. Europe, as I mentioned earlier, is another story. There, SuSE and SCO, as mentioned earlier, will compete head to head.

SCO’s pricing starts with a Base Edition, that’s meant for VARs or a small business with its own Linux expert, costs $599. Other versions, like the Classic Edition are $699, the Business Edition: $1,249 and the Enterprise Edition for $2,199. With each increase in price the owner gets higher levels of SCO direct maintenance and support with speed of response being the most important difference. The more you pay, the faster a SCO engineer will get back to the customer. At the bottom level, the reseller is responsible for all support.

All commercial versions also include the SCO Linux Update Service, which delivers upgrade and maintenance packs and security fixes. While each of the UnitedLinux partners has its own pricing system, you’ll find this basic tiered structure with better service for more money to be the same. For the full details see the SCO Linux 4 page.

Of course, you can also download UnitedLinux ISO images, but these come without support. And, as a business class operating system, technical support is the name of the game. If you’re an SCO reseller, I really wouldn’t worry about someone trying to steal your business without SCO’s support. They’ll be operating without a support network worth the name.

That said, it would be good to see a firm technical certification track set up for SCO Linux 4. Linux Professional Institute (LPI) president Evan Leibovitch has hinted that the LPI might brand their vendor-neutral certifications for UnitedLinux. Given, Caldera/SCO’s long support for the LPI certification, I expect the LPI certifications to become the de facto UnitedLinux/SCO Linux certifications.

What many resellers want to know though is whether SCO Linux 4, or any UnitedLinux, is better than RHAS. In my opinion, it depends on the customer. If you have someone who’s wedded to Oracle for their DBMS and Dell for their servers, chances are they’re going to like RHAS. But, for everyone else, but especially for IBM-oriented customers, I think SCO Linux is a good, viable choice.

ISV support, OEM support, technical support, and a strong, stable Linux distribution, there’s a lot to like here. With its pure business focus and pricing, UnitedLinux will never be the Linux for people at home, but SCO Linux 4, along with RHAS, is the Linux for people at the office.

November 6, 2002
by sjvn01
0 comments

Get some Backbone

It used to be choosing your Internet backbone provider was a serious, but not backbreaking decision. Things have changed. Now, the wrong choice could put you and your net-dependent customers-which is all of them these days-out of business.

It’s already happening. Last year, VARBusiness‘ readers picked WorldCom as their favorite backbone provider. Today, only a fool wouldn’t be looking for a way to get out of their WorldCom backbone contracts. Even, if you still believed that WorldCom divisions would keep working even as their leaders were shown to be crooks and the company continues its fall to bankruptcy, the wide-spread failures on October 2nd across the WorldCom backbone put some companies off the Internet and lead to wide-spread delays of two seconds and more for even customers. Heck, in just the days since I sent out the first version of this article to readers, a special report has damned Worldcom even more, the SEC is filing more charges, and as of this morning, they’re saying that they’ll have to restate nine (9) billion (BILLION!) dollars of income.

It’s not just the big names. Cable & Wireless, while well known in the UK, is quiet in the US even though it provides many US customers with their backbone connections thanks to buying out Digital Island in 2001, and via their purchase of Exodus, they’re also the company that hosts many American Web sites. What you probably don’t know is that C&W is very likely to be moving entirely out of the North American market. Some customers are already reporting that C&W has left them high and dry.

So it is that today, when you’re thinking about backbone services, you don’t want to just consider price, quality of service and support, you have to look closely at the backbone provider’s overall business health. These days, you need to read the financial pages as well as the technology section before picking a backbone partner.

Which backbone providers should you serve up to your customers? That’s a tricky question, considering all of the options out there. A good place to start is ISP Planet’s Backbone Directory. And these days you must follow up any companies that strike your fancy with a close look at their business news and financial reports. A useful place to start for beginners is Yahoo! Finance.

What to Look for in the Business Side

If you seen any these red flags, it’s time to give long, hard thought about your backbone provider. First, is the company laying off employees? Yes, in these bad times, everyone is doing some of that, but if they’ve gone through several layoff cycles, chances are they’re in deeper trouble than usual. Their stock may have gone up–stock analysts love companies that ‘cut out the fat.” But, the truth of the matter is that many tech. companies, ihncluding the backbone providers are now cutting muscle and bone, not fat. The market may love it, but what it means for you is that there will be fewer employees to keep your lines in order and gvie you support when they do go down. You can also be certain that those who are left will have poor morale and be overworked.

Are the officers of the company selling their stock? If it’s just one or two people, maybe they just want to buy a new house. If it’s three or more or the stock blocks are large, maybe though they’re getting ready to abandon ship.

Is the stock price below $5 a share? It is? Then the company has trouble. Unfortunately, that’s not uncommon these days. If, however, it’s below a dollar a share, then your backbone provider is in a fight for its life. Unless you have an outstanding relationship with the provider, you’ll probably want to find a new one. Has your company been delisted from the major exchanges? Yes? Then drop it. I don’t care if your mom does run it, it has almost no chance of surviving and when it goes down, it may take you with it.

What to Look for in the Technical Side

During the Net’s early days, anyone with a 1.544Mbps T1 or a 45Mbps T3 could call himself a backbone provider. If your customers don’t plan to run real-time programs, such as videoconferencing, traditional options like frame-relay over a T1 or T3 should work just fine.

But with the rise of broadband and multimedia applications, a backbone provider needs at least a 155.52Mbps OC-3 to be taken seriously. They also must have peering agreements with neighboring backbone providers so that Internet traffic can quickly reach its destination without any detours.
Clearly, not all T1s are created equal. Traffic congestion and network overhead ensure that no matter how fast a connection is supposed to go, it will never actually reach that speed. Many other factors–something as simple as what version of Cisco’s Internetworking Operating System you’re running on your router–can greatly impact effective throughput.

You also should check out a backbone provider’s basic infrastructure–and we’re not referring to copper or fiber optics. All too often, too much attention is paid to the network infrastructure of routers, switches and network connections, without any attention spent on the provider’s other basics.
For instance, a typical network operations center (NOC) used to have a half-dozen hard-core technicians living off Jolt Cola and cold pizza. But what your customers really need are backbone providers with several 24 x 7 NOCs. Each NOC should have automated trouble-ticket tracking and a top network-monitoring program, like Entuity’s Eye of the Storm, constantly running.

The real proof of the pudding, though, is how proactive the NOC is. With the best providers, the first sign that there’s a problem upstream should be when the NOC calls to let you know there’s a problem–not when your customers call you to scream about a network headache.

Another factor you should keep in mind is that some providers over-subscribe their backbones. You should ask providers exactly how many others will be sharing your section of backbone and then go with whoever gives you the lowest number if all things are equal.

Of course, savvy ISPs need more than one backbone provider to guarantee network availability. The best you can really expect from a backbone provider is 99.95 percent uptime. That’s a long way from the 99.9999 percent uptime that the harshest service-level agreements (SLA) require. The only way to achieve that type of availability is to use multiple providers.

Comparison Shop

If you don’t know your way around the market, choosing a backbone provider can be difficult. Fortunately, you can chew on Internet.com’s ISP-Lists mailing lists. These lists will give you a taste of what people really think about their backbone providers. The ISP-Bandwidth and ISP-Broadband lists are particularly useful for this.

Don’t have time for a list, but still have questions? Then simply search the list archives with the name of the providers you’re considering. Do keep in mind though that people tend to complain more than they praise though. You can always find someone who hates a given provider. The real red alert is when many people over time keep reporting the same problems with the same provider.

You also need to make sure that your provider can keep running even after disaster strikes. That’s a serious concern on the West Coast with major Internet exchanges like MAE West.

Not all disasters are natural ones. For example, you can expect California to see wave after wave of mandatory blackouts if the summer of 2003 proves to be another hot one. Even with the minimum serious power backups–diesel generators with automatic cutovers–you might want to consider including a backbone provider that doesn’t have many of its Internet eggs in California’s fragile basket.

Service Suggestion

Installation delays, poor technical support, and incompetent help-desk personnel can ignite heartburn. Again, the best way to avoid problems in the first place is to read ISP-specific mailing lists.
Ever been to a restaurant where the food was great, but you wanted to strangle the waiter because of poor service? Join the crowd. Backbone providers can be the same way.
Ken McLeod, CEO of CSG Wireless, puts it well. He looks for direct, person-to-person communication with his backbone providers. “Not an automated e-mail reply system, not a fax blast about pending orders, but a real human being who understands the network, can place and follow through on orders, and communicates delays. And, most important, I don’t want the dreaded call: ‘Hi, I’m Jim. I’m your new account rep this week!'”

Paying the Bill

You also need to look closely at your shopping bill. “From a business standpoint, we want short-term, one-year contracts because we need the ability to add or delete [providers] as necessary,” says BestWeb’s president Andrew Dickey. “Pricing needs to be competitive, but small differences do not matter. All of [our] suppliers have had reasonable contracts–but whenever the billing is complex, we have to check it carefully because I don’t think their accounting departments read the contracts the salespeople negotiate. Getting invoices corrected is difficult [and can turn into] horror stories.”

Indeed, you must keep a close eye on invoices. For example, some resellers have told me that even after C&W cut off their service, they were still getting billed for service. And, I myself have had trouble with DirecWay, which provides satellite Internet services. So, you should always have your accounts payable people go over your backbone bill with a fine-tooth comb.

Take a close look, too, at the provider’s Service Level Agreement (SLA) terms and conditions. What the salesman says and what the SLA says can be two different things. You must do your due diligence research before signing up with any backbone provider. Our point is, however, that you should strongly consider having some sort of independent auditing process in place to verify the performance levels that you’re paying for.

The plain truth is that you should be more concerned with business relationships instead of technology. A partner failing should be your greatest concern today not a hardware failure.

SIDEBAR: Align Your Backbone With the Right Bandwidth

Choosing the right bandwidth to connect to the backbone is a piece of cake–once you know which ingredients you’re looking for.
First, you’ll need to know whether your customers’ traffic is bursty, whether you have a high proportion of end users or you’re a portal (which determines how much traffic will stay in your network), and what type of applications or services you offer (real-time applications like videoconferencing or Voice over IP require special handling).
The options available to connect to the backbone are numerous, confusing and expensive, but we can try to simplify it. It’s important to understand the difference between speeds and technologies. T1 is a speed. OC is a speed. DSL, Frame Relay, ATM, Packet over Sonet and Ethernet are physical-layer technologies. These are often combined. For example, frame relay is often carved out from a T1, which rides on HDSL copper. If you’re not sure what you’re getting, ask and make sure you understand exactly what you’re getting in real world terms.
Perhaps the most common connection at the low end is the trusty T1 line (or a fractional T1, which is a provisioning of only some of a T1’s 24 64-bit channels). A T1 is just the speed, though–the technology is HDSL, the daddy to the widely available ADSL, SDSL, etc. T1 and its big brother, T3 (or DS3), generally run over copper wire.
Also on the low end is frame relay, a shared, packet-switching protocol, which is great for inexpensively connecting branch offices together over long distances, but it’s not really suited for a service provider to connect to the backbone because of the inefficiencies in encapsulating IP within frame relay.
Many users would never notice the difference, but if you’re running a real-time application like a VPN or videoconferencing, you’ll see the inferior quality of service in a hurry.
Stepping up to even higher bandwidth levels comes ATM, with a maximum limit of 622Mbps. Basically, if you have ATM, you should continue with it, but it’s complicated and expensive.
Fiber has become widely available (thus dropping its price), which makes Packet over Sonet (whose speed is defined by Optical Carrier) a more affordable backbone connector. Sonet (synchronous optical network) defines rate and interface connections over a fiber-optic line.
Fiber loops are indeed loops. THis means that if a line is cut, the traffic is automatically routed along another path. It also has fewer problems with interference, making it an excellent transport medium over long distances

Unfortunately, the bottom has fallen out of the Fiber market. Global Crossing, once a name that meant the future of the Internet, now struggles to survive. Still, you can get great deals on Fiber. Cogent Communications, now owners of venerable PSINet, for example, sells 100Mbps OC48 connections for a jaw-dropping $1000 a month. Of course, it’s only available in currently 21 metro areas, but still it’s amazing.

While Cogent can do some of this by using a simplified optical system that doesn’t use pricey ATM, you have to tread carefully anytime something that sounds to good to be true. The history of Internet connectivity is littered with ISPs and Competitive Local Exchange Carriers (CLEC)s that had connectivity offers that were too cheap to be true-or more to the point, profitable enough to keep them in business and you in Internet connectivity.

Last, but not least, is Gigabit and 10-Gigabit Ethernet. While not widely available yet, Ethernet is running on a majority of LANs, which makes it easy to connect to an Ethernet interface on the backbone. The problem is that there’s a distance limitation to Ethernet, which usually requires co-location of the routers and switches. Still, I think that these technologies will eventually play a major role in metro area network backbones. Considering the economy, though, eventually might well be 2004 or 5.

Rev the Net

Bandwidth Designation
155.52Mbps OC-3
466.56Mbps OC-9
622.08Mbps OC-12
933.12Mbps OC-18
1.244Gpbs OC-24
1.866Gbps OC-36
2.488Gbps OC-48
4.976Gbps OC-96
10Gbps OC-192
13.21Gbps OC-255

November 4, 2002
by sjvn01
0 comments

Linux Certification: What’s The Value?

By my count, there are four Linux certification programs. These are Sair Linux and GNU Certification’s Linux Certified Professional(LCP); Linux Professional Institute (LPI); Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE); and CompTIA’s Linux+. It’s too bad that so few jobs require Linux certification.

Oh, there are Linux jobs out there; it’s just that they’re much more likely to call for a bachelors in computer science than a Linux certification. In my analysis of 500 Linux job postings on Monster.com, the Washington Post job section, HotLinuxJobs, and HotJobs, only 1% of Linux jobs asked for any certification and when they did the most popular was the RHCE.

Instead of certifications, what employers want are people with four year computer science degrees and three years and up experience in Linux.

What are certifications for? Well, according to Evan Leibovitch, president of the Linux Professional Institute, in a recent article in Certification Magazine, have a “single specific purpose. They are intended to separate the people who ‘know their stuff’ from those who don’t.”

Most employers think of all certifications, with the exception of Cisco’s, as being little more than minimal standards. The most common attitude seems to be, “We still have to train them no matter how many pieces of paper they have.”

The LPI also takes a strictly vendor-neutral approach to their certification efforts. The other non-Red Hat certifications also take this approach, but the LPI takes this much more seriously.

Historically, though, that’s not been the most successful route. The important certifications in the job market, like the Microsoft Certified Software Engineer (MCSE), Certified Novell Engineer (CNE) and the Cisco Certified Internetwork Expert (CCIE), have been vendor driven. Indeed, one major reason these certifications have become so popular is that partnership relationships with each company often required that a reseller or integrator have a certain number of certified staffers on board. Given this, it should come as no surprise that what interest employers do show so far in Linux certification is in the RHCE.

Another problem seems to be that while those in the Linux community tend to know about Linux certification, potential employers don’t know them. In a recent CRN survey solution providers are clearly getting the idea that Linux is the next coming thing, but they still see certification as a “key sticking point.” And, they also think that, despite the track record, vendor-neutral certification is still the way to go.

With all this, should you still bother to get certified? If you plan to be employed in Linux in the long run, it’s probably worth it. Some companies, like IBM are strongly encouraging their partners to get either LPIs or RHCEs. Indeed, IBM will pay its middleware partners up to $3,000 for their Linux certification costs. With companies like Dell, HP, and Oracle also lining up behind Linux, it’s likely that they too will eventually support certification and with this support, Linux certification, in turn, will become important for job-seekers.

Walking The Linux Walk

In the short run, for both potential employees and employers, a Linux certification shows that someone is serious about Linux. Lots of people can talk the Linux talk, but can barely walk around a KDE desktop. With a Linux certification, you can at least be sure that the holder is trying to master Linux rather than play with it.

Another current reason to get a RHCE is that, according to a December 2001 salary survey by Certification Magazine is that at shops that do recognize this certification, RHCE holders make 9.6% more salary per year. Now if only more employers paid attention to Linux certifications, there’d be no question about the need to get one.

# CompTIA’s Linux+ — CompTIA is best known for its technician level certifications like A+, for hardware, and the self-explanatory Network+, Linux+ is another entry-level technician certification. To get a Linux+ certification you must pass a single two-hour test. More than the other certifications, the emphasis is on hardware and system maintenance. In short, it’s exactly what you think it would be: a certification for a technician, not an administrator or developer.

Given the popularity of CompTIA’s certifications, the Linux+ would work well for someone who likes getting their hands dirty with the nitty-gritty of hardware, while wanting to add some Linux expertise to their resume.
# LPI – The oldest and most broadly supported Linux certification is supported by almost anyone who’s anyone in Linux-SCO (fomerly Caldera), IBM, SGI, SuSE and VA Linux-except for Red Hat. This three-level certification program is meant for serious Linux administrators. For example, someone with a Linux+ could be expected to know the basic use of sed, someone with an LPI level 1 could be expected to know how to write basic shell scripts with sed.

Eventually, LPI will be an important certification for anyone looking for a Linux job. For now, it’s the certification to get if your job hope is to work with a Linux company or an extremely Linux savvy business, like say an IBM partner using Linux, that’s not wedded to Red Hat.
# RHCE – If an employer knows any Linux certification, it’s this one. That’s no great surprise; Red Hat is following the tried and true route of bundling their certification with what’s easily the most popular business Linux distribution in North America. And, in all fairness, it is a good set of certifications. Fairfield Research conducted an industry-wide survey 3,939 certificated IT professionals in late 2001, and RHCE, the one Linux certification to appear, got top marks.

An RHCE is meant to say that the holder is a qualified Red Hat Linux system or network administrator. Given our analysis of job ads, employers agree. With Dell and Oracle’s support, the RHCE should continue to be an important certification.
# Sair Linux and GNU Certification – The LCP is another entry-level certification that sits between the Linux+ and LPI’s Level One. Like the LPI, it’s vendor neutral.

While Sair has a good reputation, it’s hard to see the LCP becoming an important certification. The LPI and RHCE have the industry connections and CompTIA’s certifications are well-known in all kinds of business. During the last week, when you tried to click on Sair’s Why Certify page, you would have found a 404-error message-page not found. What more need be said?

So what should you do? If you’re looking for a Linux job, there really isn’t a pressing reason to get a Linux certification. A RHCE is the most likely to help you, and eventually an LPI or Linux+ could give you a leg up. But, for now, stay in college and get some kind of job where you can work with Linux, a degree and experience will serve you much better than a certification.

A version of this story was first published in Linux Planet.

October 1, 2002
by sjvn01
0 comments

Ransom Love speaks about UnitedLinux, SCO & Where He’s Going Now

Love him or hate him, if you were in the Linux business, Ransom Love, former CEO of Caldera, now SCO, and mid-wife to UnitedLinux, was impossible to ignore.

One of the very first to champion Linux in business, had he had his way, Novell, not Red Hat, would now be the major business Linux vendor.With Novell deaf to his pleas that Linux would be the operating system of the future, he, along with fellow Novell veteran Bryan Sparks, later the president and CEO of the embedded Linux business, Lineo, founded Caldera in 1994. Backed by Ray Noorda’s, Novell’s founder, Canopy Group, Caldera was the first business Linux company with Red Hat following it in 1995.With Sparks at the helm and Love as the VP of marketing and sales, Caldera was also one of the few companies to actually beat Microsoft. For four years, Caldera, which had acquired the rights to DR-DOS, an MS-DOS clone, from Novell in 1995, fought with Microsoft claiming that the ‘evil empire’ had used anti-competitive tactics to discourage users from using DR-DOS. In early 2000, Microsoft settled with Caldera for an amount believed to be about $155 million.

Soon thereafter, Love guided Caldera to its IPO in March 2000. While it wasn’t the run away success that similar, previous IPOs of other Linux companies such as Red Hat, VA Linux, and Cobalt Networks (later acquired by Sun) had been, Caldera has so far proven to be a survivor in the difficult stock market that has floundered so many other new technology companies.

While Red Hat gained popularity by appealing to end-users, Caldera under Love’s lead, moved slower and always kept its focus on the business market. To further its pursuit of the business market, Caldera bought the then struggling Unix on Intel leader, SCO in August of 2000. This gave Caldera, SCO’s strong reseller channel and two other major business operating systems: the never-say die OpenServer and the often-renamed UnixWare.

This done, Love who had been a leader in Linux standardization efforts such as the Linux Standard Base (LSB), got together with the CEOs of Conectiva, SuSE and Turbolinux to form the UnitedLinux consortium. The purpose of this organization is to create UnitedLinux, a high-end server version of Linux to compete against Red Hat Advanced Server (RHAS), the proprietary Unixes and W2K and Microsoft’s forthcoming .NET Server.

To get UnitedLinux off the drawing boards and onto production CDs, Love resigned as Caldera’s CEO and helped co-ordinate the four companies business and development efforts. And then, but let’s Ransom tell it.

Love Today

Q: Many people were surprised to discover that you were not at the head of UnitedLinux, since you had stepped down as Caldera’s CEO and you had essentially acted as the spokesman for the group since it went public in May. What happened?

A: I was never stepping into the role as manager of UnitedLinux, but I was stepping over to give guidance to UnitedLinux while we selected the general manager. All the CEOs who were driving the vision were so caught up in managing their individual companies that I volunteered to step aside at Caldera to put the structure in place.

So, what I did in those two months was work with the CEOs and what would become the Board of Managers to provide some guiding concepts, come up with the by-laws defining how new companies could join UnitedLinux and how everyone would work together and begin the search for a general manager. I did put my name in the ring.

Q: What happened then? Even analysts and reporters were surprised to see Paula Hunter, someone with little Linux experience and known essentially as a marketing officer, than you at the top.

A: Some people had concerns about me doing it because I was a founder of Caldera and because they felt it would shift the ship one way or another.

Q: Who?

A: Well, SuSE. But, in all honesty it was just timing. Gerhard (Burtscher, SuSE’s CEO) was all for it, but SuSE’s board was worried about the timing. With multiple-companies and boards involved, they needed more time to get more comfortable with Caldera and each other before they’d go with the former head of one of the companies.

Q: And, of course, going back to Caldera was impossible by then?

A: Yes. Darl McBride (the new Caldera/SCO CEO) was in charge. And, staying on Caldera didn’t make much sense, once there was a general manager for United Linux, because I’d get in the way of the new Caldera and UnitedLinux management teams.

For me personally, I had already worked out the severance arrangement with Caldera and Caldera was very generous. I’ve no complaints.

Q: So what do you think of what UnitedLinux is doing now?

A: I think they have the right team in place to make it a success.

Q: And what do you think of Caldera switching its name to SCO?

A: I wasn’t involved in that decision, but I could see it coming. I collected and saw the data and the resellers thought things were better with SCO. The bottom line as we went around the world, trying to analyze what was going on with customers and resellers, we got a lot of really good feedback and the reality is that on a global scale SCO is a known brand and Caldera isn’t. Caldera has some brand recognition in the US in Linux, but SCO had a lot more.

Q: A lot of people, even analysts, see this as a move backwards.

A: That is a negative. Many people will see SCO as heading back to Unix, but that’s not what they’re doing. They’re re-emphasizing that SCO is about business and resellers. SCO does have to follow up with very strong public relations measures to insure that the message is clear.

The nice thing that Darl has a very strong reseller background so the message should get to the resellers and I think they’ll put together some exciting reseller programs.

Q: So what will you be doing now?

A: It gives me a chance to work on a book that tells the story of the commercialization of Linux, and that’s a story that hadn’t been told. That, and deciding what to do when I grow up!

I’ve delving down multiple-paths. I’m even looking at possibly getting a Ph. D. I really want to share what I’ve learned.

Q: And that is?

I think we’re on a cusp of how organizations work. I find it fascinating how organization structures change and evolve to handle today’s constant information flow. The traditional information structure and compensation aren’t going to hold up in this new world of information exchange.

There must be something between Linux’s managed chaos and the old business hierarchy. I understand where open source is strong and weak, but I understand the old ways as well.

I think the new business world requires a different kind of management, compensation and structure and empower people to stay where they’re good.

Q: Sort of an attempt to defeat the Peter Principle? (The idea that employees advance to their highest level of competence and then are promoted to and remain at a level where they’re incompetent.)

A: Yes, we can defeat the Peter Principle. I’ve love to do more research in it, because all these businesses are dealing with these technologies now.

I think the key is the people. People are by far the greatest assets in any company if they have a vision and power to do something that with vision then they can really make change.

You can’t rely on that happening at executive level at every corporation and government. It used to be that’s how we had to do it. We’d had to have a head of the hierarchical structure. Now with technology everyone from the stock clerk to the CEO potentially has the same information. Now how do you empower this information at the lowest possible level? I loved to explore it.

Q: That does sound fascinating. Do you think you’ll ever get back in the technology business again?

A: I’ve love to find another small company especially in technology or Linux, but one that doesn’t have a grand idea of changing the world.

Q: But changing how people work in that company?

A: Yes!

Q: Thank you for your time Mr. Love

A: Anytime Steven.

September 30, 2002
by sjvn01
0 comments

The 802.11 Business

Once upon a time, there was talk of HomeRF or HiperLAN becoming the dominant wireless LAN (WLAN) technology. Not any more, you can stick a fork in them, they’re done. 802.11 technology is well on its way to dominating the WLAN market the way Ethernet had LANs

Why? It’s faster and has more range than HomeRF, it’s much farther along in the market than HiperLAN, and despite the fact that it’s built-in security protocol, Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP), can be broken relatively easily, it’s enormously popular. Analysts universally predict that the future of WLANs belong to 802.11. Ken Haase, general chairman of the HomeRF Working Group, even tacitly admits that HomeRF’s future is in telephony, not data networking.

Big Market Getting Bigger

WLANs aren’t just a niche market anymore. Allen Nogee, In-Stat/MDR‘s Senior Analyst for Wireless Component Technology says, “So far this year (first half, 2002) the numbers for all hardware (access point (AP) and Network Interface Card (NIC)) is 7.24 million for 802.11b, and 210 thousand for 802.11a.” For all of 2002, he predicts that, “it will probably be 16 – 17M.”

Sound impressive? Some think In-Stat’s numbers are on the low side. Tim Mahon, a CS First Boston analyst, sees 1-½ million 802.11a chips alone shipping in 2002, and another 200,000 combo chips. In 2002, he’s saying 11 million combo chips will ship next year. Richard Redelfs, CEO & President, Atheros, the 802.11a chip OEM, thinks Mahon’s numbers are closer to the truth. Smiling, he says, “It’s higher than half-a-million, we would be out of business if it was that low.”

Today, the market belongs to 802.11b. Navin Sabharwal, Director of Residential & Networking Technologies for Allied Business Intelligence observes that, “The market is basically 95% 11b, that will change. 11a will continue to make modest progress. 2003 will see a radical shift with 11b (solo NICs and APs) going down to 55%. The bulk of this growth will be in dual band.”

Chris Neal, Research Director for Sage Research, agrees. In Sage’s focus group studies of medium and large businesses, Sage found that CIOs are “thinking about multi-standard cards. They’re cautious about 802.11a, because of limits on 2002 capital expenditures so they’re dragging feet until spring of next year. Eventually, though, the bandwidth needs are such that they’ll go there, but not immediately.”

Driving 802.11

Several factors are driving 802.11. Gemma Paulo, senior analyst, Enterprise and Residential Communications for In-Stat/MDR, said, “In the ‘business’ space, WLANs are popular in the verticals, namely education, healthcare, retail, manufacturing/warehousing, etc.” Sabharwal thinks though that enterprise players are also driving the business market. He says, the “Number one motivation for the enterprise is that wireless is designed for notebooks and PDAs. This means that workers are no longer tied to their desktops. As companies move to laptops this lets them compute on the road, campus, or conference room. It doesn’t make sense to tether that person with an Ethernet cable.”

Paulo goes on to say that, “In the ‘home/SOHO’ space, WLANs are very popular among broadband users worldwide, with Asia Pacific really driving growth, especially Japan and South Korea. 802.11b equipment is cheap & reliable, and until consumer electronics companies actively try to embed 802.11a chipsets into CE equipment, 802.11b or 802.11g will work well for the home, as 2.4 GHz WLAN technologies are a bit more robust going through walls. We expect that eventually the desire to distribute multimedia in the home will drive a mass embedding of WLAN into CE devices, but this will not happen until 3 or 4 years down the road.”

Redelfs doesn’t think it’s going to take anything like that long and 802.11a, with its 54Mbps, not b, will move wireless ‘networking’ into consumer electronics. “There will be a market for ‘a’ in video distribution in situations because b isn’t fast enough. Sony has already done demonstrations of an 802.11 empowered video server with TiVo style technology to transmit video and audio to flat screen televisions, thus avoiding co-axial costs and hassles.” He goes on to say that Sony is on the verge of announcing 802.11a empowered home theater products.

As a result, WLAN chipset sales have increased dramatically since 802.11b’s introduction in 1999 and it shows no signs of slowing down. Businesses are the largest market for WLAN chipsets, but residential use is growing even faster. Indeed, Sabharwal says that the consumer/SOHO markets have grown explosively” with the growth “in the retail channel seems split between small business and residential.”

The Players

Many companies want a part of this product. The leading chip OEMS are Texas Instruments (TI), Intersil, and Atheros. Many other companies, more than 40 altogether according to Sabharwal want a piece of the WLAN pie. These include Resonext, LinCom Wireless, Agere Systems, Atmel, Cirrus Logic, Cisco, Intel, Philips, RF Microdevices Raytheon and Symbol Technologies.

Not all of them will make it. Ed Sperling, editor in chief of ElectronicNews sees “A lot of investment, but no one seems to be profiting that much. Sabharwal comes right out and says “the ones who are shipping today, Intersil, Philips, Atmel, Agrere, TI, Maxim, Atheros are in a better position and that Intel will be a player if they keep funding it.” But, it will be “hard for others to break out. Some won’t even be able to ship. We’re starting to see a shakeout. One thing I’ve seen is that they’re no more interest in new people entering this space since the middle of this year. In Q4/Q1 we’ll see a shakeout.”

The competition in the WLAN-chipset marketplace will continue to be fierce. With 802.11b profit margins already razor thin, grabbing market share in the ‘a,’ ‘g’ and combo chip market will become all-important in 2003. And, being to the first to market with combo chips will play an important role. Sperling thinks “most vendors will likely support chipsets that support all the standards since the cost of chips is doesn’t add much to cost of devices and customers don’t care about standards, they just want devices that work.”

Once upon a time, there was talk of HomeRF or HiperLAN becoming the dominant wireless LAN (WLAN) technology. Not any more, you can stick a fork in them, they’re done. 802.11 technology is well on its way to dominating the WLAN market the way Ethernet had LANs

Why? It’s faster and has more range than HomeRF, it’s much farther along in the market than HiperLAN, and despite the fact that it’s built-in security protocol, Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP), can be broken relatively easily, it’s enormously popular. Analysts universally predict that the future of WLANs belong to 802.11. Ken Haase, general chairman of the HomeRF Working Group, even tacitly admits that HomeRF’s future is in telephony, not data networking.

Big Market Getting Bigger

WLANs aren’t just a niche market anymore. Allen Nogee, In-Stat/MDR‘s Senior Analyst for Wireless Component Technology says, “So far this year (first half, 2002) the numbers for all hardware (access point (AP) and Network Interface Card (NIC)) is 7.24 million for 802.11b, and 210 thousand for 802.11a.” For all of 2002, he predicts that, “it will probably be 16 – 17M.”

Sound impressive? Some think In-Stat’s numbers are on the low side. Tim Mahon, a CS First Boston analyst, sees 1-½ million 802.11a chips alone shipping in 2002, and another 200,000 combo chips. In 2002, he’s saying 11 million combo chips will ship next year. Richard Redelfs, CEO & President, Atheros, the 802.11a chip OEM, thinks Mahon’s numbers are closer to the truth. Smiling, he says, “It’s higher than half-a-million, we would be out of business if it was that low.”

Today, the market belongs to 802.11b. Navin Sabharwal, Director of Residential & Networking Technologies for Allied Business Intelligence observes that, “The market is basically 95% 11b, that will change. 11a will continue to make modest progress. 2003 will see a radical shift with 11b (solo NICs and APs) going down to 55%. The bulk of this growth will be in dual band.”

Chris Neal, Research Director for Sage Research, agrees. In Sage’s focus group studies of medium and large businesses, Sage found that CIOs are “thinking about multi-standard cards. They’re cautious about 802.11a, because of limits on 2002 capital expenditures so they’re dragging feet until spring of next year. Eventually, though, the bandwidth needs are such that they’ll go there, but not immediately.”

Driving 802.11

Several factors are driving 802.11. Gemma Paulo, senior analyst, Enterprise and Residential Communications for In-Stat/MDR, said, “In the ‘business’ space, WLANs are popular in the verticals, namely education, healthcare, retail, manufacturing/warehousing, etc.” Sabharwal thinks though that enterprise players are also driving the business market. He says, the “Number one motivation for the enterprise is that wireless is designed for notebooks and PDAs. This means that workers are no longer tied to their desktops. As companies move to laptops this lets them compute on the road, campus, or conference room. It doesn’t make sense to tether that person with an Ethernet cable.”

Paulo goes on to say that, “In the ‘home/SOHO’ space, WLANs are very popular among broadband users worldwide, with Asia Pacific really driving growth, especially Japan and South Korea. 802.11b equipment is cheap & reliable, and until consumer electronics companies actively try to embed 802.11a chipsets into CE equipment, 802.11b or 802.11g will work well for the home, as 2.4 GHz WLAN technologies are a bit more robust going through walls. We expect that eventually the desire to distribute multimedia in the home will drive a mass embedding of WLAN into CE devices, but this will not happen until 3 or 4 years down the road.”

Redelfs doesn’t think it’s going to take anything like that long and 802.11a, with its 54Mbps, not b, will move wireless ‘networking’ into consumer electronics. “There will be a market for ‘a’ in video distribution in situations because b isn’t fast enough. Sony has already done demonstrations of an 802.11 empowered video server with TiVo style technology to transmit video and audio to flat screen televisions, thus avoiding co-axial costs and hassles.” He goes on to say that Sony is on the verge of announcing 802.11a empowered home theater products.

As a result, WLAN chipset sales have increased dramatically since 802.11b’s introduction in 1999 and it shows no signs of slowing down. Businesses are the largest market for WLAN chipsets, but residential use is growing even faster. Indeed, Sabharwal says that the consumer/SOHO markets have grown explosively” with the growth “in the retail channel seems split between small business and residential.”

The Players

Many companies want a part of this product. The leading chip OEMS are Texas Instruments (TI), Intersil, and Atheros. Many other companies, more than 40 altogether according to Sabharwal want a piece of the WLAN pie. These include Resonext, LinCom Wireless, Agere Systems, Atmel, Cirrus Logic, Cisco, Intel, Philips, RF Microdevices Raytheon and Symbol Technologies.

Not all of them will make it. Ed Sperling, editor in chief of ElectronicNews sees “A lot of investment, but no one seems to be profiting that much. Sabharwal comes right out and says “the ones who are shipping today, Intersil, Philips, Atmel, Agrere, TI, Maxim, Atheros are in a better position and that Intel will be a player if they keep funding it.” But, it will be “hard for others to break out. Some won’t even be able to ship. We’re starting to see a shakeout. One thing I’ve seen is that they’re no more interest in new people entering this space since the middle of this year. In Q4/Q1 we’ll see a shakeout.”

The competition in the WLAN-chipset marketplace will continue to be fierce. With 802.11b profit margins already razor thin, grabbing market share in the ‘a,’ ‘g’ and combo chip market will become all-important in 2003. And, being to the first to market with combo chips will play an important role. Sperling thinks “most vendors will likely support chipsets that support all the standards since the cost of chips is doesn’t add much to cost of devices and customers don’t care about standards, they just want devices that work.”

The Technologies

802.11b uses Complementary Code Keying (CCK) to achieve bit transfer rates of 5.5 and 11Mbps in the 2.4Ghz range. CCK works by using Differential Quadrature Phase Shift Keying (DQPSK), which encodes data by four phase shifts, and making each DQPSK ‘word’ carry additional data. Unfortunately, the 2.4 range already must contend with interference from microwave ovens, 2.4GHz telephones and other 802.11b networks. Because 802.11b only has three channels for simultaneous data transfers its throughput can plummet with multiple users.

On the other hand, 802.11b is shipping. 802.11g, another 2.4GHz standard, is another matter. After a long standards fight between Texas Instruments and Intersil over whose technology should be used to deliver service at the 22Mbps range, 802.11g still hasn’t achieved final IEEE approval. Approval is now expected in May 2003.

To finally get 802.11g out the door, Intersil and TI agreed to disagree. So it is that ‘g’ has two mandatory standards CCK at 2.4GHz for ‘b’ compatibility and 802.11a’s Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (ODFM) for a maximum of 54Mbps. ODFM achieves higher throughput by breaking a single wide frequency channel into several, multiplexed sub-channels.

In addition, ‘g’ comes with a pair of optional, and incompatible, modes to achieve throughput ranges in the 22Mbps range. These are Intersil’s CCK-OFDM mode with a maximum throughput of 33Mbps and TI’s Packet Binary Convolutional Coding (PBCC-22), with a throughput range of 6 to 54Mbps. PBCC combines codeword scrambling with binary convolutional coding to achieve its higher theoretical throughput rates.

By sticking to the 2.4GHz range, ‘g’ has the same interference problems of ‘b.’ 802.11a, on the other hand, uses ODFM at the interference free 5GHz range. In addition, as Redelfs observes, the 2nd generation of 802.11a supports 13 channels in North America and 19 in Europe giving it far more effective bandwidth and making it much more scaleable for IT uses.

In practice, no 802.11 actually hits its maximum possible throughput. Network overhead and distance attenuation combine to knock ‘b”s speed to about 2 to 4Mbps in most office environments and ‘a”s to 20Mbps. The exact performance and maximum range depends on the distance between AP and NICs, the housing structure’s materials, and interference. A site survey is a must for any large-scale WLAN deployment.

Typically, any 802.11 chipset consists of a radio, baseband processor, Medium Access Controller (MAC), internal logic to encode and decode its supported communications mode, RF noise filters, an amplifier, and support for both PCI and Cardbus interfaces.

At this point, this is usually done with two or more chips. But, most major vendors are working towards single chip CMOS designs that will require a smaller die size and less power and space on boards. In addition, zero conversion designs, like Intersil’s PRISM 3 chips, can perform direct down-conversion (DDC) RF signals, without requiring a step-down to intermediate frequency stages before conversion to the actual baseband signal. This also reduces the chipset cost and helps to make single CMOS chip designs possible.

This will be especially helpful in combo chips, which most analysts think displace pure ‘b’ chips be the best sellers in 2003 and 2004. At this time, though, sample quantities of combo chip sets are available. Atheros claims to have the lead, and TI and Intersil, devoted to their ‘g’ chip families, are known to be lagging behind other vendors.

Nogee, though, thinks, “802.11g does have a place. It will eventually replace most 802.11b. It has better range than “a” and is backward compatible with “b.” If you could get higher speeds with very little price penalty, wouldn’t you go for it?”

Some vendors though want to deliver higher throughput today without the IEEE’s blessing. TI, for example, has recently shipped a PBCC enabled 802.11b chipset, aka ‘b+,’ with claims that compatible ‘b+’ AP and NICs will reach up to 22Mbps speeds. And, since its beginning Atheros has supported ‘turbo’ modes that enable its ‘a’ chipsets to hit over 100Mbps speeds. Of course, these are all proprietary and incompatible approaches.

WLAN Futures

So it is that it seems clear that one-way or the other one 802.11 variant or the other will emerge on top. The question: which one? Some analysts think combo chips-perhaps even supporting b, g, and a on a single chip-will be the wave of the future. While others think that, delays and all, g, with built-in ‘b’ backwards compatibility will yet win out.

While WLAN chipset volume is high, and will go only higher, profits are another matter. One trouble spot is that although vendors shipped more WLAN chipsets in 2001, the revenue the chipsets generated fell because their per-unit price dropped.

The reason, according to Nogee, is that “Once the Taiwanese manufacturers started creating chips in large numbers, prices dropped fast. The rate of the fall in prices has slowed, but prices continue to drop. Also, with many more players now, there is much competition, and generally its on price more than anything else.”

Another potential problem is users becoming frustrated with incompatibilities. Nogee notes that, “The hodge-podge mix of security standards is the biggest problem now. Five 802.11b devices might all use a different security standard, and it’s almost impossible to know if one will work with the other. I think most people know that 802.11a at 5GHz won’t work with 802.11b at 2.4GHz. But Wireless Ethernet Compatibility Alliance’s (WECA) stance with first calling 802.11a Wi-Fi5 and now using Wi-Fi for all 802.11 technologies, hasn’t helped with the standards confusion.”

Eventually UltraWideBand (UWB), a non-IEEE technology, may play a role in the WLAN space. Indeed, Redelfs says that “UWB is interesting technology,” and that Atheros isn’t an 802 company, we view ourselves as a wireless company, we’ll build UWB if it makes sense.”

For the next few years, though, one way or the other, one standard or the other, 802.11 will rule both home and business WLAN.

The Reseller Take

For resellers, the bottom line is that you should look for NICs and AP with combination chipsets. I can’t see any one of these technologies dominating the marketplace anytime soon.

As the price-points drop, I expect the wireless market to pick up even if the rest of the economy continues to flop around like a fish out of water. Whether they like it or not, customers will need to replace their aging network infrastructures and move to new offices. When they do so, the new high-speed wireless standards will attract customers who don’t want to spend any more time dragging cable.

Specifically, I believe that combination a/g or a/b+ devices will sell well. I also expect though that the margins will shrink quickly. The key to making money at WLANs thus won’t be in selling equipment; it will be in network installation, integration and maintenance. With a complete installation and administration package in hand, I foresee a nicely profitable year ahead for network integrators.

September 21, 2002
by sjvn01
0 comments

Instant Messaging Clients

Somehow, some way, people who are new to Linux have gotten the idea
that Linux has limited IM choices. Since the Unix family was the first
to have popular IM clients (with “talk” leading the way), that’s more
than a little silly. It is true that if you want the latest AOL
Instant Messenger (AIM) features or MSN Messenger you’re out of luck,
but there are many other clients to choose from, and some will let you
talk to your buddies whether they’re on AIM, MSN, or even Yahoo!.

That last part is very important. People sometimes think that IM
clients are chosen for their technical excellence or features. No,
they’re not. Forthcoming research from Ferris Research shows conclusively
that we choose our IM clients based on what services our friends and
coworkers are already using.

If it’s for business, many other factors come into play, such as
security, message archiving, logging, and interoperability. Even so,
I suspect that the services that the CIOs and CEOs use at home
probably get as serious a look as the corporate IM packages.

Linux IM clients do tend to have fewer features than their Windows
counterparts. On the other hand, some IM users aren’t crazy about IM
clients that include video conferencing, file transfers, games, N’Sync
wallpaper, and the kitchen sink. If all you really want is good, solid
IM service that will let you talk to the people you want to talk to,
then there’s sure to be a Linux IM client for you.

How I tested

While this isn’t a comprehensive survey of Linux IM clients (by my
count, there are at least a dozen ICQ clients alone), it is an
overview of some of the best and most notable IM clients available
today.

I connected, when supported, with users on AIM, Jabber, MSN, and
Yahoo! servers for chatting and any other basic functionality that
the client claimed. To all the developers’ credits, I rarely found a
feature claim that their clients didn’t back up to at least a usable
level.

That said, most of these programs are still in beta, and you will run
into glitches. None of these blemishes ever got in the way of using
the clients for their main purpose, but if you push their limits,
don’t be surprised if you run into some oddities. None of them,
however, were so bad that simply closing and reopening the client
didn’t repair the problem of the moment.

Another thing to keep in mind is that if you expect these text
messaging clients to also work as videophones (as their Windows
cousins do), you’re in for a disappointment. Yes, you can do text
messaging. Yes, you can do file transfers with most of the clients.
But if you want to see and hear grandma in Nebraska, none of these
clients are able to do that job as well as the Windows clients. For
my tastes, that’s not a problem. If I want to do video-conferencing, I
want a real video-conferencing program, not an overloaded IM
client. Your viewage may vary.

The programs

AIM

If you want it, you can have AIM
running on your Linux workstation today. You might not want to,
though. The latest Linux edition dates from August 2001 and is several
iterations behind its Windows big brother. Last spring and summer, AOL
was taking AIM on Linux seriously. Today is a different story. While
no one at AOL would come right out and say the project is dead, it’s
pushing up posies.

Still, once installed, with a modified GTK library, it does give you
all the AIM basics, and if that’s all you need, it’s all you need. It
should run on most Linux desktops of July 2001 or later vintage.

Gaim

You may not want bother with AIM for Linux, though, because Gaim out-performs
it. This Open Source IM client works with AIM, ICQ, Jabber, MSN,
Yahoo! Messenger, and more IM systems than any of the others. If you
want one client to talk to everyone, Gaim is it.

The newest version, despite its beta number, is much more stable than
previous versions and is now as steady as any IM client I’ve
encountered. While Gaim is meant for GNOME, you can run it flawlessly
with KDE with the appropriate tweaks.

It’s not as feature-packed or as pretty as Trillian on Windows or Epicware‘s Open Source Fire.app on
Mac OS X, but another point in Gaim’s favor is that you can add to its
utility with plugins like a spelling checker or an RC5 encryption
system. You can only encrypt sessions between Gaim clients, but more
and more business users want that kind of protection, and relatively
few clients deliver it today.

Everybuddy

Everybuddy is
another Open Source project that tries to talk to all major IM systems
and it does a pretty fair job of it. While not as full-featured as
Gaim and slightly rougher around the edges, it’s a fine program in its
own right.

Transferring files over it can be daunting, with some uploads and
downloads unsupported. For example, the site says you can download
files from your MSN friends, but, in the current RPM, you can’t. That
feature is still being tested.

On the other hand, Everybuddy does have a few interesting features
that, to the best of my knowledge, are all its own. For example, you
can use a filter with it so that you can try to talk to someone
in another language using AltaVista’s Babelfish as your translator.
Thanks to Babelfish, this is more amusing than useful, but it does
show that the developers have an eye to the future of IM.

Gabber

Gabber is a
GNOME-based IM client for the Jabber family of Open
Source, XML-based IM programs. Jabber is the most popular IM service
after the corporate threesome of AOL, Microsoft, and Yahoo!. You can
use gateway programs with it to talk to AIM, MSN, and Yahoo! users,
with the usual proviso that these may not always work.

Gabber, unlike Gaim, is much more picky about running in GNOME than
KDE. While I was finally successful in getting it to run in KDE, more
casual users should be running GNOME if they want to use Gabber. That
said, once up, Gabber ran fine, although I did run into some odd
crashes. Still, Gabber is a young program and shows promise,
especially with its very attractive user interface.

Kinkatta

Kinkatta is a
pure AOL IM client without the other IM service trimmings. It is a
solid, reliable client.

A labor of love by chief developer Benjamin Meyer, Kinkatta has a few
features that other clients don’t have, including the ability to print
directly from the chat window and some advanced message logging
features.

Licq

The ICQ for Linux
site declares that Licq is the best ICQ
client around. Who am I to argue? I’ve tried the others, too, and if I
had to have one client and it had to be just for ICQ, Licq is the one
I’d pick.

Why? Well, not to put too fine a point on it, but the program just
shows that more elbow grease has been applied to its look,
functionality, and speed than most of the other ICQ
clients. Specifically, I like the skin support, the file transfer
mechanism, the user search capacity, and on and on. If you want an ICQ
feature and it’s not in Licq, it may not be worth the having.

Yahoo! Messenger

One of the major IM companies, Yahoo!, is taking Linux IM
seriously. Its neat Linux
client, while not as fancy as its Windows clients, includes such
bells and whistles as access to user profiles, stock reports, and
email access.

Of course, using the Web and HTTP for this instead of packing it all
into an IM protocol helps a lot. The program is, however, optimized
for Netscape. If you use Konqueror or another browser, you may have to
do some tweaking to get Yahoo! Messenger and the browser to
work well together.

Yahoo!, unlike AOL, is updating its Linux client on a regular
basis. The latest build is from this summer, and I’m told newer
versions will be out shortly. Alas, it’s not Open Source. Despite
that, YM actually has the widest OS support of all these programs. In
addition to its Linux builds, YM also comes in versions for SunOS and
FreeBSD.

YM is also limited in that it only works with Yahoo!. The good news
about this, though, is that YM will still be working come the day
that the more universal IM clients are having fits with the major IM
services.

The one for you?

Again, it really depends on what services your friends are on. For ICQ
fans, Licq is the one to beat. For personal use, though, and as
someone with friends and coworkers on all the IM networks, Gaim is my
favorite.

If you want a business IM client that works with the outside world, YM
deserves your careful attention because, unlike AIM- and MSN-dependent
clients, it’s the most likely to work today and tomorrow.

You should also think about Gabber because Jabber seems posed to
become a major, open IM server force in its own right. Its other
advantage is that if you want an internal business IM system, you can
simply install a Jabber server, and, with the right firewall settings,
you can have your own internal Open Source IM system for a minimal
investment.

Mission interoperability improbable

Gaim’s one big problem, along with all the universal clients, is that
the major IM server companies, AOL (which owns both AIM and ICQ),
Microsoft, and Yahoo!, have no reason to want unauthorized clients to
use their systems. Worse still, they have several good reasons to
block IM programs like Gaim, Everybuddy, and Kinkatta from their
servers: advertising revenue from their proprietary clients, traffic
on the last mile to their servers, perceived security holes, and
cross-licensing deals with other software vendors, such as AOL
enabling Lotus to use AIM servers with Lotus’s Sametime client.

Because of this, AOL and Microsoft have both blocked access to their
servers from non-authorized clients at times. While users want
interoperability, IM companies aren’t interested in supporting clients
that don’t contribute to their bottom line.

Currently, message protocol changes are used to block unwanted
clients. AOL, for example, uses two protocols for AIM. OSCAR is the
proprietary protocol, and there is no published specification for it.
IM clients that use OSCAR, like Gaim, can find themselves blocked from
the service if AOL fiddles with the protocol. So far, the free IM
client programmers have been successful in reverse engineering these
changes so that new versions of their clients will work with AIM
again. TOC, on the other hand, is a simpler, well-documented Java
protocol that AOL uses in its Java-based “Quickbuddy” AIM client, so
many free AIM clients, like Everybuddy, use TOC.

The bad news for TOC developers is that AOL hasn’t worked on TOC for
some time, and it’s not nearly as functional as OSCAR. For example, a
TOC-based client can’t support buddy icons or voice. On the other
hand, AOL hasn’t shown any signs of blocking access to its AIM servers
with TOC, while OSCAR is changed fairly often.

While open protocols like Jabber and Simple
(which is likely to be adopted by AOL and Microsoft) offer a way out
of this programming problem, it’s not likely to stop IM service
providers from eventually blocking non-authorized IM clients using
server-based authorization schemes, like Microsoft Password and
Project Liberty, which is supported by AOL.

Editor’s addendum: Console Clients

This review was adapted from a NewsForge article which only
discusses GUI IM clients, so I want to put in a word for some of the
more popular console clients.

The Unix console, of course, is where realtime Internet
communication began, and you’ll find talk/ytalk/etc. in most *nix
distributions if you need it to talk to someone or if you and a friend
just want to feel retro.

The more mainstream console IM clients, like the GUI clients, are
divided between those that are made to connect to one IM system and
those that work with several.

mICQ

mICQ is the
grand-daddy of console ICQ clients. It still has the same minimalist
look and IRC-like interface that it had when I used it years ago, but
has developed a respectable feature set over the years. If you want
simple ICQ access, it may be for you.

naim

naim is a
wonderful AIM client with a unique and easy-to-use interface. Since
it uses TOC, it’s continued to work while other clients have scrambled
to catch up to protocol changes. If you want a simple, stable AIM
client, naim is it.

Ari’s Yahoo Client and gnuyahoo

The traditional choice for dedicated Yahoo! chatting on the console
is Ari’s
Yahoo Client. Unfortunately, it’s recently become a victim of
Yahoo!’s ceasing to support clients based on older versions of
Messenger. Until that’s worked out, you may want to try your luck
with the newer gnuyahoo.

centericq

IMHO, the greatest of all console IM clients is the multi-protocol
centericq.

I’ve sometimes wondered why a good console Jabber client has never
appeared. The only one that’s even worked for me is IMCom, which is rather
primitive. I was using Everybuddy when I first heard about Jabber,
and I expected a console Jabber client to appear quickly; I thought it
would be a common geek itch waiting to be scratched. Unfortunately,
nothing surfaced, and when I cut back on my use of GUI applications, I
ended up with three screen windows devoted to IM clients.

centericq, despite what the name implies, came to my rescue at
last, not as a Jabber client, but as the child of someone who was
willing to add support for many protocols on his own. centericq now
boasts support for ICQ, Yahoo!, MSN, AIM, and IRC, and has an
excellent interface and a huge number of features and configuration
options. The centericq mailing list is lively, and development is
continuous. No matter which IM service(s) you use, give centericq a
try.
A version of Instant Messaging Clients was first published in FreshMeat.