Accountant closes Windows on Linux
Linux may be nibbling away at Microsoft's Windows footprint, but one small business has well and truly shut the penguin out in the cold.
Perth-based chartered accountants Marshall Michael Corporate Consultants recently completed an upgrade of its two Windows NT servers and, as a result a Linux firewall was decommissioned.
Marshall Michael account manager Rupert Cheong, who also doubles as the firm's IT manager, said an upgrade was necessary to ensure better business continuity.
"We had two NT4 servers, one for data and one for e-mail," Cheong said. "The data server kept crashing and the mail server would also crash because it couldn't handle the workload."
Cheong said that, on a busy day the server would hang "every hour" which started a chain reaction affecting the whole business.
Seemingly unconcerned about the firm's past experience with Windows, Cheong went ahead with an upgrade to Windows Small Business Server 2003 on an HP Intel system. The two NT4 systems and a Linux firewall were consolidated as a result.
"The upgrade was relatively painless [as] the data was transferred overnight and we then put everyone on the new domain controller," he said. "There was a Linux box that acted as a firewall for the fileserver. With Small Business Server 2003 there is a firewall built-in."
