Postscript
Two months after this article was written, the system has gone
``live,'' and has a large number of active users. We also
found some bugs by stress testing the system in a production
environment. Our experiences were surprising:
- So far, we have found two separate operating system bugs in
MVS. One made it impossible for the CICS region where our
software runs to be shut down, due to a problem with the
TCP/IP socket library. Another has to do with memory not
being properly freed up by the standard C function library.
So much for the robustness of mainframes!
- Unsurprisingly, we found and fixed a number of small bugs
in our own software.
- To date, we have had no problems, and have found no bugs, in the
Linux servers.
What is interesting here is that the least expensive component of
the system and the one with no formal vendor support has been
the source of the fewest (i.e., zero) problems. Much more expensive
systems and much more expensive vendors (us) have yielded more
troublesome systems than Open Source software.
