I remember that day. It had nothing to do with my department. My local servers were dedicated. Novell back ends that we contracted out a third party too support. That was my data warehousing subdivision.

But all corporate desktop support became attaching to Microsoft servers and using the Microsoft email. And that sucked. That was crashy. That was horrible. That's how Linux skunk work servers took over underneath. But that took another 10 years.

And when they were caught even if they were running great they had to go find someone to support them so they could take over officially.

I remember the day an article in Network magazine came out. It mentioned a hint of Linux and I took it over to my boss on the network side who had been in charge of the novel to Windows migration and said: See!, it's here, it's in the magazine you demanded to see it in.

He laughed at me and said very cute and went on in his job. After many more Linux servers coming into our server room and this highly technical Network administrator who started out hating Unix, he was first at novel expert and then he was a Windows server and desktop and applications expert, we had many Linux servers come in over the following years...

He's a Hands-On administrator who is really in charge of a bunch of people but he knows his stuff.

There is a major crash. It needs to be researched. We are under major corporate pressure. It is as bad as it gets.

And he walks into the raised floor room and yells: Get me to a Linux console!

Over the preceding 3 years or so he had been learning and had been enjoying all the benefits Linux has to offer in network management. He knew Snoop and ethereal and pretty much everything those tools talked to. He knew how to research network problems.

This was such a proud moment in me. I had spent the proceeding 10 years pushing towards this moment. This was a long-term project. This guy loved Linux at this point.

Trust the Linux box. Get f***** by the Microsoft box. What can we do about this problem?