Directorate of Information Technology, Council of Europe, Strasbourg, France
The Council of Europe has chosen Open Source tools to handle its network and related services (DNS, Firewall, MTA, etc.). Since early 2004, the team in charge of these services has benefited from reinforcements, which has allowed the organization to broaden its scope and meet customer needs on the following points:
- network support;
- websites based on 40 open source applications;
- monitoring.
All applications are shared across 25 Linux servers — 21 running
the stable
release of the Debian GNU/Linux distribution,
and 4 running the Red Hat distribution — with over 3,000 clients.
Debian was the natural choice given its quality and stability since 1999. This choice allows us to apply the following strict upgrade policy, ensuring the efficiency of the Council of Europe's information system:
- minor upgrades: fixes for major security issues or software regression, with no impact on production, achieved without service downtime;
-
major (
stable
) upgrade: this important process is due about once every two years. It may have effects on applications, and thus goes through a validation and testing process before being deployed. It is conducted together with disaster recovery tests for each server.