FreeTDS Development Group

[Steve Langasek <vorlon AT netexpress.net>]

On Thu, 14 Jun 2001, James K. Lowden wrote:

> Brian Bruns wrote:

>> Speaking of the 0.52 release, I've been considering adding a
>> "Case Studies" area on the homepage.  This way potential users could get a
>> feel for what FreeTDS is and some of the ways it could be used.
>> Explaining what FreeTDS is to people often ends up sounding rather
>> esoteric.  This might provide more concrete examples.

>> So if anyone thinks this is a good idea send a paragraph or three about
>> what you do and why, and I'll put it together.

> Brian's idea was kinda buried in a reponse to a long message (of mine).

> I just thought I'd repost in in the hopes 3 people would have an interesting
> story. OK, in the hopes 3 people would *submit* an interesting story.  ;-)

Story:

About 8 months ago, my employer inherited an e-commerce system that hosted a
handful of respectable local merchants, because the previous hosting company
was no longer able to keep up with the maintenance demands.  This wasn't
surprising; all credit card processing in this system was handled by means of
batch jobs running on an auxiliary NT server, using a combination of PPTP,
reused COM objects, hacked SQL queries, and fragile mail queuing services in
order to communicate with the credit card gateway and deliver notifications to
the customers and merchants.  The mail service had to be restarted three times
a week, and the box itself had to be rebooted every Friday.

We went looking for other options and found FreeTDS.  The Debian box these
batch jobs now run on has been up for 46 days without a reboot, and the
questionable PPTP security has been replaced with straight https tunneling.
The credit card gateway is happier because they no longer have to support the
custom cruft this hosting company was using, and we're happy because we don't
have to pay daily visits to the server room to coddle ailing NT servers.

Steve Langasek
postmodern programmer