Johnathan Bailes
On Thu, 2002-11-21 at 09:23, Geoff Beaumont wrote:
Alexandr Malusek wrote:
I think the IT person can remotely control the users desktop to see where the problem is and how to fix it. (I don't know about any Linux tool which can do that.)
XFree86?
YES!
So many of the newer linux folks come from WinNT IT experiences so they do not know the old school Unix ways of doing things.
It's true, but the old Unix ways have become obsolete nowadays.
NFS mounted home dirs
Several days ago, I reported I couldn't get a higher transfer speed than several hundred KiB/s via NFS. (Solaris server, SuSE Linux 8.1, 100 Mbps network). No one on this list reported a higher transfer speed. One measurement on an MR scanner generates about 10 GiB of data and the present NFS implementation cannot handle them efficiently. Moreover, NFS is insecure and Secure NFS is not contained in Linux distributions. My knowledge about NFS is useless here, I have to search for workarounds.
combined with NIS (TCPwrappers please because of security issues with NIS)
NIS is insecure and inflexible. Even Sun is going to base its name services on LDAP.
ssh combined with XFree86 allows me to remotely log into the users machine and diagnose their problems.
Yes, ssh is extremely useful but it doesn't come from the old school Unix. Insecure rlogin, telnet, rcp, and rsh were the only commands in many commercial Unixes and perhaps still are. I was told Solaris 9 finally contained OpenSSH ...
Think out of the MS IT box and remember what the linux experience is based on, a Unix-like environment. If you think in these terms and do a little research then you find out most of the IT solutions you are looking for originated not in Redmond but in Unix shops first.
I'm not thinking about managing 20 Unix boxes by highly skilled professionals with PhD in computer science. I'm thinking about managing thousands of Linux desktops by IT people who are (1) not very skilled and (2) not interested in searching for new solutions. These people prefer simple to use GUI tools. I think if software industry doesn't give them these tools (nicely packaged and ready to use) then they won't administer and support Linux on desktops in their companies. -- Alexandr.Malusek@imv.liu.se