On Mon, 2 Jul 2001, Mark Evans wrote:
I accept what you say in principle about maintenance (and I'm not sure that is is ever a perfect time) - but.... How would you cope when pupils moved from year to year - would the server move with them? And if so - you would then need all the setup you carefully performed the year before repeated on the next year server so that have all the links and shortcuts.... I don't see why this should be a big, indeed any kind of a problem. Maybe it would be if you tried in with NT...
Indeed. If you don't have all this sort of thing automated, then you're doing it wrong. Just package up all your customisations into a single RPM and you can duplicate it to as many machines as you like. The "fensystems-customisations" RPM means that, for me, installing and configuring a server is a case of inserting a boot floppy and then coming back half an hour later to log in and test it.
You don't even need anything as exotic as RPM, an NFS mount with cp -a will duplicate a machine easily.
Of course, it takes about three times as long to automate something as it does to just do it once, but unless you're planning on never using more than three computers...
Try convincing the people who sell Windows programs though... -- Mark Evans St. Peter's CofE High School Phone: +44 1392 204764 X109 Fax: +44 1392 204763