On Wed, 2004-10-13 at 21:42, Paul W. Abrahams wrote:
Unlike most posts here, and just about all of mine, this isn't a request for help (except peripherally); it's a report on something I got to work that folks might find interesting.
I'm working as the volunteer IT person in my town's municipal office. I first got involved in that by getting everyone onto a Comcast broadband Internet connection. Of course, the working environment was 100% Windows. However, one of the town's wishlist items was a "server", whatever that meant. My obvious question: if it's a server, what is it serving?
Anyway, it turned out that the main function people were looking for was backup. So I set up a box for them (total cost well under $500) running (of course) SuSE Linux 9.1, with the promise that it would look to all of them like just another Windows machine (thanks to Samba, of course). And indeed it does! Furthermore, using a crontab, a shell script, and setting the Windows permissions properly (that was the hardest part), I've arranged things so that the backup is fully automatic; the Linux box simply runs around the office several times a day collecting the folders to be backed up, and no one has to do anything or even notices that the backup is happening. More precisely, it does a backup of everything it can find at 9 am and then every two hours after that it collects the files it hasn't gotten earlier during the day because machines were turned off or otherwise inaccessible.
Of course I'd dearly love to boot Windows from the office altogether, but I have to be honest about it: if the users perceive a loss of functionality or performance, or find the interface hard to use, they won't accept it. And everyone is running some version of MS Office, of course.
I see two alternatives for introducing Linux but no way to make either of them acceptable. I could install OpenOffice, but I can't honestly make the case that it does everything that Office does and does it as well, without any extra complications. Or I could install Wine (or whatever its semicommercial version is these days) and stick with MS Office, but the performance hit would probably be unacceptable and I have my doubts about the stability also.
I'd be interested in ideas on how to sell Linux in this environment, but I have to be honest about it, and the office staff, unlike me, has little inherent reason to make the change and a big reason (the learning curve) not to.
Except of course that windows is so hard to support... with the viruses, crashes, and other gunk... First Convince them they need to use openstandards, like all published documents in PDF format (You don't know what version of word the readers will have)... And make them choose a standard for editable files, (If someone buys as new pc, with word 2004, he either has to store everything in word 2000, or buy word 2004 for everydbody in the office!) Just offer them support on linux, and on thier own with windows... Then setup a pxes cdrom's for them, with it they can run linux on the server from thier pc's, simply by booting from cdrom.... The next time everything falls flat on a pc, tell them to boot from that CDROM and they can keep working... In this way let them do the choosing... changing to linux front end may be a little more dificult than changing from 2000 to XP (a german study put them at 73% to 78% productive from word go for the jobs that thier workers had to do), but thier gains are in no viruses, no crashes and no hassles... And put thier files on shares in the server, so that when they throw the pc's away they still have everything.... In short, make it as easy for them to change to linux as you can... let windows run it's course... By trying to convince them to change you put them on a skeptical frame of mind, just waiting for any problem to point at... BTW, have you seen StoreBackup? That would be quite an addition for server... Jerry
Paul Abrahams