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"Linux is pretty bad when it comes to central management"

Have you tried to SSH into the machines and running CRON scripts to relieve you of the burden?

What services exactly are you providing to the desktop users? What does this school do that requires such complexity?

"I am responsible for administering a school network using Linux for servers and desktops"

How many servers, what distro, who is your support contract with. Have you contacted other education facilities using Linux? Do you also use Linux on the desktops?

"i'm the only one associated with the organisation who can come remotely close to knowing how stuff works or what to do when stuff breaks"

How exactly does the stuff break? Have you considered documenting how the stuff works, if in the event of, God forbid, you geting run over by a bus ?

"At least my business model is 'recession-proof', but frankly, the people running the school are powerless, and disenfranchised"

Good for you, it's not as if Windows ever made work for anyone .. :) But what part of the planet are you on, aren't there not any other trained Linux geeks in your area ?

"i find it pretty difficult to articulate any actual benefits of keeping the system on Linux"

In terms of education, what do the teachers and students require that is not being provided by the current system? Web access, email, course material .. ?

"Its a good deal for me as they're kind of stuck paying me to admin the system, but does it really have to be this complex?"

I hadn't realized Linux was the way to go to bilk up the overtime .. :)

I'm quite frankly puzzled how a Linux sysadmin with real world programming and admin experience can find IT so complex, personally, once I set up some scripts, the system runs itself, and baring hardware failure, it just runs and runs ...

"Thats why Windows wins in schools"

They why does MS have to expend so much energy is keeping it out of schools. If most peoples experiences were like yours they would all be flying back to the safe arms of MS, you being a huge Linux geek and all :)

You can subscribe at here.

I was looking at the list of speakers, and damn, it's impressive.

• Brian Hatch - author of Hacking Linux Exposed, Building Linux VPNs, and the Linux Security newsletter, talking about Linux Security

• Brian "Krow" Aker, slash guru and author of "Running weblogs with Slash" from O'Reilly and one of the Slashdot team, talking about how to optimize MySQL for high traffic websites.

• Dr Crispin Cowan of WireX, creator of things like StackGuard, FormatGuard, and Immunix

• Dr Tim Maher, a white camel award recipient and the guy who runs the Seattle perl user group, talking about shell and perl that should be seen by everyone, based on his upcoming book

This promises to be a really cool - I look forward to going up there this weekend!

Most of the instructors were using stock Motorola class stuff, some of which wasn't great, but if you have a good instructor that can make up for it.

The best instructor was James Lee from Onsight.com who had a bunch of custom Perl (beginning and advanced), CGI, TCL, and a few others, all of which were outstanding. These are the guys that wrote Hacking Linux Exposed and I recently got Open Source Web Development with LAMP that is just excellent, and really mirrors their training skills.

I don't know if they do classes outside of Motorola (their web page seems to indicate they do), but I'd highly recommend them.

In general, if you work at a big enough company, they probably have good internal training classes available, or can send you to classes that are good outside.

I'd be wary trying to pick one on your own, though. I had very bad luck with some "big names" like Learning Tree which seem to just cobble together classes quickly, and try to debug them with you as the guinea pigs at hundreds of dollars a pop.

In short, yes, the donation will apply to any books that get credited to our affiliate accounts. You can go through the book links on any of the following sites:

• Hacking Linux Exposed
  The book that caused yet another "Hacking" vs "Cracking" thread on Slashdot. I apologize.

• Building Linux VPNS
  A book by Oleg Kolesnikov and I, reviewed on slashdot last year, other reviews here.

• Onsight.com
  James and my company.

• Open Source Web Development with LAMP
  A top-notch web development book by James Lee (co-author of HLE and HLEv2) and Brent Ware. I tech edited this book, and also benifited from it in a user capacity, for example setting up the handler that controls access to the auto linux hacking software.

Going through any of those links will work. If you prefer, you can just send money to the EFF directly and cut out the middle man.

Other Linux security book authors, on the other hand, clearly are in it for more than just books. Brian Hatch of hacking linux exposed writes a free hacking newsletter every week (archives)
as well as Security Focus stuff. Michael Bauer of
Building Secure Servers with Linux writes articles for O'Reilly and is the security editor for Linux Journal.

Especially in the area of Linux, I expect to have experts. I've read RWLS 1, and was very dissapointed in the amount of fear mongering vs useful security info.