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Windows-to-Linux. Large Installations Handling the Changeover?

Posted by Cliff on from the searching-for-ideas-advice-and-previous-experience dept.

Cathal asks: "Okay. I am a senior in a large Irish university, which is a mostly Microsoft house. As a member of the college computer society, I have heard that the college bean-counters want to reduce the cost of the IT dept. The IT dept are 'thinking' of turning to Linux as a method of cutting costs and improving the service to the staff and the students. I am looking for suggestions and feedback on previous experience in similar situations, (large changeovers, support)." "What the college supports at the moment:
  • 9000 Undergrads
  • 2500 Postgrads
  • 3000 part-time students - night classes
  • About 1500 staff and lecturers
  • Print farm to support the above, with network printers available in each of the 40 or so computer labs around the place.
  • About 25 webservers with a combination of IIS, Apache(win32) and Apache(solaris)
  • 300-400 student computers in the on-campus accomodation

College resources:

  • About 2500 desktops in the college, at the moment with msoffice on win2k
  • A collection of fileservers, and mailservers, (mostly Dell poweredges)
  • Fiber backbone, 100Mbit switches, 100Mbit to most desktops, and a 20Mbit connection to net backbone (to go to 125Mbit next year)
If the college does move to Linux, there are a reasonable number of experienced Linux admins as student in the college, running a debian cluster for the compsoc, and could provide a pool of about 10 admins that know the network and the people involved in the running of the college, and could ease the changeover. If anyone has been in a similar situation, what were the pitfalls involved, and the main difficulties in rolling it out? The college *needs* (so I have been told) to have an external contract to solve problems with a defined level of service."

2 of 29 comments (clear)

  1. Have you investigated remote display? by Stinking+Pig · · Score: 3, Interesting

    In the server room, you'll be able to replace at least 70% if not 100% of the Windows computers.

    If you must replace the desktops, you'll have a tougher task. If you don't solicit feedback and get positive response from the users, I'd tread carefully.

    One way to ease the transition if you do whack the desktops is to provide a remote display service so that a couple of beefy Win2K boxes will supply the apps that people are currently used to -- that way you're not the bad guy, the support problem is centralized, and the performance is decreased enough that end-users will want to find Linux solutions.

    VNC is an option in this direction -- there's also apparently a Citrix ICA client for Linux.

    HTH,

    --
    "Nothing was broken, and it's been fixed." -- Jon Carroll
  2. Do it! was Re:Don't do it. by cmoss · · Score: 2, Interesting

    1) Think about directories.
    LDAP and PAM should be able to do the job
    2. remote access. freeswan, CIPE, ssh
    3. open standards for file formats should be ncouraged. PDF if nothing else.
    4. college is where they should learn, linux is great if you want to learn about computers, not so great if you just want to memorized one way of doing things.
    5) which features are missing? If you find linux/postgres inadequate stick with oracle on solaris. you can still dump NT. Stay away from SQL server.
    6)wierd hardware - case by case.

    linux is the platform of choice for open source software development.
    Don't go into this planning on replacing every MS box but you should be able to get rid of most of the servers painlessly. Just make sure you don't upgrade any desktops to later more restrictive licensing from MS. Take labs and individuals on a case by case basis. Setup a mirror and manage updates automatically. (autorpm, autoupdate, up2date) Mass deploy staroffice on linux/windows and solaris. upgrade to staroffice 6.0 when released.