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Largo Loving Linux
A little over a year ago, dot.kde.org and Newsforge did stories on the Linux-based systems being used in Largo, FL to run the city government. Roblimo went down there, drank their coffee, and wrote a follow-up piece which might be, but wasn't, entitled "How to be a sysadmin whose pager doesn't go off". (Newsforge is part of OSDN.)
Considering that 40 out of the 50 U.S. states are experience severe budget shortfalls, a good way to get more bang for the buck is to consider switching to open sourced software. You have:
1) Front-end savings on licensing.(perhaps offset by re-training costs)
2) Savings on future licensing
3) Less tech support headaches and consequently less staffing requirements.
As the article illustrates, spending 1.3% off a municipal budget vs. 3% (or 4%) is a substantial savings. Bring that up to the state level and you are talking tens to hundreds of millions.
I won't even start talking about the Feds...
I'm glad a municipality has caught onto hitting eBay for quality used equipment, as Largo did according to the article. OSS, plus cheaper (and SLIGHTLY) older equipment can add up to huge cost savings. Hell, any .com that dies probably has enough server and networking hardware to outfit any small company. Municipalities need to make it easier for their IT managers to purchase items used (like from eBay) and quit limiting themsleves to purchasing contracts.
All of that dirt cheap hardward adds up
Yes, but if they used windows everywhere, would they be able to use dirt-cheap hardware? No, so even that reduction is a result of using a Linux solution.
I also was impressed that they spend less than half the money other towns do on their IT. Of course, from the sysadmin POV that's bad as it means they aren't paid much. But that's the price of freedom, I guess.
One of the real plusses of being UNIX savvy in general, and GNU/Linux/free software/open source savvy in particular, is that one actually often earns a better living than their Microsoftoid equivelents. Why? Because paying one knowledgable person who, in a GNU/Linux, *BSD, or *NIX shop can do the work that requires three or four MSCE's (assuming a modicum of competence on the MSCE's part, an assumption that is, as many here have pointed out repeatedly, is not one that is safe to make), 1.5 - 2 times the salary still translates into a tremendous human resources savings, and brings with it the added benefits of expertise, lower turnover, and attention to detail (and research) pointed out in this article.
If you are saving money because your staffing requirements are lower (in raw numbers of bodies), your licensing costs are lower, and your TCO costs are lower (all nearly always true with GNU/Linux or FreeBSD vs. Microsoft), you can pay a premium for really good people and have the benefits that brings along with tremendous savings.
Which is great for everyone, except shoddy admins who probably should find another line of work anyway. It is certainly great for those of us who know what we are doing and take pride in doing quality work for our clients/employers, and like to be rewarded in kind.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
After having worked for a highschool IT dept for 3 years, and having dealt with a univsersity IT dept for 2 years, i have to ask: why can't schools do this?
My highschool regularly got grants for buying hardware, and would then proceed to spend $2000 per windows workstation, not including software (they didn't license until they got yelled at by M$). But, they wouldn't hire more then 1 IT guy for 250 workstations, so nothing ever worked.
Same at my university. Aside from all the departmental and faculty machines (~4500), there are about 1500 open-area machines for students. These are a mix of unix thin-clients running solaris, and wintel machines, most of which are outdated. They insist upon buying new NCD/Sun thin-clients, running solaris, or buying new Wintel machines running win2k. Yet these machines cost them $1500-$2000 a piece! And all the old unix clinets (~800) running solaris are super slow (5+ minutes to log in!). Explain to me why a city, with offices here,there, and everywhere, manages to run a linux-based thin-client network, while a university with a huge IT budget runs one that's too slow to use!
Considering the non-existant cost of "outdated" hardware in the marketplace, people would figure out that to run an office suite, web browser, and email, all you need is a P150!!!
-Michael Roy Some people are like Slinkies. Not really useful, but you can't help smiling when you see one tumble down
I fully agree with this. I run an LDAP infrastructure as you describe for a large multi national ( > 100,000 staff ) and after 3 years in production we now have over 100 applications taking and feeding employee and contractor data to it. The nice thing is that an incresing number of applications are now LDAP aware, from IMAP and POP mail server to around 9 different LDAP authentication modules for Apache, but increasingly products such as Notes and Network devices can use LDAP authentication, as can OSs such as Solaris.
Once you have a web authentication sorted out, it is then relativly simple to have a corporate directory on the web which allows users to keep their own details up to date, and once this is part of the company culture, you would be suprised as to the quality of this self service data. I have found that this then starts a "virtuous circle" of improving data quality, the more applications trust this data and feed from it, the more users are then reminded to keep the data up to date, the better the data quality becomes and hence the more applications use the data...
If you make your feed system email, then you even have an instant self service password system, since to update their details users can have a temporary password emailed to them, and you will always have their email address.
The return on investment can be fantastic, our most recent project was to replace the data maintained for 50,000 helpdesk users with the (mostly self service) data from the LDAP directory, and this is only one of many similar projects; so give it a go, you may be pleasenly suprised.
I suspect they aren't using 802.11b or cellular for their wireless connection. Probably they're using a radio datalink on a dedicated channel in a band reserved for their use. Those tend to be much less susceptible to link-lossage.
As for as Terminal Services or Citrix, I've used both. Their performance does not measure up to X11 in a remote application, because X11 was designed for network connections while TS and Citrix were both grafted onto a system that assumed it was dealing with a physical screen. You can do a lot hooking into GDI, but in the end the system wasn't designed to support the application. Server performance isn't the bottleneck, it's the relatively low-bandwidth connection between the server and the client.
As for free license fees, sure they're free now. Is MS going to guarantee that all upgrades to all future versions will also be free? I doubt it, and there's the hook inside that tasty free-license bait. With Linux, the city's guaranteed that in 10 years their system will still be available without paying license fees or worrying about license bookkeeping to keep the BSA off their backs.