Cisco IT Manager Targeting 70% Linux

RMX writes "LinuxWorld Australia has an interesting article discussing Linux Desktop adoption in Cisco. Cisco "already converted more than 2,000 of its engineers to Linux desktops...plans to move many laptop users to the platform over the next few years...the driver for Linux on the desktop is not cost savings, but easier support. Manning estimates that it takes a company approximately one desktop administrator to support 40 Windows PCs, while one administrator can support between 200 and 400 Linux desktops.'"

Comments

1:40 ?

[flyman]

That is the worst support ratio in history. I hate Windoze, but no large support org has that bad of ratios. Mine are approx. 250:1 for a Win2k shop, which is pretty average.

Is it

[idono]

because Cisco is now a security company?

Handling Firefox

[bogaboga]

I am sure they (CISCO) have some Mozilla/Firefox on these PCs. Question is: How have they decided o manage it? Central managing of Mozilla/Firefox is still not [officially] possible now. Any ideas?

Re:Handling Firefox

[illtud]

Am I missing something? What is there to manage for a browser besides installation?

In the corporate environment (ie when the PC isn't yours and the company doesn't want to spend ages fixing messes you've made 'personalizing' your PC) you need to lock down some preferences (eg proxy settings, security settings, mail account details if you're using thunderbird/moz suite). This used to be really easy under the old Netscape suite (there was a GUI tool), and although there's some support still left in firefox/mozilla (you can lock down prefs manually in the .js files) it's not half as good as it used to be. Other stuff is rollout support with pre-populated profiles etc.

Check out the Mozilla Enterprise project for more details and how some of us have hacked together lockdown and other 'enterprise' requirements.

Re:40:1 ?

[Wateshay]

It probably depends a lot on the type of user that you're supporting. Supporting secretaries who do nothing but type and send email is going to be a lot easier than supporting engineers who have use a wide variety of software requirements, push their computers hard, and often need new software products installed.

Re:Bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

I was a Cisco employee several years ago. I worked at the Corp. HQ in San Jose. My cube started with a Sun workstation and a Win2k laptop. The laptop was soon converted to dual boot Windows / Linux. And as one of my projects ended up demanding a test Linux system, I ended up with another desktop that was also converted to dual Windows / Linux. I never sought out tech support for my machines. And I doubt anyone but my immediate management had any clue what was going on in my cube.

The cool thing with Cisco was that this wasn't uncommon. There are some generalities - most PMs, management, marketing, etc. I met had a single Windows laptop. But when you met someone in a technical role, there was no telling what tools they had aquired to do their work. Cisco took providing their employees the desired tools seriously - "no technology religion". And as far as I could see, it created a very diverse IT environment (and very effective despite the fears of monoculuture IT fans).

This touches on another reason Cisco went this direction. Their employees demanded it. Cisco aquired quite a few startups that were heavily using Linux already. Linux was working its way in to the engineering corp. at Cisco even without these aquisitions. It was very much a part of Cisco's corporate culture to find a way to support any tool their employees needed (which explains the hell they went through to move to Exchange :).

Re:40:1 ?

[zulux]

In my experience, the engineers are fine but it's the secretaries who cause all the fuss - getting viruses from their Hotmail account, clicking yes to popups etc...

If the company can stomach the up front costs for locking down the systems - then yes their ok, and the engineers need more help, but for smaller companies that are more reactive, the AIM using, Arery form printing, spyware downloading secretaries are a pain in the butt.

About time someone mentioned this....

[Fallen Kell]

I work on the Unix/Linux side of one of the IT departments at my work. We have about 25 admins for 180+ servers and 900+ workstations, plus a beowulf cluster and associated SAN/NAS devices. And we actually have free time to work on other projects (like in-house software development/support, training, and learning/developing new technologies to roll-out). The PC group has about 80 people to support ~700 PC's and 70 servers. Do the math...

Re:40:1 ?

[cduffy]

Do an incremental rsync of their home directories everynight and if something ever goes wrong just delete their home and replace it with a good copy.

I know this is a bit offtopic, but... AFS's support for backup volumes provides basically this same thing as a feature built into the filesystem. Furthermore, it lets the administrator issue commands (from any node on the network) like "move this volume from partition 1 on file server A to partition 3 on file server B"; the data gets moved, and the clients are notified to use the new fileserver for files on that volume with no further work. You can also have read-only volumes be located on multiple fileservers, and the clients will automatically load-balance between them; further, updates to these read-only volumes can be made by an admin editing a read-write copy of the volume, and then pushed over to the read-only volume as a single transaction.

Making it performant can be a PITA, but from an administration perspective it's really neat stuff.

Cisco hardware deployment with non-Winders

[Scutter]

Ok, so someone explain to me why Cisco's web-based and desktop-based management tools are almost always Windows-only? Not only Windows-only, but frequently don't run right under anything but Internet Explorer.

Guess I'll continue to stick to CLI and console cables for configuration and management.