Windows Incompatibilities Frustrate D.C. Schools

capouch writes "The Washington Post reports that school administrators for the DC public school system are having an awful time getting their new administrative software to work properly." From the article: "'In my experience, the combination of an Oracle database, Windows operating system, Unix hardware and an Apache webserver is a bad combination,' Barlow wrote in the memo to Thomas M. Brady, the school system's chief business operations officer. 'In fact, through our research the last few days, we have found an advisory on the Apache website that states, 'Please note that at this time, Windows support is entirely experimental and is recommended only for experienced users.' The Apache Group does not guarantee that the software will work as documented or even at all...Barlow said officials plan to replace Windows with a different operating system."

Comments

That's What They Get...

[TheComputerMutt.ca]

...for not properly researching what they were going to use. A little time before can save a lot of time after.

Re:That's What They Get...

[b17bmbr]

That's government purchasing for you.

Oh, you have no idea!! My district for example, decided that the "best combination" was novell servers and windows98. Plus, at the very time the industry was going to blade servers, they were going to "fewer, more powerful" servers. of ocurse, the lady in charge of this retired the next year!! Now, every win98 box was loaded with anti-virus, admin software, lockdown, etc. they ran so sloooooooowwwwwwwwwww. and crashed 2 ways: regularly and consistently.

Later, we needed digital school money. We needed to have X computers per student, so what did they do? they went out and bought literally hundreds of P120's and P100's with 32MB ram, most of which ended up collecting dust in some back room in schools.

the decision was made, because of funding, to go with 98 instead of 2000, because the hardware requirements were too great for 2k, but when you ocnsider the extra costs of additional software, admining them, etc., it turns out that it's far more. instead of buying better hardware up front, they bought crap and piled crap upon crap.

now, as for overall school buying, here's the deal. you never come in under budget 'cause next year you'll get less. you always spend eevrything, bo over budget, get too little, then demand more next year. in fact, if principles have extra funds left over, they find dept chairs, etc., and see what they need. you can't have leftover money. eevry public school does this, even colleges. One of my profs in grad school told us he has list on excel that is rarin' to go as soon as the school year's up. he advised us to do the same.

I mention this because it is your tax dollars and your schools. I just teach in one of them. You need to stay on top of your school boards, especially those of you with tech savvy. Let them know (since they are elected) that they can't let the districts do stupid tech things.

Re:That's What They Get...

[cryogenix]

I can tell you from experience, that Netware was not the problem in that situation. Blades aren't for everyone. A lot of people say oooh blades, high tech, we must have them, when the circumstances don't really call for them. Unfortunately you have to buy what you can afford. I've been in the spit and scotch tape limited budget Macgyver everything together environment. Believe me from the system admin side it's not always a lot of fun. (Ok sometimes it can be when you do something in spite of the lack of resources.) Schools in general are difficult when it comes to purchasing. You don't always get the flexibility of being able to go back and say listen, if we spend another $20,000 we can really do this right, instead of just adding to our problems, like you can in "some" corporate environments. Often, it's "Here is your budget and that's all you get." The other problem that all admins face are non computer people above them making decisions for the people they hired who know about the stuff. For exmample, in your case, it would not surprise me if a person who calls the help desk because he can't find his power on button made the decision to stick with 98 because it's cheaper. I've had those conversations, they aren't fun, and ultimately you often lose because of the ego sitting behind the desk that thinks they know better despite the fact that they can't figure out the reason their keyboard and mouse aren't working on their docking station is because the surge protector it's plugged in to is turned off.

Re:That's What They Get...

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

now, as for overall school buying, here's the deal. you never come in under budget 'cause next year you'll get less. you always spend eevrything, bo over budget, get too little, then demand more next year.

Newsflash!

This is how it works in any large organization, state or commercial. Anytime there is a disconnect in the feedback loop such that conserving money does not directly benefit the person who makes the decision to conserve, you will see that kind of behaviour.

Heck, it is even the primary reason that health insurance premiums keep increasing - people pay a fixed monthly fee regardless of how little or how much treatment they receive. So of course they will opt for the maximum amount of testing and treatment because the additional costs do not come out of their pocket - they already paid the premium before the costs are incurred. It only affects them at the next annual premium increase and then their personal decision to max-out the available treatments is just a drop in the bucket, lost in the noise of all the other drops in that bucket from everyone else doing exactly the same thing. Just like government and corporate spending.

Re:That's What They Get...

[bladernr]

Anytime there is a disconnect in the feedback loop such that conserving money does not directly benefit the person who makes the decision to conserve

But you have to be careful about setting it up the other way: so that any money saved benefits the person responsible. Then they make brain dead decisions.

What you need is a system that rewards "value" ( = benefit/expense) over a time period. The problem with most object/reward systems (MBO systems, for instance) is that the timeframe is too short (usually 1 quarter). The problem with a longer time period is that it may be long enough as to not seem like reality to the person it is meant to incent.

If you found a way to reward for "value delivered" both in the measured term (just closed) and by somehow predicting the future (with believable TCO obtained and long-term financial benefits), then you would have a system where people are rewarded for doing the right things.

Plus, you wouldn't have to worry about using up all your budget, because if you ask for more budget next year even though you didn't use it all this year, the "higher ups" may think you have a case, because if you spent extra money without good cause, you only hurt yourself.

Re:That's What They Get...

[john82]

Let's look at this article again. First, it's written by a Wash Post staff writer. What's the chance that the reporter is technically literate? This is the Post, so the answer is "virtually none". I live in the DC area and read the paper.

Technology is not an area where one should expect the Post to get the facts straight. An administrator is allowed to second guess the IT system, unchallenged. "[Tut, tut,] in MY experience ... UNIX hardware ...". Really? Pray tell, what is UNIX hardware? (Given that it's an OS and runs on most everything.) But does the reporter pin them down? NO.

Relying on an incomplete and inaccurate source (the Post article) means that all the chest thumping here on Slashdot is pointless. We don't really KNOW what the facts are. We don't know the actual situation.

Can you run Apache on Windows? Of course you can! But there isn't enough proper information in this article to know where the problem lies. It might just be that whoever setup this system, or the administrators of it, don't have it properly configured.

Then again, this is the DC Public School system. This could very well be as big a CF as the article implies. Possibly worse.

Re:That's What They Get...

[Halfbaked Plan]

Plus, for some insane reason, most of them were left-handed.


Can't deal with being in a 'left handed world' for a few minutes a day? Try being left handed in a right handed world 24/7.

Re:That's What They Get...

[Epeeist]

> That's government purchasing for you.

As opposed to purchasing in a corporate, which depends on who the CEO last beat at golf.

Having worked in government, academia and private industry I can honestly say that there is little to choose between them. In all of them the acronym PEST applies:

Decisions are 60% Political, 30% Economic, 9% Social and 1% Technical.

Wha?

[homeobocks]

"Unix hardware"?

It sounds like he went to a DC school

[Anonymous Coward]

The experimental warning applied to older 1.3.x versions and systems running Windows 9x/Me.

Wait...

[TiredGamer]

A different operating system that is NOT Windows...?

How long until Microsoft swoops in with salesmen and faulty TCO numbers to convince this county's school board to go all-MS?

After all, there wouldn't be these problems if the schools were using Windows XP workstations accessing MS-SQL servers running alongside Windows Server 2003 Enterprise IIS webservers. Right?

Because we all know it's cheaper that way, right? Right?

Re:Wait...

[Geoffreyerffoeg]

I know you're joking, but I'm going to repeat that point seriously.

What's with the inflammatory headlines? It's not Windows per se that's causing the incompatibilities, just that the system's too heterogeneous. If they went with a regular Windows + Windows Server domain + IIS + .NET solution, they would've had fewer problems than they do now. Same with using an all-*NIX solution as they plan to be looking at.

I'm not suggesting that an MS solution would be better. And I'm definitely not suggesting that monoculture is the answer. All I'm suggesting is that when two things are incompatible, Slashdot has a nasty habit of jumping to the conclusion that the MS side is the problem and we need to switch to an open-source utopia. Of course, MS may very well be the problem, but you can't make such a conclusion without enough evidence - which there wasn't.

And what's with the color scheme in apache./..org? Is this Mardi Gras Slashdot or something?

Poor Management and Poor Project Management

[Anonymous Coward]

In my experience it is more often bad management that causes problems, regardless of the underlying technology (good or bad).

In other news...

[barfy]

Inexperienced IT professionals find it frustrating setting up systems they have never set up before...

Dog Bites Man...

And the Sun will probably come up tomorrow... God willing.

Stayed tuned for more "News for Nerds... Stuff that matters."

How much time and money?

[oldenuf2knowbetter]

How much time and money did they spend on a system without, apparently, having first determined if the various bits would play nicely together? How did they manage to get to the point of going live without testing? Why did the CIO discover fundamental issues only after system failures? Just who are these folks and why do they still have jobs?

more info please

[pavera]

Ok,
they are running apache on windows I guess then? And that's the problem? Why are they running windows on "Unix Hardware"? What is "Unix hardware"? I can only assume they mean a Sun box? I didn't know Windows had a sparc version! I bet that's really awesome!

Anyway, from reading the article I get the impression that neither the interviewer nor the people interviewed have enough technical background to describe the problems accurately, much less fix them. The people interviewed are all managers who probably don't know the difference between c++ and VB, couldn't tell you what an OS actually is, or understand the difference between hardware and software (apparently).

In short, the story is that some managers who don't understand technology and were trying to deploy an apparently advanced web service for an entire school district never bothered to read the documentation of the software they were deploying, and then ran into trouble... I guess that's interesting, or news, or something..

Reality Check

[slam smith]

All right folks this is Washington D.C. a city notorious for incompetance and corruption. (And I'm talking about the city gov't not the federal.) At my work we have NO difficultly writing software that had the same sort of software, hardware connections discussed in this article. I think we have a case here of someone using technobabble to try and cover his butt.

In an internal memo dated yesterday, D.C. schools Chief Information Officer Gregory Barlow criticized the way the computer system was set up.

"In my experience, the combination of an Oracle database, Windows operating system, Unix hardware and an Apache webserver is a bad combination," Barlow wrote in the memo to Thomas M. Brady, the school system's chief business operations officer.

A misleading title...

[supabeast!]

Given that the problem here is caused by Apache not functioning properly on Windows, shouldn't the headline be "Apache Incompatibilities Frustrate D.C. Schools?" Hell, given that the Apache programmers have been always made it abundantly clear that Apache does not work right on Windows, the title should really be "Idiotic choices by systems engineers frustrate D.C. schools?"

It's pretty pathetic that leading Linux evangelists have to go this far to come up with an anti-Windows story, but it should make Microsoft feel better that they do.

Leave it to Slashdot....

[DavidD_CA]

Leave it to Slashdot to take an article that shows complete incompetency on the part of the journalist and those interviewed, and make it a problem about Windows.

Re:Some windows problems

[Anonymous Coward]

The configuration is time-consuming and error-prone

What the fuck are you talking about? The configuration is the same as it is under Unix.

The PHP-monkeys make sure the Windows-binaries are released at the same time that the source is released, to make their Windows-audience feel like they are worth something.

MySQL is just a bad database.

Re:Some windows problems

[llefler]

It's can be a real problem to set up Apache on Windows.

Actually, with the current installer, installing Apache on Windows is brain dead easy. Getting MySQL (4.1) running under windows isn't rocket science, but getting PHP (5) to talk to MySQL in that environment is a pain the first time or two.

Hold on a sec

[erikharrison]

You know what I see when I scroll through the comments to this article?

Some people pointing out that this is essentially not a Windows problem but a management/sysadmin/apache problem, and some others saying "look at all the Linux zealots!"

Linux zealots? Where?

Sure, the story poster may not have seen clearly what was going on, but then again, the article was written by the ignorant interviewing the ignorant, so who can blame them for having the wrong opinion.

I'm sick and tired of people trolling on the biases of the Slashdot crowd, only to have the highest moderated posts betray the fact that they are really just speaking of their own biases.

dumbness all around.

[sootman]

Since all the posts were focusing on the "windows and unix hardware" bit I figured I'd RTFA (yeah, I'm new here, why do you ask?) and get the whole story. seems to be a lot of stupidity all around. A few bits:

"In fact, through our research the last few days, we have found an advisory on the Apache website that states, 'Please note that at this time, Windows support is entirely experimental and is recommended only for experienced users.'..."

And the DC admins installed it anyway because...?

"...The Apache Group does not guarantee that the software will work as documented or even at all."

I think you'll find similar words from Microsoft regarding all of their products, and most software from most vendors in general. There are no guarantees in life, period. Software companies just spell it out. This is as amazing a revelation as the "Caution: risk of electric shock, injury, and death" label on my toaster.

"We've been down for three days," said one secondary school principal, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of concern that his comments could get him into trouble. "I've sent my attendance counselor down to the central office to see if she could input today's attendance. She said they couldn't do anything." ... "D.C. STARS is not a broken system," Brady said...

Typical political bullshit. Refreshing to see it alive and well in yet another school district.

...Still, he added, "We're going to come up with a game plan to improve the system for school administrators in D.C."

Reminds me of "My client did not kill his wife, but if he did, he had a very good reason." Uh-huh. "It's not broken. On a related note, by sheer coincidence, we're going to improve it. But not because it's broken. No-sir-ee."

"Instead of the technology helping, it could be a hindrance," Roy said.

If you've got shitty admins (or, benefit of the doubt since it's school/gov't work, admins who are being asked to do way too much with way too little) then yeah, that's how it goes. A car can be helpful or kill you. Depends on how much you know.

No, wrong.

[Kadin2048]

They did exactly the right thing.

You don't choose an OS and then choose your main-line applications.

You choose the applications you need to run, in order to get whatever job you need done, and then you choose an operating system based on those applications.

In this case, they want or need Apache as a web server. That's a fine, defensible choice. It's popular. It's pretty easy to find support on it, even without a contract. Most sysadmins are familiar with it. It has a good track record. Etc.

They also want Oracle -- exactly why they'd want to do this I'm not sure, but they do. Fine.

Based on that, they should review their choice of an operating system. And from that, they should determine their hardware requirements. Absent of a lot of legacy applications or something which predetermine the OS and hardware decision, there isn't any reason why a person should pick a OS before they choose their software. That's just backwards.

Basically, it sounds like someone just was slightly lazy and didn't want to make the tough call and tell their bosses that they needed a new operating system for their server, and now they're paying the price. Perhaps that's a result of their institutional culture, I don't know. But it sounds like they finally understood that they went the wrong way.