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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."
...for not properly researching what they were going to use. A little time before can save a lot of time after.
"Unix hardware"?
MOUNT TAPE U1439 ON B3, NO RING
The experimental warning applied to older 1.3.x versions and systems running Windows 9x/Me.
Obviously, they should be using Linux hardware.
liqbase
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?
No penguins were harmed in the making of this post.
In my experience it is more often bad management that causes problems, regardless of the underlying technology (good or bad).
UNIX hardware, Windows OS, Apache, and Oracle a bad combination?
No doubt they are trying to run Windows Server 2003 on a Sunfire cluster with Oracle and Apache running on it.
No wonder they are running into trouble....
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Well, that's obviously their problem. They've melded their OS and HW together in some freaky Doctor Moreau experiment. Either that, or their IT guys suck. Apache works fine on Windows, if that's what you want to do.
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."
Meria J. Carstarphen, the chief accountability officer, said that D.C. STARS has great potential and that some of the glitches are attributable to long-standing problems with the city's technology infrastructure.
I think that tells you something about the structure of the DC school district. A chief accountability officer? WTF? Is this because the other O-level folks don't have to practice accountability, or is it because they're simply used to having to defend themselves against charges of incompetence?
They've frequently had problems getting the school year to start on time. Back when I lived in DC, it was because of asbestos in the buildings, but there have been other reasons.
The city government as a whole has been a joke for as long as anyone can remember, so it's probably unfair to blame the school district alone. But somehow this late discovery that Apache really doesn't work best with Windows doesn't surprise me, given the source.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
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?
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..
Apache has only limited support for Windows, but still, Apache is a bitch to configure for any platform. And ORACLE? Look, Oracle is a problem in itself. But adding Apache, Windows, UNIX hardware, and then expecting a proprietary software solution (D.C. Stars) to perform is not Windows fault.
Windows is a lot of things. It is slow, it is insecure, but it cannot be blamed for errors in an untested software solution running on a proprietary DB solution with a webserver that does not support the Windows platform.
*nix zealots - thats the truth. I use Ubuntu at home, but i can appreciate a falllacy when I see one.
"Sure there's porn and piracy on the Web but there's probably a downside too."
Windows is ALWAYS the problem.
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.
-David
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.
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.
It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit. -- Harry Truman
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
It takes two to tango. Contractors cause more problems than their government clients.
In a former life I was a government employee deeply involved in bringing several IT systems online, from writing requirements to staff training to getting rid of something we didn't like.
Corruption of government employees was not an issue. Lack of research by government wasn't an issue.
The biggest single problem I saw was the creation of inadequate requirement specs. I saw this happen over and over for two reasons: 1) Governmenr employees lacked the technological backgrounded needed to express their needs in terms that their IT contractors could understand; 2) Contractors, especially those hired to help write the requirements, lacked awareness of their clients business needs and processes.
So, in effect, the government knew what it wanted to do but not how to translate that into a requirements doc, and the contractors did not know very much, and did not want to know very much, about the work done by their client. As a result contractors threw assorted pieces of their IT catalog against business processes they only vaguely understood.
I don't know how it works in DC, but in my environment, it would have been the contractor's responsibility to check the Apache website for that caveat about the Windows version. That's what they're paid to do.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Quite true. But once you've done it at least once and distilled the actual need-to-do tasks from the process, it's about a 15-minute job.
;c:\php (or php5, if you named it that way).
1) Install Apache with the MSI installer. Do not reboot (it doesn't ask, so no problem).
2) Install PHP from the ZIP archive. Just unzip it to C:\PHP (or C:\PHP5 for even less config editing)
3) Install MySQL with the MSI installer. DO NOT REBOOT (yet).
4) Run through the MySQL Config Wizard when asked (at the end of the install).
5) Set the DocumentRoot and any VirtualHosts you want in the Apache config. It works just like other platforms.
6) Copy and rename the php.ini-recommended file to just php.ini. Set the doc_root and extension_root (extension root should be "./ext") settings, and uncomment (remove the semicolon) "extension=php_mysql.dll" and uncomment or add (if it's not there) "extension=php_mysqli.dll".
7) Find the PHP install.txt file. Find your system/HTTP server/version combination and add the lines they say to the end of the Apache config. There should be 2 or 3 lines. A copy/paste will suffice.
8) Right-click My Computer, click Properties, click the Advanced tab, click Environment Variables... Now, on the bottom half of the dialog box are the environment variables for everyone (your user-specific ones are at the top). Find the one called "PATH" (not case sensitive, but is usually all upper-case) and add
9) Reboot. The environment variables aren't updated unless you reboot.
It's not a walk in the park, but after the first time and figuring out just where stuff is, it's pretty easy for a techie. Another note: I added stuff about VirtualHosts in Apache above, but didn't mention that you'll need to set up DNS entries or mess with your hosts file to get those to work. You can just skip the VirtualHosts if you don't know how to configure them. The rest of it will still work.