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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
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
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 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..
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.