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First Alpha of Public Sector Linux Deployment System
New submitter mathiasfriman writes: SverigeLinux (SwedenLinux in Swedish) is a project financed by the Swedish Internet Fund that is developing a Linux deployment system for the public sector. It is based on DebianLAN and has just released its first public early alpha version. This 7 minute video shows how you can deploy up to 100 workstations with minimal Linux knowledge in under an hour, complete with DHCP, DNS and user data in LDAP, logins using Kerberos and centralized storage. The project has a home on GitHub and is looking for testers and developers. Don't worry, no Björgen Kjörgen; it's all in English.
..This is one of the reasons why companies may decide to go with e.g. Microsoft. Less uncertainty in terms of price and ability to meet delivery deadlines..
For your consideration, I was going to present you with a breakdown of the IT structure in place at my current place of employ, alas, I can't be bothered, I've heard all this crap before and am tired trying to explain why it's so wrong.
Our main IT system is all Microsoft based, all set up by highly paid external certified consultants, and isn't worth shit, trying to detail all the fuckups they've had with it would take pages, suffice to say, the bit that I really, really have to laugh at was your '..Less uncertainty in terms of price and ability to meet delivery deadlines.' bit. None of their planned upgrades of the servers and desktops have run smoothly, to budget, or to schedule. My particular sections planned upgrade is now 6 months behind 'deadline'..
..Simply because the people who design and implement the stuff have had time to learn from their wost mistakes, as opposed to the average Linux enthusiast (a definite no-go) or even contractors that set up Linux-based infrastructures (you can bet they use non-standard setups, non-standard tooling, and leave you with a system you probably need them for to maintain efficiently).
Wait, what? seriously?, It's really sad that you seem to believe all that is true..in my 20+ years experience the biggest bunch of shyster-hucksters I've come across in the IT world are MCxx qualified consultants, I really shouldn't complain though, I managed to make quite a bit by fixing their mistakes...not bad, then again, I'm probably not your 'average Linux enthusiast'.
Contractors, whatever flavour of system they're setting up, Linux or otherwise, are usually bad news. If a company has gone down the 'let's employ externals to implement our IT' it means either the management are technophobes, or they don't trust their own IT people, in which case, the contractors know this and have a license to print money by installing the most borked setups imaginable (I should know, I've had to untangle quite a few 'job creation schemes' from setups over a couple of decades..I'm currently watching an experienced Windows guy trying to unravel such a setup now, he's been at it for a couple of months..a complete reinstall is not an option)
Do you know what's most annoying about the above?, most of the people I've known in the past who've run Linux/Unix servers have all supported their corporate windows servers as well (myself included). We may be, as you put it, 'Linux enthusiasts', this doesn't mean we've never seen (or had to fix/work around) the 'worst mistakes' of borked windows systems.
You know you're in for a fun day when you pop open a cmd window on a Win2k3 server in front of its admin and run something with command line switches he never knew existed..and I'm not even doing IT support as a job these days..
Interestingly, your point about consultants and developers having had the time to learn from their mistake was a point made against MS not that long ago. MS switched their technologies and APIs so fast that developers had at best a few years of experience, since that's how long each iteration lasted. In contrast, a lot of stuff I picked up about X11 in the 90s is still valid.
Open source can be a bit of a jumble. We have had some experience with solutions based on a number of FOSS products working together (in many cases, one has to rely on additional modules or bits of software written by different communities). Which is fine until one of those products is no longer being developed further. Your NTLM-based SSO module doesn't work with the Kerberos based system the company is switching to, and the devs have long gone. But that doesn't really have to be a problem. If you know you'll have to replace a FOSS component, you start looking for a replacement. Worst case scenario: you pay someone to develop a new version for you, which rarely is a major effort. It's a problem when it is a surprise and it breaks things. Because then the responsible manager does not have a vendor to shout at.
That ties in to the cost element as well. Estimating price and timelines for MS-based projects is reasonably well understood and not more inaccurate than in other projects, in my experience. But to what degree do you favour predictability over a (much) lower cost? As an example: Sharepoint.
My client (a large multinational) rolled out Sharepoint and is gradually replacing other systems with it: document management, team collaboration spaces, web content management, discussion forums, and the company Wiki. Some of the software SP is replacing was over 15 years old, but it had some good qualities: it was designed to scale up as well as down, to run in a multi-tiered organisation with delegated administrative responsibilities, and though (or because) it was not all-singing-all-dancing web 3.0 ultra-integrated software, it performed well with a minimum of maintenance and ran on pretty light hardware. TCO was low, and most change requests could be executed on the cheap as well.
Now there is Sharepoint. The cost of implementation (including migration from the older platforms) would feed a small nation for a year. It requires much beefier hardware and an army of consultants: lift a floor tile in any of the datacenters and you'll see a few Sharepoint guys scuttle off. Maintenance is at least an order of magnitude more expensive. And functionally, it only offers the very barest of any of the solutions it replaced. What it does do well is integration between functions and with Office, and workflow... but compared to all the other stuff, I consider those to be nice-to-haves.
There's the problem: Sharepoint was too easy a choice for management. A one stop shop, well understood cost structure, a traditional big iron approach to run the project, and someone to blame when things go south. And the sexy integration with Office of course. However, if they would have looked into FOSS solutions for CMS, Forums, Wikis and team sites, and selected a tried and true document management system from a vendor who knows what document management is, they would have saved time, saved a ton of money, had less disappointment and frustration from the rank-and-file, and enjoyed a much lower TCO. What they would miss is integration between all of these functions, but you know what? They are not that important.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
I think he was talking about SMS and at least SCCM 2007. I work in a 100,000+ environment with over 300 DPs on varying links from fast to abysmally slow satellite and yeah package replication can be annoying. Usually have to refresh a couple DPs a month. Not a huge deal except when it is part of a task sequence and someone tries to migrate a couple hundred machines overnight.