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Using Linux to Cut-Down on Tech Support Costs?
alank
asks:
"I am investigating a network upgrade for a
school. The core Servers are Linux based,
but most workstations are currently Macs
or PC's and the plan is to move these
over to Linux at some later date. Currently
the issues on managing large numbers of
WinXX programs means that considerable
tech support time is wasted on fixing them.
I remembered the kiosk article
where someone mentioned using
Assimilator for the Macintosh to keep
images of the hard disks on the servers
so it could be replaced,
I could not find anything comprehensive on
the Windows side to do the same. Should I
be looking at dual booting, and somehow
using linux on the clients to re-image
the drives? How would you do this?
btw i'm an anonymous coward because i don't know if i even want an account here yet.
I don't know the answer but want to learn more myself. I admit many advantages to Linux - one way to sum it up might be Win=20k viruses, Mac=20 viruses, and Linux=2 viruses.
However maintenance of computers seems to be very different. I'll admit that the stability of Linux is a big plus but fixing installation problems by blasting a new image down is overdone - however necessary it might be with Win.
On the Mac i can do a much more tailored job with Network Assistant. Through IP (or Appletalk) it combines a scalable search/copy/delete/replace (upto total HD) with network broadcasting and observe/lock/share screen/control along with announce/talk/send message and simple text chat. On a Wintel installation that requires several softwares and ussually an NT server or two to total $10k's for a couple hundred computers (we covered about 3k Macs for about $15k with no new servers required at all.)
However my research points to an even more important factor in cutting tech support costs - training the user. Macs have the clear edge on usability (ease to learn.) I recently read an article by one of the first authors of XWindows who agrees that even his grandmother could learn the Mac. And mind you the registry on a Mac is supposed to be rebuilt periodically.
Talk about nightmares of conflicts - editing essentially registry databases to get programs to work?
I am very intrigued with the idea of Linux for schools but it would seem to require more than it is ready for. Linux for servers? Sure. Linux in the classroom? eh..... i don't think so. Not to mention i still have "286 class" Mac's on the internet. Schools don't have budgets to just toss old stuff out let alone higher enough techs.
Perhaps the consumer MacX OS....
mailto:smkolins@chatham.k12.nc.us
I probably could be mistaken..I'm not too familiar with the process going on..but I've screwed up my boot sector while trying to intall Linux..but to boot back into Windows you could use a Windows 98 startup disk. It has support for cd-rom drivers then boot from the command prompt.
Posted by Ian K. Erickson:
For two labs of Macs, I used revRDist, a mac port of rdist by souls at Purdue. It runs as a client on the mac, pulling files off an AppleTalk share by a rule-driven file of directives.
This beats tricks like ghost & dd hands-down because no matter how similar your machines are they aren't EXACTLY the same in all ways.
For example, we tried ghost with Wintel clients in our lab and found reghosting invalidated the settings for the Ethernet card, causing the driver to prompt for configuration and network identity info when you booted up...
I'd make a linux boot-floppy that mounts an NFS share, prompts for a configuration out of a list (you could preset different floppies to autoselect certain configurations), and the run the corresponding script which:
mounts an NFS share, dd's a certain disk image on to the client hard disk, mounts the client hard disk and runs a script to modify or copy over certain files based on some rules, maybe run a few linux commands on it. You could even forgo floppies and put this stuff on the first disk partition, using a boot loader, making machines that can reconfigure themselves on startup.
The "why bother" is because some admin above you is going to screw up and make you cover for their stupidity. You'll get even machine in the lab identical & stable, and they'll buy ONE liscence for Photoshop 8.whatever. Now all your clients have photoshop x.x except ONE, and you'll want a system that can handle these exceptions. RevRDist was extremely good at handling just this sort of crap, so go read the documentation (even though it's a mac app) and inspire yourself.
Apple Network Administrator Toolkit is godlike. If you aren't using it with your Mac's, you are insane. It allows to do things like re-imaging of hard drives. You can copy one hard drive to 10 in about 20 minutes.
I currently administrate a small network with around 75 MacOS machines on it. Almost all of them are running At Ease (the workstation security portion of At Ease), and I rarely have to visit them, unless something silly has happened like the Monitor has become unplugged, or it has been unplugged from the network.
I don't know what level of school you are currently working with,but I work in a K-5 environment, and have previously worked in K-12 environments. If you only use the computers for Word Processing and Internet use, Linux would be a good choice. However, most schools do stuff beyond Word Processing and Internet access. AFAIK, Hyper Studio does not exsist for the Linux platform. And Hyper Studio is one kick-ass piece of software for either Win95 or MacOS. Grades 2-12 will be able to use it, and I even think it's a cool program. Basically, you would not have access to some excellent software availible. But, it depends on your needs...
Anyways.
FOO.
You guys are doing it too hard. Here's what you do... Install Linux on all of your machines using a little less than half of the upper part of the drive. Then install Windows just the way you want it on one machine. Boot back into Linux and create a tarball of the entire Windows partition. Ftp this tarball to all of your Linux machines, untar, and go.
The part about this is if a student deletes some OS files in Windows, you just boot into Linux, login root, and untar your Windows tarball back out and you are up and running again in less than 15 minutes (10 of which are unattended minutes).
Disclaimers: I don't know what I'm talking about, I haven't done it, I don't know enough about windows to know how it would react.
:-) file back to the Windows partitions, and then --
OK. Install Windows, get it virgin like you want the students to see it.
Set up a second partition with a bare bones Linux partition.
Set up LILO to boot the Linux partition.
Now, from the Linux partition, DD the Windows partition to a Linux file.
And then set up boot so it goes to Linux, which DDs the (big-ass
--- magic happens here ---
-- reboots into Windows mode.
I don't know exactly how you'd do that last reboot into Windows mode.
But DD is your friend if you want to restore the Windows partition to a known state.
--
Infuriate left and right
It's a non-Linux solution, but today's HD's are ... so why not ... if you need to Re-Virginize
larger than are needed for Win9x
make two partitions, with only 1 bootable/viewable
at any given time
(tm) it, just use PartitionMagic to copy one
partition ("substitute virgin") over the bad/
corrupted/messed up partition. Relatively
painless, and it it doesn't put a load on your
network.
"The purpose of argument is to change the nature of truth." -- Bene Gesserit Precept
Jonathan
Ghost has been bought by Symantec and is a commercial product now, but you should be able to find older versions around. It can make images of partitions or entire HDs, can use image files or go disk-to-disk, compress as it goes, and can re-size partitions using filesystems it knows about (FAT*, NTFS). Worth its weight in gold to us at work.
After investigating numerous disk imaging "solutions" (at least 4) the only one that came out a winner was Drive Image or Drive Image Pro from Powerquest. Ghost was consistently *very* buggy in any demo version I used. DI Pro is also a whole lot less expensive than Ghost is and supports all the same features.